Trocchi, Finlay and Fraser

2025 sees the centenary of the births of three Scottish writers – Alexander Trocchi, Ian Hamilton Finlay and George MacDonald Fraser. Greg Thomas considers their lives and legacies.

The year so far has been awash with centenary celebrations for the feted Scottish poet, artist, and ‘avant-gardener’ Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). From a series of international exhibitions organised by the poet’s estate to shows at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and further afield, to print-media coverage touching on lesser-known aspects of the poet’s legacy, oeuvre, and biography, the roster has been packed. There has even been some old-fashioned broadsheet controversy of the type Finlay courted during his lifetime, with The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones offering a carping review of the recent Finlay show at Victoria Miro Gallery in London, earning a rejoinder from the veteran Scottish journalist Magnus Linklater in The Times.

It’s less well-known that 2025 also marks the centenary of two other Scottish authors, Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984) and George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008). In very different ways, both also made striking contributions to twentieth-century Scottish literary culture. Both were also, for very different reasons, figures as liable to attract opprobrium and fierce loyalty as Finlay. Yet, while the latter of these ‘tricky figures’ has seen his star rise posthumously, the counter-cultural impresario Trocchi and waspish writer of the Flashman historical novels Fraser have faded into relative obscurity or cult status—notwithstanding a two-day symposium on Trocchi’s work held at the University of Glasgow in June, and an ongoing trickle of academic interest in his work since the 1990s, not to mention Fraser’s still-sizeable and loyal coterie of readers.

I’ll touch on some possible reasons for this contrast in fortunes further on. But I’m primarily interested in comparing the lives and works of these three writers as a way of teasing out some of the details of the era of literary and public life in which they found fame. The 1960s in Scotland have been the subject of a mini-flurry of critical attention over the last decade, partly involving revisionist analysis of some of its leading literary lights, from the concrete poets Finlay and Edwin Morgan to the folk revivalist Hamish Henderson and radical women writers such as Helen Adam and Fiona Templeton. Much of the discussion has also centred on the new social infrastructure – from radical book shops such as Jim Haynes’s Paperback to iconic small publishing projects including Finlay’s Wild Hawthorn Press, the rise of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and performance spaces such as the Traverse Theatre – by which the old, ‘Rose Street’ coterie around Hugh MacDiarmid was superseded.

Trocchi, who famously clashed with MacDiarmid at the 1962 Edinburgh Writers Conference, helped to define the spirit of the new at that event in the most pugnacious possible terms, decrying the ‘turgid, petty, provincial … stale porridge Bible-class nonsense’ which he felt defined the post-Scottish-Renaissance literary establishment. (He added, for good measure that ‘of what is interesting in the last, say twenty years in Scottish writing, I have written it all’.) By contrast, Finlay and Fraser – I will argue – partly represent different kinds of conservative reaction against the tide of social and sexual liberation that Trocchi embodied, Finlay with his stern neo-classical moralising and Fraser with his white-male fantasies of imperial and sexual dominion, more of which below.

Alexander Trocchi, of Italian heritage on his father’s side, was born in 1925 in Glasgow, and became a brilliant and wayward student at the University of Glasgow, finishing his studies in English and Moral Philosophy in 1949 after a three-year stint in the Royal Navy (1943-46) had curtailed an earlier university career. Leaving for Paris immediately on completing his final exams, he fell in with the existentialist coterie, becoming the editor of the literary magazine Merlin, publishing authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Neruda, and, most crucially to his own writing, Samuel Beckett. In 1954 he published a novel squarely in the existentialist idiom, Young Adam, about a man who witnesses a woman drowning, writing under the pen-name Frances Lengel because of the gratuitous sex scenes that his editor Maurice Girodias had insisted he insert.

Leaving Paris for New York in the late 1950s, Trocchi worked on a barge and descended deeper into the heroin addiction that he had consciously cultivated as a form of counter-culture posturing in Paris. (‘I have a bounden duty to go out and experiment with strange and unknown states of mind,’ he is quoted saying in the 1996 television documentary A Life in Pieces.) His experiences at this time were gathered into the roman-à-clef Cain’s Book (1960), which presents a non-linear picture of its protagonist Joe Necchi’s inner world through flashbacks to his childhood and an abandoned domestic life, combined with various accounts of drug use and underground life.

This fairly squalid and nihilistically endured present is enlivened only by the cool ecstasy of the fix:

At certain moments I find myself looking on my whole life as leading up to the present moment, the present being all I have to affirm. It’s somehow undignified to speak of the past or to think about the future. I don’t seriously occupy myself with the question in the ‘here-and-now’, lying on my bunk and, under the influence of heroin, inviolable.

One of the implications of the book is that the routine and mental life of the junkie is in some sense naturally attuned to new principles of literature defined by Trocchi’s heroes such as Beckett. In the absence of the kind of guiding moral principles which might propel a character’s actions forward, Necchi lounges in an eternal present of hustling, scoring, and fixing, in similar fashion to Didi and Gogo beneath the dead tree waiting for a visitor who will never arrive to push the story along.

Escaping the States while on bail for a charge of supplying heroin, Trocchi was, bizarrely, taken in by Leonard Cohen in Canada, before heading back to Britain. Cain’s Book was famously banned following an obscenity trial in Sheffield during 1964-65. Meanwhile, Trocchi confirmed his status as a counter-cultural impresario as the compere for the iconic International Poetry Incarnation reading at the Albert Hall in June 1965. But his productive years as a writer were already over. He would remain in London until his death from pneumonia in 1984. By this time his wife Lyn had died of hepatitis connected to heroin use and his son Marc of cancer at the age of 19.

No new fiction followed after Cain’s Book, but the author did publish two inter-related manifestos outlining the possible conditions of a revolutionary network of educational and cultural institutions (‘Project Sigma’) during the 1960s. The first of these, ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, appeared in the Scottish journal New Saltire in 1963. ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’ was circulated privately in 1964 as part of Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio pamphlet series, in which ‘Invisible Insurrection’ had also appeared.

According to his sometime saviour Cohen, Trocchi ‘saw himself as the general secretary of some new subversive worldwide movement’. In an interesting presentation given to the recent Trocchi symposium, later published on the Bella Caledonia website, Calum Barnes points to the strange irony of a writer so fixated on his own, rudderless inner life becoming the evangelist of a revolutionary anarchist politics with implications for all of humanity: ‘[t]he hopelessly involuted self-consciousness of Cain’s Book is refashioned as a potential panacea in his quest to unleash homo ludens’. This perhaps had to do with a kind of figurative mirroring of the non-teleological, ungoverned emotional life of the junkie author with a theoretical global society freed from all institutions and economic systems with similar kinds of top-down order.

To this end, there is an interesting passage in ‘Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’ in which the base-superstructure model of Orthodox Marxist analysis is turned on its head. Revolutions in thought and language become the means by which broader, cultural and economic revolutions might be fomented.

We are concerned not with the coup-d’etat of Trotsky and Lenin, but with the coup-du-monde, a transition of necessity more complex, more diffuse….The cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them

Of course, the dystopian reality of Trocchi’s life – not to mention the appalling fortunes of many of those closest to him – give the lie to the idea that the ‘strange and unknown states of mind’ the writer doubtless inhabited were a viable basis for even the most elementary form of workable social grouping.

Ian Hamilton Finlay had no time for the international underground. Indeed, in an interesting counterpoint to Trocchi’s grand youthful adventures with drugs, the Edinburgh-based poet and artist was treated with LSD in a psychiatric hospital in 1959 and succumbed to a series of terrifying hallucinations. According to his son, the poet and critic Alec Finlay, this explains his ‘rejection of psychology and the exposure of anguish, and his distaste for the 1960s counter-culture’.

Born in 1925 in Nassau, Bahamas, to a Scottish father who was running bootleg alcohol into prohibition-era USA, Finlay returned to Scotland for boarding school at a young age and ended up at Glasgow School of Art during the early 1940s (probably 1943-45). After a decade spent as a painter he began writing plays and short stories in the mid-1950s, moving back to Edinburgh after several years living in Comrie, Perthshire. Very much indebted to the classic Russian short story, his prose is naturalistic and melancholy in tone, dealing with the loneliness and flashes of beauty in everyday life for a cast of characters mostly living in small-town or rural Scotland.

Finlay reoriented his work again at the close of the decade, becoming a lyric poet in a style closely connected to the neo-objectivist and Black Mountain aesthetics of North-American poets such as Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker, while also whimsically imbibing a kind of post-Burns doggerel. Here is ‘Glasgow Poem’:

Airship poet Guillaume (Angel) Apollinaire

Wrote poetry something rer.

It was back in the Future. What the Scotch call ‘auld Sol’

He called the ‘sun airplane’. It would drive you up the wall.

The piece is typical of this phase of Finlay’s work in alluding to the international avant-garde in a way that played off and reframed the homely and faux-parochial connotations of his craft, rather than suggesting a Trocchi-esque commitment to the new and radical.

It was through contact with the concrete poets of Brazil’s Noigandres group in 1962 that Finlay really found his animus. He began creating concrete poems, on the page and in three dimensions, exploring a variety of visual, sculptural, and tactile effects that could enhance the linguistic dimension of his work. At the same time, his concrete poetry inhabited the same realm of rustic and rural imagery that had defined his plays, short stories, and lyric verse. Again, radical figures and movements in art and literature were invoked in a way which simultaneously suggested their relevance to, and distance from, Finlay’s own emotional and creative world.

His 1965 poem ‘3 happenings’, with its titular reference to the uber-fashionable Fluxus art movement and its semi-spontaneous performance events, is quintessential in this regard:

the little leaf falls

the little fish leaps

the little fish falls

the little leaf leaps

the little fish leaps

the little leaf falls

the little leaf falls

the little fish leaps

Beneath the version of this poem printed in Emmett William’s 1967 Anthology of Concrete Poetry (whose use of italics and bolds is reproduced here), an authorial note reads: ‘[a]re happenings sometimes wearisome? This is a plein air or out-of-door one.’ The sentiment is typical in coolly imbibing contemporary intermedia art aesthetics while transporting them into a realm of rural calm in which, we sense, the urban-anarchist cultural connotations of those aesthetics are stripped away.

Finlay’s interest in aesthetic ‘purity’ – a commonly used term of his – also found expression through concrete poetry, in the reduction of the poem to just a few reiterated words and visual or formal effects. However, by the 1970s, he was defining purity in far more tendentious and politically motivated terms, ones that were largely anathema to what he felt was the prevailing, liberal and secular spirit of the age. By the mid-1960s Finlay had already been complaining in letters to Stephen Bann about the appropriation of concrete poetry by the counter-culture: ‘all those ignorant young ones are getting out of hand – they are like a blight with their “Zen” and all that nonsense’.

The spirit of ‘neoclassical rearmament’ that overtook him during the 1970s, after his 1966 move to Stonypath farmhouse, led to a pointed engagement with classical culture, taken to entail a form of rigid and virtuous social order ordained by the Gods and backed up by the latent presence of military violence. This realignment contextualises his redesignation of an art gallery on his grounds as a ‘garden temple’ in the late 1970s, something which famously set him at odds with Strathclyde Regional Council over the tax rates due on the building.

Finlay’s emergence as a classicist also indicated his complete break with any spirit of counter-cultural ideology to which he might have seemed tangentially attached via his multi-media artistic aesthetics in the 1960s. Then again, the political and cultural worldview that Finlay’s practice ultimately came to embody is almost impossible to place within any modern pigeonholes. When he described himself as a ‘High Tory, like Bakunin’ at the close of the 1980s, he was emphasising the extent to which, as Alec Finlay puts it, ‘his politics were those of a poet, party of one’.

What, finally, of George MacDonald Fraser? An introductory anecdote suggests the nature of his fandom today: you can find a spoof Flashman account on X that promises to ‘taunt … Corbynistas only to run off when it looks like it’s turning nasty’, as well as ‘the usual high-jinx with belly-dancing warrior-queens’. Born in Carlisle in 1925, Fraser was a self-confessed lazy student who entered the army at 18 and was demoted to private three times before becoming an officer in the Border Regiment that fought in Burma in World War Two. On his discharge in 1947 his father found him a job on the Carlisle Journal, and Fraser remained in journalism until he rose to become deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald from 1964 to 69.

The first of his Flashman novels appeared, not coincidentally, the year he left that employment, having promised his wife – according to a posthumously discovered note included with a recent edition of the book – that he would ‘write us out of it’. In a canny meta-fictional conceit, the character of Flashman is lifted directly from Tom Brown’s School Days, an 1857 comic novel by Thomas Hughes recounting its protagonist’s adventures at Rugby. Flashman, a drunken bully expelled halfway through the story, was recognised by Fraser as the unsung ‘hero’ of the book, and incorporated into a dozen historical novels between 1969 and 2005, in which Flashman found himself at the centre of all the major events of Victorian imperialism, from the Retreat from Kabul (the subject of the first novel) to the Boxer Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Throughout his escapades – which, as critics often point out, are the product of meticulous historical research, and richly evocative of their era – Flashman appears as a hard-drinking, sexually abusive, subordinate-flogging cad. In a particularly egregious passage in Flashman which sums up many of these tendencies, the protagonist is offered the sexual services of a topless dancer by his host, the Ghilzai leader Sher Afzul:

He beckoned her to dance close in front … and the sight of the golden, near-naked body writhing and quivering made me forget where I was for the moment. By the time she had finished her dance, with the tom-toms throbbing and the sweat glistening on her painted face, I must have been eating her alive with my eyes….Sher Afzul saw it too…. ‘You like her, Flashman bahadur? Is she the kind of she-cat you delight to scratch with? Here, then, she is yours’

This orientalist titillation takes a dark turn when the dancer angrily refuses his advances and Flashman takes her by force: ‘after a vicious struggle I managed to rape her—the only time in my life I have found it necessary.’ Fantasies of imperial and sexual conquest are entwined throughout the Flashman stories. And, while the anti-hero is undoubtedly presented as a coward, whose chief characteristics include a desire to avoid danger at all costs combined with an uncanny ability to steal credit for others’ military bravery, his seeming nudge-wink lovableness as far as Fraser is concerned is hard not to interpret as coded nostalgia for the golden age of British imperialism, when we all knew who was in charge.

Fraser was happy to accept the insinuation. In that posthumously discovered note, he writes: ‘[w]ith the exception of one left-wing journal which hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism, the press and public took Flashman, quite rightly, at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad.’ An article by historian Saul David based on a 2006 interview with the author reads:

MacDonald Fraser is an unashamed fan of the British Empire, and was delighted that revisionist historians like Niall Ferguson (and myself, for that matter) had recently felt able to write about it in a more objective, less guilt-ridden way. “With all its faults,” he says, “it’s just about the best thing that’s happened to an undeserving world[“]….It would have been a “good thing”, he adds, if the empire hadn’t ended when it did.

A 2008 obituary in The Washington Post rounds off this picture, noting that ‘Mr. Fraser was proudly conservative and often spoke out against modern social trends, including immigration, coarse language and the metric system of weights and measures’. Needless to say, he was never on the mailing list for Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio.

So much for our three centenarians. What do these three life stories tell us about the era which spawned them? Apart from anything else, we might do well to remember the historian Dominic Sandbrook’s proviso that the sixties, in Scotland as elsewhere, represented more than its gilded memoirs and flower-power mythology. For ‘people who spent the 1960s in Aberdeen or Welshpool or Wolverhampton’, the sixties might ‘conjure up memories not of Lady Chatterley, the Pill and the Rolling Stones, but of Bingo, Blackpool, and Berni Inns’.

Of course, our authors do not fit neatly into this binary model of cosmopolitan radicalism and humdrum provincial conservatism, but they do suggest that the legacy of the Scottish sixties in culture and literature is vexed and complex. If Trocchi rode the crest of a wave of emerging radical thought, crashing into drug-addled oblivion, Finlay and Fraser represent different kinds of oppositional reaction to the perceived spirit of the times, while partaking it some of its advances: Finlay, for example, in his attachment to mixed-media artforms connected with the anarchistic philosophies of Fluxus, and MacDonald with the seedy seventies eroticism of his sex scenes. (It’s not surprising to learn that he went on to co-write the script for a James Bond film, 1983’s Octopussy.)

The relative status of the three seems to have less to do with the extent to which they accepted or rejected the (real or imagined) advances of their time as with the global status and visibility that Finlay achieved in his transition from the world of (small press) literature to fine art, via his reorientation as a concrete poet and, ultimately, a maker of beautiful three-dimensional poem-sculptures and conceptual artworks at his garden Little Sparta and elsewhere. Both the striking visible presence of Finlay’s work around the world, and its entry into civic and commercial gallery circulation from the late 1960s onwards, mean that it continues to be seen—and sold at lucrative prices. In short, the artworld can perhaps provide the kind of lively critical and popular afterlife that the economics and networks of literature might fail to deliver.

It may also be that the murkier thematic subtexts of Finlay’s work – his interrogatory use of the iconography of fascism, for example – have been easier to partition off from his central achievement than those of Trochi and Fraser. The unrepentant misogyny and racism covertly embraced through the figure of Flashman is difficult to reconstruct in age of febrile debate on identity and empire, while Trocchi’s addict-life in retrospect seems far less liberatory than it does brutal, tragic, and dangerous to be around (particularly for the women in his life, such as his wife Lyn, who at one point in New York became a sex worker to fund the couple’s habit). Yet each writer, through both their flair and their flaws, helps to offer a more complex picture of the decade in which they emerged, a decade in whose long shadows our Scottish culture still moves.