Sappho of Lesbos

by Alexander Trocchi

Genres: Novels

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Alexander Trocchi was a Scottish novelist and editor. He lived in Paris in the early 1950s and edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue and Pablo Neruda, among others. Although he was never published in Merlin, American writer Terry Southern (who lived in Paris from 1948-1952) became a close friend of both Trocchi and his colleague Richard Seaver, and the three later co-edited the anthology Writers In Revolt (1962).

His early novel Young Adam (1954) was adapted into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

First released in America in 1960 through Castle Books under the editorial pseudonymn Michel Darius, bearing the subtitle ‘The Autobiography of a Strange Woman’, this is the one erotic title of Trocchi’s not to be released as part of Maurice Girodias’s erotic series for Olympia Press in Paris. Trocchi handpicks various popular beliefs about Sappho’s life for his novel, such as her marriage to the wealthy merchant Cercylas (named Cercolas here), and that she hurled herself from the Leucadian cliffs out of love for ferryman Phaon. In this version, however, she faked her own suicide to leave Lesbos and live with Phaon (a relationship that itself turns out to be ill-fated and leads Sappho to abandon men for a life of Sapphic pleasures, some of which are politely (and weirdly) described in the novel, positioning Sappho as a feminist icon. All of Trocchi’s novels are worth reading as the content surpasses the standard blandness of erotica (in this novel’s case the sex scenes are the worst scenes) and reaches always for more literary respectability. His two essential works are Young Adam and Cain’s Book. The others are out of print or available in shocking bootleg ebook forms (to be avoided). To whet your appetite:

“Virginia’s long flanks were soon interlaced with my own and the soft petal of her mouth fed on my trembling lips with all the gentle passion of her sex. Her caressing fingers moved smoothly like trembling feathers at my sensitive skin. I felt the dark sliding motion of my blood in all my limbs as they trembled at the edge of ecstasy and, breathing deeply, my lips fastening at her slender neck, was the willing witness of the sultry uncontainable movement of my own loins as fire darted there, up . . . hair on hair in a strange noctural breeding, the rise of juices, the threshing heats of flesh, and my desire like a needle of mercury in a capillary tube expanding, and then the secret burst, the thin clear bubble of blood under the weight that transported me to deliverance! Ah, Virginia!” (p107-8)