When I ask Irvine Welsh, novelist and horned arch-enemy of the lower middle classes, to ”Look at my garden,” I only meant look at my garden through the window. But he takes himself out of the babble, into the garden, and walks slowly and silently through every inch of it, returning to set about acclimatising me to his presence in my space. It is, he says, a nice garden. And it was interesting to walk down my street.
Because he used to live here. Four, five doors up. When it was a squat. I remember those lads, their bullet heads and quiet eyes, their regional accents, how equably they accepted my petrol-coupon cutlery, their junkie passivity, the incurious kindness with which one of them helped me break into my house when I’d locked myself out. I don’t remember Irvine Welsh, my former neighbour. Nor does he remember me. We are not exactly strangers, though. Well, not geographically.
It had not been easy for me to read his books. Initially it felt like being led down a dark alley and assaulted by demented aliens with no faces, which problem turned out to be more one of aural failure on my part. In the ordinary way I must tune in laboriously to heavy Celtic accents, and when they’re written down the effort to comprehend is doubled because I have to translate the spelling into voices that I can hear in my head.
I say something along these lines to Welsh; the last thing I expect is empathy. He says he has a similar problem, which he solves by not reading what he’s written. Not for pleasure, anyway. Of course, he does have to read his proofs, when he has to filter the spellings back through his mind for the sounds that live there in the first place; the language of his childhood, much of which doesn’t directly relate to the Scottish language ”as such”. It’s more lowlands Scots with Gypsy stuff thrown in. This is because he grew up in a Edinburgh housing estate, and in Edinburgh they always built such estates next to Gypsy encampments. He doesn’t know why.
Anyway, all these families who’d lived in the old, condemned tenements where he was born were moved into these new estates of what they called ”maisonettes”. There was a car park, too, a concrete square, but since nobody owned a motor car, it was where the kids congregated. Where fledgling Scots and Gypsies learned to express themselves.
Now that his books are in the process of being translated into (at last count) 33 languages, things can get complicated. People come to him asking for explanations. ”What does it mean, ‘A bairns airm wie an eeple’?” And he has to explain that he’s trying to describe some fellow’s erection. It got fairly knackering, recently, when he’d gone on a trip to America with a couple of mates from the estate, being shadowed by a reporter from the New Yorker. He’d had to use one language for his mates, another for the New Yorker guy, and it all got pretty confusing, what with him being up all night and being highly intoxicated into the bargain.
Then there is the vexed question of the filthy language. This is all quite mystifying to Welsh. One critic, apparently, opined that he overused swearwords, thus destroying the effect of a more sparing usage. If he has to think about it, Welsh counts himself as a man who is against swearwords. Yes. You’ve got to accept, he says, that the meaning of words changes through use and abuse, and becomes something else.
For instance, so far as he is concerned, fuck and cunt are not swearwords. Should he say, ”What a fucking lovely day”, he is merely emphasising the loveliness of the weather. Similarly, if he says, ”I got completely cunted in the pub last night”, it means he got plastered rather emphatically. It’s a good, blunt word, a cosh of a word. Unlike prick, which is so insubstantial, it flies away in the air. But none of these words is used to shock. They’re just emphatics, nothing to get alarmed about. Just another way of saying ”very”.
”Words should have the power to inform and to move, not the power to send people scurrying away,” he says. ”But if you attach that much emotional energy to a word, it gives people the power to hurt each other.”
He understands that middle-class people find it difficult to deal with working-class anger. They have no way of understanding how ordinary it is, how banal, to be able to see another world out there that is impossible for them to access. There’s not even any point setting themselves goals because they already know they are going to be frustrated.
That’s their lot. Anger and frustration. And it has been Welsh’s lot, over the past decade, to chronicle the coping mechanisms of the culture that spawned him, and by so doing incur the fear and loathing of those who would famously prefer to ”just say no”.
As though drugs were merely illegal banes indulged in by the wicked and foolish, rather than cheap prescriptions for altering the parameters of repressed consciousness and escaping into some kind of recreative joy. What is so disturbing about Welsh’s accounts of drug culture, it seems, is that from time to time his protagonists do realise themselves through drugs, do manage to excavate the buried treasure of their own spirit from beneath the rubble of conformity that has flattened their integrity, do manage to fly. Does this glorify the drug culture? Hardly, since it is set against the downside construct of the scene in Trainspotting where our hero dives into a sewer for a nub end of skunk.
I have a couple of bottles of a rather pleasant Sancerre in the fridge. But Mr Welsh does not want a drink. He’s not the sort of man who has ”a drink”. He’s the sort of man who decides to go to the pub for lots of drinks, then on to a club for more drinks, then get some drugs and go back to his place and go on all night and the next day and the next night, until he’s either off his face or recovering from being off his face for a fortnight. He binges. He abstains. That’s the balance. He can’t go out for a few drinks and get up next morning with a bit of a hangover and get on with his work. He’s an all or nothing man. An addictive personality, if you like. Only now, he’s addicted to writing.
All his life, he says, he’s been good at wasting time; now he writes, and discovers that nothing is wasted. Every good thing he’s ever done, every stupid thing, every fucked-up thing can be reproduced in some way. He can stare into space and call it research.
At first, when the hobby started to pay, he came off the drugs, came off everything. He got himself fit as a butcher’s dog, ran the London marathon, went to the gym, went to the park and did that oriental posturing thing to balance his karma. Then he sort of came off coming off and, well, he did the marathon again this year and finished 40 minutes slower. Which goes to show … Giving up is hard. Every time he finishes a book, he makes a song and dance about being fed up with it, making all these protestations about never writing another book. But then there’s the money. Had he been more careful with his finances, he’d never have to work again, but he knows himself, knows everything he’s ever had has been what he calls ”squanderable”.
”Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There’s this sort of one-upmanship in the underground. You want to be the first person to find something, then the first person to say it’s shit.”
Time to move on to the next thing. Pornography, it seems, became the new rock’n’roll while Welsh wasn’t looking. ”It’s massive,” he says, then, lest he has understated the massive massiveness of massive, adds, ”Fucking massive.” First he knew of it, he sauntered into one of the old Edinburgh dives to see a few old mates, expecting to find the place as he’d left it, the punters all popping Es and bopping around in a sweat haze, and found himself the only man with his clothes on in the middle of some kind of huge, gonzo sex orgy.
It seemed that while his back was turned, everyone he knew had gone through a process of disinhibition that had passed him by. All the old clubs are now sex clubs. You don’t go back to your place for more drugs and loud noises any more, you go back to your place to get your clothes off, have sex with everyone in sight, film everyone shagging everyone in sight, then sit about watching the film of you shagging everyone in sight from your last night out. You can buy a knock-off digital camera for a few hundred quid and make your own porn. And they do.
Since then, Welsh has tried to work out how he feels about pornography. Initially, he had himself down as a don’t know. He tried to define pornography and couldn’t. He argued with himself that perhaps a crude porn movie is more honest than an art-house film with porn in it, since the one offers to engage your pornographic imagination while the other tries to exploit or subvert. They call it ”eroticis”, he thinks, to make the middle classes feel better about porn. His ambivalence about the matter remained in free-float.
He had certainly never felt the need to sit in a pub watching his own spotty bum going up and down on a screen. He has to concede, however, that this disinclination puts him in a minority. Back there among the underemployed and unemployed working class, they can’t get enough of it. They want to see themselves framed, love handles, beer guts, hairy backs, immortalised for ever in the act of copulation. And, after that, they want everyone else to see them. Think, he says, of Big Brother.
Porn, he says, is like karaoke. When it’s karaoke night down at the pub,nobody wants to get up first. Then, when it gets going, you’re fighting for a turn. This is something he understands only too well. Apparently, the reports of how he smashed up an entire bar, the karaoke machine, the pub piano and anyone who stood in his way were not exaggerated. It’s quite simple. When a man’s gotta sing For Your Eyes Only, a man’s gotta sing For Your Eyes Only.
The other day he was on the treadmill down at the gym where they always have the television on to stop the keep-fitters dying from boredom. He found himself trotting along in front of TV talk-show Kilroy with the sound off. The little subhead in the corner of the box said, ”I don’t like my looks” and there on the screen he saw an ordinary, middle-aged woman with tears streaming down her face, tormented with grief and anger because she’s put on a bit of weight and thinks she’s ugly. What struck him in that small, dumb-show moment was the intensity of passion people put into exposing themselves. ”It’s as though the only way they can feel real, actualised, is on screen. Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist, the legitimiser of our egos. Kilroy was here, therefore I am.”
He thinks of all the tens of thousands of people who turn out in the pouring rain for royal funerals, hot-footing it to Trafalgar Square to find a camera to sob in front of. What’s it all about, eh, this voracious appetite we have for vicarious reality TV?
Welsh’s new novel, Porno, is not for the squeamish, but then neither is reality. He doesn’t let you suspend belief. You can catch up with all the old rogues and vagabonds who have trailed their sorry selves from Trainspotting through Glue, The Acid House, Filth and so on, but that’s as much light relief as you’ll find. Because Porno is relentless in its sociological efficacy.
When Welsh finished Porno, he thought his researches into attitudes to pornography were over. His ambivalences were still intact. He didn’t think he’d have any more truck with the topic. And then he went to Afghanistan, just for the hell of it. In Kabul he met a couple of United Nations workers, two girls who’d gone jogging in the park in their Lycra gear and got themselves stoned by a mob of 14-year-old kids. ”It was like these kids had never seen any representation of the female body shape before, so they’d sublimated their sexuality with violence.”
There, where the Taliban had the peasants by their throats, women had to be effectively disappeared lest their sexuality distract men from the lives of prayer and warfare that ensures thralldom to whatever power-mania looms over them. So what’s the difference between the Taliban vice’n’virtue police and us? ”The manifestations are more acute in Kabul,” he says, ”but the pathology is not unusual.” They are pre-democracy. We are post-democracy.
From his perspective, the onset of DIY porn is neither a good nor a bad thing. Maybe, like swearwords, it is merely a way of defusing something intrinsically frightening, shedding a garish light on the shadows and taboos of sex. ”When we break taboos,” he says, ”it doesn’t mean we also break moral codes. Unless they’re psychotic, people know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad. We have to institutionalise some kind of moral framework only so we can all live within the same one. Nothing wrong with that.”
In his books, Welsh explores what happens inside a framework where exasperation and self-assertion collide and become the natural order of things, which is what chaos means. His characters cope. He has coped.
A couple of weeks ago, he was in Edinburgh on the estate that framed him and looked at the concrete square where he learned to express himself. It was empty. Where once there had been 50, 60 kids there are now a couple of cars and … nothing. Then the ice-cream van came round and the children came running out, queued for 10 minutes, then ran back inside to their PlayStations.
”It makes me feel privileged to have grown up in the 1970s,” he says (he was born in 1961). ”We didn’t need a parent to take us swimming. We didn’t worry about paedophiles. We knew how to look out for ourselves. There is so much fear now. So much fear and so much control. And the more you lose your own coping mechanisms, the more you need to be controlled.”
And this, I take it, is the prospect for our post-democratic 21st century. Welsh would be quite depressed about it all if he were daft enough to imagine his future went on beyond the next two weeks.
But he isn’t and he doesn’t. He thinks it would be arrogant of him to say it’s all over, there aren’t any more surprises. ”I’m still optimistic,” he says. ”That’s the perversity of life, to be optimistic in spite of all the indicators to the contrary. I haven’t got the attention span to stay depressed for long.” — Â