 |
Uh, not. For one thing, my drug of choice these days is glucosamine (cf. The Arthritis Cure) for my aching ankles. For another, the above mental picture, while entirely consistent with the public image of the Scottish literary insurgency, is reductive in the aggregate and inaccurate in its particulars. Oh, no question that Irvine Welsh is an authentic roaring boy, with an industrial chemist's approach to his bloodstream on many a long evening; Trainspotting did not have to be researched. But James Kelman, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel How late it was, how late, is a husband, father, and Glaswegian householder who confines his misbehaviors and provocations to the page. Duncan McLean, author of the powerfully disturbing psychothriller Bunker Man, while an authentic founding spirit of the Edinburgh literary subculture that has spawned a gnarly new generation of writers, lives on the nightclub-free island of Orkney and confines his addictions to a staggering array of hot sauces and an equally staggering knowledge of Texas swing music. How did I manage to turn my employer, W. W. Norton, a formerly conservative publishing house, into the primary port of entry for this scalding and controversial new literature? So heavily identified had Norton become with Scottish writing that we sponsored a whirlwind "Great Scots Tour" in the spring of 1997, flying Welsh, Kelman, and McLean in for a multi-city tour that, immediately upon its conception, began to conjure up visions of Hunter Thompson- or Led Zeppelin-esque hijinks in the minds of some. Like most things in publishing, this whole development was haphazard and accidental. One fine day in 1994 an arresting lime-green galley of The Acid House, a story collection by the utter unknown Irvine Welsh arrived in my in-box from Jonathan Cape, his British publishers. Georgina Capel, the rights director, threw down the gantlet in the final line of her covering letter, writing saucily, "I dare you to publish it"—an irresistible challenge. My reading disclosed a brace of brilliantly incorrigible narratives unlike anything I had ever read: profane, dialect-heavy, full of benighted but indisputably, appallingly real characters of low morals and unhealthy habits in extreme and sometimes disgusting situations. For all the grim particulars, these stories were, more often than not, wildly hilarious and vividly imagined. (If you are laughing and gagging at the same time, there's a good chance you are reading Irvine Welsh.) A number of my more adventurous colleagues shared my sense of discovery and we signed the book up for a tiny sum. As it happened, I had a business trip to England on my schedule, and so I shoehorned in a side trip to Edinburgh to meet this intriguing writer—already a celebrity, it seemed, over there on the strength of his controversial novel of heroin addiction, the opaquely titled Trainspotting. A whole generation of nascent ravers had embraced the book as their story, an audience otherwise completely indifferent to books and literature. What publicity I had portrayed Irvine as a pharmaceutical-fueled neo-primitive, "a literary Kasper Hauser" in the words of one feature writer. His editor at Cape, a mordant, witty, and unregenerate Scotsman (no surprise there) by the name of Robin Robertson, told tales of epic bouts of substance abuse before and after readings, long periods either incommunicado or lost in action, irregular habits of lodging and employment. What really awaited me? We met in a pub off Princes Street, Edinburgh's main drag. I recognized Irvine immediately by his signature oversized and clean shaven head—a now iconic visage. It was perched on a surprisingly rangy six-foot-plus frame. I took him in quickly. Sober. Healthy. Obviously friendly. And as we shook hands and Irvine began talking, I realized that I understood . . . almost nothing. It was not the words that escaped me so much as their manner of delivery. Understanding Irvine in person required a period of adjustment similar to that required in reading Trainspotting, a returning of one's ear to an entirely unfamiliar set of rhythms and inflections in the use of English. Camouflaging my semi-comprehension behind a fixed smile, I persisted in the conversation until I began to catch on. We had an excellent Indian meal down by the dock area—coincidentally the point of entry for the massive influx of heroin that made Edinburgh the AIDS capital of Europe in the late 1980s. Irvine then drove me around the public housing projects or "schemes" where much of his fiction is set, explaining the hazards of wandering into the wrong pub or neighborhood with a native's intimacy. After a couple of quiet beers at a snug (and safe) local, I made an early night of it and was driven back by Irvine, intact in mind and body, to my hotel. As it happened, James Kelman's interior epic of alienation, How late it was, how late, was at that exact moment being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Britain's most glittering and visible literary award. I carried a copy home with me and upon reading it was enormously impressed by the sheer stubborn integrity of the book as it hews to its vision of one man's embattled life. Beaten and blinded by the cops in a post-binge altercation, exhaustively interrogated, then unceremoniously tossed on the street, tied into knots by callous welfare caseworkers, the bold Sammy (think Samson Agonistes) in his relentlessly profane fashion achieves the large stature of bottom-dog hero. He puts one in mind of one of Beckett's dogged goers-on, in a somewhat more political context. So Norton signed the book up just after the novel won the Booker—a controversial choice, occasioning much criticism from the guardians of official literary morality and the mandarins of the Oxbridge literary ascendancy. (One literary bean counter busied himself counting the precise number of iterations of the word "fuck" in the book, maliciously missing the entire point.) So the aura of foul-mouthed profanity clung to How late . . . as we proceeded to publish the book as quickly as possible to capitalize on the Booker Prize publicity, and some wondered whether the author might not partake of his hero's habits of speech. Of course he didn't. Jim carries his working class identity with him in his fondness for pints and his chain smoking of hand-rolled cigarettes—and equally in the modesty and politeness with which he comports himself. But beneath his gentle manner and softly accented speech (no comprehension problems here) one finds a fierce integrity and an understanding of the political dimensions of literature not unlike George Orwell's. Part of a circle of Glasgow writers that includes Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, and Tom Leonard, Kelman's self-chosen international affinity group includes such African writers as Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola and similar writers outside the centers of imperial powers who, like the Scots, have written in a language originally the oppressor's and made it their own. He, like Irvine Welsh, is a brilliant reader of his own work, calling forth in his cadences and inflections effects that the printed word is incapable of conveying. (Kelman, no less than Flaubert, is a devotee of le mot juste; some of those mots just happen to be words like "cunt" and "for fuck's sake.") He may be the purest example of a writer I have ever been associated with, a hero of literature with an unshakable indifference for anyone's opinion but his own. Certainly he is a hero to the younger generation of Scottish writers, who feel to a man and woman that Jim Kelman's example has freed them to write about the life and the people they known in the language they use. One such writer is Duncan McLean, a young graduate of the University of Edinburgh, who used his time in that city to immense profit. He served as the editor of Kelman's novel A Chancer for the Edinburgh-based Polygon Press; became a central figure in a circle of young writers who gravitated around their house organ, Kevin Williamson's pioneering literary magazine Rebel Inc.; and started his own low-tech publishing operation, Clocktower Press, whose pamphlets and samplers offered the first entry into print to the likes of Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner. (These chapbooks now sell for very dear prices on the collectors market.) In his own writing McLean has proven to be perhaps the clearest heir to the Kelman legacy, fashioning in the stories that comprise his first collection, Bucket of Tongues, a strong and darkly comic vision of thwarted young working class lives. The novel of his that we chose to introduce his work to America, Bunker Man, centers around a school janitor on the northeast coast of Scotland whose obsession with the hulking, homeless occupant of an abandoned World War II bunker mirrors a mind at the end of its tether. Naturally the author of this terrifying, sexually supercharged novel turns out to be an immensely genial man—as I learned when I spent a wonderful long weekend with him and his wife, an accomplished fabric designer and businesswoman whose stylish apparel items are sold at Barney's and Takashimaya, on the remote and hauntingly beautiful island of Orkney, where they live. Duncan is a genuine obsessive who is one of the world's great authorities on an obscure but wonderful subset of country and western music called Texas swing. Editorial work offers few experiences more piquant than being driven around Orkney to visit cairns and settlement ruins that are the oldest antiquities in Europe, all the while listening to and being lectured on the finer musicological and discographical points of the work of T. Texas Tyler, the Lightcrust Doughboys, and the most famous native son of Turkey, Texas, the immortal Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. If this isn't postmodern, I don't know what is. So, a troika of Scottish literary talents, all brought to the attention of an intrigued (and sometimes outraged) American reading public by a single publishing house. When it fell out that we would be publishing Bunker Man, Kelman's Busted Scotch: Selected Stories, and the paperback of what I believe is Irvine Welsh's most achieved novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares, all within a couple of months of each other, an American tour seemed not only called for, but inevitable. In the wake of Hurricane Trainspotting, the hip movie to see and novel to read in the summer of 1996, there was an enormous curiosity about things young and Scottish in Alternative America, or at least its literary division, which guaranteed excellent turnout at events and good press coverage. Thus was the Great Scots Tour born. All three of the lads arrived in Celtic-friendly Boston for their first stop, kicking off the tour with a packed reading in a downtown Borders bookshop. Then it was on to New York, where ace Norton publicist Maya Rutherford and I greeted them in the lobby of the TK Hotel on 59th Street. Irvine, dressed fittingly in the bright yellow Miro-like T-shirt of the British supergroup Blur, was to spend the morning as a guest deejay on the local alternative station WBAI. Later we all rendezvous around noon in the Corner Bistro in the West Village for their justly famous burgers. None of these men is a stranger to the States: as a boy Kelman lived with his family for a couple of years in Los Angeles before they returned to Glasgow and he has a brother living on Long Island. Irvine literally began writing the sketches that turned into Trainspotting on a coast-to-coast Greyhound bus trip, and he would escape the movie madness through quick trips to New York to hang out with his friend and soulmate Iggy Pop. (I have heard a hilarious tape of Irvine introducing Iggy to Ecstasy. "Take the pill, Iggy. Take the pill," he intones slowly and insistently as Iggy expresses some concerns about its effects.) McLean spent several weeks last year cruising Texas in a rented car on a Texas swing odyssey-cum-orgy—the subject of his next book, Lone Star Swing. Still, it was clear that Duncan was a bit thrown by the size and the pace of New York—understandable enough in someone who two days earlier was enjoying the windswept placidity of Orkney. The three men do know each other well, though, so they fell into a jocular camaraderie; some remarks about another famous Scotsman, Sean Connery, exfoliated into an excellent running joke about Jim Kelman being an MI5 agent. Burgers dispatched, it was then down to the New York Municipal Building and the studio of WNYC for one of the best local talk shows in public radio, Leonard Lopate's "New York and Company." Things get off to a strained start when the show opens with bagpipe music, proffered as the old Scottish paradigm, which Lopate then replaces with a new paradigm of drugs, crime, prostitution, and similar downbeat phenomena. For the next half hour the writers politely, ironically do battle against a host of new cliches and misconceptions. No, they never set out to consciously shock or offend people with their writing. No, they don't think of Scottish English as a "dialect" or even as one unified linguistic entity. No, the metaphor of a Scottish Beat Generation does not remotely describe the nature of the Scottish literary insurgency. Each in his own way does his level best to refocus the issues of language and representation where they belong: on questions of class and power and honest artistic reportage. Leonard Lopate, clearly the best-read author interviewer on radio, surprises us all by bringing up James Hogg's astounding early-nineteenth-century psychothriller Confessions of a Justified Sinner, an underground Scottish classic far more pertinent to the work of these three writers than Stevenson, Burns, or Sir Walter Scott. For all the surface pleasantry of the back and forth, there is an edginess to the exchanges that is telling. It has to do with the essentially political nature of these men's work—a quality absent from and even alien to American literary discourse. Ask an American writer why he writes about petty criminals, drug addicts, the homeless, and uses strong language to do so, and he'll probably talk about art as an act of witness and compassionate understanding—a therapeutic argument for the artist, the object, and the audience. The same questions asked of a Scottish writer open a can of political worms having to do with not simply the decision but the very right to write about ordinary Scottish lives in their indigenous language. Remember, Scottish schoolchildren can get a sharp reprimand for the simple use of the word "aye" for "yes" in class—let alone less common Celtic usage. Then there is the simple incompatibility of the national tempers: Americans are optimists, however soured, while Scots are pessimists, however genial. A. L. Kennedy, another excellent young Scottish novelist, put it well in an op-ed piece for The New York Times: "Death, brief joys, dark longing, hilarious despair: Scottish art is playing our song. Perhaps Americans find us appealing because we seem exotic. America is the land of positive thinking and monstrous success. In Scotland, we embrace the negative. . . . We are trying to teach ourselves the bitterness of life." The Lopate show finished, we all scatter, to reconvene later that evening for an overflow reading at a downtown Barnes & Noble, where I have the extreme pleasure of introducing them, each in their turn. What superb readers of their work these men are, what nuances and beauties and moments of dark hilarity their voices reveal. First up is Kelman, who reads one of his best stories, "By the Burn," a piece that only gradually reveals itself as a dirge for a dead daughter. In this story language follows inner thought so closely as to be indistinguishable. Next is McLean, who proves to be a tremendously effective ham as he reads two sections from Bunker Man, his voice ranging from portentous whisper to dramatic roar, his facial expressions and bodily gestures heightening the comedy and the terror alike. Last to read is Irvine Welsh, who unleashes all his charisma and star power and demonic mimicry in his reading of Marabou Stork Nightmares. All in all a glorious reading, a varied feast of some of the best writing being done in our language and a definite crowd pleaser. And then? This is the part you've been waiting for. The pub crawl. The debauch. The Scottish substance abuse Olympics. Well, it happened—but I only saw a little of it. New York magazine had sent along their nightlife correspondent, who promised to give the writers entree to every exclusive and obscure club and pick up the tab in exchange for the right to report on the revels. After a genial couple of hours at the Old Town Bar with a crowd of acquaintances and fans, Jim and Duncan sensibly peeled off for their hotel. A number of us, Irvine in the lead, headed downtown (where else?) to a happening bar on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, Max Fish. Drinks all around. Then more drinks. Between the noise and the beer (and what else?) I haven't understand a word Irvine has said since 10:45. No matter—he is deep in communion with one Rob, a wild-haired quondam Glasgow "comedian" (that's what he said) on holiday in New York. I'm introduced to a voluble and sardonic (everybody's sardonic tonight) Irish woman who is said to have written the Trainspotting of Ireland. Why didn't I see it? And where is the Trainspotting of America? No matter. This is fun! But the last bus out of town to my exurban fastness is 1:30 A.M., so I wave goodbye to all and sundry for an extremely spooky Port Authority. I wonder on the bus trip home just where the evening is headed. Two weeks later, in the pages of New York, I find out. They got their money's worth. Irvine is characterized as "a walking quality of life offense." Apparently some streetside urination took place (the john at Max Fish did have problems). As did hours of dancing to mind-numbing techno. Followed by a stop at a low after-hours club in a threatening part of downtown, where, it is implied, controlled substances of a powerful nature are not only bought but used. Finally, a wild cab ride uptown to arrive, Rolling Rock in hand, Glasgow "comedian" in tow, with all of five minutes to spare for the departure to LaGuardia and the flight to San Francisco. First scheduled event—an all-night rave . . . All of which is, or perhaps should be, besides the literary point. But in a world of faux and virtual and ersatz, it is good to know of one writer who can live up to his notorious reputation with his appetite for destruction, with no excuses or apologies. Irvine Welsh—Hero. © Gerald Howard 1997 |
