This was unfamiliar territory for Scottish author Irvine Welsh. He had never been to a hockey game before. So he had dozens of questions as he watched the Blackhawks skate against the St. Louis Blues this week at the United Center.
Questions about rules. About strategy. The puck. The Zamboni.
Finally, Welsh, a product of working-class Edinburgh, the author of the dark novel “Trainspotting” and a Scottish soccer fanatic, saw something he could relate to.
Maybe a hundred St. Louis fans, decked out in gold sweatshirts with the Blues logo on the front, were seated together at one end of the stadium. They had had a pretty enjoyable afternoon as their team took a 3-1 lead. But late in the third period, the Blackhawks rallied and scored a quick goal to get back in the game. Hawks fans seated in front of Welsh leaped to their feet and, en masse, taunted the St. Louis fans with the age-old one-fingered salute that transcends all cultures and sports.
Welsh was mightily amused.
“Ah, look!” he cried out delightedly.
He was equally entertained by what he saw on the giant video screen over center ice: Whenever one of the gold-clad Blues fans was pictured yucking it up, a Robocop-type cartoon character in a Hawks jersey would appear with a flamethrower and zap the fan, leaving only a pile of cartoon bones and ashes.
More chuckles from Welsh. And more questions.
“Do Hawks fans ever disassemble their seats and throw pieces on the ice?”
“Isn’t there a ring of security around the Blues fans?”
“Will they (Blues fans) be able to get to their cars safely after the game?”
Clearly, this man has some European soccer experience.
After the Blackhawks had staged a wild rally and won in overtime — cheered on by more than 20,000 screaming and finger-waving fans — Welsh proclaimed hockey his favorite American sport.
It was a great way to start his weeklong visit to Chicago, where he is participating in Columbia College’s Story Week Festival of Writers. The festival concludes Friday.
A few hours after the hockey game, Welsh was enjoying another aspect of Chicago, one that’s especially meaningful to him: its music. He dropped by to hear the Kimberly Gordon Trio at the Green Mill Jazz Club, just the first stop on a wish list of Chicago music clubs he hoped to visit during the week.
“I really want to experience as much of it as I can,” he said.
“You think of blues and jazz, you think of the South and Chicago. Today, you look at house and techno, Chicago is the center of that. Chicago is the center of American music.”
Welsh’s demeanor may not be what one expects from the author of such gritty novels as “Trainspotting,” “Marabou Stork Nightmares,” “Filth” and “Glue,” not to mention the short story collection “The Acid House.” Soft-spoken and charming, he’s nothing like the coarse, violent, drug-abusing characters who can inhabit his work — save for the thick Scottish accent. Sunday night his beverage of choice was club soda. You read right.
Since Monday, Welsh and fellow authors A. Manette Ansay, Edwidge Danticat, John McNally, Joe Meno, Dawn Turner Trice and John Edgar Wideman, as well as Columbia staff and students, have been giving readings and participating in panel discussions around the city. Welsh will cap his week Thursday night at Metro as part of “Troublemakers: Literary Rock & Roll,” joining McNally and Meno for readings, then metamorphosing from author Irvine Welsh to DJ Spin Master Irvine Welsh, mixing music for an hour (the evening starts at 7 and is free and open to all ages; bring your dance shoes).
“I don’t really take [being a deejay] too seriously,” said the 42-year-old Welsh, who nonetheless does act as deejay at a number of small London clubs. “I just play records. I’m not a great mixer.”
What he is, most critics agree, is a great writer — one who has served as an inspiration to many, directly or indirectly.
Don De Grazia, author of “American Skin,” editor of f Magazine, and a member of the Columbia faculty, was a fan of Welsh’s early work. More important, he took a cue from Welsh when it came to getting his work out there.
Welsh and other Scottish working-class fiction writers were being ignored by the London publishing world, De Grazia explained.
“The reasoning was, they said that Scots don’t read. But clearly that wasn’t true, and clearly one of the reasons they weren’t buying books is because there was nothing about their experience.
“These guys, mainly Irvine, started self-publishing and selling a lot of books, and they gained the attention of the London publishing world. Eventually they became the biggest thing in UK publishing.
“And to me that was extremely inspirational. I saw a lot of parallels between what Chicago writers go through in relation to New York publishing.”
A gamble
De Grazia took a shot, sending his manuscript to Jonathan Cape, a London publishing house that had started to publish Welsh and others, who were known collectively as the Beats of Edinburgh. Jonathan Cape bought De Grazia’s book, and the Chicagoan’s career as an author was off the ground.
“The thing of it is,” says De Grazia, “it wasn’t some calculated move on Irvine’s part. He didn’t care. He was going to write and reach the audience he cared about no matter what. And he did it. . . . and the established publishing world finally, basically, came crawling to him on their hands and knees.”
Welsh’s works focus on life in Edinburgh’s schemes — its public housing projects — and are, by turns,brutal, touching and funny. (Some stories, such as “The Granton Star Cause,” can be all three. It’s about a very bad day in the life of Bob Coyle, one of life’s losers, who gets cut by his soccer team, fired from work, thrown out of his parents’ home, dumped by his girlfriend, and beaten up by cops. He then has the misfortune of running into God in a pub — a very ill-tempered God, who takes out his frustrations by turning poor Bob into a fly, who comes, not surprisingly, to a messy end.)
Unemployment, bad relationships, substance abuse, trouble with the law — issues affecting a lot of young people. But don’t call Welsh the spokesman for a generation.
“Any writer will tell you you’re really just your own voice,” he said. “You can’t represent anybody but yourself.”
Still, there are a lot of people out there who recognize themselves in Welsh’s work.
“Every psychopath in Edinburgh thinks [`Trainspotting’ character] Begbie is based on him,” Welsh said. “I go in a pub, and they come up, `Hey! Begbie! That’s f—— me!’ And I’m, `No, no, it’s not.'”
The characters who populate his writing are composites, he said.
“Sometimes you can see something in a character that reminds you of someone. I try not to base them on someone I know.”
10 years after
Begbie and the other main “Trainspotting” characters — Spud, Sick Boy and Rents — return in Welsh’s fifth novel, “Porno,” scheduled to come out this fall. It’s set about 10 years beyond “Trainspotting.”
“Really, Sick Boy is the main character,” Welsh said. “[In `Porno’] he’s making amateur porno films and gets a little ambitious. He wants to make a [higher quality] porno film. The story is about how relationships change when a hobby becomes a serious business.”
(For those Welsh fans who can’t wait until fall, an excerpt from “Porno” will be published in the May edition of De Grazia’s f Magazine.)
“Porno,” Welsh’s second novel in two years, is just one of numerous projects he has been juggling. He has three screenplays in various stages of production; his musical, “Blackpool,” recently concluded its run to generally good reviews (he hopes to do some tinkering and restage it, saying it’s not that far from West End or Broadway quality); he continues to write short stories; he writes movie reviews for the Times of London; and he directs music videos. For fun, he fronts a band, Hibee Nation (“more of a loose federation than a steady group”), named after his favorite soccer team, the Hibernian Football Club of Edinburgh.
But it’s novels that remain the focus for the author, who was dubbed “the grand old man of Scottish fiction” last year by Publishers Weekly.
“Probably I still prefer the books,” he said. “With a book, you do the whole thing alone; you’re playing God. But it’s more lonely. When you do a screenplay or music, you’re working with others. You bounce ideas off each other. And that can be good. Then again, you’re far down the food chain with a screenplay. You’re a key part of the process, but there’s not a lot of status.
“I think I need to do both — a novel and something else.”
Musical history
As serious as Welsh is about his writing, he’s just as serious about his music, something that’s been a part of his life for as long as he remembers. The gravy part of his visit to Chicago was hitting the clubs and poking around in the city’s record stores.
“Music has always been an essential part of things,” he said. “I remember, sort of, [hearing] Elvis and the Beatles when I was growing up. Roy Orbison, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey — that kind of stuff.”
Wide range of music
As he got older, his favorites were T. Rex, David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Faces, then the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and later Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and the Talking Heads. These days his musical interests are all over the place, whether it be Scottish folk, country and western, techno or house. It’s the latter that he was especially hoping to enjoy this week.
“I’m looking forward to going to some of the house clubs while I’m here,” he said at the Green Mill. “Chicago and Detroit kind of were the epicenter of the whole thing.”
Not surprisingly, music figures to be in Welsh’s long-range plans. Asked about where he’ll be and what he’ll be doing 10 years down the road, he thought for the briefest second.
“I think I’d like to run a club. A really good club. I can see myself just running a bar in Greece. With music.”
And with that, he went back to his club soda.
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For more information on Columbia College of Chicago’s Story Week Festival of Writers, go to http:interactive.colum.edu/fw/ .
