Books that made me / Robin Robertson: ‘The poetry world is polarised. I’m in the middle, vaguely appalled’

 ‘There are great books that fail to be recognised at the time but are re-discovered’ … Robin Robertson. Photograph: Chris Close

Books

that 

made me

Robin Robertson: ‘The poetry world is polarised. I’m in the middle, vaguely appalled’

The Man Booker shortlisted writer on his love for Jane Bowles and biographies, and why he never gives books as presents

Robin Robertson
Friday 28 September 2018

The book I’m currently reading

As always, I have submissions to read (I work in publishing). When I’m allowed to read for pleasure, it’s usually non-fiction – or something ancient and Greek.

The book that changed my life

I was brought up within earshot of north-east Scottish dialect, folklore and music, in what remained of a fishing community with its oral tradition, superstitions and legends. Tending to the solitary, I fell naturally towards books and read indiscriminately. The stories I remember were Scottish folk tales, the Greek myths (in some hopelessly expurgated edition, upgraded slowly through the years) and Grimm. As a teenager I found Mervyn Peake’s Titus books intoxicating, and those novels, probably, started my passion for fiction, while Yeats and Hughes and Heaney were making poetry crucial to me. I’m not sure a book has changed my life, but all great art jolts your perspective and enlarges your gaze.

The book I wish I’d written

I suppose I’m always trying to write that book (which is the only way to pay attention, the only way to improve). To have produced books of the stature of James Joyce’s Ulysses, or Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, or David Jones’s In Parenthesis, without the attendant physical or psychological damage – that would be an achievement.

The book that influenced my writing

The work of David Jones – not just the poetry and essays, but the engravings, drawings, watercolours and, particularly, the painted inscriptions. I hope my admiration for his writing doesn’t stray into mimicry.

 

The world of poetry is small and currently polarised: it’s often either simplistic or incomprehensible

The book that is most underrated

There are great books that fail to be recognised at the time but are rediscovered, like John Williams’s Stoner, or novels like Ulverton or Death and Nightingales that offer a constant admonitory warning to judges of literary prizes. I wish more people read Jane Bowles: Two Serious Ladies and Plain Pleasures are wonderful.

The last book that made me laugh

The books that make me laugh, cry, then smash furniture tend to be written by people driven by self-promotion and shallow narcissism; they don’t have time to bother with all that pesky learning-the-craft business: they want “Likes” on social media and they’re having strong and important feelings somewhere near you, right now. The world of poetry is small and currently polarised: it’s often either simplistic or incomprehensible. I find myself in the middle, vaguely appalled. I’m allergic to “light verse”, because it seems a betrayal of the purpose of poetry. Equally, poetry that sets out to be deliberately opaque is betraying the purpose of language.

The book I couldn’t finish

I spend my life not finishing books – though they’re mostly manuscripts rather than books.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read

Being Scottish, I carry enough shame already without needing the help of books.

My earliest reading memory

I remember sitting in the congregation of King’s College chapel in Aberdeen, transfixed by my father’s sermon. I was never a believer, but the power and beauty of his delivery was thrilling. It was the cadences rather than the creed that moved me, and I understood then how language could be made to sing.

The book I give as a gift

I almost never give books as presents: it feels rather presumptuous, or something ...

My comfort read

I feel I’m drifting towards a fondness for biographies, where one can find comfort in seeing people make a mess of their lives and the lives of others and still produce art that is beautiful and lasting.

THE GUARDIAN

THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME
2017

22 September 2017
Books that made me / Franzen / 'I defy anyone to finish it without wetting the pages with tears'
29 September 2017
Philip Pullman / ‘The book I wish I’d written? My next one’

6 October 2017
Anne Enright / ‘I threw The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann into the Liffey in 1983’

13 October 2017

Eimear McBride / ‘I can never finish Dickens – it’s sacrilege’
20 October 2017
Shami Chakrabarti / ‘Harry Potter offers a great metaphor for the war on terror’

1 December 2017
Penelope Lively / My debt to roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce

2018

20 January 2018
Kamila Shamsie: ‘It took me 17 years to get round to War and Peace’

25 May 2018

Colm Tóibín / ‘I couldn’t read until I was nine / My first book was an Agatha Christie’

8 June 2018
Carol Ann Duffy / ‘I wish I’d written Harry Potter, obvs’

27 July 2018

Richard Powers: ‘I love sci-fi. The more 10-foot reptilians, the better’

28 september 2018
Robin Robertson: ‘The poetry world is polarised. I’m in the middle, vaguely appalled’

2019

18 January 2019
Margaret Drabble / ‘Lee Child does all the things I could never do. I’m awestruck’

1 February 2019
Leïla Sliman / ‘I’ve always been fascinated by Marilyn Monroe'

8 February 2019
Emma Glass / ‘Game of Thrones is overrated. Give me The Lord of the Rings any day'

1 March 2019
Tom Rachman / ‘Does every author read faster than I do?’

8 March 2019
Ben Okri / ‘I began Don Quixote as one person and finished as another’

2020

17 April 2020
Sally Rooney / 'I want the next thing I do to be the best thing I’ve ever done'

1 May 2020
Edna O'Brien / 'Reading Charles Darwin dislodged my religious education'

24 May 2020
André Aciman: 'I couldn’t finish Moby-Dick. I lacked the patience'

9 October 2020
Neil Gaiman / 'Narnia made me want to write, to do that magic trick'

2021

26 March 2021
Vivian Gornick / 'I couldn’t finish Michelle Obama’s Becoming'

9 April 2021
Emma Cline / ‘Reading anything because you “should” doesn’t make sense to me’

6 August 2021

Damon Galgut / ‘After reading Roald Dahl, the world never looked the same’

9 August 2021
Frank Cottrell-Boyce / ‘I read Adrian Mole every year, it gets funnier each time’

13 August 2021
Anuk Arudpragasam / ‘There’s a lot of laughter in my life, but not when I read’

Man Booker Prize 2007 / The Gathering by Anne Enright

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2007

Booker club: The Gathering by Anne Enright

This novel ticked most of the Irish cliches on my list ... yet it is nuanced, hilarious, and not to be underestimated.

Sam Jordison
Tue 4 Sep 2007

Ireland, it is widely and rightly acknowledged, punches far above its weightwhen it comes to literary output. No lover of books can look on the island with anything other than affection and gratitude for the way its native sons and daughters have enriched and transformed the written word. All the same, there is one sub-genre of uniquely Irish literature that I could happily do without: the Catholic childhood misery memoir.

Sure I found Angela's Ashes touching, but as soon as Frank McCourt's brother got in on the act, not to mention all the subsequent McAuthors eager to sell their history to the kind of Americans who like to think they have Celtic blood, I found I'd had more than enough of big families, bad parents, worse nuns and dipsomaniac uncles with the gift of the gab ...

... All of which is a long way of explaining why I approached Anne Enright's story of a big Dublin family and its murky past with considerable cynicism. No matter that The Gathering is a work of fiction and that Enright has a reputation as one of the most talented writers in Ireland today. I still expected to have heard it all before.

So great was my prejudice, and so bad my mood after three hours of housework drudgery when I came to the book late on Friday night, that as a spiteful little experiment I gathered up my big bag of Irish-childhood cliches and wrote down the first ones that popped out. As I read through I marked down where they initially occur in the book.

Anne Enright_Illustration by Alan Vest

Here's the list:

Drunken father, who veers between maudlin sentimentality and maudlin violence. (Doesn't appear) Humorous uncle - also drunk, but good for the craic and a great source of slightly ribald jokes. (Doesn't appear, but there is a brother Liam who neatly fits this description) Harried mother, living harried life in an old-fashioned kitchen. (Page 3) Too many children. (Page 7) One of these children is sexually abused. (Page 143) One of these children dies too young. (Page 8 ... More turn out to have died on page 10) A grandparent, close to death. (Page 17) A frightening, violent priest. (Page 50) A schoolteacher given over to corporal punishment. (Doesn't appear) A schoolteacher who instils a love of books in the author. (Doesn't appear) Rain. (Page 26) Brown tea. (Page 4) More rain. (Page 60) More tea. (Page 7)

So, by page 50 nearly two-thirds of my predictions had been proved correct. At that stage, however, I wasn't feeling vindicated, so much as ridiculous. Yes, plenty of the book exists on the wrong side of cliche, but my list was unfair. First, because you can't seriously write a book about Ireland and not mention tea. Second, because Enright is perfectly aware that stories of big Irish families always follow the same pattern and is not afraid to make a virtue of this fact: "There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child," her narrator tells us with simple clarity. Third, I'd underestimated Enright - and then some. The Gathering is far more than a story of childhood dolours and the glamourised poverty of olde Ireland.

The majority of the book - or the majority of the thinking in the book - actually takes place in the present, as Veronica Hegarty struggles to come to terms with the fact that her brother Liam has filled his pockets with stones and walked out to his death in the sea. The event shocks her into reminiscence about the past - and even into inventing colourful scenarios about her relatives when she does not know what actually happened to them. It also leads her to a frank assessment of her current life. Instead of maudlin sentimentality, there is a nuanced explanation of the way the past affects the present. Similarly, the exploration of childhood is accompanied by smart insight into what it means to be a wife and mother - and how such a woman is to fit into a new, economically dynamic Ireland, very different from the Guinness-stained sepia of the misery memoir.

The words come packed into short, robust sentences full of allusion and imagery. Sometimes, they don't work quite as Enright might wish. At one point we are told, for instance, that sunlight is "sexual". Unless I'm really missing something, that's a pretty daft thing to say. More often, however, the writing is effective. Veronica says of her parents' capacity to rut and produce offspring: "They were helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit." Or, how's this for an aphorism: "A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking"?

But the thing that most won me over was that even though The Gathering is a serious book (as AL Kennedy eloquently put it, "a genuine attempt to stare down both love and death") it can be absolutely hilarious. And not "look-at-my-drunken-uncle-funny", either. Enright's wit is dry, sardonic, sometimes even cruel - and all the better as a result.

"Are they good children?" Veronica asks of her own offspring. "In the main. Though Emily is a bit of a cat and cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat." Who couldn't like a book with such observations?

Eventually, I found the conclusion disappointing. I was unconvinced by the insistence that childhood events inescapably determine our adult present, and wondered if Veronica's intentions for the future weren't something of a cop out.

But the book is still a credit to this year's longlist.

THE GUARDIAN

Anne Enright / The Green Road / Review

Review: 

The Green Road by Anne Enright

by Neil D.A. Stewart

June 3, 2015

Neil Stewart reviews The Green Road, the new novel by Anne Enright, Ireland’s first Laureate for Fiction

Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering, Anne Enright was recently made Ireland’s first Laureate for Fiction. Even in a small country crammed with outstanding authors, no-one quite matches Enright for her quality of writing, her deftness of insight.

Her new novel, The Green Road, shares some similarities with The Gathering, her Booker-winner of 2007. Once again, all members of a large, geographically and lifestyle-diverse Irish family, the Madigans, are united for the first time in many years, this time for a Christmas that may be the last they share in the family home their aging, widowed mother, Rosaleen, has declared her intention to sell. They protest, but this is the new, rich pre-Crash Ireland of 2005, and as one of her four adult children realises, in a crushing moment of insight, “The truth was that the house they were sitting in was worth a ridiculous amount, and the people sitting in it were worth very little.” It’s a classic Enright line: your shoulders tense up with discomfort even as you’re laughing.

But before they are reunited in the unnamed Irish town that was their childhood home, we are given episodes from each of their lives. This masterful section sees Enright breaking new ground. I loved the story of Dan, a conflicted emigré to 1980s New York who can never quite seem to reconcile his sexuality: a girlfriend on one arm, he becomes obsessed with a young gay West Village weightlifter. There’s something rather wonderful in the wise, insightful Enright writing, in her usual stately, unblushing prose, about gay sex in the time of AIDS, and never preachily or judgementally about Dan, who takes the many decades this book spryly covers to finally be able to articulate who he is and what he wants. (This is a book whose surprises are subtle rather than explosive, but I don’t want to spoil them nonetheless.) While you feel there is hope for him and for his brother Emmet, an aid worker, their sister Hanna has spent her life hiding – with varying degrees of success – an alcohol problem that sees her swigging vodka-laced concoctions from a little fruit-juice bottle labelled “Innocent”. In truth, all four siblings and their mother are addicts of one sort or another, and medication and drugs crop up here again and again. In the very first scene of the book, set in 1980, Rosaleen sends young Hanna to her uncle’s pharmacy to pick up Solpadeine and “something for her chest”. In one of the chapters that follows the four siblings as adults, Constance waits in a doctor’s surgery for a scan to determine whether a lump in her breast is cancerous; in another, Emmet is working in Africa to try and save lives imperilled by poor hygiene. And Hanna, of course, is dependent on a kind of self-medication of her own. The links remain subtle, but the implication is clear: these are four individuals trying and failing to help themselves and others in order to compensate for something missing – stolen – from their own lives.

Since she first emerged in the mid-1990s, the quirks that once distinguished Enright’s fiction (her first books, The Portable Virgin and The Wig My Father Wore, were issued with jolly artwork appropriately attuned to those faintly glib titles) have largely fallen away over the years. What remains is work that is marvellously controlled and beautifully written, that wrestles with the world, and in which she achieves time and again – notably in The Gathering and its followup The Forgotten Waltz which, with the present book, form a sort of triptych of 21st century Ireland’s triumphs and woes – that wonderful feat of capturing some universal feeling that surely every reader has had yet never been able to articulate: Enright does it for you, with warmth, precision, empathy. But while The Green Road demonstrates that she’s lost none of this power, there is a certain downbeat tone to it, a dour quality. This might seem inevitable in a book about the decline of a matriarch and the various dissatisfactions of her offspring, but it seems more than just mimetic of its characters’ troubles. Perhaps because the four siblings are only brought together late on in the book, there is only a little of the sniping humour you might expect from this kind of gathering; old alliances and enmities resurface in this reunion, but it doesn’t generate much laughter in the dark.

Oddly, the mother never quite came to life for me; a tyrant who scolds the children she relies on so much, Rosaleen is better viewed, refracted, through her children’s stories. Letting us see her full-on, as it were, Enright removes some of her symbolic power. It couldn’t be done any other way; the climax of the book, in which Rosaleen sets out on the titular road and is promptly reported missing, is told from the perspective of the weakened tyrant – her name recalls that other maddened, wearying family despot, Lear – as well as those of her offspring who, damaged and dismayed by her behaviour, still (of course) rush to her aid. They can do nothing else. Elderly she may be, but you don’t have the sense that this is a woman who will ever die, nor that these four now middle-aged children – damaged perhaps irreparably – will ever escape her shadow, despite intriguing hints in Emmet’s story, particularly, that some changes and transformations can take an astoundingly long time to reveal themselves. We know much more about the Madigans by the close of this powerful, memorable, moving novel, yet each member of the family remains mysterious, bristling with contradictions – in other words, lifelike.

CIVILIAN

Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway in 1979's "Manhattan"Courtesy Everett Collection

Mariel Hemingway: Woody Allen tried to seduce me at 18

By Howard Kurtz, Fox News, Fox News

March 25, 2015 | 5:44pm

Modal Trigger

Long before anyone raised questions about his conduct with young women, Woody Allen had designs on an 18-year-old: Mariel Hemingway.

She had just starred as his teenage girlfriend in the 1979 movie “Manhattan” when the famed film director flew out to her parents’ home in Idaho. As Hemingway recalls in her forthcoming memoir “Out Came the Sun,” Allen repeatedly said he wanted to take her to Paris. And that made her very nervous.

“Our relationship was platonic, but I started to see that he had a kind of crush on me, though I dismissed it as the kind of thing that seemed to happen any time middle-aged men got around young women,” writes Hemingway, who was so inexperienced that she was embarrassed by the sex talk in the film.

She warned her parents “that I didn’t know what the arrangement was going to be, that I wasn’t sure if I was even going to have my own room. Woody hadn’t said that. He hadn’t even hinted it. But I wanted them to put their foot down. They didn’t. They kept lightly encouraging me.” Allen was then in his mid-forties.

Hemingway woke up in the middle of the night “with the certain knowledge that I was an idiot. No one was going to get their own room. His plan, such as it was, involved being with me.” She shook him awake in the guest room and demanded:

“I’m not going to get my own room, am I?” As Allen fumbled for his glasses, Hemingway informed him: “I can’t go to Paris with you.”

He called for his private jet the next morning and left Idaho.

Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen
Manhattan

Modal Trigger

(Allen’s personal life, of course, has been mired in controversy. The director has strongly denied allegations by his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow that he sexually assaulted his adopted daughter, Dylan, when she was 7, and no charges were ever brought. Allen started dating Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow’s adopted daughter, when she was a young woman, and they are now married.)

“Out Came the Sun” is remarkably candid about Hemingway’s struggles: With mental illness in her family (her legendary grandfather Ernest and her sister Margaux are among those who committed suicide). With her food and body image issues. With her crumbling marriage. With her roller-coaster movie career. This is anything but a gauzy celebrity memoir, as Hemingway shines a harsh light on her own scars and mistakes. (She is also publishing a companion volume about her troubled childhood, “Invisible Girl,” aimed at young women.)

Hemingway has emerged as a crusader on her signature issue, speaking at a mental health conference in Washington keynoted by Hillary Clinton. In describing how her parents’ alcoholism devastated the family, Hemingway defends her father against those who “use words like ‘violation’ and even, sometimes, ‘molestation’” of his children because there is no proof. Such a narrow focus on sexual abuse, she says, “obscures and trivializes the hundreds of other ways that a family can betray a child, most of which are far more nuanced and complex, more interwoven into everyday life…

“You could make a real argument that my mother’s behavior was just as sick if not more so, that her relentless criticism put conditions on ordinary affection.”

In the book, published by Regan Arts, the actress also illuminates the industry’s casting-couch culture by revealing a series of leading men and directors who hit on her. The book at times reads like a sitcom about Hollywood harassment.

Modal Trigger

When Hemingway had the lead role as a Playboy playmate in “Star 80,” written and directed by Bob Fosse, they were drinking one night at the Beverly Hills Hotel and Fosse wanted to go upstairs: “The elevator let us off at my floor. I let us into my room. And then, for the next fifteen minutes, I ran rings around the couch while Bob Fosse chased me for purposes of sex. ‘I have a boyfriend,’ I said.

“That didn’t dissuade him one bit…‘Well, I’m not interested,’ I said.

“This stopped him for a moment. He steadied himself on the couch and looked at me. “I have never not [blanked] my leading lady,’ he said.

Hemingway’s retort: “Meet the first.”

And then there was her discussion of a movie project with Robert De Niro. The actor was “fat and unpleasant,” she says, and “started to hit on me. I started to see what I was dealing with, which was a guy who had no interest in the movie I was describing, who had come across town only because some young actress had invited him, who was probably thinking about getting laid.”

Hemingway did have an affair with Robert Towne, the screenwriter of her film “Personal Best,” after writing him a thank-you letter once the movie had wrapped. But when she decided to break it off, he turned brutal:

“Well, let me tell you about you. You’re not who you think you are. You aren’t talented. You look strange. I didn’t even want you for ‘Personal Best.’ You should probably pick a second career now, because you’re not going to make it in this business. And that’s just professional. Personally, it’s even worse — do you know how sick and twisted your relationship with your mother is?”

On another movie set, for “Falling From Grace,” Hemingway fell for John Cougar Mellencamp, kissed him a few times, and later told her husband Stephen she was in love with the musician. Stephen said she should have just had an affair without telling him, and then disclosed that he had cheated on her.

Hemingway’s description of the slow dissolution of her marriage is excruciating, especially when her husband got cancer and they went to therapy. “Sometimes,” he told her, “I feel like you wanted me to get sick, because then you’d be able to get free.”

The roots of Mariel’s fixation on mental health are clear in this book as she struggled with one sister whose own brief movie stardom ended in drug abuse, depression and death (Margaux), and another (Muffet) diagnosed with bipolar schizophrenia. “I am a Hemingway, and to me, that means that I have a ticket to understanding a world of darkness, of courage, of sadness, of excitement, and — at times — of complete lunacy. And yet, other people with other names feel these things too. It may just be that they don’t have an American myth to which they can connect themselves.”

Despite the weirdness of her long-ago encounter with Woody Allen, Hemingway showed up for last year’s Golden Globes to help honor him with a lifetime achievement award. Hemingway was nervous before the event, which Allen boycotted. They will always be linked on the big screen, and in the popular imagination, the image of a fresh-faced teen sharing a milkshake with the neurotic actor — and in her private memory of the offer she managed to refuse.

PAGE SIX

My favourite Hitchcock / Psycho by Peter Bradshaw

My favourite Hitchcock: Psycho

At 61, Alfred Hitchcock was reaching what many saw as the end of an illustrious career. Then he took a quantum leap to further greatness with a low-budget, black-and-white shocker

Peter Bradshaw
Monday 23 July 2012 11.57 BST

"I declare!"

"I don't! That's how I get to keep it!"

Hitchcock's macabre pulp masterpiece begins with the most dangerous piece of tax evasion in movie history. Sweaty, leery, cowboy-hatted businessman Tom Cassidy has come into the office of a Phoenix realtor, George Lowery, to close a house purchase in cash: an ostentatious wedding present for his 18-year-old daughter, due to get hitched the next day.

He boasts to the secretary, Marion Crane, that the $40,000 he's waving under her nose has been amassed without reference to the tax authorities. He even brags that he never carries more than he can afford to lose. In a shrewd instant, Marion reaches a conclusion Hitchcock cleverly never spells out. If she steals his money, he can take the hit and won't call the cops because that would alert the IRS. She's right. As things turn out, Cassidy only engages a private detective, the stolid Arbogast. But her fantasies of Cassidy's rage-filled threats about getting his money back are weirdly prescient: "If any of it's missing, I'll replace it with her fine soft flesh!" What a very psycho image.

A touch of Poe ... Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho

Lost and disorientated on the rainy highway, runaway Marion winds up in a remote motel – not so different from the hotels where she enjoyed furtive lunch hours of passion with her lover. It is run by a strange taxidermy enthusiast, Norman Bates, played by a saturnine Anthony Perkins.

Hitchcock's low-budget, black-and-white shocker looks like a bad dream of crystalline clarity and detail, ushered in with crazed operatic intensity by Bernard Herrmann's superb score. There are moments in which it appears to decelerate to a floating slo-mo: Arbogast (Martin Balsam) climbing the stairs; Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) approaching Norman's house, her eyes stark and terrified. And then Hitchcock will stamp hard on the accelerator pedal, most famously for the shower scene in which Marion (Janet Leigh) will meet her destiny. For all its jagged cuts and shrieking violin stabs, it somehow seems as substantial as an entire second act, as if half an hour's dramatic incident has been compressed into one dense and horrible mass. (It took Hitchcock seven days to film, out of a 30-day shooting schedule.)

Psycho is the sort of brilliant, nimble, cheap movie you'd expect from a young hotshot at the beginning of his career. But Hitchcock was 61, known for classy and elegant films with high production values, and he was reaching what many saw as the end of an illustrious career. Yet Psycho gave Hitchcock a quantum leap to further greatness.

The story took its inspiration, partly, from the true-life horror of Ed Gein, the notorious 50s serial killer who made bizarre trophies from his victims' skin, their fine soft flesh. He, in turn, was said to have been a reader of pulp magazines such as Unknown Worlds and Marvel Tales, which featured the work of Robert Bloch, who later wrote the novel, Psycho, on which the movie was based.

My favourite part of the film is something only an Englishman could have devised. Marion is driving out of town with the stolen cash, having told her boss she was taking the money to the bank and then going home to bed with a headache. While waiting at a red light, she actually sees her boss with Cassidy: their eyes meet, and she can't help herself giving him a little polite smile of greeting. But he returns it with a puzzled frown, and she looks away, mortified, stricken with embarrassment. It would be out of the question to shout some absurd excuse from the driver's-side window. The moment is superbly played by Janet Leigh: this is an unbearably tense and horribly real scene – different, in many ways, to the remaining rococo fantasy of strangeness and fear.

The film's inspiration, for me, resides in the twin worlds of motel cabin and house. The rooms themselves are stark, bright, featureless, anonymous and modern: models of the 20th-century American service economy. But the mouldering house on the hill behind comes from the 19th century, a dark suppressed history, a world of Edgar Allan Poe. The house is gloomy, cluttered, infested with a secret personality. As the door opens, you can almost smell the damp and furniture polish. On her brief, horrified tour, Lila finds a little toy rabbit (does Norman still take it to bed with him?) and Beethoven's Eroica still on the turntable.

As Marion undresses in cabin number one, Norman is the creepiest-ever boy next door, spying on her through a peephole. Earlier that evening, he'd invited her to supper: "I don't set a fancy table, my kitchen's awful homey!" Perkins turns the second syllable of "homey" into a weird, bashful, gulping little laugh, with a vulnerable, boyish grin. Has he rehearsed this unctuous line in his head? Did he use it on the other two missing women? Later, we will see his second grin, his mother's grin: sinister and predatory and defiant, bared at the audience directly. And with pure outrageous chutzpah, Hitchcock superimposes the skull's death's-head subliminally on his grin, and then dissolves to the radiator grille of Marion's recovered car. Was there ever a directorial flourish like it?

I sometimes wonder what happened the day after the theft, the wedding day of Tom Cassidy's daughter. The ceremony probably took place in a church like the one from which we see Sheriff Al Chambers emerging after a Sunday service. Was Cassidy (so tremendously played by B-movie stalwart Frank Albertson) beaming and proprietorial and still unaware of his loss? Was he still complacently planning to announce the gift of a house at the reception? Or did he already know something was up? He and Lowery might have gone to the bank after they saw Marion on the street the day before. He might now be scowling and frowning on the wedding day he was unwilling to cancel, curtly shaking his head when his wife and daughter asked if anything was wrong. And the 18-year-old herself: is her sublime innocence the key to the whole thing? Lonely, frustrated Marion, who yearned for marriage and respectable love … perhaps something within her snapped with rage at the thought of this smug little rich girl and her unearned day of happiness. Part of the film's genius is that this first psycho moment happens silently, invisibly, inside Marion's head.

THE GUARDIAN

Irvine Welsh

Interview

Irvine Welsh: 'I'm the same kind of writer as I am a drinker. I'm a binger'

Decca Aitkenhead

Sunday 15 April 2012

When Irvine Welsh began writing 20 years ago, he hadn't much of a clue how to set about a novel. To get himself going, he hammered out 100,000 words, telling himself it was "just my launch pad to get into what I need to write about" – and sure enough the trick worked. The first 100,000 words were duly discarded, and lay forgotten for years, while the debut novel – Trainspotting – turned its author into a literary superstar.

Six more novels later, Welsh had an idea to dig those old words out again. They were stored on floppy disks he couldn't even read, so he found a data recovery expert on the internet, posted the disks off, and wondered what, if anything, would come back. "I was terrified that it would just get lost in the post. But if it was meant to be it was meant to be. I just thought: 'Oh well, I can't even remember what was on them anyway.'"

IRVING WELSH
Illustration by Sylvia Stølan for Sorgen

When the words returned safely, Welsh figured the next step would be straightforward. "Naively, I thought, well, I've got 100,000 words here, this should be all right," and so he sat down to write a prequel to Trainspotting. But immersing himself once again into the violent, darkly comic, chillingly affectless, uproariously chaotic world of his famous fictional junkies, Welsh ended up writing an epic so weighty and sprawling, it leaves Trainspotting looking like a footnote. "I just got into it," Welsh grins cheerfully. "It was fun. It was like meeting a bunch of old pals."The book revisits Trainspotting's cast of Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and co, following the group's early flirtations with heroin before they slowly descend into full-blown addiction. I found it an enjoyable but increasingly frustrating read, because for all the brilliance of Welsh's dialogue, and the compelling dramas of his characters, the lack of any discernible narrative momentum defeated me before I could get to the end. To his critics, Skagboys will probably confirm that Welsh only ever really had one good idea for a novel, and has been trading off it with diminishing returns ever since, indulged by editors too in awe of his fame to impose editorial discipline. To fans of Welsh's disregard for literary convention, on the other hand, a bumper second helping of their favourite characters will probably only make them love him even more.

This impression of a semi-delinquent literary gatecrasher played a big part in Welsh's early popular appeal, and I think he must be fond of the identity too, because it's still how he presents himself today. We meet in an Edinburgh bar, and he's not just smiley and relaxed but astonishingly inarticulate, getting tangled up in sentences that stop and start and wander off at will, until a great gust of his laughter swallows them up.

"I was in this shop in Edinburgh one time," he chuckles, "and this wee guy comes up to me like: 'You're Irvine Welsh, aren't you?' And I goes: 'Aye, I am.' And he said: 'I've read every one of your books.' And I said: 'Oh that's great.' And he goes: 'I fucking stole them all, I never paid for one.' Well that's brilliant!" People who secretly take themselves very seriously sometimes pretend not to by confecting an elaborate pretence of irreverence. But in Welsh's case, I would guess that the mischievous amusement is entirely authentic.

I tell him I'm not sure if he's a poster boy for recreational drug use – "Or the warning sign," he interjects, laughing. "I'm not sure myself sometimes." Trainspotting's influence on drug education campaigns does, he admits, entertain him. "If you look at all the drug education stuff, the anti-drug propaganda, it's practically been lifted right out of Trainspotting. And did I get a CBE or a knighthood or anything like that? No!" But he's not very comfortable about adopting any public position on drugs. "Obviously you want people to look after themselves and be safe, but it's basically up to them, you know. I don't really give a fuck what people do in terms of drugs."

Whether he likes it or not, though, Skagboys draws Welsh into this moral territory. A prequel to Trainspotting must explain why young men in the tenements of Leith swapped traditional Scottish working-class family life for the squalid despair of heroin addiction, and the novel implicates everything from Thatcherism to family bereavement. But Welsh tried very hard, he says, not to write a crude socio-economic polemic.

"Not, 'Oh, they shut down this factory and now we've got nothing to do, let's take drugs,' kind of thing. But just to show, without making a big point about it, that the dynamics within the relationships and the family relationships started to change. The idea of people who were basically stuck in a house with nothing to do all day long, it's like the Christmas syndrome, when you all get together at Christmas and think this is going to be great, but it's a fucking nightmare. Everyone needs some kind of compelling drama in their life, basically. You could look at it from the other way around, and you say why wouldn't people take drugs, because there's nothing else."In that respect, Trainspotting's prequel is uncannily timely, for the very unemployment and social deprivation it catalogues is happening again today. "Well I didn't quite see that coming," Welsh laughs. "It wasn't like, as soon as the Conservatives got back into power, oh I must get this book out!"

Welsh himself is an interesting case study because despite growing up in the poverty of Leith, he didn't suffer any serious damage in his childhood. "I wasn't gang-banged by five uncles, you know?" Leaving school at 16, he muddled through a series of manual jobs before heading off to London in the 70s, where he wound up working for Hackney council and getting married. And yet along the way he nevertheless managed to get heavily addicted to heroin.

Why did he ever try it? "Stupidity, really," he admits. "And ignorance." Having been told by everyone that one spliff would kill him, the discovery that this was not in fact true discredited every other drug warning he'd ever heard. "So after that it was like, oh, a line of speed? Yeah. Smack? Yeah."

But unlike many of his contemporaries, he had enough of a life beyond addiction to be worth fighting for. He went cold turkey, kicked the habit, and the couple returned to Edinburgh, where Welsh worked for the council and studied for an MBA. Post-heroin, he was quite scared of drugs – until the early 90s rave scene and ecstasy seduced him, and inspired him to write.

Welsh's famously enthusiastic recreational drug consumption has slowly diminished in recent years, but only because it's no longer worth it. "I used to be able to go out, get fucked up, get up the next day and be fine. Now I just want to go back to bed and feel sorry for myself and kind of lie around sweating and groaning and all that." The trouble is, fans keep trying to give him drugs.

"I'll be doing a reading or a signing and people will come up to me and …" He mimes slipping drugs into his hand. "It's like: 'Oh fuck, there's a couple of grams of charlie and loads of fucking dope.'" Some of them even hand him heroin. "They want to be able to say they've given you something. But it's like, it's a waste, because it goes down the fucking pan all the time. And I really have to watch it," he adds, starting to chuckle, "because if I'm doing a book tour in America, for example, because it's a long distance, you're on planes all the time. There's been times where I've just forgotten and I've been sitting on the plane, put my hand in my pocket and found a little packet. I really do have to watch that."

 Irvine Welsh and his wife Beth Quinn in 2009. Photograph: Barbara Lindberg/Rex Features

Welsh's life today is unrecognisable from the one he evokes in Skagboys and Trainspotting. He divides his time between Chicago, Miami and LA, and recently married for a second time, to a woman 22 years younger than him who rides dressage horses. The couple recently bought a horse, and Welsh admits: "I'm totally embarrassed, but I love this fucking horse. I don't ride him and ask him to do any work, I just talk to him and feed him nice treats so he loves me and he always tries to kiss me when I come into the stable. We've become new pals, I go out all the time to see him."

At 53 he remains childless – to his immense relief, for having felt too young to be a parent in his 20s and 30s, he says he missed the "10-minute window" and now feels too old. "I'm probably a natural uncle. I can take the kids out and have fun with them and look after them, and I can be Mr Popular. But actually having to do the grind? That stuff just doesn't appeal at all." If the 31-year-old Mrs Welsh decides she wants children, he will go along with it. "Well, you have to roll with it. But I still dread it. I live in fear."

Children would help solve the problem of isolation, though, which comes with being a writer. Welsh's solution used to be to DJ in nightclubs. "Otherwise you're sitting there alone with people that don't exist, and it's not good for me. I go fucking nuts. I just become weird and antisocial." These days, on account of the hangover problem, his remedy is film. "I go to Hollywood, and meet people, and it's fun. I've been doing a bit of screenwriting, and producing, and even a bit of directing." A movie of another Welsh novel, Filth, will be released later this year, starring James McAvoy, and the author thinks it's going to be bigger than Trainspotting. "I just can't see anything as good coming out of Britain in a long, long time. This is just so different from anything else. Completely original."

Welsh doesn't seem to suffer much angst or self-doubt, which is part of his enormous charm, and perhaps not surprising, because as he says himself: "Writing has been handed to me on a plate." He never even had to find an agent; the first big London publisher he submitted Trainspotting to snapped it up, and his publishers have been happy to print pretty much whatever he writes ever since. "I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book'll always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say: 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, forget about it, it doesn't exist."

On the face of it, this should be every writer's dream, but in truth none of Welsh's novels have come close to the impact of his first, and I wonder if such sensational early success was in fact a mixed blessing. "Oh aye," he jokes, "it's all downhill from there." More seriously, he goes on: "You have to see it as a calling card, rather than an albatross around your neck, and you have to go into it with that attitude. I think I've written a lot better books than Trainspotting. Mind you," he adds, grinning, "I've written some really shit ones as well." Which ones are which? "I'm not going to tell you! I've still got to try and sell these things, for God's sake!"

Any attempt to impose discipline on his creativity would, by the sounds of it, probably be futile anyway. "It's just a big mess," is how he describes his approach to plot. "And I think, all this shit here has got to be put into some kind of order. It's like a police kind of thing, I've got the whiteboards on the walls and I've got all the pictures I've taken of different things, and stuff that I've taken off the net, and Post-it notes that I've scribbled on all over the wall. And there I am mixing it all around, taking it off the wall, putting it back up again." The writing process itself is equally chaotic.

"I'm the same kind of writer as I am a drinker. I'm a binger. Abstinence followed by ... well it's an addict thing, I'll sit there and my eyes will hanging out my head, it'll be five days later, unshaven not changed, really, really bad. And eventually I'll just get told: 'You fucking minging bastard, get a shower, for fuck's sake.' And then I'll get in the shower and be like, this is good, I'm going for a walk. I'm off down the pub."

For such an untortured soul, the puzzle for many readers is why he always writes about transgression and darkness. Some grotesque sort of sexual or violent abomination is pretty much ubiquitous in his novels, and critics have accused him of being a literary shock jock, but Welsh says mildly: "Well everybody that writes has their own area of inquiry. And mine has always been kind of, why is it that when life can be so hard and difficult, we compound it by self-sabotage, doing terrible things. That's always been my main area of inquiry, and it does lead you to dark places."

But success has, of course, led him away from the poverty of his youth, into a sunny life of dressage horses and Hollywood parties. A suspicion of inauthenticity – or worse still, of misery tourism – has attached itself to Welsh ever since he wrote Trainspotting, and I wonder if he's experienced a form of survivor's guilt for escaping the tragedy of his old friends' lives in Leith, chiefly by writing about them.

"No it brings massive fucking relief, to be perfectly honest. You can get into that drug-taking competition, and there's always somebody who's done more drugs than you, is more fucked-up than you. But they've got to actually write a book about it. Nobody's going to sign a royalty cheque because they've done more drugs than me, you know what I mean?"

When his debut first came out and sold 10,000 copies, "I was like the hero. 'You're fuckin' tellin' our story, good on yer, telling it as it is. Go on son.' But when it sold 100,000 copies they said: 'What the fuck?' About the same book! I mean, every psychopath in Leith thinks they're Begbie. And whenever there's a book out, everyone looks at me kind of funny when I come back, almost like to see if I've changed." They're checking to see if he's turned into a tosser? "It's a bit late for that," he laughs. "Cos I started off at that point."

THE GUARDIAN