An Interview With Louise Welsh

Louise Welsh managed to squeeze in a chat between decorating and trips to B&Q. I was pleased to discover that such a celebrated writer (her first novel, The Cutting Room won the John Creasey Dagger Award and the Saltire Society First Book Award) enjoyed such mundane, and dare I say typically lesbian, activities as house painting. “If they want a programme on poorly done decorating, I’m their girl. I don’t see why Justin and Colin should get all the limelight.” The reason for the decorating is that Louise is off to Germany for a year and will be renting out her flat. “I don’t see why anyone else should put up with the squalor I’m used to, so I’m doing it up.”

From April 2006, Welsh has been offered a residency at an artist’s retreat in the UNESCO listed Cultural Heritage town of Bamberg, Bavaria. Each year six artists from a European city are invited to spend a year at the Internationales Kunsterhaus Villa Concordia. “You get a wee bedsit in the villa and a stipend.” Welsh will be joined by two visual artists, two composers, another writer, and for at least some of the time by her girlfriend Zoe. This finds them learning German in between the painting and tiling (though she’s had to get a professional in for that). So far her German stretches to introducing herself and asking lots of impertinent questions.

After initial nervousness she says she’s really looking forward to the experience. “There will be other writers there too – that suits me, working with others around, there’s a competitive energy.” She often goes to the university library near her house to write. While she has long periods of working alone at home, sometimes she can’t stand it, and she has phases of needing to get out and be surrounded by an atmosphere of industry. “If there is a constant level of noise, like traffic, I can adjust, I can’t cope with abrupt noises or music I don’t like. The level of a university library is about right.” She has ideas of a book she wants to work on while in Germany, but doesn’t want to talk about work in progress. I’d asked her about an idea for a book about the cinema that had been mooted in the past, she said, “yes it’s still there – poor women, they’re all still hanging about in their usherette uniforms waiting for me to do something. The characters are real people, it’s like the Singing Detective! I don’t like to talk about work in progress because sometimes another story pulls you more and you go with that.”

She claims she didn’t have imaginary friends as a child, but did have a very lively imagination and very vivid dreams, sometimes nightmares. “I had no problem distinguishing reality from imagination as a child, maybe that’s got worse.” She thinks the agility of the imagination is one of the best things of childhood and it’s a shame people either lose that or don’t have time to develop it. “People should be able to paint or write without feeling compelled to exhibit or publish, just for the life enhancing act of doing it, it opens doors in our heads and makes us appreciate art and literature. She’s done some painting herself, “nothing you’d even hang on the wall, in fact I’m better at painting walls and I’m not so good at that, but it made me realise what I liked in art. Maybe I’ve an untapped talent as a violinist – I haven’t tried the violin.”

Her new book, The Bullet Trick, (published by Canongate) out in July, is something that she was keen to talk about. It’s set very much in the 21st century (her last book Tamburlaine Must Die is an historical novel about the playwright Christopher Marlowe), between London, Glasgow and Berlin. She describes the structure as different from anything she’s done previously, it’s a “more risky structure” a dual structure with the protagonist, William Wilson, telling the story of events of a year ago in London and Berlin, interspersed with the story that is happening now in Glasgow. Wilson is a conjuror and while doing a routine at a retirement party for police inspectors he discovers something he shouldn’t know and is later pursued for this information. He then goes to Berlin where he meets an American woman and they develop a routine together.

This book has a fast opening but then a slower build than previous work. “I think of it in colour terms – Berlin goes from light to dark, and Glasgow from dark to light and at the end the two strands crash and explode.” The book revisits some of the themes of The Cutting Room – “the objectification of women in art – magic seems to be the epitome of that, you put a woman in spangly tights and cut her in half or shoot her or stick swords into her – why do people want to see that?” Welsh had to do quite a lot of research for the book, which she loved. “I went to Berlin quite a few times and loved it. The Berlin cabaret scene fascinates me.” She also read a lot of books about magic, including books on how to do tricks “I hoped I’d learn how to do them and impress all my friends and family.” There were also lots of magicians memoirs, “very boring memoirs, like those of booksellers, because most people’s lives are pretty boring.” While she didn’t do so much research for The Cutting Room, “it was mainly my own experience and made up stuff.” (Welsh was a bookseller for many years where she gained the knowledge of auction houses and house clearing.) She does enjoy research. “The trick of research is knowing when to stop. My first degree was in history and I love finding things out and then boring friends with them. I’m a great reader, though maybe not very discerning” reading anything and everything including the tabloids.

Her new book again features a main male character told in first person. “Will it never end!” While she has written short stories, and pieces for radio and theatre with female characters her previous novels have all had gay male leads. Should we read something Freudian into that, I asked. “You probably could, but Freud seems out in the cold these days. Sometimes you write for very conscious reasons and other times you’re not sure where things come from. I find myself trying to rationalize it after the fact. It’s probably a distancing device. I don’t write autobiographically. When you go from your bedroom to the library and back there’s not much to say. I nearly stepped in front of a car today, is about as exciting as it gets!” She says she finds writing autobiographically almost upsetting and tries to get away from herself. So I question the likelihood of her ever writing about a happy lesbian couple. “ Ach, who knows? I’d quite like to. I’d like to do a horror movie with lesbians, where the woman are OK, not crazy, they’re dynamic go-getters and they both escape.” She thinks she could bring off a relationship story in that medium. While there has been romance in her novels, she doesn’t think she could write predominantly about relationships. “We’ve no right to be happy, when people say they’re not happy I want to say, well what did you expect? I can’t bear nice romantic stories – woman meets man, falls in love and they marry, it dreadful, there has to be conflict.” She’d been buoyed up that morning by Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’ which was on Lent and mortality. On the view that Lent is a time of giving things up so by Easter you’ll be ready for summer, fitter, healthier and happier the speaker said, “What total rubbish. Yesterday I was given the news that I am going to die.” We’re all going to die. That’s the sort of view that Welsh appreciates. “I thought of calling up and requesting him everyday!”

Having brought up lesbian horror movies, I asked how she would feel about her books being made into films. “A script for The Cutting Room is already being done, by Andrea Gibb.” Welsh didn’t want to write the script herself because that would be too much time with one book and she wasn’t sure she’d be detached enough, but she thinks there are good reasons both for and against writing the script of one’s own book. “Maybe in the future I’d do it, but I’d probably rather do someone else’s or write an original screenplay. I’ve had wee forays into theatre, but there’s not much money in it. I’d love to see Johnny Depp as Marlowe. If he’s free, I’d love him to read for it!”

Louise Welsh strikes me as someone who loves the simple things in life – she seems overjoyed by the massive tube of Polyfiller she’s just bought for £3.50 – “if it really fills all cracks like it says, it’s a great bargain!” She’s also hugely enthusiastic about the tiler’s work – no How Not To Decorate Justinesque tantrums there! She loves life, loves cabaret, research, writing, and people with an almost childlike quality and yet perhaps there’s a darker side, a side glimpsed better in her books, despite her distancing tactics, a side that thinks we have no right to happiness and that life isn’t all nice romantic happy stories, which of course it isn’t. Though she says she’s no more strange and weird than anyone else, there is definitely a darker underbelly to her writing, which means she’s either got an amazing imagination, or there’s something she’s not telling us! And I didn’t even get to ask her about all the gay sex in her books!

She promises to put a hairbrush through her hair for the photo. “I couldn’t find my hairbrush today, so I never brushed it and I’ve been round B&Q several times!” What other award-winning writer would confess to that? Louise Welsh is about as down to earth and ‘normal’ as they come, but don’t let the façade fool you, there’s a lot going on there, and if nothing else make sure you read her books, if you don’t you’re definitely missing out.

Naomi Young (From Velvet issue 8)