Any human heart
William Boyd
Hamish Hamilton, ?17.99
William Boyd's new novel is the last word in an elaborate jape played at the expense of a critical establishment that sees him not as a peer of Martin Amis or Ian McEwan but as an enjoyable storyteller who sells lots of books.
Boyd's career as a novelist dates back two decades to the Whitbread-winning A Good Man in Africa and the Booker-nominated An Ice-Cream War-which respectively captured a continent and encapsulated a period with readable good humour. More recently, he has directed his first self-scripted movie, The Trench, as well as adapting his last novel, Armadillo, for the small screen.
If Boyd betrays dissatisfaction with his own reputation, this may be discerned in the fictional writer who narrates Any Human Heart. Subtitled "The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart," it is extensively footnoted to enhance the impression of biographical reality. Mountstuart is an author who has never managed to capitalise on his early success and has found some fulfilment in other fields. He is not an unusual Boyd protagonist (they are all flawed and fatalistic) but Boyd has, until now, resisted the gamble of putting a writer centre stage.
I first met Boyd in 1995 on publication of his second collection of short stories, The Destiny of Natalie "X," which was when Mountstewart, then sporting an alternative spelling but the same character, first appeared. In the brief story, "Hotel des Voyageurs," he has sex with Giselle, a French prostitute he mistakes for a countess. Mountstewart is a directionless enigma, set in inter-war aspic.
We next met in 1998, the year of Boyd's last novel, Armadillo, but also the year of the great Nat Tate scam. Boyd, with the help of friends like David Bowie (fellow board member of Modern Painters magazine), published a monograph, outlining the brief, tragic career of an American abstract expressionist. Tate's work had been created in obsessive sequences of bridges and buildings. Much of it he destroyed before taking his own life. Nat Tate, of course, never existed.
The cat was out of the bag before the book appeared in Britain but by then some New York reputations had been tarnished as art experts professed to have been aware of the artist whom Boyd had invented. But Boyd was careful not to let the joke outstay its welcome-his attention had shifted elsewhere. The primary witness in the Nat Tate book had been Logan Mountstuart, "a forgotten figure in the annals of 20th-century life." Inventing a fake biography for a painter was entertainment; but fabricating the "intimate journals" of a writer for the new novel may have steered him closer to the confessional. Boyd admits that, for the last 20 years, he has been keeping journals similar to Mountstuart's.
Were Boyd swimming in the more fashionable eddies of literary life and attracting closer critical scrutiny, it would have been impossible for him to pull off the Nat Tate trick. The mere presence of a character from an earlier short story would have given the game away. The dedication to Boyd's wife ("For Susan") which the Tate story shares with all his novels, was also a clue. Re-reading Nat Tate now, its conceits seem patently comic, culminating in Tate's final plunge from the Staten Island ferry. How could anyone have been taken in? Yet Manhattan fell for Tate to such an extent that he was still being debated in the New York Times months later. "Nat Tate's 15 minutes may be over," wrote Paul Mattick (in a piece headlined "imagining imaginary artists"), "but some interesting questions remain."
Visiting the Museum of Modern Art last month, Boyd was delighted to find his monograph in the gallery shop, carefully alphabeticised among the lives of those whose work is actually to be found in the institution. "As time goes by Nat Tate becomes ever more interesting in its hoax element," he told me. "It is almost the perfect work of art. I should hang up the Moma shopping bag with the $15 receipt in a gallery."
Any Human Heart, it turns out, is the last part of an accidental triptych of work by Boyd, begun with The New Confessions in 1988. That fictional autobiography of one John James Todd, a Scotsman on the make in the early days of Hollywood, was followed by Nat Tate and is now completed with the Mountstuart journals. One is a fake autobiography; one a fake biography; the other a fake journal. What does this development in Boyd's oeuvre mean? Mountstuart encounters great literary figures-Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh-yet is inspired most by the neglected William Gerhardie, who died a recluse in London, and whose early novels, Futility and The Polyglots have just been republished. Boyd is particularly interested in Gerhardie, noting that Waugh owed him a big debt in Scoop and Vile Bodies. "Gerhardie was like Logan Mountstuart," says Boyd. "His last book was published in 1940 and he died in 1977-that's 37 years of nothing. But Waugh ripped him off shamelessly."
Any Human Heart, then, is about self-deception and recognising fabrication when you see it. For those who have kept up with Boyd it will be a delight, the pay-off to a shared joke (one wonders if the stylish Giselle from the last pages of Any Human Heart is related to Madame Mountstewart in the Hotel des Voyageurs). Quotations from Mountstuart's journals are common to both Nat Tate and the new novel. Characters from the spoof monograph-including Tate himself-turn up in the new book.
Whether all this is self-indulgence on Boyd's part or, worse, showboating, is a question of taste. Any Human Heart is a long way from the narrative simplicity of his early books and is unlikely to receive the acclaim of Boyd's big, stand-alone successes. It is not an intelligent holiday page-turner like Brazzaville Beach or a television-adaptable novel of contemporary London, like Armadillo. For Boyd fans (and I am one) who see him as an under-appreciated man of letters, the traceable links within his recent body of work are proof of his artfulness. "The books are not about play," Boyd told me. "There is an underlying seriousness. A journal is life unspooling, the artform that most corresponds to the way we live." But he may also be speaking to a less reliable audience-trying to convince the critics, even as he toys with them, that he is more than a spinner of good yarns.
