Fascination
By William Boyd
Knopf, 277 pages, $24
Any Human Heart
By William Boyd
Knopf, 499 pages, $24.95Vintage, 480 pages, $14.95 paper
Before cracking open new books by William Boyd, let’s recall the hoax he perpetrated a half-dozen years ago. This British writer’s “Nat Tate: An American Artist” purported to be the biography of a friend of Picasso and Braque’s, an abstract expressionist who committed suicide young and whose work then slipped from public view. Initially taken by many to be a true story, “Nat Tate” was merely a twinkle in Boyd’s eye, an abstract expression of his own. And in the credulous reception to his fake biography, Boyd seems to have found his future metier.
Since then, using biographical or autobiographical means and relying heavily on the journal form, Boyd has turned out “Any Human Heart,” a novel published in the U.S. last year, and “Fascination,” his new story collection. Boyd is a serious writer–interested in the Big Questions–and yet we get the feeling that while dipping a biscuit in his tea, selling Old and New Britannia, he’s still sniggering behind the text. Tally-ho.
“We keep a journal,” writes Logan Mountstuart, the fictional character whose lifelong jottings form the basis of “Any Human Heart,” in order to “entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.” Our lives aren’t a simple progression at all, Mountstuart asserts, and “a true journal presents us with the more riotous and disorganized reality. The various stages of development are there, but they are jumbled up, counterposed and repeated randomly. The selves jostle for prominence in these pages.”
Not only does Mountstuart accurately ape his creator–Boyd has maintained in interviews that the journal is the literary form that most fits the way we actually live–but the fictional journalist has described the organization of many of Boyd’s short stories as well: fragmented selves contending with their own disparate leanings, sometimes in a process of breakdown, other times in attempts to heal. “Fascination” reads like a series of propositions being worked out, metatheories on life, while “Any Human Heart” is a denser and more complex matrix of detail tracking a biological and social trajectory. In the novel and his stories, it is the unsteadiness of life, its capriciousness and unknowability, that absorbs Boyd.
In his advanced years, crowing that he has seen every decade of the 20th Century, Mountstuart describes his life as “not so much a rollercoaster–a rollercoaster’s too smooth–a yo-yo, rather–a jerking, spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child.” Elsewhere, reflecting on the death of his longtime friend Ben Leeping, Mountstuart recalls paintings by Miro that Mountstuart had spirited out of Spain 40 years earlier, merely by happenstance but that were critical in allowing him and Leeping to make their financial way in this enigmatic world. “Is that the way it works? Is this the truth about the life-game?” Mountstuart asks.
Mountstuart is a wonderful literary creation. Boyd cleverly interpolates what are meant to be comments and footnotes by the editor of Mountstuart’s journals, explaining various periods of his life, and appends an index to the journals as well, the citations an extra implication of verity. He also modulates the literary style of the journals gradually over the years, to mimic the aging of a mind. It’s a good thing, too, because Mountstuart’s dawn-to-dusk ride through the past century is somewhat implausible in the outline of its action, which shuttles from England and France to Switzerland, the Bahamas, America and Nigeria, but is quite believable in its evocation of the human psyche.
Mountstuart was a writer and spy (shades of Coleridge), survivor of prison and poverty, and an art dealer as well. His life intersected with the lives of, among others, Hemingway and Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Ian Fleming, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and, more tangentially, such artists as Kline, Rothko and Motherwell. In its agglomeration of real and fictional characters, the novel is a sort of “Ragtime” writ Brit, and it gives Boyd occasion to touch on the interwar expat scene in Paris, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, cultural events like the advent of abstract expressionism, even the ’70s radicalism of the Baader-Meinhof and Red Army groups and other factions–with which, at second hand, Mountstuart has a glancing, distant and innocent connection.
One of the most vibrant sections of Mountstuart’s life as Boyd plays it out involves the Windsors–the abdicated King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, “a beautifully matched porcelain couple”–on whom Mountstuart is sent to spy by naval intelligence during World War II. (None other than James Bond creator Fleming hooked Mountstuart into intelligence.) Mountstuart plays golf with the duke, and we see how cleverly Boyd’s writing creates immediacy in Mountstuart’s description of the duchess:
“When she talks to you she puts her face about two inches closer than is normal. As a result even the most banal statement has a quality of intimacy and when she speaks you feel her breath on your face. . . . I saw her at close range and I must say her teeth are immaculate.”
“Any Human Heart” is a sexual diary as well, it should be noted, a chronicle of what is gained and lost in such relations–although in comparison with writers such as Anais Nin, Boyle’s narrator is exceedingly chaste in his language if not his appetites. Mountstuart lets us see his desires, that’s all, as he manages, over the course of his lifetime, to couple not just with his wives but with the girlfriend of a friend, the wife of a friend, mistresses, prostitutes, even (unwittingly) a 16-year-old. “Even now it strikes me that the nature of your first, all-consuming sexual experience might determine your needs and appetite for the rest of your life,” he observes.
And through it all is a great, nearly impenetrable distance between people, evidenced movingly when the middleage Mountstuart meets his son in New York:
“We sit in a restaurant and try to chat naturally. Try: I wonder if we can ever know each other well enough so that we no longer have to make an effort, so that our conversation is instinctive and thoughtless. But, I say to myself, why should that ever be?”
Such skepticism about life–we could say realism instead–suffuses many of the stories in “Fascination” as well. In “Notebook No. 9,” in which Boyd once again resorts to a diaristic mode, a film director jots cynical notes in his travels between London, New York and Cannes as he obsesses on an actress named Tanja:
“How to Become a Successful Film Director: page one, paragraph one, line one. Don’t fall in love with your leading lady.”
He overhears a young woman, one of the “new internationalists” who rove the globe speaking Euro-English, tell a companion, ” ‘I am very bad with separation,’ ” and decides that is his case as well. “Is it fair to say,” he asks, “that the only truths in the world you can really vouch for are those you yourself feel and can therefore verify?”
Put another way, in “The Mind/Body Problem,” a hilarious take-off on bodybuilding, a character notes:
” ‘What do we see when we look at our fellow human beings? The bulk of their behavior is as unpredictable as the weather. We intuit that they have mental lives–minds–of one sort or another, but beyond that we arrive at perplexity.’ “
Boyd’s humor, commonly visible only in sly insertions in his stories, shines through in this one. Noting the machines at a health club–“the ab benches, leg presses, stair-climbers, squat racks, cycles, steppers, treadmills”–he has an eye as well for their muscular counterparts: “the pecs, the delts, the abs, the bi’s and tri’s, the glutes, the traps, the hams, the rhombs, the lats and quads.” When one character gives a female bodybuilder a friendly squeeze, “It’s like hugging a wide-screen television.”
Abstract ideas taken from science or mathematics inform some of Boyd’s stories in “Fascination,” and we feel the literary artist stretching, like a comedian trying out a new routine, sometimes with success and sometimes not. For example, is it possible that character is like a wave form that can continue through time and sweep over us, the premise of “A Haunting”? Here landscape architect Alexander Rief has an occasional seizure or fit, and his personality begins to change, bringing on binge drinking and womanizing, in emulation of another character long dead.
Another example appears in “Visions Fugitives,” part travelogue, part mystery, in which a character speculates that an event, a moment, can be “launched at your life like a projectile–a stone, a dart, an arrow,” and one day it will descend and “hit you, or glance off you, or nearly miss.” This conclusion arises from the strange echoing of events, years apart, and the narrator’s sense of self-consciousness while alone that “every gesture, every scratch of the head, every throat-clearing acquires a curious, mannered significance.”
Boyd’s writing is aphoristic in these stories, in which the characters move to moments not of epiphany but wonderment. In “The Ghost of a Bird,” a soldier with a shrapnel wound to the head becomes fixated with a fiction, so that what became real “was a consoling phantasm, a dream, an urgent wish. It was more solid and tangible to him than the fragmented physical world.” In “The View From Yves Hill,” an elderly writer is composing a screenplay titled “Sex and Violence,” in which the motivation of “every single scene is either sexy or violent.” Yves says that isn’t strange “because everything in life is strange. It was strange being born in Tokyo; my late mother and father were strange people; spreading marmalade on toast is strange.” He also muses that, when it comes to happiness, “It seems wrong somehow that the glow dies.”
Yet if the glow dies for Boyd’s characters as their lives rend in varied ways, from Logan Mountstuart to Yves Hill, they help keep it alive for us.
