Observer Review: Any Human Heart By William Boyd Essay, Research Paper

Tues: tiffin with Baader-Meinhof & # 8230 ; Any Human HeartWilliam BoydHamish Hamilton? 17.99, pp503In 1998, William Boyd pulled off a celebrated small fraud. He invented an all-American creative person, one Nat Tate, a friend of Jackson Pollock who, in an alcoholic desperation, jumped off the Staten Island ferry to his decease, most of his possible unrealized. Boyd wrote a small book about Tate, full of farinaceous archive exposures seemingly of the creative person with his buddies, the critic Clement Greenberg and the poet Frank O & # 8217 ; Hara. There were pictures, excessively, a series inspired by Hart Crane & # 8217 ; s poem & # 8216 ; The Bridge & # 8217 ; , pictures which Boyd claimed to hold discovered the twelvemonth before.The gag was carried off with some manner: there was an gap at a New York gallery, with critics weighing up the painter & # 8217 ; s part to abstract expressionism ; the book came with appropriately pretentious quotation marks from David Bowie and Gore Vidal certifying to Tate & # 8217 ; s mastermind ; the Sunday Telegraph printed infusions ; and, so, after about a hebdomad, the game was up, and everyone claimed, non rather convincingly, to hold known all the clip and to hold merely been playing along.In his small monograph on Tate, Boyd suggested that he had been alerted to the creative person & # 8217 ; s work through the authorship of & # 8216 ; the British author and critic Logan Mountstuart, 1906-1991 & # 8230 ; biographer, belle-lettriste, editor, failed novelist & # 8217 ; , whose diaries he suggested he was redacting. The book was full of sly small anecdotes from these diaries: & # 8216 ; Bumped into Tate once more as I was go forthing [ the gallery ] and complimented him on his work. I asked if he had anything else for sale and he said & # 8211 ; most curiously & # 8211 ; that I would hold to inquire his male parent. Later Pablo shat abundantly in the center of the room, so Larry Rivers told me & # 8230 ; & # 8217 ; & # 8211 ; that sort of thing.It now turns out, nevertheless, that this peculiar portion of Boyd & # 8217 ; s narrative at least was & # 8216 ; true & # 8217 ; : Any Human Heart, a novel, purports to be the compact gathered journals of the fictional Mountstuart, and comes complete with small debuts by the writer, footers and an index. It is non clear whether it was conceived originally as an extension of the parody, or already had a life of its ain, but the consequence is a clearly uneven book: a late-arriving lead balloon to the nicely timed punchline of Nat Tate.The narration is made up of half-a-dozen journals, which are devoted to different periods of Mountstuart & # 8217 ; s life of aspiration and failure: schooltimes, war old ages, second childhood and so on. It ranges across the universe & # 8211 ; the novelist is born in Uruguay, raised in Birmingham and lives later in London, New York, the Bahamas, Switzerland, Africa and the South of France & # 8211 ; and takes in the century. It comes from a similar urge in Boyd as The New Confessions, a novel in which he besides tried to derive the signifier and force per unit area of our times through one life, though if Rousseau was the loose inspiration at that place, here it is Montaigne who skulks in the margins.Mountstuart keeps the Essais by his bedside and his life, as it suggests, appears as merely a parade of scintillas and spots of really different lives, dictated by fortune and clip and topographic point: & # 8216 ; We keep a diary to ensnare that aggregation of egos that forms us, & # 8217 ; Boyd, as & # 8216 ; editor & # 8217 ; , suggests in his debut, & # 8216 ; the single homo being. & # 8217 ; The job is that the person created here ne’er rather becomes critical in any of his lives

. Boyd starts brightly and ambitiously enough; the journal of the 17-year-old Mountstuart, at his boarding school, is nicely layered with the pretensions of a particular precocious kind of student – ‘Wrote a Spenserian ode on loss of faith. Not very good’ – and with adolescent notes to self: ‘I shall kiss her this holiday or else become a monk.’ Days begin full of hope and poetry and mostly end in masturbation: ‘Pleasured myself with delectable visions of Lucy.’The ambition of this section, though, like Mountstuart’s, remains unfulfilled as the life and the journal progresses. Once Boyd is locked into his tyrannical chronology – ‘Monday 11 March 1929?, and so on – he seems a little mesmerised by it. Thus, occasionally, plodding on through the decades, you have an unnerving sense of the century passing in real time.Mountstuart has a walk-on part in literary history that becomes all too predictable. He has tea at Garsington with Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh makes a pass at him, he supplies an unlikely neologism to Joyce in a Parisian bar, shares a beer with Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, is recruited to the intelligence services by Ian Fleming, and that’s all before he fetches up in New York with O’Hara and Pollock and ‘Nat Tate’.Some of this might have been played for laughs, but Boyd seems curiously at pains here to have his readers take Mountstuart as seriously as Mountstuart takes himself. The belle-lettriste is, of course, a friend of Cyril Connolly’s, and one model for him might be Logan Pearsall Smith, dedicatee of Enemies of Promise.Mountstuart is thus seduced from great work, we are led to believe, by nearly all of Connolly’s roster of distractions: journalism, early success, domesticity, drink and, mostly, sex. He is married three times, and despairs of his writing as he throws most of his creative energy into a series of ill-fated affairs (in middle age, he typically ejaculates thinking of Balzac’s line: ‘There goes another novel…’).This feels like wishful thinking. It seems more likely that by far the greater threat to his success as a novelist lies in the stiff-upper-lip prose he displays in his journals. Mountstuart’s adventures, notably a run in with Edward and Mrs Simpson, a period in solitary confinement in a Swiss jail and a preposterous interlude with the Baader-Meinhof gang, are all detailed in uniform pipe-and-slippers sentences; very few of his experiences – not murder or incarceration or sexual obsession or extreme poverty – ever really disturb the pleasant equilibrium of this prose. It is as if by inhabiting this other writer, Boyd, lacking his usual easy charm, has sometimes forgotten that he still has to write.In a way, the author has set himself an impossible task. Even the immediacy and frankness of the century’s greatest name-dropping diarists – Kenneth Tynan, Andy Warhol – derive much of their force from the knowledge that the encounters described actually happened. Take that away and you are left with a dull kind of parade. For all the incident, for all the change he witnesses, Mountstuart never really feels like a credible witness either to history or emotion.Early on in the book, in one of his annual personal statements of account, he makes it his stated goal ‘to work, to write, to live’. By the end, you are not really convinced that he has made much of a fist at any of the three.