by William Boyd
But the hard evidence of my journal is irrefutably there and I value its honesty and have to acknowledge its truth. However, this schism between my memory of my earlier self and the historical facts made me wonder if the journal served another, more covert purpose for its keeper, namely to chart that progression of selves that we are at various stages of our life. We do change as people—even though our fundamental natures may remain the same. Whether we are in love or out of love, rich or poor, happy or sad, healthy or beset by illness will affect the self that we are at any given moment. Ageing and the getting of wisdom contribute to this constant metamorphosis as well but, as we move through time, it’s as if we shed these selves in the way a snake will slough off its skin: the glossy new scales bearing no imprint of the weathered, dull integument that was once there. And it seems too that we can be certain that our memories will play us false about our past: only the journal remains as witness to the series of individuals we were in our lives.
This thesis that we are an anthology, a composite of many selves, was put into practice when I decided to write my last novel, Any Human Heart, as the fictional intimate journal of a fictional writer. Over 500 pages, from 1923 to 1991, the protagonist ages from a seventeen-year-old schoolboy to an eighty-five-year-old man. The various journals he keeps during his life, among other things, record these transformations in himself. It was a paradoxical exercise because in writing the fictional journal I had to remain true to another constant that is a defining feature of the journal-form. For the journal—relating as it does a life-story, or part of a life-story—does so in a manifestly different manner than the other forms available, whether biography, memoir, or autobiography. All these last three are fashioned by the view backward, informed by the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Only the journal truly reflects, in its dogged chronology, the day-by-day, week-by-week progress of a life. Events have not yet acquired their retrospective gloss and significance; meetings and people, projects and schemes have not matured or developed. The impenetrable judgements of the future more often than not undermine the honest analysis of the present. That job you were so excited about has not yet turned tedious; that thriving dot-com company you sunk your savings into has still to go belly-up; that pretty woman/good-looking man you met at the party last night has not become your wife/husband—and so on. The journal has to have the same random shape as a human life: governed by chance and the haphazard, by that aggregate of good luck and bad luck that everybody receives. Biography and autobiography dilute this inexorable fact, shaped as they are by the wisdom of hindsight and the manipulations of ego, and are literary forms that are, in many ways, as artificial and contrived as fiction. But, by definition, a journal cannot do this: it’s written as the future unspools into the present. There are glances backward, true, but in its essence it mimics and reflects our own wayward passage through time like no other form of writing.
There is one further fundamental stipulation I would make: no true journal worthy of the name can be published while its author is alive. Only a posthumous appearance guarantees the prime condition of honesty. However interesting, journals and diaries published while their author is alive seem to me (with very few exceptions) to be bogus in some crucial way. This is particularly true of politicians’ journals—Clark, Benn, Castle et al. They have a different agenda (their very publication makes that point) and thus they can’t be totally honest, certainly not about their author, and thus they lose their legitimacy as true journals—they’ve sacrificed that potent alchemy of confession and confidentiality that all great journals require—for the quick fix of controversy and renown. If you’re going to publish your intimate journal while you are still alive you reduce it to another category of writing—your journal becomes a form of bastard-journalism or bastard-autobiography. There’s something inherently contradictory about being a living writer acclaimed for your published journals: you have to be dead to escape the various charges of vanity, of special-pleading, of creeping amour-propre. More to the point, because of these suspicions, we can’t read such journals in the same way: only the posthumous journal can be read purely.
However parochial they are, however apparently insignificant the entries, the pages of a journal offer us, as readers, a chance to live the writer’s life as he or she lived it, after he or she has lived it. On occasion, we are provided with the curious godlike knowledge of their destiny. Reading Virginia Woolf on 26 February 1941, a month before she commits suicide, provokes a bizarre conjunction of subjectivity and objectivity. She comments: “Food becomes an obsession. I grudge giving away a spice bun. Curious—age or the war? Never mind. Adventure. Make solid. But shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me intense pleasure?” We actually know the negative answer to that question: we share the quiddity of her day and at the same time note that her vital clock is nearly wound down. Similarly, on 16 May 1763 James Boswell writes: “I drank tea at Mr Davies’s in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see. Mr Davies introduced me to him. As I knew his mortal antipathy to the Scotch, I cried to Davies, ‘Don’t tell where I come from.’” As he describes his first sight of Dr Johnson we participate in the thrill of the young man’s meeting with the literary lion but there’s an extra frisson delivered by the foreknowledge that the mortal antipathy won’t frustrate the riches that ensued from that encounter.
But often we read with the same ignorance as that of the journal-keeper as he writes. The mundane flow of the day engulfs us similarly. Francis Kilvert notes on 21 September 1870: “Went to the Bronith. People at work in the orchard gathering up the windfall apples for early cider. The smell of the apples very strong. Beyond the orchards the lone aspen was rustling loud and mournfully a lament for the departure of summer.” We are with Kilvert that day. “The smell of the apples very strong” bears a kind of witness to 21 September 1870 that has as cogent and undeniable a validity as any other. Which brings me to the final characteristic of journal-keeping: it is the most democratic form of writing available, perhaps even more so than a letter. The letter presupposes another person in order to function; the intimate journal is designed to be read by only one pair of eyes, the author’s (even though others may be hoped for one distant day). Therefore it is judged by standards of truth, integrity, honesty and immediacy that require no special education, talent or gift. Poetry, the novel, biography, the essay and journalism are weighed up by different criteria, different forms of evaluation—and therefore different categories of success and failure too. D. H. Lawrence defined the novel as “the bright book of life.” Not everyone can write a novel but everyone is, in theory, capable of keeping a journal. And if you keep a journal—a true intimate journal—then it becomes, in a real sense, the book of your life and is therefore a unique document. But there is more to it than simply that, I feel, for we all share the same fate and—as we live, as long as we live—we all submit to the same condition: the human condition. In that case, then, the book of a life, an intimate journal—if it is true, if it is honest—will speak to everyone who has a chance to read it: it will be, in a curious way, both completely individual and universal. This is what happens when we read a journal: “The smell of the apples very strong” is, in its own way, perfect and unimprovable—21 September 1870 is fixed for us, for ever.
2003
Three French Novels
I write these words in France on the eve of war [the invasion and occupation of Iraq]. A few days ago I travelled from London to my house, not far from Bordeaux in the south-west, by train, stopping off, en route, for a few hours in Paris. Fortuitously, I have covered a great swathe of this country and the weather, for March, is sublime: cool, dry and sunny—the hedgerows and the plum trees are dense with blossom. And to sit on a wicker chair in a Parisian sidewalk cafe with a cold beer on the table and the sun slanting warmly on the façade of the Louvre is to reinforce the abiding impression that there is no city in the world as beautiful as Paris and that—sure
ly, also—France is the best country in the world when it comes to the quality of life. The things that give us pleasure, the buildings we see, the landscapes we traverse, what we drink, what we eat, what stimulates us aesthetically, and so on, seem to have been sorted out better here, if I can put it that way. Centuries of refinement have created a country where even the simplest, most democratic pleasures—a loaf of bread, a café au lait, a glass of wine—have a depth of meaning, a quality of enrichment that is somehow lacking elsewhere.
But there is another side to France, a more complex, darker one that coexists with its sophisticated hedonism, and the three books I’ve chosen all in their own way exemplify this admixture. Rather than range through French literature and select a Molière with a Proust and a Sainte-Beuve, or a Rimbaud with a Racine and a Montaigne, I have deliberately limited myself to the twentieth-century novel. On no other country in Europe (with the possible exception of Germany) does the last century cast such a sombre shadow and each of these novels hints at or explores the three great traumas France has endured during those hundred years and still endures today.
The first, moving chronologically by publication, is Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier. I read this novel in my teens and I can still recall the impression it made on me then. It is a great novel of adolescence—you might say The Catcher in the Rye of contemporary French literature. It deals with the relationships between three school friends in provincial France at the end of the nineteenth century and the adventures that befall its eponymous hero, Meaulnes. The boys discover, in the depths of the French countryside, a lost domain, an old manor house, and at the same time are captivated by the girl who lives there, Yvonne. It’s hard to analyse the magic that this book works. It’s to do with secrecy, with the stirrings of adolescent sexuality but, more movingly, with the transience of our childhood pleasures and pains. Lurking behind the sunlit felicities of the simple story is the idea of death and its inevitability. All the more poignantly, the novel was written and published in 1913, a year before the outbreak of the First World War. Alain-Fournier, twenty-eight years old, was killed in the first month of the conflict and his body never recovered. The memento mori prescience of the novel’s atmosphere found an eerie parallel in the author’s own fate. And the undertone of melancholia that sits beside the precise and beautiful descriptions of a provincial adolescence is very French.
There’s a similar but more brazen confrontation with the human condition in my second choice: Albert Camus’s celebrated L’Etranger (The Outsider). Its status as a modern classic makes it difficult to imagine what it must have been like to read this short, laconic novel at the time of its publication in 1942 in the middle of the war, with France occupied by the invading Germans.
Camus’s hero, Mersault, is a truly modern man in his godlessness and his uncompromising, ironic understanding of the absurd nature of human existence. He is chillingly and brutally honest in his refusal to ameliorate his relentless non-conformity. Again the extra-literary resonances of the novel contribute to its exemplary nature. Camus was an Algerian, a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa. There is, in Mersault’s blunt diffidence, his absolute disinterestedness, a challenge to the culture of France and Europe. Here is a Frenchman with a different and very uncomfortable attitude—but who is as French as any Parisian waiter, for all that. These tensions foreshadow the Algerian war of the 1950s—effectively a French civil war—whose ramifications are still powerfully felt in the country half a century on.
My third novel was published in 1970 and won the Goncourt Prize of that year. Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes (The Erl King) is an extraordinary account of the life of one Abel Tiffauges, whom we follow from ungainly schoolboy to humble garagiste to a prisoner of war of the Germans in East Prussia. There he is transformed into, literally, a form of ogre—a child stealer (the erlking of legend). The novel is a haunting mixture of beautifully observed reality (Tiffauges’s boarding school is enduringly horrible) and an expert reinvention of familiar myth. While it deals with the Second World War and the Nazi terror it is also an example of the kind of novel that only a French writer can achieve. Tournier is an immensely learned author with powerful opinions of true and controversial intellectual heft. And although he uses these ideas to buttress the cultural and literary leitmotifs of the novel they never overwhelm it. There is a tendency to denigrate French abstract thinking by contrasting it with Anglo-Saxon plain speaking. Each cultural predisposition has its extremes: impenetrable pretentious waffle on the one hand and pipe-and-slippers philistinism on the other. Tournier’s novel manages, however, to walk a line between intellectual profundity and narrative excitement with unusual poise and fascinating, stimulating flair. It is a very French novel.
Which is why I admire it so. I love France, I love its culture and its people. I was educated in one of its universities and I have lived in the country for ten years now. But like all countries and all peoples there are complexities of attitude, problems of understanding and comportment. All three of these novels explore aspects of the French “character” and in so doing elaborate, sometimes inadvertently, on themes peculiar to it. Generalizations about a country or its population are facile and effortlessly disproved (I’m speaking as a spendthrift Scotsman), but Camus said once, “situveuxêtre philosophe, écris un roman.” Novels, then, with their complexity, their scope, their built-in engagement with our common humanity, may be an ideal way of getting under a nation’s skin. So what do these three tell us about France? My feeling is that all three of them are darker than they may first appear and I think one can point to a strain of pessimism in French life and behaviour that these works echo. When Camus says, “everything that exalts life adds at the same time to its absurdity” he is not airing some convoluted intellectual trope but facing up to a pitiless fact about our existence that we would be better off acknowledging. Does this darkness contribute to that wilful stubbornness, that contrariness we non-French so often find in the French? Perhaps so—and tant mieux, I would add. The world seems palpably, rebarbatively absurd this week, hellbent on war. A dose of French contrariness is both provocative and salutary in the face of the new hegemony to whose tune we seem obliged to march, these days. A discordant note in a military band has never been so welcome.
2003
Evelyn Waugh (2)
(Introduction to A Handful of Dust)
Madame Bovary rewritten by Noël Coward. Is this too harsh—or too glib—a redaction of A Handful of Dust, considered by many readers to be Evelyn Waugh’s finest novel? My one-sentence summary is not intended to be facetious but arose from a thought-experiment I imposed on myself. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to read the novel when it was first published (in 1934), to imagine what the experience must have been to read Waugh without the mighty baggage of the posthumous reputation. The problem is that we know too much about Evelyn Waugh—the biographies, the journals, the letters and the memoirs flesh him out in a manner rare amongst twentieth-century British writers. Virginia Woolf runs him close, Philip Larkin is coming up on the rails, but it is unusual to have so much information so comparatively soon on a writer who died only a generation ago. This weight of public judgement and analysis (and self-analysis) makes it hard to return to the novels as an innocent and unknowing reader: the bloated Catholic apologist, the misanthropic, check-suited Tory squire, stands at your shoulder and hindsight’s 20/20 vision provides answers that are both too swift and too pat. Hence the attempt at a thought-experiment and hence the reference to Noël Coward and Madame Bovary. And in this spirit it seems to me that above all else A Handful of Dust—this complex, fraught, tension-riven novel—is essentially, pre-eminently, two things: namely, it is a society novel (which is not the same as a novel about society) and a novel about adultery. I had forgotten how Tatlery the book is: how it was so plainly written for a small elite of London and County readers who would pick up the many smart references and the in-jokes. It is bright and brittle and knowing in its depiction o
f that milieu and written with an insider’s ease and familiarity. This tone of voice seems a little mannered and tiresome today (as indeed does Noël Coward’s) but it was designed at the time to play to a well-heeled and well-connected gallery.
It is also a brutally cold and clear-eyed look at a wife’s betrayal of a loving husband. Brenda Last, like Emma Bovary, is a provincial lady married to a stuffy and somewhat dull, prematurely aged man (“a bore,” as Cyril Connolly dubbed Tony Last). John Beaver is a metropolitan version of the clerk who takes his pleasure selfishly and lovelessly. From here the comparisons begin to grow a little strained. Flaubert may have said “Madame Bovary c’est moi” but Waugh would never have made that claim about Brenda. A Handful of Dust is a portrait of adultery seen from the side of the blameless cuckold—there can be few more ruthless and unredeeming literary portrayals of a woman than Waugh’s of Brenda Last. As the affair between Brenda and Beaver continues and the lies become more and more brazen (and therefore condemnable) one begins to question the veracity of the earlier portrayal of the Lasts’ marriage: how could Tony Last (a good man, though set in his ways) have ever married anyone as vapid, heartless and lacking in human warmth as the Brenda who takes up with Beaver? I would argue that the portrait of Brenda is inconsistent and dislocated (wife and adulteress seem different people) because it is not her character that particularly interests the author but the nature of what she has done to her marriage. The betrayal is everything and Waugh is unsparing in the way he wrings every final humiliation from it.