by William Boyd
I felt shocked and then saddened. Life does this to you sometimes—leads you up a path and then drops you in the shit, to mix a metaphor. I thought of my days of Anna-mania, of how her story had inspired The Girl Factory. I realized I had thought—selfishly—that Anna would always be there, that she couldn’t just disappear, as if part of a conjuring trick. I was a little subdued at dinner but Ben was on good form, the gallery beginning to show signs of life, and much talk of Sandrine. Apparently her little boy is charming. I hear the distant chime of wedding bells.
Saturday, 9 August
To Les Halles. I ask the concierge of Anna’s apartment block if she still lives here but am told that she and her ‘uncle’ have moved on, destination unknown. I sit in the little bistro du coin where I met the Colonel, feeling both bereft and baffled—and also, after some reflection, a little annoyed with myself. Did I expect Anna to forward her new address to her regular clients? To have escaped from that life must be an unmitigated blessing. Anna will be fine, she has her own life to lead. I should concentrate on Land.
Tuesday, 12 August
Most uncomfortable. I wonder if what I ate last night is the cause (blanquette de veau)? Whatever it was, when I went to the lavatory this morning it was like shitting sulphuric acid. A burning, itching arse-crack all day that hadn’t eased off all that much by the time I turned up at Land’s for dinner. She’s staying for a month at the home of a businessman and art collector called Emile Berlanger (a great patron of Vernon Fothergill), ostensibly to improve her French. The Berlangers live in a large apartment on the avenue Foch, full of mediocre landscapes amongst which Vernon’s did at least stand out. Land’s hair is different from the last time: she has dyed it ink black, which, curiously, makes her look a ravishing sixteen. The Berlangers were charming, their excruciating good manners a form of inhibiting social armour—one felt one could hardly move, that a scratch or a sniff would be the ultimate faux pas. Consequently, I was achingly conscious of my fiery bum. There was also a man there called Cyprien Dieudonne,↓ who said he was a writer.
≡ Cyprien Dieudonne (1888-1976), belletrist and poet. Part of a group known as Les Cosmopolites, which included Valery Larbaud, Leon-Paul Fargue, Henry Levet, etc.
‘But my day has long gone,’ he said, in excellent English. ‘If this was, oh, 1910 you might have been just a little curious to meet me.’ He was plump and genial with an almost perfectly round face. Wispy fair hair thinning fast. He gave me his card.
[August]
Took Land to meet Ben at the gallery. It seemed to go well: Ben said to her, ‘We must compare notes, get my Logan-file up to date.’
As Land wandered around looking at the paintings, she said, ‘Geddes would love this. He must come.’
‘Geddes?’
‘Geddes Brown, silly. He’s in Paris too.’
Now this is bad news. Ben is going to Bandol for two weeks and has asked me to join him—and I’m very tempted. But I can’t leave Land in Paris with Geddes Brown.
[August]
Lunch at the Brasserie Lutetia with Land and Geddes Brown. They seemed, very at ease with each other and there was a joke they shared—something to do with Hugh and one of the dogs—that had them weeping with recollected laughter. When I asked them about it, they said it was too complicated to explain.
Later, Land told Brown about Ben’s gallery and then added the suggestion that Ben might be the ideal dealer for him—and in Paris, no less.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful, Logan?’
‘What? Ah…Yes, wonderful.’
‘Let’s go and see him. Now, this afternoon.’
All this zeal for Geddes Brown, who sat there chewing placidly on his steak. I told her Ben had gone south, to the Mediterranean. In fact he’s due to go in a couple of days, but I was damned if I was going to do Geddes Brown any favours. Instead, we went to his studio, a dingy little place down by the Bastille. All he seemed to be painting were small dark portrait heads of his neighbours: strong angular faces, stylized with lots of black in them. I have to admit they weren’t bad.
Monday, 25 August
This is getting ridiculous. Here I am sweltering in Paris in August trying to snatch the odd moment with Land, just wasting my time. The Berlangers have a house in Trouville where they spend August, M. Berlanger returning to Paris for a day or two when business calls, so Land is rarely here. But at least if she’s absent I console myself that she’s also absent from the loathsome Brown. I think it’s his physical combination of svelte muscular presence and cherubic, spilling blond curls that I find so repugnant.
I should say I dined with Dieudonne—a wholly relaxed, sophisticated yet diffident man. He confesses to being folkmentanglophik, but one knows that any liking he has for us is qualified by the shrewdest eye. He talked of Les Cosmopolites and the literary scene in France before the war, of their obsession with foreign travel, their dandyism, their celebration of le style anglais, their appreciation of the comforts that a little money could bring, the almost sexual thrill of being out of your own country: an outsider, derating, worldly, nomadic. I was entranced and envious. He said he would introduce me to Larbaud, who had translated Ulysses and was very close to Joyce (‘a difficult man to know’). Dieudonne is obviously independently wealthy himself, you can tell that from one glance at his clothes: everything, right down to his co-respondent boots, is bespoke. He writes about ‘two or three little articles a year’, he says, and has abandoned poetry, ‘a young man’s vocation’. His life is steeped in culture, self-indulgence and the exotic. He spent half of last year in Japan and said it was a completely fascinating place. I quizzed him more about Les Cosmopolites. Oh, that world has gone, he said, the war changed everything. When I think of my youth, he went on, what we took for granted, what we assumed was for ever certain, for ever permanent. I was captivated: this was the literary life I should have lived; I should have been born two decades earlier. Imagine what I would have done with my £500 a year! I could have had a manservant follow me around. I felt the glimmering of an idea for my next book.
[August]
Still here in Paris. I’ve decided to go back at the end of the week What a waste of a month. I haunt the bouquinistes on the quays beside the Seine, buying up anything I can find by Larbaud, Fargue, Dieudonne, Levet, et al. I found Larbaud’s Poemes par un riche amateur—utterly captivating. The Cosmopolitans by Logan Mountstuart—I like the sound of it. I wonder what Wallace will think? Geddes Brown actually asked me to dinner but I made an excuse—said I had a cold.
[August]
Viens dans man lit Viens sur man cceur. Je vats te confer une histoire [Blaise Cendrars]
§
Sex-dreams of Land. Chez Chantal holds nothing for me now. I wander alone in this dusty, sun-basted, beautiful city, staring at the tourists as if they were alien beings from a distant planet. I carry with me my little pile of slim volumes and read the work of Les Cosmopolites in cafes and at my solitary dinners, lost in a world of wagons-Jits, the Trans-Siberian express, foggy northern cities, the perfect idyll of underpopulated islands in the sun. I dream of being in a sleeping car with Land, lying naked side by side in our bunk, heading south through the night, the champagne bottle chinking in its ice bucket, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic thrum of the wheels on the tracks beneath us. ‘Le douxtrain-train de notre vie paisible et monotone.’
Land has written: she is coming to Paris on Monday for a dental appointment. Any possibility of us lunching together?
Monday, 31 August
So I decided to stay on, just to have the chance of seeing Land one more time. I met her outside the dentist’s (on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore), where she had had a large filling replaced, so she told me. We wandered over to the Left Bank and had lunch at the Flore—an omelette, a salad, a bottle of wine. I told her about Dieudonne and Les Cosmopolites. The wine—and the fact that I was going home the next day—emboldened me. ‘Land,’ I said. ‘I have to know about Geddes.’
‘What do you mean?
He’s a friend. And I happen to admire him enormously.’
‘But do you love him?’
‘I suppose I must. In a friendly sort of way.’
‘And he loves you, no doubt. How cosy.’
‘I hate it when you’re sarcastic, Logan. You seem a different person.’
‘You can hardly blame me.’
She looked at me with resignation and pity. ‘What’s going on?’
‘You know how I feel about you,’ I said, ‘and yet you flaunt this Geddes Brown at me. If he’s the one for you, then make the choice. Don’t torture me like this.’
She silenced me. ‘I thought you were meant to be the sophisticated, man-of-the-world writer,’ she said, trying not to smile. ‘Geddes is a homosexual.’
‘A homosexual?’
§
I will never forget this afternoon. Land and I came back to the Hotel Rembrandt. The shutters were closed against the heat. The sheets had been changed and we stripped off our clothes and for a minute enjoyed the bed’s cool starched crispness on our naked bodies before our sweat besmirched it. Land, with her fringe and her girl’s uptilted breasts. Kissing her and tasting on my tongue the metallic spearmint flavour of that morning’s dental work. Watching her dress and noting how her buttocks and haunches were heavier than I had imagined. I savour the fact that I am now a familiar of all the singularities of Land. I saw her off on the train back to Trouville, an oratorio playing in my head.
It’s only now as I sit here that I wonder if I am the first. There is no small bloom of blood on the sheets. I’ve no idea.
[September-October]
Movements. After Land I couldn’t go back to London. To Bandol to stay with Ben. Then London for a fortnight, then to Vienna, a commission for Time & Tide. Leisurely journey back: Berlin—
Amsterdam—Brussels—Paris (more research on Les Cosmopolites)—London. Land is sharing a flat with two girlfriends in Islington.
Wednesday, 31 December
Land is downstairs. She’s told her parents and her flatmates she is going to a house party in Carmarthenshire. We have three days to ourselves. Enough food and drink to last a month-long siege and no plans to venture out.
1931
Sunday, 22 February
Spent the day going over the proofs of The Girl Factory. I feel curiously distanced from the book it has a certain melodramatic, low-life allure (my hero Lennox Devane is completely under the spell of Lydia—the Anna-figure—she could make him brand himself if she asked) and I think I have the authentic atmosphere of Paris, but, true to its compositional history, it rather fizzles out. There is a nice hinted-at incest theme: the colonel is known as ‘uncle’ in the book and he runs a string of ‘nieces’—hence the title—in other motions de tolerance around town. At the novel’s end Lennox manages to turn him into the police, allowing Lennox and Lydia to flee to Innsbruck (of all places), where Lydia dies of tuberculosis.
Land telephoned this morning to say she’s been offered the chance of going to India on some parliamentary fact-finding committee—something to do with Gandhi and the Congress Party.↓
≡ Mahatma Gandhi (1868-1948) had recently been released from prison and was participating in the Round Table conference with the Viceroy of India.
I magnanimously said she should go, shouldn’t let such an opportunity pass by, and all that. I will miss her, of course, but I do need to concentrate on my work—I’ve about four articles overdue, including a long and rather important one on Cubism for the Burlington Magazine.
Feeling of contentment pottering around Glebe Place all day. Fire on, proofs spread on the dining-room table. Land was here on Friday and the house still seems redolent of her presence, not least suggested by the powerful scent from the pot of hyacinth she brought—and she left a scarf behind her. Memories of lovemaking on Saturday morning, also, and of our eating toast and marmalade in our rumpled bed, the teapot steaming on the bedside table. After she left I wandered down to the river at lunchtime and had a pint of beer and a steak pie in the Eight Bells. Then back to continue the proofs. I have over £800 in the bank and the prospect of another £50 arriving on publication day (less Wallace’s commission of course). I love Land and she loves me, I have published one book and my second is imminent, and I’m not quite twenty-five years old. When I think of all my doom and gloom on leaving Oxford! H-D was right: after a fortnight your degree ceases to have any bearing on your progress through life. Look at Waugh, look at Connolly, look at Isherwood and myself: it would seem almost de rigueur to take a bad degree in order to make your way as a man of letters.
[March]
At Sumner Place today I was introduced to an elderly couple, Major and Mrs Irvine, who, it transpires, are now living in my rooms on the top floor. ‘Paying guests,’ Mother says, and she goes on to tell me of other problems engendered by the Crash of ‘29. Mr Prendergast, it seems, had invested almost all her capital in American stocks—which are now more or less worthless.
‘So what do you have left?’ I ask.
‘Well, I have the house, but income is low. I borrow a lot from the bank. Like you told me.’
I persuaded her to sell the motor and let all the staff go except Encarnacion. Apparently she had even borrowed money to pay my allowance. I told her I no longer needed any subvention from her and wrote her a cheque for a hundred pounds to cover any immediate shortfall. I asked for Prendergast’s address—he is still in New York, trying to rescue anything from the ruins.
‘He is a broken man,’ she said with tears in her eyes.
‘Don’t cry, Mother. Everything’ll be fine.’
‘Oh yes, I know. But I keep thinking: what would your father say?’
[April]
Publication of The Girl Factory. The success of Imaginings prompted immediate reviews. ‘Tawdry and shameful’—the Mail. ‘A nastily unpleasant little shocker’—The Times. ‘Mr Mountstuart’s manifest talent lies in the field of biography; we suggest he leaves fiction in surer hands’—the Criterion. Thank God Land is away in India.
Monday, 27 April
Celebratory luncheon at the Savoy Grill: LMS, Wallace, Roderick and Mr Sprymont of Sprymont & Drew himself, come to see his cash-cow with his own eyes. Wallace and I bask comfortably in the flow of compliments. Almost 11,000 copies have been sold in three weeks, a fifth reprint is in hand. On the strength of this Wallace has sold the book to the US (Decker, Pride & Wolfson) and France .(Cahier Noir). Sprymont & Drew are begging for another novel. Wallace cleverly allows them to think this might indeed be a possibility (I let him speak for me on these occasions—grand vizier to my emperor) but suggests that before a novel Logan wants to write a book called The Cosmopolitans, don’t you, Logan?
‘I do like the title,’ says Roderick.
‘So do I,’ echoes Mr Sprymont, almost reaching for his cheque book. ‘What’s it about? De luxe travel? The millionaire style of life?’
‘It’s a study of a group of French poets before the Great War.’
By the end of the meal they can see there is no hope of dissuading me and they feign a kind of enthusiasm. As Wallace and I stand in Savoy Court, our cigar smoke thick as ectoplasm in the spring sunshine, Wallace says he’s looking forward to the negotiations: he intends to set a new benchmark for the advance paid for a book of literary criticism.
[April]
Land is home but has almost immediately gone—with Lee—up north to Durham or Sheffield or somewhere to speak to the starving families of unemployed miners. £500 advance for The Cosmopolitans. TGF has sold 17,500 copies and no sign of slowing down. I am despised by my literary peers—but I can cope with their disdain.
Thursday, 14 May
Lunch with Land at the Ritz. I want to celebrate, but she says she would have preferred a sandwich in Green Park or a pie in a pub—anywhere but the Ritz. She regales me with the horrors of poverty in the north and the mood is rather cool as a result—she seems not remotely interested in my success or my new wealth. She says Lee has warned h
er that the German banks are on the verge of collapse↓ and if that happens then the whole of Europe could fall apart.
≡ In fact they collapsed in July. 142
I sit and listen and let her rant on as I drink most of the champagne. She comes home with me to Glebe but it can’t be described as a satisfactory night. I am too amorous and, being rebuffed, become clinical. She leaves at six this morning with hardly a word of goodbye. I’ll give her some time.
Monday, 1 June
Today I asked Land Fothergill to marry me and she said no.
§
[The First London Journal ceases at this point for some sixteen months. The Girl Factory continued to sell. LMS made his first visit to New York in September for the American publication and in October he sold the film rights to British Clarion Film Co. for £1,000. He spent much of the first half of 1932 in France, where he continued his researches for The Cosmopolitans. In the summer he visited Cyprien Dieudonne in his home in Quercy in the Lot. August saw his return to London and, as had become his habit, he went to Scotland to join Dick Hodge’s shooting party at Kildonnan by Galashiels. Lady Laeticia Edgefield (Lottie) and her brother Lord Angus Cassell were there also. In the weeks and months that followed LMS began to see much more of Lottie Edgefield—they became a well-known couple in London social circles and were frequently mentioned in gossip columns (‘Who’s the Girl in Logan’s Girl Factory?’). He proposed marriage to her in March 1932. The engagement was to be a short one, the wedding being scheduled for Saturday, 26 November 1932, in the parish church, St Andrew’s, in Edgefield, Norfolk.]