The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  I thought I should feel more animosity than I did for Eugen. I tried to summon up a rage—unsuccessfully.

  “Shut up, you little bastard,” I said with no conviction. Then I shouted “Coming!” to Doon and set off back up through the damp lucent meadow towards the road.

  “Herr Todd.” Eugen slipped and slithered behind me. “Could you possibly … ? I’d be extremely grateful for a lift back down to the lake. These hired motors—”

  “Sorry.” I strode on.

  “Don’t worry, Herr Todd. I quite understand.”

  Sonia waited until I returned to Berlin in October. In the interim we did not communicate. The sun was shining and there were still some bright autumnal leaves on the birches in the garden at Charlottenburg. I got out of the car, a full cargo of guilt slowing my steps. The house was partially cleared. The carpets were gone but the pictures still hung upon the wall.

  Sonia wore black. I suppose she was still in mourning for Hereford, but the effect was suitably menacing and doom laden. For some reason she suddenly seemed much older than me, and when I saw her face, pale but immaculately made up, I felt childishly frightened of her. I had done wrong. Even I could not rally any bravado. I had to face my punishment. Sonia confined herself to only one rebuke, but it was enough.

  “Hereford dies. And then you do this to me.”

  Lies and excuses filled my mouth but I ignored them. “Sonia, I … Where are the children?”

  “In a hotel. We’re going back to London tomorrow.”

  I rubbed my face, as if I were washing it. I could see the long avenue of resentment and acrimony stretching ahead of me.

  “I love Doon,” I said. “I’ve loved her for years. I want to marry her.”

  It was a mistake. My impulsive honesty ruined things for me again. I should have done nothing but apologize that day. I saw tears bulge in Sonia’s hitherto conspicuously dry eyes.

  “Oh, really,” she said with venomous cynicism. “Well, you’ll get no divorce from me.”

  She took a letter from her handbag and gave it to me, said good-bye and left. I sat down and read the letter, from her lawyer, about the financial arrangements I was to provide for my wife and family; so much a month to be paid into this or that account, a trust fund to be established for the children, arrangements to be subject to an annual review, etc., etc.

  I shed a few predictable tears of self-pity, and allowed my mind to travel back to those days just after the war at Superb-Imperial, days of Raymond Maude, the Wee MacGregors, beer and chops at the grill in Islington. Then, Sonia had been everything I desired; it was hardly her fault that I had fallen in love with Doon. I had been a late developer. In 1920 I had been barely half-formed, now that I came to think about it. I had survived the Salient and prison camp but emotionally I was no more advanced than I had been at Minto Academy. I wandered around our house, revisiting chapters of my past. But the ghost of little Hereford seemed to haunt the rooms and passageways: I could hear echoes of his pratfalls and collisions at every step and corner, and soon the shawl of misery and regret that hung heavily over my shoulders drove me out of doors.

  I never went back to that house. I had the contents packed up and sold it eventually for a small loss. I sent all the money to Sonia, as it was going to take some time to get the funds I had deposited in Switzerland to London. Our separation proved a tedious, depressing business; Sonia’s lawyer was a particularly aggressive, solemn man and I used to dread the regular summonses I received to his office to iron out this or that hitch or petty grievance.

  We were still filming, of course, throughout all this, and at a punishing pace too, in an attempt to make up for lost time. To my dismay, the rough cut of the film was now over seven hours long and we still had to shoot the departure from Les Charmettes and the arrival in Paris.

  I asked Doon if I could move in with her, but she said no. It was a perfectly reasonable refusal: she said we should wait a while. I was too disoriented to remonstrate for long, and while I was waiting moved to Eddie’s glum house on Kronenstrasse. Eddie was sympathetic, but he was more concerned about my professional rather than personal life.

  “I told you not to get involved with actresses,” he said. “Look at you now: money problems, no house, no family …”

  “I’m not ‘involved,’ ” I said earnestly. “I love her, can’t you understand that? I’m free now. I couldn’t be happier. Really. Sonia’ll give me a divorce eventually and then Doon and I will marry.”

  “Has she said so? Doon?”

  “Actually, she says she doesn’t want to get married.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “But she will.”

  “She’ll never marry you, John. She knows herself. If she says she won’t, she won’t.”

  “She’ll change her mind.”

  “She’s tough.”

  “I’m tougher.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, my friend.”

  He was right. I saw Doon a lot, we worked together, we spent most nights together, but once or twice a week I would spend a night or two away. It just seemed to happen. I would be working late, messages would miss one or the other person, meetings and appointments got in the way. When I rebuked her or acted petulantly, she employed a brand of clear-minded logic I could not defeat.

  “Will I see you tonight?” I would ask.

  “I’ve got a meeting, till late.”

  “I’ll stay up.”

  “When do you start work tomorrow morning?”

  “Six.”

  “I’ll be back around three.”

  “Ah.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather get a good night’s sleep? I’ll come by at lunch time.”

  What could I say? It made perfect sense. But there are times in your life when the sensible approach is exactly the one you do not require. I wanted to be irresponsible, as if that could somehow underline my love for her, erode my guilt over Hereford and Sonia. I wanted signs of grand passion. I wanted us both to declare that a moment apart was agony, that three hours’ sleep and a bleary-eyed start in the morning were a real proof of undying devotion. But I never got it.

  Emotionally, I was in something of a bad way after Sonia had left me, but at least the work was going well for once. The Tri-Kamera was behaving impeccably on the reshoots and the first run-throughs of the cherry-picking sequence were a revelation.

  We showed it to Eddie early in the New Year, with an orchestral accompaniment. He was overwhelmed and embraced me, kissing me on both cheeks, the Lodokian in him breaking the Simmonette veneer for an instant. On his insistence we showed it again to some financiers to the same ecstatic effect; more funding came through. Rumors began to spread through the industry about the film, its revolutionary techniques, of a scale and size matched only by the ambition of its director. I suppose early 1929 saw me at the very apex of my fame. Impressive achievements behind me, limitless potential ahead. I was feted, courted, flattered. Lubitsch wrote to me from Hollywood, inviting me over. I gave interviews to newspapers from France, Italy, Britain, the U.S.A. In Germany, in Berlin, I was for a few months a household name. I was approached in the street by strangers, was offered drinks in bars, signed menus in restaurants. All the heady trappings of temporary renown. A publisher wanted to publish my autobiography. A newspaper article about my war experiences was mooted as a possible movie. The whole world, it seemed, was agog with anticipation. The Confessions, as one newspaper put it, would be the film to end all films.

  Was I happy? Yes and no. I find it hard to think of myself as I was then. I was thirty years old and on the brink of achieving everything I had dreamed of and more.… But I was unsettled as well, and as some sort of exculpation I used to draw up rough profit-and-loss columns of my life. True, I was a rich and famous man—but my baby son had died. True, The Confessions was about to astonish the world—but my marriage was over, my wife and children estranged. True, I was in love with a celebrated and beautiful film actress—but she refused to marry me. And so on
. Whenever I was alone, this curious schizoid litany would enter my head to forestall any hasty conclusions about my good fortune.

  I mention this because it is the only explanation I can find for what I did next. Or else I must have been a little mad.… But I think I unconsciously wanted to make life difficult for myself, simply to bolster the loss column. Does that seem perverse? I think we are inclined to do this more often than we realize.

  Two aspects of The Confessions fatefully coincided in March 1929 to set me on this course of action.

  In 1738 Rousseau had come into his inheritance and for the first time in his life was in the possession of a fair sum of money. However, he was not feeling well—“fading away,” as he put it—and had diagnosed himself as suffering from a polyp on the heart. A certain doctor in Montpellier was reputed to have successfully treated such a case and Jean Jacques went there to consult him.

  This departure, significantly, coincided with the entry of his rival Witzenreid into Mme. de Warens’s household. The great love affair was nearing its end: things were no longer as they once had been between Rousseau and his beloved Maman.

  On his way to Montpellier, Rousseau encountered and fell in with a party of genteel travelers who included one Mme. de Larnage and a Marquis de Taulignon. Mme. de Larnage was attractive, heavily rouged, forty-four years old and mother of ten children, and the appearance of young Jean Jacques on the scene proved much more enticing than her ostensible suitor, the old marquis. For some reason—and this is what drew me to the episode—Rousseau seemed ashamed of his lowly background in this company and, quite astonishingly, claimed to be an Englishman called Dudding. By extreme good fortune no one asked “Mr. Dudding” to speak in his native language—of which he knew not one word. Mme. de Larnage made her feelings evident, and at one of their nightly stops in a coaching inn Jean Jacques surrendered himself to this “sensual and voluptuous” woman. They parted before they reached Montpellier, Jean Jacques—physically exhausted—promising a rendezvous a few weeks hence. This never occurred. Rousseau, having learned a few English phrases in Montpellier to sustain the Mr. Dudding disguise, and having regained some of his health, set off to meet with Mme. de Larnage at Bourg-St.-Andéol. On his way there, however, his guilt at betraying Maman was so intense that he broke off his journey and returned immediately to Chambéry to rejoin her. He was received coolly. Witzenreid was still there. Jean Jacques’s place had been taken.

  We filmed the coach journey in the state forest near Spandau and I cast Monika Alt as Mme. de Larnage. I scrutinized the episode in The Confessions, trying to understand Rousseau’s motives in dallying with Mme. de Larnage. Was it a preemptive revenge because he knew Witzenreid would edge him out of the nest? Or was there something in Mme. de Larnage that he could not find in Maman? In the book he goes as far as to contrast the two experiences of sex. With Maman, he says, sex was always accompanied by melancholy, but with Mme. de Larnage, he says, “I was always proud to be a man. I surrendered myself to my senses with joy and with confidence.” What did he mean? What went on?

  The Confessions is remarkable in its candor, not least about its author’s sexual nature. From his earliest days Jean Jacques liked to be dominated. When he was a child, the sister of his guardian at Bossey, Mlle. Lambercier, had to stop spanking him for his misdemeanors when she saw how much he was enjoying it. Later, in Nyon, a young girl—Mlle. Goton—was to act out a fantasy of a strict governess and whip him. It was the only moment in his life, he implies, when a member of the opposite sex actually discerned and satisfied his deepest sexual cravings. Had Mme. de Larnage, I wondered, done the same?

  I must admit I was happy to see Monika again, We based ourselves up the road from Spandau in Falkenhagen for three or four days while we went out with the coaches and horses filming traveling scenes. Monika knew about Doon and me and was provocatively discreet about our past. “It’s all forgotten, Johnny,” she said on more than one occasion, miming sealed lips, which of course made me remember all the more vividly.

  The last evening in the little Gasthaus in Falkenhagen we had a ribald discussion about Rousseau and flagellation. Karl-Heinz said he found it very easy to sympathize with. Günter Koll (he played the marquis) said he thought it was depraved. Monika claimed to understand the feeling—even though she had no inclinations in that direction herself. She said that if a man asked her to beat him and it gave him real pleasure, she would not refuse.

  I said, “So if I asked you, ‘Monika, I want you to beat me,’ you wouldn’t be shocked?”

  “Not at all.”

  We talked on. Karl-Heinz told us about a man he used to sleep with who liked having the juice of citrus fruit squeezed over his body. “For some reason grapefruit was his favorite,” Karl-Heinz said. The tone of the evening’s conversation degenerated further as we called for more drink.

  Later, I came out of the Gasthaus’s sole bathroom to find Monika waiting her turn.

  “Ah, Monika,” I said stupidly. We were standing rather close together. I was wearing pajamas and dressing gown. She looked at me, smiling.

  “You want to try it?” she asked.

  “I’ll come along in half an hour.”

  She was still dressed when I went into her room. She seemed incapable of removing a knowing smile from her lips.

  “Look, Monica …” I began cautiously.

  “This is just an experiment. Yes?”

  “Yes.” I enjoyed the lie. “Purely in the interests of research.” The pretense made my breathing quicken with excitement.

  “What do you want me to use?” she asked. “I’ve got a newspaper. My father used to beat me with a rolled-up newspaper. Or a brush.”

  “What about a shoe? A slipper?”

  We selected a fine suede slipper and stood and looked at each other.

  “Do you think I should be naked?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, I think so.”

  I took my clothes off.

  “See, you’re excited already. Do you want me—”

  “No, I think you should be clothed.” I could hear my blood like surf in my ears.

  She sat down on the bed. I knelt beside her then bent over her knees. Her hands ran over my back and buttocks.

  “Monika, please!”

  “Sorry. I forgot. This is simply literary criticism. Shall I start?”

  She gave me a good severe spanking. My buttocks reddened, then stung. The erection I had had subsided utterly.

  “Harder?”

  “No. Stop, stop,” I said weakly. I stood up. “Ouch,” I said rubbing my smarting arse. “That’s bloody agony!”

  “And look, it’s not working.” She got to her feet. “Perhaps I should be naked too.”

  I looked at her. She dropped the slipper and began unbuttoning her dress.

  “Yes,” I said. “Might be a good idea.”

  I took up my journal again after a gap of several years.

  Chambéry, May 15, 1929. Filming at our version of Les Charmettes. The house is ideal. Orchard very pretty in bloom. We have planted four hundred mature vines in the field at the back and have terraced the garden in front. Now all we require is a sunny day.

  I wrote that entry as we sat in a small tented village to one side of the farmhouse, listening to the rain rumble on the stretched canvas overhead. The Tri-Kamera was set up and ready to roll. The beehives were in position and Georg Pfau had five thousand bees ready to be loosed on the grassy meadows and orchard blossoms whenever the sun broke through the clouds. We had been waiting for sun—which the meteorological office in Grenoble had been assuring us was on its way—for four days. Everyone was numb with boredom. We had one scene left to shoot and The Confessions: Part I would be over.

  I did not care what the weather was like for Rousseau’s departure from Les Charmettes, and had already shot it in a dismal drizzle, but it was absolutely essential that when he arrived the gorgeous sunshine should, in the best traditions of the pathetic fallacy, reflect his mood. Remember, he has only recent
ly betrayed Maman with Mme. de Larnage, and conscience has now redirected his steps to Les Charmettes—his arrival unannounced and unexpected. I had changed things somewhat from the book. There, Jean Jacques encounters Mme. de Warens in her dressing room. In the film I wanted him to walk up the country road lined with bulging flowery hedgerows, his face animated with joyous expectation. He knocks at the farmhouse door. No reply. He hears a distant peal of female laughter. Slowly he walks down towards the orchard (we should recall the idyll of the cherry-picking sequence here) and comes across Maman and Witzenreid picnicking, Witzenreid stretched out on the grass, his head in Maman’s lap. (Witzenreid was dismissed by Rousseau as “a hairdresser … tall, pale, with a flat face and dull wits, whose conversation betrayed all the affectation and bad taste of the hairdresser’s trade”!) Jean Jacques approaches them. We go to three screens—the three faces in close-up, all trying to disguise their respective emotions. It is the end of the affair. I wanted it to be a moment of bitter poignancy set in a scene of fragrant summer beauty. But all we had was rain.

  I was prepared to wait it out. I had not let the weather spoil my film thus far and was not about to make compromises now. Doon sat in a deck chair beside me, in costume and makeup, reading a book. I glanced at her strong profile and felt a pleasant pang of love for her. My one night with Monika Alt at Falkenhagen had been a momentary aberration, a mere matter of circumstance and mood (and Monika) conspiring against me. I had no guilt about it because it had made no difference. Doon and I still saw each other virtually every day. I spent most nights at her apartment. I kept many of my clothes and possessions there. I talked from time to time of buying a new larger apartment for us both—Doon did not object and the implication was that we would both be living together before too long. My only worry was to do with future filming. Mme. de Warens, at the end of Part I, disappears completely from the story of The Confessions. We would be often separated over the coming three years as I filmed Part II and Part III.

  Doon reached into her handbag and removed a cigarette case. I smiled, enjoying the oddly exciting anachronism of an eighteenth-century noblewoman smoking a Lucky Strike. She looked round and caught my eye.