The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  “Where are you going?” I asked as we waited for a train. “Waverley?”

  “I’ll get the stopper to Bonnington.”

  We sat on the station bench side by side. It was still raining. I felt obscurely cheated of my second night with her.

  “Do you go to that pub—the Linlithgow—often?” It was the only reference I had made to her profession.

  “Aye, sometimes.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  “Maybe, aye.”

  Her train came in five minutes. She got up.

  “Thanks for the spongebag, Mr. Todd. Cheerio, now.”

  My film The Divorce had its trade show in August 1935. Close-up described it as “a powerful and at times shocking melodrama, very much in the German style.” Bioscope said, “A skillful and impressive film let down by mediocre performances.” In the film the impossible love affair ends with the hero murdering the uncaring prostitute and then killing himself. I shot it full of shadows, unrelievedly murky in every scene. It was a small inexpensive film compared to the scale I had become accustomed to in The Confessions, but I was pleased with it. It was infused with its own strange passion. On the whole The Divorce received a good press, though it did only average business. This was the result of the inept distribution deal negotiated by the film company I made it for—Astra-King. But I was pleased with the movie for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it was a memento of the bizarre twenty-four hours I had spent in Joppa committing adultery with Senga. There were other advantages that accrued. The good notices had attracted interest from Gaumont, J. Arthur Rank and British Lion. The Confessions: Part II was being discussed once more.

  My most ardent fan was the celebrated Courtney Young, variously known as Mr. Film, Father of the British Cinema and any number of other flattering epithets. Young was a hugely wealthy man who had made his fortune in the ancillary trades of the film business. He started out hiring equipment—lamps and cameras—then he expanded into the costumier side. He bought a studio during the postwar slump, demolished it and then sold the land to the electricity board. The money he made from this purchased the second-largest cinema chain in the North of England. And so on. He was one of those men who would have done well, and done it in the same way, no matter what industry he went into—he just happened to choose the cinema. Now he was making films. His company, Court Films, had produced two expensive flops: Vanity Fair and Sir Walter Raleigh, but this had not dissuaded him. He was mad for The Confessions.

  Young was a huge fleshy man with a handsome face spoiled by heavy bags under his eyes. He had thin ginger-blond hair, which he brushed straight back from a pale freckleless face. He looked as if he should have been dark and saturnine. The fact that he was not was somewhat unsettling. For a while I used to wonder if his hair was dyed, but I saw him naked once (showering in his golf club) and his pubic hair was as pale as old thistledown.

  I did not like Young much, but I needed him. He was married to a still-beautiful actress of the silent era, Meredith Pershing, and I spent quite a few weekends at their country house near High Wycombe. He paid me to rewrite my scripts so that Rousseau’s English years were emphasized (he wanted Hector Seagoe to play David Hume) and I obliged. It took considerable persuasion to get him to accept Karl-Heinz as Rousseau, but I made it a condition of my directing. In the end he had to agree.

  It was the spring of 1936, I think, March or April, when Leo Druce finally returned from Berlin. He was something of a wasted man, having been embroiled in a nasty court case after the death of his ex-wife, Lola Templin-Tavel. Her body had been found in a grove of trees near the Wannsee with a bullet hole in her head and a revolver lying nearby. However, in her room was a suicide note that stated that she and Leo were going to stage a double suicide exactly like Kleist and his mistress Henriette Vogel (Lola had made her name in the role of Henriette Vogel in a long-running play). Leo knew nothing of this and protested as much when he was arrested for murder. There was a lot of lurid publicity and it was only as a result of witnesses testifying to Lola’s total craziness that the charges against him were dropped.

  Since his window-cleaner film, Leo had made three other low-quality musical comedies and was now, I suppose, regarded as a director rather than a producer.

  We met for lunch in an oyster bar off the Strand. Leo looked thinner and needed a haircut. We shook hands with as much warmth as the gesture can generate.

  “I came away with virtually nothing,” he said. “I had to get out of the place. You should have seen those baboons that arrested me … and the jail! It’s all the uniforms I can’t take. Suddenly everybody’s allowed to dress up. And flags. Flags everywhere. Never known a country so keen on flags.”

  We ordered turtle soup and three dozen oysters. To my surprise I had developed a taste for them. In celebration of our reunion I called for champagne.

  “Doing well, Johnny?”

  I told him The Confessions was on the go again.

  “Wonderful. Great news. Saw The Divorce. Splendid. The end shook me up a bit, I can tell you.” He lifted his chin and slid an oyster down his throat. “You know—what with Lola topping herself like that.”

  I asked him for news of Doon. He told me he had none. We talked on about the occupation of the Rhineland, life in Berlin and mutual friends. He told me that Georg Pfau had died in some kind of internment camp. Karl-Heinz was in a successful play at the Schiller-Theater but was still living in Georg’s old apartment, which he now owned.

  “Place is full of dead insects,” Leo said. “Doesn’t seem to care.”

  “I must write to him. Get him over to meet Young.” I looked at Leo. “What do you say to keeping The Confessions a Todd-Druce production? I’ll talk to Young about it.”

  He set down his coffee cup and looked solemn.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you, John.” He held up his hand, palm outwards. “No, I mean it. I tell you, that business with Lola almost finished me.”

  “Don’t give it a thought,” I said. “What are friends for?”

  Leo moved in with me for a week or so until he could find a place of his own. I introduced him to Young, who quickly agreed to his producing The Confessions. In the meantime Young set him to work overseeing a musical version of Major Barbara while I got down to some serious revisions on my script. I was quite happy with the reemphasis Young had proposed. I now saw Part II as, in essence, a film about exile. It opened with Rousseau on a Channel pacquet boat approaching Dover Harbor on a wet squally day. He is alone (Thérèse le Vasseur is following later, escorted by Boswell* ). His thoughts turn to the past, the fame and disgrace he had known, the celebration and vilification. He meets Hume and is soon settled in England. Then, reunited with the faithless Thérèse, he begins to write his Confessions. His mind goes back to his youth, Geneva, Maman, Paris and early fame.… In a series of fragmented memories we relive his past life (here I could employ some of the footage from Part I). Gradually, however, his loneliness gets the better of him. He does not warm to England or the cold English. He begins to suspect Hume of intercepting his mail.… I worked on steadily and with growing satisfaction. For the first time since I had left Berlin I felt a modicum of contentment again. I even grew to enjoy my solitary bachelor’s life—working in the morning, lunch in a local pub, a stroll round Islington’s streets, perhaps some shopping, then another long session of work until seven or eight in the evening. Then I might go out to the theater or the cinema and have a late supper. Often I’d meet up with Leo. He was dallying now with a chorus girl from Major Barbara (I rebuked him for this cliché) called Belinda, and I would join them and assorted friends in restaurants or parties or wherever the “fun” was to be had that night. I met a fair number of bright ambitious girls on these assignations, but they must have found me disappointing company. My mind was full of Jean Jacques again and I barely listened to the humorous chitchat that flowed insatiably between the others. In the summer I went down to the Courtney Youn
gs’ for house parties every second or third weekend. It was there one Saturday that I read in The Times of my divorce from Sonia on the grounds of adultery committed at the Harry Lauder Temperance Hotel, Joppa, Midlothian, with one Agnes Outram. (“Very Johnny Todd, somehow,” Young commented when he read it. This annoyed me.) I felt no grief or disappointment and smiled blandly through the sophisticated commiserations of my fellow guests. Instead I thought rather poignantly of that bizarre couple of days and the strange charade we had played out—myself and Senga and the efficient Orr brothers.…

  A few days later Sonia wrote to inform me that she was marrying her lawyer, Devize, and that he proposed to adopt my three children as his own. I gave them my blessing in the enterprise. There was nothing for me there anymore.

  Then I received another letter that filled me with real joy.

  Hello, Johnny!

  My God, you should be seeing Berlin now. We are in heavy trouble. I am a great success in a bad play. Famous again, like Julie. Good news about Jean Jacques. I make a little more money, then I come to England. Poor Georg is dead, you know. I tell you when I see you. Tell to your Mr. Young that I want one thousand pounds a week for your film. Hello to Leo.

  Good-bye. A strong English handshake from your German friend,

  Karl-Heinz

  It was a warm drizzly Wednesday in late July when I was telephoned by Courtney Young and asked to come and see him. I knew it was Wednesday because I had gone out after lunch to buy some bananas and found the shops all shut. I had forgotten it was half-day closing. I had returned home and was just beginning to write the scene where Rousseau accuses Hume of plotting to defame him when the phone rang. Young wanted to see me straightaway.

  During that summer of 1936, curious though it is to relate now, a novel called Great Alfred by one Land Fothergill (an unlikely name for a woman) had enjoyed a huge success both in Britain and the U.S.A. That afternoon in his office in Portland Square, Young told me he had just bought the film rights for fifty thousand pounds, a vast sum, in competition with MGM and 20th Century-Fox. The novel was about Alfred the Great, preposterously romanticized (I had reached page 7 before I had hurled it away), but Young said it would make the English epic to rival anything the Americans would produce. The cast would include Hartley Dale, Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Cecily Dart, Charles Laughton and Felicia Feast. He envisaged a budget of around a million pounds. There was only one man who could direct it—John James Todd.

  “Don’t say anything,” Young interrupted quickly. “Think about it. My commitment to The Confessions is absolute, rock solid. But this is an opportunity we have to take.”

  “But what about The Confessions?” I asked. “Karl-Heinz is coming over.”

  “Superb, wonderful. There must be a role for him in Alfred. We’ll do The Confessions after.” He went to the window and spoke to the plane trees in the square. “Think, John, think. After Alfred … The whole world’s talking about that book. Think what we’ll be able to do with The Confessions.” He turned, his pale face was almost flushed. “And you’re the only man who can do it. You’re the only English—sorry, British—director who’s worked on this kind of huge scale. I saw what you did with The Confessions. You’ll have a million quid for Alfred.…”

  He went on sousing me in statistics, predictions and the grossest flattery. I went home and thought about it for hours. I telephoned Leo and said I needed his advice. We met that evening in a quiet restaurant in Bloomsbury.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” Leo said.

  “What?”

  “You have to stick with The Confessions.” He spoke with tense sincerity.

  “I know.”

  “Young’s trying to sidetrack you. He’s got this hot property. If he can persuade you to postpone The Confessions once, he’ll try again. You’ll lose his commitment once he sees yours can be diverted.”

  “You’re right.” He was. “I know.” I smiled at him. “I think I just needed to hear it from someone else. Thanks, Leo.”

  “Christ, we’ve waited long enough,” he said. “Let’s keep forging on, for God’s sake. What about another bottle of rosé?”

  This was how events went. I telephoned Young the next morning. I said I was deeply honored to have been asked, but I had devoted years of my life to The Confessions and that to set it aside now just as it was reaching fruition would be, in my opinion, disastrous. Alas, I had to say no to Great Alfred. It had been one of the hardest decisions of my life.

  “Thank you, John,” he said. “I’m sad, I wish you’d change your mind, but I think I can understand your position.”

  We said good-bye. I said I was looking forward to seeing him and Meredith that weekend.

  The next day in the Manchester Guardian I read that Land Fothergill’s Great Alfred was to be filmed by Courtney Young’s Court Films. The director was to be “the internationally celebrated film director Mr. Leo Druce.”

  That afternoon I received a telegram. REGRET CONFESSIONS NO LONGER OF INTEREST TO COURT FILMS. They wished me luck.

  That evening Leo Druce stood in the middle of my living room trying to lie his way out of a tight corner. He was agitated; he kept running his hands through his thick hair.

  “You must believe me, John. I didn’t know. I swear. I had no idea when we spoke. I never dreamed he would ask me.”

  “You fucking liar.” I had said this about twenty times so far.

  “He rang me out of the blue. We met. He said The Confessions was off. Finished. Did I want to direct Great Alfred? You’d turned it down flat, he said.”

  “You should have told him where to stuff Great Alfred.”

  “What good would that do? Look, I’m broke. I’ve got no job. This is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

  “You stinking filthy scum.”

  “I swear—” His voice cracked. “I never knew. The Confessions is over, Johnny. Put yourself in my place.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Go back to him. Say you’ve changed your mind. I don’t care. You do it.”

  “You’re vermin, Druce. I wouldn’t piss on Young’s grave, now. He’s filth. You’re a perfect match. I hope you’ll be very happy.”

  “John, I beg you.”

  I felt my face harden, as if it were being slowly frozen.

  “I made you, Druce. I’ve given you every break. When I think—”

  “John, please—”

  “When I think what I’ve done for you. How many times I’ve helped you. This is what you do to me.”

  “I’ll tell him I don’t want it. Say you’ve changed your mind.”

  “You disgust me. Get out.”

  “John—”

  “GET OUT!”

  I actually screamed. The dam broke. I called him every vile name I could think of. He stood there and took it for a minute or so, then left. After he had gone I sat down and plotted murder. I was going to kill Young and his wife and their children. I was going to torture Druce in unspeakable ways until he died. Then I was going to seek out their families and relatives and spring on them from the darkness. I was going to conduct my own private pogrom, cleanse the world of this worthless contemptible human bacteria.…

  Well, this is the sort of thing you do—these are the words you say to yourself in such moments. It was the lowest point my life had reached. The darkest depths. The nadir. Only thoughts of vicious revenge kept me going. Eventually I began to calm down. The first thing I realized was that I had to get away. I had to leave London. So where did I go? I went back to Scotland.

  I rented a small freezing cottage on old Sir Hector Dale’s estate at Drumlarish. Somehow the old chap was still just in the land of the living. He was bedridden and quite gaga 90 percent of the time. A grandson, my cousin Mungo Dale, ran the increasingly decrepit estate. Mungo was a big, fair, utterly stupid man in his early forties whose company I found oddly consoling. I never saw him wear anything but a kilt. From time to time he would come by the cottage and ask me if I wanted to parti
cipate in the life of the farm—repairing dry-stone dikes, feeding sheep and cattle, and so on—but I always politely declined. I have never sought solace in physical labor. My energies are purely mental.

  Mungo was far too shy ever to marry, and in fact was quite happy looking after the estate and his ancient grandfather. None of the other Dales enjoyed living at Drumlarish and were all firmly established in Glasgow and Edinburgh in various easy jobs. Mungo would inherit the house and land when old Sir Hector finally passed away. Mungo lived with him in the big house (colder than my cottage) and said with some pride that he had slept in the same bedroom for over forty years. An old couple saw to their food and tried to keep dust and all types of encroaching decay in hand. Somehow, with the occasional help of the sale of a few shares, a good picture or a piece of furniture, the leasing of pasture and moorland, the place just managed to keep going.

  I went into a kind of mental hibernation during the winter of 1936–37. I grew a beard. I did some token work on my script and tried to keep warm. My social life consisted of visits to Mungo and Sir Hector and the occasional trip to Glenfinnan to stock up on provisions and draw money from the bank. My finances were about as healthy as Sir Hector. I spent Christmas at my father’s with Thompson and Heather but returned to Drumlarish before New Year’s Eve. I avoided buying newspapers and listening to the radio. My only source of news was Mungo.

  “There’s a war going on in Spain,” he said to me in January, as we drove into Glenfinnan to buy paraffin.

  “Oh yes? What’s happening?”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, John, I’m no very sure. But it’s pretty bad, I believe.”

  “I see.”

  “Ever been tae Spain, John?”

  “No, can’t say I have.”

  “I hear tell it’s an awfy beautiful country.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Thus we conversed. We could talk for hours like this, usually at night in the kitchen of the big house, a whiskey bottle and two glasses in front of us. Slowly I healed. I shaved off my beard. In February I finished my script of The Confessions: Part II and then neatly retyped it.