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The
first pages of the lifelong, though intermittent, journal that I began
to keep from the age of fifteen are missing. No great loss and, doubtless,
like the avowals that begin almost all intimate journals, mine too would
have commenced with the familiar determination to be wholly and unshakeably
truthful. I would have sworn an oath to absolute candour and asserted
my refusal to feel shame over any revelations which that candour would
have encouraged. Why do we urge ourselves on in this way, us journal-keepers?
Do we fear the constant threat of backslide in us, the urge to tinker
and cover up? Are there aspects of our lives--things we do, feel and think--that
we daren't confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of
our private record? Anyway, I'm sure I vowed to tell the truth, the whole
truth, etc., etc., and I think these pages will bear me out in that endeavour.
I have sometimes behaved well and I have sometimes behaved less than well--but
I have resisted all attempts to present myself in a better light. There
are no excisions designed to conceal errors of judgement ("The Japanese
would never dare to attack the USA unprovoked"); no additions aimed at
conferring an unearned sagacity ("I don't like the cut of that Herr Hitler's
jib"); and no sly insertions to indicate canny prescience ("If only there
were some way to harness safely the power in the atom")--for that is not
the purpose of keeping a journal. We keep a journal to entrap that collection
of selves that forms us, the individual human being. Think of our progress
through time as one of those handy images that illustrate the Ascent of
Man. You know the type: diagrams that begin with the shaggy ape and his
ground-grazing knuckles, moving on through slowly straightening and depilating
hominids, until we reach the clean-shaven Caucasian nudist proudly clutching
the haft of his stone axe or spear. All the intervening orders assume
a form of inevitable progression towards this brawny ideal. But our human
lives aren't like that, and a true journal presents us with the more riotous
and disorganized reality. The various stages of development are there,
but they are jumbled up, counterposed and repeated randomly. The selves
jostle for prominence in these pages: the mono-browed Neanderthal shoulders
aside axe-wielding Homo sapiens; the neurasthenic intellectual trips up
the bedaubed aborigine. It doesn't make sense; the logical, perceived
progression never takes place. The true journal intime understands this
fact and doesn't try to posit any order or hierarchy, doesn't try to judge
or analyze: I am all these different people--all these different people
are me.
Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary--it is the respective proportions
of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.
I was born on the 27th February 1906 in Montevideo, Uruguay, the sea-girt
city on its bay in that small country wedged between beefy Argentina and
broiling Brazil. The "Switzerland of South America" it is sometimes dubbed
and the land-locked associations of that comparison are apt, for, despite
their country's long coastline--the republic is surrounded on three sides
by water: the Atlantic, the vast estuary of the R�o Plata and the broad
R�o Uruguay--the Uruguayans themselves are defiantly non-seafaring, a
fact that has always warmed my heart, divided as it is between seadog
Briton and landlubberly Uruguayan. My nature, true to its genetic heritage,
is resolutely divided: I love the sea, but I love it viewed from a beach--my
feet must always be planted on the strand.
My father's name was Francis Mountstuart (b. 1871). My mother's was Mercedes
de Sol�s. She claimed to be descended from the first European, Juan D�az
de Sol�s, who set his foot on Uruguayan soil early in the sixteenth century.
An unfortunate move on his part as he and most of his band of explorers
were swiftly killed by Charrua Indians. No matter: my mother's preposterous
boast is unverifiable.
My parents met because my mother, who spoke good English, became my father's
secretary. My father was the general manager of Foley & Cardogin's
Fresh Meat Company's processing plant in Uruguay. Foley's Finest Corned
Beef is their most famous brand ("Foley's Finest": we have all, we British,
eaten Foley's corned beef at some stage in our lives), but the bulk of
their business was in the exporting of frozen beef carcasses to Europe
from their huge frigor�fico--a slaughterhouse and massive freezing unit
combined--on the coast a few miles west of Montevideo. Foley's was not
the biggest frigor�fico in Uruguay at the turn of the twentieth century
(that honour went to Lemco's at Fray Bentos), but it was very profitable--thanks
to the diligence and perseverance of Francis Mountstuart. My father was
thirty-three years old when he married my mother in 1904 (she was ten
years younger than he) in Montevideo's pretty cathedral. Two years later
I was born, their only child, named Logan Gonzago after my respective
grandfathers (neither of whom was alive to meet his grandson).
I stir the memory soup in my head, hoping gobbets of Uruguay will float
to the surface. I can see the frigor�fico--a vast white factory with its
stone jetty and towering chimney stack. I can hear the lowing of a thousand
cattle waiting to be slaughtered, butchered, cleaned and frozen. But I
didn't like the frigor�fico and its chill aura of mass-produced death*--it
made me frightened--I preferred our house and its dense and leafy grounds,
a big villa on the chic and swanky Avenida de Brasil in Montevideo's new
town. I remember a lemon tree in our garden and lobes of lemon-coloured
light on a stone terrace. And there was a lead fountain set in a brick
wall, with water spouting from a putto's mouth. A putto who looked, I
now remember, just like the daughter of Jacob Pauser, the manager of the
Foley estancia, 30,000 acres of the Banda Oriental, the purple-flowered
flatlands where the beef herds roamed. What was this girl's name? Let's
call her Esmerelda. Little Esmerelda Pauser--you can be my first love.
* 80,000 cattle
a year were slaughtered at the Foley frigorifico and numberless
sheep.
We spoke English in the house and from the age of six I went to a church
school run by monoglot nuns on the Playa Trienta y Tres. I could read
English but barely write by the time Roderick Poole arrived in 1913 (fresh
from Oxford with a pass degree in Greats) to take my slipshod education
by the scruff of its neck and make me fit for St. Alfred's School, Warwick,
Warwickshire,
England. I had no real concept of what England was like, my whole world
was Montevideo and Uruguay. Lincoln, Shropshire, Hampshire, Romney Marsh
and Southdown--breeds of sheep routinely slaughtered in my father's frigor�fico
were what my country meant to me. One more memory. After my lessons with
Roderick we would go sea-bathing at Pocitos (where Roderick had to keep
his bathing suit on) and would take the number 15 or 22 tram to reach
the resort. Our treat was to order sorbets and have them served to us
in the gardens of the Grand Hotel--gardens full of flowers: stock, lilac,
orange, myrtle and mimosa--and then rattle home in the tender dusk to
find my mother in the kitchen shouting at the cook, my father on the terrace
smoking his quotidian cigar.
The Mountstuart family home was in Birmingham, where my father had been
born and raised and where the head office of Foley & Cardogin's Fresh
Meat Co. was to be found. In 1914 Foley's decided to concentrate on its
meat-processing factories in Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia, and
the Uruguayan business was sold to an Argentine firm, the Compa��a Sansinena
de Carnes Congeladas. My father was promoted to managing director and
summoned home to Birmingham. We sailed for Liverpool on the SS Zenobia
in the company of 2,000 frozen carcasses of Pollen Angus. The First World
War began a week after we made landfall.
Did I weep when I looked back at my beautiful city beneath its small,
fort-topped, conic hill and we left the yellow waters of the R�o Plata
behind? Probably not: I was sharing a cabin with Roderick Poole and he
was teaching me to play gin rummy.
The city of Birmingham became my new home. I swapped the eucalyptus groves
of Col�n, the grass seas of the campo and the endless yellow waters of
the R�o Plata for a handsome, Victorian, redbrick villa in Edgbaston.
My mother was delighted to be in Europe and revelled in her new role as
the managing director's wife. I was sent as a boarder to St. Alfred's
(where I briefly acquired the nickname "Dago"--I was a dark, dark-eyed
boy) and at the age of thirteen I moved on to Abbeyhurst College (usually
known as Abbey)--an eminent boys' boarding school, though not quite of
the first rank--to complete my secondary education. It is here in 1923,
when I was seventeen years old, that the first of my journals, and the
story of my life, begins.
THE SCHOOL JOURNAL
1923
10 December 1923
We--the five Roman Catholics--were walking back from the bus stop up the
drive to school, fresh from Mass, when Barrowsmith and four or five of
his Neanderthals started chanting "Papist dogs" and "Fenian traitors"
at us. Two of the junior sprats began weeping, so I stood up to Barrowsmith
and said: "So tell us what religion you are, Barrowboy." "Church of England,
of course, you dunce," he said. "Then count yourself very fortunate,"
said I, "that one religion at least will accept someone as physically
repulsive as you are." Everyone laughed, even Barrowsmith's simian crew,
and I shepherded my little flock together and we regained the purlieus
of school without further incident.
Scabius and Leeping* declared I had done work of sub-magnificent standard
and that the encounter and exchange were droll enough to deserve entry
in our Livre d'Or. I argued that I should have a starred sub-magnificent
because of the potential risk of physical injury from Barrowsmith and
his lackeys, but Scabius and Leeping both voted against. The swine! Little
Montague, one of the blubbers, was the witness, and Scabius and Leeping
both handed over the honorarium (two cigarettes each for a sub-magnificent)
with goodly cheer.
*Peter Scabius,
LMS's closest friend from his schooldays, along with Benjamin Leeping.
When we brewed up after second prep I hatched a plan for the Martinmas
term. It was no good, I said, just waiting for the various categories
of magnificents to happen--we had to initiate them ourselves. I proposed
that we should each be presented with a challenge: that two of us, in
turn, should think up a task for the third and that the endeavour would
be documented (and witnessed as far as possible) in the Livre d'Or. Only
in this way, I averred, could the ghastly rigours of next term be survived,
and, after that, we were on the home stretch: summer term was always more
agreeable and could take care of itself. There were the School Certificate
and scholarship exams and then we'd be free--and of course we hoped Oxford
would be waiting (for me and Scabius, at least--Leeping said he had no
intention of wasting three years--of what was bound to be a short life--at
university). Scabius suggested the raising of a fund to privately print
and publish a deluxe limited edition of the Livre d'Or if only to preserve
the iniquities of Abbey for all time. "Or as a terrible warning for our
offspring," added Leeping. This was unanimously agreed and we each deposited
one penny into the new "publishing fund," Leeping already pondering weight
and weave of paper types, embossed leather binding and the like.*
In the dormitory that night I pleasured myself with delectable visions
of Lucy. No. 127 of the term.
*As far as
is known, the Livre d'Or was never printed. No trace of the manuscript
survives.
Excerpted from Any Human Heart by William Boyd Copyright�
2003 by William Boyd. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Synopsis
The author
of Armadillo, The Blue Afternoon and Brazzaville Beach—the
novelist who has been called a “master storyteller” (Chicago
Tribune) and “a gutsy writer who is good company to keep” (Time)—now
gives us his most entertaining, sly and compelling novel to date, a novel
that evokes the tumult, events and iconic faces of our time, as it tells
the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover and man of the world—through
his intimate journals.
Here is the
“riotous and disorganized reality” of Mountstuart’s eighty-five
years in all their extraordinary, tragic and humorous aspects. The journals
begin with his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay; then move to Oxford in
the 1920s and the publication of his first book; then on to Paris (where
he meets Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, et al.) and to Spain where he covers
the civil war. During World War II, we see him as an agent for Naval Intelligence,
becoming embroiled in a murder scandal that involves the Duke and Duchess
of Windsor. The postwar years bring him to New York as an art dealer in
the world of 1950s abstract expressionism, then on to West Africa, to
London (where he has a run-in with the Baader-Meinhof Gang) and, finally,
to France where, in his old age, he acquires a measure of hard-won serenity.
A moving,
ambitious and richly conceived novel that summons up the heroics and follies
of twentieth-century life.
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Author
 William
Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana, and attended university in Nice, Glasgow
and Oxford. He is the author of seven novels and eleven screenplays and
has been the recipient of several awards, including the Whitbread Award
for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. William
Boyd lives with his wife in London and southwest France.
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