Traipsing Through the 20th Century

...His final decade, spent in a dilapidated French villa, is almost unbearably poignant...

...He publishes a novel based on his experiences with a French prostitute, and writes two critical biographies...

...Do we have to be told Ian Fleming was "the creator of James Bond...

...That book, which does in fact exist, is fiction too—but so convincing that it reportedly caused much confusion in the art world...

...Almost despite himself, Boyd is a wonderfully straight storyteller...

...The result, though, is a book that alternates between being irritating and affecting...

...If he needs the intellectual games of postmodernism to keep at it, it is worth his readers' while to put up with some shenanigans just to get the story out of him...

...Mountstuart's one constant in this picaresque journey from one end of the century to the other is his diary...

...Yet he claims it boldly, knowing his own shortcomings...

...Nor is there a genuine biography of Mountstuart's American painter friend Nat Tate, whose life we are told (again in a footnote) can be more fully explored in "Nat Tate: An American Artist, by William Boyd...

...his little gollywog wife...

...He takes as his epigraph Henry James' dictum, "Never say you know the last word about any human heart...

...He manages to convey a genuine vivacity to the diary entries of the young Mountstuart through pacing and language that match the protagonist's puppy-like energy, curiosity and arrogance, and alter appropriately when Mountstuart falls prey to those other youthful characteristics, self-doubt and self-consciousness...

...It allows our protagonist—who if real, would probably have been as bigoted as many of his age and class—the opportunity to chastise Virginia Woolf for her well-known caste sensitivity...

...There is an echo of Powell's unpopular Windermerpool in Boyd's Vanderpoel, and it seems too odd to be pure coincidence that Mountstuart's tutor at Oxford is Le Mayne while Powell called his housemaster Le Bas...

...But it is difficult to weigh the irony Boyd intends to ascribe to the single words Mountstuart has engraved on to his tombstone, 'Escritor/ Writer/ Écrivain...

...What could have less gravitas...

...They also identify the many famous writers and artists Mountstuart encounters during his days at Oxford and in London, where he makes a precarious living as a journalist, author and sometime spy...

...Boyd's evocation of British public school life in the 1920s calls to mind Anthony Powell's A Question of Upbringing, the first novel in A Dance to the Music of Time...

...It isn't unreasonable to think that a man like Mountstuart—Oxford-educated, artistic, well-connected —would have come into contact with the cream that rose to the top of the culture in his century...

...But where his inventiveness is stymied by his "celebrity" characters, his evoking Powell and other writers, such as Evelyn Waugh (whom Mounstuart kisses at a University debauch), does not hamper him...

...One can't tell whether it is the lens through which one sees life, or life itself...

...Paradoxically, the reason for this may in part be that some of the material is familiar from other literary works...

...As it turns out, Boyd has a remarkable ability to re-create the details of decades he never saw himself, but there is something fundamentally inauthentic about his enterprise...

...He begins to write journalism, and subsequently to work for British intelligence...

...To use a classic English put-down, it's too clever by half...

...The footnotes, when they are not coyly phony, seem intended to give the journals a sense of reality...

...To Woolf she says, "You should be ashamed of yourself...

...Like Powell's Jenkins, the boy Mountstuart wants to be a writer...

...This episode is footnoted: "See The Diary of Virginia Woolf...

...In addition, the story continues a little beyond Mountstuart's demise, because the "editor" describes details of his will and provides a list of his works, two of them published posthumously...

...Volume IV: 1931-5...

...Like the boarding school friends in Powell, these three boys remain in contact, if not always on the same friendly basis, throughout their lives...

...As Nabokov said, the definition of a second-rate writer is that he confirms what we already believe about the world...

...What is extraordinary, and successful, about the novel is its breadth...

...When Boyd is not reminding us that the journals are his creation, they are convincing...

...An unhappy marriage leads to the first of several literary dry spells...

...A nervous breakdown leads him to New York, where he again dabbles in writing but chiefly makes his living as an art dealer...

...The success of the first of the challenges has repercussions that persist into Mountstuart's adulthood...

...Moreover, since Boyd was born in Ghana in 1952, he is hardly a primary source for the bare bones, at least, of the life of Logan Mountstuart, his fictional journal-keeper, who is born in Uruguay in 1906 and dies in 1991...

...Just as his youthful diary entries reflected the characteristics of that age, so does Boyd convey the preoccupations and style of a solitary man at the close of his life...

...In the professional sense, Mountstuart has a very tentative claim to the title...

...In typical teenage fashion, Mountstuart and his two closest friends set one another unlikely challenges...

...Boyd's view seems to be that literature is inescapable...

...This gives the diary an unusual trajectory for a novel...

...He is alone with his animals, the weather and his wine...

...It is, nevertheless, a very good summation of his life's jarring contrasts...

...Where Boyd resorts to using the famous as supporting characters, Any Human Heart is distinctly second-rate...

...Once you get the point that Mountstuart is meeting a lot of famous people, the footnotes about them become annoying...

...His career at Oxford bodes well, but after taking a third-class degree the road to academe, in any event, is closed to him...

...Boyd can never contradict what we already know of them...

...Boyd's metafiction succeeds, but largely on the strengths of its more ordinary, less clever, narrative elements...

...Hindsight is what makes these journals different from actual ones...

...One must seduce the daughter of a local farmer, another must convert from Judaism to Catholicism, and Mountstuart, a layabout, must win a prize for playing Rugby...

...It spans one man's long and varied life, beginning in Montevideo and ending in rural France, with sojourns in glamorous 1930s London, grubby 1970s London, Spain, Switzerland, Nigeria, Portugal, and Paris...

...Diary writing, then, is as disingenuous and constructed as any other art form, and just as worthy...

...Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic There are so many fascinating diaries of 20th-century British upperclass life (think of the Bloomsbury set's, alone) that William Boyd's decision to write a novel in the form of a diary of the period may seem self-defeating...

...Although I didn't check, Woolf's diary will not contain any reference to Mountstuart...

...Fortunately, there is much more to the book than Mountstuart's brushes with celebrities and Boyd's notations of their vital stats...

...He later lives in New York and gets to know the likes of Frank ?'Hara and Jackson Pollock...

...But the ersatz cameo appearances by, say, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, instead remind the reader of the diary's fictitiousness, because the portraits of the famous can go only so far...

...The journals are annotated with scholarly-sounding footnotes that inform the reader of picayune details of Mountstuart's family history...

...The last word he writes before his death is "yoyo...

...The effect is reminiscent of the appearances of dead American Presidents in Fon-est Gump...

...This takes him away from a new, happy home to Bermuda, where he learns too much about a royal scandal, and to Switzerland, where he stays until the War is over...

...Likewise, the trail to Mountstuart's governmental reports, cataloged meticulously as "PRO FO 931 33/180," will almost certainly go cold...

...Drink and other women provide distraction...

...Following a stint in Africa, on the lam from charges of statutory rape, Mountstuart lives the last quarter of his life in severely reduced circumstances...

...Rather than reaching a single climax, it has several...

...Beyond the initial thrill of seeing the celebrities in a new context, and acknowledging the author's ingenuity in bringing them back to life, there is not much that can be added to the accumulated myths and clichés already defining them...

...Mountstuart interjects, speaking to Freya, "Now you understand Mrs...

...Meeting Woolf at the Café Royal, after an evening with Cyril Connolly, Mountstuart's girlfriend, Freya, is asked by Woolf if Connolly's "Black baboon was with him...

...Much of this inauthenticity is intended as an in-joke between the author and the reader, a way to raise a familiar novelistic form to the level of a postmodern metaf iction...

...Boyd appears to be doing a subtler form of footnoting through these encrypted acknowledgments...

...Woolf's reputation for charm...

...His books and a few photographs provide the only connection with his past loves, and his neighbors know very little about him...