赤子之心 (2002)

Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart is a 2002 novel by William Boyd, a British writer. It is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by the fictional character Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the 20th century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form to explore how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart's journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister, or the abdication of the king. Boyd plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters.

The journal style of the novel, with its gaps, false starts and contradictions, reinforces the theme of the changing self in the novel. Many plot points simply fade away. The novel received mixed reviews from critics on publication, but has sold well and has become one of the best known of Boyd's works. It is the second of Boyd's 'whole-life' novels which follow a protagonist through all, or at least most, of his or her life interspersing real and imagined events and people. Other such novels include The New Confessions (1987), Sweet Caress (2015) and The Romantic (2022).

A television adaptation was made with the screenplay written by Boyd, first broadcast in 2010.

Composition

Mountstuart appeared in Boyd's short story "Hôtel des Voyageurs" written in the early 1990s and published in London Magazine and his 1995 collection The Destiny of Nathalie 'X'. The story was inspired by the journals written by writer and critic Cyril Connolly in the 1920s. It was written in journal form and was, like Connolly's journals self obsessed, lyrical and hedonistic. As a schoolboy, Boyd was obsessed with Connolly, avidly reading his reviews in The Sunday Times, and later read his entire published œuvre and found his flawed personality 'deeply beguiling'.

In 1998 Boyd had written the hoax biography of an invented artist, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, in which Mountstuart reappeared. Boyd claimed that he, as a biographer, had first heard of the painter through the work of a little-known British writer, a black-and-white photograph of whom Boyd had found in a French second-hand shop. The caption identified the chubby man as "Logan Mountstuart in 1952". Boyd described him as, a curious and forgotten figure in the annals of 20th-century literary life. 'A man of letters' is probably the only description which does justice to his strange career – by turns acclaimed or wholly indigent. Biographer, belletrist, editor, failed novelist, he was perhaps most successful at happening to be in the right place at the right time during most of the century, and his journal – a huge, copious document – will probably prove his lasting memorial.

Boyd distinguished journal, biography and memoir as literary forms, different treatments of the same essential subject, the human condition, the change in medium justified his writing again of a whole-life view: "I don't think there's anything wrong with going back over territory you've previously covered."

Though avowedly not an (auto-)biographical novelist, Boyd acknowledged that personal experiences often subconsciously affect a writer's fiction. As in several of Boyd's novels there are parallels with the author's life: both Boyd and Mountstuart lived in Africa and France, studied at Oxford, worked in literary London and had a taste of New York. Boyd usually splits the creation of a novel into two phases: research and writing. The first phase of Any Human Heart took 30 months as he carefully plotted Mountstuart's life to be significant but seem random, a period during which he bought several hundred books. He spent another year and a half writing the book.

Synopsis

The book begins with a quotation from Henry James, "Never say you know the last word about any human heart." A short preface (an anonymous editor suggests it was written in 1987) explains that the earliest pages have been lost, and recounts briefly Mountstuart's childhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, before he moves to England aged seven with his English father and Uruguayan mother. In his final term at school he and two friends set challenges. Logan is to get on to the school's first XV rugby team; Peter Scabius has to seduce Tess, a local farmer's daughter; and Ben Leeping, a lapsed Jew, has to convert to Roman Catholicism. Mountstuart enters Oxford on an exhibition and leaves with a third in History. Settling in London, he enjoys early success as a writer with The Mind's Imaginings, a critically successful biography of Shelley; The Girl Factory, a salacious novel about prostitutes (which is poorly reviewed but sells well); and Les Cosmopolites, a respectable book on some obscure French poets. Mountstuart's mother loses the family wealth in the Wall Street crash. He embarks on a series of amorous encounters: he loses his virginity to Tess, is rejected by Land Fothergill whom he met at Oxford, and marries Lottie, an Earl's daughter. They live together at Thorpe Hall in Norfolk, where Mountstuart, unstimulated by slow country life and his warm but dull wife, becomes idle.