I've just read William Boyd's Any Human Heart (2002). I had seen the PBS miniseries on television and liked it very much, but the book is even better, one of the best I've read in a very long time. Boyd tells the story of Logan Mountstuart by means of the journals that Mountstuart kept more and less continuously throughout his long life, eighty-five years that spanned the last century from 1906 to 1991. When there are gaps in the record, these are filled in by an unidentified editor who appears to have found and published Mountstuart's surviving personal journals. However, we know from the acknowledgements to Nat Tate, where Boyd first introduced the character of Logan Mountstuart, that Gudrun Ingridsdottir, the administrator of Mountstuart's estate, has been assisting Boyd. And early in his biography of Nat Tate we are told that Boyd was already at work editing Mountstuart's private journals. Of course, we now know that Nat Tate was a playful hoax, but perhaps it was much more than that. Perhaps the plan all along was not just to introduce the fictitious artist, but also the fictitious journalist and man of letters Logan Mountstuart.
While Nat Tate is an interesting and somewhat mysterious character, Logan Mountstuart is one of the most complete fictional inventions I've ever encountered. When one has finished the last of his private journals, one feels that Logan Mountstuart's complicated personal history is very real. His journals are filled with circumstantial details and complications that give the story the haphazard randomness and feel of actual human existence, interrupted by accidents, or as Logan remarks repeatedly, filled with all of life's luck, both good and bad, happiness and sorrow. As a result the story of Any Human Heart is also as fascinating as it is believable.
I'm writing this in an effort to explain to myself what I find most attractive about this book. Perhaps it is the way Logan grows from a boy to a young man, and gradually matures into old age, without ever feeling that he has got control of his own life. There is a consistency of character that forms the armature around which the novel grows, but there are also the shifting fortunes of Logan's existence, the twists and turns of fate that bring successes and failures in unequal portions, but rarely in fulfillment of his plans. In this novel, life is lived as it presents itself, and the hero is both always at its center and rarely able to exert in any kind of control. Logan, like so many of us, discovers that he is more reactive than active, and perhaps that is why I find myself so attracted to him.
Any Human Heart is not a long book, but Boyd manages to cover so much of Logan Mountstuart's long and well-lived life that it has the feel of a family saga. We get to know Logan's family and friends, experience his dreams, fantasies, and work, his successes and failures, his obsessions and preoccupations. And through Logan Mountstuart we glimpse facets of ourselves and the human condition. We know all of this because of Logan's private journals, but it is also significant to the story that Logan is an author, a writer not only of journals, but of literary criticism and of novels. In addition, he is a working journalist and foreign correspondent. That is the world he inhabits, and consequently where he meets and makes friends (and enemies) as he practices his literary trade. We see him bond with Hemingway in Spain, and fall in with Ian Fleming during World War II; Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly make appearances, as do Virginia Woolf and Anthony Powell, and so too the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, first in Portugal, and later in the Bahamas.
But Logan's success with writing is not consistent, and he finds himself turning to other ways of making his way in the world. Through one of his former schoolboy friends Logan is introduced to the world of art and art galleries and dealers. Taken to dinner in Paris, he meets Picasso (who turns up again later in the story). Logan's casual interest in art eventually leads to his managing his friend's gallery in New York, where he discovers Nat Tate among the New York artists and befriends others such as Frank O'Hara. Later in life Logan becomes a teacher of English for a time at a university in war torn Nigeria, and after a fairly disastrous return to London as an old age pensioner, finally ends his days in modest comfort in rural France.
I don't suppose this would appeal to everyone as it does to me, but lately I've been more and more convinced of the truth in the observation now often attributed to John Lennon, that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I've always been a great one for making plans and arrangements. Some of them have worked out as I intended, others haven't. I'm still doing it, even though I now realize that all such plans are at best only provisional. We feel we have to make them, but we should also learn to be more flexible and open to accepting the life that comes our way, as Logan Mountstuart eventually learns to do. As his father told him, life is just the sum of our luck, the good and the bad. It's also as Logan discovers the sum of all of the different versions of ourselves that we become as we make our passage. As I was reading Any Human Heart I thought of other writers I like, Anthony Powell and Barbara Pym especially, but also Michel de Montaigne. In some ways Logan Mountstuart's journals become more and more like Montaigne's essays as the book draws to its close in France. It seems appropriate then that in his old age Logan also turns to the essays of Montaigne for insight. Is it any wonder I liked this book?
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