Nat Tate Redivivus

I'm not sure how someone who never actually lived can return to life, but then in the world of letters life takes on a completely different dimension. In any case, the other day my wife got an advance reading edition of William Boyd's little biography, Nat Tate: An American Artist, 1928-1960, originally published in 1998, and now reissued in paper by Bloomsbury. If you don't know the story of the hoax, aided and abetted by David Bowie, Gore Vidal, and others, then you can check it out on Google or Wikipedia. What has attracted me is the way Boyd created not only the fictitious artist, Nat Tate, but also a circle of fictitious friends, most of whom, and especially Logan Mountstuart, reappear in Boyd's novel Any Human Heart (2002), which was later made into an excellent British television miniseries for Channel 4 and later rebroadcast in the U.S. on PBS.

Fascinating though Nat Tate may or may not be, it's Logan Mountstuart who interests me. I enjoy catching glimpses of him when his observations and reminiscences of Tate and his art are quoted in the earlier biography. Clearly the Tate book was a dry run for characters who would emerge in far more detail and with greater context in the novel. And so, after reading Nat Tate, I turned immediately to Any Human Heart, which has now captured my attention. Here again one encounters Nat Tate and Janet Felzer and others from the biography (redivivus indeed), but now imbedded in the much expanded story of Logan Mountstuart (1906-1991), an author or, as Boyd suggests in Nat Tate, a man of letters. The novel is told entirely from the perspective and by means of Mountstuart's journals, his more or less complete and "honest" personal history of his passage through most of the twentieth century.

There are many reasons I should find a book such as Any Human Heart appealing. Two that occur to me immediately are the form -- journals, diaries, personal essays are among my favorite literary kinds -- and the period, from the first world war into the 1990s, an era which I now consider my own area of special interest, having set aside for the moment the ancient, medieval, and early modern. Moreover, Boyd's novel has the added bonus not only of overlapping with the chronology of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, but also of including Tony Powell himself among its characters, as well as many echoes and hints that Logan Mountstuart inhabits the same world as that of Powell's creations. Along the way Mountstuart also encounters many historical figures, including Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming, Picasso, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It's a witty book, but also provocative. Perhaps I'll have more thoughts later.