William Boyd - Any Human Heart

PENGUIN CELEBRATIONS
ANY HUMAN HEART

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and was brought up there and in Nigeria. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa, won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His other novels are An Ice-Cream War, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The New Confessions, Brazzaville Beach, Tlie Blue Afternoon, Armadillo, Any Human Heart and, most recently, Restless. William Boyd is married and lives in Chelsea, London, and in France.

WILLIAM BOYD

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First published by Hamish Hamilton 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2003
Reissued in this edition 2007
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Copyright William Boyd, 2002
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-141-92532-5

For Susan

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

Henry James

to reflect that my first written words were in a language not my own. My lost fluency in Spanish is probably my greatest regret about my otherwise perfectly happy childhood. The serviceable, error-dotted, grammatically unsophisticated Spanish that I speak today is the poorest of poor cousins to that instinctive colloquial jabber that spilled out of me for the first nine years of my life. Curious how these early linguistic abilities are so fragile, how unthinkingly and easily the brain lets them go. I was a bilingual child in the true sense, namely that the Spanish I spoke was indistinguishable from that of a Uruguayan.

Uruguay, my native land, is held as fleetingly in my head as the demotic Spanish I once unconsciously spoke. I retain an image of a wide brown river with trees clustered on the far bank as dense as broccoli florets. On this river, there is a narrow boat with a single person sitting in the stern. A small outboard motor scratches a dwindling, creamy wake on the turbid surface of the river as the boat moves downstream, the ripples of its progress causing the reeds at the waters edge to sway and nod and then grow still again as the boat passes on. Am I the person in the boat or am I the observer on the bank? Is this the view of a stretch of the Ro Negro where I used to fish as a child? Or is it a vision of the individual souls journey through time, a passage as transient as a boats wake on flowing water? I cant claim it as my first reliable, datable memory, alas. That award goes to the sight of my tutor Roderick Pooles short and stubby circumcised penis, observed by my covertly curious eyes as he emerged naked from the Atlantic surf at Punta del Este, where we two had gone for a summer picnic one June day in 1914.1 was eight years old and Roderick Poole had come to Montevideo from England to prepare me for St Alfreds, my English prep school. Always swim naked when you can, Logan, was the advice he gave to me that day, and I have tried to adhere to it ever since. Anyway, Roderick was circumcised and I was not which explains why I was paying such close attention, I suppose, but doesnt account for that particular day of all others being the one that sticks in my mind. Up until that precise moment the distant past of my earlier years is all vague swirling images, unfixed by time and place. I wish I could offer up something more telling, more poetic, something more thematically pertinent to the life that was to follow, but I cant and I must be honest, here of all places.

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 darent confess, even to ourselves, even in the absolute privacy of our private record? Anyway, Im 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 dont like the cut of that Herr Hitlers 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 cleanshaven 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 arent 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 doesnt make sense; the logical, perceived progression never takes place. The true journal intime understands this fact and doesnt try to posit any order or hierarchy, doesnt try to judge or analyse: 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 countrys long coastline the republic is surrounded on three sides by water: the Atlantic, the vast estuary of the River Plate and the broad Ro 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.