No discernible pattern in the carpet
Francis King
THE NEW CONFESSIONS by William Boyd
Hamish Hamilton, f11.95
From the title of this novel, from its prefatory quotation from the private pap- ers of James Boswell (describing how the young Boswell takes a typically emotional farewell of the ageing Jean-Jacques Rous- seau), and from its opening sentence 'My first act in entering this world was to kill my mother' — one might be pardoned for concluding that here is a modern version of Rousseau's Les Confessions. But except for that losing of his mother shortly after his birth and the writing of voluminous memoirs shortly before his death, the life of Boyd's narrator and protagonist, a Scottish film-director named John James Todd, bears little similarity to that of one of the most influential of all writers and thinkers.
Nonetheless there is a strong link be- tween the two men. A prisoner of the Germans in occupied Belgium in the first world war, Todd persuades one of the gaolers, a homosexual, to smuggle a book to him, in loose-leaf sections, in exchange for unwelcome kisses. The book — Todd, by no means literary, is ignorant of its subject and even genre -- turns out to be Les Confessions. At once, he is 'seized and captivated by this extraordinary auto- biography', as he is seized and captivated by no other book in the course of the long life that makes up a long novel. Why should Les Confessions plough so deep a furrow in his psyche? One never really gets the answer. 'I could have been reading about myself,' Todd declares. But there is no more similarity between Todd's and Rousseau's characters — other than that in their early years both men suffer from an uncomfortable mixture of innocence and lubricity — than there is between the events of their lives.
Having finished Rousseau's Les Confes- sions and subsequently — by now free and living in the Germany of the Weimar Republic — his novel Julie ou la Nouvelle lieloIse, Todd becomes obsessed with turn- ing these works into silent films. In each case the undertaking seems doomed. But improbably his The Confessions: Part I is acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of the silent cinema, even if the coming of the talkies turns it overnight into an antique and so robs it of wide distribution.
From then on, although he goes on working intermittently as script-writer and director, Todd sinks into obscurity. That he should do so is due in part to bad luck, and in part to the inexorable certainty that almost everyone with whom he comes into contact will eventually betray him. This betrayal becomes most frequent and vi- cious after he has quitted Germany, by then taken over by the Nazis, to settle first in Britain and then in the States. An exile in Hollywood during the war, he is attack- ed — through the malevolence of a former friend, whom he has repeatedly helped for absenting himself from his country at its hour of direst need. Subsequently, the war over, he is arraigned — through the malevolence of another former friend before the House Committee on Un- American Activities. During his interroga- tion even his interest in Rousseau — 'You are about to start production on a film called Father of Liberty? . . . And this film is about a man called Rousseau? A French socialist?' — is comically held against him. One can only conclude that Todd is a man extraordinarily unfortunate both in his friends and in the women whom he loves. Rousseau, a master of self-analysis, would have advanced some reasons, however spurious and self-justificatory, for this. But Todd appears unable to do so.
Boyd's novel is at its finest in its first 70 or so pages, in which Todd recounts the story of his often unhappy childhood and youth. His father, a senior consultant surgeon and lecturer in anatomy in Edin- burgh, has little love or even patience for him, so that it is the maid-of-all-work surely at that period a man in such a position would have a larger domestic staff? — who becomes the object first of his affection and then of his adolescent desire. A duffer at all but mathematics, he is eventually despatched to a second-rate independent school, where he develops the interest in photography first wakened in him by a family friend whom, erroneously, he believes to be his true father. This emotionally and physically constrained early life is splendidly realised, as is the gaunt, grim Edinburgh of the period.
When Todd describes his war experi- ences, the narrative tension begins to relax. There are some horribly vivid scenes of haphazard carnage, there are some wonderfully entertaining characters. But from now on, it is only intermittently that the author manages to scramble back on to the high plateau along which he first set forth. All that he writes about life after the first world war in Germany and Britain, and during and after the second world war in the States, has — a few details apart — a remarkable authenticity; but despite that authenticity, the book becomes less and less crisp and sharp, and therefore less and less seductive.
Certainly one never ceases to be con- scious of the creative energy that, for me at least, makes Boyd the most exciting En- glish novelist under 40. But this energy here suggests some vast textile factory, thrumming and clacking with the weaving of a vast, seamless carpet. As yard after yard of the carpet, rich and brilliantly coloured, rolls off the loom, one searches in vain for an overall pattern. Like the child who asks, apropos of a man of prodigious size, 'What is that man for?, one is tempted to ask what this novel is for. It has enough plot for at least half-a-dozen other novels, but what it bewilderingly lacks is a dominating theme.
What it no less bewilderingly also lacks is a hero-narrator who can persuade one that he matters. Todd writes like an angel, since he writes like Boyd himself. But apart from the films — the genius of which we have to take largely on his own testimony — he is so ordinary a character that he cannot adequately sustain a lengthy narrative con- cerned so much with himself. There, of course, he differs from his idol and fellow autobiographer Rousseau.
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