William Boyd explains the origins of Any Human Heart's Logan Mountstuart, and why the journal form of his novel was the natural choice:
"The origins of Any Human Heart go back a fair way. In the early 1990s I wrote a short story called "Hotel des Voyageurs" that was published in London Magazine (and then in 1995 in my collection The Destiny of Nathalie X). The story had been inspired by some journals kept during the 1920s by the writer and critic Cyril Connolly (1903-74). The story I wrote - an account of a fleeting, doomed love affair on a journey south through France - was in journal form and was tonally close to Connolly's journals (self-obsessed, lyrical, hedonistic), but I had decided to christen the author Logan Mountstuart.
Connolly was and is something of an obsession with me: as a schoolboy, I had read his weekly reviews in the Sunday Times with avidity - they were genuinely inspiring - and later I read his entire published oeuvre. Connolly was selfish, promiscuous, talented, hard up, lazy, an epicurean and a particular kind of English intellectual (his tastes were refined but narrow), and I found something about his flawed personality deeply beguiling. His character chimed with other gifted, self-destructive English writers I liked: Henry Green, Lawrence Durrell and, pre-eminently, William Gerhardie.
I duly [wrote the book] over a four-year period, figuring out, researching and writing the intimate journals of Logan Mountstuart, composed intermittently during his long, fraught and complex life (1906-91), journals that were eventually published as the novel Any Human Heart in 2002.
The journal form of the novel seemed to me to be the natural one to choose - Logan should be the only person to tell the story of his life. The Connolly journal had been the first inspiration, and the citations from the journal in Nat Tate seemed already to determine the form the book should take. However, in writing fake intimate journals a lot of art is required to make them seem artless - or at least spontaneous and natural. The journal form, written effectively in the present moment and without benefit of hindsight, is the one literary form that most approximates to the way we all live. The journal is the opposite of a shapely narrative, written, as it is, moment to moment. The future is a void: we don't know if this decision we have taken will be life-changing; we don't know, when we meet a certain person, that two years later, we will be married to him or her; we don't know if, indeed, we will even be alive tomorrow to continue writing. Life is lived hopefully, but based on very uncertain knowledge, and with no real concept of what the future holds or guarantee of what our fate will be.
Logan says at one stage that the definition of a human life is simply the aggregate of good luck and bad luck that one person has had: and he is right - luck, chance, happenstance, chaos, absurdity, randomness are what wait for us up ahead and what determine what will become of us and our loved ones. Only the view backward makes any kind of sense but even that is the wisdom of hindsight, and what kind of wisdom is that?
This, then, is the kind of life that Logan leads and one that, as fellow human beings, male and female, we all participate in also, like it or not. As we read on through Any Human Heart we live Logan's life with him - unknowingly, hopefully, cautiously. Logan's highs and lows, the people he loves and hates, his moments of shame and personal tragedy, his acts of kindness and his sins of omission are ones we share with him. Logan's life, however uniquely individual and idiosyncratic, is a template for the uniquely individual and idiosyncratic lives we all lead. It is a very intimate journal - and we therefore grow very close to him. In some ways we come to know Logan Mountstuart better than he knows himself. "
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Comment on Any human heart by William Boyd was sent in by Sue W.
Woodlands Book no 2271, Caroline.
