Read The New Confessions Online
Authors: William Boyd
The New Confessions
William Boyd’S
THE NEW CONFESSIONS
“
The New Confessions
is a huge epic.… Boyd has turned Rousseau’s painful cry into a tragicomic work of art.”
— Newsweek
“A darkly comic novel about a neurotic genius obsessed with making a film about another neurotic genius, both of whom are authors of their own worst misfortunes—Boyd brings it all off with his sly wit and wry sense of history.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“
The New Confessions
is an audacious, ambitious book.”
— The Milwaukee Journal
“Brilliant … a ‘Citizen Kane’ of a novel.”
— Daily Telegraph
“
The New Confessions
is Boyd’s most ambitious and powerful novel.… The key experiences and settings are powerfully evoked.… The writing is often brilliant in his impressively economic vignettes.”
— The Times Literary Supplement
(London)
“The measure of Boyd’s success is that so powerful is his grip on the narrative, and so fecund his imagination, that at one point, hypnotized by the realism of his autobiographical form, I found myself riffling through the pages for the photographs. Boyd has given us a work of rich, ripe, and immensely enjoyable entertainment.”
— The Sunday Times
(London)
“Boyd’s best novel to date.”
— The Independent
“[An] often magnificent feat of story-telling.”
— The Observer
A Good Man in Africa
On the Yankee Station
(short stories)
An Ice-Cream War
Stars and Bars
School Ties
(screenplays)
Brazzaville Beach
The Blue Afternoon
The Destiny of Nathalie X and Other Stories
Armadillo
THE NEW CONFESSIONS
William Boyd’s first novel, A
Good Man in Africa
, won a Whit-bread Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award; his second, An
Ice-Cream War
, was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker;
Brazzaville Beach
won the James Tait Memorial Prize; and
The Blue Afternoon
won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction. Boyd lives in London.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER
2000
Copyright
© 1988
by William Boyd
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, in 1988.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boyd, William, 1952–
The new confessions / William Boyd.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78709-5
1. Motion picture producers and directors — Fiction. 2. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) — Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6052.O9192 N4 2000
823′.914 — dc21
00-036340
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
v3.1
For Susan
Monsieur Rousseau embraced me. He kissed me several times, and held me in his arms with elegant cordiality. Oh, I shall never forget that I have been thus.
ROUSSEAU
: “Goodbye, you are a fine fellow.”
BOSWELL
: “You have shown me great goodness. But I deserved it.”
ROUSSEAU
: “Yes, you are malicious, but ’tis a pleasant malice, a malice I don’t dislike. Write and tell me how you are.”
BOSWELL
: “And you will write to me?” …
ROUSSEAU
: “Yes.”
BOSWELL
: “Goodbye. If you are still living in seven years I shall return to Switzerland from Scotland to see you.”
ROUSSEAU
: “Do so. We shall be old acquaintances.”
BOSWELL
: “One word more. Can I feel sure that I am held to you by a thread, even if of the finest? By a hair?” (
Seizing a hair of my head.)
ROUSSEAU
: “Yes. Remember always that there are points at which our souls are bound.”
BOSWELL
: “It is enough. I, with my melancholy, I, who often look upon myself as a despicable being, a good for nothing creature who should make his exit from life—I shall be upheld for ever by the thought that I am bound to Rousseau. Goodbye. Bravo! I shall
live
to the end of my days.”
ROUSSEAU
: “That is undoubtedly a thing one must do. Goodbye.”
—
The Private Papers of James Boswell
Beginnings
My first act on entering this world was to kill my mother. I was heaved—a healthy eight pounds—lacquered and ruddy from her womb one cold March day in Edinburgh, 1899. I like to think that for a few hours she knew she had another son but I have no evidence for the fact. The date of my birth was the date of her death, and thus began all my misfortunes. My father? My father was lecturing to his anatomy students at the University. Word of my mother’s confinement was sent to him at once but the messenger—a dim porter called McPhail—could not gain admittance to the lecture theater. My father’s habit was to lock the doors from the inside and refuse to be interrupted. I believe that day he even had a cadaver on a marble slab before his lectern. The messenger, McPhail, having tried the door, peered through the portholed glass, saw the corpse and queasily decided to wait until the lecture was over. My father later emerged to learn the good and bad news. By the time he arrived at the infirmary, I was alive and his wife was dead.
How did he feel? I can almost see his bloodless bony face, the thick tufts of unshaved bristle on his cheekbones, as he looms over the cot. No emotion would be registered there—neither joy nor desperation.
There might be a thin reek of camphor and formaldehyde overlaying the smell of tobacco that normally clung to his clothes (he was a sixty-a-day man). And his hands, firm on the cot frame, would be perfumed too, with carbolic, and the nails would be edged white with residues of the talcum powder that preserved the rubber of his dun, transparent operating gloves.
My father was normally a clean man, almost obsessively so, and I could never understand why he did not take the end of a match or the point of a penknife to his cuticles and scrape away the small talcum beach deposited there. It was one of two personal features that I found continually aggravating. The other was his refusal to shave those bristles from his cheeks. Twin dense sickles of beard grew there, beneath his eyes. It is an affectation I have observed frequently among Englishmen, particularly in army officers, yet I would say that my father was a man almost bereft of affectations—so why did he persist with such an obtrusive one? As I grew older it sometimes drove me almost insane with irritation.
On those rare occasions when I came across my father asleep, I would stand and gaze at his waxy features—at once smooth (because of the paleness of his skin) and crude (because of the sharp angularities of his facial bones)—and be genuinely tempted to attempt a clandestine razoring. I might at least remove or so seriously damage one tuft that he would be obliged to shave off the other. Of course, I never dared, and the cheek fuzz remained.
Why do I go on about it so? you might ask, with perfect reasonableness.… Let me put it this way. When you live with someone, when you see his face every day, and you do not love him, the banal traffic of social intercourse is only tolerable when there is nothing on that face or about that person that attracts your eye. It could be a scar, a squint, a tic, a mole—whatever—the gaze is irresistibly drawn there. You know how sometimes in the cinema a hair or a piece of fluff will get trapped in the projector’s lens and flicker and twitch maddeningly at the edge of the frame until freed? When that happens, have you ever been able to pay full attention to what is on the screen? Never. An irritating blemish on the face of a constant companion has the same effect: a large portion of your mind is always claimed by it. So it was with me and my father. He was usually irked by me, and I was needled by him.