270- ] English Literature , William Boyd

270--] English Literature

William Boyd 

Interview with William Boyd

ON A WET, GREY MORNING IN MARCH, WILLIAM BOYD INVITED us into a large terraced house, half-way between the King’s Road and the Thames. On the right-hand side of the thin corridor’s crisp white walls hung three dozen framed figurative paintings of identical sizes, each no bigger than a paperback book. These were David Hockney’s series of flower sketches, executed on tablet computers and smart phones.

The enthusiasm which William Boyd shows for these is in keeping with the evident pleasure he has in a range of creative arts – his career contains numerous film and television credits, alongside his notorious forays into the art world as the ‘lost’ abstract expressionist painter Nat Tate’s biographer. Having authored a monograph in 1998 on Tate, backed by stellar co-conspirators David Bowie and Gore Vidal, he convinced many in the art world of the existence of this entirely fictitious artist who had supposedly killed himself at the age of thirty-two in 1960 – in the style of Hart Crane, by jumping off a boat – after destroying ninety-nine percent of his work. Opposite Hockney’s digital essais sat a solitary Nat Tate, painted in preparation for the hoax by Boyd himself a decade or so ago.

The interview took place in an excessively heated first-floor living-room; paintings in various styles cluttered the walls, illuminated by tall bay windows. The central coffee table was stacked full of books, six or seven high – Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Lewis Crofts’ The Pornographer of Vienna prominent among them – testament to the meticulous research that goes into the composition of a William Boyd novel. His next book, set in Freud’s Vienna, will be his sixteenth, in a career spanning three decades that includes several short-story collections and volumes of non-fiction.

Perhaps his most ambitious projects have been the trilogy of works that tasked themselves with chronicling entire human lives, beginning with The New Confessions and Nat Tate: An American Artist. These include his most celebrated novel, Any Human Heart, which tracks the course of its hero Logan Mountstuart through the chaos of the twentieth century. Boyd’s life seems comparatively easy compared to those of his characters, who are often caught up in the vicissitudes of their times. Open and affable, William Boyd was a charming host, generous in his answers, and parading a contagious enthusiasm for his work and the wider world of books.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — You grew up in Africa. What was that like?

AWILLIAM BOYD — I am a child of the colonial system, and, as somebody said to me the other day, I suppose I am the last of a generation. I was born in Accra in 1952. Ghana got its independence in 1957 when I was five and then we moved to Nigeria, which got its independence in 1960, so we were really living out there at the tail end of the colonial era, when the wind of change was blowing through Africa.

My father was a doctor and my mother was a teacher and they spent their working lives out on what was then called the Gold Coast, where they moved in 1950. During the war, my father had specialised in tropical medicine, so he went back to the tropics five years later. It was supposed to be short-term but in fact he spent thirty years there, until he became ill and died. I grew up in a nice house with lots of African servants, nannies, gardeners, houseboys and cooks, and I often wonder how totally different my life would have been if my father had stayed and become a GP in Scotland.

It was an idyllic childhood, going to the beach and the club and the pool and tennis and so on, except in the late 1960s Nigeria began to implode. There were a series of military coups followed by the Nigerian Civil War – the Biafran War – which made a profound impression on me in my late teens. I was never in any danger but living in a country that was tearing itself apart was pretty extraordinary.

The great thing about the West African colonies as opposed to the eastern or the southern colonies was that there was no white settler class, so there was no racism. Obviously, apartheid existed in South Africa, but Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Kenya and Tanganyika had all been settled by white people and the tension between white and black was always there. Growing up in West Africa was, racially, a completely different experience. It was totally integrated and I could go anywhere without fearing anything whatsoever. I could walk around in the middle of the night in Ibadan, a great sprawling Nigerian city of close to a million people, and people would shout, ‘White boy!’ but you never felt threatened.

When I meet people who grew up in South Africa or Kenya, I realise that their experience of an African life was quite different because of this settler-indigenous schism. But in West Africa it just wasn’t there. White people would come out, work for thirty years, and then go away again. Nobody bought property, nobody had farms, nobody owned anything. In Rhodesia, there was this extraordinary statistic: five percent of the white population owned seventy percent of the arable land. In West Africa, that time bomb didn’t exist.

When I look back on this childhood now, I see it as something quite extraordinary but of course where you live with your parents is quite normal. It was a very odd mix of the exotic and the astonishing and sometimes the frightening and the terrifying – all of these part of your everyday life.

Until the age of about twenty-two, I regarded West Africa as my home. Even though I was at boarding school and my relatives lived in Scotland, my home was in Western Nigeria, and I felt more at home there than I did in London or Edinburgh.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Did you feel comfortable when you were back in Scotland?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Not really. I felt sort of an outsider, which became useful to me as a writer. I spent nine and a half years at boarding school up in the north of Scotland, at Gordonstoun. I knew that world fantastically well but I realised quite early on it was totally artificial and bore no resemblance to the real world. The single-sex boarding school is a very strange society, and in my day you went there for a three-month stretch and it was a type of penal servitude.

I only saw the ‘real’ world on occasional holidays. I always felt as if I were on the outside looking in. I didn’t feel particularly at home and it wasn’t until I went to university and I started living in a flat in Glasgow that I could honestly say for the first time that I was experiencing British life.

My father was a powerful figure in his realm in Africa, where he ran half-a-dozen clinics and was responsible for 40,000 people, but I always remember him trying to buy an evening newspaper in Edinburgh. He didn’t know what the money was and the paper man had to pick the coins out of his hands. Suddenly I realised that he was adrift here as well.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Is this why this idea of the outsider recurs in your writing?

AWILLIAM BOYD — I do feel deracinated and I always have, and maybe that feeds into the way I write and my ability to look at society and the things around me with the slightly curious eye of the permanent visitor. It was a very long time before I wrote a novel that could be described as British. Obviously, parts of my novels were British, but I think the first truly home-based novel was my seventh,Armadillo, which is a London novel. My characters are often outsiders, or, because of events that happen to them, they become alien or under stress. Very often I put a central character in an environment that is strange, threatening, perplexing. I suspect that’s as a result of my own journey through the various societies that I’ve encountered.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Did you feel the need to write A Good Man in Africa to deal with your colonial childhood?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Partly, although A Good Man in Africa was actually the fourth novel I’d written. I’d already written three unpublished novels. When I was an undergraduate I wrote a novel which was incredibly autobiographical about my year in France between school and university. I’d gone to do a diploma at the University of Nice, which was a very formative year for me. Again, I was away from my family, culture and language, and I wrote a novel about that year, got it out of my system, and put it in a bottom drawer where it remains.

 Then, I wrote a novel about the Biafran War while at Oxford, where I was doing my DPhil. It was a very self-consciously modernist novel with a fractured form, switching from diary extracts, newspaper extracts, standard narrative and first person. I’d shattered the linear conventions of the novel but it didn’t quite come off so I wrote another novel – a thriller – because I was beginning to get a bit desperate about getting published.

At the time, I was also publishing short stories quite successfully – nine or ten appeared in magazines and some were being broadcast on the radio. My short story writing career seemed to be going well, so I sent a collection off to Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape. In a post-scriptum, I told them that I’d written a novel featuring a character called Morgan Leafy, a fat drunken diplomat in Africa who appeared in two of the stories.

Very quickly, I got a letter back from Hamish Hamilton asking for more information about the novel I had mentioned, so I wrote the synopsis of this novel in three or four pages and sent it off. A letter came back saying they’d like to publish my short story collection and my novel. That was the great ‘Yes!’ punch-the-air day, but they wanted to publish the novel first, and, of course, I hadn’t written it, I had lied.

So I said to my new editor, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, ‘Look, the manuscript is in a shocking state, I just need a couple of months to knock into shape’, and I sat down and wrote A Good Man in Africa in a white heat of dynamic endeavour in three months at my kitchen table. I was teaching at Oxford at the time so I just dropped everything and borrowed some money from my mother. It was all there waiting to come out and suddenly there it was.

Six months later, the stories came out. I published two books in 1981, so it was a great start, but it was by no means an overnight success. I was able to write A Good Man in Africa because I’d already written three novels. It’s not the classic first novel because I’d already written that four or five years earlier. I’d gotten the fascination with my own life out of my system.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Are there no autobiographical elements there? What about Dr Alex Murray, the good man in Africa? Is he not based on your father?

AWILLIAM BOYD — It is very much the world I knew. It is completely set in Ibadan in Western Nigeria even though I changed the names, but everybody in it is made up. It’s rooted in my autobiography in terms of its colour, texture and smells but the story is – and that’s something that’s always been the case with me – invented.

 There is an autobiographical element in that the character of Dr Murray is very much a two-dimensional portrait of my father. He had died the year before I wrote the novel so he was very much present in my mind. The clash in the novel is between a dissolute, overweight diplomat and the rectitude and solidity of somebody rather like my father. It may echo the clash which he and I had. We got on pretty well, but we were like chalk and cheese. So, there is an element of my own life in it but it’s seventy percent out of my imagination.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Who were the authors who were influencing you at the time, and throughout your career? When reading your books, one is so often reminded of Evelyn Waugh.

AWILLIAM BOYD — I’m fascinated by Waugh and I’ve read everything he’s written but I’m almost more fascinated by him as a type of Englishman. The absolute blackness and ruthlessness of his sense of humour is something that chimes with me. I don’t think Brideshead Revisited, A Handful of Dust and A Sword of Honour are as good or as brilliant as his early comedies. I’d also read Kingsley Amis and I think I am a comic novelist in the sense that I see the world as an absurd and curious place.

As for other writers, I studied and later taught English literature at Oxford so I read my way through the canon. I was also reading a lot of American literature at the time. In fact, if you’d asked me then I would probably have said I preferred Philip Roth, John Updike, Joseph Heller or Ernest Hemingway to their English equivalents. I was widely read when I was first published but not conscious of any influence, although the comic-realistic tradition in English fiction is so strong, it’s such a broad river, that I am bound to have picked up influences along the way.

I’ve always read voraciously and indiscriminately and I apparently started reading very early. My father was a great reader of detective novels and when I came back to Africa on my school holidays, there would be a great stack of little 220-page detective novels. Some were interesting – Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, Georges Simenon – and others are completely forgotten like Richard S. Prather and Peter Cheyney. I would read my way through ten or twenty of them in the holidays and then go back to Jane Austen.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Why did you decide to become a writer?

AWILLIAM BOYD — I wanted to be a painter originally because I was very good at art when I was young. I did O-Level and A-Level art and I was very keen. It was my first love, and I think I knew that I was not cut out for any kind of proper job. I come from a family of middle-class professional Scots – engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants – but I somehow got this idea that I wanted to be anartist. I told my father I was thinking about going to art school, but he just said, ‘Forget it, not a hope in hell’. So, not being a rebel, I just switched to another art form – literature.

If I had gone to art school, I may have been a very mediocre painter, but as writer I always had the safety net of an academic career if it all went pear-shaped. It was only after I’d published three books and written a film that I decided that I could quit my job as a college lecturer at Oxford. By then I felt that I could cut all these ties to live by my wits and my pen, but for a while I wasn’t sure if I could earn a living out of writing, which is a key dilemma in a writer’s life.

Something was urging me in that direction but I had to find out how you did it because I didn’t come from a family or a background where that was remotely normal. I had no idea what was involved and it was a long process of education.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — What kind of process?

AWILLIAM BOYD — When I was at university in Glasgow I wrote a novel, a play and some poetry. I also wrote a lot of theatre criticism and film criticism for the university newspaper. When I moved to Oxford, I went to work for Isis and I met other writers because the place was full of them. Iris Murdoch lived up the road; I lived next door to Brian Aldiss, the science-fiction writer; and I entered a short-story competition that Roald Dahl was judging. I also met other students with dreams of writing such as Andrew Motion, Alan Hollinghurst, A. N. Wilson and James Fenton.

 We were at the beginning of our careers and that collegiate feeling of young writers wanting to make their way in the world helped. I started to review for little magazines – Books & Bookmen and The London Magazine – and then I got a review in the Times Literary Supplement, another red letter day. I was slowly but surely finding my way into that world and discovering the nuts and bolts of being a writer. It was an education but it took several years before it finally bore fruit and I had that first published book in my hands.