271-] English Literature , William Boyd

271-] English Literature

William Boyd 

 Interview With William Boyd

 QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How do you go about writing? Have you always written in the same way?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes, I have actually. I’m part of that pre-computer generation and I’ve always written in longhand. All my novels have manuscripts, which is rare for anybody under the age of forty. I used to write my first draft in my tiny anal retentive handwriting and then I’d write a fair copy in large legible handwriting. I would then give that second draft to a typing agency – that dates me – and the typists typed it up from my fair copy so that I could then hand it in to the publisher. I’ve always had this process of writing a draft and then writing it all again, however long it takes. Now, of course, I type the second draft onto a screen.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How much changes between drafts?

AWILLIAM BOYD — I change things all the time. When you are copying a sentence or typing it or rewriting it you think, ‘Oh, this is clumsy’, or ‘I can stick that word here’, so the difference from manuscript to typescript or manuscript to fair copy is often huge. It’s a very good editorial process and I wonder if writers who write directly onto a screen lose that. Of course, you rewrite and polish anyway, but there’s something about the two forms, there’s a real moment of decision, and just making that transfer, I wouldn’t change that working method now. I do write screenplays straight onto the screen, I do write journalism straight onto the screen, but I would never write a novel or a short story like that, I just seem to need the two forms – the handwritten and then the perfection of type.

 The last few months of my working life have been very simple: I get up in the morning and write the novel. I can write for about three hours and then I’m knackered but I can type up what I’ve written. I’ve been doing that seven days a week. I’ve been writing my latest novel since the early summer of last year and since December I’ve been working full-time seven days a week on it. I’m now polishing it and tweaking it but I’m already thinking about the next one and that makes me relaxed because that plane is circling and waiting to be called in to land.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Do you have a structure worked out when you sit down to write?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes. It takes me about three years to write a novel and I spend roughly two years figuring it out and one year writing it. Iris Murdoch, who worked in the same way, called it the period of invention and the period of composition. I think that’s quite a neat division. It’s become absolutely rigid for me now.

 I get an idea for a novel, which is usually one sentence or a concept. Then I spend a long time thinking about it, filling out notebooks, travelling, acquiring the library I need for the book. I set about making more and more elaborate plans for the narrative and making lots and lots of mistakes, going up blind alleys and developing characters or sub-themes that fizzle out. Even then, I haven’t actually started writing the book. That whole period of invention is absolutely crucial in my work. Eventually, and usually when I know how the book is going to end, I will write a draft of the last paragraph or the last few lines – so I’m that sure of it – and only at that stage do I write chapter one and start the book.

Then it takes me about nine months or a year to write it but I write with confidence – not particularly fast but with fluency because I’m not stopping to think, ‘What happens next?’ I’ve already made all those mistakes and all of those bad decisions and corrected them. Of course, I still get lots of new ideas as I’m writing but there’s a real template, or as I describe it a skeleton, and then I add the flesh when I write it.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Do you play around with the voice of your characters in the invention period?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes, because those elements are the first questions you ask yourself once you’ve got your idea and the whole process of invention is a series of questions and answers that goes on over this period of two years. For example, I ask myself whether it is going to be in the first person or the third person, and that decision is absolutely crucial. Am I going to write from one point of view or from many points of view? Is my central character going to be male or female? The answer to these questions trigger a whole set of other questions: ‘Oh, it’s a woman, right, OK, how old is she? What’s her name? How tall is she?’ And so on and so forth and this aggregate of information begins to accrue and you see stories and storylines emerging.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — What are you currently working on?

AWILLIAM BOYD — It’s a novel that starts in Vienna in 1913 and it’s about a young Englishman who is an actor. He’s got a sexual dysfunction and he’s engaged to be married, so he decides to go out to Vienna to try out this new-fangled psychoanalysis lark to see if it can cure him of this particular problem. He starts being psychoanalysed and he meets another woman there and then, because it’s one my novels, things go from bad to worse and World War One begins.

It’s very long and it’s possibly one of my most complex plots ever because he gets embroiled in all sorts of Buchanesque adventures, but it’s got a lot more sex in it than John Buchan ever had. It covers a lot of ground but I now realise, two weeks before I hand it in to my editor, that it’s actually about lying and uncertainty which seems to me to be a very modern state of mind. And with Vienna in 1913-1914, we are at the beginning of the modern era and in the capital of a decadent empire. Something about the city then made it the focus and locus of what was modern.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How do you go about researching your novels? Do you read a lot?

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes, I often read novels set in the period I want to write about. For this latest novel, for example, I read Joseph Roth and Robert Musil. I find novels very useful because what a novelist saw in 1912 or 1913 is not necessary what a historian writing today will see. I also use photographs a lot. I’ve never really gone beyond the twentieth century – 1902 is as early a novel as I have set – so photographic evidence exists and I find books of photographs fantastically helpful. Then I use all sorts of newspapers, magazines, guide books – but all contemporary.

 It’s not about reading some book on the Viennese Secession, it’s about reading books that are much more banal because as a novelist the banal is what you are looking for. What struck Joseph Roth as he described a country scene in The Radetzky March is what I want to reproduce through the eyes of this young Englishman in Vienna for the first time. It’s a very selective process and if you get the detail right suddenly that world comes alive. As you sift through this material you find that you are not looking at it in the way that a journalist or a historian would look at it – you are looking at it for something that intrigues and seems unusual.

Take the business of communicating for example: you could make telephone calls in 1914-15 but only 20,000 people had telephones. The telegram and the telegraph offices were the main avenues for communication because you just popped one in the post at half a pence a word. These details make the book come alive but they have to be fed in seamlessly so that it doesn’t look like a gobbet of research. We’ve all read novels where you plough through three pages on the manufacture of rubber and you realise that the writer has been to Singapore to see a rubber plantation and by God are we going to hear about it. It is a very interesting process to make it seem entirely natural and yet at the same time you want the reader to be aware of time travel.

I always quote something from Ulysses where Bloom goes into a pub in Dublin and orders a glass of claret and a sardine sandwich. That seems very modern and it brings a Dublin pub to life in a way that knowing that Guinness costs one and sixpence doesn’t. Language is another thing. People swore as violently in 1913 as they do today, maybe not in mixed company but amongst men, and certainly soldiers’ language was as rich as anyone’s.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Where do you find traces of that? Because it doesn’t appear much in the literature of the time…

AWILLIAM BOYD — It does if you know where to look for it. I can give you two good examples. If you read the letters of James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 1909 or thereabouts, they are the most sexually candid letters you can find two lovers writing to each other. Joyce was in Trieste and Nora was in Dublin so they wrote each other some dirty letters for sexual stimulation at a distance.

 The other one is a novel by Frederic Manning which might be the best novel that came out of World War One. Manning wrote two versions of the book: one called Middle Parts of Fortune which is unexpurgated and another called Her Privates We which had no swearwords in it and was published at the time. Manning was an intellectual who fought at the battle of the Somme as a private soldier. The soldiers he writes about are all saying ‘Fuck’ and ‘Cunt’ like a soldier today would, but of course our image of the Tommy is of a plucky chap with a fag in his mouth saying, ‘Cor, blimey, it’s the Huns throwing over’.

This is what is so fantastic about Manning’s novel. You realise the soldiers didn’t give a toss about the war, they hated their officers, they hated the officers back home, and the only things they wanted were food, drink, and sex if it was available. These words weren’t invented in 1940. You just need to read Shakespeare’s soldiers to see that it’s an absolute truth, but gentility has tended to mask that so it does take some unearthing.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — What was the genesis of your forthcoming novel on psychoanalysis?

AWILLIAM BOYD — I became very interested in psychoanalysis, which is one of the three great scientific revolutions. There is the Copernican revolution, when we realised that the sun didn’t go around us but that we went around the sun. There’s the Darwinian revolution – we are animals – and then there’s the Freudian revolution – half the time we don’t know why we do things because our unconscious mind is at work.

 Whatever anyone may think of Freud and however discredited he is, there is no doubt that we are all Freudians. Even though the unconscious existed before Freud, he schematised and systematised it and changed the way we think about ourselves. So to begin with I asked myself, ‘What would it have been like to be psychoanalysed and to realise that half the things you do are driven by forces that you are only partially aware of?’ Then I decided I’d send my protagonist off to Vienna before the First World War when psychoanalysis was new and controversial, and off I went.

That was the idea that grabbed me and it’s nearly always like that. I start off with an idea and it has enough mass in it to be a four-hundred or five-hundred page novel. The ideas I get for short stories or movies or a piece I might write are different. There is a certain category of idea I get which is gravid enough or has enough potential to fill a novel. I’ve never written a short novel.

Some people like to start and see where they end up, but I’m not that kind of writer. I like to know my destination and my period of composition is not fraught with having to stop and invent, which is where novels get abandoned of course. The first sixty pages come like that and then you think, ‘What does she do next?’ I’ve never abandoned a novel because I never get to that stage.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Some writers say that once they start writing their characters take on a life of their own and become uncontrollable.

AWILLIAM BOYD — Vladimir Nabokov was always asked this and he was very much anti-Freudian and anti the unconscious. He said: ‘All my characters are galley slaves and I’m the man on the deck with the whip’. I feel rather like that because I try to make my characters live and breathe on the page as real and complex human beings. You are the master of that particular world and they are your creatures. Sometimes you don’t know where you get ideas from but it’s not the character taking over. That’s a romantic fallacy or convention – the inspired driven artist at the mercy of his or her muse. I think writing a novel takes so long that there is something very dogged and methodical about it. I believe in the Flaubertian-Joycean model of the artist controlling everything, not the drink-fuelled spontaneity of the muse descending.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How does that relate to when you are writing about characters who are already iconic figures such as Woolf, Picasso, Hemingway or Joyce? How do you create their voice?

AWILLIAM BOYD — They are usually people I have been very intrigued by anyway and I’ve read a great deal about them. It’s a kind of thought experiment. I think, ‘What would it actually be like to meet Virginia Woolf?’ I’ve never particularly liked Virginia Woolf and I’ve read everything and taught her books for many years but she just seems to me an unpleasant, snobbish, slightly bogus person. I know she was disturbed as well and that’s how I imagined her.

 If you read her letters and diaries, you see what type of person she is – we’ve all met them. The challenge as a writer is to bring that iconic figure alive in a way that makes them a real person rather than a postcard that you bought at the National Portrait Gallery. I’ve written stories about Chekhov, Wittgenstein, Brahms and Cyril Connolly, people I’m really intrigued by, and I try to make them live as characters in fiction. It’s about stripping away the myth and getting to the real person, but they are always people about whom I have been curious about and read a lot about. I can’t imagine writing a novel about George VI for example.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — The Duke of Windsor is much more interesting.

AWILLIAM BOYD — Yes, and that is the wonderful thing about writing fiction. I got Logan Mountstuart to meet all these people that I was intrigued by so I could present them through his eyes. Some people who knew the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who I have spoken to have said that their appearance in Any Human Heart is a fascinating and very credible portrait of them. Some of my favourite short stories of mine are these biographical short stories because when it is successful I feel like I captured the essence of the person in those fifteen or twenty pages and the reader gets a sense of them as a character quite apart from their reputation.

QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Does this tie in with your interest in blurring the lines between fact and fiction? Say with Nat Tate for example? Or is it really just a narrative device you are using?

AWILLIAM BOYD — That exercise was to make something utterly fictitious seem completely real so that the line is blurred, so that your suspension of disbelief is rocky, and it’s amazing how it could be done with tricks and presentation. And why did I do it? If you look at three books where I do this, The New Confessions, Nat Tate and Any Human Heart – published between 1987 and 2002, so that’s a long time – I think they stand up as a trilogy of books all exploring the same thing: is it true or is it false?

 There is an ongoing argument that somehow non-fiction is more powerful and gripping than fiction and I felt that I wanted to reclaim the top of the hill for fiction. These three books were a series of attempts to prove that something made-up could supplant what you might regard as real.

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.

  

269-] English Literature , William Boyd

269-] English Literature

William Boyd

Best Selling Author and Screenwriter

William Boyd is the author of seventeen novels, including A Good Man in Africa,  winner of the Whitbread Literary Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection. William Boyd’s new novel The Romantic is to be published on 6th October 2022.

The World of William Boyd

A St James’ art dealer with a penchant for postwar British painting finds terrifyingly new horizons opening up for him in East London, in William Boyd’s savagely funny new series.

Adventures in the Human Heart

William Boyd talks to Sam Leith from The Spectator, about his latest novel The Romantic which is about the incredible life of Cashel Greville Ross born in 1799.

The Romantic – Press reviews

Boyd is as magically readable as ever, and, as always with his whole life novels, there is an invigorating air of spontaneity ― Telegraph

The Romantic is certainly a crowd-pleaser, an old-fashioned bildungsroman that kicks off in the early 1800s and follows the hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatectic life . . . Boyd knows how to time the hights and lows, how to blend triumphs and tragedies, personal and historical . . . genuinely poignant and wise ― Sunday Times

Picaresque . . . these is a cornucopia of fine things here . . . The Romantic, always enjoyable, ranks with two of his best: The New Confessions and Any Human Heart. Both were intelligent and engrossing, novels you lived with. Both told a fine story very well. The Romantic does just that ― Scotsman

If it’s true escapism you’re after, William Boyd can always be relied upon to transport the reader from reality and his next offering, The Romantic, another epic that follows Cashel Greville Ross from 19th-century Country Cork to Zanzibar via Oxford and Sri Lanka, offers a wonderful literary getaway as the nights draw in ― Vogue, A Most Promising Page-Turner of the Season

A globe-trotting adventure through the 19th century ― i, Best Books for Autumn

Boyd’s pile-up of set piece escapades offers a huge amount of fun ― Daily Mail

One of our best contemporary storytellers ― Spectator

What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd novel?  ― Sunday Telegraph

Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game ― Guardian

This breakneck pace seems to be a function of Boyd’s exceptional imaginative facility, which sees him just as irresistibly drawn to new ideas as his hero is. Boyd, too, is the romantic. And yet there’s something irresistible about that energy – Financial Times

William Boyd at his boy’s own, balloon-flying, continent-hopping, historical name-dropping Boydiest. Our hero is Cashel Greville Ross, born in Co Cork in 1799, whose life spans swooping geographical leaps and great historical transformations. Think the Napoleonic battles, railways, Romantic poets, the source of the Nile, flushing loos, love affairs and pure, pure escapism ― The

THE ROMANTIC, published 6th October.

From one of Britain’s best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set in the 19th century

The Romantic

A new “whole life” novel from William Boyd, the author of Any Human Heart. Set in the 19th century, the novel follows the roller-coaster fortunes of a man as he tries to negotiate the random stages, adventures and vicissitudes of his life. He is variously a soldier, a lover, a husband, a father, a bankrupt, a friend of famous poets, a writer, a jailbird, a farmer, an African explorer – and many other manifestations – before, finally, he becomes a minor diplomat, a consul based in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary) where he thinks he will see out the end of his days in well-deserved tranquillity. This will not come to pass…

Spy City – all six episodes streaming now on Britbox.

AFM: Edgar Ramirez, Gugu Mbatha-Raw to Star in Isabel Coixet’s Romance ‘Nobody’s Heart’

The film — about love and loss in 1930s Portugal — is being introduced to buyers at the online AFM by WestEnd Films.

Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet (The Bookshop, Learning to Drive) has cast the duo of Edgar Ramirez (The Girl on the Train, Joy, Jungle Cruise) and BAFTA nominee Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Misbehaviour, Belle, The Morning Show) in her next feature.

Nobody’s Heart, adapted from bestselling author and screenwriter William Boyd’s short story Cork, and based on the life of celebrated Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, is described as a “beautiful, poetic story of love and loss” set against the backdrop of Lisbon in the 1930s. WestEnd Films has launched international sales on the project.

The film follows Lily after the sudden and devastating death of her husband. She inherits his cork factory and begins to form an unexpected, highly charged relationship with his enigmatic co-worker, igniting repressed imagination and passion, and discovering unknown truths about both herself and her late husband.

 “This is a fascinating, twisted and sexually charged love story between two characters sharing a unique passion with the background of Portugal in the 1930s,” said Coixet . “After reading William Boyd’s script, I completely fell in love with the story and I know there’s a hunger out there for stories like Nobody’s Heart.”The film will begin shooting in January in Portugal. WestEnd will be introducing the film to buyers at AFM Online where it will show a video presentation. CAA Media Finance is representing North American sales.

“Nobody’s Heart is a rich, evocative and moving drama, and we know Isabel Coixet will elevate the film even further with her eye for nuance and beauty,” said WestEnd managing director Maya Amsellem. “At WestEnd, we have a continued focus on female-centric narratives through our WeLove brand, and this is a great example of the type of story audiences want to see more of.”

By Alex Ritman

A producer, a novelist and an actress – all leading secret lives. But what happens when the trio’s private worlds begin to take over their public ones?

Happy paperback publication to Trio, the Sunday Times bestselling novel from William Boyd

One Night in Nihonbashi by William Boyd

RESTLESS has been chosen as one of four novels for the Duchess of Cornwall’s new Instagram-based reading group, I’m delighted to report. This is the hardback cover of the 2006 first edition, published by Bloomsbury. RESTLESS was my 10th novel and followed ANY HUMAN HEART (2002). I had done a lot of research into WW2 espionage for Any Human Heart and had stumbled across the extraordinary and pretty much unknown account of British espionage in the USA before Pearl Harbor. British agents, instructed by Churchill, tried to manipulate US media to encourage the States to join the war in Europe. They were very ingenious and very successful. Sometimes you get lucky as a novelist! This was a gift from the literary gods. And this the background against which the story of the young British spy, Eva Delectorskya , plays out. Restless features on @duchessofcornwallsreadingroom for two weeks from February 12.

Restless

A Good Man in Africa, first edition hardback. Published 40 years ago this week in January 1981. Still in print in the UK, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Spain.

cover2

08.22-william-body-book-jac

GOOD MAN IN AFRICA was published by Hamish Hamilton. This photograph was taken by the late, great JERRY BAUER (1934-2010). It was the first official publicity photo designed to accompany my debut novel. Jerry became a friend and took jacket/publicity photos of me for decades. The last one was on RESTLESS (2005). Jerry made photographing writers his unique speciality. Over the years he photographed everybody: Samuel Beckett, Muriel Spark, Alberto Moravia, Simone de Beauvoir etc etc. His amazing archive can be accessed via Jerry.bauer.photos@gmail.com. HINT — someone should produce a book of them….

@penguinukbooks @aaknopf @curtisbrownbooks #agoodmaninafrica #julietnicolson @vikingbooks

My Trio talk with Francine Stock 2.30pm Saturday 28th November. Not to be missed!!!

Cold War spy-thriller, Spy City. Starring Dominic Cooper as a British spy in Berlin during the summer of 1961. The summer before the Wall went up.  Coming to a TV near you soon.

William Boyd in conversation with Douglas Rae at the 2020 Petworth Festival.

Trio review from the Sunday Times.

‘Trio is about double lives. Three characters are central to it: Talbot Kydd, a middle-aged film producer; Elfrida Wing, a novelist with writer’s block; and Anny Viklund, a glamorous young actress. What brings them together is the making of a film in Brighton in high summer 1968.

The late 1960s have been enjoying something of a literary vogue this year: vibrantly chronicled in Craig Brown’s Beatles biography, One Two Three Four; gaudily resurrected in David Mitchell’s novel Utopia Avenue. Trio’s return to the period has a triple motive: to let the sunshine in again on its psychedelic euphoria, to highlight its political hinterland, and to spotlight gay liberation after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.’

William Boyd’s new novel, Trio is out now.

This exhilarating and tender novel set in the summer of 1968 asks: what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn’t?

Reviews

Trio is about double lives. Three characters are central to it: Talbot Kydd, a middle-aged film producer; Elfrida Wing, a novelist with writer’s block; and Anny Viklund, a glamorous young actress. What brings them together is the making of a film in Brighton in high summer 1968.

The late 1960s have been enjoying something of a literary vogue this year: vibrantly chronicled in Craig Brown’s Beatles biography, One Two Three Four; gaudily resurrected in David Mitchell’s novel Utopia Avenue. Trio’s return to the period has a triple motive: to let the sunshine in again on its psychedelic euphoria, to highlight its political hinterland, and to spotlight gay liberation after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

The film, with its camply whimsical title, “Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon”, and the banana-yellow Mini in which its lovers zip around Brighton, her purple kaftan glinting with tiny mirrors, his cerise hussar’s jacket matched by red boots, snazzily evokes the era. As William Boyd’s earlier fiction has shown — his depiction of the electric excitements of the 1920s Berlin film world in The New Confessions (1987), his ironic take on Hollywood in his short story The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’ (1995) — cinema fascinates him.

Trio sends an affably satiric shimmer over the making of its film, with the never-nonplussed Talbot adroitly manoeuvring his way through a maze of complications: ceaseless rewrites, grotesque miscastings, preposterous demands from investors, an absconding key performer.

Some of the figures involved seem like comic stereotypes from central casting: Dorian Villiers, a booming thespian trying to reboot his career; Sylvia Slaye, a cleavage-and-wink sexpot from saucy 1950s screen romps, now amply past her curvaceous prime. But the plot keeps things moving along entertainingly. At the same time, deeper concerns are broached.

An epigraph from Chekhov, “Most people live their real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy”, indicates Trio’s main theme: duplicity. Simulation, an essential component in film-making, pervades the book. Fraud, chicanery, covert theft, surreptitious adultery and fake friendship lurk. Names can’t be taken on trust. Rousingly billed as Troy Blaze, the film’s lead is Nigel Farthingly from Swindon. The film-maker exotically upgrades from Reggie to Rodrigo. Jacques Soldat, a preening Parisian intellectual, was once Mehdi Duhameldeb.

Talbot, a closeted homosexual, has another name too. As “Mr Eastman”, unknown to the wife he has lived with in “manufactured intimacy” for 26 years, he keeps a clandestine flat in Primrose Hill where he can photograph male models found by placing coded ads in magazines. Leading a double life, he approvingly notes that “there were two words in Japanese to describe the self . . . a word for the self that existed in the private realm and another, completely different, word for the self that existed in the world”.

Talbot’s situation is paralleled by those of Elfrida and Anny. The former, whose talent has dried up as her eagerness for drink has welled up, is concealing an alcoholic lifestyle that begins with breakfast tipplings of vodka slyly stored in Sarson’s White Vinegar bottles. Anny, sustaining her equilibrium with Equanil pills, is struggling to hide the return of a nightmare from her past: her ex-husband, now a terrorist hunted by the FBI.

In a thriller-like narrative about an insurance expert obsessed with armoury, Boyd’s 1998 novel Armadillo explored the urge to feel safely shielded and the way a social carapace can become more encumbrance than protection. Trio treats the same themes in a more relaxed style. Although one of its storylines takes a darker turn than might have been expected, its prevailing tone is jaunty and its conclusion optimistic. Full of neat phrases (“Brighton’s gull-clawed air”) and quirkily funny scenes (between takes naked actors in a porn film grouse about the rise in local vandalism), it’s an elating read.

Review from the Sunday Times.

Viking £18.99 pp345 

269-] English Literature , William Boyd

269-] English Literature

William Boyd

 William Andrew Murray Boyd CBE FRSL (born 7 March 1952) is a British] novelist, short story writer screenwriter and film director. He is best known for his novels, which include A Good Man in Africa (1981), Any Human Heart (2002), and Restless (2006), many of which have received critical acclaim and literary awards. Boyd has also written screenplays for film and television, including Chaplin (1992), and directed the World War I drama The Trench (1999). His work is characterised by its narrative vitality and range, earning him numerous accolades including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Costa Book Award. A number of his works are what he describes as "whole-life" novels which follow a protagonist through the highs and lows of a varied and often remarkable life. He regularly fuses fact with fiction and his lead characters encounter well-known historical figures. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for services to literature. John Self, writing for The Booker Prizes, described Boyd’s work as “vigorous, entertaining novels” produced by an “exceptionally fertile imagination,” and praised his fiction as “fully committed to his stories and characters.”

Biography

Boyd was born in Accra, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), to Scottish parents, both from Fife, and has two younger sisters. His father Alexander, a doctor specialising in tropical medicine, and Boyd's mother, who was a teacher, moved to the Gold Coast in 1950 to run the health clinic at the University College of the Gold Coast, Legon (now the University of Ghana). In the early 1960s, the family moved to western Nigeria, where Boyd's father held a similar position at the University of Ibadan. Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria and, at the age of nine, went to a preparatory school and then to Gordonstoun school in Scotland, and, after that, to the University of Nice in France, followed by the University of Glasgow, where he gained an M.A. (Hons) in English & Philosophy, and finally Jesus College, Oxford. His father died of a rare disease when Boyd was 26.

Between 1980 and 1983, Boyd was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and it was while he was there that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published. He was also a television critic for the New Statesman between 1981 and 1983.

Boyd was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for services to literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been presented with honorary Doctorates in Literature from the universities of St. Andrews, Stirling, Glasgow, and Dundee and is an honorary fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Boyd is a member of the Chelsea Arts Club.

Boyd met his wife Susan, a former editor and now a screenwriter, while they were both at Glasgow University. He has a house in Chelsea, London, and a farmhouse and vineyard (with its own appellation Château Pecachard) in Bergerac in the Dordogne in south-west France.

In August 2014, Boyd was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.

In March 2025, Boyd featured on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.

Work

Novels

Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Novelists" in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. Boyd's novels include: A Good Man in Africa, a study of a disaster-prone British diplomat operating in West Africa, for which he won the Whitbread Book award and Somerset Maugham Award in 1981; An Ice-Cream War, set against the background of the World War I campaigns in colonial East Africa, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982; Brazzaville Beach, published in 1991, which follows a scientist researching chimpanzee behaviour in Africa; and Any Human Heart, written in the form of the journals of a fictitious male 20th-century British writer, which won the Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002. Restless, the tale of a young woman who discovers that her mother had been recruited as a spy during World War II, was published in 2006 and won the Novel of the Year award in the 2006 Costa Book Awards. Boyd's novel Waiting for Sunrise was published in 2012.[13] Following Solo in 2013, Sweet Caress was published in 2015, the fourth novel Boyd has written from a woman's viewpoint. His sixteenth novel, Trio, was published in 2020.

Solo, the James Bond novel

In April 2012, Ian Fleming's estate announced that Boyd would write the next James Bond novel.[14] The book, Solo, is set in 1969; it was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in September 2013. Boyd used Bond creator Ian Fleming as a character in his novel Any Human Heart. Fleming recruits the book's protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, to British Naval Intelligence during World War Two.

Short stories

Several collections of short stories by Boyd have been published, including On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth (2017). In his introduction to The Dream Lover (2008), Boyd says that he believes the short story form to have been key to his evolution as a writer.

Screenplays

As a screenwriter,, Boyd has written several feature film and television productions. The feature films include: Scoop (1987), adapted from the Evelyn Waugh novel; Stars and Bars (1988), adapted from Boyd's own novel; Mister Johnson (1990), based on the 1939 novel by Joyce Cary; Tune in Tomorrow (1990), based on the Mario Vargas Llosa novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; A Good Man in Africa (1994), also adapted from his own novel; The Trench (1999) an independent war film which he also directed; Man to Man (2005), a historical drama which was nominated for a Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival; and Sword of Honour, based on the Sword of Honour trilogy of novels by Evelyn Waugh. He was one of several writers who worked on Chaplin (1992). His television screenwriting credits include: Good and Bad at Games (1983), adapted from Boyd's short story about English public school life; Dutch Girls (1985); Armadillo (2001), adapted from his own novel; A Waste of Shame (2005) about Shakespeare's composition of his sonnets; Any Human Heart (2010), adapted from Boyd's own novel into a Channel 4 series starring Jim Broadbent, which won the 2011 Best Drama Serial BAFTA award; and Restless (2012), also adapted from his own novel. Boyd created the miniseries Spy City which aired in 2020.

Plays

Boyd adapted two Anton Chekhov short stories – "A Visit to Friends" and "My Life (The Story of a Provincial)" – to create the play Longing. Directed by Nina Raine and performed at London's Hampstead Theatre, the play starred Jonathan Bailey, Tamsin Greig, Natasha Little, Eve Ponsonby, John Sessions and Catrin Stewart. Previews began on 28 February 2013; the press night was on 7 March 2013. Boyd, who was theatre critic for the University of Glasgow student newspaper The Glasgow Guardian in the 1970s and has many actor friends, refers to his ambition to write a play as finally getting "this monkey off my back". A further play by Boyd, The Argument, described as a Strindberg-like take on human dynamics, was performed at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs in March 2016. Both plays were published by Methuen Drama (see Bibliography).

Non-fiction

Protobiography, an autobiographical work by Boyd that recalls his early childhood, was published initially in 1998 by Bridgewater Press in a limited edition. A paperback edition was published in 2005 by Penguin Books. A collection of Boyd's journalism and other non-fiction writing was published in 2005 as Bamboo.

Nat Tate hoax

In 1998, Boyd published Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960, which presents the paintings and tragic biography of a supposed New York-based 1950s abstract expressionist painter named Nat Tate, who actually never existed and was, along with his paintings, a creation of Boyd's. When the book was initially published, it was not revealed that it was a work of fiction, and some were duped by the hoax; it was launched at a lavish party, with excerpts read by David Bowie and Gore Vidal (both of whom were in on the joke), and a number of prominent members of the art world claimed to remember the artist. It caused quite a stir once the truth was revealed. The name "Nat Tate" is derived from the names of the two leading British art galleries: the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery. Boyd, who also paints, made artwork under the pseudonym of Nat Tate and sent it to auction, where it raised funds for an art charity. Nat Tate also appears in Any Human Heart, also by Boyd, with a wry footnote to the 1998 book.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (July 2021)

Novels

A Good Man in Africa; Hamish Hamilton, 1981, An Ice-Cream War; Hamish Hamilton, 1982 , Stars and Bars; Hamish Hamilton, 1984 , The New Confessions; Hamish Hamilton, 1987 , Brazzaville Beach; Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990 , The Blue Afternoon; Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993, Armadillo; Hamish Hamilton, 1998 , Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960; 21 Publishing, 1998 ,Any Human Heart; Hamish Hamilton, 2002 , Restless; Bloomsbury, 2006 , Ordinary Thunderstorms; Bloomsbury, 2009 , Waiting for Sunrise; Bloomsbury, 2012 , Solo; Jonathan Cape, 2013 , Sweet Caress; Bloomsbury, 2015 , Love Is Blind; Viking Penguin, 2018 , Trio; Viking Penguin, 2020

The Romantic; Viking Penguin, 2022 , Gabriel's Moon; Viking Penguin, 2024

Unpublished , Against the Day , Truelove at 29

Short-story collections

On the Yankee Station; Hamish Hamilton, 1981, The Destiny of Nathalie 'X'; Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995 , Fascination; Hamish Hamilton, 2004 , The Dream Lover; Bloomsbury, 2008. This combines the short story collections in On the Yankee Station (1981) and The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995) The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth; Viking Press, 2017. This includes "The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth" (short story), first published in Notes from the Underground, 2007

Plays

School Ties; Hamish Hamilton, 1985, Longing (based on two Anton Chekhov stories); Methuen Drama, 2013 , The Argument; Methuen Drama, 2016

Screenplays

Good and Bad at Games (1983) Dutch Girls (1985)Scoop (1987)Stars and Bars (1988) Mister Johnson (1990) Tune in Tomorrow (1990) Chaplin (1992) A Good Man in Africa (1994) The Trench (1999) Armadillo (2001) Sword of Honour (2001) Man to Man (2005) A Waste of Shame (2005) Any Human Heart (2010) Restless (2012) Spy City (2020)

Radio

The McFeggan Offensive (2020) The Jura Affair (2025)

Non-fiction

Protobiography; Bridgewater Press, 1998 (limited edition) Bamboo; Hamish Hamilton, 2005

Literary prizes and awards

1981 Whitbread First Novel Award for A Good Man in Africa

1982 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for An Ice-Cream War

1982 Somerset Maugham Award for A Good Man in Africa

1983 Selected as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Novelists" by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council

1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) for Brazzaville Beach

1991 McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year for Brazzaville Beach

1993 The Sunday Express Book of the Year for The Blue Afternoon

1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) for The Blue Afternoon

2003 Prix Jean Monnet de Littérature Européenne for Any Human Heart

2003 Grand prix des lectrices de Elle for À livre ouvert, French language edition of Any Human Heart

2004 Shortlisted for International Dublin Literary Award for Any Human Heart

2006 Costa Book Award for Restless

2007 Shortlisted for British Book Awards Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year for Restless