Alter Egos
William Boyd in practice
A Good Man in Africa, An Ice-Cream War, Stars and Bars, School Ties, The New Confessions, Brazzaville Beach, The Blue Afternoon, Protobiography, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928—1960, Any Human Heart, Fascination, Restless, Bamboo, The Dream Lover, Ordinary Thunderstorms, Waiting for Sunrise, Solo, Longing, Sweet Caress, The Argument, The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth, Love Is Blind, Trio and Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd; and The Mirror and the Road: Conversations with William Boyd, edited by Alistair Owen
Often I write that the truths about very prolific writers are found in works that other people do not talk about. Do not talk about in part for reasons of genre or status. The short stories that sell well enough but that are in an outmoded medium. The pieces for the press written but not collected between hard covers. The play that was never performed. The theatrical criticism found in letters to friends. All of these tell us things about famous figures that you might not find in the classic works. After all, everyone has already read all of them.
With William Boyd, where is the truth? It is possibly — I can’t say otherwise — in his grandest and most expansive novels. The cradle to grave narratives like Any Human Heart, like The New Confessions and Love Is Blind — whose themes are the vitality but transience of love, the sense that life is contingent and full of chances and tragedies, that there is no predestination, no ultimate fate but the tomb, nothing but randomness and luck and the products of our deepest characters guiding human existence.
But enough people have written about those books. I have done so myself. I’d rather talk a little, if I may, about essays, short stories, the radio and about alter egos. In Boyd’s essays, collected in Bamboo, he expands at some length some of his preoccupations: with photography, for instance, with mid-century writers, with spy fiction. And alter egos, real or imagined lives lived a little differently. Boyd has short stories which are more autobiographical — or rather are about a boy or a man who could in a parallel world have been a little like him — than his other work. Boyd is certain — and he is right — that he is non-autobiographical. One of the few non-autobiographical writers permitted to exist in our world of Americans turning every genre of book into a memoir admixture, be it novel, or travel book, or work of history or criticism or self-help.
Boyd has a character who recurs in his stories called Yves Hill. An almost William Gerhardie-like figure, a man with a great future behind him, Hill is an old novelist who lives a quiet, shut up life for reasons that are a little mysterious. (I love good titles and must say here that ‘The View from Yves Hill’ is a nice one.)
Boyd has another alter ego type character, who I identify a good deal more with. She’s called Bethany Mellmoth, about whom Boyd has been writing for some time. In a recent radio series, Bethany is now 26, not much younger than I am — but I imagine some telescoping has gone on. It’s my fancy, but only my fancy, that she and I are exactly the same age.
The primary characteristic of Bethany’s life — aside from a sense of time passing, which we all have — is a kind of aimlessness. A sense that she has not yet found her calling, not yet decided fully and finally on the path that she must follow, the thing she was destined to do. She wants to write; she is interested in art (aren’t we all). She is a gallerina at one moment; she works for a magazine when a sponsored podcast story demands she visit a Mandarin Oriental hotel. Her great novel is never done, nor really started. She never sticks at one thing for very long. (Such is our peripatetic age. Such is my own life, if you care.)
In the radio Bethany finds a real voice: it’s an increasingly worldly voice, a voice of ironic amusement as well as of confusion. But what Bethany never has, except for those moments when the plot picks her up and spirits her along, is a focus.
Some scholars (I must refer here to Beci Carver) have identified a kind of aimlessness, a theme of wasted time, in the works of interwar writers like William Gerhardie, Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh — many of whom Boyd has studied deeply. Since we’re due a global war and one is clearly brewing, the interwar years have a new salience.
Aimlessness appears the essential feature of my own generation, the generation I believe Bethany is meant to belong to herself.
Bethany is a dreamer, though. She dreams about futures for herself, lives that might make the game worth the candle. How many of these does she bring to full fruition? How many of them remain only as dreams?
That’s the thing about dreams. They come to us when we are doing nothing at all. They’re unstoppable; we cannot prevent ourselves from having them. Do they tell us anything interesting? Not often. But sometimes, just occasionally, they do.
I don’t dream much but recently I have had more than one dream where I meet someone I loved very much, a man who has recently died. Every time I see him in a dream like this, I walk up to him happier than I ever am in waking life, and say, ‘I heard you were dead. I’m so glad it’s not true.’
Boyd’s James Bond novel, Solo, begins a similar way. ‘James Bond was dreaming.’ That’s how it begins. But Bond is dreaming of a bad past. Betrayed back, as D. H. Lawrence might say, to the truth, to reality — however it comes. Because it all becomes true upon waking, for all of us. The dream is over and the truth comes as a cold rain, the clouds filling the whole sky.