Any Human Heart
First edition cover
|
|
| Author | William Boyd |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Realism |
| Publisher | Hamish Hamilton |
|
Publication date
|
2002 |
| Media type | Print novel |
| Pages | 503 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 48753788 |
| 823/.914 21 | |
| LC Class | PR6052.O9192 A64 2002 |
Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart is a 2002 novel by William Boyd, a British writer. It is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the 20th century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form to explore how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart’s journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king. Boyd plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters – a spat with Virginia Woolf in London, a possible sexual encounter with Evelyn Waugh at Oxford, a clumsy exchange with James Joyce in Paris, and a friendship with Ernest Hemingway that spans several years.
Boyd spent 30 months writing the novel. The journal style, with its gaps, false starts and contradictions, reinforces the theme of the changing self in the novel. Many plot points simply fade away. The novel received mixed reviews from critics on publication, but has sold well. A television adaptation was made with the screenplay written by Boyd, first broadcast in 2010.
Mountstuart appeared in Boyd's short story "Hôtel des Voyageurs" written in the early 1990s and published in London Magazine and his 1995 collection The Destiny of Nathalie 'X'. The story was inspired by the journals written by writer and critic Cyril Connolly in the 1920s. It was written in journal form and was, like Connolly's journals self obsessed, lyrical and hedonistic. Boyd was obsessed with Connolly as a schoolboy, avidly reading his reviews in The Sunday Times, and later read his entire published œuvre and found his flawed personality 'deeply beguiling'.
In 1988 Boyd had written The New Confessions as a memoir, the hoax biography of an invented artist, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, in which Mountstuart reappeared. Boyd claimed that he, as biographer, had first heard of the painter through the work of a little-known British writer, a black-and-white photograph Boyd of whom had found in a French second-hand shop. The caption identified the chubby man as "Logan Mountstuart in 1952". Boyd described him as,
...
Wikipedia