ANY HUMAN HEART: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart

Categories used to bundle characteristics of related subjects -- those characteristics having been developed in differing circumstances and over time -- often become fenced off into obligatory interrelated elements of a particular kind of somethingorother.  These structures or tags can then be used by authors for the sake of their own work.  One example might be the “road story.”  Another might be a “journal” imitation that leads the supposed journaling character through interesting times and places.

Last night I marathoned the four hours of  Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart, (on disc at Netflix)  derived from a 2002 novel by William Boyd, a British writer. The fictional Mountstuart, a writer whose life is like a game of billiards, bouncing around the green felt table of the 20th century.  Major forces -- at least in terms of the Atlantic world (which generously includes Uruguay and non-English speaking countries in Europe) -- are interpreted as good luck or bad luck, which seems justified since no one inquires into causes or seems to have any control. 

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Here’s the part interesting to English professors and the reason I ordered the discs.  Boyd plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters.  The helpful but anonymous writer of the Wikipedia entry tells us:  “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.”  . . .

“The story was inspired by the journals written by writer and critic Cyril Connolly in the 1920s.”  “Cyril Vernon Connolly (10 September 1903 – 26 November 1974) was a literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–49) and wrote Enemies of Promise (1938), which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.”

Connolly’s defense goes to class, and therefore becomes political.  "We have seen that there are two styles which it is convenient to describe as the realist, or vernacular, the style of rebels, journalists, common-sense addicts, and unromantic observers of human destiny – and the Mandarin, the artificial style of men of letters or of those in authority who make letters their spare time occupation."

William Boyd

The great irony, not addressed by Boyd, is that yesterday’s vernacular becomes today’s Mandarin:  Joyce, Hemingway, Kerouac, et al.  Of course, some vernaculars are born of resentful revolution and are so muscular that they persist politically even when they go out of style, accessible only to the Mandarin intellectuals.  I’m talking about the post-structuralists and all the other post-whatevers that overturn hegemony.  For example, the politically correct accusations adopted by the American Indian Movement, which became a “devolution” into a straightforward demand for reparation.  Not that it wasn’t completely justified.  

As the lockstep Mandarins have aged out of today's universities, the newest generation is left reduced to outlines and shadows.  They have a renewed fascination with what Boyd calls “S and M” novels, defined as “Sex and Money.”  The kinkier and more resourceful the money-handling is, and the more warnings of financial implosion there are, the better the book sells.  It is the M that dominates.  S trails along behind.

But Boyd’s version of life is dominated by the S, as Logan Montstuart marks his fortunes according to with whom he sleeps, and though their personalities and attractions are quite various, he can’t keep their names straight.  Clearly, it is not about the other person in the relationship and therefore it is not about anyone but himself.  The exception is the parallel paths taken by his lifelong friends.  One takes the vernacular popular path and is a huge success.  The other takes the rarefied life of a gallery owner and is able to help Montstuart until this faithful friend dies of prostate cancer -- bad luck.

The novel's imagined version.

Montstuart is always on the verge of writing a best-selling book, he thinks, but he falls between chairs.  His first book is too much S and the second is too Mandarin.  Unable to figure it out and preoccupied with the problems at hand, he puts writing off and off and off, until in the end he has only eight piles of remnants from his life, one for each woman. Ironically, these journals become the book he didn’t write.  It is a best-seller and young men read it avidly, in hopes of finding clues to success.  What can that advice be except to keep on keeping on?

Is there a difference between journals, diaries, and today’s blogging?  The medium in which writing is done has always had impact on the content, from quills on parchment through ink on paper, from isolated one-off chapbooks of poetry for one’s own eyes, to mass-produced newspapers and on to subscription-only high-art handmade books, as much about the font, binding, and presentation as about subject.  I'll put off the blogging question, because I think it is multiple choice.

frontispiece

An extremely fine book in concept and execution is “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea”, elegant and political, even in concept.  http://www.peterkochprinters.com/show.php?bookid=75

Debra Magpie Earling

Debra Magpie Earling, the poet, inspired the content, by giving Sacajawea a voice.  Peter Koch, the inspiree, persuaded her to expand her poems and managed and illustrated the publishing.  I haven’t read it because it is too expensive: $4500.  “The spine is beaded with trade beads and small caliber cartridge cases.”  Thus it exists as a reversal of the strange hybrid vernacular/Mandarin “world” that is Lewis and Clark, but also crosses into the world of Material Culture, as a Native American artifact made by Europeans.  From the beginning it was a paradoxical written work pretending to be created by an illiterate person from an oral culture.  But it must have had a reality.

I think there is only one library in Montana that owns a copy but it is too far away for me to drive there over the Rocky Mountains in my failing pickiup.  

"Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian"

by George Devereaux

Perhaps some day I’ll write an imitation “dream diary” equivalent to what I thought I was buying when I acquired a copy of the book called “Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” by George Devereaux, published in 1951.  I bought it late one night at the Powell’s in Hyde Park, under the impression that Devereux was Blackfeet, since it’s a common Metis name around Browning.

“Reality and Dream” turned out to be about PTSD, not that helpful since it was still early after WWII and theory was not far along.  The movie, “Jimmy P.” upgraded the theories a bit.  It could not avoid showing the environment of the rez that created “Jimmy,” and the four Plains tribes that Devereaux conflated into the “Wolf” tribe.  The discussion of these matters is valuable -- worth being republished as a small stand-alone book -- but it is non-Indian, so mostly based on short sojourns with the tribes, usually in summer.

Journals and diaries are “found” writing as opposed to designed, shaped and marketed.  Since uniqueness has always been a value enhancer, it’s fortunate that humans are so various, but the supply never quite matches the value assigners -- some are over-estimated and others are certainly neglected.  This suggests the premise of “Any Human Heart” -- that it’s just a matter of luck, good or bad.  So what DOES guide the discerning of value in the creation of a book?