The New Confessions

Infobox Book
author= William Boyd
name= The New Confessions
isbn= 0375705031
release_date= 1987
publisher= Vintage Press

"The New Confessions", William Boyd’s 1987 epic, is his fourth novel (pp. 558). It focuses on a film-maker, John James Todd, and his overriding obsession with Rousseau's "Confessions", which become the basis for his own confessional memoir of a life lived, through war, romance and ambition, in tandem with the twentieth century. __TOC__

Plot Overview

"The New Confessions" is a very ambitious book as a remake of Rousseau. The hero's name, John James, is a kind of prophecy, parallel to that of the Jean Jacques whose work he will not discover until he is 18 and a prisoner of war in Germany. As the protagonist himself says at the beginning of his confessions:

His last name is Todd, and he is the seemingly untalented son of a Scottish surgeon and professor of anatomy. He grows up with his dour father and his pompous elder brother, not knowing much of love except for the erratic attentions of Oonagh, the daily. He is eventually shipped off to a boarding school that he actually enjoys, in part because of its unorthodox curriculum - it only accepts boys highly proficient in one particular skill (John James' is mathematics) and in part because he is able to develop his talent for photography. ["Time", May. 30, 1988, 'Rousseau Redux The New Confessions', Martha Duffy [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,967515,00.html] ]

On leaving school he becomes an amateur photographer, fights in Flanders in World War I, makes a documentary movie of a battle's aftermath; is a film director in London and Berlin; moves to Hollywood, has a brief spell as a war correspondent. As the disgruntled director of westerns he is blacklisted - as the eleventh member of the Hollywood Ten - in spite of an indifference to politics that would amount to innocence if anything could; and ends up old and reminiscing on an island in the Mediterranean.

It is while imprisoned in Germany during World War I that he reads Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions", and it takes over his powerful imagination. Having directed one successful film in Berlin, Todd persuades his studio to allow him to make a three film series of Rousseau's book. However, the great catastrophe is that, by the time he has finished Part I to his highly exacting standards, it is 1931 and the arrival of sound has rendered his 5-hour, 48-minute extravaganza a "splendid three-masted clipper ship . . . magnificent, but of another age than ours." He goes on to direct other films - potboiler comedies in the silent era, a melodrama, twelve westerns, and a late experimental work called "The Last Walk of Jean Jacques Rousseau," using some footage from his old, much-aborted project.

The novel's protagonist also has awkward sexual escapades that recall those of Boyd's earlier heroes. Self-centered, and given to gusts and swoons of excitement, he is, as one of his actress lovers tells him, a "great, big, Grade A, ignorant fool." He is not aggressive, merely impulsive, but he seems to attract enemies and the kind of persecution that seems a rather dogged embodiment of bad luck. Todd is driven by a ruthless ambition but is plagued by misfortune - he turns out to be a genius foiled by a lifetime of mischances, some of them major, many of them trivial. But even the trivial becomes important if it goes on and on, and he himself rails eloquently against the comfortable, moralizing notion that we make our own fates. ["New York Times", May 29th, 1988 'Rousseau, Hollywood and the Uncertainty Principle', Michael Wood [http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/boyd-confessions.html] ] We have our faults, of course, and we make mistakes, but we pay prices out of all proportion to our errors, and quite often we pay for no reason at all, so there are definite Hardyean echoes in the novel's main theme:

" [Thomas] Hardy felt experience as the ominous weight of life itself, and brooded tragically or stoically before it, making his characters not so much discover experience as suffer it ... Hardy subjected his characters to his inexorable plots, those plots to cosmic ironies ... [his plots] are schematically written, as one admirer, Marcel Proust observed, with the solid geometry of the master stonemason." ["The Modern British Novel", Malcolm Bradbury, Penguin Books, 1994, pp. 34-35]

The pace of this novel, packed as it is with historical action and personal adventures, is also as well-crafted as one of Hardy's novels.

The aim of this novel is admirable: to take, as Rousseau does, a weirdly exceptional life and claim it is merely representative, that of the naked creature, the thing itself. Rousseau, Todd recognizes, is the "first modern man ... (who) spoke for all of us suffering mortals, our vanities, our hopes, our moments of greatness and our base corrupted natures." John James Todd stands at the end of this book on a beach on his Mediterranean island, not knowing which of six alternatives in the plot awaits him, a programmatic emblem of the uncertainty principle: ["New York Times", May 29th, 1988 'Rousseau, Hollywood and the Uncertainty Principle', Michael Wood [http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/22/specials/boyd-confessions.html] ]

Plot Structure

The novel's opening lines have an immediate impact on the reader: 'My first act entering this world was to kill my mother. I was heaved - a healthy eight pounds - lacquered and ruddy from her womb one cold March day in Edinburgh, 1899.' He experiences a lonely childhood growing up with a father who is distant and cold towards him and a brother, Thompson Todd, who dislikes him intensely. His only solace is Oonagh, 'a braw, buxom girl from the Isle of Lewis', who, although illiterate, has a tough, sharp mind and acts as a kind of surrogate mother. His father, Innes McNeil Todd, is a senior consultant at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and Professor of clinical anatomy at the University. His only close friend is Donald Verulam, a bachelor Englishman in his thirties and colleague from the University, who teaches John James to use a camera and who might be, the latter mistakenly believes, his real father. As the result of poor school reports, John James is packed of to Minto Academy - originally founded for boys gifted in either mathematics or music. He comes to enjoy his education and befriends Hamish Malahide, a brilliant mathematician, but a reviled and unpopular figure because of his appalling acne. John James' school years pass uneventfully until he decides to run away to visit his mother's sister, Faye, living in the south of England - a woman for whom he has developed a school boy crush as a consequence of their correspondence following her husband's death. During his stay, John James exposes himself while they are having a picnic while punting in Oxford and his aunt slaps him. Feeling disgraced, and discovering from Donald that he is not his real father, he decides to enlist in the army and ends up on the Western Front.

Todd's war starts of fairly peacefully because he is stationed at Nieuport-les-Bains in Belgium at the extreme end of the Front. His regiment - the 13th (Public School) service battalion of the Duke of Clarence's Own South Oxfordshire Light Infantry is made up of public schoolboys, none of whom Todd particularly likes apart from Leo Druce. He starts to fantasize about two women - a nurse and a restaurateur's daughter - but nothing comes of it and his regiment is moved up to Ypres in early July 1917. D Company is unfortunately attached to the Grampian Highlanders, full of soldiers whom he refers to as Bantams owing to their small stature, who loathe the public schoolboys. Todd takes part in the attack and his company is almost entirely wiped out, with over fifty percent casualties. He ends up with the militaristic Teague being temporarily attached to the Bantams whose sergeant, Tanqueray, and a fisherman from Stonehaven, makes their life hell. On August 22nd, 1917 Todd is involved in a second attack - one of the Bantams tries to kill him (after a previous run in) but mistakenly kills Todd's Lieutenant, and Todd himself spends his time trying to get the badly injured Teague (blasted by a defective Mills bomb and whose legs are crushed by a British tank) back to their trenches. Todd is finally relieved from his own personal nightmare by Donald Verulam, who enlists him into the WOCC (War Office Cinema Committee).

As a WOCC cameraman, John James spends his time filming subjects that are worthy of propaganda value and is delighted when his first four reels of film of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry - shot as part of the Great British Regiments series (no.23) - are shown to the KOYLI colonel and his officers in their battalion reserve billets. While filming other regiments, Todd decides to make his own film of the true horrors of fighting but this is rejected by the censors for being unpatriotic and he is almost returned to the front line (unlike his rival, Harold Faithfull, who is much lauded for his artificially-shot 50 minute film, "The Battle of Messines". For his misdemeanour, Todd is assigned to filming observer balloons to make his film, "Eyes in the Sky" and is unluckily swept away across occupied Belgium when the balloon he is in has its metal cable cut by a bullet from an aeroplane's guns. Todd ends up being imprisoned in solitary confinement in Weilberg, Germany - suspected of being a spy because of his camera and lack of rank badges - and sinks into a profound depression until he befriends a German guard, Karl-Heinz, who, in return for kisses, smuggles him torn out pages of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Les Confessions". Finishing it over a seven-week period, John James weeps because he is so profoundly affected: 'This man spoke for all of us suffering mortals, our vanities, our hopes, our moments of greatness and our base corrupted natures.' Eventually, his story is confirmed and he is transferred to an officers' camp in Mainz for five months until the war's end.

The story moves forward to July, 1922 and Todd is now working for Superb-Imperial in Islington, London (Harold Faithfull is also a film director there) while living in Fulham with his wife, Sonia, above the Salisbury pub on the Dawes Road. He attempts to present a few film scripts to the husband-and-wife owners but these are rejected until he has one last try with "Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes" which they both love. While Faithfull is working on the studio's most expensive production, "The Blue Cockade", Todd starts filming in and around Edinburgh, joined by his old friend Leo Druce as producer, whom he meets again at an old regimental reunion and who is down on his luck. The film is a commercial success but Supert-Imperial fims goes bankrupt as a result of the escalating costs of Faithfull's film. Now down on his luck and without an income, Todd receives a postcard from Karl-Heinz saying that he is making lots of films and plays in Berlin and that Todd should come and see him. He jumps at this opportunity, only to find that Karl-Heinz is just a bit-part extra, so he becomes the doorman at The Hotel Windsor and moves in with Karl-Heinz and his landlord, Georg, who KH masturbates once a month in return for free rent. Karl-Heinz starts to enjoy more success while Todd remains in a rut, and one day presents Jojn Hames with a copy of Rousseau's "Julie" which the latter hates but turns into a film script. Liking it, Karl-Heinz introduces Todd to Duric Lodokian and his son, Aram - the Armenian owners of Realismus films - and they offer him a contract. Todd's prospects are now looking up and he is joined by Sonia and Vincent, their son, at his apartment at 129b on Rudolf Platz. All goes well until Todd encounters Doon Bogan, an American film star, who Karl-Heinz suggests play the lead role of Julie.

After their first meeting, Todd knows he is in love with Doon. However, while living with Sonia and his increasing family, he is able to keep his emotions in check. However, after one particularly successful scene while filming "Julie", John James makes his feelings known to her only to receive a knee in his groin. With the huge commercial success of the film, Todd and Sonia move to a new comfortable villa in Charlottenburg, where Sonia acquires an English nurse, Lily Maidlaw, to look after their growing family. John James bemoans his position to Karl-Heinz as they drink together in the bar Dix, and he is only restored when he decides to make a film version of "The Confessions". Now he is happier living at home and becomes very attached to his second son, Hereford, who is an engaging affectionate baby. He also rents a small wooden villa and has an affair with a German actress, Monika Alt. Doric Lodokian dies but extracts a promise from his son that Realismus will undertake the three films, each three hours long, of "The Confessions". Todd meets Doon after receiving a phone call from her, having finally tracked her down at a Revolutionary Artists' Association of the KPD meeting (which Todd has to join before he can gain admittance). The Confessions: Part I starts to be filmed and requires a vast machine to set it in motion. As Todd says, 'The individual spirit would have its great immortal document. I had grandiose plans as to how this should be achieved and I intended to employ every trick and technique available to the modern film-maker - and a few more I had devised myself. I was going to extend the cinematic form to its very limits.' The filming takes place at Annecy and Chambery in Switzerland and Doon and John James finally make love one night after he turns up at her bedroom door drunk. On their return to Berlin, they carry on the affair intermittently, and Todd begins to suspect that Sonia is having her own affair. He hires a private detective, Eugen P. Eugen, to follow her but she is innocent. John James asks Doon to marry him but, although she is divorced from her ex-husband Mavrocordato, she refuses. Todd is also knocked sideways by the death of his baby son, Hereford, who is only three years old.

The affair continues while they are filming until, on a weekend trip into the mountains, they are discovered together by Eugen.P. Eugen who has been hired by Sonia to follow them. Following Todd's return to Berlin, Sonia announces she is divorcing him and returning to London with the children and emotionally he is in a bad way despite the successful shooting of the film. While filming Rousseau's return to Mme de Lanrnage at Les Charmettes at Grenoble, Todd returns early one day to Doon's suite, only to find Mavrocordato there, offering her a role in a new film. The two get into a fight over Doon and Todd has to finish the rest of the filming with his right arm and hand set in plaster (although he is reconciled with Doon who looks after him tenderly). The film is at last completed but Aram arrives - who now calls himself Eddie Simmonette following a trip to the USA - and thinks they are too late owing to the introduction of sound. Doon announces she is moving to Paris - disliking Germany because of its increasing Nazification - and Realismus films comes close to bankruptcy as a result of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. "The Confessions: Part I" is shown in the enormous Gloria-Plast cinema on the Kurfurstendamm, accompanied by a 60-man orchestra - but the great auditorium is half empty for the gala and only runs for a week to average houses before they have to close it.

Eddie manages to scrape up enough money for "The Confessions: Part 2" and filming starts at Neuchatel in January, 1934. However, it is beset by misfortunes and Eddie finally arrives to say that the studios have been shut down and all his property impounded after his being declared a 'non-Alien'. After closing down filming, Todd goes to Paris to find Doon but is told by the concierge that she has left with Mavrocordato and his dog days begin after he is forced to return to London. He has a cold, comfortless meeting with Sonia and the children in a large house near Parsons Green, and is forced to pay support by Mr Devize, her solicitor (whom Sonia later marries). Todd returns to Edinburgh and has to go through the ritual of being caught "in flagrante" committing adultery so Sonia can divorce him. While staying with a prostitute for two days in the Harry Lauder Temperance Hotel near Portobello sation, he gets the idea for a film script and "The Divorce" has its trade show in August 1935. Todd is taken on by Courtney Young, his most ardent film fan and the owner of Court Films, and is joined there once more by Leo Druce as his producer. Young is persuaded to finance "The Confessions" and pays Todd to work on the script of Part II, but is then asked by his boss to direct a film about King Alfred. Following a meeting with Druce, he decides to turn it down, only to find out the next day that Druce has been made its director and they have a furious falling out. John James is sacked by Court Films and,with nowhere else to go, returns to Scotland.

Todd rents a cottage on his grandfather's, Sir Hector Dale's, estate at Drumlarish and befriends his grandson, Mungo Dale, 'a big, utterly stupid man in his early forties whose company I found oddly consoling.' Mungo, however, is astute enough to advise his cousin to make "The Confessions: Part II" on his own and to tap his brother, Thompson, for a loan since he works for a bank. Inspired, John James returns to Edinburgh to set up Alef-Null Films Ltd., but, after lengthy meetings, he is only granted £2,500 which he has to later spend on legal damages to Leo Druce after invalidly criticising him in a public letter for being a coward during World War I. Leaving Britain with his tail between his legs, Todd is forced to relocate to Los Angeles in his search for work and to escape his financial commitments. He joins all the other German refugees living in Pacific Palisades, who have been given synocure jobs by the major Hollywood film studios. He manages to scrape by on a $100 a week script writer fee from Twentieth Century Fox and earns some extra money a a freelance script writer for a man named Monroe Smee, whom he meets at some anti-Nazi League meetings and whom he unwittingly alienates by criticizing Smees own scripts. Todd also unwittingly insults his studio boss, D.F. Zanuck, and is fired the next day. Now having to live on reduced terms, he has part-time writing jobs and takes up English teaching to support himself. He strikes up his affair with Monika Alt again but she remains committed t o her husband, Faithfull. However, his position worsens when he becomes stuck in Tijuana, Mexico, unable to renew his visa. Luckily, as his financial plight becomes desperate, he meets Ramon Dusenberry, a local newspaper proprietor, and becomes a photographer for the Tijuana, Tecate, Rumorosa and Mexicali "Clarions" on $25 a week plus bonuses. Finally, Monika Alt comes to his rescue by marrying him on 23rd April, 1940 so that he can legally re-enter the United States.

Between 1940 and 1943 Todd's fortunes look up. Although divorcing Monika owing to their incompatible characters, he is reunited with Eddie Simmonette in LA and he directs eleven westerns, all under one hour long. He also re-encounters Mavrocordato, only to learn that Doon left him in France to return to the United States. While making a true-to-life film of Billy the Kid, called "The Equaliser", he asks Ramon to try and track down her whereabouts and learns that she is living in Montezuma, Arizona. After finishing his film, he hires a car and drives down there but is disappointed to find an older, more cynical chain-smoking Doon who is completely different from the young woman he knew twenty years earlier. Returning disillusioned to LA, Todd finds out that his name is being slandered in the English press as an example of a Brit living off the fat of the land in the US while the rest of his countrymen are suffering from the war effort. Determined to take a role in the war, he is sent by Ramon as a war correspondent to follow General Patch's 7th Army invasion of France's southern coastline. While on an assignment with a Red Indian driver called Two Dogs Running, their jeep is fired upon by American paratroopers and he is invalided back to a hospital in Washington DC.

In the chapter entitled "Berlin. Year Zero", John James returns to Berlin to look for Karl-Heinz. He finds it difficult to comprehend the amount of devastation caused, but makes the best of it and sleeps with a young German prostitute called Henni in return for cigarettes. He eventually manages to be re-united with Eugen P. Eugen who eventually tracks down Karl-Heinz in a half-demolished church, stinking and suffering from stomach disorders. After blackmailing a high-ranking British officer who is a known smuggler of German loot, Todd gets his friend permission to leave Germany and, after a quick visit to Edinburgh where they meet Innes who is now in a nursing home, they fly onto to LA. John James receives news of his father's death some days later but he is buoyed up by Karl-Heinz's return to health in the Californian sunshine. They start filming "Father of Liberty" for Lone Star Films. However, everything changes when Eddie asks to meet him secretly and they discuss the Hollywood Ten and John James' listing in "Red Connections" as a communist. Taking advice from Eddie's lawyer, he appears before the Brayfield subcommittee of House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and pleads the Fifth Amendment (so becoming the Hollywood One). From this point on, he is laid off by Eddie and blacklisted by all the major studios and is forced to make money by hiring out his apartment and teaching English. He also notices that his movements are being constantly watched and that his phone has been tapped. Eventually, he is named in executive session by Monika Alt and Ernest Cooper as a member of the revolutionary communist cell in Berlin in the Twenties. John James gives a confident performance in front of the cameras and Doon perjures herself in order to save his skin. Their meeting after the hearing is a poignant one and also the last time they ever meet.

From their detailed knowledge, Todd knows he has been set up and, speaking to one of his students, a Japanese businessman, he hires a Japanese private dick to find out who - it turns out to be Monroe Smee. Todd, after following Smee to the "Red Connections" office in West Hollywood, decides to confront his persecutor at his home but is thrown out of the house. Finally, the fear of the Red Threat declines and Todd once more takes up film directing, producing his eighteenth and last film, "The Last Walk of Jean-Jaques Rousseau" based on his "Reveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire" at a cost of $128,000 and financed by Eddie. At this point, rather like Jean Jaques himself, he pauses to take stock of his life to date:

Karl-Heinz, however, suffers from his old ulcer complaint - which kept him out of the German Army for most of the war - and some days later is found dead in the Hotel Cythera where he has always lived. Retiring to the convict shack at Big Sur which he and Karl-Heinz rented while filming, Todd decides to have his private detective, O'Hara, get Smee off his back after he sees him observing him swimming. O'Hara misunderstands his instructions and kills Smee to order for a one thousand dollar fee and, together, he and Todd dump the body over the edge off the cliff by the ocean.

The novel comes to a close with John James finishing his reminiscences at the Villa Luxe, a house he has been renting from Eddie on a Mediterranean island for the past nine years after fleeing the US owing to his fear of being connected with Smee's death. Deciding to take a walk on the beach, he reflects on the last seven decades, saddened by the death of so many old friends like Oonagh, Karl Heinz, Mungo and his close childhood friend, Hamish. He stands on his modest beach, waiting for his future as he watches the waves roll in, feeling a strange light-headed elation that now, in the Age of Uncertainty and Incompleteness, he is completely in tune with the universe.

References

External links

* [http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth17 William Boyd biography] , The British Council, Arts, Dr Eve Patten, 2005
* [http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375705038 "The New Confessions"] , The Borzoi Reader