William Boyd - The New Confessions

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In this extraordinary novel, William Boyd presents the autobiography of John James Todd, whose uncanny and exhilarating life as one of the most unappreciated geniuses of the twentieth century is equal parts Laurence Stern, Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies, and Saul Bellow, and a hundred percent William Boyd.
From his birth in 1899, Todd was doomed. Emerging from his angst-filled childhood, he rushes into the throes of the twentieth century on the Western Front during the Great War, and quickly changes his role on the battlefield from cannon fodder to cameraman. When he becomes a prisoner of war, he discovers Rousseau's
, and dedicates his life to bringing the memoir to the silver screen. Plagued by bad luck and blind ambition, Todd becomes a celebrated London upstart, a Weimar luminary, and finally a disgruntled director of cowboy movies and the eleventh member of the Hollywood Ten. Ambitious and entertaining, Boyd has invented a most irresistible hero.

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Minto was a passionate rugby football enthusiast and he determined that the Minto Academy first fifteen should excel in this also. Accordingly, he granted “scholarships” to any strapping lad or nippy sprinter he fancied for his team. The school regularly triumphed in the local leagues, held up and down the Tweed Valley. This obsession explained the presence of the bearded Fraser — he was required for the second row of the scrum.

We were a curious student body. There were genuine mathematical and musical talents, but, while I was there, there was only one prodigy. Then there were people like me whose vague gifts seemed to lie only in one or the other of these directions and whose parents were despairing of getting them educated. Then there were the misfits, encouraged by Minto’s all-embracing manifesto. Boys who could draw well, boys who “were good with their hands,” boys who could run fast. Some of these types verged on the freakish. There was a brilliant juggler; there was one boy with exceptional eyesight who could read a printed page at eight feet. There was another, a thin long-armed fellow, who could hurl a cricket ball well over a hundred yards. There was a prodigious high-jumper. And so on. This category was the smallest in the school, seldom more than a dozen all told at any one time. They made up a sullen edgy population (we called them black buns for some reason) who often lasted no more than a term or two. Outside the orthodox curriculum they were encouraged to develop their specialty under Minto’s eye. He believed passionately in excellence, and if that happened in an individual case to confine itself to cricket ball throwing, then so be it. And then there was the rugby team: local lads plucked from farm or mill (rumor had it Minto actually paid their parents), provided with board and lodging, offered the notional gloss of secondary education and throughout winter and spring as much rugby football as they could take.

Most of us were averagely good mathematicians or musicians. Minto took us for maths; Mr. Leadbetter taught the musicians. The school orchestra was quite proficient and played regular concerts in council chambers and corn exchanges in the Tweed Valley, incidentally providing the Academy with another source of income. Two other teachers, forlorn-looking bachelors, a Mr. Fry and a Mr. Handasyde, made a stab at the other subjects necessary to have the Academy accredited by the regional school board. These two glum, wistful men seemed more fearful of Minto than we boys and we wondered what duress kept them at the school.

Minto himself was a smallish man in his late forties. He had dark-ginger hair — close cropped on cheeks and chin, dry and wispy on his head. He wore round horn spectacles and had a friendly light voice with a trace of rhotacismus: “Weally vey good,” he used to say in approbation.

Ostensibly there was nothing threatening about him. Any member of the rugby team could have knocked him flat, for example, but his discipline was unquestioned and would have done credit to an army barracks.

After one of his rare vicious floggings I asked the victim (a twenty-year-old wheelwright from Kelso) why he had not retaliated. His crime had been to give cheek to Mrs. Leadbetter. He looked at me as if I were an idiot.

“D’ye no ken aboot that Angus?”

Angus was a big stupid man with pronounced pigeon-toes. It was his job to control the beefier pupils. He had killed a man with his bare hands in a public house brawl, so local legend had it. After his prison sentence (manslaughter) Minto had taken him on. From time to time, I was told, Angus had administered savage beatings to any member of the rugby team who questioned Minto’s authority.

In spite of these deterrents — perhaps because of them — the school was a tolerant, tolerable place. Only once did I suffer at the hands of other boys, but it was an initiation rite that everyone underwent.

This was a bonding ritual known as the “wax-bogey plate.” On his first night in the dormitory a newboy was obliged to consume a symbolic meal consisting of small balls — the size of shot — made up of earwax and phlegm. The other boys mined their orifices for the raw material, which they then diligently rolled into little balls. Collected on a plate, these were then presented to the initiate. They looked like a loose beige caviar. You had the choice of eating them individually or all at once. I selected the latter course. It was not so unpleasant. A swallow, a quick swill round the mouth with your tongue. Only the sour taste of earwax lingered for an hour or two.

Hamish Malahide was the school’s only bona fide prodigy. He was a year older than I and had been at the Academy for two years. He was so good at maths that Minto gave him private tuition. I encountered him shortly after I arrived.

One dark Sunday evening before chapel, a senior boy sent me over to the classroom block to fetch something or other. On my way back I saw a group of boys — six or seven — gathered round the railings at the rear of the house. Here there was a small basement well that led to the coal cellars and the boiler house — Angus’s responsibility and strictly out of bounds. As I approached I recognized the boys were all black buns. They were laughing with enjoyment and pleasure, holding their kilt fronts up and urinating into the basement well. I looked down and saw a figure trying to dodge the spraying streams with little success. Then he tripped and the arcs of piss zeroed in, pattering loudly on his clothes until he scrambled up again. The ordeal lasted only as long as the tormentors’ bladders held out. Soon the urinators gave up and wandered away. In the well the figure tugged fitfully at his damp clothes. I was struck by the fact that he had made no sound of complaint. He looked up at me.

“I suppose you want to have a shot now.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Give us a hand,” he said as he climbed the steps.

I grabbed his moist hand and helped him over the high railings. The gate was padlocked.

“Thanks.” He explained how he had been caught by the black buns and had been hustled into the well.

“Why did they do it?”

“Who knows.”

We walked in the back door. A maid came out of the kitchen and glanced at us curiously before walking away. In the light from the gas mantle in the corridor I took a closer look at the victim. At that stage I did not know his name, but I knew his face. Hamish Malahide had the worst acne I had ever seen, or have ever seen since. He had spots everywhere, from his forehead to his chin. They clustered thickly round his nose and below his bottom lip. His neck and jawbone were rashed with them. He even seemed to have spots in his hair. His face looked so angry and sore, not to say repellent, that one wanted to flinch. I saw later the boils on his back, the large red buttons, the hard pink wens of incipient pustules.

I did not flinch, in fact, but he would not have noticed anyway, preoccupied as he was with the state of his clothes.

“I’ll have to change,” he said. “Bastards.”

“Why don’t you tell Minto? He said we should report bullying.”

He looked at me. “New rat?”

“Yes.”

“Minto would flog them, I suppose, but he always flogs the fellow who clypes as well.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not worth it. You’ll understand when you see how Minto flogs.”

“Why does he flog the victim?”

“Makes sense. He has a quieter life. He knows that when someone does complain it’s really serious.”

He smiled. He had large uneven teeth. He had fair hair and a pale skin that somehow made his acne seem worse. He was an ugly boy.

“What’s your name?”

“Todd.”

“I’m Malahide. Thanks for not slashing on me, Todd.” He paused. “I won’t forget it. Ever.”

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