William Boyd - The New Confessions

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Chapter One

My heart beat vigorously with anticipation. The first sentences, the first paragraph … what would they be like? I read.

I am now entering on a task which is without precedent and which when achieved will have no imitator. I am going to show my fellow creatures a man in all the integrity of nature; and that man shall be myself.

Yes. Myself! I know my own heart and have studied mankind. I am not made like anyone I have seen. I do not believe there is another man like me in existence.

I had to set the page down, such was my emotion. My heart clubbed, struggled violently in my chest. My God.… I felt drugged, intoxicated, almost swooning.

I know I was in every possible way in reduced circumstances. Like a parched man in the desert coming across a spring of fresh water. But I have never read such an opening to a book, have never been so powerfully and immediately engaged. Who was this man? Whose was this voice that spoke to me so directly, whose brazen immodesty rang with such candid integrity? I read on, mesmerized. Ten pages were all Karl-Heinz had supplied this time. I read and reread them. But the suspense was insufferable, agonizing. I had to wait two restless days for the next installment.

Karl-Heinz “fed” me the entire book over the next seven weeks. The metaphor is exact. The thin wads of pages were like crucial scraps of nutrition. I devoured them. I masticated, swallowed and digested that book. I cracked its bones and sipped its marrow; every fiber of meat, every cartilaginous nodule of gristle was dined on with gourmandising fervor. I have never read before or since with such miserly love and profound concentration. I paid for half that book with lingering chaste kisses, but the remaining portion was purchased more orthodoxly. I received my first Red Cross parcel. There had been some pilfering but I was left with a scarf, a pair of socks, a one-pound plum pudding and a bag of peppermints. Parcels began to arrive once a fortnight. I gave away my food for a book.

And the book? You will have recognized the unmistakable tones of Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Confessions . I was seized and captivated by this extraordinary autobiography — so intensely I could have been reading about myself. Buy it, read it and you will see what I mean. I knew nothing of Rousseau, nothing of his life, his work, his ideas, and precious little about eighteenth-century Europe, but the voice was so fresh, the candor so moving and unusual, it made no difference. Here was the story of the first truly honest man. The first modern man. Here was the life of the individual spirit recounted in all its nobility and squalor for the first time in the history of the human race. When I set the dog-eared stack of pages down at the end of my seven-week, fervid read, I wept. Then I started reading it again. This man spoke for all of us suffering mortals, our vanities, our hopes, our moments of greatness and our base corrupted natures.

Pause. Stop. Reflect. We will come back to The Confessions . Suffice it to say that at this juncture the book released me from prison, metaphorically speaking. Rousseau and his autobiography delivered me. I never forgot that precious exceptional gift. The book, as you will see, was to become my life.

Karl-Heinz found it hard to understand my fervent gratitude.

“I can get another book if you like.”

“God, no! That’s enough. I just need the one.”

“What’s so special about this book?”

I tried to explain but I could see it made no sense to him. I think he thought I had become slightly demented by my imprisonment. Perhaps I was. I have to say that a kind of love had grown up in me for Karl-Heinz — not carnal in the least, but not simply fraternal either. I cared for him in an odd way and found his lazy corruption (I discovered later he had been pilfering my parcels), his casual attempt at seducing me, surprisingly unreprehensible. I suppose our long dry kisses did bring us together. Even though he was some years older than me I felt as I imagine the father did for the Prodigal Son, say a week after he had returned home and the remains of the fatted calf had finally been consumed. The passion had died and there was an odds-on chance that the boy would go to the bad again, but somehow he was still enfolded and protected by a blanket of tolerant paternal affection. I think this is about as close as I can get to expressing the way I felt about Karl-Heinz.

One day in May I was pacing erratically round the exercise yard when Karl-Heinz’s head and shoulders appeared above the palisade.

“Good news,” he said. “They have confirmed your story. You’re going to transfer.”

I felt suddenly, strangely unsettled at this information.

“Where?” I asked.

“A camp for British officers. In Mainz.”

Later that day this was officially confirmed by the camp commandant, a man who I had only seen once before, on arrival, some six months earlier. He was thin and sickly looking, his collar loose around his scrawny neck. His tone was semi-apologetic; he used once or twice the adjective “regrettable.”

I had one more meeting with Karl-Heinz before I left. He escorted me to the gymnasium washroom for my morning shave. He seemed entirely unaffected by my departure, which rather irritated me. (I suppose this was vanity. I was reluctant to accept that his sexual interest in me was simply opportunism.) I made him write my name and address on a piece of paper and promise to contact me once the war was over.

“Of course,” he said politely. “That would be fun.”

“Give me your address.”

“I don’t have one yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“All I know is that when I get out of this uniform I will be in Berlin.” He said this with unusual vehemence. Then he laughed. “Go to Berlin and ask where is Karl-Heinz Kornfeld. They will tell you.”

I did not see him again. A day later I was marched back to the station — up the hill to town, through the cobbled streets — and put on the train for Mainz.

The new camp was in a barracks on a hill overlooking the city. From the window of our room we had a pleasant view of the cathedral and the Rhine. Compared to the gloom and deprivation of Weilburg, the camp at Mainz was a hotel. Six hundred English officers were held there. We slept ten to a room in an atmosphere that was half boarding school — hearty conviviality — and half Boy Scout camp — all ingenious make-do-and-mend. Officers were allowed to cash one 5-pound check a month at a Swiss bank in town, and with that money we could modestly supplement our rations (almost the same as at Weilburg) with purchases from a small canteen: fish and liver pastes, plum jam, packets of dehydrated soup. With the usual relish that the British seem to exhibit when forcibly confined, the place boasted more educational possibilities than the average university. Classes, seminars and study groups existed in every subject from Aramaic to Zoroastrianism. There was a theater club, a light-opera society and a debating competition with dozens of teams that seemed to run for months. There was a well-stocked library and, of course, a literary society for those who wished to talk about what they had read.

I went to the library from time to time. On the advice of others I borrowed and tried to read Maupassant, Turgenev and Walter Pater. I read them listlessly and with no enthusiasm. Having been burned by the flame of The Confessions , I found the alternatives pallid and lukewarm. I abandoned the library. My brain was still full of Rousseau’s life and words. My memory was haunted by those last weeks in Weilburg and, oddly, with the image of Karl-Heinz. Was it there in Mainz, in the tedious stuffy summer evenings when we were confined to our airless dormitories, that the first glimmerings of the enterprise that was later to dominate my life was conceived?… In all honesty I do not think so. I had no idea what I was going to do. In my empty docile moods I did not even think of “after the war,” far less of a career or prospects. I lived monotonously in the present. I cashed my checks, bartered the contents of my food parcels, played kabuki, dumb crambo and gin rummy and — a measure of how alien my mood was — I learned to play the banjo quite proficiently. Eighteen months later, in London at a party, someone brought along a banjo. I picked it up, people gathered round expectantly (I had been loud about my accomplishments), but I discovered to my embarrassment I could not play a single tune. It was as if some twin or sibling had learned the instrument, some ghostly edition of myself. The skill was fixed and localized both temporally and historically — Mainz, 1918—beyond that it disappeared.