Read The New Confessions Online
Authors: William Boyd
Our house that December was bedlam. Sonia and Lily were fully occupied with the girls—Emmeline and Annabelle—and for a while I had to oversee the two boys. For some reason Frau Mittenklott—who had followed us from Rudolfplatz—had been given responsibility for the Christmas decorations. There was a vast green fir tree in the drawing room, burning real candles and hung with real cakes and a kind of decorative shortbread. Smaller replicas stood in the hall and dining room. Furthermore boughs had been hewn from other conifers and were suspended wherever possible above doors, windows and staircases. The air was thick with resinous piny fumes that made my eyes sting and reminded me of my father’s antiseptic experiments. Heavy swags of redvelvet ribbon were draped above the fireplaces and from every projecting ledge, picture frame and table corner the good woman had set or hung miniature presents—matchboxes wrapped in bright paper and filled with raisins or nuts to be unwrapped by the children whenever the anticipation proved too much or the wait too long. This was the whimsical custom, so Frau Mittenklott informed me, in the village where she had been born and raised. Our house seemed the very paradigm of festivity, bright symbol of the Christmas season itself. The misery was capped,
though my duties diminished, when Vincent and Noreen Shorrold arrived from London to share our joy.
On Christmas Day 1926 we were all present in the sitting room. John James Todd, the film director; his wife, Sonia; their four children—Vincent, Hereford, Emmeline and Annabelle—the nurse, Lily Maid-bow; and the in-laws, Mr, and Mrs. Shorrold, In the kitchen Frau Mittenklott was cooking a goose, three rabbits, a suckling pig—a whole farmyard of animals, as far as I know. I had just opened my present from Sonia. A pipe. A ghastly curved meerschaum with a carved yellow bowl the size of a coffee cup and—this is true—red and green tassels hanging from it.
“I can’t smoke
this
!” I said, shocked, to Sonia.
“Course you can, Johnny,” Vincent Shorrold said. “Nothing like a pipe for a man.”
“And what on earth does that mean? But—seriously—I can’t put this thing in my mouth. I’d be a laughingstock.”
“Here, I’ll get it going for you, boy,” Vincent Shorrold said, and took it from me. He proceeded to fill it with what looked like fistfuls of shag from his own pouch.
“That’s a right big smoke, that’s for sure,” he said as he tamped down the tobacco with his thumbs. “There’s a tin and a half of ready-rubbed in there.” He put it in his mouth. I saw his jaw muscles clench as they took the strain.
“Fair weight,” he commented. “Give you a right stiff neck, this will.”
It took him five or six matches and as many minutes to ignite the compacted mass of tobacco. The room was soon blue with gently shifting strata of smoke. The twins began to cry, their pure new eyes stinging. I sat very still in my chair, my face fixed. The women looked on with admiration as Vincent Shorrold fumed and blew, thick smoke snorting, apparently, from every orifice in his head.
“Grand cool draw,” he said, coming over, sucking and blowing. “It’ll be going for a couple of hours yet.” He held the vile object out to me, its little tassels swinging, its stem gleaming with Shorrold saliva.
“Have a puff, John,” Sonia said.
“Go on, Johnny,” said her mother.
The telephone rang.
I threw myself from the chair and strode urgently to answer it (why did we—why do people—keep a telephone in the hall?). I snatched the receiver from its cradle.
“Yes?”
“Jamie?”
“Yes.” It was Doon. I felt my entire body tremble. I sat down very slowly.
“Did you …” She paused. She sounded upset. “Did you mean what you said that night?”
“What night?”
She hung up. I knew what night, of course. I swore at myself for not thinking faster. But how could I think at all in this farcical Christmas grotto of a house? I put on my overcoat and a hat and went back into the drawing room. Shorrold was relighting the pipe.
“John?” Sonia said, surprised at my appearance.
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Problems … Karl-Heinz. He’s ill.”
“But there’s dinner.”
“Save some for me. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Exultantly, I went outside. There had been some snow earlier in the week but it had thawed. It was a cold dull afternoon as I drove towards the Kurfürstendamm, Schulter Strasse and Doon’s apartment.
There was no reply. I knocked again. I pressed my ear to the cold door listening for signs of movement within.
A neat young man carrying a new briefcase came up the stairs.
“Are you looking for Miss Bogan?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You’ve just missed her. I passed her in the street on my way here. You might catch her. She’s heading north. Up towards the Knie.”
I spotted her as she crossed the busy intersection at Schiller and Grolmanstrasse. She was wearing a leather coat and a small-brimmed brown felt hat pulled hard down on her head. I thought she must be going to the Schiller-Theater but she passed that by. Why did I not approach her in the street? Run up behind her, tap her on the shoulder?… Because I felt suddenly weak and uncertain, now that I saw her tall figure again, striding so purposefully. Why had she telephoned me after months of silence? What had she meant by her question? I knew what I had said that night, so why now did she want the statement confirmed? I could provide no convincing answers to these questions apart from wishful ones, so I followed her discreetly as we walked through the cold quiet streets, even more deserted now as we moved further from the west end and into the industrial district of Lutzow. She turned right at the Landwehr-Kanal, with the sprawl of the Siemens electrical works opposite, and went through the doorway of what looked like a meeting hall or Low Church chapel.
I paused. The granite afternoon light was fading. The canal looked solid and very cold, as if the water was viscous, at the freezing point. I stood there dithering, getting colder by the minute. Some more people went into the hall. I had no gloves or scarf with me. Should I wait? She might be hours.… I went in.
At the far end of a thin vestibule a young man sat behind a table. He was wearing an overcoat, a roll-neck sweater and a soft brown hat of quite good quality. There were some papers in front of him.
“Afternoon,” I said.
“Are you a member?” He had a square bulging jaw that needed shaving.
“I want to join,” I improvised. “I came to meet Miss Bogan.”
He was impressed by the name. “Oh, good. Excellent. There should be no problem.”
He rummaged in the desk drawer and produced a form. “That’ll be two hundred marks,” he said. “Fill that in and I can give you a temporary card now. We’ll send the official one later.”
What kind of a club was this? I wondered as I handed in the money. I could hear indistinct conversation from the hall. The neighborhood was so drab—too drab for pornography. I filled in half the form—name, address, profession—before I thought to ask what the letters at its head stood for.
The man looked suddenly wary.
“The Revolutionary Artists’ Association,” he said. “Of the KPD.”
The Communist party. “Of course.” I managed a laugh of sorts. “What am I thinking about?”
He filled in my name on a square of cardboard and carefully stamped and initialed its reverse. He stood up and shook my hand.
“Welcome,” he said, then gestured at the door. “The meeting’s just starting.”
There must have been over two hundred people inside, mainly men, but with a fair representation of women. So many artists? I thought. I could see nothing of Doon. I edged diffidently in, pressed my back to a wall and waited. A thin man on a rostrum spoke passionately in clichés. I lost interest in seconds. In those days I was indifferent to politics, creeds and dogmas. Politics especially—I had not yet become one of its hapless victims. As Chekhov puts it, I wanted only to be a free artist. So as I scanned the faces of the audience, intent and earnest, impassive and mobile, I noted only that some of them were well-to-do; these were not
all workers or students. I wondered what it was about them or the occasion that drew Doon here.
Speakers changed but the tone of voice and diminished vocabulary remained the same. There was vehement applause at the end of every speech. And then Doon got up on the rostrum. I listened to what she had to say. She attacked the institution of Christmas and, thinking of the travesty my own home had become, found myself loudly applauding all the predictable ideological grievances. She wound up with a plea for donations to party funds. She would be passing among us, she said, taking a collection.
I waited for Doon to reach me. Four people were going through the audience with wooden boxes as the meeting’s business was ponderously concluded by the thin man who had begun it all. I kept changing my position and thus made two donations before Doon and I finally met.
I felt a poignant helplessness suffuse my body as I stuffed notes into her box. To my credit, and my joy, she colored. Admiring noises came from others at my party-spirited largess.
“Thank you, comrade,” she said. Then in a lower voice, “What’re you doing here?”
“I followed you. After you called. I had to see you.”
“Are you a member?”
“Yes.”
“How long? I thought you were a cynic.”
“Oh, not so long.… People are allowed to change their minds, you know.”
“Wait for me at the end.”
I was wrong about it finishing. That meeting ran on for three hours. By its conclusion I was overpoweringly hungry. My stomach was audible at three yards, my mouth awash with saliva as I thought helplessly of Frau Mittenklott’s Christmas rum grog, her rabbit paprika and her
Schokoladenstrudel
.
It was night when Doon and I finally left. We walked back towards her flat, she talking overanimatedly of the cell, the cause, the struggle, the comrades. I let her natter on—she had slipped her hand through mine and I was close enough to smell her lavender perfume. Eventually I could stand it no longer and steered her into a small cellar café.
I ordered two coffees with kirsch and whipped cream and ate two large but rather solid slices of yesterday’s date torte. Then I put my hand on hers.
“Doon,” I asked, “why did you phone?”
“I shouldn’t have.”
“But you did.”
“God.… I don’t know. I was feeling blue. Fucking Christmas. I hate it.… I left Alex. Two weeks ago. I was sitting waiting for the meeting and I thought I’d—Shit. It was silly of me.”
My mouth was dry. “I still mean it.”
She lit a cigarette. She seemed uneasy now.
“It’s sweet of you to say that, Jamie.” She was trying to be composed. “But you don’t have to. Not on my account. Can I have another coffee?”
“But I
do
. I’ve known it since I saw you that first day in the Metropol.”
She looked down, blew a strong jet of smoke away to her left.
“But you’re a married man. You’ve got two kids—”
“Four. Now.”
“
Jesus!
Four?”
“Sonia had twins three weeks ago.”
“My God. Well, there you are.… It’s useless. We shouldn’t even be talking about it. I should never have called.”
She continued listing objections. I felt short of oxygen, like Duric Lodokian. I was breathing through mouth and nose but my lungs still felt starved of air. I had to divert her from the wife-and-children topic. She paused to take off her hat.
“See, I kept it blond. Memories of
Julie.
”
The idea seemed to fly up in my face, like a game bird started from heather.
“I was going to get in touch anyway,” I said slowly. “I want you to be in my new film. With Karl-Heinz again.”
“Oh yes. I read about it. But what part is there for me?”
“Someone called Madame de Warens.”
“I don’t know.…”
“You’d be wonderful.”
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea. What’s the film called again?”
“
The Confessions.
”
Emilia has been acting strangely, lately. It’s all to do with that hole in the shutter, I’m sure. One day she was taciturn. Then yesterday she
came wearing lipstick and some unattractive wooden earrings. I sense too that she doesn’t like Ulrike. It’s curious how women can become so proprietorial. I told her Ulrike had permission to use the beach. She was clearly irritated by this. I can’t be bothered trying to work out what’s going on. Could it be—however absurd it sounds—that she’s jealous? My God.…
It’s time I told you something of Jean Jacques Rousseau, for those of you unfamiliar with him. First I will give you the public image, the official version, one we can swiftly forget. Unfortunately my library here is impoverished. I can only quote from A
Students’ Guide to European Philosophy
by one Dr. Ida Milby-Low (M.A., D. Phil., Oxford), published in 1934. I apologize, but this is the mere husk of the man we are interested in. Bear with me.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712. His father was a watchmender [a watchmaker, in fact] and his mother died immediately after his birth. He received no regular education, but such as he had in the formative years of his life was augmented by a reading of French novels kept in his father’s library. In Rousseau’s infancy his father was obliged to quit Geneva as a consequence of a quarrel and the young Jean Jacques was placed first in the care of a country parson and subsequently an uncle. After a turbulent adolescence he was apprenticed to an engraver, who attempted vainly to discipline him. Deeply unhappy, Rousseau made his escape from this employer and fled from Switzerland to Annecy in Savoy, where he shortly made the acquaintance of one Mme. de Warens, a woman of facile morals [this is the voice of Miss Milby-Low—spinster don, I predict, with a moustache, and whose sole vices are a rare cigarette and a secret tipple from that sherry bottle in her desk drawer].
Mme. de Warens directed Rousseau to Turin, where he was converted to Roman Catholicism and was employed as a domestic servant by two prosperous aristocratic families. He might have risen to become the steward of one of these households had not his perennial instability caused him to run away again. He fled his responsibilities once more, back to Annecy and Mme. de Warens, who became, in Rousseau’s own parlance, his “
Maman.
”
There now followed a succession of temporary employments and wanderings. Rousseau took up music as his main career and worked intermittently as a chorister. He even composed an opera during this uncertain period of fleeting attachments to adventurers, which took
him to Lausanne and Paris. Each time he returned inevitably to Mme. de Warens whom he had lived with first at Chambéry and then at Les Charmettes, a charming country house nearby. Rousseau continued his education here, in a period of some tranquillity, through a self-imposed course of various indiscriminate reading. Emotionally, however, his life was less calm. Mme. de Warens had introduced into her household a man named Witzenreid. Rousseau found himself unable to share his “
Maman
” with another and left Les Charmettes to take up work as an itinerant tutor. He had written little by this stage of his life and was quite unconscious of his genius.
In 1742 he decided to try and make his fortune in Paris on the strength of a new system of musical notation that he had devised. This was never popular and Rousseau remained ignored. In 1744 he took up with one Thérèse le Vasseur, an ignorant girl of low class [the voice of the senior common room again] who became the mother of his children.
Rousseau earned his living by copying music, secretarial work and the very limited success of his operatic comedies. In 1749, Diderot (q.v.) invited him to contribute to the French Encyclopedia (q.v.), wherein Rousseau wrote the articles on music and political economy. Thus he was drawn into the society of French intellectuals such as d’Alembert and F. M. Grimm, a German of gross impiety.
The first thirty-eight years of Rousseau’s life were passed in almost total obscurity. He occupied a succession of menial jobs and probably would have been content to remain with the
encyclopédistes’
claque (who contrived to find the amiable civilization of monarchical France too despotic for their taste) had he not emerged as a figure of fame and renown with his
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
. In this he asserted—with improbable eloquence obscuring the unlikely paradox—that man is happier in a savage natural state than in an advanced civilized one. He became the toast of Paris and his
Discourse
proved to be the passport he sought to high society. [He did not
seek
this.]
In the meantime Thérèse le Vasseur had borne him five children, all of whom, and with no qualms, Rousseau had abandoned in succession at the door of the foundling hospital in Paris.
Fame and its trappings, however, consorted uneasily with the man who had enjoined the “noble savage” as an exemplary model for mankind. Rousseau returned to Geneva in 1754, promptly renounced his Catholicism and became a Calvinist and a citizen once
more. His retreat did not last long. Society and its rich patrons proved to be too strong an allure and Rousseau accepted the offer of Mme. d’Épinay to occupy the Hermitage, a pleasant cottage on her estate in the forest of Montmorency. The peace and quiet of the countryside delighted him, but it was not too last. Mme. d’Épinay desired his company; Diderot and Grimm besought him to return to the salons of Paris; and then Rousseau fell in love with Mme. d’Épinay’s sister, the Comtesse d’Houdetot, who was mistress of the noble soldier-poet Saint-Lambert. This led first to complications, then to tension and recrimination, concluding in bitter acrimony among the participants.
With surprising ease Rousseau found another patron, the Maréchal de Luxembourg. Upon him now fell the honour of providing the philosopher and his doxy with a home [this is academic bitchery at its worst]. But new heights of celebrity awaited Rousseau. Within a period of eighteen months (1761–62) three large works were published:
The New Héloïse, Émile
and
The Social Contract
They presented revolutionary views on all the topics most vital to humanity and society: government, education, religion, sexual morality, family life, the source of our deep emotions and love.
This was Rousseau’s
annus mirabilis
but, as so often with the man, it brought only disaster in its train. Unorthodox views of religion expounded in
Emile
(a treatise of education in the form of a novel) offended the authorities. The book was condemned and a warrant was issued for its author’s arrest. Rousseau, however, was given every opportunity to escape and he proceeded quickly to Switzerland. But he was no longer welcome there and so moved to Neuchâtel, then Prussian territory. He lived quietly there in rural seclusion, began writing his
Confessions
and received occasional visitors, among whom was the young Scotsman James Boswell, later biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson (q.v.).
Conscious of the fragile nature of his state of exile in Neuchâtel, Rousseau accepted the generous invitation of David Hume (q.v.), the philosopher, to come and live in England. He settled at Wootton Hall near Ashbourne. By this time the persecution complex from which he had always suffered took greater hold on him and degenerated to a chronic form of delusional insanity. He became convinced that Hume—his benefactor—was in fact plotting against him, and grew jealous of his fame. Rousseau accused him of intercepting his mail and a violent quarrel ensued, with Rousseau and Mlle, le Vasseur returning to the Continent. Then followed a nomadic period of
brief sojourns in provincial France before Rousseau settled finally in Paris, tolerated and unmolested by an indulgent and forgiving government. He completed his
Confessions
(which was published posthumously) and composed the famous
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques
and the serene
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
.
In Rousseau’s
Confessions
the bizarre compulsion to tell unsparingly the whole and entire truth about oneself was more original than edifying, but the more contemplative
Reveries
gave rise to a sense of pity for a man who Was, it must be admitted, his own worst enemy. He was a man in whom astonishing gifts were marred and undermined by serious defects of character and judgment. Selfishness and paranoia, vanity and reckless opportunism, base ingratitude, passion and prejudice ruled this simple, intermittently sagacious thinker. It is indeed true that Rousseau and his works irrevocably altered European thought and sensibility, but it must be adjoined that it was not always for the better. He died on July 2, 1778, at Ermenonville, of an apoplectic fit.