William Boyd's photographic memory of a life well lived

Earlier this year, Andrew O’Hagan published his Man Booker longlisted The Illuminations. Now, coincidentally, the prizewinning writer and gifted storyteller William Boyd weighs in with his latest, the much-anticipated Sweet Caress: The Many Lives Of Amory Clay, in which his eponymous photographer narrator relates her life story. And what a story it is, observed through the wide-angle lens of great events of the 20th century, from the decadence of Weimar Germany and brutal fascist marches in the east end of London, to the Blitz and the Vietnam War.

Amory’s fictive autobiography is the feminist version of Logan Mountstuart, protagonist of Boyd’s 2002 masterpiece Any Human Heart. This was another dazzlingly written, invented life, mixing fact and fiction, which dates back to Boyd’s fictional autobiography, The New Confessions (1987). Reading Amory’s story brings to mind Mountstuart’s remark that “every person’s life is an aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck they’ve had in that life”.

Unlike O’Hagan’s central figure – almost-famous, avant-garde photographer Anne Quirk, who is fading, like an old sepia print, into terminal dementia – Amory’s memory is pin-sharp, as focused as her photographs. These include nudes in Berlin’s brothels and images of dead German soldiers from the Second World War, in France, when Amory became one of the first women war photographers. There’s even a stint as a fashion photographer and, finally, her award-winning reportage from Vietnam.

Amory’s “photographs” are scattered throughout the book in what the French describe as “phototexte”, a stylistic trope that has been used by writers from Virginia Woolf and, most notably, W G Sebald to Dave Eggers, Michel Faber and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Boyd and O’Hagan’s novels could not be more different, although both also deal with the tragic aftermath of war. Sixty-three-year-old Boyd’s compelling, beautifully written book has, however, not been Booker nominated – as Professor John Sutherland predicted in an early review.

“This is yet one more candidate for William Boyd’s sizeable list of contenders for the ‘Best Books that Never Won the Booker’... Chances are the Man Booker judges will, as usual, pass it by,” wrote Sutherland. And they did. Which is clearly not giving Boyd, who recently took on the mantle of James Bond in his novel, Solo, cause for concern. He is speaking from his Chelsea home during a flying visit to London from his house – and vineyard – in France, where he and his screenwriter wife, Susan, always summer. The couple met as students at Glasgow University, have no children but share a long, happy marriage.

The courtly-mannered Boyd, who exudes charm even down the phone, has yet to read O’Hagan’s novel, partly inspired by the life of the late Scottish-Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins. When I mention her, Boyd says: “It’s like all these forgotten women photographers are just waiting to be discovered. Amory Clay is based on the legion of 20th-century women photographers and photojournalists, who I discovered had made a living and a reputation alongside their male counterparts.”

There is therefore much to discuss about Sweet Caress. The title comes from the novel’s French epigraph, which in translation reads, “However long your stay on this small planet lasts, and whatever happens during it, the most important thing is that – from time to time – you feel life’s sweet caress.” This is attributed to “Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, Avis de passage (1957).” Do not waste time, as I did, Googling Charbonneau’s name, labouring under the illusion that he must be some sexy French intellectual – he is in fact one of Amory’s lovers, an entirely fictional sexy French intellectual.

But we begin with those photographs – grainy, black-and-white and used like vintage snapshots to punctuate Amory’s story: her mother on a beach, her father doing a handstand, even a portrait of Charbonneau. Where did Boyd find them, particularly that frontispiece image – a rather tattered picture of a slender, lovely young woman, in a black bathing-suit, dancing in a pool? It’s captioned, “Amory Clay in 1928”.

“They are all found images,” responds Boyd. “I’ve always collected anonymous old photographs in junk shops and at car boot sales, particularly in France. The French seem to sell family albums willy-nilly, so I started buying them. You can even buy old photographs online now. But this one on the frontispiece was just perfect for Amory as the woman in it seemed to be around 20-years-old and I write that Amory was born in 1908. [She dies in 1983.] A friend knew I was looking for images for a new novel I was researching. He found this one – it’s actually tiny – lying in the road at a bus stop in Dulwich about four years ago.”

It has since emerged that the photograph may be of renowned film director Martha Fiennes, sister of the actor Ralph Fiennes, although she told the Telegraph last week that she has no memory of wearing such a swimsuit or having the photograph taken. Nonetheless, she “recognised” her body and profile. Meanwhile Boyd hopes that others might identify anonymous faces among the “lost” photographs that he’s used to illustrate Amory’s story.

“One of the amazing things about researching this novel was that I discovered this hidden world of women photographers, who were also writers and journalists,” he says. “If you were a historian of photography, you might know their names, but I didn’t. It really is a forgotten sorority and I still keep coming across more and more of them. It is a very interesting facet of photographic history that between the wars it was a very open profession, very egalitarian. There was no glass ceiling.

“Gerda Taro, for instance, was covering the Spanish Civil War with Robert Capa, her colleague and companion. There are many other famous women photographers – Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus, Lee Miller, of whom we’ve all heard – but it was a revelation for me to dig deep and find the names of amazing women, in Vienna, in the early 20th century, for instance Dora Kalmuss, Trude Fleischmann, Grete Kollner. I looked at their work and I was astonished.”

In an age when everyone with a mobile phone thinks they are Annie Leibowitz, Boyd’s rediscovery of these exemplary yet shadowy women, all listed in his Acknowledgements (I recommend the sheer pleasure of researching them, their stunning photographs and incredible life stories when you finish reading the novel) reminds us that photography truly is an art.

It has long been an interest of Boyd’s. He wrote an introduction to a book of anonymous photographs as a result of his monograph, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, in which he recounted the tragic story of the gifted abstract expressionist, and sometime lover of Peggy Guggenheim, who, faced with the inescapable truth of his mediocrity, destroyed 99% of his own work and then committed suicide. The book – the first time Boyd illustrated his work with found photographs – was launched at a glamorous Manhattan party in Jeff Koons’s studio, completely fooling the assembled “glitter-scenti” before it was duly exposed as a fraud.

Nat Tate, he says, was a dry run for Sweet Caress. “I’ve since become fascinated with photography’s true nature as an art form and have written a lot about it. When I came up with the character of Amory and the plan to write another ‘whole life’ novel, about a woman, I wondered, ‘What sort of job can she do?’ Then I thought, ‘I know, I’ll make her a photographer.’ So I had to have lots of images that she would have taken, as well as snapshots of her family and friends.

“That was kind of unprecedented in fiction, because I don’t think any other novel has ever used 73 black-and-white photographs. It enhances the fiction in a curious way, blurring the boundaries between it and reality. I’m still trying to work out what is happening with this novel. You are actually the first person I’ve talked to about it, so your feedback is much appreciated.”

It was, he says, a strange act of parallel creation, writing the book and finding the photographs. “I knew I wanted Amory to go to Vietnam and finding shots from there is phenomenally difficult. Most of the great photographs are owned by agencies. I had a massive amount of fun and frustration trying to find some.

“I bought a bundle of 800 photographs from the late 1960s in Vietnam – two carrier bags full for $10 – and I got only one or two out of them, but they were fantastic. Looking for images knowingly, slowly but surely in the course of writing the book, I brought together a considerable collection, then selected those I felt resonated with the narrative. I want people to forget this is fiction. I want them to believe it is real, that Amory was a real artist when it came to photography. Just as I want them to believe that Logan Mountstuart is real when they read Any Human Heart.”

Boyd once harboured an ambition to be an artist himself – though he says he’s no photographer – and works both as an art critic and occasional painter. Indeed, in the hallway of his art-and-book-filled London home there are five drawings he did in the name of Nat Tate, “proving how credible a pure fiction can be”.

Born in Ghana to Scottish parents – his father a doctor, his mother a teacher, and both middle-class Fifers – and educated at Gordonstoun and Glasgow University, Boyd became an Oxford don, teaching English and publishing two novels and a short story collection within 18 months in 1981-82. He won the Whitbread award for his first novel, A Good Man In Africa, which was shortlisted for the Booker.

In 1983, he appeared in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list and a mantelpiece in one or other of his homes is certainly groaning beneath the weight of many prestigious prizes, although not that elusive Booker. He’s also had a dozen television and film screenplays made, including his acclaimed, BAFTA-winning adaptation of Any Human Heart for Channel 4.

What will happen to Amory’s gallery of photographs? An exhibition perhaps? A glossy coffee-table book?

“All I can say is you are not far off with either suggestion,” replies Boyd. “Watch this space.”

Sweet Caress: The Many Lives Of Amory Clay, by William Boyd, is published by Bloomsbury, £18.99. William Boyd is at the Mitchell Theatre, Glasgow, on September 3; http://bit.ly/1MJsaIw for ticket details

ENDS