Any Human Heart - Composition

Composition

Boyd had previously written a novel as a memoir (The New Confessions – 1988) and the hoax biography of an invented artist, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, in which the character of Logan Mountstuart was first mentioned in 1998. Boyd claimed that he, as biographer, had first heard of the painter through the work of a little-known British writer, of whom a black-and-white photograph Boyd had found in a French second-hand shop was included. The caption identified the chubby man as "Logan Mountstuart in 1952". Boyd described him as,

a curious and forgotten figure in the annals of 20th-century literary life. ‘A man of letters’ is probably the only description which does justice to his strange career – by turns acclaimed or wholly indigent. Biographer, belletrist, editor, failed novelist, he was perhaps most successful at happening to be in the right place at the right time during most of the century, and his journal – a huge, copious document – will probably prove his lasting memorial.

Boyd distinguished journal, biography, and memoir as literary forms, different treatments of the same essential subject, the human condition, the change in medium justified his writing again of a whole-life view : "I don't think there's anything wrong with going back over territory you've previously covered."

Boyd, though avowedly not an (auto-)biographical novelist, acknowledged that personal experiences often subconsciously affect a writer's fiction. As in several of Boyd's novels there are parallels with the author's life: both Boyd and Mountstuart lived in Africa and France, studied at Oxford, worked in literary London and had a taste of New York. Boyd usually splits the creation of a novel into two phases: research and writing. The first phase of Any Human Heart took thirty months as he carefully plotted Mountstuart's life to be significant but seem random, a period during which he bought several hundred books. He spent another year and a half writing the book.