John Fowles (1926-2005)

English novelist and essayist, master of layered story-telling, illusionism,

and purposefully ambiguous endings. Among Fowles's best-known novels are
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN (1969), adapted into screen in 1981,
and THE MAGUS (1965), which has gained a cult status. His protagonists must
often confront their past, self-delusions and illusions, in order to gain their
personal freedom or peace of mind.
"'I must know the real truth, the truth beyond magic.'
'There
is
no
truth
beyond
magic,'
said
the
king.
"
(from The Magus, 1965)
The Collector gained a huge success and since its publication Fowles
devoted himself entirely to writing. The narrative alternates between the
viewpoints of the two protagonists, Freddie Clegg, is in his middle twenties,
orphaned child, and a collector of butterflies. After winning a national football
lottery, he uses his winnings to purchase a secluded Tudor mansion with a
fortresslike cellar. He kidnaps and imprisons a young woman, Miranda Grey, a
lively art student. The strong-willed Miranda, whose name refers to Prosperos
daughter in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, keeps a diary, records their
conversations, and plans her escape, while Clegg wants to win her "respect." She
gains small victories, calls Freddie "Caliban", and dies without her freedom. At
the finale the collector plays with the idea of repeating his performance.
The story had two sources. Fowles had seen a performance of Bartk's
Bluebeard's Castle, in which a man imprisoned women underground, and he had
read a true story of a London boy, who captured a girl and kept her several
moths in an air-raid shelter. Clegg's narrative provides the frame of the story, but
Fowles offers also Miranda's point of view, her diary. In the film version Terence
Stamp played Clegg, although he first thought the character was impossible for
him. Samantha Eggar did not have much acting experience, but she got the role
of Miranda. Stanley Mann and John Kohn wrote the screenplay. John Fowles,
who found the script "a pleasant surprise," doctored some dialogue. Wyler also
followed Fowles's suggestion and eliminated all the background music in the
kidnap sequence. The French composer Maurice Jarre scored the film. In the
Village Voice Andrew Sarris called The Collector "the most erotic movie ever to
come out past the Production Code", but said that Wyler's direction was
"horribly impersonal."
Fowles's second novel, The Magus, used also elements The Tempest. It is
a story about Nicholas Urfe, who escapes his latest love affair on the Greek
island of Phraxos. There he meets the demonic millionaire Maurice Conchis, the
1

Prospero of the tale, and falls in love with Lily, Conchis's dead fiance or an
actress portraying her. Conchis is the master of magic and hallucinations in the
"Godgame", which leads gradually Urfe to deeper self-knowledge and re-birth.
"All my life I had turned life into fiction, to hold reality away," Urfi says.
Fowles interweaves in the story Greek myths, psychoanalysis, Nazis, and
shifting explanations of the mysterious events. Finally Urfe breaks free from
Conchis's power. However, when Fowles published the revised version twelve
years later, this point is left more ambiguous. Fowles's draft title for the book
was originally "The Godgame." In the novel he acknowledged the influence of
psychologist Carl Jung, and such literary models as Henry James's The Turn of
the Screw and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.
"One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power
because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were
successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the
commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may
persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed
without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true,
everything is permitted." (from The Magus)
The French Lieutenant's Woman grew out of a dream the author had of a
woman standing at the edge of a quay, looking out to sea. The film version of
the story from 1981 was made by Karel Reisz, starring Meryl Streep. Reiz
followed Fowles's storyline, but the modern subplot, a film within a film, was
created by Reisz and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay. "There was
trouble with the proposal scene," wrote Fowless in his diary, "and one day Karel
rang me up to see if I could help - he felt it was too curt and quick. 'Harold says
he'll do anything, but he simply can't write a happy scene.'"
The French Lieutenant's Woman, set largely in Lyme Regis in the 1860s,
re-created the Victorian melodrama and the world of Thomas Hardy. In the story
a wealthy amateur paleontologist Charles Smithson, a supporter of Darwin's
evolution theory, falls in love with Sarah Woodruff. She is a passionate and
imaginative governess, who is believed to have been deserted by a French naval
lieutenant. This affair has ostracized her from society. Another woman in
Charles's life is Ernestina Freeman, whose conformity contrasts to Sarah's
rebelliousness. Fowles moves between past and present, adds footnotes,
quotations from Darwin, Marx, and the greats Victorian poets, and comments
Victorian politics and customs. This experimental, self-conscious novel has
different endings, one heart-warming, another shocking. "In some ways the
unhappy ending pleases the novelist. He has set out on a voyage and announced,
I have failed and must set out again. If you create a happy ending, there is a
2

somewhat false sense of having solved life's problems." (Fowles in The New
York Times, November 13, 1977)
DANIEL MARTIN (1977) was about an English screenwriter's search for
himself in his past. But the work is also full of observations on aesthetics,
philosophy, cultural history, the difference between Britain and the United
States, archeology, myth. Fowles described Daniel Martin as "a very long novel
about Englishness." At one point the protagonist compares differences between
written word and films: "Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp
the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience, as if, faced with
ruins, we must turn architects, not archeologists. The word is the most imprecise
of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its
great virtue, not its defect." Daniel is engaged to Nell but he realizes that he
loves his sister Jane.
In the murder mystery A MAGGOT (1985) Fowles returned to the layered
structure of The Magus. A group of five people travels in Devon in 1736. After a
night's lodging, they continue their journey - and disappear. An investigation
starts, three members of the group are found, but their testimonies lead to a
miracle and a disturbing vision of a contact with travellers from the future.
Although Fowles's atheistic view is obvious, he also gives room for a religious
interpretation of the mystical events.
For further reading: The Fiction of John Fowles by William J. Palmer
(1974); John Fowles: Magus and Moralist by Peter Wolfe (1976); John Fowles
by Barry N. Olshen (1978); John Fowles by Robert Huffaker (1980); John
Fowles by Peter Conradi (1982); The Fiction of John Fowles by Carol M.
Barnum (1988); John Fowles: A Reference Companion by James R. Aubrey
(1991); Point of View in Fiction and Film, Focus on John Fowles by Charles
Garard (1991); Fiction of John Updike and John Fowles by John Neary (1992);
Understanding John Fowles by T.C. Foster (1994); Conversations with John
Fowles, ed. by Dianne L. Vipond (1999)
Selected works:
THE COLLECTOR, 1963 - Neitoperho (suom. Seere
Salminen) - film 1965, dir. by William Wyler, starring Terence Stamp and
Samatha Eggar

THE ARISTOS: A SELF-PORTRAIT AND IDEAS, 1964 Aristos: ksityksini elmst (suom. Tuija Rovamo)

THE MAGUS, 1965 (rev. ed. 1977) - Jumalten naamiot

(suom. Erkki Haglund)

screenplay: THE MAGUS, 1968 - film 1968, dir. by Guy

Green, starring Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, Anna
Karina.

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, 1969 Ranskalaisen luutnantin lainen (suom. Kaarina Jaatinen, Hannu Sarrala) film 1981, dir. by Karel Reisz from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring
Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

POEMS, 1973

SHIPWRECK, 1974 (photographs by the Gibsons of Scilly)

THE EBONY TOWER, 1974 - Eebenpuutorni (suom. Heimo

Pihlajamaa) - television film 1984, dir. by Robert Knights, starring
Laurence Olivier, Roger Rees, Greta Scacchi

translator: CINDERELLA by Charles Perrault, 1974

DANIEL MARTIN, 1977

translator: OURIKA by Claire de Durfort, 1977

ed.: STEEP HOLM, 1978

CONDITIONAL, 1979

ISLANDS, 1979 (photographs by Fay Godwin)

THE TREE, 1979 (photographs by Frank Horvat)

THE ENIGMA OF STONEHENGE, 1980 (photographs by

Barry Brukoff)

DON JUAN, 1981 (adaptation of the play by Molire)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LYME, 1981

ed.: MONUMENTA BRITANNICA by John Aubrey, 198182 (with Rodney Legg)

MANTISSA, 1982

A SHORT HISTORY OF LYME REGIS, 1982

LORENZACCIO, 1983 (adaptation of the play by Alfred de

Musset)

ed.: THOMAS HARDY'S ENGLAND by Jo Draper, 1984

A MAGGOT, 1985 - Ilmestys (suom. Klaus Karttunen)

4

LAND, 1985 (photographs by Fay Godwin)

MARTINE, 1985 (adaptation of a play by Jean Jacques

Bernard)

LYME REGIS CAMERA, 1991

TESSERA, 1993

WORMHOLES:
ESSAYS
WRITINGS, 1998 (with Jan Relf)

AND

OCCASIONAL

JOHN FOWLES AND NATURE, 1999 (ed. by James R.

Aubrey)
CONVERSATIONS WITH JOHN FOWLES, 1999 (ed. by
Dianne L. Vipond)

THE JOURNALS. VOLUME I, 2005

THE JOURNALS. VOLUME II, 2005

The Collector
The Collector is the story of the abduction and imprisonment of Miranda
Grey by Frederick Clegg, told first from his point of view, and then from hers by
means of a diary she has kept, with a return in the last few pages to Clegg's
narration of her illness and death.
Clegg's section begins with his recalling how he used to watch Miranda
entering and leaving her house, across the street from the town hall in which he
worked. He describes keeping an "observation diary" about her, whom he thinks
of as "a rarity," and his mention of meetings of the "Bug Section" confirms that
he is an amateur lepidopterist. On the first page, then, Clegg reveals himself to
possess the mind-set of a collector, one whose attitude leads him to regard
Miranda as he would a beautiful butterfly, as an object from which he may
derive pleasurable control, even if "collecting" her will deprive her of freedom
and life.
5

Clegg goes on to describe events leading up to his abduction of her, from

dreams about Miranda and memories of his stepparents or coworkers to his
winning a "small fortune" in a football pool. When his family emigrates to
Australia and Clegg finds himself on his own, he begins to fantasize about how
Miranda would like him if only she knew him. He buys a van and a house in the
country with an enclosed room in its basement that he remodels to make
securable and hideable. When he returns to London, Clegg watches Miranda for
10 days. Then, as she is walking home alone from a movie, he captures her,
using a rag soaked in chloroform, ties her up in his van, takes her to his house,
and locks her in the basement room.
When she awakens, Clegg finds Miranda sharper than "normal people"
like himself. She sees through some of his explanations, and recognizes him as
the person whose picture was in the paper when he won the pool. Because he is
somewhat confused by her unwillingness to be his "guest" and embarrassed by
his inadvertent declaration of love, he agrees to let her go in one month. He
attributes her resentment to the difference in their social background: "There
was always class between us."
Clegg tries to please Miranda by providing for her immediate needs. He
buys her a Mozart record and thinks, "She liked it and so me for buying it." he
fails to understand human relations except in terms of things. About her
appreciation for the music, he comments, "It sounded like all the rest to me but
of course she was musical." There is indeed a vast difference between them, but
he fails to recognize the nature of the difference because of the terms he thinks
in. When he shows her his butterfly collection, Miranda tells him that he thinks
like a scientist rather than an artist, someone who classifies and names and then
forgets about things. She sees a deadening tendency, too, in his photography, his
use of cant, and his decoration of the house. As a student of art and a maker of
drawings, her values contrast with his: Clegg can judge her work only in terms
6

of its representationalism, or photographic realism. In despair at his insensitivity

when he comments that all of her pictures are "nice," she says that his name
should be Caliban--the subhuman creature in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Miranda uses several ploys in attempts to escape. She feigns appendicitis,
but Clegg only pretends to leave, and sees her recover immediately. She tries to
slip a message into the reassuring note that he says he will send to her parents,
but he finds it. When he goes to London, she asks for a number of articles that
will be difficult to find, so that she will have time to, try to dig her way out with
a nail she has found, but that effort also is futile.
When the first month has elapsed, Miranda dresses up for what she hopes
will be their last dinner. She looks so beautiful that Clegg has difficulty
responding except with cliches and confusion. When she refuses his present of
diamonds and offer of marriage, he tells her that he will not release her after all.
She tries to escape by kicking a log out of the fire, but he catches her and
chloroforms her again, this time taking off her outer clothing while she is
unconscious and photographing her in her underwear.
Increasingly desperate, Miranda tries to kill Clegg with an axe he has left
out when he is escorting her to take a bath upstairs. She injures him, but he is
able to prevent her from escaping. Finally, she tries to seduce him, but he is
unable to respond, and leaves, feeling humiliated. He pretends that he will allow
her to move upstairs, with the stipulation that she must allow him to take
pornographic photographs of her. She reluctantly cooperates, and he
immediately develops the pictures, preferring the ones with her face cut off.
Having caught a cold from Clegg, Miranda becomes seriously ill, but
Clegg hesitates to bring a doctor to the house. He does get her some pills, but
she becomes delirious, and the first section ends with Clegg's recollection: "I
thought I was acting for the best and within my rights."
7

The second section is Miranda's diary, which rehearses the same events
from her point of view, but includes much autobiographical reflection on her life
before her abduction. She begins with her feelings over the first seven days,
before she had paper to write on. She observes that she never knew before how
much she wanted to live.
Miranda describes her thoughts about Clegg as she tries to understand
him. She describes her view of the house and ponders the unfairness of the
whole situation. She frequently remembers things said by G. P., who gradually is
revealed to be a middle-aged man who is a painter and mentor whom Miranda
admires. She re-creates a conversation with Clegg over, among other things, the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She gets him to promise to send a
contribution, but he only pretends to. She admits that he's now the only real
person in her world.
Miranda describes G. P. as the sort of person she would like to marry, or at
any rate the sort of mind. She lists various ways he has changed her think- ing,
most of which involved precepts about how to live an authentic, committed life.
Then she characterizes G. P. by telling of a time that he met her aunt and found
her so lacking in discernment and sincerity that he made Miranda feel compelled
to choose between him and her aunt. Miranda seems to choose his way of
seeing, and he subsequently offers some harsh but honest criticism of her
drawing, which seems to help her to become more self-aware and
discriminating. Her friends Antoinette and Piers fail to appreciate the art G. P.
has produced, and Miranda breaks with her Aunt Caroline over her failure to
appreciate Rembrandt. Miranda describes her growing attraction to G. P., despite
their age difference and his history of sexual infidelity. In the final episode about
him, however, G. P. confesses to being in love with her and, as a consequence,
wants to break off their friendship. She is flattered but agrees that doing so
would probably be for the best.
8

Miranda says that G. P. is "one of the few." Her aunt--and Clegg--are

implicitly among "the many," who lack creativity and authenticity. Indeed,
Miranda associates Clegg's shortcomings with "the blindness, deadness, out-ofdateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England,"
and she begins to lose hope. She gets Clegg to read Catcher in the Rye, but he
doesn't understand it. Miranda feels more alone and more desperate, and her
reflections become more philosophical. She describes her reasons for thinking
that seducing Clegg might change him, and does not regret the subsequent failed
attempt, but she fears that he now can hope only to keep her prisoner.
Miranda begins to think of what she will do if she ever gets free, including
revive her relationship with G. P. on any terms as a commitment to life. At this
point, Miranda becomes sick with Clegg's cold, literally as well as
metaphorically. As she becomes increasingly ill, her entries in the journal
become short, declarative sentences and lamentations.
The third section is Clegg's, and picks up where his first left off. He tells
of becoming worried over her symptoms and over her belief that she is dying.
When he takes her temperature, Clegg realizes how ill Miranda is and decides to
go for a doctor. As he sits in the waiting room, Clegg begins to feel insecure, and
he goes to a drugstore instead, where the pharmacist refuses to help him. When
he returns and finds Miranda worse, Clegg goes back to town in the middle of
the night, to wake a doctor; this time an inquisitive policeman frightens him off.
Miranda dies, and Clegg plans to commit suicide.
In the final section, less than three pages long, Clegg describes awakening
to a new outlook. He decides that he is not responsible for Miranda's death, that
his mistake was kidnapping someone too far above him, socially. As the novel
ends, Clegg is thinking about how he will have to do things somewhat

differently when he abducts a more suitable girl that he has seen working in
Woolworth's.

The Magus
The Magus is told from the point of view of Nicholas Urfe, who is bored
with life. Having attended Oxford and taught for a year at a public school, he
decides to take a position as the English teacher at the Lord Bryon School in
Greece, on the island of Phraxos. Nicholas looks up a former teacher there, and
is warned to "Beware of the waiting-room," without explanation. Nicholas is not
deterred, but during the last few weeks before he leaves, he meets Alison Kelly,
an Australian girl who is about to begin training as an airline stewardess. They
are both sophisticated about sex and somewhat cynical, but each experiences
some regret as they go their separate ways.
During his first six months on Phraxos, Nicholas finds the school
claustrophobic but the island beautiful. He realizes that he cannot write good
poetry and that he is having difficulty forgetting Alison. In a funk, he visits a
brothel in Athens and contracts a venereal disease. He seriously contemplates
suicide. The first of the novel's three parts ends at this point.
The mysteries begin as Nicholas goes swimming and someone leaves a
book of poems, evidently meant for him to find. As he looks in the woods
nearby, he finds a gate to a villa with a nearby sign Salle D'Attente, French for
"waiting room." One of his colleagues at the school explains that the villa is
owned by a rich recluse named Maurice Conchis. Nicholas decides to look him
up and finds, inexplicably, that he is expected. After some conversation, as
Nicholas is leaving, he finds an old-fashioned glove on the path and surmises
that someone has been watching them.
10

Invited back for the next weekend, Nicholas is astonished by Conchis'

collection of art and by his claim to be psychic. After dinner, Conchis tells
Nicholas about an episode in his boyhood when he was fifteen and met a
fourteen-year-old girl named Lily Montgomery, whose image haunted him
afterward. They were both musically inclined and fell in love, but in 1914, she
led him to feel that he ought to volunteer for the army. Conchis explains that he
deserted at the battle of Neuve Chapelle, and offers Nicholas a chance to gamble
with his own life by rolling a die and promising that he will take a cyanide pill if
the die comes up six. It does, but Nicholas refuses to take the pill; Conchis
seems to approve his decision, and reveals that the die was loaded against the
roller--as was World War I against the soldiers. That night, as Nicholas is going
to sleep, he hears voices singing a war song and smells a foul stench.
The next day Conchis encourages Nicholas to read a pamphlet by Robert
Foulkes, written as he was waiting to be hanged in 1677. Nicholas takes it with
him on a walk, falls asleep, and awakes to see a man in 17th-century dress
staring at him from across a ravine. The man disappears before Nicholas can
reach him.
At dinner that night, Conchis tells of his wartime pretense to be on leave
so that he could return to England to visit Lily. As Nicholas retires, he hears a
harpsichord accompanied by a recorder, and investigates, to find Conchis and a
beautiful girl dressed in Edwardian clothes, but he declines to interrupt them.
The next weekend "Lily" joins them after dinner and speaks in the
language of the early 1900s. Their conversation is interrupted when a horn
sounds, a spotlight illuminates a nymph who runs by, pursued by a satyr, and
another woman seems to shoot the satyr with an arrow. Nicholas is bewildered
but decides that Conchis must be re-creating masques for his own amusement.
Lily refuses to explain, and Conchis talks in parables. He describes an attempt to
11

found a Society for Reason after the war, and he tells the story of a rich collector
whose mansion is burned by a resentful servant. Nicholas begins to fall in love
with Lily, who professes to be as mystified by what Conchis may be up to as
Nicholas is. Conchis explains that she is a schizophrenic whom he indulges by
letting her manipulate men in the controlled environment at Bourani, but that
Nicholas must not believe what she tells him. For the weekend's culminating
experience, Conchis hypnotizes Nicholas, who experiences the separateness of
himself from everything else. Nicholas leaves eager to return for more
adventures.
Alison has invited Nicholas to Athens the next weekend. Nicholas finds
the villa closed up, so he meets her and falsely tells her that he is suffering from
syphilis. They have an enjoyable weekend climbing in the mountains, at the end
of which, back in Athens, Nicholas confesses his lie and tells her about Bourani
and Lily. Alison is hurt, and gives him an ultimatum: She will quit her job and
join him on Phraxos, or she will leave him. When Nicholas hesitates, a violent
argument ensues, and she refuses to let him back in their hotel room.
When Nicholas returns to the villa, Conchis drops the pretense that Lily is
a schizophrenic and tells him that she and her twin sister are actresses named
Julie and June, whom Conchis has hired for a theatrical experiment. The first
evening, Conchis tells Nicholas the story of Henrik Nygaard, a blind madman
who believes that he talks with God. Afterward, Nicholas goes to a passionate
rendezvous with Julie in the woods, where he is shocked to discover that Julie
has sent her twin sister instead. June explains that they feel like prisoners,
always watched by Conchis' black valet, Joe, repeatedly told to learn lines and to
prepare for improvisations, but never told what it all means. The next day the
twins tell Nicholas their backgrounds and show him documents to support their
statements. After a day of being shadowed by Joe, even while they are inside an

12

empty chapel, the twins leave with Conchis on his yacht, vowing to insist that he
begin to be forthright with them all.
The next Wednesday the yacht returns, and Julie meets Nicholas at night
to assure him that there will be no more pretense of schizophrenia; however,
Nicholas is to join the twins in the improvisation the next weekend, after which
all will be explained. Julie again avoids sex with Nicholas, pleading her
menstrual period. On his way back to school in the dark, Nicholas is stopped by
a patrol of soldiers in Nazi uniforms, who proceed to beat up a captured partisan.
To Nicholas's dismay, he receives a letter on Friday that he will not be welcome,
after all, at the villa that weekend.
Nicholas receives two letters the next Thursday, one from Julie indicating
that Conchis has told her that Nicholas was sick and the other from Alison's
roommate telling Nicholas that Alison has committed suicide. He does not
reveal this to Conchis the next weekend, but demands to know the truth.
Conchis explains that he is experimenting with a new form of theater, without
audience, in which everyone is an actor.
Conchis continues the supposed story of his life with the narrative of the
German occupation, when he served as mayor of Phraxos. A crucial event,
interpreted differently by different characters in the novel, occurred after the
killing of three Austrian soldiers by guerrillas. Conchis was told that the lives of
eighty villagers about to be executed in reprisal would be spared if he would
club the guerrilla leader to death; he refused, and took his place with the
hostages, but managed to survive the mass execution.
Conchis then explains that Julie is his mistress and that they are all about
to leave. When Nicholas tries to confront Julie, she disappears, playfully
demonstrating one of their hiding places in an old bunker. Inside, she denies
what Conchis has said, but as she climbs out of the bunker, she is grabbed and
13

Nicholas locked in. When he gets out, he finds the villa shut up and a skull and a
doll hanging from a nearby tree. Nicholas does not know what to think and
returns to school.
Several nights later, June appears at the school in distress, concerned
about Julie. She says that they have lied to Nicholas and falsified documents
about who they are. Nicholas explains that their games have cost the life of
Alison. She apologizes, and explains that Conchis is really a psychiatrist doing
research and that Julie is at his house in the village, to which June offers to take
Nicholas. When he arrives, Nicholas and Julie make passionate love, after which
she tells him that Julie is not really her name, and walks out. Three men walk in
and restrain Nicholas as they administer an injection that makes him lose
consciousness.
Some days later, Nicholas revives, is dressed in ritual garb, and is taken to
a chamber decorated with symbols, where he is seated on a throne facing 12
figures in bizarre costumes. As they unmask, they are introduced as
psychiatrists, including the former Lily as Dr. Vanessa Maxwell, who reads a
clinical diagnosis of Nicholas's psychological problems. She is then stripped to
the waist and tied to a flogging frame, as Nicholas is handed a cat-o'-nine-tails
and invited to judge her--and the others--by choosing to flay her or not. He
declines. Then Nicholas is tied to the frame, to watch Lily and Joe make tender
love in front of him. Afterward, he is again made unconscious.
Nicholas awakens on the mainland, alone. He returns to the school and
gets himself fired. He goes back to the villa and searches for clues. Although he
finds a typescript of a story about how a prince learns to become a magician by
accepting that life is full of illusion, Nicholas goes on looking for expla- nations.
The second part of the book ends with his discovery that Alison is still alive, her
supposed suicide evidently part of the charade.
14

In the last part, Nicholas continues his research. Nicholas finds no record
of Conchis' supposed credentials in psychology. He interviews one of his
predecessors at the Lord Byron School, now living as a monk in Italy, but the
monk is not interested in helping Nicholas. He finally succeeds in locating a
house in which a Montgomery lived during World War I and the inhabitant
directs him to one of the Montgomery daughters, a Mrs. Lily de Seitas. At first,
she toys with Nicholas, but when he finds out that she has twin daughters of her
own, she admits that she is a friend of Conchis--and of Alison. Nicholas is
angry, partly over her refusal to tell him where Alison is, but he gradually
overcomes his resentment and they meet again.
Nicholas begins to appreciate what has happened, and even declines to
discuss it with his immediate predecessor at the Lord Byron School. Finally,
Alison appears when he least expects her, and they have a confrontation in
Regent's Park, where he at first imagines that they are being watched from
Cumberland Terrace. Nicholas issues her an ultimatum--"them or me." She
rejects the ultimatum, and Nicholas walks away from her. When she follows
him, he slaps her without understanding why. Then he realizes that they are
unobserved and asks forgiveness. The novel ends at that point, with their future
relationship uncertain.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

The first chapter describes Lyme Regis and its Cobb, a harbor quay on
which three characters are standing: Charles Smithson, Ernestina Freeman, and
Sarah Woodruff. The describing narrator has a distinctive voice, all-knowing yet
intimate, with a wide-ranging vocabulary and evidently vast knowledge of
political and geographical history. In one sentence the narrator sounds like a
Victorian, as he remarks that the male character recently "had severely reduced
15

his dundrearies, which the arbiters of the best English male fashion had declared
a shade vulgar--that is, risible to the foreigner--a year or two previously." In the
next sentence he sounds modern, as he describes how "the colors of the young
lady's clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident." The narrator's double
vision and double voice make him as important as the characters in this novel.
Charles is a middle-aged bachelor and amateur paleontologist; Ernestina
is his fiance, who has brought him to spend a few days with her aunt. Out of a
chivalric concern for Sarah, Charles advises her to return from the end of the
Cobb to a safer position, but she merely stares at him. As he reflects on this
curious meeting, the narrator begins to comment on Charles's outlook on life and
on the attitudes that were typical of the age in 1867, with occasional
comparisons with 1967.
Ernestina is revealed to be a pretty but conventional young woman. Sarah
is an outcast who is reputed to be pining for the French lieutenant who has jilted
her. Charles is earnest but intelligent enough to be aware of Ernestina's
limitations. When he is looking for fossils along the wooded Undercliff, Charles
discovers Sarah sleeping, and must apologize when she awakes and sees him
observing her. As he returns to Lyme, he inquires about her at a nearby farm,
whose owner tells him that the "French Loot'n'nt's Hoer" often walks that way.
Sarah's employer, having separately become aware of that fact, forbids her to
walk there any more. Sarah spends that night contemplating suicide, and
Chapter 12 ends with two questions: "Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does
she come?"
Chapter 13 begins "I do not know," and the narrator proceeds to discuss
the difficulty of writing a story when characters behave independently rather
than do his bidding. Charles, he complains, did not return to Lyme as the
narrator had intended but willfully went down to the Dairy to ask about Sarah.
16

But, the narrator concedes, times have changed, and the traditional novel is out
of fashion, according to some. Novels may seem more real if the characters do
not behave like marionettes and narrators do not behave like God. So the
narrator, in effect, promises to give his characters the free will that people would
want a deity to grant them. Likewise, the narrator will candidly admit to the
artifice of the narration and will thereby treat his readers as intelligent,
independent beings who deserve more than the manipulative illusions of reality
provided in a traditional novel.
Subsequent chapters contain representations of domestic life--a quiet
evening with Charles and Ernestina, a morning with Charles and his valet, a
concert at the Assembly Rooms. During this last, Charles reflects on where his
life seems to be leading and on the fact that, as he puts it, he has become "a little
obsessed with Sarahor at any rate with the enigma she presented." He returns
to the Undercliff, again finds Sarah there, and is shocked to be told by her that
she is not pining for her French lieutenant, that he is married. The next time
Charles encounters her in the Undercliff she offers Charles some fossils she has
found and tells him that she thinks she may be going mad; she asks him to meet
her there once more, when she has more time, so that she can tell him the truth
about her situation and obtain his advice.
Charles decides to seek advice himself and visits Dr. Grogan, an elderly
bachelor and an admirer of Darwin, whose theories they discuss. When the
conversation turns to Sarah, Grogan expresses the belief that she wants to be a
victim. Sarah seems to bear out his view when she explains to Charles that she
indeed became infatuated with the French lieutenant when he was recovering
from an injury in the house, where Sarah was governess, and that she followed
him when he left to return to France. She tells Charles that she quickly realized
that he had regarded her only as an amusement, but that she "gave" herself to
him nonetheless, doubly dishonoring herself by choice as well as by
17

circumstances. She seems to be proud of her status as outcast, for it

differentiates her from a society she considers unjust. Charles accepts her story-even finds it fascinating.
When Charles returns to his room at the inn, he finds a telegram from his
bachelor uncle Robert, summoning him home to the family estate he is in line to
inherit. To Charles's surprise, Robert has decided to marry Bella Tomkins, a
young widow, whose sons--if she has any--would displace Charles as heir. On
Charles's return to Lyme Regis, Ernestina mentions that Sarah was seen
returning from their last meeting in the Undercliff, where she had been
forbidden to walk, and has been dismissed by Mrs. Poulteney. At his hotel,
Charles finds a message from Sarah, urging him to meet her one more time.
Charles has Dr. Grogan call off the search for Sarah, who, it was thought, might
have killed herself Grogan again warns Charles against Sarah, this time by
offering him a document to read about a case of bizarre behavior by a young
woman in France who manages to get one of her father's officers unjustly
convicted of attempting to rape her. Charles decides to meet Sarah again, despite
the possibility that she may be deranged and trying to destroy him.
When he finds her, she confesses that she deliberately allowed herself to
be seen and, hence, dismissed. Charles is unable to resist kissing her but is
bewildered. His feelings turn to dismay when they are stumbled on by Sam and
Mary, his valet and Ernestina's aunt's servant, who have come to the Undercliff
for their own privacy. Embarrassed, he swears them to secrecy.
Now even more of two minds about his marriage, Charles decides to go to
London to discuss his altered financial prospects with Ernestina's father, a
prosperous merchant there. Mr. Freeman is more concerned for the happiness of
his daughter, who evidently loves Charles dearly, so the engagement stands; but
Charles is increasingly uncomfortable with, even trapped by, his situation. He
18

goes to his club and drinks too much. He visits a brothel with two of his friends,
but finds the entertainment repellant, and leaves. He picks up a Cockney
streetwalker and returns to her flat with her; when she tells him her name is,
coincidentally, Sarah, Charles becomes ill and, subsequently, returns to his
room. The next morning Charles receives a letter from Grogan, and a note from
Sarah with the name of a hotel in Exeter.
Because the train station nearest to Lyme Regis is in Exeter, Charles must
pass through that town on his way back from London. Having steamed open the
note from Sarah, Sam is confident that they will spend the night in Exeter, so
that Charles can visit Sarah, but they proceed to Lyme, where Charles and
Ernestina are reunited. The narrator recounts that they go on to marry, have
seven children, and live well into the twentieth century. In the next chapter, the
narrator explains that this traditional ending is just one possibility, a hypothetical
future for his characters. Charles recognized his freedom of choice and
"actually" did decide to put up at Exeter for the night, precisely as Sam had
expected.
As the story resumes and continues to unfold, Charles visits Sarah at her
hotel. He must see her in her room because she has supposedly injured her
ankle, though she has purchased the bandage before the "accident" occurred.
Charles is overcome by passion and takes her to bed, only to discover that she is
a virgin, despite what she had told him about the French lieutenant. She
confesses that she has deceived him, says that she cannot explain why and,
furthermore, cannot marry him. Stunned by the whole experience, Charles visits
a nearby church and meditates on the human condition. He decides that Sarah
has been trying to "unblind" him with her stratagems, so that he would recognize
that he is free to choose. He writes a letter to Sarah, telling her how much she
means to him, and then returns to Lyme to call off his engagement.

19

Sam does not deliver the letter. Ernestina is distraught when Charles tells
her that he is unworthy to be her husband, more so when she realizes that the
true reason is another woman. Sam correctly surmises that his master's star will
wane as the marriage is called off, so determined to protect his prospect of
marriage to Mary, he leaves his position as Charles's valet in hope that
Ernestina's aunt and her father will help him.
When Charles returns to Exeter, he finds Sarah gone to London, having
left no forwarding address. As he follows her, by train, a bearded figure sits
opposite Charles and watches him as he dozes. The character is the narrator
himself, who professes not to know where Sarah is or what she wants; indeed,
he is wondering what exactly to do with Charles. He compares writing a novel
to fixing a fight in favor of one boxer or another; to seem less dishonest, he
decides to show the "fight" as if "fixed" both ways, with different "victors," or
endings. Because the last ending will seem privileged by its final position, he
flips a coin to determine which ending to give first.
The narrative resumes the description of Charles's search for Sarah. He
checks agencies for governesses, patrols areas frequented by prostitutes, and
advertises--all without success. He visits the United States and advertises there.
Two years after she disappeared, Charles gets a cable from his solicitor saying
that Sarah has been found. Charles hopes that Sarah has decided to answer the
ad, but the narrator explains that Mary has seen Sarah enter a house in Chelsea,
and that it is Sam who responded to the ad, now that he is a thriving employee of
Mr. Freeman as well as a happy father and husband, but still slightly guilt-ridden
over his having intercepted the letter at Lyme.
When Charles arrives at Sarah's house, he finds her surprised to see him
and not apologetic about having left him in ignorance of her whereabouts. She
gradually is revealed to be living in the house of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
20

several other artists and models of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Charles is

shocked, partly by the rather notoriously unconventional company she is
keeping and partly by her lack of repentance for having deceived him and left
him in uncertainty. He accuses her of implanting a dagger in his breast and then
twisting it. She decides not to let Charles leave without revealing that she has
had a child by him, named Lalage. Chapter 60 ends with the three of them
evidently on the threshold of some kind of future together.
Chapter 61 begins with the bearded narrator in front of Sarah's house with
a watch, which he sets back fifteen minutes and drives off. The narrative
resumes with the same piece of dialogue from Chapter 60, about twisting the
knife. In this version of the conversation, Charles sees that she cannot marry
without betraying herself, and that he cannot accept her on more independent
terms. He leaves without realizing that the child he notices on the way out is his.
The narrator ends the novel by noting that Charles has at least begun to have
some faith in himself, despite his not feeling that he understands Sarah, and that
the reader should not imagine that the last ending is any less plausible than the
one before it.
The French Lieutenants Woman (1969), by John Fowles, is a period novel
inspired by the 1823 novel Ourika, by Claire de Duras, which Fowles translated
to English during 1977 (and revised in 1994). Fowles was a great aficionado
of Thomas Hardy, and, in particular, likened his heroine, Sarah Woodruff, to
Tess Durbeyfield, the protagonist of Hardys popular novel Tess of the
d'Urbervilles (1891).
Plot summary
The novel's protagonist is Sarah Woodruff, the title Woman, also known by the
nickname of Tragedy, and by the unfortunate nickname The French
Lieutenants Woman. She lives in the coastal town of Lyme Regis, as a
disgraced woman, supposedly abandoned by a French naval officer named
Varguennes--married, unknown to her, to another woman-- with whom she had
supposedly had an affair and who had returned to France.
21

She spends her limited time-off at the Cobb [sea wall], staring at the sea. One
day, she is seen there by the gentleman Charles Smithson and his fiance,
Ernestina Freeman, the shallow-minded daughter of a wealthy tradesman.
Ernestina tells Charles something of Sarahs story, and he develops a strong
curiosity about her. Eventually, he and she meet clandestinely, during which
times Sarah tells Charles her history, and asks for his support, mostly emotional.
Despite trying to remain objective, Charles eventually sends Sarah to Exeter,
where he, during a journey, cannot resist stopping in to visit and see her. At the
time she has suffered an ankle injury; he visits her alone and after they have
made love he realises that she had been, contrary to the rumours, a virgin.
Simultaneously, he learns that his prospective inheritance from an elder uncle is
in jeopardy; the uncle is engaged to a woman young enough to bear him an heir.
Sarah is portrayed ambiguously: is she a genuine, ill-used woman? Is she a sly,
manipulative character using her own self-pity to get Charles to succumb to her?
Is she merely a victim of the notion of gender as perceived by upper-middleclass people of the 19th century?
From there, the novelist offers three different endings for The French
Lieutenants Woman.

First ending: Charles marries Ernestina, and their marriage is unhappy;

Sarahs fate is unknown. Charles tells Ernestina about an encounter with
whom he implies is the French Lieutenants Whore, but elides the sordid
details, and the matter is ended. This ending, however, might be dismissed as
a daydream, before the alternative events of the subsequent meeting with
Ernestina are described.

Before the second- and third endings, the narrator whom the novelist wants
the reader to believe is John Fowles, himself appears as a minor character
sharing a train carriage with Charles. He flips a coin to determine the order in
which he will portray the two, other possible endings, emphasising their equal
plausibility.

Second ending: Charles and Sarah become intimate; he ends his

engagement to Ernestina, with unpleasant consequences. He is disgraced, and
his uncle marries, then produces an heir. Sarah flees to London without
telling the enamoured Charles, who searches for her for years, before finding
her living with several artists (likely the Rossettis), enjoying an artistic,

22

creative life. He then sees he has fathered a child with her; as a family, their
future is open, with possible reunion implied.

Third ending: the narrator re-appears, standing outside the house where
the second ending occurred; at the aftermath. He turns back his pocket watch
by fifteen minutes, before leaving in his carriage. Events are the same as in
the second-ending version, but, when Charles finds Sarah again, in London,
their reunion is sour. It is possible that their union was childless; Sarah does
not tell Charles about one, and does not express interest for continuing the
relationship. He leaves the house, deciding to return to America, and sees the
carriage, in which the narrator was thought gone. Raising the question: is
Sarah a manipulating, lying woman of few morals, exploiting Charless
obvious love to get what she wants?

En route, Fowles the novelist discourses upon the difficulties of controlling the
characters, and offers analyses of differences in 19th-century customs and class,
the theories of Charles Darwin, the poetry of Matthew Arnold, Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, and the literature of Thomas Hardy. He questions the role of the
author when speaking of how the Charles character disobeys his orders; the
characters have discrete lives of their own in the novel.
Philosophically, Existentialism is mentioned several times during the story, and
in particular detail at the end, after the portrayals of the two, apparent, equally
possible endings.

Daniel Martin
The novel begins in 1942 as 15-year-old Danny Martin is helping with
"The Harvest," title of the first chapter. He is terrified by a low-flying German
bomber and repelled by the more localized violence against rabbits that have
become trapped in the center of a field as the circles of the reaper grow nearer.
The chapter ends with his retreat into a beech wood, "innocent, already in
exile..."

23

The second chapter, "Games," takes place in the early 1970s, in

Hollywood, when Daniel Martin is now a middle-aged, successful screenwriter
who is divorced from Nell, with a daughter named Caro. He is dissatisfied with
script-writing as well as with his life, and is thinking of trying to write a novel.
He receives encouragement from his girlfriend, a young English actress named
Jenny, who proposes that he name his fictionalized self Simon Wolfe. The
chapter ends as Dan receives a telephone call from England.
The third chapter, "The Woman in the Reeds," takes place in a third time
period, when Dan was attending Oxford University in his early twenties. Dan is
on a picnic with Jane, sister of his girlfriend Nell, when they discover a body in
one of the canals. Andrew, a baronet's son, helps them recover from the shock
while they wait for the police to arrive. Dan uses the word "games" to describe
their superficial lives at Oxford.
"An Unbiased View" is written by Jenny as a contribution toward Dan's
novel. The chapter describes the world of filmmaking as well as how they met,
and how she found him attractive because she could not read him easily. "The
Door" picks up with a telephone call from Jane, who tells Dan that her
terminally ill husband, Anthony, wants to see Dan before he dies. Dan is
stunned, and the next chapter, "Aftermath," helps to account for his reaction.
After they had returned from their Oxford outing, Jane proposed that they go to
bed together, just once, as a gratuitous, Rabelaisian act. "Passage" switches the
scene back to the United States, where Dan is flying from Los Angeles to New
York, en route to England, and thinking about what it means to be English.
"The Umbrella" returns to Dan's boyhood in the 1930s, as Dan describes
how the son of a vicar grew into an atheist. Allusions to Citizen Kane help to
emphasize Dan's father's lack of demonstrative love for his son. The next
chapter, "Gratuitous Act," describes Dan and Jane's sexual intercourse in Dan's
24

room at Oxford, where they are almost discovered by Barney Dillon, who lives
in the room above. "Returns" takes place on the airplane from New York to
London, where Dan coincidentally encounters the older Barney, who is now a
media critic for a London newspaper. Dan's daughter, Caroline, is his secretary.
"Tarquinia" provides another reminiscence of the Oxford days, on a
vacation when Dan, Nell, Jane, and Anthony visited Italy and "played Pagan" in
the sea near the Etruscan ruins. In "Petard," while Dan stays over in London
with Caro, she tells him that she is having an affair with the still-married Barney.
On the subway to Padding- ton Station, in "Forward Backward," Dan thinks
back to a trip he took to Devon with Caro to show her where he grew up and
ended up buying a farm he found for sale, named Thorricombe. In "Breaking
Silence," while riding the train from London to Oxford, Dan thinks back further
to the early years of his marriage to Nell--his successes as a playwright that
gained him entre to the film world, his infidelity with an actress, Nell's
acquisitiveness and growing discontent with their marriage, her accusation that
Dan must be having an affair with his assistant, and her demand for a divorce.
In "Rencontre," Dan meets Jane for dinner, and in "Crimes and
Punishments," he recalls how a play of his with obvious parallels in their lives
had led to anger all around and a letter from Anthony that wrote him out of their
lives. Now, in "Catastasis," Dan goes to the hospital to meet Anthony and finds
that Jane long ago told her husband of her gratuitous act, with Dan. Anthony
explains that they have had a somewhat bloodless relationship in their marriage,
due in part to his religiosity, and he wants Dan to be a friend to Jane when he is
gone. After he leaves, in "Jane," Dan takes Jane to dinner, where she explains
why she is thinking of joining the Communist Party. When they return to Jane's
house, in "Beyond the Door," they learn that Anthony committed suicide shortly
after Dan left. In "Webs," NelI arrives with Andrew, whom she has married, and
their daughter Rosamund. Dan and Caro drive back to London, where Dan
25

watches an old man on the street and thinks about how separated people are
from one another.I
Jenny writes "A Second Contribution," which describes her view of Dan's
Jewish friends Mildred and Abe and of Dan, whose discussions have enabled her
to see that he is in love with loss, and that his seeming untypicality is really what
is most typical of the English: their ability to hide their true selves from others.
"Interlude" provides a narrator's view of Dan, who does expect to lose women,
and illustrates Dan's life with a "fable" about twin sisters, Miriam and Marjory,
whom Dan allows to move in with him; they are unsophisticated (except as
sexual partners), but Dan genuinely likes them. At the end of the chapter, they
have moved away, and Dan is haunted by their loss.
In "Hollow Men," Dan meets Barney for lunch, and they discuss his life,
including Caro. At breakfast the next day, in "Solid Daughter," Caro tells Dan
that Jane thinks him to be two persons, and Caro suggests that he does not want
her to know him either. The topic leads Dan to write "The Sacred Combe," about
why Robin Hood is the perfect myth for England because the English love to
retreat behind masks, to melt into the trees. Dan notes that his own impulse to
write a novel may be evidence of this wish to escape from social responsibility
into a self-chosen exile, into a private world of self-indulgence.
In "Rituals," Dan meets with David Malevich, his producer, about their
next film project, and David suggests that Dan visit possible shooting locations
in Egypt. Dan attends the inquest into the suicide and then takes Rosamund,
Jane's oldest daughter, to dinner. Dan spends the weekend at "Compton," the
title of the next chapter and country estate of Nell and Andrew, where he
ponders the existence of the upper class and discusses the state of England with
a cynical ultraconservative named Miles Fenwick.

26

"Tsankawi" is another reminiscence, of a visit to an archeological site in

New Mexico. Dan identifies strongly with the place, and is offended that Jenny
wants to make gifts out of potsherds she finds there.
In "Westward," back in England, Dan invites Jane and her teenage son
Paul to visit Thorncombe. Paul is somewhat obsessed with medieval agriculture,
so he agrees to come along if he can visit some sites of historical interest. Dan
recalls how he acquired his gardener and housekeeper, Ben and Phoebe, and
then, in "Phillida," how he fell in love as a boy with Nancy Reed, who then lived
on the farm Dan has bought, until their parents put an end to the romance. After
they have arrived, in "Thorncombe," Dan tells Jane about his wish to try writing
a novel, and she tells him about Marxist views of the novel and of culture. On
impulse, Dan invites Jane to accompany him to Egypt. That night, "In the
Orchard of the Blessed," Dan ponders the devaluation of happy endings in
contemporary culture but decides that his novel will have one nonetheless. In
"Rain," Jane reluctantly agrees to go along to Egypt, and Dan has two strained
transatlantic telephone conversations with Jenny.
In "A Third Contribution," Jenny describes a supposedly fictional but
extremely detailed sexual liaison with her costar, Steve. When they talk by
telephone again, in "The Shadows of Women," she apologizes for having sent it.
Jane and Dan arrive in Cairo in "Pyramids and Prisons," where Dan
discusses the film project with an Egyptian agent and Jane visits the pyramids.
They attend a dinner party at which the jokes told by an Egyptian playwright
reveal much about Egyptian culture, including, in Dan's view, much it has in
common with Jewish culture. In "Barbarians," they start a tour up the Nile at
Karnak and reflect on the ancient Egyptian obsession with size, which reminds
them of ancient Rome and the modern United States. An old German
archaeologist named Otto Kirnberger befriends them and offers suggestions
27

about purchasing artifacts. In "Nile," they encounter other tourists, including an

American couple, the Hoopers, who disagree about Vietnam but are enthusiastic
about visiting Palmyra, Syria. In "The River Between," Kirnberger tells about
himself and offers insights into cultural and biological differences. When they
arrive at Aswan and "Kitchener's Island, they find a paradise surrounded by
technology run amok. Jane imagines living in a house there and accepts some
beads from a little girl. Dan increasingly wants to reveal the growing affection
he is feeling toward Jane, but instead, he proposes a side excursion to Palmyra
on their trip back to England. Back at the hotel in Aswan, "In the Silence of
Other Voices," Dan experiences a mental crisis of anxiety that he must choose
himself, and of confidence that he alone can create a world in film or fiction, let
alone in life, but he sits down and composes a scene that he believes will work.
The chapter title "Flights" refers to the return by air to Cairo and to Jane's
demurral when Dan declares that he does not want to leave Jane, that there was
something right about their day in Oxford, that they should try living together.
In "North," Dan feels depressed. After they arrive in Beirut, he sits in a
bar and feels that he must be condemned to pursue emotional situations that
contain the structure of their own destruction, for which his thwarted
relationship with Nancy Reed was the seed crystal. The drive to Palmyra in the
fog takes them to "The End of the World," a desolate landscape Dan compares to
the possibilities Jane has destroyed over the courses of their lives. He persuades
her that she should stop conforming to an ideal of nobility and sacrifice, acting
as if Anthony is still watching her, and instead join him in movement toward a
sympathetic, loving relationship. For the first time on the trip they sleep
together. The next day, in "The Bitch," still wary of love but proceeding on
instinct like the mother dog of the chapter title, Jane buries her wedding ring in
the sand.

28

In the last chapter, "Future Past," Dan meets Jenny in a London pub to
discuss why he is ending their relationship. They walk on Hampstead Heath and
part. Dan goes into the Kenwood Museum and looks at the Rembrandt selfportrait there, which seems like a sentinel. Dan will not turn back but will
continue to choose and to learn to feel and to write his novel. Indeed, the last
sentence of Dan's novel, which exists only as an idea in Daniel Martin, John
Fowles as Dan's "ill-concealed ghost" has adopted as the first sentence of this
novel: "Whole sight; or the rest is desolation."

John Fowles, The Art of Fiction No. 109

Interviewed by James R. Baker
John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, on March 31, 1926. He
attended Bedford School (19401944) and then served nearly two years in the
Royal Marines. After his four years at Oxford (New College), where he read in
French and received a B. A. (Honors) in 1950, Fowles turned away from his
conservative upper-middle-class background toward a new freedom and a trying
decade of apprenticeship as a writer. He supported himself through teaching jobs
at the University of Poitiers, at Spetsai, Greece (where he met his wife-to-be,
Elizabeth Whitton) and at various schools in and around London until his first
published novel, The Collector, appeared in 1963. It became a best-seller, and
was made into a film by William Wyler in 1965. These successes did not deter
him from going back to earlier projects: the philosophers notebook (begun at
Oxford), in which he attempted to deal with many questions pertinent to
contemporary experience, was published as The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas
in 1964; a first, tortured novel he wrote (inspired largely by his own selfanalysis and conversion to existential freedom) appeared as The Magus in
1965. In that same year he took up residence in Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast.
The view of Lyme Bay from Fowless own Belmont House is described in
the opening chapters of his most famous novel, The French Lieutenants Woman
(1969), which won the Silver Pen Award from PEN International and the W. H.
Smith Literary Award. The apprenticeship was over. This pseudo-historical
novel revealed a new openness to experimentation with narrative voices and an
intellectual sophistication that has marked all his later fiction: The Ebony Tower
(1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot (1985).
29

But Fowles the novelist, true to the humanistic tradition, has insisted upon
playing other roles. He is an imaginative historian, an environmentalist, and a
student of natural historyas evidenced in Islands (1978), The Tree (1980), The
Enigma of Stonehenge (1980), and A Short History of Lyme Regis (1982). He
has translated and commented on several classic French works, including
Perraults Cinderella and Molires play, Don Juan. One comes to a better
understanding of his art through a reading of his afterword for Alain-Fourniers
famous novel of youthful quest, The Wanderer, his foreword to The Lais of
Marie de France, or his satirical conte on the deconstructionist thinkers,
Mantissa. Just where Fowles stands in relation to the history and culture of his
own country is made clear in an early essay suggestively titled, On Being
English but Not British. In spite of a large body of critical literature on his
fiction, the best description of his attitudes and procedures in the course of
creative composition is the often-anthologized Notes on Writing a Novel.
The interview was done, at Fowless request, through written exchanges
beginning in June, 1987, and concluding in April, 1989. His desire to proceed
by post had its origin in a certain dissatisfaction with the several taped
interviews he had done and perhaps with some of the academic criticism of his
fiction. He would set the record straight. Yet a taped interview was the occasion
for our first encounter at his home in November 1985. At that time he gave the
impression of great strength and confidence, gentle manner, and enormous
capacity for ambiguity and complexity. When that interview was published (in
the Michigan Quarterly Review), he wrote to say that in the future he wanted
time to write out more thoughtful responses. On reaching mid-point in our
written exchanges, John Fowles suffered a life-threatening stroke. He wrote:
Writing, what it is to be a writer, fills one with horror in their smallness,
pettiness. All ones former vanity is folly. But he had the questions before him,
he had promised to reply, and partial recovery allowed him to continue. The
impact of that stroke on his spirit is described in the interview, but it is most
tellingly realized in his concluding quotation of the refrain from Scottish poet
William Dunbars sixteenth-century Lament for the MakersTimor mortis
conturbat me.

INTERVIEWER
Is it accurate to say that you did not begin to establish an identity as a
writer until you went to Oxford in 1947 and entered into a rather fashionable
revolt against the limitations of a suburban middle-class background?
JOHN FOWLES
30

Yes, completely accurate, though I think the notion of joining a rather

fashionable revolt is a little bit wrong. You must remember my generationI
was born in 1926had spent our late adolescence and early twenties in
wartime, followed by a period of national austerity that remained
psychologically like war. Oxford in the late 1940s was, I think, to all of us lucky
enough to be there, a kind of wonderful escape from all thata happy dream, an
alternative world . . . in a sense a novel we had heard of, but never actually read
until then. Where the individual was paramount, not the nation. I came out of the
strict order and discipline of the British Marine Corps into the ancient
indulgence of Oxford; it was a heady experience for all of us, an intoxication,
hardly a matter of revolt.
I should add that in my teens I had a somewhat unusual experience for a
youth, having become head boy of my large public school (in Britain really a
private school, of course). Head boys were in those days responsible for all
minor discipline in the school outside of class, able to give punishments and
cane delinquents; we were, so to speak, appointed heads of Gestapo, with a body
of lesser prefects to help us spy on and patrol, cow and bully, the several
hundred other boys. It was really a very bad system, and I wish I could say that a
more sensitive side of myself had revolted against it at once. It did not. The
power went to my head, and it was only afterwardswhen I had left the school
that I rejected it completely. I have indeed hated all forms of public authority
ever sinceoh, not every individual representative of it, but the general idea
behind it.
Apart from anything else, head boys were largely excused from any other
kind of work, and that had fatal results on my own proper academic career. We
were also supposed to stand as models for the whole system (in my particular
school, producing eventual administrators of the already dying British Empire,
stiff with every supposed middle-class virtue), and that was a role I came to
realize I despised and did not want. This happened in the two years or so of
service in the Royal Marines between leaving school and going to Oxford. I
arrived in that latter place, in other words, in a state of full rejection of
everything I had been earlier taught to believe in. Oxford handsomely confirmed
the revolt, rather than initiated it.
INTERVIEWER
What induced you to read in French during your four years at Oxford?
What writers particularly impressed you? Was Montaigne, for example, an
influence and a model in the formation of your humanistic philosophy?
FOWLES
31

This was largely pure chance. I had been fairly good at modern languages
in school, and had a very sympathetic master there. It was sort of taken for
granted that I would later do them at university. Those were, of course, the days
of compulsory conscription. So I was in the Marines from 1944 to 1946, ending
as a lieutenant training recruits who hoped to become commandos. I was at the
time a little bit torn between joining the Marines permanently or taking the place
I had been promised at Oxford. One day we had an official visit from a famous
lord mayor of Plymouth, Isaac Foot. I was appointed his temporary ADC for the
visit, and took the opportunity to ask his advice about my dilemma. To my
surprisewe had all been brainwashed in those days into thinking the only thing
that mattered was ones middle-class national dutyhe said very crisply that
only a fool would find it a dilemma. If I had a place at Oxford, of course I
should go for that, not the Marines. Spurred by what Isaac Foot said, I applied at
once.
My first year at Oxford I read both French and German. I liked my
French tutors, did not like the German ones, and so dropped German . . .
something I have regretted somewhat ever since. Despite grim experiences in
the trenches and afterwards in the occupation army in Germany itself during the
First World War, my own father was much more fond of German literature than
French. That decision of mine did not please him. In a sense I was going against
family (or Victorian) tradition in turning my back on Germany and German. But
I am sure now, forty years later, that it was basically the right decision. I think it
is much more useful for the future novelistfor any seeker after cultureto get
to know the Latin side of Europe well, rather than the Teutonic and Nordic one.
The Germans are too like the British, and the French so richly different. We need
what we havent got by nature.
I had student love affairs with various French writers, although some
took years to take effect. I very much liked Montaigne, although I havent read
him for years now. He seems to me one of the sanest and intellectually most
attractive Europeans who has ever lived and he set me on the course of
humanism that I have followed ever since. We had at that time to spend a great
deal of time on Old French, and used to rather groan about it linguistically; but
there seeped into me eventually an affection for the early storytellingfor Marie
de France, Chrtien de Troyes and the rest, the fathers and mothers of the
European novel. I also liked the French comedy, especially Molire and
Marivauxnot Racine and Corneille, Im afraid, and I liked the late-nineteenthcentury poetsBaudelaire, Mallarm, Laforgue. I also particularly fell for that
elegant, precise tradition of the pense, the carefully framed apothegm and
wisdom, something weve never really mastered in EnglishPascal, La
Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, all the rest. That admiration ruined a book I wrote

32

later, The Aristos. I learnt my lesson there. It is not only wines that wont travel
between our two countries.
By and large, I have never had much enthusiasm for the classical side of
the French tradition, whose apotheosis is, I suppose, Racine. Even at Oxford I
seemed to get endlessly lost in the byways, things I should notat least for
exam purposeshave been reading. I have never been particularly interested in
French contemporary literature. Though I love the language, I have never
learned to speak it well, though I would claim I am quite a good reader of it. But
that was, I think, the aim of the old Oxford at that time: to teach one to
understand France and the French, not to speak the language currently and
fluently. That for me remains a vital difference between proper university
Frenchor any other foreign culture and languageand its language-school
variation. They are, or should be, two different things. One is for human beings,
the other for business people. I dont think modern educationists have ever
understood that, at least in this country.
INTERVIEWER
But werent the existentialist writersSartre, Camus, de Beauvoir
important in fostering your bid for freedom from the rigid structures of your
conservative background?
FOWLES
Those writers certainly came to us after the war as strange and exciting. I
always liked Camus best. Sartre I often found hard to understand. I can
remember giving up LEtre et le Nant in a mixture of despair and disgust. It
wasnt just a language problem, more a philosophical one, not knowing what he
actually meant in real life. That applies to most of the gurus since. I dont recall
having read Simone de Beauvoir then. I think the influence was partly from
the endless amount of talk in Oxford about the existentialists, authenticity,
being engag and the rest, all the implicit condemnations of the bourgeois view
of life, that affected me. It corresponded to feelings inside myself that I think
would have emerged anyway, indeed had already emerged, if confusedly, but
were certainly quickened by the existentialist writers.
Students of my work often make rather a lot of existentialism, a good deal
more than I ever felt is true of myself. But that is a familiar feeling, for me,
anyway. You are presented as something you never really were. Of course its
flattering to be extensively studied; but Im not altogether happy about the
intensive pursuit of living writers that seems so popular now with literary
students and teachers. I write for other reasons than providing fodder for the
literary faculties.
33

INTERVIEWER
Did you read Jung? Could his influence be linked with the theme of
psychological growth so apparent in the early novels?
FOWLES
I did dabble in him, from Oxford days and after. But not as a serious
student might, much more as a dilettante, picking up the ideas I needed and that
appealed to me rather as a spoilt child might pick out of a lucky dip if he or she
were given free range and choice. For me Jung has always been the most fruitful
psychologist, that is, most fertile in his effects on any subsequent fiction. I
suspect a straight analyst, more or less in Freuds footsteps, would suit me better
medically, if I ever needed such attentionwhich perhaps I do . . . like every
other novelist!
INTERVIEWER
You have said that you started writing The Aristos as a sort of students
notebook or self-portrait in ideas at this time. It seems an indispensable book
for the serious student of your early fictionThe Magus and The Collector. Did
it precede any extended effort to write fiction?
FOWLES
Like so many Oxford students, I developed very timid literary ambitions
there. Such as they were, mine had far more to do with poetry than the novel.
Poetry lasted as a long dream, long after Id left university, of which the Poems
that were published in 1973 were a funeral relic. I still occasionally get the urge
to write poems, but usually sternly resist it. I didnt attempt fiction till the mid1950s, and then not very seriously; it long remained a kind of second best, or
faute de mieux to me. The Aristos I did begin in my last year at Oxford, 1949. I
also began keeping a personal diary about that time. I am a great believer in
diaries, if only in the sense that bar exercises are good for ballet dancers: its
often through personal diarieshowever embarrassing they are to read now
that the novelist discovers his true bentthat he can narrate real events and
distort them to please himself, describe character, observe other human beings,
hypothesize, invent, all the rest. I think that is how I became a novelist,
eventually. Its certainly how I tend to see my older books when I reread them,
which is not at all often: that is, as a sort of past diary about myself. So thats
how I felt and thought then. Not always a pleasant experience! The Aristos
certainly preceded my novels, and yes, often bears heavily on them.
INTERVIEWER
34

You have said that you wanted to be known as a writer and not simply a
novelist. You continue to make it difficult for us to separate the fiction and the
nonfiction in your work. Is this a result of the early humanistic idealismbeing
a renaissance man, a generalist, rather than a devotee in any single genre?
FOWLES
Ive always felt that expressing myself in other literary forms is natural
and desirable. Or putting it most generally, that all novelists should live in two
different worlds: a real one and an unreal one. That is perhaps why my taste in
fiction is towards a fair degree of realism in style and my taste in nonfiction (say
in what scientists and academics write) is towards those who can exhibit
qualities like tolerance of hypothesis, dislike of the rigid interpretation, a general
fluidity of attitude, and a basic sympathy towards a subject . . . a touch of
ordinary humanity, in a phrase.
Very important for me also is the collection of old books I have
gathered over the years. I am a lousy bibliophile in the proper and normal sense.
What I like about picking up old books is their enormous variety and the
glimpses they can give into past and lost worlds and cultures. I do this quite
indiscriminately, with whatever takes my fancy; the returns, in a literary sense,
are infinite, but difficult to categorize. An American student to whom I
mentioned this asked if she might have a list of what I had read or collected over
the years. I told her it was impossible. I keep no such list. But this very
miscellaneous reading I have done over the years has become a major influence
for all its maddening vagueness for the students. Students nowadays seem to
want to place precisely, to locate precisely, everything about a writers work:
what he is, what has made him or her what they are, and so on. It seems to me
that to imprison it is to deny something very essential about writing. Rather the
same thing has taken place in nature, or natural historythe mania to place
everything in a precise species or subspecies, to discover exactly how it works,
all the rest. I am opposed to the scientization of nature, the reducing of it all to
species, ecological distributions, biochemical mechanisms, and so on. I feel this
very strongly about writing and writers too. The world wants us caged, in one
place, behind bars; it is very important we stay free.
INTERVIEWER
Like Forster, you have always distrusted Jamesian perfection of form, or
at least you seemed to reject it as a worthy goal after the two early novels. Why?
FOWLES

35

Im not quite sure what perfection of form means, unless it means

obeying whatever ideal form, that fickle thing, that the general educated taste,
and in particular its leading determiners, the literary professors and serious
critics and students, have decided their age must judge as ideal. I dislike
intensely the notion that a perfect form, like a sort of god, hovers over all of us,
which we either cling or pay lip service to. I think whatever form is chosen by
each writer is perfect for him or her, however imperfect it may seem to those
under the delusion of some general perfect form and its attainability. That sort
of myth of a perfect form, applicable to all, seems to me one of those things
modern art has sunk beyond resurrection. I certainly try to make the form I put
things in suit their matter, but I agree totally with Forster that forcing that matter
into some supposed general ideal of the form best suited to it is wrong. Novels
in a sense are like new scientific theories. Of course there are ways in which
they have to pay homage to the past, to high past standards; but they have also to
disobey and question them, to break new ground. Nothing in their cultural pasts
could have allowed for or predicted, say, Tristram Shandy or Ulysses.
INTERVIEWER
I meant to suggest that the two early novels are quite highly structured
compared with the later ones. Theyre both allegories on power, arent they?
Both novels reach for the living myththe archetypal and perennial
confrontation of the aristoi with the hoi polloi. Theyre set pieces, worldweary. Doesnt The French Lieutenants Woman show a new openness in form
and mark a real change in your conception of the novel and novelist?
FOWLES
They may be allegories on power, but I really dont think I saw them
particularly so at the time. The younger novelist is really so excited by the
powers he discovers he hasin partthat novels grow closer to love affairs
between novelist and subjectthan to the sort of serious theme youre
suggesting. This is perhaps why they come to you as world-weary set pieces;
they were both written in a state of excitement! In a sense the young novelist
finds himself in a gymnasium, with apparatus for set exercises, and wants to try
his hand at some or all of them. I think it is only when he at last has mastered
that side of it, that the real work, and the freedom we all fundamentally covet,
become possible. Certainly I hope that in that way The French Lieutenants
Woman marks a real change and a new opennesswhat the Russians now call
glasnost, transparency.
INTERVIEWER

36

You insist in these early works on the natural inequality of human beings,
but at the same time you lean toward socialism. How do you reconcile your
social egalitarianism with the rather snobbish idea of an aristoi or elite few set
apart from the many?
FOWLES
This is something of an eternal torment, or split, in my life. The idea of an
elite few is, of course, nowadays something no one likes to declare a belief in.
On the other hand I am absolutely sure that it is a biologicalif you like,
Darwiniantruth. So I am torn between this cruel but necessary truththat
some, perhaps most strikingly in the arts and sciences, are clearly better
endowed or adapted than the othersand by that other, kinder truth that asks
equality and equal justice for society as a whole. In general I confess I much
prefer the company of reasonably intelligent and educated people, but I still
basically hold with the contention I made in The Aristos: that being superior in
intelligence or education does not excuse an indifference to hoi polloi, the
Cleggs and fools they have to live among. On the other hand, some of the
recent calls for greater egalitarianism seem to me absurdly unreal. You cant
legislate stupidity and ignorance out of existence, or deny they arent
evolutionary disadvantages. But perhaps wed better not go into that!
INTERVIEWER
Have your work habits and methods changed or evolved since you wrote
those early, idea-driven novels? In your Notes on Writing a Novel, you say
The French Lieutenants Woman had its genesis in an image that simply welled
up from the unconscious. Just how do you now proceed in the task of writing
fiction?
FOWLES
I dont think my methods and habits have changed. When I do write
fiction it is still much more by instinct and feeling than by some kind of theory. I
am at the moment toying with the idea of a novel about French
counterrevolution in La Vende in the 1790s. That also has come to me by
something very like an image. I may not do it, but what attracts me are these
image-constituted kernels of a story. How shall I put itthey seem inherently
rich, they promise all sorts of potentialities in how they might grow. What is
rather terrifying at my age is the prospect of all the work you are setting for
yourself by allowing such images to haunt the mind. That has changed. Some
stories in the past one couldnt wait to get into; the energy needed, all the hard
work, seemed nothing. Now it is frankly much more difficult. My last novel, A
MaggotLa Crature in Frenchis currently having some success in France; it
37

has just been chosen the best book of 1987. Marvelous, most writers think. But,
perversely, I find it all rather depressing; men of sixty still expect to hurdle, or
run marathons, as well as they did thirty years before!
INTERVIEWER
The visual image seems very important to you, as it was to D. H.
Lawrence. You constantly refer to painters and painting in your fiction. When
did this interest in art and art history arise in your career?
FOWLES
I have no artistic ability whatever myself, but I do have a great fondness
for the art of the past. I once said that if I werent a novelist I would like to have
been an artist. In a way I both envy and pity painters their general inability with
writing and words. More practically, I think the countless wordless shortcuts the
painters have to make to show their truths are of value to all writers. In
semiological terms they have a whole vocabulary of signs totally beyond
literature, obviously. A lot of very recent postmodernist art does not satisfy me.
Upsetting tradition is justifiable; putting virtually nothing in its place is not.
INTERVIEWER
Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites seem to have special significance for
you. Rossetti appears as a mentor, or magus, for Sarah in The French
Lieutenants Woman. Isnt he also quite close in spirit to your painter, Breasley,
in The Ebony Tower?
FOWLES
Yes, I am very fond of the Pre-Raphaelites. I was sent only the other day a
copy of Holman Hunts portrait of Rossetti as a young man, and felt a very sharp
sense of almost personal identity with that; something about his slightly neurotic
look. I certainly didnt link him with Breasley in The Ebony TowerI had no
clear modelbut perhaps there was, as there so often is in fiction, some
unconscious link with him.
INTERVIEWER
Breasley is very much against abstraction and makes negative and
obscene puns on Picassos very name. He insists that great art is not mental but
arises instead from nature or fullness of being. You agree with that, dont you?
FOWLES
38

Well, yes, I am not altogether happy about some of the developments in

very modern art. The great abstract artists, fine; but far too many of the lesser
ones seem to me to use the abstract to hide their own lack of basic technique and
of things like draughtsmanship. It does seem to me on occasion altogether too
mental, too associatedespecially in New York, Im afraidwith notions of
what is commercially viable or chic today rather than with the kind of more
humanisticand human-basedtraditions from the past.
INTERVIEWER
But is your attitude essentially romantic? Drawing a portrait of the artist
based on your fiction and various statements you have made, one forms a
Rossetti-like image of a rather isolated, anima-driven man, dependent upon the
muse, or unconscious forces, somewhat self-destructive, and dreaming always
of a saner and greener world than the contemporary reality.
FOWLES
Here we must differ. Everything I have learnt of other writers and most
artists does constitute a portrait of the sort of figure for which you blame me
certainly the isolation, certainly being driven by largely unconscious forces,
certainly having to rely on idealized images from the past. I think all the arts
draw on a nostalgia or longing for a better worldat root a better metaphysical
conditionthan the one that is. Self-destructive, I dont know, but certainly we
are all victims of some form of manic depression. That is the price of being what
we are. I would never chooseeven if I could!to be a more normal human
being; I would never choose something without that emotional cost, severe
though it can become.
INTERVIEWER
Doesnt all this remind you of Hardy? You sometimes seem to merge with
Hardys Judea man with a vision of the humanists New Jerusalem glowing on
the horizon, as Christminister appeared to Jude. You remember he carved into
the milestone, Thither, J. F. This isnt really a fair comparison, I suppose,
since you dont have his naive faith in social evolution.
FOWLES
I think every writer, certainly from this part of the world, feels a bit of
Hardy in him, but I wouldnt like to be compared personally to Jude the
Obscure. I really cant altogether go with Hardys general gloom and pessimism.
I certainly have doubts about social evolution, especially today, and especially
as so many politicians like to use the hope or promise of it in their speeches
39

too often merely because its something people want to hear. By and large I
retain a kind of optimism about the human condition, a belief that we will one
dayeven if always a later day than naive optimism expectscorrect much of
what is wrong in the world, or perhaps just what makes us believe it is wrong.
Do I think that things will get better in any immediate future, no; that there is
some kind of slow progress, despite countless wrong turnings, yes. I am working
at the moment at an attempt to dramatize the debate over Darwins On the
Origin of Species at the British Association meeting at Oxford in 1860in many
ways perhaps the most important event of the whole century since it was when
rational science began at last to cast off the shackles of obscurantist religion,
when reason began to triumph over myth. Our present scientific world, which
resulted from all that, has its faults and problems, of course, and perhaps the
pendulum has swung too far. But I still cant feel, despite all the well-known
intervening horrors and disasters, that the world hasnt progressed since the new
reality Darwin and his followers introduced into life just over a century ago.
Basically Hardy saw Darwinian theory as grist to his mill, or scientific backing
for his gloom. I dont feel that. It seems to me to have represented a major
clearing in the clouds over humanity.
INTERVIEWER
Granted your philosophical differences with Hardy, there does seem to be
a psychological bond between you. In your essay, Hardy and the Hag, you
recognize his rather painful last novel, The Well-Beloved, as a precocious (preFreudian and pre-Jungian) fable on the power of the muse or the animathe
eroticin the life of the writer. A more innocent perception of this connection is
the mainstay in the life and work of another writer you have admired, AlainFournier. Bring in Rossetti and you have a psychological brotherhood. Isnt your
Mantissa a sort of spoof on this link between the erotic and the creative impulses
a tribute to old Erato?
FOWLES
I certainly think the erotic was very important for Hardy. The avoiding
any direct contact with it, or expression of it, the slipping around it, plays an
enormous part in his novels. He was obviously a shy and repressed man. He
liked the trystthat first secret meeting or instinctual attraction between lovers
so much more than the fully physical side, what we should call the sex. I
suppose I am the same, that is, hauntedboth ravished and tormentedby the
erotic; yet happiest when it is left three-quarters hidden, in secret. I spent a year
of my life once writing an erotic novelin common terms, a pornographic one.
One day, when it was virtually complete, I took it and all its drafts into the
garden and burnt the lot. It would no doubt have made me a great deal of money,
and I was rather proud of it, for what it was. It was not prudishness that made
40

me burn it, but much more a feeling of blasphemy, an error of bad taste. It broke
that secret, bared the hidden part. That is why I dislike what I see as the
unnecessary sexual explicitness in so much American fiction; it becomes
infantile, destructive of the truly erotic, in the end.
Mantissa was meant to make fun of that, in part, and also of the poor
novelists, like Hardy, Fournier, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and countless
others, laboring under this monstrous erotic succubus they have to carry on their
backs. That and the money succubusthe idiots illusion: I must be a great
writer because I make a lot of moneyare the two main danger points for the
male writer.
INTERVIEWER
You have told visiting academics searching for influences to consider
nature itselfas well as your long-standing interest in natural history and in
conservationas sources. The essential connection between nature and your art
is explained, I think, in the most admirable of your nonfictional works, The Tree.
I refer to that perfect essay you wrote to accompany the photographs in that
volume. Would you care to clarify and elaborate?
FOWLES
Thank you for liking The Tree. I am most happy at having written that.
This relation, between man and nature, is far more important and real to me than
that between man and God, even between man and other men. I also find it
intensely pleasurable, endlessly rich. Men often bore, books often bore, all
things human can bore; nature, never. I once had to be in a jury at the Old
Bailey, Londons principal criminal court. We had to listen to a series of very
unpleasant cases, involving child abuse, incest, all the rest. I was left afterwards
standing outside the court with my jury fee. I decided to go to the nearest
bookshop and buy the title remotest from anything human that I could find. I
bought the then standard work on British spiders, about which I knew nothing.
Now, many years later, after endless peering down a microscope, I still know
nothing scientific about spidersthat is, I can still not identify them safely. But
at least I have glimpsed and spent many hours in their strangely complex and
beautiful world.
For many years, and with rather more success, I have pursued wild
orchids all over Europe andthrough someones kind gift of Luers booksin
imagination as well, all over the United States. When I was in a hospital bed just
after having had a stroke recently, I was near weeping with self-rage and selfpity, reciting a mantra to myself: tenthredinifera, tenthredinifera, tenthredinifera
. . . that unpronounceable name belongs to one of the most beautiful Ophrys, or
41

bee orchids, of Europe. I had come upon it on a Cretan mountain the previous
spring; and I was saying that name like a mantra because I thought I should
never climb that remote mountain again. Nature regularly brings tears into my
eyes; humans very, very seldom.
INTERVIEWER
Academic critics have questioned you again and again about literary
influences, but of course there have been other influences. What people have
impressed you? And what about the impact of your travelsFrance, Greece,
America?
FOWLES
Very few people, I am afraid, have influenced me. I say I am afraid
because I think ones indifference, deep down, to most other human beings is not
something to be proud of; it is a form of hopelessness. Increasingly, as I grow
older, I try to justify this, and perhaps do, in part, by mans bestial treatment of
nature and his overwhelmingly selfish stupidity, his letting himself proliferate to
such an insane degree. There are just too many of us these days. We have a
dialect expression here in the west of England: the grockles. A grockle is
someone ugly, but necessary: a visitor, a tourist, a foreigner. It is not just here in
Dorset, but all over the world: the grockles begin to ruin everything.
Places touch me, move me, far more. If I am lucky, now, in the present,
visiting; but these days it seems more and more in memory they move me, what
they were like. There is a beach on Spetsai in Greece I describe in The Magus.
Later visitors have told me how the grockles have completely spoilt it. But I can
still remember it as it once was. I do not need my own words. Words are clumsy
things. In my mind I can return earlier, to the first place, my first experience, as
perhaps Adam could recall lost Eden. I remember equally a site in New Mexico,
that I also wrote about; and the first American woods I walked through, in
Massachusetts, entrancingly new to me and strange, though it showed nothing
but the commonest species.
INTERVIEWER
Orwell wrote his late books in behalf of democratic socialism; you write
in behalf of freedom. Apparently you mean that the individual must free
himself from conventions. We must escape from the ebony tower of our
conventional lives. Is that the key idea?
FOWLES
42

I have just written a conservation piece in which I suggestnot altogether

humorouslythat mans nearest relative is not the ape, but the sheep. I was
brought up in an intensely conventional suburb not far from London by, in social
terms, conventional parents. I have tried to escape ever since, and have admired
the unconventional, the breakers of rules. Though often timid about that myself.
INTERVIEWER
Many of your novels are timescapes, as they have been called, but
Daniel Martin stands out as a venture into contemporary realism. Like Dan, you
did live in Los Angeles for a while and worked on films.
FOWLES
Daniel Martin is certainly closer to me, or my own life, than the other
books. Yes, I did briefly experience Los Angeles when William Wyler was
getting ready to make The Collector. I enjoyed that, though I loathed Los
Angeles and the vulgar tinsel of the film world. I wrote an account of it, very
safely unpublishable for libel reasons.
I have a kind of love-hate relationship with the cinema. I admire it at its
best, as an art, but I am increasingly hostile to the way it has invaded literature. I
hate the way some silly people (often those who think themselves intellectuals)
suppose we writers can know no greater glory than to have been filmed; almost
as if we would never have written in the first place but for the prospect of being
translated into the cinema. A year to two years ago my Chinese translator wrote
and asked me if he could ask me a very important literary question, which all his
Chinese readers would like answered. I agreedthere then came this very
important literary question: What was Meryl Streep really like? I did not, and
will not, answer, not because I in the least despised or disliked Meryl in The
French Lieutenants Womanshe made a very good effort at a very difficult, for
an American, partbut because the Chinese were showing themselves just as
foolish as the Americans and the British, totally under the tyranny of the
fashionable art form, of the visual. Something in the cinema and television
wants to usurp the novel totally. It will fail, I believe; in any case these visual
arts will receive no help from me in their encroachment on my own art.
INTERVIEWER
There arent many heroes in your novels. Well, in A Maggot there is Lord
B., who certainly qualifies, but he turns out to be a transient incarnation of
qualities found only in a better world than ours. On the other hand, every novel
provides a heroine. You give women most of the virtues and you imply that our
43

timecontrary to the public myth sustained by scientific achievementis

anything but a heroic age.
FOWLES
I am certainly not a feminist in the militant sense, and Im sure many such
contemporary feminists would disown me. I have great sympathy for the general
feminine principle in life. I find very little heroic about most men, and think
that quality is far more likely to appear among women in ordinary, non-literary
life. That ours is in general a heroic age seems to me ridiculous. We are near
stifling and exterminating our planet. What scientific and technological
advances we have made are flagrantly not paralleled by any moral or ethical
ones. By and large men are never moral; they always let themselves be
pressured into the amoral or the immoral. In terms of history men have failed; it
is time we tried Eve.
INTERVIEWER
You have often said you admire Golding. Is it partly because he is so wellread in scientific literature and so often attacks the myth of objective science?
Certainly Golding would approve your book on Stonehenge for this very reason.
FOWLES
Ive long liked Goldings work. Though I have met him, I hardly know
him personally. Without agreeing all the way, I have a general sympathy with
what I take him to be doing. The piece I wrote for the volume in tribute to him
on his seventy-fifth birthday [Golding and Golding in William Golding: The
Man and His Books (1986)] tries to say that. Ive just reviewed the last of his sea
trilogy. It shows marvelous gusto in a man of his age. Thank God someone still
knows what the novel is about.
INTERVIEWER
What other contemporaries, or near contemporaries, have impressed you
or directly influenced your own writing?
FOWLES
Noneor rather, too ephemerally for me to feel happy about talking of
influence. At the moment I am for instance readingand enjoyinga proof of
Sybille Bedfords new novel, Jigsaw. I very much like her general attitude to
life, her Europeanism, her slightly watercolorish writing technique, those
seemingly haphazard, Dufy-like little dabs of description. She would very well
44

answer my general notion of a humanist. But I could not quite call this an
influence. As I suspect happens with most writers and over most literature, she
simply helps constitute a general tenor, or climate, that I like. I think baldly
asking for specific names is really a much too clumsyperhaps a masculine
way of probing a very vague, delicate, and obscure process.
INTERVIEWER
You say you feel time is running out. If you must abandon certain
possibilities and projects in favor of others, what criteria come into play in
making that decision?
FOWLES
As we both know, this has been, through my fault, a very prolonged
interview. During its midstream, early in 1988, I had a mild strokemedically,
a transient ischaemic episode. It did not, and still does not, seem the transient
episode the doctors would make it, but something much more life altering. At
one moment an eminent neurologist happened to lightly remark to me that of
course I would have lost my writing ability. I was used to other peoples
indifference, but thought this a damned sight too much. He knew who I was, and
I found his light insouciance monstrous. I was in complete error. What he had
been talking of was righting ability, the power to look to one side yet still to
keep ones balance as one walks ona faculty I had never before even realized I
hadand which I have indeed partly lost. On bad days I go down the street like
a wino, canoning from side to side.
It seems I was lucky, really. My memory was affected a little, but seems to
be returning. I can still enjoy reading, I feel I can still judge books. What
escapes me is composing fiction. The two main writing blocks are these: firstly,
finding myself starved of alternatives. In the pre-stroke days my mind seemed
automatically, and quite unconsciously, to offer ten ways of saying something.
Now I am hard put to think of more than one, and that often not one I like. I
never before realized I had this totally unconscious verbal dexterity; and that not
having it is salutary, is reducing me to the common state of most peoplethis is
why Ive been so lucky, this is why they cant write novels.
The other bar to writing is less mysterious. It is something like abulia, loss
of will, indecision; but not quite. It seems more like a loss of vanity, a not really
caring what I write or have writteneven worse, what anyone writes or has
written. In short, I have lost all conventional faith or belief in books, in
literature, most of that superstructure of self-regard most writers have to erect
between themselves and the outside world. Only the old and very successful can
throw that superstructure away; and even then, often dont.
45

This new slowness, the intellectual equivalent of my new physical

clumsiness, this doubt of the worth of the game, have largely kept me from
serious writing during this last year. I certainly dont feel barren, bereft of ideas,
just of the ability to put them into practice. Nor is it basically a question of help,
human or mechanical. The individual mind is just something no other mind or a
word-processor can replace.
This stroke has made me feel time is running out; in other words, much
more aware of death, my own and that of the one other human being I love most
and whose ghost, in one form or another, has lain close behind all those
female heroines we mentioned earlier. I can imagine my own real death, but not
that of Elizabeth, my wife. The one thing I try to keep writing, as I have during
nearly all my adult life, is my diary. You wonder, at times, what it is all worth,
the maundering on about countless things that other people will have forgotten.
Yet something drives one on; manand womanis profoundly self-reflexive.
Years ago in The Aristos I suggested death itself was like a loved wife, a
vital and essential part of me. Still today I wouldnt alter any of that part of the
book. I stay an atheist, a totally unreligious man, with a deep, deep conviction
that there is no afterlife. But I wrote it a little as one who writes things in novels:
imagining them, not knowing them. Now the rough seas begin, and Timor
mortis, though I despise it, conturbat me.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2415/the-art-of-fiction-no-109john-fowles

46