There is a curious spiral rhythm, and the mind approaches again and again the point of concern, repeats itself, goes back, destroys the time-sequence entirely. . . .
D. H. LAWRENCE
As a novelist, John Fowles needs no introduction. His popularity and his place in the English literary canon have been assured for at least the past two decades. His non-fiction writings are less well known, in part because their appearance has been scattered in ephemeral periodicals, in academic journals, and (in the case of his introductions and forewords) in books by others which have enjoyed a considerably smaller circulation and less popularity than his own novels, and which, in some cases, are now out of print. Here, then, for the first time, is a representative gathering of Fowles’s fugitive and intensely personal writings: essays, literary criticism, commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs, and musings.
The selection in this volume comprises some thirty pieces, ranging from a single page to substantial essays, and covers the period from 1963 and the appearance of Fowles’s first novel, The Collector, to the present. It thus represents the writer’s developing views on the art of fiction, and the relationship of literature to life and morality, throughout the mature, fertile period of his career.
The process of selection was not an easy one. Most of the essays here are reproduced in full, but in some cases—the long essay entitled ‘Islands’, for instance—the inclusion of the full text would have meant the exclusion of some important shorter pieces. My aim in making the selection, and the inevitable editorial cuts that followed, has been always to give the reader a sense of the diversity of Fowles’s interests, and of what Coleridge called the ‘passion and the life that are within’. (I am, incidentally, the ‘academic friend’ referred to in the last essay, ‘The Nature of Nature’—the friend who, quoting William Hazlitt on Coleridge, and probably momentarily maddened by John’s wildly digressive habits of thought and speech, suggested that Fowles himself had a tangential and Coleridgean mind! It was taken, fortunately, as an oblique compliment.)
The essays collected here represent a chronicle of the various matters that have plagued, preoccupied, or delighted Fowles throughout his life, and the thread that connects them is inevitably an autobiographical one. All writing, of course, is to some extent autobiographical—‘true lies’—whether it is fiction or non-fiction. The writer’s obsessions and passions permeate his work, and readers who are familiar with Fowles’s novels will find in these essays frequent resonances and reflections of themes that they may already have met in the fiction: the lost domaine, the woman as princesse lointaine; evolution and natural history; freedom and responsibility, randomness and hazard; literature, literariness, and the role of the writer. They also reflect his lifelong commitment to left-wing politics, conservation, and ‘green’ issues. And the gift for narrative, for which Fowles’s novels are so justly celebrated, is evident in many of these essays. In ‘Shipwreck’, for instance, the opening lines have all the qualities of a compelling story: the feeling of ‘once upon a time’, the powerful sense of place, and the way the first-person narrator draws the reader into the here and now of the tale he is telling.
Fowles’s style is lively, scholarly, frequently provocative, and occasionally contentious—as, for instance, in his statement that ‘writing is like eating or making love: a natural process, not an artificial one’! Above all, it is extremely accessible. He writes primarily for ‘you the reader who is neither critic nor writer’ (‘Notes on an Unfinished Novel’). At the same time, these essays must be of great interest to scholars and writers everywhere, affirming as Fowles himself so often does the importance of the novel, and taking issue with those critical Cassandras who prophecy its imminent demise.
The writings also bear witness to Fowles’s grumblingly ambivalent relationships with the literary academy and with the wilder shores of literary theory and criticism, and to his adamant refusal to concede what Roland Barthes famously called the ‘death of the author’. He constantly claims that he is utterly baffled by the intellectual flights of literary theorists—as, for instance, in ‘A Modern Writer’s France’: ‘What very skimpy reading I have done of Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, and their fellow maîtres has more often left me baffled and frustrated than enlightened,’ he complains. In an earlier piece on Kafka, the literary academy is referred to as a ‘college of morticians’, who murder to dissect. Scholars, he says, will not be impressed by his ‘quasi-academic’ views on literature; and yet, in spite of the tongue-in-cheek insults, they are, it seems, impressed. Moreover, his strangest novel, Mantissa, bears witness to his more-than-competent grasp of de-construction and poststructuralist theory. Nevertheless, the continuing stream of academic visitors and thesis writers who find their way to the writer’s home in Lyme Regis—which might reasonably be regarded as the price of being taken seriously as a writer—seems to inspire in him a kind of terror. Is it, one wonders, that terror familiar to many academics as well as to writers and other artists—the terror of being disarmed or found out? ‘Novelists,’ says Fowles, ‘are like conjurors, always expert at misleading’; and the last thing a conjuror (or magus) wants is for his shamanistic tricks, his particular magic, to be rumbled.
Fowles’s writings reflect the diversity and overlapping nature of his interests. Neither the writings nor the interests fall into neat, convenient categories, and the task of ordering the essays was not an easy one. The reader looking for references to Fowles’s views on a particular subject will find it easier to work through the index than to scan the contents pages for clues. Eventually the material seemed to sort itself out into four main groups, and I have ordered it accordingly; within each section, the essays are presented chronologically. It may be tempting to read them as an exposition of linear intellectual development, but for me they represent something far more interesting: the ‘curious spiral rhythm’ of a mind returning again and again to its main points of concern, always moving on, and yet blurring or destroying the idea of time as sequence, so that the fragments, the tesserae that at one time were to have given this book its title, combine to form a kaleidoscopic pattern: a shake, or a reordering, and a new image takes shape. A shoring-up against the ruins, perhaps, but as the essay ‘Behind The Magus’ affirms, ‘such fragments make good shoring’ indeed. As Fowles himself tells us in the interview with Dianne Vipond, each piece of his non-fiction writing, whatever its subject matter, is a ‘little square of mosaic in my general portrait’; but given the shape-shifting nature of this particular writer’s persona, each reader will find in this text a different mosaic, a different John Fowles.
Just as the author-persona of The French Lieutenant’s Woman self-consciously reminds us of the inevitably split nature of the writer—the way in which he, or she, is both the ‘I’ who writes and the ‘I’ who is written, the self who is both within and without the fiction—so here we find recurrent meditations on the same theme. The tribute to William Golding, for instance, juxtaposes the private man, gentle, elderly, unknown and perhaps unknowable, with the publicly owned and constructed figure ‘Golding’, a semi-mythical entity ‘made purely of words’. The briefest essay in this collection, ‘The J. R. Fowles Club’, similarly reflects on the fractured nature of the writer-beast. It was written in response to a request from the Ecco Press, which, in the spring of 1995, published an issue of Antæus devoted to writers’ senses of themselves as writers. Ecco had asked for a ‘little experimental/mock-autobiographical prose on the experience of writing’. The model was Borges’s famous mini-essay ‘Borges and I’, an early postmodernist statement on the act of writing, in which Borges speaks of himself as his ‘other’, as a split subject: the ‘I’ who writes, acts, speaks, and has ‘produced a few worthwhile pages’, and the ‘I’ who watches and is ‘doomed to oblivion’. The most startling difference between the Borges piece and John’s is that whereas Borges sees himself as split in two—self and other, subject and object, the seeing and the seen—the Fowlesian self is multiply fractured, a shambolical disunity of many, often reluctantly coexisting parts. This self—the ‘club’—is composed of many members, some of whom are in constant, querulous disagreement with each other: the would-be feminist, for instance, who’s consumed with male guilt over the sins committed against women by an earlier, younger self—a self who had much in common with Nicholas of The Magus.
At the same time, certain recurrent motifs do accumulate and cohere: the writer’s sense of himself as dislocated, as a romantic in exile; the technophobe at odds with a world of computers and virtual reality; the need for solitude and for the green, regenerative retreat; the sacred combe that is part of and fundamental to his passionate love of the natural world (‘Solitude—in exile geographically and socially—is essential for me’).1
The interview with Dianne Vipond with which this book ends is the most recent of the many interviews given by Fowles over the years. Here we find him reflecting upon and amplifying many of the issues and concerns that have emerged in the preceding pages. In some matters, Fowles’s views have remained remarkably consistent since he first became known as a writer in the 1960s; but where his views have changed or shifted ground, this interview provides a useful and illuminating update.
The first section—Writing and the Self—includes the most explicitly autobiographical of Fowles’s non-fiction writing, and it is here (though not only here) that we find his most confessional statements about the guilty pleasures of what he calls the godgame of writing fiction. Writing, it seems, is a sexy business. Fiction making, the creating of another world, is a ‘haunting, isolating, and guilt-ridden experience’; his characters need ‘constant caressing’; he falls in love with his heroines and is, if only imaginatively, unfaithful to his wife with every novel he writes. His relationship with the novel, for the duration of its writing, is like an affair, full of guilts, anxieties, secret delights. ‘Such pleasures,’ he says, ‘are unholy.’
There are more infidelities in the travel writing—with la sauvage and agria Ellada, both shatteringly beautiful, remote, and bounteous in their offerings. The first, of course, is France, the France of ‘endless obscure countrysides and lost villages’, where Fowles first discovered the lost domain that was to haunt him, and his fiction, for ever: the Sologne of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, the wild France of Fowles the latter-day Romantic. With agria Ellada, or ‘wild Hellas’, he has had, since falling ‘hopelessly, overwhelmingly in love on the first day of arrival’, a lifelong love affair. Although there may be some repetition and echoes between the two pieces on Greece here, this was clearly an experience that was so important, so impressive—in the sense of making a mark, an impress—that I had no hesitation in including both.
The title of the second section, Culture and Society, is a conscious allusion to the work of the great Marxist critic and writer Raymond Williams, and here I have included John’s most openly political commentary. It is, in fact, rare for him to make overt political statements, though he is quite open—trenchantly so—in his adherence to left-wing politics, socialism, and republicanism, even while declaring a pox on all political parties!
In his essay on the Falklands war, Fowles deplores the way in which party politics have been reduced by the media to low-grade public entertainment, and laments the irresponsible use of language for party-political ends. ‘The one thing we [writers] learn from our profession (and share with the politicians) is the frightening capacity of the image and the word to trigger buried things, and to drown sober reason,’ he writes. History indeed has provided us with ample evidence of that power and the horrors it can unleash. But then there is a recoil, prompted perhaps by memories of that evidence—an unwillingness to stand so close to the politician: ‘Bad and self-indulgent art hurts few; bad and self-indulgent politics hurts millions.’ Few of us would disagree with the latter part of this statement, but I for one do not believe that bad art is innocuous, any more than I believe that good art is impotent. Fowles’s art is a committed art; it is neither morally nor politically neutral. The duty of all art, he asserts in his ‘Recollections of Kafka’, ‘is in some way to improve society at large’, and this is affirmed in the Vipond interview. Writers, he says, have inherited a moral and ethical function from the clerics of the Middle Ages, whose domain was also literature. Like D. H. Lawrence, whom he so much admires (in spite of my efforts as a good feminist to persuade him otherwise!), Fowles is a self-confessed didact. Lawrence believed that the purpose of the novel was to teach, which is largely why F. R. Leavis canonized and elevated him to one of the ‘great tradition’. Would Leavis, one wonders, have done the same for John Fowles? Certainly Fowles writes, as Lawrence wrote, to be heard; and as he writes of Lawrence, he himself is constantly trying, like a good preacher, to save us, and wringing his hands at our apparent collective unwillingness to be saved.
The writers who seem to speak most strongly to Fowles, with whom he seems to feel the greatest sense of connection, are those who for one reason or another have shared his own sense of exile, his sense of being an outsider of some kind, or, in his own words, a ‘crusty recluse, a hermit’. As I assembled the essays for the third section here, I was intrigued by the accumulation of evidence of John’s predilection for literary ‘sports’, historical odd-bods, dissenters of one sort or another, whether in their choice of subject matter or in their personae.
With Ebenezer Le Page, the subject and ‘fictional alter ego’ created by G. B. Edwards, Fowles shares a ‘querulousness over the new’ and a sense of being excluded from the modern world. For Fowles, this is the postindustrial world of virtual reality and information technology; for Edwards himself it was a ‘kind of againstness, or bloody-mindedness’, the characteristics of the lifelong dissenter with whom Fowles clearly identifies. The Channel Island world of Ebenezer Le Page becomes a metaphor for the ‘island of the self’, with its fierce resistance to anyone or anything attempting occupation or colonization.
John Aubrey, best known for his Brief Lives, was another lonely maverick, fervent conservationist, fellow magpie, and dissenter from all orthodoxies. And with his contemporary William Golding, Fowles also seems to share a sense of being a kind of intellectual expatriate. ‘Ideas,’ as he quotes from another writer in an earlier essay, ‘are the only motherland.’2 Nor is this identification with his subjects confined to members of his own sex. Ann Lee, the subject of Fowles’s most recent novel, A Maggot, and founder of the Shakers, was one of the great dissenters of the eighteenth century and, though not represented in this collection, has long been one of John’s heroines. Another heroine who is included here is Marie de France, the twelfth-century writer of the Lais, about whose life we know very little, but whose writing tells us that she was highly educated, extremely successful, very wise, and rather wicked. Almost certainly, whatever her professed allegiances, she was another intellectual expatriate.
Alain-Fournier, the writer to whom Fowles ‘still feel[s] closer’ than to any other novelist, living or dead, was clearly a fellow nympholept. The importance of his only novel, Le Grand Meaulnes (irreverently referred to as ‘The Great Moan’ by some of the less reverent of John’s friends), to the life and work of Fowles has been fully and ably documented by critics and scholars, as well as by John himself, and this is not the place for yet another critical analysis. Yet something must be said here, since its central theme, the idea of the lost domaine, constitutes what I believe we may call John’s life myth. It speaks of something always already lost—a mythical Garden of Eden, some golden age of childhood innocence, or, in psychoanalytic terms, the idealized mother of infancy, as suggested by Gilbert Rose in Fowles’s revealingly autobiographical essay ‘Hardy and the Hag’. In the same essay, Fowles universalizes this state—‘The universal condition of mankind [is] a state of loss,’ he writes—but in his revised foreword to The Magus he speaks, also, of its special importance to the writer. ‘Loss is essential for the novelist,’ he says, and ‘immensely fertile for his books, however painful to his private being’. He is not the only writer to have made this observation and connection. Günter Grass, for instance, has written similarly of his own sense of exile and loss: ‘Language didn’t compensate me for my loss, but by stringing words together I was able to make something in which my loss could be declared. . . . Loss has given me a voice. Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is a mania to call the lost thing until it returns. Without loss there would be no literature.’3
Paradise lost, then. But Paradise is regained, time and again, in the green retreats, the sacred combes and bons vaux that figure so significantly in the fictional work and in the life. Fournier’s hero is an adolescent when he finds his lost domaine in the French countryside, as John was when he had what was then called a nervous breakdown and, at the same time, moved to Devon, where he discovered his own private Eden in his relationship with nature, wildlife, and the landscape. It’s a relationship that has sustained him throughout his life, as his journals testify. Undoubtedly it has provided some kind of check or balance to the sense of loss: a solace, a refuge, a sense of evolutionary continuity. In the novels, it’s at the very point where the two things converge—the driving sense of loss and the consolatory green retreat—that we find the lost domaine. In the life, it’s the daily contact with the wild as well as the cultivated parts of his garden, and his intimate, ‘hands-on’ experience of nature—the year’s first snowdrop, a sighting of a rare bird or bug, a new colony of orchids to be visited—that clearly provide the wellspring of the writer’s life force and creativity.
The haunting presence that inhabits the lost domaine is, of course, the figure of the princesse lointaine, the archetypally unattainable woman, and its supplement is John’s self-confessed nympholepsy—that perverse but persistent condition of desire for the unattainable which in his case is so paradoxically productive.
These writers and their subjects, then, tend to reflect the quirks and preoccupations—the obsessional maggots—of Fowles himself. The subject of two of the essays in this collection, Thomas Hardy, is perhaps rather a special case. Again there is an identification with a fellow self-exile, and again there is a recognition of the sense of loss and its corollary, literary fertility. Of Hardy’s attempt to cut himself off from his past, Fowles writes that the ‘deep sense of loss this self-exile engenders, the guilt, the sense of the wasteful futility of human history, are a very valuable thing for a writer, since they are also a deep source of energy in creation’. But Hardy is a literary giant, one whose shadow (in the metaphorical and the Jungian sense) cannot be avoided—a literary mentor and father figure who, according to Fowles, shared the experience of writing as an ‘onanistic and taboo-laden pursuit’. More guilty pleasures. Indeed, the Hardy poem with which Fowles prefaces his essay ‘Hardy and the Hag’—a metaphorical striptease whereby the young goddess attained and enjoyed during the night emerges with the dawn as loathsome, rotten, haglike—speaks disturbingly of a terror that goes beyond pleasure. If the satisfaction of the desire is also (as it must be, however temporarily) the death of the desire, and if that death is experienced, as Hardy’s poem suggests, as a foul and shameful corruption, then nympholepsy—the rejection of the attainable (from the ‘need to avoid consummation’) in favour of the unattainable object of desire that may be gazed upon but never carnally enjoyed—is an obvious psychological response. Fowles’s essay on Hardy’s novel The Well-Beloved probably reveals at least as much about himself as about his subject; and if the ‘shared predicament’ has, as he tells us, been painful and problematic in daily life, it has also been, for both writers, extraordinarily and indispensably important for the imaginative and creative life.
John Fowles’s main private interest—passion, even—is, and has always been, natural history and (as the title of the final essay in this collection indicates) the nature of nature. In recent years that passion has been fuelled by anger, as the last group of essays bears witness. It is an anger born out of the rage and despair of the ardent conservationist who sees what he loves desecrated and dying; it is directed at those who are seen to be ‘murdering nature and natural landscape the world over’.
In ‘Land’, Fowles takes on the more complex question of nature and representation, speaking of his suspicion of landscape photography. What he seeks in landscape is, he says, the ‘personal and direct experience of it’, that intimate connection which is so professionally generative and personally regenerative. There is anger, too, at the spurious sentimentality of those who would purvey only prettiness and nostalgia in their views of the English countryside—the legacy of a decadent romanticism. Fowles, like Hardy—and like the poet John Clare, that other nature writer whom he so admires—never forgets that ‘rural life can be obscene, stupid, and cruel’, so that even as he cherishes the myth of the sacred combe, les bons vaux, he always insists on an honest recognition of the often harsh realities of rural, agricultural life. He reckons that his experience of practical farming all through the 1940s, though far more poetic than practical, has deeply marked his life, and he is most proud of having written the first chapter of Daniel Martin in honour of that closeness. Nature, for Fowles, commands respect above all things; not sentimentality, not nostalgia, not romantic representation. When not angry, the writings about nature often take on an elegaic tone, a mourning for what is already lost, a pleading for the conservation and survival of what is left. Reading these pieces is like listening to the ‘loud lament of the disconsolate chimera’, as Eliot puts it in his ‘Four Quartets’; as if the voice that speaks had a strong sense of crying in the wilderness, of being ‘the Word in the desert’. One of the bees in Fowles’s bonnet is the ‘lethal perversion’ of the collector—another of the themes that inflect and inform his fiction. Clegg, the repellent hero of The Collector, is the archetype of all those natural-history collectors who ‘in the end collect the same thing: the death of the living’—a statement central to Fowles’s relationship to nature and the natural world.
More than once in these writings, Fowles makes contrite reference to his own early collecting habits, and confesses that he first came to nature ‘through hunting it with both gun and rod’. Later, he not only relinquished all such pursuits, but came to despise most ‘collecting and hoarding activities . . . however useful they may claim to be scientifically’, since they bring out the very worst in man. Here the gendered language is conscious and deliberate. (Gendered language has been something of an editorial difficulty; wherever possible without changing the sense or sacrificing the elegance of Fowles’s prose, I have altered gender-specific language—man meaning ‘humanity’, for instance—to more politically correct usage.) Throughout his extended (over a lifetime) critique of man’s iniquitous collecting habits, Fowles exempts woman from blame. Women, for Fowles, are natural conservationists; man, that ‘vicious parasitical predator’, is the greedy, guilty party. Perhaps it is not surprising that this should be so. Nature, after all, is consistently identified as female (problematically so, for many feminists), and so long as this is the case, ‘man’ will probably continue to treat nature as he has traditionally treated women—as semi-sentient, unpredictable, something to be tamed, colonized, exploited, and occasionally placated—whereas women’s fellow feeling for nature may continue to keep them on the side of the angels, ecologically speaking.
Natural historian he may be, but what Fowles advocates in the final essay here is the cultivation of the poetic and Keatsian (or MacCaigian), rather than the scientific and Linnaean, relationship to nature. For Fowles, the only (possibly) forgivable form of collecting is bibliophily, and even then, a certain puritanism forbids him the purchase of first editions and expensive rare books. Here at least, though, the thrill of the chase, and of the find, is permissible.
But I have said enough of guilty pleasures. It is time now for the reader’s pleasure—the pleasure of the text. The writings that follow may have a didactic function, may be controversial, may have a ‘use value’, but they are also superbly entertaining, vital, varied, and beautifully crafted. For having myself been a kind of collector in assembling them, I make no apology whatsoever, since they are not to keep but to offer; not to hoard but to share.
JAN RELF
MAY 1997
1. Journal entry for July 7, 1951.
2. Claire de Duras, Ourika (1824). See ‘Notes on an Unfinished Novel’ in section I.
3. ‘Losses’, Granta 42 (Winter 1992).