MAKING sense of John Fowles’ life and literary work is no easy task. Best known for novels such as The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he has also published poems, short stories, screenplays, translations and diaries - though no new fiction since A Maggot in 1985.

Eileen Warburton has had exclusive access to Fowles’s private papers for this first full-scale biography. With Fowles’ collaboration she has compiled a detailed and often depressing account of his crankish existentialism, schoolboy politics, sexual obsessions, messy ménages and megalomaniac self-regard.

Born in Essex in 1926, Fowles graduated from Oxford and became a reluctant schoolmaster - first in Greece, then at a girls’ grammar school in London. He had already written novels before publication of his first, The Collector, in 1963. Warburton writes illuminatingly about Fowles’ friendship with Tom Maschler, his dynamic American publisher at Jonathan Cape, and about the importance of Elizabeth Fowles, the author’s first wife, as mentor and editor.

The biography does little to disguise the extent of Fowles’ self-deluding vanity. Early on he persuaded himself that an unknown, inexperienced director was the only man qualified to adapt The Collector as a film. He wrote: "I could certainly direct performance as well as the only other two directors I have seen at work. The technical knowledge needed doesn’t seem very great. If one could only gain the autonomy one has in a novel, I should be very tempted."

Although Warburton is not much of a literary critic, she gives a useful account of Fowles’ unpublished books, including an abandoned thriller written flat-out in 17 days, a long erotic poem in 1,000 quatrains, and an indecent novel in which an English toff has sex with his sister-in-law and niece before gunning down random proletarians as "vermin".

The final chapters describe Fowles’ descent into illness and literary incapacity. He suffered a stroke in 1988 and since then has written nothing of substance except his diaries. After Elizabeth’s death in 1990, Fowles acquired a 21-year-old companion/secretary to whom he gave houses, cars, pianos, jewellery, foreign holidays and a large salary. He wrote of this woman: "She uses me? Very well, all right, she does. Even if true, what am I to do? Refuse to be used - and join the dead?" He declared that she was his Muse, even though he was writing nothing.

Happily, the biographical narrative ends with a kind of resolution. After years of surrounding himself with unreliable women and hangers-on, Fowles remarried in 1998 and his second wife has brought him a certain degree of happiness and domestic security.

But it is hard to feel any affection for the writer who is exposed in these pages and, disappointingly, the book does not engage with Fowles’ novels in enough detail to make a serious critical case for them. Fowles’ life is a mess, but Warburton scarcely takes the trouble to explain why he was also a great writer.

John Fowles (1926-)

A Biography.

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 have 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)

John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, in the south-east of England, as the son of Robert Fowles, a prosperous cigar merchant, and Gladys Richards Fowles. "The rows of respectable little houses inhabited by respectable little people had an early depressive effect on me," he later wrote. Fowles was educated at Alleyn Court School and Bedford School. He has regretted that as a captain of prefects at Bedford School he allowed himself to exercise tyranny over the younger boys. "Being head boy was a weird experience," Fowles has told. "I suppose I used to beat on average three or four boys a day.... Very evil, I think. Terrible system." During World War II his family evacuated to a small Devonshire village near Dartmoor. In 1944 he entered the University of Edinburgh. Between the years 1945 and 1946 Fowles served in the Royal Marines. He studied at New College, Oxford, French and German languages and literature. While at Oxford, Fowles was much influenced by French Existentialism, the most fashionable philosophical movement at that time.

After receiving his B. A. in 1950, Fowles worked as a teacher at the University of Poitiers in France, and at a boys' school at Anargyrios College on the Greek island Spetsai. There he met his future wife, Elisabeth Whitton; they married in 1956. In England Fowles continued his career as a teacher at Ashridge College (1953-54) and at St. Godric's College (1954-63). He also worked on many writing projects, including a novel, The Magus, that he continued to revise for 13 years.

"I have in any case no memory at all for novels, for their ideas, plots and characters. I could not even reconstitute my own with any accuracy if I were obliged to. I suppose I read as I write. I live the directs and present experience very intensely; but when it is over, it sinks very rapidly out of sight." (Fowles in 'Of Memoirs and Magpies', The Atlantic Monthly, June 1975) In 1963 Fowles made his debut as a novelist with THE COLLECTOR, a mixture of thriller and an analysis of class conflict. Jud Kinberg and John Kohn, former television writers, purchased the screenrights of the book before its publication. William Wyler agreed to direct the picture. "I found I couldn't put the book down," he recalled.

The Collector gained a huge success and since its publication Fowles devoted himself entirely to writing. The narrator, 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 keeps a diary, records their conversations, and plans her escape, while Clegg wants to win her "respect." She gains small victories but never her freedom and dies of pneumonia. At the finale the collector plays with the idea of repeating his performance. The story had two sources. Fowles had seen a performance of Bartók'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 surptise," 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 "horridly impersonal."

Fowles's second novel, The Magus, used elements from William Shakespeare's play The Tempest (1623). It is a story about Nicholas Urfe, who escapes his his latest love affair on the Greek island of Phraxos. There he meets the demonic millionaire Maurice Conchis, the Prospero of the tale, and falls in love with Lily, Conchis's dead fiancée or an actress portraying her. Conchis is the master of magic and hallucinations in the 'Godgame', which lead Urfe to deeper self-knowledge and re-birth. "All my life I had turned life into fiction, to hold reality away," Urfi confesses. 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 book was adapted into screen in

1981, directed by Karel Reisz and starring Meryl Streep. The story set in the Victorian period followed the book, but the modern subplot, a film within a film, was created by Reisz and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay. Before them Fred Zinneman has planned to direct a film based on the book, but he did not find the right actress for the title role. The script was written by Dennis Potter. Also the directors Mike Nichols and Franklin Schaffner wrestled for a short with their film projects. Fowles had little to do with the making of the film. Reisz has later said that for him the project came alive when Meryl Streep was signed. Jeremy Irons played Charles, who tries to solve the mystery of the elusive Sarah.

The novel was set largely in Lyme Regis in the 1860s and re-created the Victorian romance 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 novel had 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 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 love 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 undiluted, he also gives room for religious interpretation of the mystical events.

In 1966 Fowles moved with his wife Elisabeth to Dorset. They lived first at Unerhill Farm and then settled to a cliff-top house by the sea in a southern town called Lyme Regis. Fowles was appointed in 1978 joint honorary curator of the Lyme Regis Museum, and from 1979 to 1988 he was the sole honorary curator. Elisabeth Fowles died of cancer in 1990.

Fowles also has published several nonfiction books about Lyme Regis. His other works include poems, short stories, and essays. THE TREE (1992) contains recollections of Fowles's childhood and explores the impact of nature on his life and work. The author's philosophical basis for much of his work can be discerned in his early collection of notes and aphorisms, THE ARIOSTO (1964), originally subtitled "A Self-Portrait in Ideas". Fowles once said: " I hate to think of the awful pages of bad philosophy that would be in my novels if I hadn't written that."

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 - film 1965, dir. by William Wyler, starring Terence Stamp and Samatha Eggar THE ARISTOS: A SELF-PORTRAIT AND IDEAS, 1964 THE MAGUS, 1965 (rev. ed. 1977) screenplay: THE MAGUS, 1968 - film 1968, dir. by Guy Green, starring Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, Anna Karina. - "This near-miss is not without many notable virtues. Fowles's script sustains interest in its convolutions, direction is resourceful and sensitive, Caine is far more dynamic than usual and Quinn and the two femme stars register strongly." (from Variety Movie Guide 2000, ed. by Derek Elley, 2000) THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, 1969 - film 1981, dir. by Karel Reisz from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. - "The film's frequent mirror shots are not only a reference to the illusions of the Victorian age, or the way Victorian fiction is mirrored by events in the modern story. They also relate to Sarah Woodruff as conscious performer, a woman of imagination with a flair for lurid self-dramatization." (from Neil Sinyard's essay, quoted in The Meryl Streep Story by Nick Smurthwaite, 1984) POEMS, 1973 SHIPWRECK, 1974 (photographs by the Gibsons of Scilly) THE EBONY TOWER, 1974 - television film 1984 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 Molière) A BRIEF HISTORY OF LYME, 1981 ed.: MONUMENTA BRITANNICA by John Aubrey, 1981-82 (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 LAND, 1985 (photographs by Fay Godwin) MARTINE, 1985 (adaptation of a play by Jean Jacques Bernard) LYME REGIS CAMERA, 1991 TESSERA, 1993 WORMHOLES: ESSAYS AND OCCASIONAL WRITINGS, 1998 (with Jan Relf) JOHN FOWLES AND NATURE, 1999 (ed. by James R. Aubrey) CONVERSATIONS WITH JOHN FOWLES, 1999 (ed. by Dianne L. Vipond)


A Mystery to Himself
(Filed: 18/04/2004)

Julian Evans reviews

John Fowles by Eileen Warburton

Reading the first published volume of John Fowles's Journals last year, I was overwhelmingly struck by the absence of self-knowledge. Incompleteness in that direction may be important for a writer – didn't Kierkegaard say, "One ought to be a mystery, not only to others, but also to one's self"? – yet Fowles seemed as uninterested in developing an understanding of what made him a good or bad writer as he was in whether he was a good or bad human being. The result can now, I think, be seen in his fiction – in, for example, the long 1977 novel Daniel Martin: self-searching was the book's capital theme but it failed to rise to its own rhetorical demands.

In Eileen Warburton's sometimes breathless, but frank and very readable biography, the trait is also evident in Fowles's treatment of his wife Elizabeth. Elizabeth – initially the wife of another teacher whom Fowles had met while teaching English on the island of Spetsai – was blonde, long-legged, ethereal and, to him, uneducated. But as his first reader, editor of his drafts and harshest critic – as well as muse – she was central to his success.

There was, as Warburton points out, no published novel before Elizabeth came on the scene, and none after she died in 1990. She made him jettison swathes of his typescripts, on one occasion accusing him of having a "Woman's Own style". She was responsible for his changing the endings of The Magus (1966) and of The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), and her suggested open ending of the latter was a reason for its extraordinary success, at least in America, where the enigmatic Sarah Woodruff stood as emblem of the women's liberation movement, a female character not confined to matrimony.

Fowles, by his own admission in The Journals, neglected his future wife before they were married. Returning from Spetsai in 1953 and finding employment at a finishing school in Hertfordshire, he willingly fell for two female pupils, while Elizabeth suffered in poverty in London. Warburton's account adds to the story, revealing that Elizabeth moved reluctantly with her husband to Lyme Regis when

The Collector (1963) became successful, finding it lonely and profoundly depressing in winter. An editorial split with Elizabeth, when she deeply disliked a thriller he had written called The Device, drove the wedge deeper. Though they still loved one another, one has the impression that for the last six or seven years of Elizabeth's life she lived with a hermit. The connection between the young Fowles, who failed to buy his freezing fiancée a winter coat, and the senior Fowles, who ignored his wife's 64th birthday, is striking.

Wedded to certain ideals of his twenties – an erotically charged idealisation of women, personal freedom and philosophical independence – Fowles's Romanticism was a strained, perhaps rather static business. As a boy repelled by his suburban surroundings in Leigh-on-Sea, a young officer in the Royal Marines, a student at Oxford, and a teacher in France and Greece, his instinct was to escape. He was happiest when he succeeded, at Underhill Farm and behind the Georgian frontage of Belmont House in Lyme, but it was there that the successful writer became a depressive, the lover a recluse, the thinker self-absorbed, meditating on the decline of the West.

Outwardly, he retained the contours of the true Englishman. Beneath the athlete and the officer, however, lurked the kidnapper who inspired The Collector – long after adolescence, he admitted to a favourite fantasy of "imprisoning women underground". (In the couple's move to Lyme, one hears an echo of that fantasy.) Fowles's novels are remembered as the bestsellers of their era, his narrative innovations as a high fusion of traditional storytelling with the postmodern world.

This account underlines that a contradiction existed from the outset, that whenever the world confronted him, he retreated further into what he called "the domain", a private region where his self could be declutched from reality. That refusal to test his ideas against the world was determiningly bad for his fiction. Yet his life – he is now 79 – has brimmed with incident. The making of Karel Reisz's film of The French Lieutenant's Woman would make a book in itself. Sensitively, Warburton also reminds the reader of the quality of Fowles's poetry, his excellent translations, his nature writing.

What was missing? The answer may be in the story of a dinner with Fowles's publisher, Tom Maschler, in 1977, when Elizabeth found herself next to Philip Roth. Roth divined her discomfort at being a writer's wife and launched into a mockney comic routine, setting up an imaginary table at a bookshop with her and discounting the books to get them sold. "He was so nice," she wrote afterwards. "It made being married to a writer seem rather a lark.

[It was] one of the best moments of my life." She had found that a writer's ideals can be tough going, and a GSOH helps.