300-] English Literature - John Fowles

300-] English Literature

John Fowles

John Fowles, Alone But Not Lonely

By RICHARD BOSTON

John Fowles has always hankered for exile. His chief discovery of the last five years is that "if you're into English and you want to go into exile then you live in England. There's nowhere you can feel more alienated from your fellow human beings. If you go to France or Greece you're not really an exile because you're living among people you might admire. If I'd been born in 1906 instead of 1926 I'd be living abroad, because I can't stand the English way of life. I'd be leading Lawrence Durrell's or D. H. Lawrence's kind of life."

Fowles taste for exile comes not only from his feelings about English middle-class society, but also from a positive taste for isolation and loneliness. "It's a terrible confession to make. Loneliness is meant to make you unhappy. It's never done so to me." He has no contact at all with the social life of the community around him and plays no part in the life of the London-centered literary world, which he despises.

The world of the imagination to which he is always drifting is obviously very important to him. He says that his mind, which he talks about as objectively as if it was someone else's, is deficient in all sorts of ways, but that imaginatively it is very rich. He enjoys his imagination and for this reason he doesn't mind sleeping nights: "I can always lie in the darkness and let my imagination run riot." Indeed most of his creative work seems to be done in the state between sleeping and waking. In that sort of condition, he says, he needs very little material to get a story going: It might be the face of an actress seen on television, or a street scene in a print he's been looking at in the daytime. Then he can write the whole story in 40 seconds in his mind.

"The period when I'm going to sleep and the dream is taking over I usually use for working on stuff I'm already writing about. I sort of film scenes." His richest creative period, however, is waking up. His new novel, "The French Lieutenant's Woman," started in this way. "I saw this woman standing on the end of a quay looking out to sea. It was one of these hypno. . .hypno. . .waking up things." He fetches a dictionary to find the word. "Hypnogogic? No, that's just before falling asleep. Here we are. Hypnopompic: between sleeping and waking. Hypnopompic." He repeats the word several times, obviously liking it.

The hypnopompic woman on the end of the quay was wearing Victorian clothes, and this connected up with an interest he had long had in the Victorian period. He dropped the novel he was working on at the time and wrote the book all in one go, the only time he has written a book in this way. His usual procedure is to write a first draft very quickly. (The first draft of "The Collector," for example, was written in under a month.) Then he drops it for a long time. The second stage, when he returns to the book to revise and write, usually takes about six or nine months.

This way of writing explains why "The Collector," his first published book, was the eighth or ninth (he's not exactly sure of the number) to be written. And the first draft of "The Magus," his third book to be published, was written some 12 years or so earlier.

Most of his first drafts are not publishable, he says. "I suppose I can write first drafts at exceptional speeds. I can write a novel in a fortnight or three weeks. I have the strength and the freedom to do so. I've collected a lot of these very rapid first-draft manuscripts, which I tend to hang on to. I did with 'The Magus.' One or two others I've thrown away. But I have four or five now, which gradually I'll pick up again."

He talks about his own work very frankly. He published "The Collector" first (1963) because he felt that it came off, whereas all his other books had been too diffuse: "They were too large and I hadn't the technique." Next came "The Aristos" (1965), a collection of philosophical apothegms written over a space of several years. Most readers of "The Aristos" seem to have felt that it did not work, an opinion Fowles himself apparently shares. "A lot of it was completely misfired flamboyance. And the pensÈe form is very antipathetic to the English palate." But though he considers the book to have been a mistake he says it is a mistake he would go on making. "I wouldn't withdraw it even if I was given the chance. I stick by what I said in that book. I think some of it was even mildly prophetic."

He also agrees that his second novel to be published, "The Magus" (1966), was not very good. He even goes so far as to call it a failure. "I hadn't the technique. The form is inadequate for the content." What was he trying to do in "The Magus?" "I've given many answers to that question, which perhaps shows a certain confusion. . .I was trying to tell a fable about the relationship between man and his conception of God." At the same time, he says, he was trying to do an adventure story on the lines of Alain Fournier's "Le Grand Meaulnes," a book that has always haunted him, and the one which he thinks is really the influence behind "The Magus."

But he is against questions along such lines as what he is trying to do in his books. "Books aren't planned, they write themselves." He agrees, however, that "The Collector" was consciously given a deliberate shape and meaning and is to that extent a programmatic novel--at least by comparison with his other books. He calls "The Collector" an island which he deliberately went to, whereas "The Magus" was an island to which he drifted. Though "The Collector" was 50 times easier to write, he says, "The Magus" was much nicer.

In "The French Lieutenant's Woman" he doesn't think he was trying to say anything much, but Prokofiev's "Classical Symphony" was drifting about in his mind all the time he was writing the book, and he suggests that perhaps the novel is similar to the music in its half-loving, half-ironic treatment of the material. Beyond that, the aim of the book is presumably that of any novel: the art of novel writing, he says in rather a nice phrase, is that of "being able to caress people's imaginations." Later he said that it was "being able to put your finger on the archetypal things in people's minds." It is a good description of what makes his novels, at their best, so compulsively readable.

Fowles didn't expect "The Collector" to be a success--which of course it was. Before the book was even published, he had earned several thousand pounds from the sale of paperback, translation and film rights, and the book has now been selling very well in several countries for six years. On the other hand, he thought "The Magus" would be more successful than it was. He didn't expect "The French Lieutenant's Woman" to do well either critically or in sales; in fact the reviews in Britain were more favorable than those for any of his other books. It has also sold well--in so far as any hardback edition of a novel sells well in Britain. He feels that the novel is in terrible condition commercially in Britain and that "in Britain there's a kind of coldness toward novelists that makes one very indifferent to being published here. There's no contact with an English audience." This may of course be simply because his books are less popular and are much less highly rated in Britain than in the United States (though I would guess that the publication of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" may cause Fowles to be taken more seriously by his compatriots). "I don't know why the Americans like my books so much," he says reflectively.

Like many English writers of this century (and perhaps especially of his generation) Fowles has had consciously to revolt against his middle-class background. Up to the age of 20, he says, he was a very successful conformer. He enjoyed his public school, where he was made a prefect very young and became captain of cricket and head boy and had really rather a comfortable life. "Being head boy was a weird experience. You had total power over 800 other boys; you were totally responsible for discipline and punishment. I spent my 18th year holding court really. I'd have 20 boys before me every morning, who you were both prosecutor and judge of. . .and executioner, of course. I suppose I used to beat on average three or four boys a day. . ." He pauses for nearly half a minute, then adds, "Very evil, I think. Terrible system."

Near the end of World War II he left school and went into the Marines, which he disliked intensely. "I reckon I was--I probably still am--about five or six years behind the average writer, who is usually aware by around the age of 16 that there is something literary about him and that he's going to try and be a writer. But this didn't really happen to me until I was 22 or 23. I was a nonintellectual at school."

He did not have much money at this time and says that until he was 35 he often couldn't even afford to buy a pack of cigarettes, though he feels that not having money mattered much less in the 1950's than it would today. His finances changed drastically with the publication of "The Collector."

He now lives in Dorset in a beautiful house in Lyme Regis. The house faces due south and looks down over a large garden, the surrounding trees of which not only make it a suntrap but also mean that there is not a single other house in sight. The garden slopes down steeply, and below is the sea and a small harbor with a few tiny fishing vessels that from this height look like toys. This is the quay on which Fowles hypnopompically saw the figure who originated "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and who is described in the first pages of the book. In fact he moved to this house only after he had had the dream and written the book.

There are other reminders of the novel in the house. The tests, for example. These are the petrified sea-urchins found at Lyme Regis which the Darwinian protagonist of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" collects. John Fowles has several of them. He gave up smoking recently, having been a heavy smoker all his adult life. As he talks, he picks up and plays with the tests as a cigarette-substitute. "This is what giving up smoking does to you," he says, helping himself to a second piece of chocolate cake. "You go back to your Billy Bunter self. I haven't enjoyed things like chocolate cake so much for years."

"I'm very rich," he says. "I'm rich in a minor financial way, rich enough never to buy new clothes, never to want to go abroad, rich enough not to like spending money any more. I'm also rich in having many interests. I always have a backlog of books to read, there's the garden, nature, walking. . ."

What he calls "this nature business" is difficult to talk about in modern times, he says, but clearly it is very important to him. The English writers and artists he feels closest to--"I don't consider them the greatest by any means, but I feel a kind of kinship with them"-- are those like John Clare, Richard Jefferies and Samuel Palmer, in whom observation of nature is of prime importance.

When he was a boy he used to be a great butterfly collector and hunter of animals. "I've completely rejected that now for many years. I loathe guns and people who collect living things. This is the only thing that really makes me angry nowadays, I'm afraid--the abuse of nature."

In spite of his harsh comments about England it is quite apparent that he loves England very much. The comments are aimed at the restrictions of middle-class life, restrictions from which he seems quite successfully to have freed himself. A few years ago he told everyone that he was going to leave England, but all the time he knew that he didn't really want to go. For one thing there is the "nature business," which Malta, or whatever other tax-haven he might have been driven to by Her Majesty's inspectors of taxes, could never have replaced.

Fowles's life is one of literally and metaphorically, cultivating his garden. He doesn't write regularly, but in bursts for very long hours. Then for a long time he dreams and drifts. He hates routine and considers himself to be as lucky as it is possible to be. He and his wife, he says, are the people of the year 2069: "Like us they'll be free of the responsibility of children and of making money and they'll have to find a creative outlet of some kind. You will have hundreds and hundreds of poets and painters and novelists who are not going to have an audience, but will have to find some justification in the activity itself." He himself doesn't particularly like publishing his books and feels that he doesn't need an audience to write for, and that if he was the only person left in the world he would still go on writing.

"I get much more pleasure from writing books than from having them published. I like the creation of another world. That is very beautiful and satisfying for me. As soon as a book leaves this room, this house, there's always a diminution of pleasure."

Mr. Boston is an English journalist and critic.