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John Fowles (1926-2005) |
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English novelist and essayist, master of layered story-telling, illusionism, and purposefully ambiguous endings. John Fowles's best-known novels include The French Lieutenant's (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. "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) John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, in the south-east of England,
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
once said. Fowles's favorite book as a boy was Richard Jefferies's Bevis (1882). Fowles was educated at Alleyn Court School and Bedford School. Later Fowles 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," confessed. "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 then studied at New College, Oxford, French, and German languages and literature. While at Oxford, Fowles was much influenced by the 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) As a novelist Fowles made his debut awith The Collector (1963), a mixture of thriller and an analysis of class conflict. Before its publication, Jud Kinberg and John Kohn, former television writers, purchased the screenrights of the book. 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 enabled Fowles to devote 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 and strong-willed art student. 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. In an interview Fowles said that he wanted to illustrate with terms of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heracleitus the opposition of the Few and the Many. The Many are the stupid, the ignorant, and the easily molded. The Few were the good, the intelligent, the independent. In the novel the boy stood for the Many, and the girl for the Few. (Fowles in Conversations with John Fowles, ed. by Dianne L. Vipond, 1999) 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 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, drew from Shakespeare's 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, an ingenious trickster, 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", into which Urfe is drawn. "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, and chooses reality over fabulation. However, when Fowles published the revised
version twelve years later, this point is left more ambiguous. The
novel ends with a quotation from The Pervigilium Veneris
(The Virgil of Venus): "cras amet qui numquam amavit / quique amavit
cras amet". (Let those love now, who never loved before, / Let those
who always loved, now love the more. - Translated by Thomas Parnell)
The quote doesn't shed any light to the events that took in the island. The reader is left with the nagging
feeling that by the end of the experience Urfe had, he has not become
any wiser ‒ he remains committed to his self-centered vision of the world. Fowles's
draft title for the book was originally "The Godgame." He began
writing the work in the early 1950s. Both narrative and mood
went through countless transformations. 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.
The philosophical background of Fowles' works of the 1960s was in
existentialism. In an interview with James Campbel in 1974, Fowles said
that Sartre and Camus were among his main influences. "Most of my major
characters have been involved in this Sartrean concept of authenticity
and inauthenticity." ('The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles' by Michelle Phillips Buchberger, in The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon, 2018, p. 165) Guy
Green's screen adaptation of The Magus was a huge disappointment for the author. There was, Fowles mourned, no poetry, no mystery, "just Caine, the
bestpaid European filmstar, drifting through a role he doesn't
understand." Due to its metafictional nature, The French Lieutenant's Woman was said to be impossible to translate to film. Karel Reiz's screen version from 1981, starring Meryl Streep, followed Fowles's storyline, but the modern subplot, a film within a film, was created by the director and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay. A clapperboard in the opening shot sets the tone of the adaptation. "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.'" Before them Fred Zinneman had 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 own versions. Fowles had little to do with the production. Reisz 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 French Lieutenant's Woman, set largely in Lyme Regis in the 1860s, re-created the Victorian melodrama and the world of Thomas Hardy. The story grew out of a dream the author had of a woman standing at the edge of a quay, looking out to sea. 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 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. With the murder mystery A Maggot (1985) Fowles returned to the layered narrative of The Magus, but the structure of the novel has also some sort of literary connection with Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). A group of five people travels in Devon in 1736. After a night's lodging, they continue their journey - and disappear. During the following investigation conducted by Henry Ayscough, 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. "There are two truths," concludes Ayscough's clerk, "One that a person believes in truth; and one that is truth incontestible." The account of the former prostitute Rebecca Lee, the most important witness, who has undergone a religious conversion, only adds to the confusion. Although Fowles's sceptic view is obvious, he also gives room for a 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. Gaining a reputation of "a
cantankerous man of letters," Fowles lived quietly in Lyme. He spoke in
an English public-school voice, which he punctuated with such
gap-fillers as "you know," "I mean," and "sort of." ('An Interview with John Fowles,' conducted by James Campbell, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17, No. 4, Autumn, 1976) In America, Fowles' books were read in college literary courses. Fowles died at his
home in 2005 at the age of 79. He was survived by his second wife,
Sarah Smith, whom he married in 1998. Fowles published also several
nonfiction 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. Fowles wrote poetry throughout his life; much
of it remains unpublished. His translation of Molière's Dom Juan for the National Theatre was produced in 1981. 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." His atheism is apparent in the revised edition from 1980: "If there had been a creator, his first act would have been to disappear." ('John Fowles and the Fiction of Freedom' by Lance St John Butler, in The British and Irish Novel Since 1960, edited by James Acheson, 1991, p. 75) In many interviews Fowles expressed his enthusiam for feminist movement and as a result he has attracted the attention of feminist scholars, who have accused him of failing to reflect the reality of women's lived experience.
Selected works:
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