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John Fowles

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John Fowles (born March 31, 1926, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex , England—died November 5, 2005, Lyme Regis , Dorset) was an English novelist, whose allusive and descriptive works combine psychological probings—chiefly of sex and love—with an interest in social and philosophical issues.

Fowles graduated from the University of Oxford in 1950 and taught in Greece, France, and Britain. His first novel , The Collector (1963; filmed 1965), about a shy man who kidnaps a girl in a hapless search for love, was an immediate success. This was followed by The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas (1964), a collection of essays reflecting Fowles’s views on such subjects as evolution, art, and politics. He returned to fiction with The Magus (1965, rev. ed. 1977; filmed 1968). Set on a Greek island, the book centres on an English schoolteacher who struggles to discern between fantasy and reality after befriending a mysterious local man. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969; filmed 1981), arguably Fowles’s best-known work, is a love story set in 19th-century England that richly documents the social mores of that time. An example of Fowles’s original style, the book combined elements of the Victorian novel with postmodern works and featured alternate endings.

Fowles’s later fictional works include The Ebony Tower (1974), a volume of collected novellas, Daniel Martin (1977), and Mantissa (1982). His last novel, A Maggot (1985), centred on a group of travelers in the 1700s and the mysterious events that occur during their journey. Fowles also wrote verse, adaptations of plays, and the text for several photographic studies. Wormholes , a collection of essays and writings, was published in 1998.

• Carolyn Djanodly

John Fowles

• Non-Fiction
• Short Stories
• Leighton-on-Sea, England
• Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Sheil Land Associates Ltd

John Fowles was born at Leighton-on-Sea, Essex in 1926, where he lived until the outbreak of the Second World War.

He was educated at Bedford School and New College, Oxford, where he read French and German. After graduating he taught English at the University of Poitiers and then at the Anagyriou School at Spetses. He became a full-time writer in 1963. His best-known fiction includes his first novel, The Collector (1963), the story of a young clerk, a butterfly collector, who kidnaps a young woman; The Magus (1966), set on a Greek island where a schoolteacher confronts a series of disturbing events; and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), a formally experimental novel that tells the tale of Victorian palaeontologist Charles Smithson and his involvement with the notorious and enigmatic Sarah Woodruff. The French Lieutenant's Woman won the Silver Pen Award and the WH Smith Literary Award and was adapted as a film in 1981 with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. Fowles' other fiction includes Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982) and A Maggot (1985). John Fowles lived in Lyme Regis in Dorset on the south coast of England and was for a period curator of the local museum. He was an avid collector of old books and china and a fascinated student of fossils. The Tree, published in 1992, is partly a memoir of childhood and explores Fowles' enduring love of nature. He also published a Short History of Lyme Regis in 1982 and was the editor of Thomas Hardy's England (1984). His last book, The Journals: Volume 1 (2003), is the first volume of the journal he began as a student at Oxford in the late 1940s and continued over the next half century.

John Fowles died in November 2005.

Critical perspective

John fowles enjoys a justifiably high standing as both a novelist of outstanding imaginative power (in some ways a modern-day thomas hardy, especially as a chronicler of his beloved dorset), and as a highly self-conscious 'postmodernist' author who fully registers the artifice inherent in the act of writing, the fictiveness of fiction itself..

His novels began with an original psychological thriller, The Collector (1963), but his reputation was made by his two best-known novels The Magus (1966), and especially The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) with its vivid pastiche of Victorian fiction and famous device of 'alternative endings'. Fowles' writing is dominated by the consciousness of the author as a figure within his own books, entering the narrative at certain points to comment on the action, the characters' motives and possibilities, and explain how things might have been different. Able with equal ease to transform futures or point out absurdities, the novelist is a capricious, no longer an omnipotent god; a magician whose tricks may all be bogus; or simply a late-arriving, rather seedy impresario, as in the denouement to The French Lieutenant's Woman. Exercising free will, playing with fiction's constraints and conventions, the writer's authority is nevertheless relative: appropriate for an era of relative not absolute values. All of Fowles' large, capacious novels are incredibly rich reading experiences, from the labyrinthine plot twists of The Magus and the international panoramas in Daniel Martin (1977) to the brilliant recreation of the eighteenth century mind set in A Maggot (1985). They operate on the reader's consciousness on several levels at once; as page-turning narratives with memorable characters, demonstrations of the novelist's craft, historical and political commentaries; and as profound reflections on the whole spectrum of human behaviours. By his own account, Fowles was much influenced, during and after his student days at Oxford in the late 1940s, by the cultures of ancient Greece (especially the philosopher Heraclitus) and modern France, from Flaubert to post-war Existentialism and the nouveau roman. In The Aristos (1965), Fowles set out his ideas on 'the essential mystery in art', religion and its rituals, ethics, politics (no truck with 'quasi-emotional liberalism') that inform much of the drama, as well as the author's commentary, within his subsequent novels. Fowles' own fascination with the 'Circe-like quality' of Greece found unforgettable expression in his first great novel, The Magus. Nick, a young Englishman escaping from an unsatisfactory love affair and teaching at the Lord Byron School on the island of Phraxos, falls under the spell of Conchis, a rich mystery man, and the two alluring young English women attached to him. Nick is subjected to a disorientating succession of strange events, conflicting stories from 'actors', and erotic apparitions, during which he experiences echoes of the Greek mythic culture. The book suggests a world beyond ordinary reality but also the bogus mystification of a trickster: a multi-layered, ambiguous commentary on the nature of art and the artist's situation. The French Lieutenant's Woman is a tale of seduction in two senses: of 'fallen woman' Sarah Woodruff by the highly respectable gentleman geologist Charles Smithson; and of the reader by the author. Fowles offers pleasure and sentiment in the mode of the nineteenth century realist novel, complete with wonderfully realised characters, epigraphs to its chapters, and even sets it in his own town of Lyme Regis in Dorset. But this is written by a modern consciousness, aware of Darwin, Marx and Freud, (not to mention Barthes and Robbe-Grillet) and the wretched mid-nineteenth century conditions of the servant and labouring classes. Set alongside Fowles' socio-historical commentary, the players are made ever more ambiguous author's playthings. Sarah turns out to be an arch manipulator herself, whose story is an almost complete fabrication. Sarah's priggish employer Mrs Poulteney is imagined falling into hell, only to be reprieved by the author. And yet - the scene in which Smithson's naïve fiancée Ernestina is rejected by him is truly affecting. Dickens himself could hardly have bettered the scheming servants Sam and Mary, 'low' characters speaking in local dialect, whose domestic happiness runs throughout as a counterpoint to Charles and Sarah's doomed yearnings. Fowles' cutting through fiction's illusion is, however, shown most starkly when Sarah has fled to a small room in Exeter. She unwraps a toby jug that is sadly cracked, 'as I can testify', the author comments, 'having bought it myself a year or two ago for a good deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged'. By contrast with his major novels' vivid and wide-ranging scenes, Mantissa (1982) takes place entirely within the mind of the novelist Miles Green, who is in hospital following a stroke. A small scale jeux d'esprit in the Flann O'Brien manner, its characters take violent revenge upon their creator, in a satirical revisiting of some of the preoccupations of Fowles' writing, sending up modish critical jargon and the pretensions of literature itself. The recumbent novelist's fantasies about the female medical staff (the Caribbean nurse Cory, and a shapely specialist in abnormal brain behaviour 'Dr A. Delfie') becomes a splenetic exchange about art and ethics with the Muses. Their traditional function as erotic inspiration for the male writer's craft has become comically outmoded by their status as modern women; withering exchanges between them and the hapless Green provide the entertainment. Fowles' dialogue, particularly the perennial verbal warfare between the sexes, is always incisive. Never more so than in Daniel Martin and A Maggot, books overshadowed by their grand predecessors but having attractive qualities of their own. Daniel Martin has elements that are tempting to read as semi-autobiographical: a rural West Country childhood during the Second World War, Oxford student friendships and love affairs, career involvement with the film industry. What it also has is some marvellous travel writing on Egypt and Syria, as its scriptwriter scouts locations for a movie and takes up again with his former lover; and a good deal of now very dated political debates from the 1970s. A Maggot is more satisfying though less ambitious. Set during 1736, it is not, as the author comments, a conventional historical novel about the mother of Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker sect. Rather, its eighteenth century world of religious visions and gross human appetites is presented in sections, as a lawyer interrogates a range of conflicting accounts, from actors to a brothel madam, about the apparent suicide of a deaf mute servant. Its main female character is, like Sarah Woodruff, a 'fallen woman' who undergoes a transformation: submissive prostitute Fanny becomes the fearless Quaker Rebecca. This shifting of identity before our very eyes during the teasing progression of a plot, with the direction of author himself, is what we identify as 'Fowlesian'. Dr. Jules Smith, 2002

For an in-depth critical review, see John Fowles by William Stephenson (Northcote House, 2003: Writers and their Work Series)

Bibliography

Author statement.

'I don't very often have the courage of my convictions face to face with people. This is why I became a novelist. If I was asked to pick the school child most likely to become a writer, I'd pick the shy boy or girl, the one who never manages to stand up for his or her beliefs. Who walks away from a lost argument thinking of all the answers that would have won it ... When I am inside a text I can say what I like. Not only about politics. I can be franker about sex, for example ... '

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John Fowles Biography

Birthday: March 31 , 1926 ( Aries )

Born In: Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England

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Also Known As: John Robert Fowles

Died At Age: 79

Spouse/Ex-: Elizabeth Christy

father: Robert John Fowles

mother: Gladys May Richards Fowles

siblings: Jack

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Died on: November 5 , 2005

place of death: Lyme Regis

education: Alleyn Court Preparatory School, Bedford School, Edinburgh University, New College, Oxford

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John Fowles, 79, British Postmodernist Who Tested Novel's Conventions, Dies

By Sarah Lyall

• Nov. 8, 2005

John Fowles, the British writer whose teasing, multilayered fiction explored the tensions between free will and the constraints of society, even as it played with traditional novelistic conventions and challenged readers to find their own interpretations, died on Saturday at his home in Lyme Regis, England. He was 79.

His death was announced by his publisher, Random House UK. No cause was given, but Random House said Mr. Fowles, who suffered a stroke in the late 1980's and had heart problems, had been ill for some time.

Mr. Fowles's originality, versatility and skill were nowhere more evident than in his most celebrated novels, among them "The Collector," "The Magus" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman." In "The French Lieutenant's Woman," for example, he combined the melodrama of a 19th-century Victorian novel with the sensibility of a 20th-century postmodern narrator, offering his readers two alternative endings from which to choose and at one point boldly inserting himself into the book as a character who accompanies the hero on a train to London.

In "The Collector," Mr. Fowles painted an eerily plausible portrait of a psychopath who kidnaps a young woman out of what he imagines is love, telling the story from the two characters' opposing points of view until, at the end, the narratives converge with a shocking immediacy. And in "The Magus," the story of a young Englishman who gets caught up in the frightening dramatic fantasies of a strangely powerful man on an Aegean island, he again wrote an ending of self-conscious ambiguity, leaving the hero's future an open puzzle that readers are challenged to solve for themselves.

"Fowles's success in the marketplace derives from his great skill as a storyteller," wrote Ellen Pifer in the "Dictionary of Literary Biography." "Remarkably, he manages to sustain such effects at the same time that, as an experimental writer testing conventional assumptions about reality, he examines and parodies the traditional devices of storytelling."

For whatever reason -- he always said it was because he was mistrusted by the British literary establishment that he had rejected -- Mr. Fowles was always far more celebrated in the United States than in his native country. In America, his books became mainstays of college literature courses while achieving that rare combination: admiring reviews from serious-minded critics and best-seller status in the stores.

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John Fowles Books In Order

Publication order of standalone novels.

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

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Publication Order of Anthologies

John Fowles was an internationally renowned novelist best known for writing ‘The Magus’, a bestseller that was inspired by the time the author spent on the Greek Island of Spetses.

John Fowles was born in 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex to a family of merchants. Robert John Fowles, the author’s father, worked with a Tobacco importer (Allen & Wright). Gladys May Richards, his mother, died when he was six.

Gladys, whose family hails from Essex, met Robert at a Tennis Club after she moved to Westcliff-on-Sea. There was no reason to believe that the pair would hit it off, not only because the war had ruined Robert’s health but also because he was a decade older than Gladys.

Yet it only took the pair a year to court and marry, with Fowles coming into the world just months after that. Fowles’ earliest memories largely revolved around his cousin Peggy who, at the age of 18 when he was born, not only worked as his nursemaid but also acted as his constant companion for several years.

Because he spent the first sixteen years of his life as an only child, the author spent a lot of time reading. He was especially drawn to Richard Jefferies’ books and characters.

Following his time at Alleyn Court Preparatory School, John Fowles joined Bedford School in 1939. This was just as the Second World War was kicking off

Fowles’ father was a war veteran. Despite showing an interest in the law at a relatively early age, Robert went into the army following the completion of his legal training. He joined the First World War as a member of the Honorable Artillery Company.

During the years that followed, the author’s father was struck with many a tragedy, this including the death of his brother Jack and his father. It fell on the shoulders of Robert to take care his brother’s children as well as a number of young half-siblings.

But Robert did not buckle under the pressure, choosing to forego his dream of practicing law in favor of raising his extended family. It was in that climate that the author’s father made the decision to go into the Tobacco trade.

John Fowles wasn’t as unfortunate. He spent four years at Bedford School, exceeding expectations as an athlete and even becoming head boy before departing in 1944. Life after school took Fowles to Edinburgh University where pursued a Naval Short Course.

His plans for the Royal Marines were upended when he found himself at Okehampton Camp near Devon. Fowles none the less performed his duties to the best of his abilities, though he eventually left the military service behind in 1947.

Choosing to go back to school, the author set his sights on French and German at New College, Oxford. Those years saw Fowles’ politics transformed. Initially, a hopeful youth determined to maintain the British status quo it was at Oxford that Fowles began to nurture anarchist ideals.

Writing came naturally to him. He saw it as a means of expressing his unique views on life in his community, though he did not immediately pursue a career in the field, instead choosing to go into teaching.

His most notable assignment was at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School of Spetses on a Greek Island. An English master at the time, it was on Spetses that John Fowles met his wife (Elizabeth Christy).

Teaching in Greece was a fulfilling experience for Fowles. It was there that he began to experiment with poetry. He formed close relationships with other expatriates and he would have gladly spent the rest of his life on the Island.

However, when the author and his colleagues at his school attempted to initiate reforms, Fowles was amongst those that were fired, this forcing him back to England. Fowles was initially separated from Elizabeth, not only because of the move back to England but also because she was married at the time.

But circumstances drove them back together. They were married in 1957. By 1960, the author had begun work on ‘The Collector’, his first novel, which he used to garner the attention of a publisher at Jonathan Cape.

By 1963, Fowles had become a published author. While British critics appreciated his debut work, American reviewers were put off by the elements of existentialism in the novel.

The tentative reception from the United States did not slow Fowles down. He stopped teaching and started writing full time. He continued to put out bestsellers and was eventually named one of the Fifty Greatest Writers to ever come of Britain.

Despite the strong political views of his youth, Fowles came to be known as a recluse even after becoming the curator of the Lyme Regis Museum. The author lost his wife to cancer in 1990.

John Fowles married again in 1998. He died in 2005.

+Adaptations

John Fowles was fortunate to see three of his works receive notable adaptations. The first was ‘The Collector’ which became a psychological crime film of the same name directed by William Wyler and released in 1965.

‘The Magus’ was also adapted into a British Mystery film two years later, directed by Guy Green. Fowles pushed for the making of this adaptation and even wrote the screenplay. However, the movie was panned by almost every notable critic that watched.

‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ was a better-received adaptation. The romantic drama was released in 1981, directed by Karel Reisz.

Nicholas Urfe is a young Englishman who enthusiastically accepts a teaching position at a school on a remote Greek Island. What starts as an exciting new friendship with a local millionaire devolves into something more dangerous. It isn’t long before Nicholas is fighting for his life and sanity.

This book tells the story of a confident young man who’s yearning for a little bit of mystery in life. Nicholas gets a little more mystery than he bargained for when he takes a teaching job in Greece.

+The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Sarah Woodruff is a governess whose life in the English Community of Lyme Regis is upended when she falls for a French Naval Officer that washes ashore and then abandons her after ruining her reputation.

Charles Smithson is a financially stable Gentleman who should be happily engaged to a beautiful heiress. Charles accidentally encounters Sarah while visiting his aunt and, despite warnings from the locals, falls for her, this causing his life to take a strange turn.

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John fowles , the art of fiction no. 109, issue 111, summer 1989.

John Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, on March 31, 1926. He attended Bedford School (1940–1944) 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 philosopher’s 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 self-analysis 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 Fowles’s own Belmont House is described in the opening chapters of his most famous novel,  The French Lieutenant’s 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).

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 history—as 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 Perrault’s  Cinderella  and Molière’s play,  Don Juan . One comes to a better understanding of his art through a reading of his afterword for Alain-Fournier’s 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 Fowles’s 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 one’s 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 Dunbar’s sixteenth-century “Lament for the Makers”— Timor 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

Yes, completely accurate, though I think the notion of joining “a rather fashionable revolt” is a little bit wrong. You must remember my generation—I was born in 1926—had 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 that—a 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 afterwards—when I had left the school—that I rejected it completely. I have indeed hated all forms of public authority ever since—oh, 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.

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?

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 surprise—we had all been brainwashed in those days into thinking the only thing that mattered was one’s middle-class national duty—he 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 novelist—for any seeker after culture—to 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 haven’t 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 haven’t 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 storytelling—for Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes and the rest, the fathers and mothers of the European novel. I also liked the French comedy, especially Molière and Marivaux—not Racine and Corneille, I’m afraid, and I liked the late-nineteenth-century poets—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Laforgue. I also particularly fell for that elegant, precise tradition of the  pensée , the carefully framed apothegm and wisdom, something we’ve never really mastered in English—Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, all the rest. That admiration ruined a book I wrote later,  The Aristos . I learnt my lesson there. It is not only wines that won’t 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 not—at least for exam purposes—have 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 “French”—or any other foreign culture and language—and its language-school variation. They are, or should be, two different things. One is for human beings, the other for business people. I don’t think modern educationists have ever understood that, at least in this country.

But weren’t the existentialist writers—Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir—important in fostering your bid for freedom from the rigid structures of your conservative background?

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  L’Etre et le Néant  in a mixture of despair and disgust. It wasn’t 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 don’t 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 engagé 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 it’s flattering to be extensively studied; but I’m 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.

Did you read Jung? Could his influence be linked with the theme of psychological growth so apparent in the early novels?

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 Freud’s footsteps, would suit me better medically, if I ever needed such attention—which perhaps I do . . . like every other novelist!

You have said that you started writing  The Aristos  as a sort of student’s notebook or “self-portrait in ideas” at this time. It seems an indispensable book for the serious student of your early fiction— The Magus  and  The Collector . Did it precede any extended effort to write fiction?

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 I’d 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 didn’t attempt fiction till the mid-1950s, 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: it’s often through personal diaries—however embarrassing they are to read now—that the novelist discovers his true bent—that 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. It’s 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 that’s how I felt and thought then. Not always a pleasant experience!  The Aristos  certainly preceded my novels, and yes, often bears heavily on them.

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 idealism—being a “renaissance man,” a generalist, rather than a devotee in any single genre?

I’ve 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 writer’s 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 history—the 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.

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By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books . He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America , a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark , trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said. All the while, a new issue of Harper’s would hit the newsstands every month, with a lead essay by Lapham that couched his erudite observations on American society and politics in Augustan prose.

Today Lapham is the rare surviving eminence from that literary world. But he has managed to keep a handsome bit of it alive—so I observed when I went to interview him last summer in the offices of Lapham’s , a book-filled, crepuscular warren on a high floor of an old building just off Union Square. There he presides over a compact but bustling editorial operation, with an improbably youthful crew of subeditors. One LQ intern, who had also done stints at other magazines, told me that Lapham was singular among top editors for the personal attention he showed to each member of his staff.

Our conversation took place over several sessions, each around ninety minutes. Despite the heat, he was always impeccably attired: well-tailored blue blazer, silk tie, cuff links, and elegant loafers with no socks. He speaks in a relaxed baritone, punctuated by an occasional cough of almost orchestral resonance—a product, perhaps, of the Parliaments he is always dashing outside to smoke. The frequency with which he chuckles attests to a vision of life that is essentially comic, in which the most pervasive evils are folly and pretension.

I was familiar with such aspects of the Lapham persona. But what surprised me was his candid revelation of the struggle and self-doubt that lay behind what I had imagined to be his effortlessness. Those essays, so coolly modulated and intellectually assured, are the outcome of a creative process filled with arduous redrafting, rejiggering, revision, and last-minute amendment in the teeth of the printing press. And it is a creative process that always begins—as it did with his model, Montaigne—not with a dogmatic axiom to be unpacked but in a state of skeptical self-questioning: What do I really know? If there a unifying core to Lapham’s dual career as an editor and an essayist, that may be it.

— Jim Holt

From the Archive, Issue 229

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Biography of John Fowles

John Fowles was born on March 31st, 1926, in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England. His father, Robert Fowles, was a soldier in the First World War before becoming a tobacconist and later marrying Gladys Richards, who gave birth to John soon after. John Fowles claims to have felt suffocated by the suburban environment where he grew up, saying that he has "tried to escape" his childhood all his life. During the Second World War, the Fowles family was evacuated to the remote town of Ipplepen, in Devon, where Fowles attended Bedford School as a teenager. He excelled at sport and became Head Boy, despite suffering a nervous breakdown; his main academic interests were French and German literature.

After the fighting ceased, Fowles spent a brief time in the Royal Marines as a Lieutenant in charge of training new recruits, before leaving the army to attend Oxford University. He continued his study of Modern Languages, specializing in French at New College. John Fowles moved to France and then to Greece after college to teach English - it was in Greece that he started writing poetry and fiction, and also met his future wife, Elizabeth Whitton, who was married to someone else at the time. In 1953, Fowles moved back to England, where he continued to teach English until he could support himself through his writing alone. He and his wife lived in Lyme Regis, overlooking the Cobb, where some of the most important scenes of The French Lieutenant's Woman take place.

Fowles achieved literary success with his first published novel, The Collector , in 1963, though he had already written a novel about his time in Greece, titled The Magus , which would be published in 1965 to similar acclaim. The Collector describes the kidnapping and imprisonment of a college student by a lonely and obsessed young man, and was made into a horror movie that caught the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, among others. Fowles' famously innovative historical novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was published in 1969, and was met with huge commercial success. It caused huge waves in the literary world because of its modern take on the Victorian novel, and Fowles soon won the W. H. Smith & Son Literary Award and the PEN Silver Pen Award for his work. Meryl Streep starred in the film adaptation, the screenplay of which was written by Harold Pinter, and which met with positive reviews. Fowles continued to write novels for the next several decades, tackling themes like love, art, and lust through the lens of what he called "old-fashioned existentialism."

His wife Elizabeth died of cancer in 1990, two years after Fowles himself had suffered a minor stroke and associated memory loss. He remarried in 1998 to Sarah Smith, and died in 2005 after a prolonged illness.

Study Guides on Works by John Fowles

The collector john fowles.

The Collector was John Fowles's first published novel, released in 1963. Fowles described this book as a commentary on class in England, specifically on class issues such as prosperity, pretension, and the contrasts between the working class and...

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The French Lieutenant's Woman John Fowles

The French Lieutenant's Woman was John Fowles' third published novel, and it has achieved enduring commercial and critical success.

The novel attracted the attention of critics soon after it was published, and was better received in literary...

The Magus John Fowles

The Magus is the first novel that John Fowles actually penned, although it would only be published after two subsequent efforts were completed. Fowles is perhaps most famous for later writing The French Lieutenant’s Woman . Anyone who has read that...

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John Fowles (1926-2005) was a British, Post-Modernist writer. He was greatly influenced by the Existentialist writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. His most famous novels include The Collector  (1963), The Magus   (1965), and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Fowles's work was so successful that it was translated into many languages, and some of his novels have been adapted into films.                                          

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A Biography of John Fowles

John Fowles was born on March 31, 1926, in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England. In his youth, Fowles discovered the work of Richard Jefferies and attended Bedford School in 1939. In 1944, Fowles left the Bedford School and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh's Naval Short course. In 1947, after completing two years at the Okehampton Camp, Fowles enrolled at New College, Oxford. There, he studied French and German, but mainly focused on French. While at Oxford, Fowles explored the literature of Existentialists such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. He was also introduced to anarchy.

In 1951, Fowles went to teach English in the Peloponnese, located in Greece. Fowles would use his time in Greece as inspiration for his novels, such as The Magus (1965) and various poems. In 1953, Fowles was asked to leave the school after attempting to institute a series of reforms. Fowles returned to England and taught English at St. Godric's College for about ten years. In 1960, while also working to complete his novel, The Magus , Fowles began work on The Collector (1963) which he would publish in 1963.

The Collector was so successful that Fowles was able to fully devote his time to writing and quit teaching. In 1965, the novel was adapted into a film. In 1964, Fowles published a collection of philosophical essays titled The Aristos . Fowles moved to an isolated home in Dorset in 1965. The isolation proved too much for Fowles, and in 1968, he moved to Belmont with his wife, which would serve as inspiration for the setting in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). When The French Lieutenant's Woman was published, it was extremely successful and cemented Fowles' reputation as a critically acclaimed author.

Controversy surrounded Fowles after his death when his diaries, written between 1965 and 1990, were published. In the diaries, Fowles wrote cruel, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim remarks about people, including his wife, Elizabeth.

Fowles remained at Belmont for the rest of his life, working on more novels, short fiction, and poetry. On the November 5, 2005, Fowles died of heart failure.

Works by John Fowles

John Fowles wrote many literary works, such as novels, short fiction, and poems, over his lifetime. His most famous pieces are The Collector , The Magus , and The French Lieutenant's Woman . Some other works by Fowles include:

• The Aristos (1964)
• The Ebony Tower (1974)
• Daniel Martin (1977)
• A Short History of Lyme Regis (1982)
• A Maggot (1985)
• Wormholes—Essays and Occasional Writings (1998)

The Collector

The Collecto r is a thriller novel written by Fowles in 1963. It centers around a young, lonely, and psychotic man named Frederick Clegg, who kidnaps a female, named Miranda Grey, he is obsessed with. She is an art student he keeps captive in a cellar in a farmhouse. Miranda does whatever she can to escape Clegg, who will not let her go.

The Collector was so successful that it was adapted several times into a play. In 1965, the novel was adapted into a feature film of the same name, starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. On a more serious note, three serial killers have claimed to use the novel as the basis of their crimes.

The novel is told from both the perspective of Clegg and Miranda. Miranda's chapters are written in epistolary form, which means the narration is told through a series of letters. The novel contains themes such as irony and the absurd.

The Magus is a novel by Fowles, published in 1965. It is a P ost-Modern novel that centers on Nicholas Urfe, a young British teacher living on a Greek island.

Post-modernism : a late 20th-century philosophical and literary movement that emphasized subjectivity, relativism, skepticism, and the role of ideology in politics and economy. Post-modern novels and other works are meant to question and subvert one's expectations of a known concept, genre, or narrative form.

There he meets Maurice Conchis, a wealthy and reclusive Greek man that plays psychological games on Nicholas. As the novel progresses, the psychological games grow more intense and intricate leading Nicholas to lose sight of what is reality and what is part of the game. The novel contains themes such as escape, identity, and the blurring of reality. The novel was included in the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels.

The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a post-modern novel by Fowles, written in 1969. It centers on Sarah Woodruff, who lives in a coastal town and works as a servant in the Poulteney household. She is considered a disgraced woman because the French ship officer she was involved with abandoned her and went back to France to marry.

When Sarah meets Charles Smithson, an engaged man, they have three meetings. During each meeting, Sarah tells of her history and asks for support. The narrator presents three possible endings for the novel, opening the door to three plausible outcomes. The novel contains themes such as the role of gender, the concept of metafiction, and religion.

John Fowles' Influences

While at Oxford, Fowles was exposed to existentialism , particularly in Jean-Paul Sartre's and Albert Camus's works.

Existentialism is a philosophical belief that states that each individual is responsible for creating and finding meaning in their lives that is unique from other people's existence. Existentialists also believe that all problems are rooted in the essence of existence. This leads many existentialists to ponder the meaning of life.

This concept is thoroughly explored in The Magus, in which Nicholas believes his mind is being controlled by Conchis and therefore falls into more and more psychological games. However, had Nicholas realized the game adapted to his choices, ideas, and openness of mind, he would have been able to escape the psychological games sooner. In this framework, Nicholas is responsible for all that happens to him.

Fowles commonly wrote characters that grappled with freedom and the freedom of choice in the face of a character that symbolized a regime. In the case of The Magus , Nicholas is the one who struggles with freedom, while Conchis represents a regime.

The Writing Style of John Fowles

John Fowles is considered a post-modern writer who sees the artificiality of writing fiction. He consciously places himself into his novels, interrupting the narrator to include his commentary on the action of the novel. Using this narrative technique, Fowles can enter the text and provide commentary. This technique is known as metafiction .

Metafiction is a type of narrative in which the fictitious aspect of the literary work is emphasized, particularly by the author entering the text.

Quotes by John Fowles

Here are a few quotes from John Fowles' novels to get a better sense of post-modernist literature and his writing style.

They sensed that their current accounts of the world were inadequate; that they had allowed their windows on reality to become smeared by convention, religion, and social stagnation; they knew, in short, that they had things to discover, and that the discovery was of the utmost importance to the future of man" (The French Lieutenant's Woman, Chapter 8).

In this quote from The French Lieutenant's Woman, the reader is exposed to a notion that was felt during the Victorian Age, when the novel is set, and during the 1960s, when the novel is written. Great change and revolution in the Victorian Age make the characters feel that their discoveries will set them apart from the past and launch them straight into the future. Similarly, during the 1960s and 1970s, many technological and scientific achievements, such as the Space Race, made those two decades significant and different from previous centuries.

I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it's the dead me he wants," (The Collector, Part 2).

Miranda writes this excerpt in epistolary form towards the end of the novel. Miranda observes that according to Clegg, she is no longer a woman; rather, she is just another object to be collected. She compares herself to the beautiful butterflies he collects. Miranda rejects this notion and attempts to escape many times. However, this only makes Clegg more upset. Miranda slowly realizes she in fact may join those butterflies in death.

'Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'

'To live alone?'

'To live. With what you are.'" (The Magus, Chapter 15).

This quote in the Magus is a conversation between Alison and Nicholas. It reveals Fowles's interest in existentialism. The main concept of Existentialism is that each individual being must learn to create meaning and purpose for themselves, separate from others. In this quote, Greece acts as the "mirror" or place where an individual's values, thoughts, and beliefs are reflected towards them. Within that reflection, the individual must come to terms with who they are and how to live with who they are.

John Fowles - Key takeaways

• John Fowles was born in Essex, England, in 1926.
• While studying at Oxford, Fowles was exposed to Existentialism, which would influence his writing and beliefs.
• John Fowles is considered a post-modernist writer and has written many novels, short fiction, and poems.
• His most famous novels include The Magus , The Collector , and The French Lieutenant's Woman .
• John Fowles would insert himself into the texts of his novels to emphasize the fictitious aspect of his novels, which is a post-modernist writing technique.

Flashcards in John Fowles 51

a British, Post-Modernist writer

Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England

Existentialism

A Greek island in the Peloponnese

The Magus   (1965)

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Frequently Asked Questions about John Fowles

Who is John Fowles? 

John Fowles (1926-2005) was a British, Post-Modernist writer. 

How did John Fowles die? 

On the 5th of November 2005, Fowles died of heart failure.  

What did John Fowles write? 

John Fowles wrote novels such as The Collector  (1963), The Magus  (1965), and  The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). 

When was John Fowles born? 

John Fowles was born on March 31, 1926. 

What is John Fowles famous for? 

John Fowles is well-known for his post-modernist literature and is most well known for his 1969 novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman.  

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John Fowles - Biography and Works

In 1944, he enrolled in the University of Edinburgh. From 1945 to 1946, he worked for the Royal Marines. He then studied French, and German languages and literature at New College, Oxford. While he was at Oxford, he was much inclined by the French Existentialism, the most fashionable philosophical movement at that time. After receiving his B.A. In 1950, Fowles started instructing as a teacher at the University of Poitiers in France, and at a boys' school at the Anargyrios College on the Greek island Spetsai. There he met with Elisabeth Whitton; they married in 1956.

In England, he persistently moved his career as a teacher at Ashridge College from 1953 to 1954 and at St. Godric's College he instructed for ten long years i.e. from 1954 to 1963. He involved himself in many writing projects. One of them is a novel called The Magus (1965) . It is said that he continued to revise it for 13 years. It is one postmodern novel telling about Nicholas, who is a teacher by profession but is confused in the psychological illusions of a master trickster, which become increasingly dark and serious. He published its revised version in 1977.

 As a novelist Fowles made his debut with The Collector (1963), a mixture of thriller and an analysis of class conflict. It is about the abduction and imprisonment of Miranda by Frederick Clegg. It was first told from his point of view, and then from Miranda’s view point by the means of the diary she has kept, and last part of the narration is again taken up by Clegg about her illness and death.  Jud Kinberg and John Kohn, former television writers, bought the screen rights of the book before its publication. William Wyler agreed to direct the picture.

The Collector gained a huge success and since its publication. Fowles devoted himself entirely to writing. After winning a national football lottery, he uses his winnings to purchase a secluded Tudor mansion with a fortress like a cellar. His another successful novel was The French Lieutenant’s Woman , set largely in Lyme Regis in the 1860s. He has re-created the Victorian melodrama and the world of Thomas Hardy. In the story, Charles Smithson, a supporter of Darwin's evolution theory, falls in love with Sarah Woodruff, despite his engagement with Ernestina. Sarah is believed to be deserted by a French naval lieutenant. She bears the title of the novel. Ernestina Freeman’s 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 multiple endings, one expected and traditional and another shocking and unconventional.

John Fowles is a writer of metafiction. He has pushed one step further the experimental vigour of postmodernism. As a writer of experimental fiction Fowles made room for experimental postmodernism in the art of fiction writing. By the time John Fowles began to write, the domain of fiction - writing was already affected by the experimental excitement. Most of the contemporaries of John Fowles had been making different kinds of experiments. The experiment was largely directed towards the traditional narrative structure. Even the experimental fervor of 1960-1970 entered into the domain of characterization. John Barthes had, with a great deal of success, been making a creative use of experimentation. John followed the line of postmodernist writers who wrote a lot on the subject of the fiction of fiction.

Fowles also come to the same postmodernist fervour of interrogating the traditional narrative structure. Affected by the 1960’s wave of experimental postmodernism, John Fowles wrote metafictions, which altered out traditional view on the relationship between the author and the work of fiction he/she creates.

 As a postmodern novelist Fowles captures the changing direction and experimental trend in the broad field of fiction writing. John Fowles is an experimental writer of metafiction in the postmodern context. He is a new trend-setter in the art of fixing the opening and the end of narrative structure. The end of narrative structure is radically altered by John Fowles. He interrogates narrative structures. He gives a unique twist to the narrative ending. Fowles is a writer of metafiction because he questions the fictionality of fiction. He is a postmodern writer because he interrogates the elusive nature of truth. As a writer John Fowles alters the traditional viewpoint a writer is expected to adopt to render his narrative far more intact. When the world view of people change, when life-view of an individual changes, the art of imagination also change. With a change in society, an individual also allows a certain degree of change within him. A writer who is aware of this change around the world and in the individual tries to distrust the traditionalism of the artistic convention. John Fowles is said to have captured this trend of change in the orbit of perception. John Fowles caught a glimpse of new perceptivity around the changing order of society.

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The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)

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John Fowles – The Journals, Volumes I & II

Hardbound volumes of John Fowles’ journals were published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Alfred Knopf in the U.S. in 2003-2006 (both are also available in paperback). 

The first volume of Fowles’ journals begins in 1949, when he was a young man studying French at New College, Oxford. It takes us up to the film version of his first novel, The Collector , filmed in 1965 (see excerpt below). Along the way Fowles teaches English on the island of Spetsai and begins formulating ideas for The Magus , ultimately marries, moves back to England and struggles to achieve literary success.

The second and final volume of John Fowles’ journals covers the years 1966-1990.  From the jacket flap:

A major literary landmark, this is the second volume of one of the most extraordinary journals of our time.  The first volume of John Fowles’ “Journals” ended with him achieving international literary renown after the publication of “The Collector” and “The Magus,” and leaving London behind to live in a remote house on the Dorset coast near Lyme Regis.  This final volume charts the rewards and struggles of his continuing literary career, but at the same time reveals the often reluctant celebrity behind the outward success.

Enjoying a reputation as one of the world’s leading novelists, Fowles wins enormous wealth, kudos and attention, has the satisfaction of seeing “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” turned into a highly acclaimed Hollywood film, but none the less comes to regard his fame with deep ambivalence.  It cannot repair the growing strains between himself and his wife Elizabeth, who does not share his taste for rural isolation, nor can it cure the disenchantment he feels for an increasingly materialist society.

While the challenges of the passing years – whether illness, depression or personal bereavement – underline the vanity of worldly ambition, he finds refuge and solace in his study of the animals, plants, birds and insects of the surrounding countryside.  This concluding volume of the “Journals” contains an eloquent expression of this profound attachment to the natural world, but also marks a writer’s continuing quest for wisdom and self-understanding.  Unflinchingly honest, it provides an invaluable insight into the creative background of his novels, as well as the writer’s inner life and preoccupations.

Fowles kept a diary for most of his life, and his complete unedited diaries–totaling approximately one million words–are now housed in the university library at Exeter.

Here is an excerpt from Volume I, with Fowles in Los Angeles describing the ongoing conflicts that occurred during filming of The Collector in 1964:

Strange days – fighting the battle of the film script – 18 hours each day completely rewriting all the worst bits of dialogue (i.e. those not taken from the book), and suddenly having the characters from my novel – Paston, Miranda and Clegg – alive with me again. That odd state in which one’s creations seem so real that it becomes a bore to stay at the typewriter when one can walk round the room, and hear and see them.

I am luxuriously ensconced in a hotel on the Sunset Strip. The night view is very beautiful, a spill of endless jewels glittering in limpid air; chains and towers of light that stretch as far as one can see. This is the mad, rich woman America; with the courage of her convictions, her rich madness.

Jud Kinberg [co-producer] pours words about William Wyler, the director, and his “junta” (special advisers), the script battles, Samantha Eggar’s troubles and their troubles with her.

Going up alone to SE’s room to meet her. She’s a slim creature, pale green eyes, no make-up, nice red hair (natural); not very pretty, because she totally lacks any life. Some mysterious incident took place at Peter Sellers’s last night (I’ve just learned) – Sam was “badly treated”. Certainly she behaved like someone suffering from collision shock.

She is so remote from my conception of Miranda that I can’t imagine Wyler doing anything with her. The essential thing – life, intelligence, an eager thrust – she seems to lack completely, both in looks and mind. But various aspects of her past suit her casting: her parents are separated, daddy’s a brigadier, she had two years at art school (father wouldn’t allow the stage), she’s had an affaire with a much older man – but the vital spark isn’t there.

John Kohn [co-producer and scriptwriter] took me down to the studio through an endless area of tall palms, parking-lots and bizarrely exuberant cinemas and amusement places. The studio is rather tatty; like a factory, in feel. A lot of machinery, a lot of mechanicals; no room anywhere for art. When we finally came on the set for The Collector, built in the middle of the huge floor, it seemed a very small kernel for such a big nut.

The cellar they’ve built looks like the crypt of some 13th-century chapel – wildly implausible. And they’ve furnished it with a sort of queasy attempt at luxury that may be a parody or may, one feels, be Hollywood’s idea of what a nice furnished cellar ought to look like. I went around it picking out faults. Nobody really listens to criticisms, for two reasons – a sort of instinctive trade unionism, a deep Hollywood belief that each man does his own job and never interferes in anyone else’s; and a sort of inability to concentrate. Everyone works under pressure or likes to give that impression. The absence of leisurely amateurism, from which all great art finally springs – that is, an insistence on taking pains, not compromising and the rest – is the most frightening thing here.

The two things that are wrong with Hollywood: the too much money, the enormous surplus that has to be wasted; and the belief that showbiz is the same as art. Stanley Mann [scriptwriter] was hurt by my rejection of this world. He keeps on talking about Mr. Wyler, as if he’s Eisenstein, Griffith and René Clair all in one.

They’re Egyptian, these film people, totally unable to question rank, power and money.

We sat around a long wooden table in a corner of the studio. Willie Wyler, Sam [Eggar], myself, Jud, Bob Swink, the editor, John Kohn, Terry [Terence Stamp]. Terry is splendid, a lovely quick-thinking and highly articulate Cockney lad, sensitive and aggressive. After the first scene I said I thought he was too aggressive and he immediately read it through again with a wonderful dead monotony. He keeps on flashing out ideas about the part, trying out lines – he has absolute command of his voice, in contrast to poor Sam, who reads like a high-school understudy. Terry feeds her so well that he ought to be the easiest man to do dialogue with. But she constantly hits false notes, gets wrong emphases, and the one quality we’re all looking for, a sort of warm eagerness, just doesn’t appear.

Instead of flashing genuine anger, she has a sort of debby petulance; instead of genuine sorrow, a B-feature pathos. This is the sad fact: she’s a B-feature starlet, as she is. Terry completely outclasses her – she keeps on looking at his exuberant explosions of ideas and mimickings with a sort of little-girl admiration.

I see that Wyler is a kind of cross between Rumpelstiltskin and Socrates – he worries sleepily at things and sometimes he makes a point. Sam and Terry get very restless; Sam looks bored and tired, Terry begins to guy the whole thing, putting on a Tommy Steele accent and staring at Wyler with an absolutely straight face as he says lines absurdly.

After the day’s session I sat with Terry in Sam’s car and we had a long talk. He talked about Sam (“She and I used to live together. She was always trying to correct my English, that’s what’s so funny.”). He wanted Sarah Miles to act with him. He also thought Julie Christie could have done it.

Terry’s current mistress: a very charming little French girl, Annie Fargé, a leading soubrette on TV here; he treats her outrageously in his style and calls her my “fucking French bit” to her face, and she wrinkles her monkey face and kisses him. Terry has created a sort of dream life-style for himself. He says whatever comes into his head, does what he likes, lives like a sort of Hamlet without neurosis, eternally white-shirted, open-throated, thrusting, on the crest of the wave.

The awful American-English language problem. Anything that wouldn’t be comprehensible to the average American moron Willie objects to. We had the line: “I did it to exorcise you from my life.” “Exorcise, exorcise,” said Willie. “Who’s ever going to be able to say that – we need another line.” “I did it to get you out of my system,” I suggested. Yes, that was fine. But Willie kept on saying it over and over again. “Out of my system, out of my system, OUT of my SYSTEM. That sounds kind of peculiar.” About 20 minutes later, we ended up with “I did it to get you out of my mind.” Everything has to be mish-mashed to a smooth banality.

Sam took me into the studio this morning. Her car wasn’t waiting for her when she came down. She flew into a sudden filthy temper: “In future I want my car out here when I say.”

“I’m sorry, lady,” said the car-fetcher, “there’s a jam at this time of day.”

“I don’t care what there is. I want my car out here when I say.” And she slammed the door in the man’s face.

I gave her a look and said, “Relax.” But she didn’t. On the way there she talked about Terry. “He won’t talk to me, he hasn’t said a word to me for a year now.” He’s badly cast, she thinks. “So many people tell me I’m ideal for the part.” I threw her a startled look at that. She looked prettier today, but as human as a mannequin in a shop window.

Wyler explained to me at length — every sentence, however short, takes him about a minute to get out – why he wants to change the ending. “That girl’s got to hold the gun over the boy in the end. People feel angry if they don’t see the man with the gun disarmed at the end.” Basically Willie’s mind works on the Western level: Shane must triumph.

Terry on the set is rather alarming, as he dances around inventing “business”. He acts very method-style, like a Cockney James Dean, and makes the boy impossibly appealing and charming at times. Most girls would give their all to get in a cellar with him.

John Kohn dominates all the script conferences – he shouts and argues and pours out his ideas. He’s like a sort of pipe of power; his voice and energy never tire, while Jud has awful moods, and they keep on snapping at each other. Both have wild ideas – wildly implausible, and I spend miserable hours shooting down their “ideas”.

Willie, looking at the work of various art students, candidates for Miranda’s drawing work: “Aw, what the hell, let’s get the one with the big tits.” The only thing that lets one know he is teasing is a mischievous monkey grin that comes two or three seconds later.

“We’ve written a new scene, Willie,” said John Kohn very earnestly the other day. “Yeah,” said Willie. “Got a new director too?” Terry on the set, muttering to me. “If they change the fucking end I’m off. That’ll be the end all right.” He told me in strict confidence that he nearly didn’t come here. He only signed his final contract last Friday, and had already booked an air ticket to Greece. “I was going to fucking well disappear. This film’s such a fucking bore.”

Terry blames it all on Mike Frankovich, head of Columbia. He got Sam. He got the film made out here. He got it done in colour. “It’s all his fucking fault.”

Sam’s clothes. The wardrobe mistress has no taste. They’re all trite Technicolor get-ups to accentuate her bust and her femininity. Her bust doesn’t need accentuating; and when they use “femininity” out here, read “figure”. Sam is very fed up about this; and for once I don’t blame her. I at least got them to agree to use the old faded pants and cardigan she was wearing on the set today for one sequence. But not the actual clothes: “We’ll get some like that made.” One gives up.

John, Jud and I sit in an executive office and go through the script. But the interruption of phone calls is absolutely non-stop; and every tiny point has to be gone over and over again. Where the idea that Americans got things done fast sprang from, I just don’t know. They sound fast and look fast, but they talk and they talk and they talk.

Dinner at the Wylers, in Beverly Hills. A palatial house. There are four or five Utrillos on the walls, a fine Renoir, a Rivera. Willie is much nicer on his home ground, more French and more human altogether. Mrs. Sam Zimbalist was there, and the George Axelrods (the poetry of Hollywood names). I sat alone with Willie and we argued about the beginning of the film. He has just this one very primitive idea about what people need for entertainment, but he knows this domain very well, and he’s difficult to budge on it.

I tried to sell Willie the idea of getting Sarah Miles, who’s in New York, and sacking Sam. But he thinks Sarah’s “kinda dirty, kinda not pretty. No boy’s going to follow her around.”

Sam is doing the illness scene. The make-up man came up and asked me if she looked sick. I said, “She always looks sick.” “You English,” he said. “You’re just so unkind.” He’s a nice sour-salt New York Jew.

Sam did a “test” take with Maxwell Reed, a 45-year-old “rugged” masculine lead, who looked to me like six feet of tired intestine. He’s supposed to be English (on the strength of having once been married to Joan Collins). He spoke throughout in a strong American drawl, adlibbing some lines. “I’m never gonna see you again, baby”, was one English-Midlands gem. Willie thought he was great; but I exploded, and I think I cooked Mr. Reed.

Terry came up to the office and blew his top this afternoon. I think he must have rehearsed it as he put up a magnificent 15 minutes’ solo performance of mingled rage, frustration and brilliant mimicry of Sam on the set. Jud, who normally never laughs, was bellowing with laughter, tears running down his face.

Terry: “We’re all in the fucking soup. It’s the film I’ve turned down a dozen fat Hollywood parts to do. It’s the film that’s going to make you boys (John and Jud). It’s his fucking first novel. I mean all this arsing about. It’s fucking ridiculous.” Outside he said to me: “It’s incredible. I’m a serious actor, I know I’m going to be bloody marvellous one day, and here I am – stuck in the one fucking situation I’ve fought against all my life.

“There I am doing the big scene, shouting at her, doing my fucking nut, telling her she’s never going to get out, and she’s sitting there like a sow who’s just had a full breakfast.”

I took Sam out this evening, to hear Segovia and to try to get to the bottom of the mystery of her nothingness. I felt like Seneca locked up with Poppaea… or something. A pretty corrupt Seneca, as I have done my best to get her the sack these last days; and like everyone else have indulged wholeheartedly in the favourite sport on the Columbia lot – making fun of her behind her back.

She is an astoundingly gauche young woman. From certain angles very pretty indeed but only as a still, not as a motion. She sat bored through the concert, and then we drove fast home to the hotel. I took her to the restaurant downstairs, and finally forced her to listen to words of wisdom about her coldness (“I know people think I’m cold, it’s because I can’t be bothered to make friends”) and her ghastly harsh upper register (“I have voice problems”). I shook her hand in the lift and said: “If I can help you with the part, for God’s sake ask me.”

Jud is frantically phoning New York and London to try to get Susannah York or Sarah Miles. Susannah Y wants $350,000 for the role; they think Sarah has just been signed for another film. “Sue York’s wonderful. But 350 G’s is a lot of wonder.”

“I’ve thought of how to sack Samantha,” says John Kohn. “I go up to the broad and I say, ‘Sam, dear, owing to circumstances inside my control…'” I feel this film is like a car running out of control.

We sat all today in Kohn’s house, a UCLA professor’s house he’s rented, and beat at the script, shouting and pleading and bellowing and walking away and let’s-try-this-ing. So mad. Outside there was a pleasant garden with camelias and hibiscus in flower, and a blue swimming-pool. But we stayed at the same table from ten till seven. The script is their life, the characters 10 times more real to them than the people around.

The language in these script conferences becomes peculiarly tense and obscene: “OK, he wants to lay the fucking broad, but she’s a fucking little cockteaser, she won’t let him”; “Look, you got this goddam virgin fucking around…” And so on.

The horrible monotony of a city where you turn and look when you see someone walking down a pavement. One doesn’t have to say goddam a city without walkers; God has damned it.

Today (Monday 23) has been “getting the star” day. I wrote a long report for Wyler over the weekend slamming Sam. Terry and I have both been selling Sarah Miles like mad. Sam played into our hands by forgetting her lines and having a row with Willie on the set; and then the rushes from Friday came through. I sat next to Terry in the projection room and watched her play a scene alone, being ill. It was hilariously funny, and the session suddenly dissolved from all seriousness. “Frankenstein,” howled Terry. Jud and John Kohn just walked out in despair.

At half past five Willie called the three of us in, and admitted defeat.

“The girl makes me feel I never directed a film before. I don’t know anything any more.” We all in turn attacked Sam. I got Willie to promise he would consider Sarah again.

I began to feel sorry for Sam about then; she’s really, in a merciless world like this one, a victim of the machine. She ought never to have been cast, and she plainly (to me) begins to know it. She walked around the set this afternoon and no one would talk to her; but everywhere there were little angrily discussing groups. Sam walked like a Renaissance princess among all the courtiers who know she’s going to be poisoned for state reasons at dinner that night. Terry was outrageous on the set, upstaging her and clowning, suddenly starting to laugh when she forgot her lines for the 10th time.

Mike Frankovich flies in from New York tonight. “Who’s going to tell him?” asked Jud.

“I’m going to tell him,” says Willie, “and I mean tell. Not ask.” But John Kohn says, “Willie talks big tonight. Let’s see how he sings tomorrow.”

Today my loathing for this place reached a climax, and five or six times I have been on the point of catching the next plane out. At 10.00 it was said that Willie had not chickened during the night. At 12.30 a conference was called for Willie, John Kohn and Jud with Frankovich.

While I was waiting out front to go for lunch with Terry, Sam came up. I knew Terry wanted to hear the latest on Sarah Miles (who’s starting her film in May, so is “out”), but I couldn’t dodge it. Sam was, or was trying to be, pleasanter than usual, and even managed to look like a freckle-faced kid of 24 once or twice – innocent in a sort of way. She said, “Terry’s making it impossible. I’m going to Mike this afternoon to tell him so.” Then a bit later: “Terry spoke all his lines this morning to the script-girl.” And “I know why Mike wants to see me, Wyler’s told him I’m not into the part yet.” Then she asked me a couple of things about her lines. It was horrible, trying to find something to say.

At 2.15 Sam was called up to Frankovich’s office and given the sack. Frankovich apparently said, “Sam, I’ve got some terrible news for you.” “Only time I ever saw her face go soft,” says John Kohn.

At 4.00 Terry was called to Wyler’s office and we heard him shouting through the door. At 5.00 Frankovich rang John Kohn to say he had Sam with him and that she had something important to say.

Frankovich won’t look at Susannah York, who once refused to go to bed with him or something. He wants Audrey Hepburn, the best 35-year-old 20-year-old in the business; or failing her, Natalie Wood.

Palatial as this bedroom is, it begins to bore me; even the view begins to bore me.

7.15. John Kohn rang to say that after Sam had gone on her knees to Wyler he promised to give her one more chance tomorrow.

“Oh God,” I said.

“It’s nothing. Willie’s not chickening,” said John Kohn.

7.20. I rang Sam’s room. Could I help? Yes, please would I come up? “Willie told me you think I’m no good,” she said. “I was amazed. You said on Friday that I could do the part.” “Well look,” I said, “I thought you could do the part if… you know, it’s this business of… I’m a writer, you know, I have a sort of ideal…. ” It can’t have been very convincing, but the poor kid (and to give her her due she looked a poor shocked kid this evening) was too overwhelmed to notice a few prevarications. Apparently Willie wasn’t present when the axe fell. “He told Mike he didn’t want to see me again. I couldn’t believe it. He sacks me and he hasn’t even the courage to look me in the face.” She did get to Willie in the end. Then she flew round to Terry “to have it out with him” – “he’s hurt, it’s because we were once so close, I was the first girl he ever took out (Sam’s a great one for the euphemism) and I taught him a lot and he’s never forgiven me”. I said, well, I’ll try to help, so we played a couple of scenes together.

As we went through her lines, I kept on saying, “Your voice is so harsh, so debby, so hard…” Then I said, “I wish you could have heard yourself bawl out the car-fetcher the other day. You sounded such an utter young bitch from Belgravia.” “Oh God,” she said, wide-eyed and with a great thought bubble (“Thinks back”) emerging from her tawny hair, “Did I?” Sometimes she looks almost Pygmalionable.

The irony is that Wyler forced Terry to coach her for an hour late yesterday afternoon, and then I “coached” her for an hour this evening. If by some nightmarish miracle she suddenly started acting in this great final test, the two people who most want her out would have got her back in.

The climax day. Terry came tearing into the office from the set at 12.15: “He’s going to fucking well take her!” Consternation and alarm. He and Sam had been alone on the set with Willie. “She was so bloody frightened she was almost good, weeping all over the fucking place and all the rest. I could see old Willie swallowing it all.” He urged Jud and John to walk out; he said he would walk out.

2.15. Violent discussion, a feeling that the whole thing must be decided in the next hour.

“I don’t know what she’s got going for her except a lot of red hair.”

“She was 60 per cent better this morning,” said Bob Swink.

“Yeah,” said John Kohn. “Sixty per cent of nothing.”

2.30. Willie came in and marched up to me. “You ought to be directing this film. That girl’s much, much better.” I said she hadn’t any voice, any technical skill, any heart, any conception of the part. Frankovich kept on ringing through.

“Tell him I’m not here,” said Wyler. He paced around the room. What did I think of York? He wanted York… So I sold York, beautiful, passionate, virginal, brilliant York.

2.45. We hear Terry shouting at Willie through the wall. It goes on for about an hour. I rang Terry later back at home and he said he’d done the same as us, sold York, attacked Eggar.

3.30. John and Jud are called to Frankovich. Eggar is to go. Apparently Frankovich was very angry against everyone – he even managed to include me – that writer’s a hypocrite, coaching the girl like that and then trying to get her the sack.

4.00. They went down to tell Sam she must go. Willie funked it, and refused to see her. She went out slamming the door, it seems: “I wish you luck with your next leading lady.”

Actresses’ names have been flying round the lot all today (Thursday): Natalie Wood heads the stakes, but then there’s Yvette Mimieux, backed by John Kohn and me. Inge Stephens, Hope Lange, Susan Pleshette, wild talk of getting Sarah to break her contract with MGM, and many others whose names I’ve never heard of. All depends on Wood now. She is said to have loved the book, but no one knows whether she will love the script. If she’s as good as they say she is, she won’t.

Sam rang up at eight and asked me to go to her room. Her boyfriend from London, the actor Tom Stern, was there. She wanted to pump me, in fact. I kissed her hand, and said she was a brave girl, which I think she has been. She is furious against Wyler: “He’s been such a hypocrite.” She’s a very innocent creature: “Terry hates Sarah, I know, he told me so the other day.” When I explained the real situation, she looked at me with hurt eyes. Tom Stern said, “I read the script. That girl in the cellar is Sam. She doesn’t have to act. It’s her natural self.” I looked appropriately of the same opinion.

A last morning. I said goodbye to Willie and spent a last 10 minutes trying to get him to drop Reed and take Kenneth More, but he was as slippery as ever. Jud told me the latest on the film. Frankovich has turned down Natalie Wood, who has decided she wants to do the film. She has asked for $400,000 and 10%, not an exorbitant price by Hollywood standards. But Jud says F is still furious that they have turned down “his” girl, and is determined to put Jud and John out of business. “We’re never going to do another film with Columbia. That’s sure on both sides.”

A last drink, then home in an almost empty plane over a vast sea of cloud under the moon, with Cassiopeia on the black wall to the north; breakfast in brilliant sunshine – and then a vile plunge down through thousands of feet of cloud. We came out finally only just above ground level, and landed at once. Cold, dank rain and wind, added injury to the eternal insult of England’s small scale and miserable inadequacy as a 20th-century society – the traffic crawl, the mean housing, the cramped appearance of everything. It’s like a punch in the face, that descent down back into England.

Samantha Eggar was re-hired and for her performance in The Collector went on to win the Best Actress awards in the Golden Globes and at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as being nominated for an Oscar.

• Biography of John Fowles
• Novels of John Fowles
• John Fowles First Editions and related items for sale
• BBC Radio’s Adaptation of The Magus
• Journals of John Fowles — Volumes I & II
• Selected Poems of John Fowles
• John Fowles 1926-2005 : An appreciation and more
• Radio Interviews of John Fowles
• Collecting John Fowles — Article in Firsts Magazine
• The Last Chapter — TV adaptation of Fowles short story
• The Magus ready for a revival?
• Film Adaptations of Fowles novels
• 1966 Fowles Letter discusses meaning of The Magus
• Transcript of 1977 BBC interview of John Fowles
• Author visits Lyme Regis in remembrance of John Fowles
• Novels similar to The Magus
• Translating the last lines of The Magus
• The Magus and TFLW chosen as two of 20th century’s top novels
• Wormholes Review by Professor James Aubrey
• Does the 1997 movie The Game rip off The Magus?

The Definitive Biography of John Fowles

What’s New?

• Recent news about John Fowles and his work, including potential film and TV adaptations, happenings in his home town of Lyme Regis, the publication of new books about Fowles, etc.
• Miniseries of The Magus in the Works
• Bringing The Magus to the Screen — How to Do It Right This Time
• Criterion Blu-ray of The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• Restoration of John Fowles’ Lyme Regis Home
• NEW BLU-RAY OF THE COLLECTOR PACKED WITH SPECIAL FEATURES
• John Fowles News & Notes

Film Adaptations

• Four of John Fowles’ novels have been adapted into films: The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Ebony Tower. Click here for all the details, including DVD and Blu-ray availability.