Daniel Martin (88 page)

‘I didn’t tell you how sweet Abe and Mildred were. When you junked me.’

‘Yes?’

‘He offered to divorce Mildred and marry me himself.’

‘In front of her, I hope.’

‘Of course. And you’re never to have the Cabin again.’

‘But you are?’

‘Any time I want.’

He pressed her hand. ‘I’m glad.’

After he had posted the letter in Italy, he had rung Mildred to warn her it was coming; and again, back in London, when he knew it should have arrived—and had. Mildred had said drily that she was doing his ‘dirty work’ for him, but he knew whose side she was really on. He said nothing now. They came to the terrace and walked to where a tunnel-arbour led beside the eighteenth-century house. Then Jenny suddenly pulled him to a halt, as if they had reached a mark on set.

‘I’m going to say goodbye now, Dan.’

She turned in front of him, mimicking a niece at the end of a treat. A smile, a look into his eyes. ‘Thank you for having me. In all senses. And I think the rewrite of this scene’s been so much better than the first draft.’

‘But how are you…’

‘If you walk through here and up the drive, you’ll be in Hampstead Lane. You can get a taxi there.’ She smiled again. ‘I’d rather walk home alone.’

They stood frozen a moment, then she moved. Her mouth hardly touched his, for the briefest second he was allowed to hold her against him; then she was walking away. He stood watching her, feeling obscurely tricked, even in some way hurt that it had been her decision—which told him that it had been one that still, somewhere deep inside himself, he had not absolutely taken. At the top of the steps down, fifty yards away, she glanced back at him, and extended a discreet arm with the hand cocked up slightly, as if they were just saying goodbye for a few hours and she was late for some next appointment. Her face had turned away before she could have seen his own hand raised in return. He watched her walk quickly down, the woollen cap, fair hair, patchwork coat, brown wicker basket, over the long slope of grass to the footbridge that led across a brook and up over another slope to the woods. She did not look back again. He moved a few yards and sat on an empty bench, and watched her still, a speck with a basket, until she had walked out of his life; then lit a cigarette and stared unseeingly at the tame, tranquil landscape in front of him.

He felt bereft beyond his calculation of it; almost cheated by the understanding of himself he had arrived at over the last two months, and which he had tried to convey to her; trapped in his own trap, turned someone he wasn’t. It was as if, having sucked the poison of her mood in the pub, he was left poisoned by it himself. In the end he stood and went through the hornbeam tunnel beside the house—but there, instead of walking up the drive to the road outside, on some impulse given realization by seeing two other people enter, vaguely remembering it was a public gallery, he went in himself. He walked round the place, not really looking at anything, until, by chance in the last room he came to, he stood before the famous late Rembrandt self-portrait.

The sad, proud old man stared eternally out of his canvas, out of the entire knowledge of his own genius and of the inadequacy of genius before human reality. Dan stared back. The painting seemed uncomfortable in its eighteenth-century drawing-room, telling a truth such decors had been evolved to exclude. The supreme nobility of such art, the plebeian simplicity of such sadness; an immortal, a morose old Dutchman; the deepest inner loneliness, the being on trivial public show; a date beneath a frame, a presentness beyond all time, fashion, language; a puffed face, a pair of rheumy eyes, and a profound and un-assuageable vision.

Dan felt dwarfed, in his century, his personal being, his own art. The great picture seemed to denounce, almost to repel. Yet it lived, it was timeless, it spoke very directly, said all he had never managed to say and would never manage to say—even though, with the abruptness of that dash, he had hardly thought this before he saw himself saying the thought to the woman who would be waiting for him on the platform at Oxford that evening; telling her also what had gone before, a girl and a past walking into winter trees, knowing she would understand. He had lied a little to Jenny, to make it easier for her. But that was his secret now, his shared private mystery; which left him with the imagining of the real and the realizing of the imagined. Standing there before the Rembrandt, he experienced a kind of vertigo: the distances he had to return. It seemed frightening to him, this last of the coincidences that had dogged his recent life; to have encountered, so punctually after a farewell to many more things than one face, one choice, one future, this formidable sentinel guarding the way back.

He could see only one consolation in those remorseless and aloof Dutch eyes. It is not finally a matter of skill, of knowledge, of intellect; of good luck or bad, but choosing and learning to feel. Dan began at last to detect it behind the surface of the painting; behind the sternness lay the declaration of the one true marriage in the mind mankind is allowed, the ultimate citadel of humanism. No true compassion without will, no true will without compassion.

Some young schoolchildren came in, a babble of voices. The peace was broken, and Dan moved away. But as he left the room, he turned a moment by the door and looked back at the old man in his corner. The children were restlessly gathered before the painting, while a harassed woman teacher tried to tell them something about it. But Rembrandt’s eyes still seemed to follow Dan over the young heads implacably; as many years before, when he was their age, his father had once unwittingly terrified him by insisting that Christ’s eyes followed… wherever you went, whatever you did, they watched.

That evening, in Oxford, leaning beside Jane in her kitchen while she cooked supper for them, Dan told her with a suitable irony that at least he had found a last sentence for the novel he was never going to write. She laughed at such flagrant Irishry; which is perhaps why, in the end, and in the knowledge that Dan’s novel can never be read, lies eternally in the future, his ill-concealed ghost has made that impossible last his own impossible first.

The End

Robert McCrum

Sunday November 13, 2005

The Observer

The life of John Fowles, which sadly ended in Lyme Regis on 5 November, offers a moving snapshot of English literary life that is close to a parable. Often described as ‘England’s first postmodernist’, an innovator scorned by the critics, by the end his career had mellowed into a pattern familiar to his literary forebears.

First, there was the decade of dizzying acclaim and creativity. From 1963, the year of his chilling first novel, The Collector, to The Magus (1965), to The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Fowles had his moment in the sun like few of his generation. In retrospect, the innovations of his fiction seem much less significant than his more traditional gifts.

Still, an autodidactic experimentalist, Fowles gave provincial English readers a frisson of French literary theory, and they revered him for it. At the height of his powers in the mid-Sixties, he was a fashionable, but reclusive, member of swinging Britain.

But styles change. The Ebony Tower (1974), published in the afterglow of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, was a novella and some linked stories from a writer drained by his achievement. Daniel Martin (1977), a self-hating portrait of a British writer enslaved by Hollywood contracts, was a sad coda. Later, there was Mantissa (1982) and A Maggot (1985), but these were the embers from a much fiercer blaze. Most successful writers have their moment and then have to cope with indifference and neglect. Fowles experienced this fate in an acute form.

This brings us to the key to his astonishing contemporary success. This, too, was archetypal. Like nearly all the most renowned English writers, his art was a winning high-low confection, an acute literary sensibility mixed with a storyteller’s ear and eye for mass culture. Nothing wrong with that; it probably came to him instinctively. For instance, when retrospectively addressing his cult book The Magus, he wrote that it was ‘a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent’. Until the critics turned on him for the books of his late middle age, the high-low combo guaranteed huge sales, colossal film deals and the kind of attention that later generations of Booker wannabes can only dream about.

His work also made strikingly successful transitions to the screen. Pinter’s screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman is one of his best. The exception was The Magus. Of this, Woody Allen famously remarked: ‘I would do it all exactly the same, only next time I’d skip seeing The Magus.’

Allen’s remark raises another resonant irony: Fowles’s achievement was far more fully recognised in America than Britain. Like many of our finest post-war writers, he was more honoured abroad than at home. It was the American literary press that saluted Daniel Martin; the English critics who murdered it.

I’m not going to re-heat that argument, but there is no doubt that his rejection helped to enforce his internal exile in Lyme Regis, and sponsored a bitter and dismissive attitude towards the metropolitan critical establishment.

But there in Lyme, working through a slow decade of ill health after a stroke in 1988, he gave a generation maddened by deal-mania and advances a master-class in the commitment necessary for literature of consequence. To the end of his life, he did what the best writers always do: he wrote for himself.

Sunday October 12, 2003

The Observer

He is notoriously private. So why, asks Adam Lee-Potter, is the author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman publishing his diaries?

John Fowles, author of The Collector, The Magus and Daniel Martin, can barely walk; his speech is slurred and his gaze is rheumy. Fowles has not written a novel (since A Maggot ) for 18 years and his newly published diaries are almost certain to be his last work.

However, as he says: ‘I do think a lot, though.’ The intellect that has dazzled readers since the publication of The Collector 40 years ago is still razor-sharp, if haphazard. His recall is patchy, and he is forever wafting a questioning hand at Sarah, his second wife: ‘She is my memory now.’ He sporadically forgets the titles of his books, referring to The Magus as ‘that Greek book I wrote a long time ago’ and Daniel Martin as ‘me in America’.

This is probably the last interview John Fowles will do. In 1988, two years before Elizabeth, his wife of 33 years, died of cancer, he had a stroke, followed by heart surgery. Today, he is nursed at his rambling seaside refuge in Lyme Regis by Sarah, 20 years his junior, an old friend of Elizabeth’s. They make a touching couple. He is her ‘sick pig’; Fowles calls her Rats: ‘She of the Ravishing Auburn Tresses.’

Fowles is constantly tripping off at bizarre tangents, zooming from his father’s ‘ghastly’ attempt at a novel to his love of France, a recurrent theme: ‘I think in French, you know.’ He looks across to his wife, sitting quietly in the corner. ‘Can I say that?’ She shrugs indulgently: ‘You do what you fucking like.’ Sheepish, he grins. This is, I realise, by far the best way of dealing with Fowles, as a supremely gifted but slightly naughty schoolboy. Sarah, who handles him in the manner of some public school matron, says wearily: ‘I do adore him, but it is very difficult. He is demanding beyond belief.’

Fowles is hard work. A born recluse, he despises parties and pomp, is uneasy around other writers— he dislikes ‘vain’ Martin Amis in particular— and shuns fame even more than he craves attention. Hence his self-imposed, 40-year exile, hidden away in this magnificently shambolic house on the south coast. ‘I know I have a reputation as a cantankerous man of letters and I don’t try and play it down. But I’m not really. I partly propagated it. A writer, well-known, more-or-less living on his own, will be persecuted by his readers. They want to see you and talk to you. And they don’t realise that very often that gets on one’s nerves.’

These days his visitors are scarce. Even Sarah, a senior advertising executive, spends much of the week in London. He only leaves his bedroom to sit in the delightfully overgrown garden below, looking out across treetops to the sea, rather like the eponymous heroine of The French Lieutenant’s Woman—or, as Sarah abbreviates it, TFLW. It seems a tad rich of him to complain, however mildly, of gawpers, especially since TFLW— made, in 1981, into a five-Oscar-nominated movie with Meryl Streep—single-handedly catapulted Lyme Regis into the spotlight. Fowles admits: ‘Well, exactly, by irony I wrote a book which made this town popular. You can think, “Oh God, the bloody grockles”, but then you realise, “I caused it, I made it happen”.’

Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, the son of a tobacconist and a schoolteacher. He adds with mock grandeur: ‘She was the daughter of the chief lingerie buyer for John Lewis.’

Fowles’s greatest bugbear is his background, his parents. Both were irredeemably suburban, a trait which he loathes. Fowles’s leading characters are invariably womanisers, middleclass, caddishly intelligent and orphans. From Nicholas Urfe to Daniel Martin to Charles Smithson, he never hesitates to kill off the parents. Fowles sees himself as a one-off genetic fluke.

‘No one in my family had any literary interests or skills at all. I seemed to come from nowhere. I didn’t really have a happy childhood. What bored me about my mother was her lack of taste. My father’s great fault was that he hated France from his experiences in the war, at Ypres. And he liked Germany. We had a geographical falling out. I deviated at the wrong branch of European culture. When I was a young boy my parents were always laughing at “the fellow who couldn’t draw”— Picasso. Their crassness horrified me.’ Was his father an intellectual? ‘No’, Fowles snorts with contempt: ‘he was a tobacconist’.

Sarah breaks in: ‘They never understood him, but they were proud. He was good at cricket, and they were pleased about that. As for what they thought of his books, I don’t know. Nor does John. For such a curious man, it’s extraordinary he doesn’t know what his parents thought.’

Fowles all but jumps out of bed at this: ‘Correction, correction, correction. I do not want to know what my parents really felt. And that’s part of growing up. It’s not knowing how your parents judge you or esteem you. To get a response, you have to ask a question. And I never asked them what they thought of my books. I knew they would find my books difficult.’

The novels are everything to Fowles. He has lived vicariously through them. ‘You are every character you write. In Daniel Martin , where I describe myself travelling all over America, I probably revealed more of myself than anywhere else. Daniel is a grownup Nicholas Urfe. They are both changed by women. And so was I. There has been a succession of her [Sarah’s] predecessors.’

After Elizabeth’s ‘dreadful’ death, and before his marriage to Sarah five years ago, he embarked— ‘I’m sorry to say’, he says, sounding not remotely sorry—on an eight-year-long string of affairs.

But here Fowles is the master of reinvention: ‘I am a feminist. Men need to realise that a great deal of truth in life lies in the woman. A woman’s main task is to educate us, to make us see we’re not fully educated yet. Can a feminist be predatory? I certainly at one point used to make after women. But sex is nothing more now than a happy memory.’

Fowles is an atheist and has no children. Does he have regrets? ‘I wish I knew more. But that’s a matter of luck. I don’t spend much time in self-loathing or self-admiration. I have a great deal of contempt for writers who are vain, who want fame. You do have to have a certain amount of vanity to be successful, to sell books. But you have to keep it under control, you can’t take yourself too seriously or you become what you pretend to despise.’

So why publish his diaries? Fowles hesitates. ‘I just hope they give a detailed picture of what I have been.’ He shakes his head sadly: ‘I do not begin to understand my own personality myself.’