John Fowles: The Journals, Vol. 2: v. 2 [Hardcover]

These two volumes of diaries display an unflinching honesty, a trait that was evident in John Fowles's great novels. But as Ben Johnson sagely observed of Shakespeare, `reader, look not upon the writer, but his book.'

Despite his literary triumph the man who emerges from these pages led a life that was frequently unhappy, at least up to 1990 when these journals conclude. Perhaps the most interesting frustration expressed in these pages is over Fowles's own lack of any oral articulacy to compliment the quality of his writing and the power of his imagination.

Finding huge success, especially in the United States, Fowles was catapulted into the media spotlight where he was expected to perform. But he was particularly poor at this and, in time, he came to loathe the `media shallowness' of the modern world and to become a recluse.

John Fowles was the very last of the pre-Second World War generation. Privately educated, he was at public school during the conflict, then served at an officer in the Royal Marines before reading French Literature at Oxford. Despite the new, more egalitarian mood that pervaded Oxford immediately after WWII, Fowles remained extremely class conscious and intolerant of fools. These diaries also seem to cast him as anti-Semitic, even though several of his few close friends were Jewish. Rather, I think he was `conscious' of Jewishness and its traits in a way that the British middle-classes in the 1930s would have been. In these aspects, Fowles did not change with the times.

His spectacular (and overwhelming) American success may have been helped by the very aura of `old-fashioned Englishness' that he exuded (which in the USA would have seemed very upper class), an image that played less well in the social revolution that was occurring in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.

Above all, it seems that the latter half of Fowles's life was blighted by a long first marriage which had turned bad and a stroke in 1988 that he felt affected his ability to write fiction (although the journals remain lucid and insightful).

Fowles unsparingly records his refusal to take on his wife's young daughter by a previous marriage and his own wish not to have children. This was perhaps the `pram in the hall' syndrome that Philip Larkin expressed on behalf of all artists, but it seems shabby and very mean spirited. Later it was to become a major bone of contention in the marriage.

Neither he nor his wife Elizabeth (who died in 1990) found the strength to leave the union (although the mutual desire appears in the journals) and it its heartrending to read of their antagonism and unhappiness during the years that led up to her death. In a masterstroke as exciting as the appearance of `the author' in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Elizabeth Fowles's own voice appears near the end of these journals to answer angrily her husband's many complaints about her. The naked, impotent fury that existed between the pair is laid bare.

Many entries in these journals express dolorous negativity. Fowles despaired of much - particularly the rise of the British proletariat who, when they gained economic independence and personal enfranchisement, turned out to be ugly, loud and crass. A life-long socialist, the results of the democratisation of privilege and culture for the working class dismayed the novelist. It was an irony he recognised and recorded in these journals.

Above all, John Fowles loved nature. His comfort came from his garden and the countryside around Lyme Regis where, despite Elizabeth's intense dislike of the town's provincialism., they lived for over twenty-five years, until her death.

Unsparing in criticism and self-criticism, these journals are the most wonderful, painful and rewarding insight into a life that was overwhelmed by success. Had Fowles made a living, rather than a killing, from his work, he would probably have been more productive and, perhaps, somewhat happier.

Ray Hammond

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