The Journals of John Fowles: v.1: Vol 1 [Hardcover]

One must surmise that Mr. Preece is not interested in a serious search for self knowledge which Mr. Fowles sought from 1949 - 1990. In Vol 1, 1 became bogged down during his affair with Elizabeth, whom he then married. However, beginning with chapter 7, 'Married Life in London' (p. 391), the tone changes and the literary and personal criticisms are succinct and superb, as are his observations on world events and travel. Fowles was disenchanted with our material world long before some of us were aware it was destroying us. Fowles is keen observer and lover of nature, and this beautifully informs his journals. Lyme Regis was never so alive in his famous book and film, The French Lieutenant's Woman (described in Vol. 2). Fowles was an admirer of another Dorset writer, Thomas Hardy, whom his work resembles in its brevity and clarity. If you liked The Life of Graham Green (3 vols) by Norman Sherry, you will also like Charles Drazin's editing of John Fowles Journals (2 vols). (Vol. 2 is 5 *****) I feel that every word Fowles ever wrote should be published.

John Fowles life is laid out truthfully in his journals.He literally mined his life for his great novels.An existentialist, his perceptions are primed up with the rhythms of his daily ruminations,his deepest impulses. His love of nature makes him an honest observer with feeling:plants,flowers,geology,the skies,gardening,the sea, travel.He has a dark night of the soul in his relationship with Elizabeth, due to her first husband's manipulation of the situation,using their child, Anna,as a lure to get her back.Roy Christie was his biggest rival and similar to him in many ways:wanting to go to Spetsai,the Greek island( made famous as the inspiration for The Magus),to get inspiration to write himself.What other people don't acknowledge in their critiques-is Fowles very great determination to write,the long struggle,the poverty the couple had to undergo in the lean early years.He's honest about the reason he couldn't take Anna on as his child for adoption.But he assists Liz later to help her get treatment so they can have a child of their own.This doesn't work out,hence Liz's digging her heels in, becoming embittered and depressed as time goes on,having lost the early contact with Anna,making her guilty.Liz was the great axle of his world.His Astarte.She had great intelligence,intuition,without the need to talk.

Fowles had a genuinely idiosyncratic perspective on his times through the narrow lens of his fiction.It was a burning glass through which he powerfully focussed his tremendous imagination with a charismatic intensity.No other novelist followed a 1st controversial world-wide best seller with a book of his philosophical musings, Aristos.He follows another existentialist,Camus,in this,who wrote The Myth of Sisythus.Fowles said he should have been born French.He studied French at Oxford.Fowles did hate the pettiness of the English mentality, castigating Lucky Jim and Room at the Top,but inspired by Osborne's Look Back in Anger and its disgust with its times.Like no other writer of his time,Fowles,has a great insight into the female psyche,through his teaching of female students.He taught in France,and the after Greece,in England.He is also an atheist, and is always intellectually passionate about books,ideas, art, discussing them throughout the Journals.His greatest love affair is with Monique,whom he met on his travels with groups of foreign students,she is 'too ideal..too perfect',but unattainable,merely platonic.Fowles real sources of literary inspiration,Le Grand Meaulnes, Bevis,Greece, existentialism(Camus/Sartre/Beauvoir),travel( to France,Spain,Greece) was an escape from his own lower middle class Leigh-on-Sea origins and his mother.The conquest of absurdity was through active choices about who he was, what he believed,in order to engage fully with the mystery of being.

Fowles gambled with his life,giving everything to his writing once he'd been able to give up teaching for good.His commentaries on art and the great auteur film-makers like Truffaut,Godard,Bergman,Antonionni,the Roman satirists, fellow writers like Greene and Golding(who he thought was best writer),are sharp and stimulating.He is surprisingly a fan of Jane Austen and loves Thomas Hardy.He cultivated a few solid friends,had bizarre dealings with the film world in the making of his novels into films,perhaps in a Faustian pact that propelled him into big bucks success,but also a cantankerousness of spirit,which drove him to the move to Lyme Regis, where he felt most at home away from all the literary coteries,urban shallowness.John is shown early on literally climbing Parnassus, and then fulfilling it in his imagination through setting exacting standards as a writer.His shyness and his solitary nature show emotional vulnerability but give to his musings a solar humanism and poetic vision.He spoke from the heart in his writing,with the novel conveying `feeling truths' as John withdrew within himself behind a series of masks,leaving his self for all to see.Swimming against the currents of his time.His greatest inspiration was his wife Elizabeth,who he relied on as his 1st reader,muse,mate,love and mainstay.He seems to have drawn his best work from his life.Why his best novel is The Magus.

Make way Mr Pooter! Critics recoiled from the portrait Fowles' journals presented of himself: superior, snotty, whining, and selfish. Alas, they failed to recognise one of the most hilarious books ever written.
The po-faced Fowles out-pooters Mr Pooter on every page. Examples are legion. He hates Leigh-on-Sea, where he was born and brought up. Nothing ever happens there, declares Fowles on frequent visits to his parents, only to return to his London flat where the most exciting thing he does is listen to Journey from Space on the radio or play his recorder.
On the rare evenings Fowles spent with people decent enough to put up with him, Fowles declares that he couldn't be bothered to talk to them since they never took anything seriously. And if they did, they inevitably never understood things with the insight Fowles possesses. He complains that most of his friends drink too much - it doesn't occur to him that they might have been anaesthetising themselves in preparation for an evening with the Fowleses. He hates Britain, but never bothers to leave. There's a hilarious bit where he waxes lyrical about Truffaut films after just having seeing one - and the footnote says that it was in fact directed by Godard.
It provides a fascinating glimpse into Fifties Britain - well, as it was lived by Fowles. The birth of rock and roll and the renaissance of British design, for example, passes Fowles by.
The fact that Fowles hasn't written a decent novel in decades is laid bare: he is utterly insensitive to the feelings of others. Once Fowles had written books based on his own life he had no more ideas left.
I have scarcely enjoyed a book so much. You can't help liking a man so clueless and who wrote a wonderful novel in The Magus (apart from its ending). Just don't invite him to dinner.
A comic masterpiece. I can't wait to read it again.