John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds - Rilegato

Warburton, Eileen

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670032832 ISBN 13: 9780670032839

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2004

Riassunto

Drawing on his intimate, fifty-year journal, personal letters, and interviews, the first definitive biography of celebrated novelist John Fowles furnishes a richly detailed study of his life, his rise to success as one of the twentieth century's most important writers, his literary influence, and his compelling fiction, poetry, essays, and translations.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Eileen Warburton is a scholar who lives in Newport, Rhode Island.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Introduction

The truth about any artist, however terrible, is better than the silence. . . . I know many writers fight fanatically to keep their published self separate from their private reality. . . . But I’ve always thought of that as something out of our social, time-serving side; not our true artistic ones. I don’t see how the “lies” we write and the “lies” we live can or should be divided. They are seamless, one canvas, for me. While we live we can keep them apart, but not command the future to do the same. The outrage some Thomas Hardy fans have shown over all the revelations about the private man seems to me hypocritical in the extreme. They hugely enrich our understanding of him. . . . I have had to convince a number of friends and relatives that the kindest act to the [writer] is remembering them— and that all art comes from a human being, not out of mysterious thin air.
—john fowles, letter to jo jones, september 15, 1980
(arguing for the preservation of john collier’s personal papers)

By the early 1970s John Fowles, still in the midst of his active career as a writer, was already the subject of academic scrutiny. He was beginning, at this point, to critique the critics, wondering why they “devoted far too much . . . time to the analysis and exegesis of ‘dead’ literary product as against the investigation of living literary experience.” He himself was fascinated by the interior process of mythmaking, the transmutation into art of his own life, past personal experiences, understanding of nature, and reading. He defined inspiration as the state “of extreme sensitivity to past biographical data.” It baffled him that scholars and commentators should focus their attention on finished texts and overlook the obvious, the “dark world of self-experience inherent in myth-making, . . . the subjective living experience.”1

I met him around this time, in January 1974. I was probably typical: a twenty-six-year- old American graduate student, very nervous, armed with three carefully crafted scholarly questions about John Fowles’s published books, his intentions, and so forth. But the day was miserably wet and squally. My husband and I had walked for hours, fascinated and anxious, around a Lyme Regis we both “knew” from The French Lieutenant’s Woman. When we knocked at Belmont House that afternoon, we were soaked and cold and must have looked like two bedraggled children to the woman who opened the door.

I was struck speechless. This was Elizabeth Fowles (she insisted on “Elizabeth” immediately) offering her hand. But I “knew” instantly that she was Alison, the character I most loved in The Magus. John Fowles hurried up behind her, kindly, welcoming, pressing our cold hands and hustling us to the fireside. What I overwhelmingly felt at that moment was the conviction that the books and the life I was briefly touching were connected at a profound, organic level. My academic interview questions seemed shallow and beside the point.

I stumbled through the questions, of course, although I can’t remember either what I asked or what Fowles answered. We tried to hurry off but were urged to stay. Through a long afternoon of cups of tea and concern over wet shoes, we were enfolded in the tender ordinariness of John and Elizabeth’s world. We heard of Elizabeth’s daughter, marrying that summer; I must someday meet her. They asked of our families, our life as young marrieds. Fowles spoke of a new book of short stories to be published later that year. It was nearly evening, though still daylight, when the rain stopped and John led me down the muddy, sloping pathways deep into his overgrown garden. There were no Latin names that day and little talking. He parted dripping branches to reveal winter blossoms. He crushed leaves and held them to my nose to sniff. He stopped at the deep center of the garden and smiled. The outside world was gone, and there was only wet green, damp earth, silence, and fading light. These were his real answers, I now know.

So, many years and many meetings later, I became John Fowles’s biographer. As I think he wishes I have tried to focus on what Fowles calls the ethnology of the novelist, the study of living behavior in the artist. For me, this means simply telling the story of how this man’s life resulted in the books he made. In large measure, it has also meant writing the biography of a marriage. Elizabeth is at the center of the books, as she was of John Fowles’s life. There were no publishable novels before her coming. There were none after her going.

It was possible for me to observe this relationship between the books and a private existence over the writer’s lifetime because, with staggering generosity, John Fowles made his diaries available to me before they were published or openly archived at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I read them while they were still archived (and not open) at Exeter University in Devon. Fowles further supported my research by permitting me to use his own correspondence, that of his first wife, Elizabeth Fowles, and a very personal assortment of private papers, photographs, and other materials. He introduced me and vouched for me to his friends, family, and professional associates, almost all of whom consented to be interviewed and/or to release materials. He himself gave me many hours of interview and research time, occasions I shall always treasure. What Fowles did not do was interfere, censor, or collaborate. He did not read drafts of the manuscript or review the book before publication. Mistakes are entirely mine.

John Fowles and I seriously began our discussions about a biography when he was touring the United States in 1996. Sitting on my back porch in Newport, Rhode Island, on May 22, he advised me emphatically: “There’s only one way that you could do it. Tell the truth. Tell the truth.” Since then he has assured me repeatedly of his trust. I am honored by his trust and have tried to be worthy of it by following his advice, telling the truth, even in places where it was difficult.

For all his astonishing support, I acknowledge John Fowles with deepest gratitude. Fowles’s diaries, from 1947 to 1998, provided the chronological backbone for the biography. (Chapters 1 and 2, covering 1926 to 1947, are the exception.) These diaries, however, are the record of an interior journey over half a century and are confined to Fowles’s powerful personal interpretations of exterior fact, the immediate impressions recorded in a single moment. To balance the diaries with other kinds of witness, I have used other written documents and interviews. I drew on John Fowles’s and Elizabeth Fowles’s letters and a wide range of interviews with family, friends, and associates of both JF and EF. I was given access to all of Fowles’s surviving papers, both published and unpublished.

Because of the magnificent, overwhelming richness of these primary documents, I have included very, very little from the vast library of secondary sources about John Fowles, the books and articles about his works. The exception is James R. Aubrey’s John Fowles: A Reference Companion. I have only rarely used any of Fowles’s published interviews with scholars and journalists. Beyond the interests of brevity, I wanted Fowles to speak for himself from diaries and letters as much as possible. I wanted to include a direct sense of his “voice,” along with those of the other major figures in the story. Furthermore, I have learned to be somewhat suspicious of taking the “John Fowles” who speaks in interviews for the “real” John Fowles. I came to this conclusion both from reading what he says about interviews in his diaries and, more important, from interviewing him myself over a lengthy period.

Fowles’s interviews with me were filled with stories and “memories” in direct conflict with other sources, particularly his own diaries. Although to this day he has phenomenal recall for facts of natural history and geographical place, Fowles would be the first to say what a poor memory he has and has always had for biographical fact. Throughout his life he has forgotten the details of events, safely recording them in his diary, then letting go of them. In fact, the written diary record was in many ways the most “real” part of any experience for Fowles. In addition, most of my interviews were recorded when the man was over seventy and his memories were further blurring. However, if Fowles forgot an incident, he simply invented it or reinterpreted it to suit his purposes. After a lifetime of regarding his own biography as raw material for his fiction, a malleable substance to be shaped and reshaped in his imagination, many of the stories he presented as factual were obviously fictional. Sometimes he presented other people’s experience, in perfect sincerity, as if it were his own. Although I suspect that Fowles sometimes does lie to interviewers, particularly when he is bored or the interviewer is especially irritating, I learned to regard his interview narratives as different from deliberate lying. They were the product of what I call fertile forgetting. The personal past is forgotten or suppressed but returns through imagination in the writer’s fiction, often in a different shape. Throughout the narrative of Fowles’s life there is a marked tendency for him to slip away into hiding of one sort or another, then to reappear in a mask or disguise, refashioning himself as a fiction.

I confess that I was annoyed when I first became aware of this tendency in his interviews with me. But when Anna Christy, Fowles’s stepdaughter, wrote me that Fowles was “playing the god-game” with me, I had to laugh. I learned to feel rather honored to sit listening to the great novelist actually weaving his fictions in my presence. I use these interviews in the biography only with caution. But I’m very glad we did them.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas, awarded me an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, 1998–1999. This enabled me to spend several months among the ...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0670032832
• ISBN 13: 9780670032839
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 528