Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (124 page)

Hitler, Fowles archly claimed, ‘helped me greatly’ because, aged thirteen when the war started, he was evacuated and spent five idyllic years in a remote and rural Devon village – Bevis at last. From adolescence onwards he kept voluminous diaries, journals and private writing. It was always more interesting to him than the stuff he later published; it was part of what he called his ‘chauvinism of self’, something, that is, more glorious than old-fashioned selfishness or egotism. In his teenage years Fowles was a boarder at a minor public school, Bedford School, which meant classics, cricket, painfully prolonged virginity, and chronic uncertainty about his heterosexuality. On leaving school in 1944, he was commissioned into the Royal Marines, an elite and highly selective arm of the service. Had Hitler been less friendly, and kept the war going a year or two longer, Lieutenant Fowles might have seen action as a commando. As it was he entered active service on the day, as he liked to recall, that the war ended.

Fowles became one of the demobilised military intake into Oxford University in 1947. He ‘drifted’, choosing, eventually, to do French – which meant existentialism and Brigitte Bardot. He was a virgin until he was twenty-two, when an experienced Frenchwoman, Micheline Gilbert, introduced him to sex and Camus. Both would be lifelong interests thereafter. Despite ill-health and a simmering nervous breakdown, he took a respectable degree and chose (declining his family ‘trade’) to teach abroad: first in France, then, in 1951, on the Peloponnesian island of Spetses, at what was grandly called ‘the Eton of Greece’. He spent two life-changing years on the island, and enjoyed two tangled love affairs, before being dismissed for moral turpitude and general bolshiness. Out of the experience came a novel,
The Magus
(1965), which it would take him fifteen years to finish writing – one cannot say he ever completed it. It took him less time to relieve his best friend at the school (another hopeful novelist), Roy Christy, of his wife, Elizabeth. After much angst (‘a slow moral crack-up,’ he called it) and a messy divorce, Fowles and the former Mrs Christy married in 1957. At the same period, he gave up wildfowling – previously a main pleasure in his life and a connection with his idyllic years in Devon. The couple settled in Hampstead and he went through a succession of teaching jobs well below his abilities.

Fowles regarded himself as primarily a writer not a teacher, but he was constitutionally reluctant to publish. His first novel would not come out until he was thirty-seven, though it was worth waiting for.
The Collector
(1963) is a tour de force exercise in I-narration. The I-narrator is Frederick Clegg, an impotent young psychopath of the lower classes, who has two interests: catching, killing and mounting butterflies; and sexual voyeurism. Having won a lottery prize, Clegg (who prefers to be called ‘Ferdinand’) captures and imprisons in his cellar a young girl – Miranda (the Shakespearian allusions are pushed hard in the novel). Clegg’s diary alternates with hers. It all ends bleakly, there being no Prospero in this Fowlesian world. The novel was an international bestseller and was adapted as a Hollywood film in 1965. Fowles scorned its happy ending. It was what the audience wanted, the director William Wyler patiently informed him. They were boss. Fowles took the hint and in his next two novels offered double endings. It was seen by his admirers as postmodernism, but it could also be seen as the Charles Peirce pragmatism his father had trained him in. At this period – around 1963 – Fowles came across
Le Grand Meaulnes
. Alain-Fournier’s novel, first published fifty years earlier, and its celebration of the
domaine perdu
– the lost country – influenced him more than anything since Camus’
The Rebel
. Fiction itself was, he determined, that impossibly yearned-for other country.

Royalties from
The Collector
had now freed Fowles from the hated classroom and
enabled him, finally, to wrap up work on
The Magus
. In the interim, however, he published (much against his publisher’s advice) his philosophical manifesto,
The Aristos
(1964). It took the form of a majestic (‘pompous,’ as the universally hostile reviews thought)
non serviam
. ‘My chief concern in
The Aristos
’, declared Fowles loftily, ‘is to preserve the freedom of the individual against all those pressures-to-conform that threaten our century.’ What he advocated was a version of Carlyle’s hero worship – individuals who could rise above the Heraclitean flux and the quotidian. ‘I’ve never needed other human beings really,’ he once said, and his misanthropy was enlarged on in a revenge-on-humanity fiction he never published called ‘The Fucker’.

The Magus
, earlier entitled ‘The Godgame’, is the acid test for Fowlesphiliacs. The novel-cum-fable was a decade and a half in the making – a quarter of a century if one includes the period between the first version (1966) and the second (1977). A fantasia woven out of his two, emotionally tempestuous, years on Spetses (‘Phraxos’ in the novel) it follows the perplexities of Nicholas Urfe, a young English teacher, the woman he loves, and the malignantly playful magician of the title, Maurice Conchis. The 1968 film of
The Magus
inspired Woody Allen’s much-relished wisecrack, ‘If I had to live my life again, I’d do everything the same, except that I wouldn’t see
The Magus
.’ Fowles thought the actors (principally Michael Caine, who played Urfe) did not understand the narrative – nor Woody Allen, evidently.

Fowles was now rich enough to take up residence in a fine house at Lyme Regis, the setting for his most successful novel,
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969). A neo-Victorian narrative of appropriately three-volume length, it celebrates – in the sexually rebellious heroine, and the reluctantly rebellious hero – profound anti-Victorianism. At this period of his writing career, Fowles felt close – spiritually and regionally – to Thomas Hardy. The ‘woman’ of the title and Eustacia Vye (
The Return of the Native
) clearly have much in common. The enigmatic triple-ending of the novel can be seen as English
roman nouveau
, or a wanton fracturing of the old (essentially Victorian) realisms of English fiction. By this stage of his career, Fowles was a darling of the American reading public and of American critics – who took to
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
much more eagerly than their British counterparts, for many of whom Fowles’s proper place was ‘Pseud’s Corner’. The novel was filmed, scripted by Harold Pinter and starred Meryl Streep, elegantly hooded, on the Cobb (sea wall) at Lyme Regis. Her image branded the paperback novel, and helped it to long-term bestseller status.

Fowles’s last major effort in fiction is his most autobiographical and bitter.
Daniel Martin
(1977) opens in the Devon of the author’s idyllic childhood before flashing forward (flashing everywhere, indeed) over the various locations of his later life with a particularly angry attention to ‘Illusionville’, as he sardonically called Los
Angeles – the epitome of the twentieth century’s shallowness. The novel was poorly received (‘gangbanged to death,’ as Fowles’s biographer put it), particularly in the UK, and confirmed the author’s sense that he was an exile in his own country. He seems to have revelled in the feeling. When, the year before his death, he sanctioned the publication of his journals he insisted that passages (anti-Semitic, homophobic) reflecting badly on him
not
be removed: no whitewash for John Fowles.

He suffered a minor stroke in late 1988 and was widowed two years later. He had some absurd sexual infatuations in his later years (including one with a girl fifty years his junior) and remarried in 1998. Always parsimonious about publication, he put out nothing in his later years, working intensively, however, on his unpublished
Tesserae
– a title which, for most fans of
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
, would need a footnote.

If there wasn’t a Fitzgerald, I don’t think I would have become a writer.

Richard Yates was of literature’s nearly men. Born into an impoverished and dysfunctional family in Yonkers, New York (whose dysfunctions and monetary crises he reproduced, with Xerox fidelity, in his own roles of husband and father), he missed out on a university education. Throughout life he nursed a corrosive anger against novelists who had that advantage over him. ‘I’d give anything to have gotten a college education,’ he complained in later life. ‘I feel the lack of it all the time.’ He was, as photographs – and innumerable sexual partners – confirm, strikingly handsome, but in a style that he himself despised. Yates privately thought his looks feminine, and he had ‘a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual’.

After leaving school, Yates served (just) in the Second World War and was measured a single IQ point short of qualifying for officer training. He was discharged ‘with a Good Conduct medal and the rank of private first class’, the lowest of the military low. He brought back no good war stories but, typically, made good fiction out of the lack of them. His early and finest short story, as he believed, ‘A Really Good Jazz Piano’, was turned down nine times, with gushing praise, by the best magazines in the United States. Only the devoted persistence of his agent got it into
print. Yates’s first published novel,
Revolutionary Road
(1961), had the misfortune to be a finalist for the National Book Award in 1962, an
annus mirabilis
for American fiction, coming up against Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
, J. D. Salinger’s
Franny and Zooey
, Edward Lewis Wallant’s
The Pawnbroker
and Walker Percy’s
The Moviegoer
, which – amazingly – won. In later life, he taught creative writing (very well, apparently) at various universities but he failed to get tenure at his main base, the University of Iowa – something that embittered him inordinately.

Richard Yates was that most despised American thing, a loser. Bitterness stoically concealed – except when in drink or mania – was the presiding flavour of his career. Nothing ever went quite right for him. He arrived slightly too late on the literary scene and was overtaken by what he contemptuously called the ‘post-Realistic School’. A cost was paid for all this disappointment. He was, as his biographer Blake Bailey portrays him, both a great writer and simultaneously ‘a parody of the self-destructive personality’. He was a lifelong four-pack-a-day man. He chain-smoked in a tuberculosis sanatorium and puffed on even when chained to oxygen cylinders, his lungs rotten with terminal emphysema. On at least one occasion he burned down his apartment, toasting his work in progress which, prudently, he stored in his refrigerator. There was nothing else in it other than liquor. His workplace in such apartments, during his years of divorced solitude, was spartan in its simplicity and gothic in its squalor. ‘Visitors were struck by certain awful details to which Yates himself seemed oblivious: the bloodstains on his desk-chair cushion (from piles), the calm roaches in plain sight, nothing but bourbon and instant coffee in the tiny kitchen.’ His daily routine in later life was described by one of his daughters: ‘He’d wake up tremendously hung over, and put himself together for about two hours. Then he wrote, and then he went out and got drunk for the rest of the day.’

Children of a failed artist mother, divorced from his father when Richard was three, Yates and his sister spent their infancy flitting from apartment to apartment. It was, as he described it, a domestic environment smelling of ‘mildew and cat droppings and plasticine’. In later years his mother, always hysterical, descended into alcoholism and eventual dementia. Her image – ambivalently accented – haunts his fiction. The one aesthetic pleasure Yates records in his boyhood is the movie theatre. It was the hovel on his childhood heath. What saved him for literature was the good fortune of a few years at a private school, during one of the family’s upswings. His experience at Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut is chronicled in his novel
A Good School
(1978). Here he learned to write for student magazines. Words, he discovered, came easily to him.

After being discharged from the army, Yates took on various jobs in which he could employ his verbal fluency. He was, variously, a copywriter and a malcontented
journalist while, all the time, he laboured at his own writing. His best-paid work was with Remington Rand, merchandisers of the first commercially viable computer (something that interested Yates not at all). He was trapped, like other men in grey flannel suits, in a good job. He married, entrapping himself further. His wife Sheila, a gifted woman who could possibly have done well on the stage, had settled for the life of a ‘no-nonsense New York secretary’. Their marriage produced two daughters before failing. It also produced a magnificent novel of suburban nightmare,
Revolutionary Road
.

Published in 1961,
Revolutionary Road
catches, almost before it had passed, the deep materialistic pointlessness of the Eisenhower-
Mad Men
1950s (the ‘you’ve never had it so good’ era in Macmillan’s UK). It was – there is no other word – boring:

Then it was Sunday, with the living room deep in the rustling torpor of Sunday newspapers, and no words had passed between Frank Wheeler and his wife for what seemed a year. She had gone alone to the second and final performance of
The Petrified Forest
, and afterwards had slept on the sofa again.

He was trying now to take his ease in an armchair, looking through the magazine section of the
Times
, while the children played quietly in the corner and April washed the dishes in the kitchen.