John Fowles’s diaries — or ‘disjoints’, as he calls them — are evidence of his own theory that while some writers have a genius for a specific genre, others ‘have merely a universal mind’. ‘I’m a mind-writer … I feel master of none, yet at home in all,’ he wrote in 1954, about halfway through this first volume which runs from his student days in 1949 until 1965.
And why not present all one’s work — if one is a mind-writer (much more occupied with ideas than with words) — as it comes out; in years, or periods of time; short stories, fragments of plays, poems, essays, notes, criticisms, journals; the aim being a portrait of the total living artist, not a classified museum.The fact that he wrote the above nine years before his first novel, The Collector, was published, demonstrates the over- riding theme of these journals: Fowles’s faith in his immortal destiny as a writer and artist. His creative development is the central narratives of the diaries, as he progresses (sometimes extremely gradually) from arrogant, gauche student to established author.
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