John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds | Eileen Warburton

For someone who never had the gift of seeing himself as others saw him, Fowles made a very good living out of seeing himself as he saw himself. When Warburton, then a graduate student in America, first met him, in 1974, he was at the height of his fame. His part-autobiographical fictions The Collector and The Magus were bestsellers and had been made into films, the first with Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, the second with Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn and Candice Bergen. The French Lieutenant’s Woman had sold 100,000 copies within a week of publication in the USA, and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for most of 1970. But Fowles hated the resulting loss of privacy. With the help of his voluminously self-important diaries (Fowles claimed that it was his ‘duty’ as a novelist ‘to have a profound love-affair with the complexity of his own mind’), John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds uncovers an extreme version of the paradoxical relationship in romantic writing between solitude and self-exposure. The book also shows how much input (and output: she cut a huge amount) came from Fowles’s wife Elizabeth — until he foolishly decided not to involve her in Daniel Martin. The role of professional editor-entrepreneurs, especially Tom Maschler at Cape, are another part of the story, as are the gaps between Fowles’s intentions and how his books were read.

Fowles was born in 1926. Both sides of his family had briefly been well off, but the money had run out. Fowles’s father, Robert, spent three years in Flanders, lost a brother at Ypres and never fully recovered his health. In much reduced circumstances, he and his wife set up home in Leigh-on-Sea, where Fowles grew up. He was an only child until the age of 15, when a sister, Hazel, was born: an unwelcome surprise to the rivalrous, intense adolescent, and one which affected him in ways at least as far-reaching as the more direct influence of several obsessions of his father’s (gardening, for example, and, less expectedly, German Romantic poetry and American philosophy). With Hazel’s birth, the boy began his diaries.