During the period when he is involved, very profitably, in the movie world, he almost relishes his proximity to its big names, and its byzantine politics. As he notes, I was the first to be asked, by Maschler, to write the screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman. My participation was limited, in the event, to one meeting with Maschler and Dick Lester, then an A-list director. I always thought the text a windy show-off. During the chat, in the early Seventies, I suggested that ‘we’ find a cinematic correlative for Fowles’ intrusive comments in propria persona on the characters and their situation by overhearing today’s actors discussing ‘motivation’ etc in rehearsal clothes and post-Freudian jargon. Funny then to find that, in 1980, Fowles notes, ‘Great precautions were taken to see that no one knew of the past and modern aspects of Harold [Pinter]’s script.’ Gabby screenwriters must expect to have their ideas lifted, but there is comedy in seeing them valued as another goose’s golden egg. My revenge is that it turned out to be addled.

In a tasty coda, director Karel Reisz tells Fowles, ‘Harold says he’ll do anything, but he simply cannot write a happy scene.’ Nor could Fowles, except when alone with rare orchids: ‘Heaven!’ he then exclaims; his shortest sentence.

This goitrous accumulation ends with the wretched Elizabeth dying, with agonising swiftness, of generalised cancer. Only then, like Hardy after the death of his first wife, does Fowles fall back in love with what is gone forever. His editor, Charles Drazin, whose footnotes are excellent this time, chooses to end with the bereavement, so sewing together a giant novel from what Fowles, with typical latinitas, called his ‘disjuncts’. Finally, you realise that this, not Daniel Martin, is his self-revealing swansong, a posthumous chef d’oeuvre, inconnu even to its author.

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