Powell was a born autobiographer and diarist; but his novels have always seemed to me like bad opera — set-pieces (‘arias’, if you like) such as the pouring of sugar over Widmerpool’s head, joined together by dreary recitative of the ‘I must go to the bathroom’. ‘Why must you go to the bathroom?’ sort. Fowles’s vivid journals have immediacy, but his novels are laboured and mannered.
How can one account for this odd dichotomy in the cases of these authors? Is it that they were only interested in themselves? No: Lees-Milne, in particular, has ultra-sensitive antennae which begin quivering when he notices somebody in distress. It is more, I think, that they could only record what they had actually seen and experienced themselves, with, in each case, the aid of a phenomenal memory. (Newman’s Dream of Gerontius is clearly, to some extent, self-referential, so has merit, though it took Elgar to make it sing.)
Fowles proposed a striking corollary to this theorem in his journal of July 1989:
Perhaps I — and many others — have been novelists because we could not stand saying the truth. We always needed to escape from what is the world as it appears to us; to invent other worlds. The world that is too cold and cruel to bear; and above all we ourselves (I myself) that are also a lot too cold and cruel. We create the surfaces of the mirrors we see ourselves in …
Certainly Lees-Milne found some aspects of life very difficult. Probably because of the slights he had received from an unsympathetic father (‘He disliked me from the start’), he suffered from what modern jargon calls ‘low self-esteem’. Again and again he puts himself down, feeling he is less intelligent than the people he is meeting. He was often hard up, especially in comparison with the society in which he liked to mix. It is a surprise to find one of his cheques bouncing — before his marriage to the well-off Alvilde Chaplin. (He was bisexual and could fall in love with women as well as men.) His job, as adviser to the National Trust as to which buildings should be acquired for the nation, presented constant problems, whether in the shape of cantankerous owners or the agonies that dilapidation caused him.
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