A voracious collector

‘The only novelist now writing in English whose works are likely to stand as literary classics…who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James.’ Verdicts like this American one on John Fowles were a lot more common in the 1960s and 1970s than they have been since, and in the USA more than the UK. Fortunately, you don’t have to agree with them to be absorbed by Eileen Warburton’s well-written, thoroughly researched and even-handed biography — her first book, and evidently a labour, if not of love, then of the queasy fascination which will also be most readers’ main response. ‘The truth about any artist, however terrible, is better than silence,’ Fowles — who authorised the book — once wrote, partly apropos of Thomas Hardy.

I don’t see how the ‘lies’ we write and the ‘lies’ we live can or should be divided … the kindest act to the [writer] is remembering them — and … all art comes from a human being, not out of mysterious thin air.

Fair enough, except that Fowles simply wasn’t Hardy. The usual excuse in such cases — nasty piece of work, but he produced such wonderful pieces of work — won’t quite do.

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.