The Timon of Lyme Regis

Dr Johnson talks somewhere of a Reverend Dr Campbell whom he calls the ‘richest man ever to graze the pasture of literature’. If his riches derived from his books, he was surely outgrossed by John Fowles, whose novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman topped all the bestseller lists, and remained on the New York Times list for a full year. Fowles’s advances reached $250,000. Even The Ebony Tower, a soft-porn novella, and a clutch of short stories made him a small fortune. Hollywood films were made of FLW (as he refers to it) and of his earlier novels The Collector and The Magus, though none was worth seeing. The movies are always said not to do justice to literary sources, but they often reveal fustian, bluff and heartlessness.

Even the massive Daniel Martin, that protracted and self-involved tombstone which he laid on his own career, earned another fortune in movie options alone. Fowles was then only 50; if he lived on to his late seventies, his subsequent work was a succession of dandyish postscripts, interspersed with local histories of Lyme Regis, and translations of Molière and of recondite texts culled from second-hand bouquinistes. At the same time, these journals enabled him to vent his increasingly solipsistic angst. Love of nature — birds and flowers supplied the only society he relished — served to emphasise his contempt for modern man.

When I read the first volume, covering the apprentice years, I was nettled by the unremitting Jew-consciousness. Even his friends never fail to be ticketed with long-nosed or venal traits. The habit continues here, but I have become immune. He refers early on to a visit to Leigh-on-Sea, his hated childhood home, where ‘life is lived as if the year is 1929 — 1939, at most’.