John Fowles
THE JOURNALS
Volume Two
Edited by Charles Drazin
463pp. Cape. £30.
0 224 06912 8
John Fowles regarded his Journals, available now in two massive volumes, as his “last novel”. This might seem a remarkably lazy piece of self-importance (in other words, an exemplary postmodern gesture) or perhaps a desperate act of reclamation by a man who has written himself out. The surprise, however, as one treks through half a million words of self-address, forty years spent staring into the blank-paged mirror, is that it is hard to disagree with the claim. At least, given the type of novel that Fowles kept attempting – a capacious literary-philosophical-autobiographical holdall – it would be fair to say that these Journals are the condition to which all Fowles’s writing aspired.
Fowles remarked that the key to his fiction was his relationship to nature. Here, in this “last novel”, more successfully than in any of the multivocal, multivalent blockbusters with which he made his name, Fowles found a form and expression adequate to this relationship. Where other diarists have left us delightful observations on the small scale, full of incidental drama, character sketches and anecdotal wit, Fowles is more attuned to profound depths, far from the prattling, shrieking, honking world of mere humans. Ensconced in Lyme Regis, with a loathing of cities so histrionic that a walk in London reads like one of the Labours of Hercules, Fowles is “happiest being, doing, thinking nothing”. The years covered by this second volume (1966–90) are full of industry – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin, a revised Magus, film adaptations, translations and non-fiction – but the story as Fowles tells it is one of retreat and willed dullness. Fowles drags himself to dinner with friends, endures literary functions and steels himself for family visits, always relieved to return to the sanctuary of home and solitude. These social excursions – gifts for the diarist – barely disturb the long-breathed rhythm of Fowles’s continual attempts to “establish what one is” sub specie aeternitatis. This is less a Journal than a Diuturnal.
Fowles’s heroic disengagement means that he often sounds like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (his refusal to go to the marketplace to ask for public approval; his superbia) or Timon (regretting his wealth; cursing mankind). People are a threat to that which is most precious to him: his integrity. He sees hostility and mistrust everywhere, which is hardly surprising, given that these are the twin lenses through which he views the world. This can have amusing consequences. After a sleepless night, he suspects a waiter of having plied him with real (not decaffeinated) coffee; though he has just described the challenging meal – oysters, partridge, a marquise – to which the innocent little drink was a mere coda. Fowles rises so far above it all that the occasional reminders that he is flesh and blood – a cut knuckle, trousers snagged climbing a wall in Crete – are comically surprising.
From his Olympian heights, Fowles cannot be expected to make out individual details. Often, unfortunately, the best he can do is identify blacks, gays and Jews; all, needless to say, behaving typically. Even where familiarity is unavoidable – friends, colleagues, family – people are subjected to psychological mythologizing, their personality disregarded, as easily removed as gloves or a hat, while Fowles gets to grips with their Freudian wounds. They blunder around, these sad humans, blind to the deeper motives which govern their silly, fanciful lives. Fowles’s wife, Elizabeth, clearly essential to him on a practical level (cook, chauffeur, housekeeper) is, as a person, no more than an off-stage voice, throwing bitter accusations in the direction of the bemused, put-upon author. With books, as with people, the judgements are swift and absolute, although here Fowles’s pronouncements seem born of a more probing analysis.
On one or two occasions Fowles sharpens his focus, shrewdly and wittily, at the human level, but – as if this were an accident – he never lingers long. Most often his sight is trained on nature itself. Birds, butterflies and flowers are accorded the kind of detailed, careful observation that humans evidently do not deserve. These field notes – dry and tedious in themselves, at least from this city-dweller’s point of view – build up through their quiet, powerful insistence to a kind of Brucknerian symphonic grandeur. They are the bedrock of the Journals.
Indeed, it is the sameness of nature that makes it attractive. For all their vitality, the world’s flora and fauna appear unchanging. As Fowles writes himself into this perpetual landscape he is able to escape grubby mortality and its threat to his integrity. Eventually, and inevitably, nature claims him; the illusion of immortality is dispelled. Fowles grows old, falls ill, loses purpose. There is a change of tone in this second volume as he takes on a more frail human shape, while nature, heedless, marches on. These are “bad, bad days”, times of futility, drift and boredom, of staggering and stumbling, all powerfully captured in his simple prose.
The real enemy is not Darwinian momentum (as Fowles thinks) but the second law of thermodynamics: the dissipation and degradation of energy. Truly Darwinian, in the face of faceless entropy, is Fowles’s effort to hold everything together. “All endeavour useless”, he notes; yet endeavour he does, as do we all, intent on retaining a once-splendid singularity.
Somehow, it matters. This is brought home to shattering effect with the sudden, terrible death of Elizabeth. Having recently sighed at the pointlessless of life, voicing his desire for oblivion, Fowles is now winded by “the stupendous enormity” of death. “She will never be here again. It is as simple to write as it is impossible to believe.” That is perfectly expressed. An additional sadness is that it is only in her death that Elizabeth comes to life in these Journals. (That, and the few occasions, late on, when she adds bitter, corrective comments to Fowles’s notebooks; chilling textual exchanges that speak of a relationship in shreds.) The Journals, as published, end with Elizabeth’s death. For Fowles, however, that was far from the end of the story. Despite having sketched the shadow of his own death from the mid-1980s onwards, Fowles lived until the end of 2005, all the time writing his Journal. Given the distinctive focus on natural history of this work, it is odd that the editor, Charles Drazin, has chosen to truncate his material in a way that transforms it from Darwinian epic to conventional tragedy, or even melodrama. Of course, Elizabeth’s death is a true crisis, yet Fowles recovered, remarried and fought on for another fifteen years. The current ending is not true to the spirit of the Journals – their unsparing, even crude, honesty – and one can’t help feeling that Drazin has done a Nahum Tate, offering a falsely satisfying conclusion where a genuinely artistic inconclusiveness would be preferable.
Drazin’s whole edition – for all that it is thoughtful, painstaking, and undertaken with the approval and assistance of Fowles – is something of a compromise, severely abridging a narrative that operates through fullness and duration. The original Journals run to two million words, four times longer than Drazin’s two volumes. Of course, a complete edition – at 5,000 pages – would be almost unreadable, certainly unsellable, not to say unwieldy. But this, paradoxically, constitutes Fowles’s real achievement.
For twenty years, after A Maggot (1985), Fowles disappeared from the literary scene; his absence was a mystery. The reason is that, more and more, he came to live as a writer in these ongoing Journals rather than in published work. This was not just an artistic move away from the false endings and overt shaping of novels. More importantly, Fowles saw his novels as dead objects, pored over, mangled and, as it were, bodysnatched by students and critics. The name “John Fowles” became strange to him, as if he were reading it off a headstone. To avoid being thus read and buried, he had to keep writing but avoid publishing. The unreadability of the Journals is the measure of Fowles’s success. The notebooks lie in the archives of the Harry Ransom Institute, Austin, Texas, unstudied, uncomprehended, unencompassed. As long as this remains the case, Fowles keeps a kind of literary immortality, a freedom from our desire to “finish” him.
It is a remarkable phenomenon, but one wonders about the sheer number of words; the implication of a life not lived outside the writing. One ends Drazin’s impressive and compelling reduction amazed, saddened and keenly aware that the greatest defence against our cruel entropic fate is love; a defence seemingly suppressed into oblivion by Fowles’s determination to cry out, with Coriolanus, “Alone I did it”.
