Fair or Fowles?

He is notoriously private. So why, asks Adam Lee-Potter, is the author of The French Lieutenant's Woman publishing his diaries?
  • The Observer,
Journals by John Fowles

John Fowles, author of The Collector, The Magus and Daniel Martin, can barely walk; his speech is slurred and his gaze is rheumy. Fowles has not written a novel (since A Maggot ) for 18 years and his newly published diaries are almost certain to be his last work.

However, as he says: 'I do think a lot, though.' The intellect that has dazzled readers since the publication of The Collector 40 years ago is still razor-sharp, if haphazard. His recall is patchy, and he is forever wafting a questioning hand at Sarah, his second wife: 'She is my memory now.' He sporadically forgets the titles of his books, referring to The Magus as 'that Greek book I wrote a long time ago' and Daniel Martin as 'me in America'.

This is probably the last interview John Fowles will do. In 1988, two years before Elizabeth, his wife of 33 years, died of cancer, he had a stroke, followed by heart surgery. Today, he is nursed at his rambling seaside refuge in Lyme Regis by Sarah, 20 years his junior , an old friend of Elizabeth's. They make a touching couple. He is her 'sick pig'; Fowles calls her Rats: 'She of the Ravishing Auburn Tresses.'

Fowles is constantly tripping off at bizarre tangents, zooming from his father's 'ghastly' attempt at a novel to his love of France, a recurrent theme: 'I think in French, you know.' He looks across to his wife, sitting quietly in the corner. 'Can I say that?' She shrugs indulgently: 'You do what you fucking like.' Sheepish, he grins. This is, I realise, by far the best way of dealing with Fowles, as a supremely gifted but slightly naughty schoolboy. Sarah, who handles him in the manner of some public school matron, says wearily: 'I do adore him, but it is very difficult. He is demanding beyond belief.'

Fowles is hard work. A born recluse, he despises parties and pomp, is uneasy around other writers - he dislikes 'vain' Martin Amis in particular - and shuns fame even more than he craves attention. Hence his self-imposed, 40-year exile, hidden away in this magnificently shambolic house on the south coast. 'I know I have a reputation as a cantankerous man of letters and I don't try and play it down. But I'm not really. I partly propagated it. A writer, well-known, more-or-less living on his own, will be persecuted by his readers. They want to see you and talk to you. And they don't realise that very often that gets on one's nerves.'

These days his visitors are scarce. Even Sarah, a senior advertising executive, spends much of the week in London. He only leaves his bedroom to sit in the delightfully overgrown garden below, looking out across treetops to the sea, rather like the eponymous heroine of The French Lieutenant's Woman - or, as Sarah abbreviates it, TFLW. It seems a tad rich of him to complain, however mildly, of gawpers, especially since TFLW - made, in 1981, into a five-Oscar-nominated movie with Meryl Streep - single-handedly catapulted Lyme Regis into the spotlight. Fowles admits: 'Well, exactly, by irony I wrote a book which made this town popular. You can think, "Oh God, the bloody grockles", but then you realise, "I caused it, I made it happen".'

Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, the son of a tobacconist and a schoolteacher. He adds with mock grandeur: 'She was the daughter of the chief lingerie buyer for John Lewis.'

Fowles's greatest bugbear is his background, his parents. Both were irredeemably suburban, a trait which he loathes. Fowles's leading characters are invariably womanisers, middle-class, caddishly intelligent and orphans. From Nicholas Urfe to Daniel Martin to Charles Smithson, he never hesitates to kill off the parents. Fowles sees himself as a one-off genetic fluke.

'No one in my family had any literary interests or skills at all. I seemed to come from nowhere. I didn't really have a happy childhood. What bored me about my mother was her lack of taste. My father's great fault was that he hated France from his experiences in the war, at Ypres. And he liked Germany. We had a geographical falling out. I deviated at the wrong branch of European culture. When I was a young boy my parents were always laughing at "the fellow who couldn't draw" - Picasso. Their crassness horrified me.' Was his father an intellectual? 'No', Fowles snorts with contempt: 'he was a tobacconist'.

Sarah breaks in: 'They never under stood him, but they were proud. He was good at cricket, and they were pleased about that. As for what they thought of his books, I don't know. Nor does John. For such a curious man, it's extraordinary he doesn't know what his parents thought.'

Fowles all but jumps out of bed at this: 'Correction, correction, correction. I do not want to know what my parents really felt. And that's part of growing up. It's not knowing how your parents judge you or esteem you. To get a response, you have to ask a question. And I never asked them what they thought of my books. I knew they would find my books difficult.'

The novels are everything to Fowles. He has lived vicariously through them. 'You are every character you write. In Daniel Martin , where I describe myself travelling all over America, I probably revealed more of myself than anywhere else. Daniel is a grown-up Nicholas Urfe. They are both changed by women. And so was I. There has been a succession of her [Sarah's] predecessors.'

After Elizabeth's 'dreadful' death, and before his marriage to Sarah five years ago, he embarked - 'I'm sorry to say', he says, sounding not remotely sorry - on an eight-year-long string of affairs.

But here Fowles is the master of reinvention:'I am a feminist. Men need to realise that a great deal of truth in life lies in the woman. A woman's main task is to educate us, to make us see we're not fully educated yet. Can a feminist be predatory? I certainly at one point used to make after women. But sex is nothing more now than a happy memory.'

Fowles is an atheist and has no children. Does he have regrets? 'I wish I knew more. But that's a matter of luck. I don't spend much time in self-loathing or self-admiration. I have a great deal of contempt for writers who are vain, who want fame. You do have to have a certain amount of vanity to be successful, to sell books. But you have to keep it under control, you can't take yourself too seriously or you become what you pretend to despise.'

So why publish his diaries? Fowles hesitates. 'I just hope they give a detailed picture of what I have been.' He shakes his head sadly: 'I do not begin to understand my own personality myself.'

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