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The Fountain
An English officer in a German POW camp discovers that his childhood sweetheart is married to one of the German officers.
450 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1932
11 people are currently reading
357 people want to read
About the author
Charles Morgan
114 books23 followersCharles Langbridge Morgan was a playwright and novelist of English and Welsh parentage. The main themes of his work were, as he himself put it, "Art, Love, and Death", and the relation between them. Themes of individual novels range from the paradoxes of freedom (The Voyage, The River Line), through passionate love seen from within (Portrait in a Mirror) and without (A Breeze of Morning), to the conflict of good and evil (The Judge's Story) and the enchanted boundary of death (Sparkenbroke).
Morgan was educated at the Naval Colleges of Osborne and Dartmouth and served as a midshipman in the China Fleet until 1913. On the outbreak of war he was sent with Churchill's Naval Division to the defence of Antwerp. He was interned in Holland which provided the setting for his best-selling novel The Fountain.
He married the Welsh novelist Hilda Vaughan in 1923.
He was the drama critic of The Times from the 1920s until 1938, and contributed weekly articles on the London theatre to the New York Times. His first play, The Flashing Stream (1938), had successful runs in London and Paris but was not well received in New York. The River Line (1952) was originally written as a novel in 1949 and concerned the activities of escaped British prisoners of war in France.
He was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 1936, a promotion in 1945, and was elected a member of the Institut de France in 1949. From 1953 he was the president of International PEN.
While Morgan enjoyed an immense reputation during his lifetime and was awarded the 1940 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, he was sometimes criticised for excessive seriousness, and for some time rather neglected; he once claimed that the "sense of humour by which we are ruled avoids emotion and vision and grandeur of spirit as a weevil avoids the sun. It has banished tragedy from our theatre, eloquence from our debates, glory from our years of peace, splendour from our wars..." The character Gerard Challis in Stella Gibbons's Westwood is thought to be a caricature of him.
Morgan was educated at the Naval Colleges of Osborne and Dartmouth and served as a midshipman in the China Fleet until 1913. On the outbreak of war he was sent with Churchill's Naval Division to the defence of Antwerp. He was interned in Holland which provided the setting for his best-selling novel The Fountain.
He married the Welsh novelist Hilda Vaughan in 1923.
He was the drama critic of The Times from the 1920s until 1938, and contributed weekly articles on the London theatre to the New York Times. His first play, The Flashing Stream (1938), had successful runs in London and Paris but was not well received in New York. The River Line (1952) was originally written as a novel in 1949 and concerned the activities of escaped British prisoners of war in France.
He was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 1936, a promotion in 1945, and was elected a member of the Institut de France in 1949. From 1953 he was the president of International PEN.
While Morgan enjoyed an immense reputation during his lifetime and was awarded the 1940 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, he was sometimes criticised for excessive seriousness, and for some time rather neglected; he once claimed that the "sense of humour by which we are ruled avoids emotion and vision and grandeur of spirit as a weevil avoids the sun. It has banished tragedy from our theatre, eloquence from our debates, glory from our years of peace, splendour from our wars..." The character Gerard Challis in Stella Gibbons's Westwood is thought to be a caricature of him.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 21, 2021
Dull, pointless, and a tiny bit confusing.
I can’t even remember why I got this. I know I must have read about it somewhere, like maybe it was mentioned by an author I like, or referred to in an article about an author I like. No idea. I wish I remembered; I’d like to go back and see the reference.
Lewis Alison is a British naval officer (or something) in WWI. He is imprisoned (or something) with a few other fellows in a Dutch estate. This is the vaguely confusing part. I suppose it would have been more easily understood at the time of the book’s publication, but I was baffled. “They’re prisoners? But they just get to live on the grounds of this fancy house, and they can do whatever they like? And there aren’t any guards or anything?” In the very beginning, the men were in more of a prison/dormitory situation, and there’s a tunneling escape attempt, but then they get sent to this estate for unclear reasons, and that’s where the story kicks off.
Lewis wants to write a book on the history of the contemplative life, so how convenient that’s he’s interred in a castle with a huge, stuffy library? And what are the odds that the stepdaughter of the estate’s owner is the same girl (now woman) that Lewis used to tutor back in England? She’s now married to a German officer, off at the front. Julie and Lewis fall in love, or at least begin an affair, because conveniently, there is a long-unused staircase in the library that leads right to her bedchamber.
Soon though, Julie’s husband, wounded and half-dead from being gassed, arrives, and he and Lewis start their own (platonic) bromance, because they like the same books and ideas. Julie and Lewis stop banging when he gets there, but he figures it out anyway. He likes to have someone row him over to this island where he can sit and ponder, and conveniently yet again, and even though he’s severely crippled and gassed, manages to ROW HIMSELF to the island DURING A STORM, which naturally leads to his demise. After pretending for a while to all and sundry that they weren’t having an affair, Lewis leaves for home (he’s just allowed to, or something? I guess because the war is almost over?) and Julie dithers for about half a minute until she rushes to join him on the boat. Then there’s an ending vaguely reminiscent of The Graduate where Lewis is thinking that poor Julie will have to make the best of it (he’s not as wealthy as she, you see, and has to take over the family business, which is law or something).
If this had been written by a more pedestrian author, it would have been a better book. This is all completely sans melodrama. Lewis is a bore, Julie is thinly drawn. Her husband is the most interesting character, and I can’t even remember his name (Naftert or something) even though I just finished the book about 4 hours ago. (There’s another character, Sophie, who’s jealous and scheming to reveal the affair, and she was fun, but I can’t even remember who she’s related to, she’s in the estate, maybe Julie’s stepsister? I think that’s right.) It’s all too preoccupied with the contemplative life itself to be anything other than dead boring. And I don’t feel bad spoiling the plot, because who’s reading this, really?
I can’t even remember why I got this. I know I must have read about it somewhere, like maybe it was mentioned by an author I like, or referred to in an article about an author I like. No idea. I wish I remembered; I’d like to go back and see the reference.
Lewis Alison is a British naval officer (or something) in WWI. He is imprisoned (or something) with a few other fellows in a Dutch estate. This is the vaguely confusing part. I suppose it would have been more easily understood at the time of the book’s publication, but I was baffled. “They’re prisoners? But they just get to live on the grounds of this fancy house, and they can do whatever they like? And there aren’t any guards or anything?” In the very beginning, the men were in more of a prison/dormitory situation, and there’s a tunneling escape attempt, but then they get sent to this estate for unclear reasons, and that’s where the story kicks off.
Lewis wants to write a book on the history of the contemplative life, so how convenient that’s he’s interred in a castle with a huge, stuffy library? And what are the odds that the stepdaughter of the estate’s owner is the same girl (now woman) that Lewis used to tutor back in England? She’s now married to a German officer, off at the front. Julie and Lewis fall in love, or at least begin an affair, because conveniently, there is a long-unused staircase in the library that leads right to her bedchamber.
Soon though, Julie’s husband, wounded and half-dead from being gassed, arrives, and he and Lewis start their own (platonic) bromance, because they like the same books and ideas. Julie and Lewis stop banging when he gets there, but he figures it out anyway. He likes to have someone row him over to this island where he can sit and ponder, and conveniently yet again, and even though he’s severely crippled and gassed, manages to ROW HIMSELF to the island DURING A STORM, which naturally leads to his demise. After pretending for a while to all and sundry that they weren’t having an affair, Lewis leaves for home (he’s just allowed to, or something? I guess because the war is almost over?) and Julie dithers for about half a minute until she rushes to join him on the boat. Then there’s an ending vaguely reminiscent of The Graduate where Lewis is thinking that poor Julie will have to make the best of it (he’s not as wealthy as she, you see, and has to take over the family business, which is law or something).
If this had been written by a more pedestrian author, it would have been a better book. This is all completely sans melodrama. Lewis is a bore, Julie is thinly drawn. Her husband is the most interesting character, and I can’t even remember his name (Naftert or something) even though I just finished the book about 4 hours ago. (There’s another character, Sophie, who’s jealous and scheming to reveal the affair, and she was fun, but I can’t even remember who she’s related to, she’s in the estate, maybe Julie’s stepsister? I think that’s right.) It’s all too preoccupied with the contemplative life itself to be anything other than dead boring. And I don’t feel bad spoiling the plot, because who’s reading this, really?
December 1, 2013
Rather annoying.
What I did like: Morgan writes about female desire, not as directly as I might wish, but still at some length, and with attention to the physical, and from the woman's own experience of it rather than from the male gaze, which is quite something for 1932. (Especially with Morgan having been born in 1894.)
But the rest... the worst of it, I think, is the prose, which gets in its own way. Morgan is very good at setting a scene and interweaving the details of it with human emotion and motivation, so that the light on the elms is variously summer's indifference to human suffering (which mirrors a character's fear that she is herself indifferent to someone's suffering) or a luminous glow of life and hope etc. All of which is well and good and the sort of thing I might like, but he has this terrible habit of breaking his descriptive passages by overloading them with metaphor, so that instead of being lyrical and beautiful it is just overwrought and silly. And there is much too much of it, much of him being in love with his own writing and going on and on. I think even if I found it beautifully done, there would be too much of it.
As for the plot itself...
How could Morgan, after 1918, write such a thing? Wishful thinking, I suppose. But certainly not worth my time.
What I did like: Morgan writes about female desire, not as directly as I might wish, but still at some length, and with attention to the physical, and from the woman's own experience of it rather than from the male gaze, which is quite something for 1932. (Especially with Morgan having been born in 1894.)
But the rest... the worst of it, I think, is the prose, which gets in its own way. Morgan is very good at setting a scene and interweaving the details of it with human emotion and motivation, so that the light on the elms is variously summer's indifference to human suffering (which mirrors a character's fear that she is herself indifferent to someone's suffering) or a luminous glow of life and hope etc. All of which is well and good and the sort of thing I might like, but he has this terrible habit of breaking his descriptive passages by overloading them with metaphor, so that instead of being lyrical and beautiful it is just overwrought and silly. And there is much too much of it, much of him being in love with his own writing and going on and on. I think even if I found it beautifully done, there would be too much of it.
As for the plot itself...
How could Morgan, after 1918, write such a thing? Wishful thinking, I suppose. But certainly not worth my time.
October 10, 2025
It took me a while, but I liked it. The beginning was a little tedious. The story recounts the experiences of a man fighting in Europe during the First World War. He and his group were captured early and imprisoned in a castle in Denmark, I think. It was near The Hague. Being far from the front, it seemed that the jailers got bored and went home, abandoning the prisoners, leaving them to find their own way home. Lewis was actually enjoying his imprisonment. An introvert and scholar, he spent his time researching the library for a book he wanted to write. Left to their own devices, he and a friend wandered the countryside, eventually heading for another castle where he meets the baron and his family. He discovered the baron also had a library in a tower, and so he offered Lewis a position organizing the books and personal papers stored there in exchange for room and board and the full use of the library for his own research.
So he became part of the household which included the baron’s daughter-in-law, Julie, whose husband was battling at the front in the fiercest part of the fight. Life at the castle carried on with dinners, tennis parties, horseback riding and other social activities. Coincidentally, Julie had been a student of Lewis when he was teaching in London. She was a child then but she had grown into a beautiful young woman, reason enough for them to become friends. She was an accomplished pianist. She took a room in an adjacent part of the tower so she could assist Lewis, and serenade him on the piano and her clavichord which she had moved into her tower apartment. Their relationship deepened and though their sections of the tower were separate, there was an unused door that could provide access between the two. They began an affair, successfully keeping their romance a secret from the rest of the household. Eventually Julie’s husband returned home, brutally wounded from battle and not likely to survive. Julie ended the affair and dedicated herself to caring for her husband. From there the story hangs on Julie. How will she resolve her conflicted feelings?
I wasn’t sure at first but ultimately, I liked the story. It’s much different than my usual reads. Once the novel gets past the strange imprisonment, it takes on a dreamlike quality. There’s little dialogue. The story is told in descriptive prose. It’s like you are propelled in a gently rocking boat which actually makes this a good bedtime read. The story is odd and you wonder where it’s going but ultimately you go along for the ride and the conclusion is hopeful, but foggy. You leave them at this part of the story without a clear resolution but isn’t that like life?
This is an old book, published in 1932. It was part of my high school library’s collection which was being purged in an effort to regain space for an updated collection. My school purchased it from another library, which probably did the same thing. In retrospect, having read it, this was a strange book for a high school. It was an adult book, with adult themes and surprisingly graphic for its time. I bought 20 books for 10¢ each, spending a whopping $2 — my “dime novels!”
So he became part of the household which included the baron’s daughter-in-law, Julie, whose husband was battling at the front in the fiercest part of the fight. Life at the castle carried on with dinners, tennis parties, horseback riding and other social activities. Coincidentally, Julie had been a student of Lewis when he was teaching in London. She was a child then but she had grown into a beautiful young woman, reason enough for them to become friends. She was an accomplished pianist. She took a room in an adjacent part of the tower so she could assist Lewis, and serenade him on the piano and her clavichord which she had moved into her tower apartment. Their relationship deepened and though their sections of the tower were separate, there was an unused door that could provide access between the two. They began an affair, successfully keeping their romance a secret from the rest of the household. Eventually Julie’s husband returned home, brutally wounded from battle and not likely to survive. Julie ended the affair and dedicated herself to caring for her husband. From there the story hangs on Julie. How will she resolve her conflicted feelings?
I wasn’t sure at first but ultimately, I liked the story. It’s much different than my usual reads. Once the novel gets past the strange imprisonment, it takes on a dreamlike quality. There’s little dialogue. The story is told in descriptive prose. It’s like you are propelled in a gently rocking boat which actually makes this a good bedtime read. The story is odd and you wonder where it’s going but ultimately you go along for the ride and the conclusion is hopeful, but foggy. You leave them at this part of the story without a clear resolution but isn’t that like life?
This is an old book, published in 1932. It was part of my high school library’s collection which was being purged in an effort to regain space for an updated collection. My school purchased it from another library, which probably did the same thing. In retrospect, having read it, this was a strange book for a high school. It was an adult book, with adult themes and surprisingly graphic for its time. I bought 20 books for 10¢ each, spending a whopping $2 — my “dime novels!”
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March 18, 2021altho' I've not read 'The Fountain' I will, when I happen across a copy.
However I can thoroughly recommend his later novel, 'The Voyage', unfortunately also o/p, tho' there's a somewhat carelessly printed 2009 issue by the seemingly now moribund reissue publisher Capuchin Classics (website not updated since 2013).
Set in the very rural Champagne area, but with a fin-de-siecle feeling and some Parisian scenes, it's a marvelous evocation, worthy of Zola.
However I can thoroughly recommend his later novel, 'The Voyage', unfortunately also o/p, tho' there's a somewhat carelessly printed 2009 issue by the seemingly now moribund reissue publisher Capuchin Classics (website not updated since 2013).
Set in the very rural Champagne area, but with a fin-de-siecle feeling and some Parisian scenes, it's a marvelous evocation, worthy of Zola.
December 29, 2018
It was a tough read. Glad to have made it to the end. Last half of the book was better than the first.
May 9, 2019
i love this book. It is not one that you can skim. It has to have your full attention. Beautifully written. It wasn't an easy read but worth all the rainy days spent curled up with it.
May 27, 2021
I good story about finding yourself and figuring out what you want in life.
February 6, 2017
Good evocation of the unreality of a life of parole for officer prisoners in the first world war in Belgium, interlaced with the journey towards spiritual peace of the main character (in spite of fleshly temptation). The reconciliation between German and British competitors is very well done, and reminiscent of the unusual relationships in The Heaven Tree (qv, by a different author), though ultimately less destructive.
I would have rated the book higher except for a certain slowness of the narrative, that is not required by the story of contemplation - so the pace is ultimately a bit too even, in spite of some points of high drama.
I would have rated the book higher except for a certain slowness of the narrative, that is not required by the story of contemplation - so the pace is ultimately a bit too even, in spite of some points of high drama.
September 8, 2016
'Most popular book of 1932'
With advocation I could be persuaded to make this a 4. :) A rather race-y story for 1932 in my limited awareness of 1932?
Post script. I found this interesting referral to Dutch skates a foreshadowing to the Dutch speed skating dominance in the Olympics:
"Have you ever used Dutch skates -- a very fine knife-edge and loose under the heel. You get a swing and rhythm you don't get any other way. It's like playing music on the air."
With advocation I could be persuaded to make this a 4. :) A rather race-y story for 1932 in my limited awareness of 1932?
Post script. I found this interesting referral to Dutch skates a foreshadowing to the Dutch speed skating dominance in the Olympics:
"Have you ever used Dutch skates -- a very fine knife-edge and loose under the heel. You get a swing and rhythm you don't get any other way. It's like playing music on the air."
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews