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John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
Drawing on his intimate, fifty-year journal, personal letters, and interviews, the first definitive biography of celebrated novelist John Fowles furnishes a richly detailed study of his life, his rise to success as one of the twentieth century's most important writers, his literary influence, and his compelling fiction, poetry, essays, and translations.
- GenresBiography
528 pages, Hardcover
First published April 15, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 17, 2014
In the pages of Eileen Warburton’s book, one encounters a man whose writing won him great acclaim; early on, his wife was a vital part of his work, but she was later excluded from it and spent years of her life with him mostly alone, ignored while he wrote. One summary of their marriage given here is a “kind of misery.” The writer was Thomas Hardy, the woman was his first wife, Emma, and that phrase was written by John Fowles, who felt a kinship with Hardy in many ways. Fowles, like Hardy before him, wrote novels, poems, and plays, spent much of his life in the English county of Dorset, and loved nature. The connections ran deeper and darker as well. Fowles sensed Hardy to be like “a brother”—and then there were the marriages.
By the mid-1970s, Fowles and his first wife, Elizabeth, were paralleling Hardy’s first marriage; Elizabeth inspired more than one of Fowles’s characters and had been his first reader as well as first editor before he shut her out after a strong disagreement. They recognized the comparison, would diffuse their dissatisfactions by joking to each other about it, but didn’t change it. After an argument, Fowles might turn to his diary and ask, “What can prevent us sinking into the kind of misery that affected Hardy and Emma…?” An obvious answer is that a little effort would’ve helped, but Fowles kept to his ways, as did Elizabeth, who shares responsibility because she stayed. The unhappy situation continued for years. These men who fashion their lives of lesser stuff than composes their art—must they be so human?
A large part of Fowles’s life story, as Warburton relates it, is also Elizabeth’s. Her name first appears about one quarter of the way in, and it reappears through the final page. He more or less thrived, at least in his work, after he shut her out, while she became increasingly depressed, purposeless, a veritable shade wandering her old environs. One cannot—at least I can’t—dismiss Elizabeth’s suffering as secondary to John’s art. Or rather, one can ignore her when considering his work per se—as the New Criticism, current at the time I first read Fowles, would propose we do—but in reading the life and taking a broader view of its relations with the work, one must include her. Elizabeth was maimed if not wholly sacrificed on the altar of Fowles’s art. I found myself resenting Fowles for that.
Such are the pains one may feel in reading a good literary biography. The fascination of the form holds, however. A fiction writer seems to create something where nothing was. To bring into being, through mere marks on a page, times and places, experiences and lives and entire worlds, is the work of a mage, a wizard, a god. As with a magic show, we may want to know how it’s done and may seek illumination from a biography. This one provides a lot.
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, a critical biography, in the sense of providing critical analysis of the work. As the book makes clear, a lot of scholarly work has been done, but Warburton mostly leaves that alone, though she traces countless connections. By relying on direct as well as published interviews, letters, countless quotations from the diaries that Fowles kept, almost without interruption, for decades, and other material, this biography gives a thorough account of Fowles’s time on Earth; he was still alive when the book was completed and published, in 2004, though he died the following year. It also offers many insights into the sources of the fiction and his other writings, so much so that the book amounts to a portrait of the mind of the man.
Warburton relates Fowles’s early-50s sojourn as a teacher on a Greek island that’s called here Spetsai, and she recounts the many attempts Fowles made after that time to turn the experience into some kind of fiction. Eventually he succeeded, with the novel The Magus, first published in 1965 as his second novel, following The Collector. (Fowles later reworked The Magus and published a revised version in 1977.) She also provides an account of the origin and development of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It began in December 1966, when an image sprang into Fowles’s mind, not the first time that had happened, which gripped him with a sense of promise and potency; Warburton calls these visions “his mythopoeic stills.” In this particular image (the embedded quotations come from an essay Fowles published in 1969), “‘a woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea.’ She wore black, turned her back reproachfully on the land, and was in some way an outcast. She haunted him. He ‘began to fall in love with her.’” There’s much of Elizabeth in the character of Sarah Woodruff, the woman on the quay, and Elizabeth also contributed to the novel’s surprising, much-discussed double ending. Incidentally, Warburton relates the long backstory of the film version too. As one who loves reading how Hollywood either messes things up or succeeds in spite of itself, I was delighted by the twists and turns of TFLW’s path to the screen.
A major element through Fowles’s entire adulthood is the role played by particular kinds of women in his life and in his art. Elizabeth was one kind, unique in the story for having been his wife, companion, and more for many years. There were also many instances of what Warburton labels the “muse princess,” always younger, always acquiring some value in Fowles’s imagination beyond what the actual person presented—as Fowles himself recognized early on. Jan Relf, a scholar at the University of Exeter, who became Fowles’s “confidante” after Elizabeth's death, took another angle on his fascination with these women. “She supplied him with a new label to describe his feelings for mysterious young women, ‘nympholepsy…a perverse but persistent condition of desire for the unattainable.’”
The two worlds of the title are easily summarized. The obvious reading, apparent early on, is the natural world, that of “wildness,” alongside civilization; Fowles lived in the latter but had always been drawn to and was happier in the former. Another reading, which emerges only gradually, is the writer in the world of his imagination versus the man in his personal and social relations. I won’t try to evoke any of those aspects here, but the title is perfectly apt.
Though I’ve long thought of myself as an admirer of Fowles’s writing, I’m familiar with only four of his works. In my first year in college, 1972–73, I saw a film of The Collector and read The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sometime later, I read The Aristos (not a contraction of “aristocrats,” the word comes from ancient Greek meaning roughly “the best for a given situation”), a philosophical essay that dates from the 60s, as those three novels do. For me, a major value of this biography was that it introduced me to all of Fowles’s later work, which ranged from text for books of photographs to script translations for the National Theatre. Incidentally, Warburton, who had access to Fowles’s entire archive at the University of Texas Ransom Center, has read and here describes the many texts that Fowles wrote but never published. It's a paltry image, but…the book is a feast, not without bitter notes, for anyone with a taste for reading about the writing life.
(I read an uncorrected galley proof and haven’t checked quotations against the published book.)
By the mid-1970s, Fowles and his first wife, Elizabeth, were paralleling Hardy’s first marriage; Elizabeth inspired more than one of Fowles’s characters and had been his first reader as well as first editor before he shut her out after a strong disagreement. They recognized the comparison, would diffuse their dissatisfactions by joking to each other about it, but didn’t change it. After an argument, Fowles might turn to his diary and ask, “What can prevent us sinking into the kind of misery that affected Hardy and Emma…?” An obvious answer is that a little effort would’ve helped, but Fowles kept to his ways, as did Elizabeth, who shares responsibility because she stayed. The unhappy situation continued for years. These men who fashion their lives of lesser stuff than composes their art—must they be so human?
A large part of Fowles’s life story, as Warburton relates it, is also Elizabeth’s. Her name first appears about one quarter of the way in, and it reappears through the final page. He more or less thrived, at least in his work, after he shut her out, while she became increasingly depressed, purposeless, a veritable shade wandering her old environs. One cannot—at least I can’t—dismiss Elizabeth’s suffering as secondary to John’s art. Or rather, one can ignore her when considering his work per se—as the New Criticism, current at the time I first read Fowles, would propose we do—but in reading the life and taking a broader view of its relations with the work, one must include her. Elizabeth was maimed if not wholly sacrificed on the altar of Fowles’s art. I found myself resenting Fowles for that.
Such are the pains one may feel in reading a good literary biography. The fascination of the form holds, however. A fiction writer seems to create something where nothing was. To bring into being, through mere marks on a page, times and places, experiences and lives and entire worlds, is the work of a mage, a wizard, a god. As with a magic show, we may want to know how it’s done and may seek illumination from a biography. This one provides a lot.
John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, a critical biography, in the sense of providing critical analysis of the work. As the book makes clear, a lot of scholarly work has been done, but Warburton mostly leaves that alone, though she traces countless connections. By relying on direct as well as published interviews, letters, countless quotations from the diaries that Fowles kept, almost without interruption, for decades, and other material, this biography gives a thorough account of Fowles’s time on Earth; he was still alive when the book was completed and published, in 2004, though he died the following year. It also offers many insights into the sources of the fiction and his other writings, so much so that the book amounts to a portrait of the mind of the man.
Warburton relates Fowles’s early-50s sojourn as a teacher on a Greek island that’s called here Spetsai, and she recounts the many attempts Fowles made after that time to turn the experience into some kind of fiction. Eventually he succeeded, with the novel The Magus, first published in 1965 as his second novel, following The Collector. (Fowles later reworked The Magus and published a revised version in 1977.) She also provides an account of the origin and development of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It began in December 1966, when an image sprang into Fowles’s mind, not the first time that had happened, which gripped him with a sense of promise and potency; Warburton calls these visions “his mythopoeic stills.” In this particular image (the embedded quotations come from an essay Fowles published in 1969), “‘a woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea.’ She wore black, turned her back reproachfully on the land, and was in some way an outcast. She haunted him. He ‘began to fall in love with her.’” There’s much of Elizabeth in the character of Sarah Woodruff, the woman on the quay, and Elizabeth also contributed to the novel’s surprising, much-discussed double ending. Incidentally, Warburton relates the long backstory of the film version too. As one who loves reading how Hollywood either messes things up or succeeds in spite of itself, I was delighted by the twists and turns of TFLW’s path to the screen.
A major element through Fowles’s entire adulthood is the role played by particular kinds of women in his life and in his art. Elizabeth was one kind, unique in the story for having been his wife, companion, and more for many years. There were also many instances of what Warburton labels the “muse princess,” always younger, always acquiring some value in Fowles’s imagination beyond what the actual person presented—as Fowles himself recognized early on. Jan Relf, a scholar at the University of Exeter, who became Fowles’s “confidante” after Elizabeth's death, took another angle on his fascination with these women. “She supplied him with a new label to describe his feelings for mysterious young women, ‘nympholepsy…a perverse but persistent condition of desire for the unattainable.’”
The two worlds of the title are easily summarized. The obvious reading, apparent early on, is the natural world, that of “wildness,” alongside civilization; Fowles lived in the latter but had always been drawn to and was happier in the former. Another reading, which emerges only gradually, is the writer in the world of his imagination versus the man in his personal and social relations. I won’t try to evoke any of those aspects here, but the title is perfectly apt.
Though I’ve long thought of myself as an admirer of Fowles’s writing, I’m familiar with only four of his works. In my first year in college, 1972–73, I saw a film of The Collector and read The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Sometime later, I read The Aristos (not a contraction of “aristocrats,” the word comes from ancient Greek meaning roughly “the best for a given situation”), a philosophical essay that dates from the 60s, as those three novels do. For me, a major value of this biography was that it introduced me to all of Fowles’s later work, which ranged from text for books of photographs to script translations for the National Theatre. Incidentally, Warburton, who had access to Fowles’s entire archive at the University of Texas Ransom Center, has read and here describes the many texts that Fowles wrote but never published. It's a paltry image, but…the book is a feast, not without bitter notes, for anyone with a taste for reading about the writing life.
(I read an uncorrected galley proof and haven’t checked quotations against the published book.)
September 9, 2024
There was, finally, a mention of humour. But never self-deprecatory. Fowles was too self-important to be able to put a pin in himself now and then. He strikes me as a reactionary in thought who embraced too long and too closely Freud and existentialism.
His forays into new methods in his fiction came from a more adventurous part of himself than from where emanated his philosophy of life, his deeply held views on women's submissive role, the stereotyping of people from nations and parts of continents, and of ethnic groups. Warburton shows his negative feelings toward the child his first wife had with someone else, his forcing his first wife to choose him or her child, and his first impressions of people who he, almost invariably, disliked at first glance. At least later he liked some of them, admitting an error.
There's probably only one biography needed of Fowles. Recommended if he's of interest.
His forays into new methods in his fiction came from a more adventurous part of himself than from where emanated his philosophy of life, his deeply held views on women's submissive role, the stereotyping of people from nations and parts of continents, and of ethnic groups. Warburton shows his negative feelings toward the child his first wife had with someone else, his forcing his first wife to choose him or her child, and his first impressions of people who he, almost invariably, disliked at first glance. At least later he liked some of them, admitting an error.
There's probably only one biography needed of Fowles. Recommended if he's of interest.
May 26, 2019
I almost gave up on this about a quarter of the way in, because I really didn't like Fowles. But I persisted, and as he changed, I developed an appreciation for how he himself understood his early faults and how he used this in his work. I'd just re-read The Magus for the first time in 30 years, and it was fascinating to see how it evolved, very slowly, over a long period of time, and how he drew on so much of his life.
April 26, 2020
Excellent biography of a writer I read a lot in the 1970s. It ends in 2000, which was, at first, a little disappointing. However, it also seemed to leave him in peace and with the privacy he sought so much through his life for his final years.
July 14, 2019
Great biography. Very good background info on Fowles' inspiration for The Magus.
April 24, 2013
Obviously this one is for fans of the novels Fowles wrote. Well-researched and written, the author knew Fowles. He was an obsessive writer. He didn't censor his journals when they were published -- some of what he wrote was sexist, or priggish, or anti-semitic. He made sense of the significance of events and people, particularly the women in his life, by placing them inside his personal mythology. He (over time) badly misjudged his first wife -- though he grieved deeply when she died. The mindset that created the fiction "rewrote" her to fit into his fictional explanation of the world. Highly recommended (the book, that is, not the habit of misjudging your wife).
September 3, 2012
A sensitive biography written by a well researched aficionado. Lots of detail which will enhance re reading Fowles. Fascinating glimpses of manuscripts which didn't quite make it - he tried a thriller hoping to improve upon Ian Fleming and Len Deighton - the long struggle against depression, a not always blissfully happy marriage and his tussles with Hollywood and illness.
I don't see how this could be improved.
I don't see how this could be improved.
July 28, 2011
I am just getting into this bio, and so far so good. Warburton certainly has the props to delve into Fowles's life and I'm looking forward to reading more.
February 9, 2011...slow going. Been distracted by the new Alice Hoffman as well as the news of the world.
February 9, 2011...slow going. Been distracted by the new Alice Hoffman as well as the news of the world.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews