Portland Arts & Lectures: John Fowles
by David Loftus
[Notes from Fowles's April 24, 1996 appearance in Portland, Oregon]
It had been reported in the local news that the shy and reclusive Fowles had responded to an invitation to speak "if they could guarantee him a walk in the woods with Barry Lopez," the prize-winning naturalist/author of Arctic Dreams, Winterkill, Field Notes, and many other books, who lives in the west central Oregon wilderness.
This turned out to be true, for it was Lopez who formally introduced Fowles at Portland's Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where most Portland Arts & Lectures series events take place. I didn't pay much attention to the biographical information because it was all pretty familiar to me, although I had forgotten that Fowles had trained commandoes in England shortly after World War II.
Lopez called Fowles "a citizen of the landscape he occupies," and though he is a novelist, "The word novel is inadequate because he's done it in so many ways." Primary issues of Fowles's work, according to Lopez, are freedom, individual choice, and autonomy; manipulation and conventionalities of time; and how the human landscape is placed within nature.
This was the first time the two men had met. Many years ago Lopez made a pilgrimage to the home of a sea captain (Capt. Lewis?) who had been a model for respecting indigenous peoples and animal species and whose book A Sailor's Secrets had guided generations of seafarers after him. It was not that far from Lyme Regis, so Lopez went down there but out of a timid respect for the author's privacy did not seek out Fowles.
One of the great things about his stories is that they have a strong sense of place, Lopez said; you can visit the places where they occur. Lopez stood on the Cobb, where Sarah, and his own wife, had stood before him, and thought, isn't this why we read? For the connection to other lives, and the deep stimulation of memory? Fowles gave us "not a wall but a horizon ... that opened our imaginations." The basic question about an author is: "Is he willing to share the mute page with us? John Fowles certainly does share the mute page with us, and he's very good to be there with."
Fowles came out and explained that he had been ill the past two years (no details -- I understand he suffered a stroke in 1989) and has not spoken to more than two people at a time during that period, so "to be faced by this gargantuan mass is rather scary." The hall, a classic opera house with considerable balconies, held an audience of about 2500. I noticed that while the reserved orchestra seats had a more even gender split, the general seating seemed to contain 10 women for every man.
Fowles wore a comfortable cream-colored leisure suit with a scarf at his throat that offered a bright splash of red-orange. He walked slowly, assisted with a cane. The white in his hair and beard far outweighed the dark. (He was 70 years old.) He has a somewhat high-pitched and prissy British voice, a fact I was aware of from hearing radio interviews and found disappointing; I would have expected such an eminent countenance to emit a rich baritone.
Writers are torn when they face a crowd like you, he said, because normally one starts with the principle of writing for just one other person -- in an "I/Thou" stance. He had sworn decades ago never to give another lecture, and especially not to give a lecture-like talk, but here he was, and feeling forced by the situation to come up with some sort of axiomatic truths.
"I am an atheist, I have no religious beliefs at all, but I do have sympathy with many religions." He recalled once summing up existence for a youthful audience by saying the soul is like a pinball bouncing between three cushions, and added one may tart up the description by using Greek terms (which I will spell roughly phonetically, since I do not know Greek).
The first cushion is "sidros" (steel or iron), which stands for necessity: the things you cannot avoid, such as death, the clash between public self and private ego, etc.
The second is "keranos" (thunderbolt), or total hazard. (You'll see that last, favorite Fowles word in The Magus and especially The Aristos.) This is his word for unpredictable happenings such as an air crash, a lottery win, being noticed by someone you thought would never notice you -- "one of the jokers in the pack."
The third is "eleutheria" (freedom), which turns up especially in the World War II sequences of Conchis's autobiography in The Magus -- the ability to want, demand, fight for freedom. "I am ferocious" about maintaining my freedom as a writer, he said. "For me, writing is about discovering how you can be free." You must put all your "soul money" -- the money of your soul, your deepest feelings -- in your writing.
"I am a feminist," Fowles said, "but not perhaps the ideal feminist that you would have in mind." Later, in response to a question about the role of women in his fiction, he repeated, "I believe I am a sort of feminist, although I doubt most feminists would acknowledge that I exist." He mentioned a feminist academic friend -- Jan Relf -- who edits everything he writes and catches him on his sexist slips.
Fowles talked about the importance to him of natural history. He recounted what Einstein had said when asked why he ran from his native country to Switzerland during World War I: because I had decided I was a member of a disgusting species. There was some light laughter from the audience and Fowles responded earnestly, "It's not funny, we really are a disgusting species." He quoted the poet Denise Levertov: "May Earth outwit the huge stupidities of mankind." He concluded, "The world is set on a process of ruin," meaning ecologically. Later, he said he was optimistic, not that earth would outwit the huge stupidities of mankind, but that humankind could pull out of it. "We're like a very good champagne cork: We bob."
Fowles said he had spent most of the day up the Columbia River, in the company of Lopez and a local botanist, in search of a rare wild orchid called (again, I am approximating the Latin) Calypso valvosa. The pink bloom is known in the U.S. as Fairy Slipper, "which is rather a too sentimental a name." Fowles had long desired to see one in the wild; a Russian friend had offered to take him in search of one if he ever got to Russia. He admitted shamefacedly that he had been almost petulant when, upon his arrival, his hosts had asked him about people to see, receptions to attend, and he had said, "To hell with human beings, I want to see a calypso!"
With the botanist's help, they had indeed found one, and Fowles said his emotion was so great he almost wept. The botanist told him he had indeed wept the first time he laid eyes on it. Throughout the evening Fowles made many references to calypso and the pleasure he had taken in the sighting. At one point, as an example of the preciousness of life and the great good luck of existence, he said he felt "profoundly grateful" to have been able to have lived until now, when he could see the calypso orchid.
Novelists "have a command of virtual reality that is terrifying," Fowles said. Like the moguls of Turkey, "they only have to raise their hand and it happens."
"We're all double people; never think that novelists are all upright people. We know that we have to lie in order to get any kind of message across. It's the ability to entertain people by not telling the whole truth."
Writers often lie most to themselves, he said. They're very preoccupied with how they should present themselves. He pointed out that his dress was perhaps too casual for this occasion: "That's not disrespect for you, but disrespect for the kind of masks that writers wear, especially in front of congregations like this. We are acutely, abominably vain. You must realize the vanity of writers is beyond belief."
He pointed out that the scarf he was wearing was an exact replica of the one Wordsworth used to wear. Not that he wished to compare himself to Wordsworth; some of that man's poetry was terrible. Now, Coleridge ... there's a poet Fowles would not have minded being like.
Writers must learn how to live with a tremendous amount of fantasy, which is a kind of disease. They all have highs and lows, and have to learn to live with the "terrible graph" of their moods.
Following that caustic recitation, Lopez reentered in his conservative necktie and jacket to introduce the next segment, and got a big laugh by saying, "Now I don't know what to do with my tie."
He introduced Dianne Vipond, a professor of English at California State University in Long Beach who was guest editor of the current edition of the journal Twentieth Century Literature, which issue was devoted entirely to the work of Fowles. She came out to interview Fowles on stage and to filter through and read questions written and submitted by the audience.
First she asked about current projects. Fowles said he had been working on a book-length essay called In Heliogalia or In Heliberia, I didn't quite catch it, which is about the Balkans and is meant to tie together both ends of the Mediterranean: Greece (Hellas) and Spain/Portugal (Iberia). "For me it's still a kind of Paradise" -- one which inspired much of his published poetry and from which he sort of had to be exiled to pursue his art. The book is about 3/4 written, "But I'm enjoying it so much that I don't want anyone else to read it."
"I believe very strongly in not writing too quickly," he said. I had read elsewhere that the success of each succeeding book bought him the time he wanted to take as long as he felt comfortable to complete a book. He said he likes to leave a first draft alone for at least a year, which he calls "brewing." Asked why he had revised books like The Aristos and The Magus, he replied simply, "Because they weren't very good." He noted that Dickens and Henry James had done a lot of revising. Most writers know they are putting out slightly substandard material, he declared, and if they were given 200 years to live and revise their work, they would take it.
"I just said 'cutting out'; this is one of the great, great arts of creating, especially the novel. Omission is a way of involving you, a kind of priest, and the other," a kind of religious seeker. It's important to "give your partner a chance to do the work for you." He praised this "communion" with the reader. "It's very potent -- omission."
He said he respected the ability of playwrights like Pinter and Beckett to "present dramatic scenes through dialogue." The novel is a pale imitation by comparison. "Jane Austen can be very long-winded and boring," but when she gets into dialogue her writing seems to take flight, becomes lighter than air, like a balloon, he said.
Asked about the role of women in his books, Fowles said he has basically been writing about one woman, his wife Elizabeth, whom he met on the Greek island of Spetsai (the model for Phraxos in The Magus) when she was married to another schoolmaster. (I believe she was a bit older than Fowles and had two daughters who were in their mid or late teens by the time they married. She died in 1990.)
"Woman is enormously more important than man in social and aesthetic realms. I think I have learned much more from women than men. Most men are very stereotypical, very stupid. For general humanity and sensitivity, I would give a woman every time."
He disputed the assertion that there have been few women artists in the world by saying some male writers are deeply feminine, "and I count myself among them."
"I've been beastly to my mother," he admitted. She suffered from "logorrhea, or diarrhea of the mouth. She had a mania for the trivial." But she was a great storyteller, he said, perhaps because she was from Cornwall. "The great art of narratology comes to us through the Celts, the Cornish, the Bretons, and the Irish. You can't beat the Irish for good writing."
Vipond noted a strong erotic element in his work. He said the English and the Americans are so tortured in matters of sex; the French are much more relaxed and sophisticated in these matters. Although he was not drawn to the more lurid examples like de Sade and The Story of O, "Some of the lighter (French) pornography I did rather like; I'm too old for that now."
Asked about other art forms, he said when he was at Oxford, he watched three or four films every week and got a good grounding in European cinema. (I got the impression he pays no attention to films today.) The artists he admires most are Rembrandt, Vermeer ("deeply fond of"), and Goya ("such a marvelously alive, dark painter"). He mentioned the wit of Goya's royal portraits; you can tell he has his tongue planted firmly in his cheek about these foolish people he must depend on for work.
"Music? I'm awful. 'Course I love almost all music," even some pop music, he said. Here it became very difficult to make out names and references; he mentioned Jimmy Yancey (sp?), apparently an old jazz musician that Fowles said nobody seems to know whenever he mentions him. General Norton(?) was another. He likes a lot of folk music -- had recently found a collection of 18th-century Greek songs from Istanbul during their domination by the Turks. He also noted works by Mozart (a G minor quartet, was it?) and Beethoven (opus 130 and 111, late piano sonatas?).
Vipond suggested an affinity for Thomas Hardy, and he said not really, though he did write a foreward to a recent study of Hardy.
She then asked him to define "humanist," since he often refers to himself as one. "I can probably describe what a humanist is; what I cannot do is defend it," said Fowles, because humanists believe in compromise. "The humanist always wants the other side to see reason, be reasonable. You're always saying 'wait a minute,' or 'you can't say that.'" One thing he was very clear about was that humanists hate violence. He mentioned with distaste the "lager louts" of England -- aggressive young people who get drunk and knock things and other people about. Being a humanist means "hating violence, hating anyone who is sure they are right. That's why I would never never be a Republican." (Laughter and applause.)
Vipond asked his opinion of America and Americans. "I love you, and you make me so angry," he said. "Your trouble is, you're so damn rich, so damn powerful." Someone once called the U.S. an adolescent, and he thought that was accurate: handsome, often a good schoolboy, but sometimes a little devil.
However, "I hate the Royal Family. Poor old Charles is a nightmare, Princess Diana I have no time for at all."
Asked which Fowles book he considered the most successful, he observed weakly that The French Lieutenant's Woman had been on the NY Times bestseller list for a whole year, and at the top for six months; "and that's why I love America."
Someone submitted a question asking why he led readers to believe one thing, then discarded it and led them down still other primrose paths. "Because I believe in teasing. Every detective story is based on teasing ... and the reason is that you the reader like to be teased!"
Who does he read? "I like to have a very omnivorous diet," he said, which includes a lot of older stuff. He's currently reading a 17th century French poetess (whom he did not name), and a "very great Viennese writer" named Robert Musil (author of Young Torless and The Man Without Qualities). Musil has been compared to Proust and Joyce, Fowles said.
Someone asked "Where can we purchase the Wordsworth scarf?" After a moment passed for our laughter and his thought, Fowles said he would answer that question in a manner we would not expect. He said he recently did something that an older, established writer should never do -- should be prohibited by law from doing. His account was brief and fragmented, but I understood it to go like this: Probably because she had written something on his work, he phoned a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, "pretty" he allowed, and established some sort of connection. She attended a Wordsworth conference or festival and gave him the scarf as a gift. Almost as an afterthought, he added, "This scarf is stained with my tears."
Asked how someone might best approach The French Lieutenant's Woman in attempting to teach it, Fowles said to regard it as a work written by "someone who'd got very bored with the way novels are written" -- not only today but even in the 19th century. (One of the unpublished chapters of The French Lieutenant's Woman is written in a manic style reminiscent of Alice In Wonderland, and reportedly features the narrator as a mad butcher attacking Charles with an ax; Fowles's wife persuaded him not to include it.) He said Dickens is "very stale and out of date. I don't like Dickens." In his judgment, Dickens wrote only a couple of good or great novels, one of which was Great Expectations.
A question regarding freedom and autonomy came up, and he said, "One of the 50 million things wrong with being human" is keeping the bounds between the freedom you give yourself and the countless boundaries that society and even your own body lay upon you. "Society always wants more of you than you ought to give, certainly more than you want to give." He recalled Socrates' great dictum: "We have to know ourselves."
What does Greece mean to him? He claims three homelands: England, France, and Greece. He was careful to distinguish between England, which he loves, and the sort of patriotic corporation called Britain. (Many years ago he published an essay -- in the Texas Quarterly! -- called "On Being English But Not British.") "The British Empire makes me sick much of the time." He referred with great respect to three Greek poets, only one of whose names I noted down -- Cavafy. He called Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. In it, the narrator and his city anxiously await and prepare for the arrival of the enemy armies, and concludes, "Perhaps the barbarians were a kind of solution." That is, one needs one's enemies (fears? setbacks?) in order to keep going.
I had submitted a question to him asking about the utility of art criticism, which my wife argues is of no use at all and I defend. Fowles fastened on the word "review" and merely answered that he disliked the tendency of English reviewers to express a "could-do-better-ism." Here in America one is treated more like an adult by book reviewers, he said.
Asked about his aspirations for the future, Fowles said he was trying to formulate some plan to leave his home and garden -- which includes many rare plants collected from all over the world -- for some public, educational purpose. The authorities always say "yes, and...?" meaning they are expecting some way to fund its upkeep too, and Fowles does not have that kind of money. So he's looking to start a foundation, with a generous benefactor or two.
He would like a foundation devoted to discussion of books, printing, natural history, and ecology. He would like to see his diaries published someday, but he is not personally in a hurry for that to happen -- it could happen after he is gone.
And he would like to publish a novel about an older woman. He's quite enthralled with this character. "I'm nursing it, I suppose -- not in a very healthy way."
His last words were: "Novelists are really awful people, they're liars, evasive."