John Fowles
John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex. He recalled the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles said "I have tried to escape ever since."
Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service in 1945 with training at Dartmoor, where he spent the next two years. World War II ended shortly after his training began so Fowles never came near combat, and by 1947 he had decided that the military life was not for him.
Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer.
Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing in English literature at the University of Poitiers, France; two years teaching English at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and finally, between 1954 and 1963, teaching English at St. Godric's College in London, where he ultimately served as the department head.
The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy.
In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he submitted it to a publisher; it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing.
The Aristos, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature and other subjects, appeared the following year. Then in 1965, The Magus - drafts of which Fowles had been working on for over a decade - was published.
The most commercially successful of Fowles' novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman, appeared in 1969. It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner.
In the 1970s Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects--including a series of essays on nature--and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry, Poems.
Daniel Martin, a long and somewhat autobiographical novel spanning over 40 years in the life of a screenwriter, appeared in 1977, along with a revised version of The Magus. These were followed by Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist's struggle with his muse; and A Maggot (1985), an 18th century mystery which combines science fiction and history.
In addition to The Aristos, Fowles wrote a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews, and forewords/afterwords to other writers' novels. He also wrote the text for several photographic compilations.
From 1968, Fowles lived in the small harbour town of Lyme Regis, Dorset. His interest in the town's local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.
Wormholes, a book of essays, was published in May 1998. The first comprehensive biography on Fowles, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, was published in 2004, and the first volume of his journals appeared the same year (followed recently by volume two).
John Fowles passed away on November 5, 2005 after a long illness.
“If anything might hurt her, silence would; and I wanted to hurt her.”
“I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which, as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My 'technique' was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.”
“Nu va vorbi niciodată, nu va ierta, nu va întinde niciodată mîna, va rămîne de-a pururi înacest prezent îngheţat. Totul este suspendat în aşteptare: copacii de toamnă, cerul de toamnă, trecătoriianonimi. Printre sălciile de la malul lacului, o biată mierlă cam nebună cîntă, deşi nu e timpul ei. Unstol de porumbei deasupra caselor; fragmente de libertate, de hazard, o algebră incarnată. Şi venind nuse ştie de unde, mirosul înţepător de frunze arse.”
“His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now,therefore I am happy' , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.”
“Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education.”
“No doubt our accepting what we are must always inhibit our being what we ought to be.”
“(...) Şi de aici mi-am dat seama că era dement şi deci nevinovat, căci toţi oamenii nebuni, până şi cei mai cruzi, sunt nevinovaţi. Reprezenta una din forţele întunecate pe care viaţa le poate crea dacă vrea: forma cea mai primitivă de viaţă transformată într-o hidoasă combinaţie de carne şi gândire. Poate ăsta era şi motivul pentru care reuşea să se impună atât de puternic, ca o divinitate a întunericului. Căci în această vrajă malefică exista ceva ce nu ţinea de omenesc. Aşa că adevărata monstruozitate se afla în ceilalţi nemţi, în cei pe care îi comanda, locotenenţii, caporalii, soldaţii, care nu erau demenţi, dar care stăteau aici, martori ai acestei scene, fără să sufle un cuvânt".”
“[...] era un viso indimenticabile, un viso tragico. Sgorgava dolore con la stessa purezza, naturalezza e inarrestabilità con cui sgorga l'acqua da una sorgente nei boschi. Non c'era artificio in esso, né ipocrisia, né isterismo, né maschera; soprattutto non c'era la minima traccia di pazzia. La pazzia era nel mare vuoto, nel vuoto orizzonte, [...]; come se la sorgente fosse stata naturale in sé ma innaturale in quanto sgorgava da un deserto.”
“Sono gli stessi gradini dai quali Jane Austen fa cadere Louisa Musgrove in Persuasione." "Come è romantico." "Gli uomini erano romantici... allora.”
“Cu cat intelegi mai mult libertatea, cu atat o pierzi mai mult.”
“Mediocritatea este plaga civilizatiei. Dar mediocritatea il face atat de comun, incat devine iesit din comun.”
“The best wines take the longest to mature.”
“Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?”
“A look I shall never forget, because it was almost one of hatred, and hatred in her face was like spite in the Virgen Mary's; it reversed the entire order of nature.”
“The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.”
“The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.”
“All would be well when she was truly his; in his bed and in his bank ... and of course in his heart, too.”
“Write, if you must, because you feel like writing, never because you feel you ought to write.”
“People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.”
“I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.”
“Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.”
“You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”
“...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.”
“I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.”
“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”
“We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.”
“The second cause of failure to enact good stems from conflict of intention. High intelligence leads to multiplicity of interest and a sharpened capacity to foresee the consequences of any action. Will is lost in a labyrinth of hypothesis.”
“My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it.”
“Our stereotyping societies force us to feel more alone. They stamp masks on us and isolate out real selves. We all live in two worlds: the old comfortable man-centred world of absolutes and the harsh real world of relatives. The latter, the relativity reality, terrifies us; and isolates and dwarfs us all.”
“Each pleasure we feel is a pleasure less; each day a stroke on a calendar. What we will not accept is that the joy in the day and the passing of the day are inseparable. What makes our existence worthwhile is precisely that its worth and its while - its quality and duration - are as impossible to unravel as time and space in mathematics of relativity.”
“There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.”
“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”
“It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did”
“We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.”
“She was trying to write a novel, it was so slow, you had to destroy so much and start again; so hard to discover whether one was really a writer or just a victim of a literary home environment.”
“Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently endless indifference to individual things. Obscurely he sees catastrophes happening to other rafts, rafts that are too distant for him to determine whether they have other humans aboard, but too numerous and too identical for him to presume that they have not.”
“You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.”
“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.”
“Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.”
“He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”
“I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.”
“I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.”
“8. You hate the political buisness of nationality. You hate everything, in politics and art and everything else, that is not genuine and deep and necessary. You don't have time for silly trivial things. You live seriously. You don't go to silly films, even if you want to; you don't read cheap newspapers; you don't listen to trash on the wireless and the telly; you don't waste time talking about nothing. You use your life.”
“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
“I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any. There are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted.”
“But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you.”
“Aquí en la frontera, caen las hojas. Aunque mis vecinos son todos bárbaros, y tú, tú estás a mil kilómetros de aquí, siempre hay dos tazas en mi mesa.”
“Pero ya entonces me parecía muy lejana, aunque no en la distancia ni en el tiempo, sino en alguna dimensión para la que no tenemos nombre. En la realidad, quizás.”
“Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”
“The sky is absolutely empty. Beautifully pure and empty.As if the architects and builders would live in all the houses they built! Or could live in them all. It's obvious, it stares you in the fact. There must be a God and he can't know anything about us.”