The Double World of John Fowles
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing THE DOUBLE WORLD OF JOHN FOWLES BY PEARL K. BELL At the very beginning of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman (Little Brown, 467 pp., $7.95) we are tapped on the...
...In various interruptions of the story we are given complex explications, not of the people whose destinies Fowles might want us to respond to, but of his theory of the novel...
...even Valley of the Dolls and "the egregious McLuhan" are dragged into the commentary...
...it leaves one with no desire to do anything, except indeed to read the book again...
...As a contemporary of Sartre, he tells us character is fate, and therefore the author cannot presume to control his characters...
...Yet almost nowhere does he enter, as an artist, wholeheartedly into the creative truth of his remarks about the autonomy of novelist and characters...
...The story itself is rather simple and straight-lined, with a few but hardly enough of the cruel and mockingly melodramatic twists of destiny that a Victorian like Dickens was so inventive at devising in the brilliantly intricate tapestry of character, society, treachery and discovery and loss that makes it impossible to paraphrase the plot of, say, Barnaby Rudge anywhere as briefly as one can telescope that of The French Lieutenant's Woman...
...A bit later, in the first full-scale portrait of his hero, Charles Smithson, we are reminded: "Needless to say, Charles knew nothing of the beavered German Jew quietly working, as it so happened, that very afternoon in the British Museum Library...
...The one voice is modulated, quiet but confident, as befits the Victorian period, the other sly and arch...
...and whose work in those somber walls was to bear such bright red fruit...
...or in the book in itself...
...In order to complete them it seems necessary to do something—to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque...
...more words than insight...
...The end—I could say that it should not be told, in fairness to the reader...
...Tristram Shandy or Pride and Prejudice is complete in itself...
...Writers & Writing THE DOUBLE WORLD OF JOHN FOWLES BY PEARL K. BELL At the very beginning of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman (Little Brown, 467 pp., $7.95) we are tapped on the shoulder by an insistent finger, and warned that everything is anything but what it seems in this "Victorian novel" written by a fortyish Englishman in the late 1960s...
...against the baying Victorian beasts of conformity...
...in character in itself...
...more arcana than feeling...
...He just fools around with it...
...It is not really a new idea, but it conflicts strangely with the do-it-yourself endings, which in their actual variety seem to proclaim that the writer can indeed control them with even more fanciful totality than we know...
...it can be put upon the shelf, and need never be read again...
...But in fact it cannot be told, because Fowles offers us a speciously free choice of do-it-yourself morals to be drawn from his several finales...
...That is why we cannot plan...
...Sterne and Jane Austen were interested in things in themselves...
...imagined more...
...But with the work of other novelists it is different...
...We are left writing the cheques...
...The case is different in The French Lieutenant's Woman because he has a theme—the nature of individual freedom—and a target—the demented sexual and social hypocrisy of the Victorians—that are universal, humanistic and rich in fictional possibility...
...more extraordinarily clever red herrings than illuminations...
...Describing a stone jetty on the sea front of Lyme, on the southern coast of England, he writes that it is "as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore...
...In a moment of rash longing he makes love to her—90 tons of guilt for 90 seconds of lust—decides to break his engagement, marry his beloved outcast, cry "Freedom...
...Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all...
...His characters, he insists, are autonomous, free of the Victorian writer's Godlike authoritarian tyranny, because Fowles is a m;d-20th-century man...
...That done, the restlessness is laid, the book finished...
...Writing about Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy in 1924, Virginia Woolf said some things about the nature of a novelist's achievement that are eerily relevant to Fowles' books: ". . . what odd books they are...
...But his treacherous manservant fails to deliver a letter at the right moment, and Sarah disappears...
...In The Magus one finally felt that the wheels within wheels and labyrinths within labyrinths were being spun out at such relentless and overdevious length because in truth Fowles had so little to say about his characters that was truly original, he had to hide the emptiness with an elaborate pseudo-occult, quasi-theological machinery that ultimately broke under the weight of its creator's mania for shuffling Deus and machina like a cardsharp...
...Clearly, we are being told something, with sardonic subtlety, about the true intent of this novel...
...For they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction...
...They were interested in something outside...
...Like some of the new-wave movie directors who cannot resist carrying their ingenuity just a little fur'her than it can credibly go, and thereby rum the whole film, Fowles has more gamesmanship at this stage of his development than profundity (though his manner forces us to seek for profundity...
...Smithson, a handsome, well-to-do young Cambridge product and a passionate Darwinian, is amiably if a bit tediously engaged to the daughter of an enormously wealthy London storekeeper...
...She is nowhere to be found, and Charles wanders out the obsessive restlessness of his melancholy through Europe and America...
...Or was...
...And at first the idea seems amusing, mischievous, an ingenious device for turning the shibboleths of Victorian life inside out as only a descendant of Forster, Joyce and Lawrence could do...
...But as Fowles gets seriously down to business, one begins to wonder with increasing irritation what he is really about—not what he tells us he is about...
...in the book in itself...
...They can move backward or forward, rise into heaven or crash into hell, quite of their own volition, ard not because that monolithic seeing-eye dog, the novelist, has led them there: "We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is...
...remembered more...
...Fowles has read Virginia Woolf...
...We are meant to stumble in delighted surprise over these protrusions of contemporaneity, in order to realize that though this long book resembles some Victorian novels in its length, its prose (ornate and classically learned), its tone (stern, judgmental, weighted with metaphors of moral dilemma), its time (the heyday of the Empress of India), its plot (an admirable man of good will caught between socially acceptable duty and illicit passion), it is nonetheless a Victorian novel no Dickens, no Trollope, no George Eliot or Thackeray or Hardy could have written—a hoisting of their omnipotent-narrator's assurance by the infinitely powerful petard of hindsight...
...and can write more astonishingly than any reader has even begun to suspect...
...Fowles is a brilliant master of English prose—this is why he must be taken seriously—drunk and garrulous with love of the language at his erudite command, and he states his position with some persuasiveness...
...Fowles is a very, very clever chap, but one wishes he wouldn't keep reminding us of his cleverness, as he did in The Magus, as he does, less shrilly, here...
...Even the word "existential" crops up with rather tiresome frequency when he describes various characters in moments of urgent moral perplexity...
...Thus a strange intrusion of two voices, one telling a story and the other commenting on the scene, is present from the start...
...Yet he fails to fulfill his declaration of independence...
...We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator...
...Their books, then, were incomplete . . . and required that the reader should finish them, actively and practically, for himself...
...We know a world is an organism, not a machine...
...But still he insists on being the bantering jester, the juggler of realities, the magician of words, obtruding himself with heavy-handed ironic narcissism into the structure of the narrative, needing to prove over and again that he has read more obscure Victorian treatises full of forgotten and fascinating trivia...
...is a dead world...
...It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live...
...But [Wells, et al] were never interested in character in itself...
...Against his better judgment he is drawn to the social-outcast governess Sarah Woodruff by her mystery, her shortlived but fatal sexual heresy with the French Lieutenant, her auburn hair, her nakedly un-Victorian intensity...
...a planned world...
...it is self-contained...
Vol. 53 • January 1970 • No. 1
