John Fowles, Ghostwriter
MATHEWSON, RUTH
Writers & Writing JOHN FOWLES, GHOSTWRITER BY RUTH MATHEWSON I count on my reader fully," wrote Anton Chekhov, "assuming that he himself will add the subjective elements that are lacking in the...
...She laughed at such flagrant Irishry...
...that mysterious sense he had always thought of as right feeling...
...and eternally lost conscious course because the unconscious knowledge of the true one always lay inexorably underneath...
...The book's final paragraph raises the possibility that these writing problems have been too much for Daniel Martin...
...For this and other reasons, Anthony's existence with her had been embittered, "dominated by mind...
...Turning to the opening line, we find: "Whole sight...
...The central character in what I'll call the novel-as-scenario (to distinguish it from the novel-as-discourse that ultimately swamps it) is Dan, a successful Hollywood screenwriter in his late 40s...
...This is a valid undertaking-indeed, an heroic one-and it occurred to me that Fowles was aiming at something like Eliot's idea, "thought recreated into feeling" and the other way around...
...which is perhaps why, in the end, and in the knowledge that Dan's novel can never be read, lies eternally in the future, his ill-concealed ghost had made that impossible last his own impossible first...
...It follows that Dan is impressed by a passage from Lukacs on the writer's choosing Mann over Kafka, "the great and progressive literary traditions of realism in preference to formalistic experimentation...
...He might have arranged for the writing to improve, too...
...The two men had married sisters: Anthony the brilliant and spirited Jane, Dan the more conventional Nell, whom he divorced after their daughter Caro was born...
...When the main action begins, he is returning home to England at the dying request of his old college friend Anthony, an Oxford philosophy professor from whom he has been estranged for years...
...Daniel Martin, writer, has problems with syntax and diction that would stop a more modest thinker dead in his tracks...
...These elements are certainly not lacking in John Fowles' Daniel Martin (Little, Brown, 629 pp., $12.95...
...We could, if we wished, start over again...
...Where Fowles might have let his protagonist come to terms with literary failure, near the conclusion he has Dan speak of "handling words" as one of his two talents...
...There can be no question that John Fowles is the author and subject of Daniel Martin...
...This best-seller made such a small demand on me for collaboration that I am tempted to compensate for the lack of exercise by giving my own subjective reasons for finding it a bore...
...He hopes to find in "this book...
...with existential nausea...
...And what is he to John Fowles...
...Courageous to the end, he has refused the outs 1 would have given him...
...Not my kind of thing, never cottoned to him, what I like is"-the sort of talk that is all right for a dinner party but fatuous in print...
...Caro asks Dan...
...Clearly all this is part of Fowles' plan, and it must be acknowledged that repeatedly he comes close to realizing it...
...To achieve this totality, he must write about his own consciousness...
...Mankind may think there are two poles...
...He invites her, "purely, in all senses of the word, as an old friend," to accompany him to Egypt, where he wants to scout locations for an epic film he is writing on Lord Kitchener...
...The wind shook a patch of sere foot-high thistles that stood between them and the dog...
...He is now in love with Jenny, a pert English actress his daughter's age...
...Caro, meanwhile, is having an affair with a slick BBC personality who is his age...
...Dan serves tea to "the assembled logorrhoea of ladies...
...Writers & Writing JOHN FOWLES, GHOSTWRITER BY RUTH MATHEWSON I count on my reader fully," wrote Anton Chekhov, "assuming that he himself will add the subjective elements that are lacking in the story...
...Not so large as Fowles thinks...
...He is attempting, then, a philosophical novel...
...The emergence of the not very ghostly Fowles is no great surprise to readers who have recognized the notions he has offered elsewhere, or found parallels between his career and Dan's...
...acceptance or avoidance of angst...
...or all the rest is desolation...
...The success of this mirror trick-a variation of those played by Gide, Nabokov, Roth, and others-depends on the writer's control and economy...
...there lay, as there had always lain-in some analogue of that vague entity the Marxists call totality, full consciousness of both essence and phenomenon-a profound and profoundly unintellectual, sense of natural orientation...
...Even on the basis of this sketch, it should be evident that the plot is rich in dramatic possibilities, and moreover that it provides splendid opportunities for examining England in crisis, comparing it with old empires, seeing its problems through the lives of a great many characters of different generations in a variety of milieux...
...The crucial question is whether a man escapes from the life of his time into a realm of abstraction-it is there that angst is engendered in human consciousness-or confronts modern life determined to fight its evils and support what is good in it...
...He wants to work on a novel that would be Daniel Martin...
...It was simply that she felt deeper...
...Resisting this urge, and also the impulse to toy with some small paradox (why, for example, does an artificer like Fowles spend 600 pages arguing against all artifice...
...He commits himself to recording not merely his life, but ideas determining and determined by it: arguments, theories, considerations, reconsiderations...
...So he establishes an illusion as old as realism-that what is happening "isn't a story"-and the book, shifting from first to third person and back, goes on to become the one that he is composing as we are reading...
...Or heart...
...The other is loving "one single other human being wholly...
...It is significant, though, because it forecloses the last small hope that Fowles had kept his distance from his hero and this mishmash of '30s jargon, structuralist religiosity and evasive metaphor that betrays his call for honesty...
...Nevertheless, abstraction, source of angst, extends its unhappy realm over Daniel Martin even when the "real" is described...
...and above all, with the imagined that does not say, not only in, but behind the images, the real...
...and I categorically had no wish to pick up the emotional tab when it was shattered...
...He cries, "To hell with cultural fashion...
...And we are given some crisp dialogue (that the screenwriter, of course, wants to get away from...
...and even though it is set in an arctic where no incarnate mind can exist...
...This manifesto may seem "supremely self-centered," but is actually "supremely socialist" though "a majority of contemporary socialists" don't recognize it...
...a medium that would tally better with this real structure of my racial being and mind...
...To "correct a design failure," Anthony makes Dan a promise to help Jane put her life in order...
...These usually had some visual objective correlative, of course, but...
...Jane and Dan decide that "the Nile, like the Bible, was a great poem and rich in still relevant metaphors...
...Nell is pleased with Caro's BBC job because "the association added an agreeable little vicarious feather to her local social hat...
...The most important decision in his life," he believes, is to exercise "free will" in working out the use of himself in the novel...
...I will move on to the most interesting questions I can think of about this novel: Who is Daniel Martin...
...she is now contemplating membership in the Communist party...
...in the desolation of Palmyra they realize they have needed each other always...
...He tells Jane he has found "the last sentence for the novel he was never going to write...
...Unfortunately for the reader, Daniel Martin sees control as limitation and economy as impoverishment...
...Most of the good patches come early...
...But the miasma of the discourse-and the awkward connection between discourse and scenario-blur these virtues...
...Not flesh...
...but there is, morally as magnetically, only one in the geography of the mind's total being...
...After their talk, he leaps to his death from his balcony, and Dan, sooner than expected, becomes deeply involved with Jane...
...What are tropes...
...with elitist guilt...
...In the reunion with Anthony he learns that his friend has long known that before their marriages, Dan had gone to bed one night with Jane...
...Not so obvious as they seem...
...Here are a few of them: "I had no right to encourage such an illusion...
...a set-piece chapter on the massacre of rabbits on the Devonshire farm of Dan's boyhood and another about young love have a faint yet authentic ring of D. H. Lawrence...
...He has a larger end in view, however, and does not care that modern literature has anticipated him by 50 years...
...he cannot create a fictional character-It would be a lie"-nor invent a less self-absorbed Dan-he would have no ghost to inquire about...
...is determined by...
...When they return to London, Dan bids a tender farewell to Jenny...
...But my respect for his courage ebbed when I repeatedly encountered such atrocities as the following (paragraph transition and all), describing the moment of Dan's deepest rapport with Jane...
...Things I can't get straight," he replies...
...But clarity and coherence are sacrificed, and the action is forced into slow motion, because he has a much more elaborate, more ambitious design-a larger script that follows his hero's transformation from screenwriter to novelist...
...The personal decision...
...a totality of consciousness that fragmented modern man has lost...
...There are other vivid scenes, interesting descriptions of flora and fauna, English country estates and Egyptian monuments...
...The Daniel Martin of the novel-as-discourse has tired of filmwriting: "The artifice of the medium" betrays "the real thing...
...Jane had converted to her husband's ascetic Catholicism, lost her faith and become a Marxist...
...Beneath all her faults, her wrong dogmas...
...On a voyage up the Nile their old affinity is slowly restored...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
