Schoolteachers Unbound

...Had Fowles never read Anna Kareninal He seems to have wanted a sort of Frieda Lawrence whose worship of art was such that she could sacrifice her young to the chosen, semidivine artist...

...John Fowles might not be someone you would choose as a friend or even, as with Anthony Burgess, as a dinner partner...

...denigrating his past and the man he was...

...She was not only his muse—the elusive Alison Kelly in The Magus is modeled on her—but, on a more prosaic level, his best reader and critic...

...he is the quintessential secluded, ivory-tower artist, who has carefully nurtured what he sees as a mystical connection between his life and his work...

...John Wilson's life began with a loss and dislocation so profound, we can only agree with Lewis that it must have helped create the pathologically detached adult: When he was a baby of 19 months, both his mother and sister died during the Spanish flu epidemic...

...Fowles came from solidly middle class, suburban roots...

...Lewis' intense, bubbling, negative tirade can only loosely be called a "biography," despite its succeeding as a sort of unleashed personal and literary expos...

...They are what he gets emotional and meaningful about...

...Once back in the UK, he spent several happy years teaching English at the Banbury Grammar School, then decamped to Malaya, where he taught, took notes for what would become The Malayan Trilogy, and made grandiose plans to translate T.S...

...If we can't help laughing, we also feel some compassion for the narcissistic novelist, dead now and unable to defend himself...

...Lewis shows this to be the fiction one always suspected it was...

...On Fiction Schoolteachers Unbound By Brooke Allen With the senescence and passing of the generation that came of age around the time of World War II, biographers are busy summing up the lives, careers and comparative merits of the writers who dominated the postwar scene...

...Indeed, an elderly colleague of Wilson's, tracked down by the indefatigable biographer, tells the same sad story: "He was a splendid chap...

...As a youth, Lewis admits "I adored his spectacle and noise, his flamboyance, the surface pleasure of his prose...

...The yellowishwhite powdery strands were coiled on his scalp like Bram Stoker's Dracula's peruke, not maintained since Prince Vlad the Impaler fought off the Turks in the Carpathian mountains in 1462...

...What did happen at this stage in England, beyond a doubt, was the emergence of "Anthony Burgess," who rode a tidal wave of energy and industry that lasted until his death more than 30 years later...

...Sometimes he even compared poor Elizabeth unfavorably with Frieda, whom he saw as the archetypal woman...

...You would have to leave the guilt behind as well...

...It's the old mother or lover issue...

...She notices the large discrepancies between his versions of events (in oral interviews, diaries and novels) and calls the technique not "lying" or "embroidery" but "fertile forgetting...

...Perhaps creative artists are necessarily egocentric...

...Although the emperor turns out to be clad in rather threadbare jester's rags, he is assuredly not naked...

...And start again, totally without Roy and Anna...

...It would not be enough to leave Anna...

...Then he took a job at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School on Spetsai—a "'ridiculous great mock-British school on a gemlike Aegean island"—and began to emerge from his shell...

...Fowles has felt no need for showmanship and publicity...

...The actorish mannerisms, the voice, the wielding of the cigarillo, the silk handkerchief, the whole Burgess plumage, imply a high level of personal vanity...

...What does it say about a man that he could go around like that, as Burgess did...

...That is the voice of a treacherous Boswell who sat next to his victim, often, and observed him with a cold and merciless camera's eye...

...Fowles' story is really that of a marriage...

...In his case "and his wife's" was literally true: Elizabeth read everything as he wrote it, and her contributions were invaluable...

...When at the age of 36 he achieved international fame with the publication of The Collector, he turned firmly away from the limelight and retrenched his identity as, in his own words, "a professional existentialist solitary," living deep in the country with his wife, Elizabeth...

...She understands and sympathizes with his need to see various decisions and turning points as a series of actes gratuits on his part, rather than the result of endless dithering they too often were...

...it cannot, on its own, create art, and Burgess' literary reputation will probably prove shorter-lived than was assumed during his lifetime...

...As Eileen Warburton points out, he never wrote a publishable book either before Elizabeth's appearance in his life or after her death...

...Spoils magic," she scrawled over one passage—a valuable lesson for many a writer...

...His physician from that period explained to Lewis discreetly that "what a patient chooses to believe about his condition is not necessarily the same thing as what his consultants had told him about his condition...

...They fell in love, but Fowles refused to consider taking on the Christys' baby daughter, Anna...

...The biographer is more concerned with airing his own opinions about his subject's Life and Work than with drawing a detailed picture...

...You know as well as I do that you can't have both...

...Lewis rightly claims that Burgess' true love was reserved not for humanity but for its speech and languages: "Words were things to him, objects, jewels...

...His character at this time seems to have been repressed to the point of constipation, and did not change during his year as a lecturer at the University of Poitiers...

...He identified artistically with Thomas Hardy: "I have that same kind of mind, that adoration of personal myth, that ability to use and transmute it...

...He was the author of some 60 titles and a caricature of the "great writer," modern-style...

...That one can be ruled out...

...no professional barber can be blamed for this___Was he indifferent to his appearance...

...Fowles' letters to her from that period make for disturbing reading...

...She constantly exhorted him to make his work trimmer, less didactic, less overtly philosophical...

...As a boy he exemplified the bourgeois virtues, winning a scholarship to a good school where he excelled in academics and sports...

...Warburton's extensive research, as well as her friendship with Fowles and his late wife, have had an interesting result, for though she never ceases to revere Fowles as an artist, she seems on a personal level to prefer Elizabeth, who certainly had a great deal to suffer and bore it all with real grace...

...he compares himself with the little boy in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, who is mesmerized by a toy theater because it is so brightly lit...

...Thus began a dance that went on for years, sending Elizabeth spinning between Fowles and Christy with occasional attempts at independence, and plunging her into deep depressions that became a lifelong pattern...

...Burgess' combination of intellectual overheatedness and emotional frigidity is certainly striking, and the observation that he took more interest in his characters' physical characteristics than their emotional ones is on target...

...True enough, but Lewis' vehemence is such that one can't resist playing devil's advocate and pointing out that the emptiness has been perfectly evident for years, and that if a reader is taken in by such gimcrack stage sets he has no one to blame but himself...

...I think Burgess is not really so revered—not so much in need of debunking—as Lewis seems to believe...

...This passion can entertain and even inspire...

...In England Anthony Burgess and Kingsley Amis are said to have competed for first place, but there are other contenders: William Golding, William Trevor, Muriel Spark, even perhaps the reclusive John Fowles, whom the American critic John Gardner rather startlingly decided in 1977 was "the only living novelist now writing in English whose works are likely to stand as literary classics—the only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoy or James...

...Though he was a king of the combover (did the clumps and fronds emanate from his ear-hole...

...His other works, including Earthly Powers, Nothing Like the Sun and the Enderby books, are seldom encountered...

...He was a sensitive man, John...

...Nevertheless, we do learn that Wilson entered the Army and found his niche as a teacher in Gibraltar during the War (his novel A Vision of Battlements covers this experience...

...He trusted and befriended this younger academic—in all innocence, surely, for academics, so pathetically easy to impress with displays of erudition and allusion, have been his most dependable groupies...

...Warburton, to her credit, is both responsive to the personal myth and critically alive to what it is: 'As I think he wishes, I have tried to focus on what Fowles calls the ethnology of the novelist...

...From this description Fowles may not seem a very likable man...

...Lewis' book is a tale of the dramatic metamorphosis of John Wilson, a likable, hardworking schoolteacher of provincial lower-middle class origins, into "Anthony Burgess," the "novelist, journalist, composer, pundit, television and radio personality, would-be Broadway and Hollywood operator, translator, after-dinner speaker, showman...

...Give up lecture...

...The biographers themselves differ greatly too...

...Lewis' rage is so deeply personal that it unmistakably brands him an amant décu (in both senses of décu—disappointed and deceived...

...Nonetheless, his intelligence, his cold humor, and his uncompromising truth to himself and his talent have made him a formidable and often admirable figure...

...In England he is still a force, but more, I suspect, as a remembered "character" ready and eager to be outrageous on screen or in newsprint than for his novels...

...Warburton's achievement is that while she never softpedals the unpleasant aspects of his character, she never loses her respect for his personal and artistic integrity, and she communicates that respect to the reader...

...After serving as a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines during World War II, he entered Oxford...

...Elizabeth's eventual choice of Fowles over Anna was indescribably painful, and though mother and daughter later became very close, some part of Elizabeth's psyche, or soul, was permanently broken...

...I stare at nonartists and wonder how on earth they can stand the work they do, with its brutal absence of self-absorption, its unceasing demand for attention on other things, other selves," he wrote...

...It was also in Greece that he met Elizabeth...

...No respectable biographer would feel quite comfortable, for example, giving the following brutal physical description of his subject: "And how are we going to describe his hair...

...Kill your wife, kill your parents...

...Just how necessary is Roger Lewis' frantic effort to debunk...

...Fowles saw a lot of things in terms of archetypes...

...Furthermore, while Burgess was certainly no Jane Austen (which in any case he never wanted to be) and no James Joyce (which he did), he did a respectable job of being a flawed, second-rate yet enjoyable scribbler...

...At one point he believed passionately in Burgess, blissfully buying into the pretensions, the theatrics, the "fanatic pedantry," the showy but futile attempts to subsume all language, all knowledge into his novels...

...It was she, for example, who came up with the famous "double ending" of The French Lieutenant's Woman after finding his original, conventional one "NOT WORTHY of you...

...Fowles' frequent forays into the movie business (many of his works were filmed, beginning with The Collector and culminating with the big-budget production of The French Lieutenant's Woman) convinced him that this collaborative art was not for him, and that his natural home was the novel—"one man's work, or one man's and his wife's work...

...moreover, he not only didn't have a tumor, but no doctor ever said he had one...

...Wilson had actually been writing constantly since the War...

...Two new books, read in tandem, Roger Lewis' Anthony Burgess: A Biography (Thomas Dunne, 434 pp., $27.95), and Eileen Warburton's John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds (Viking, 510pp., $34.95), provide an almost comically vivid contrast: They present men with entirely different concepts of art, of literature, of what it means to be a writer and a literary personality...

...Lewis, on the other hand, has written a manic, logorrheic tirade, not so much a biography of Burgess as a 400-page rant—but a funny one...

...His imagination didn't retain the wonder of a child—neither the intensity, nor the innocence...

...It makes me angry to see him on television or in the paper, roaring away as Anthony Burgess, coarsening himself, travestying himself...

...In this country Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike have ended their rivalry in a threeway draw...

...The mystery of Sarah is not answered, wonder if it should be— In fact, to my way of thinking this novel should end with no answer but only an implied one of tragedy...

...Liz, there is no hope for us until you are prepared to commit a brutal act, a sin, a burning of boats...

...When asked by a group of students what an aspiring writer should do to prepare himself, his immediate response was: "Kill your parents, kill your professors, kill your lovers...

...Fowles at least made no secret about his self-involvement, and no pretense...

...Lewis plausibly suggests that Wilson/Burgess might have suffered from Reactive Attachment Disorder—an inability to form attachments stemming from the withdrawal of physical and emotional affection in childhood: "Left, after his mother's funeral, to fend with relatives, you feel that he can't grow up quickly enough—and there's never any youthful spirit in Burgess' work...

...John Fowles, now 78, started out like Burgess, as an obscure schoolteacher who struggled for years to become a published novelist—but there the similarities end...

...Everyone was fond of him___All his grandiose ways are an act...

...He's the least intimate and spontaneous of writers...

...A stint in Brunei (Devil of a State) ended with his becoming ill and returning to England, where soon afterward the most famous incident of his life is supposed to have occurred: Informed that he had an inoperable brain tumor, the 42-yearold author reportedly churned out five novels in a year so that his widow might have some pin money...

...How can an imaginative writer have so little basic psychological understanding...

...Lewis prefers Wilson to Burgess, and many readers will share his preference...

...The child had a haphazard upbringing by relatives until his father, several years later, married a pub landlady and opened a tobacconist and off-license business...

...But bedazzlement, the most immediate of esthetic experiences, is also the least sustaining, and once Lewis penetrated Burgess' elaborate stage machinery he was shocked to find it a mere Potemkin village...

...It was in Greece that he received, almost like a religious conversion, "a flash of vivid perception of the marvelous, the poetic—a tissue of the legendary, the enchanted forest, the spirits of places, nymphs in groves—partly French and medieval, partly Greek and classical, partly my own dream world...

...Warburton has produced a classic study of Fowles that is profound, sympathetic, clear-sighted, and balanced...

...She was married to Roy Christy, a rowdy teaching colleague of Fowles...

...He writes: '"Is there a subject on which you are not an expert?' [Burgess] was once asked on a radio show—and an honest and comprehensive answer would have to include unguarded feelings, domestic familiarities, normal, simple emotions, an instinct for beauty, sympathy and understanding...

...the story of how this man's life resulted in the books he made," she writes in her Introduction—but she does not take his own myth-creating word for the details of the life...

...Eliot's The Waste Land and Ezra Pound's Cantos into Malay...

...This habit can be harmful to realistic fiction, but it was fruitful within the terms ofhis own esthetic, which apotheosized personal mythology: All of Fowles' work, and especially TheMagus zndDaniel Martin, grows out of myth and archetype working upon the raw material ofhis life...

...In America only A Clockwork Orange is still read, and the film version is far better known than the novel...

...who was showing early signs of his long descent into manic depression and alcoholism...