Vanity and literature: inside the two worlds of a megalomaniac

Eileen Warburton

Jonathan Cape, 25

MAKING sense of John Fowles’ life and literary work is no easy task. Best known for novels such as The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he has also published poems, short stories, screenplays, translations and diaries - though no new fiction since A Maggot in 1985.

Eileen Warburton has had exclusive access to Fowles’s private papers for this first full-scale biography. With Fowles’ collaboration she has compiled a detailed and often depressing account of his crankish existentialism, schoolboy politics, sexual obsessions, messy mnages and megalomaniac self-regard.

Born in Essex in 1926, Fowles graduated from Oxford and became a reluctant schoolmaster - first in Greece, then at a girls’ grammar school in London. He had already written novels before publication of his first, The Collector, in 1963. Warburton writes illuminatingly about Fowles’ friendship with Tom Maschler, his dynamic American publisher at Jonathan Cape, and about the importance of Elizabeth Fowles, the author’s first wife, as mentor and editor.

The biography does little to disguise the extent of Fowles’ self-deluding vanity. Early on he persuaded himself that an unknown, inexperienced director was the only man qualified to adapt The Collector as a film. He wrote: "I could certainly direct performance as well as the only other two directors I have seen at work. The technical knowledge needed doesn’t seem very great. If one could only gain the autonomy one has in a novel, I should be very tempted."

Although Warburton is not much of a literary critic, she gives a useful account of Fowles’ unpublished books, including an abandoned thriller written flat-out in 17 days, a long erotic poem in 1,000 quatrains, and an indecent novel in which an English toff has sex with his sister-in-law and niece before gunning down random proletarians as "vermin".

The final chapters describe Fowles’ descent into illness and literary incapacity. He suffered a stroke in 1988 and since then has written nothing of substance except his diaries. After Elizabeth’s death in 1990, Fowles acquired a 21-year-old companion/secretary to whom he gave houses, cars, pianos, jewellery, foreign holidays and a large salary. He wrote of this woman: "She uses me? Very well, all right, she does. Even if true, what am I to do? Refuse to be used - and join the dead?" He declared that she was his Muse, even though he was writing nothing.

Happily, the biographical narrative ends with a kind of resolution. After years of surrounding himself with unreliable women and hangers-on, Fowles remarried in 1998 and his second wife has brought him a certain degree of happiness and domestic security.

But it is hard to feel any affection for the writer who is exposed in these pages and, disappointingly, the book does not engage with Fowles’ novels in enough detail to make a serious critical case for them. Fowles’ life is a mess, but Warburton scarcely takes the trouble to explain why he was also a great writer.