Part 3

John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton

(Page 5 of 7)

Both his children recalled Robert Fowles as a thin man of very nervous disposition who constantly worried about his business and the people dependent on him. In the mid-1930s he developed a debilitating duodenal ulcer. John Fowles would recall how as a little boy he "decided that London was synonymous with physical exhaustion and nervous anxiety, and that the one thing I would never be was a commuter." His father also hoped for better for him. Robert was extremely tight with money for housekeeping, and Gladys Fowles did not have use of a checkbook until she was a widow. There were few luxuries, though she did have household help.

The elder Fowles valued the comradeship and shared memories of his fellow officers from the Honourable Artillery Company and kept up connections with these veterans. But the other regimental officers were "well-to-do men . . . with good connections," John Fowles remembered, and Robert Fowles was condemned to watch his own resources shrink while hankering after the ethos and aspirations of this officer class. John Fowles wrote in 1951 that his father "was brought up in a rich home, lived with well-to-do people, still has friends and connections in a richer stratum of life. He regrets all that and has now an obsession about other people's riches."21 Robert was determined that John would not have those regrets. He wrote to John's headmaster in 1944 how he felt qualms about his son's future "not necessarily because of the hazards of war, but more because I have constantly in mind the example of my own career being wrecked in the last war."

John Fowles grew up in an atmosphere of thwarted ambition, with a father resolved that his son would not be disappointed professionally and a mother who plied him with intense, self-sacrificing attention. A sensitive only child until he was sixteen, the boy must have been aware that he was the object of very high expectations. In all outward ways he complied. He was an attentive son, an outstanding student, a talented athlete. At considerable sacrifice to themselves, the parents directed the family's resources, financial and otherwise, toward the boy's success for many years.

John's school was only a slight extension of the closely caring familial world in which he prospered. His uncle Stanley Richards began teaching at Alleyn Court Preparatory School in 1928, and when eight-year-old John was sent there in 1934, he was eligible for reduced tuition. From his front door John's school was an easy half mile by bicycle, mostly through Chalkwell Park. Riding to No. 3, at the end of Imperial Avenue where the neo-Gothic brownstone school building was located, John passed by the houses of his uncle and aunt on one side of Imperial Avenue and of several teachers on the other. His grandmother's home was in the next street. He rode in the company of another lad from Fillebrook Avenue, the two-years-older Trevor Bailey, destined to be the legendary England Test cricketer. The reflected glory of the school's sports hero made Fowles the envy of the other pupils. All six hundred boys, mostly day students, were highly visible in school uniforms of navy blue, and pink - blue blazer with pink braiding, gray shirt with pink tie, pink cap, and short gray trousers.

Even for a local preparatory school, Alleyn Court Preparatory School was unusually familylike. It had been founded by Theodore Wilcox in 1904 and has thrived under four direct generations of Wilcox headmasters. The administration was so benignly patriarchal that when Stanley Richards first asked out his future wife, the infants' teacher, he was sternly warned by the headmaster that "Miss Kidgell is a lady" and that his behavior was being watched. Stanley Richards and Eileen Kidgell were married in 1937 and, between them, taught at Alleyn Court for a total of ninety-two years. John Fowles himself could recall the young headmaster of his day bringing home his bride in 1938.23 Gladys and Robert Fowles often took tea with Alleyn Court teachers. They also supported athletic prizes, and Robert annually played cricket for the Paters against his son and his fellow pupils.

The teaching staff was small, but upper school pupils like John Fowles received close attention. By the time he left the school at thirteen and a half, Fowles was studying Scripture, English, Latin, French, mathematics, history, geography, drawing, and natural science. His teacher for English, Latin, French, and mathematics was the Senior Master, a gentle, elderly man named E. P. Noble, who considered Fowles hardworking and "very promising." Under his guidance, the boy began his lifelong love of French language and literature. In English class, where he was one of Noble's two best students, John's essays showed "power of imagery." He was first in his class in natural science, taught to a high standard by his uncle Stanley, who also instructed in geography and drawing.

History was taught by the headmaster, Denys Wilcox. But the handsome young D. R. Wilcox was more locally famous as joint-captain of Essex County Cricket Club and the coach of Alleyn Court's cricket side. Fowles, who had inherited both ability and a passion for cricket from his father, shone in the Saturday afternoon matches played on school fields just across the Crowstone Road. Playing for Rankine's, his athletic house, John was one of the team's best, noted as both bowler and batsman. He regularly took prizes in cricket events competitions. He was a strong competitor who excelled at most sports, training in swimming and diving in 1938, for example, until he could edge out the reigning swimming champion and capture the School Challenge Cup.

Sport was central to the school and to John's boyhood. He remembered with pleasure how D. R. Wilcox coaxed distinguished cricketers to the school's nets for demonstrations and to give "cherished autographs." By the time Fowles left Alleyn Court he "had been given a batting point or two by Hendren and even 'faced' the formidable Essex fast bowler, Kenneth Farnes." Farnes would "deliver very gently against [the] small boys" and then would terrify them with "demonstrations of reality" as he bowled "a few at full run-up and speed to the empty net."

Robert Fowles taught his son to play golf and tennis well, but cricket was a shared passion and lifelong bond between them. Before the war Robert had been quite a good amateur, playing at club level against many of the greats of the age. His son heard personal accounts of W. G. Grace, Ranji, and Trumper. In John's boyhood, father and son attended all the local Essex matches, played in Chalkwell Park, just around the corner, or at Victoria Park in nearby Southend. John Fowles recalled seeing "almost all the great players of the 1930s on those two grounds" and soon had eyewitness tales of his own of "Patsy" Hendren, Verity, Larwood, Hammond, and Frank Woolley, his father's hero. John played cricket as a talented amateur until he left Oxford University at the age of twenty-four, and badminton and occasional tennis until well into his fifties. Even after learning to disdain what he regarded as the class-conscious trappings of cricket, golf, and tennis, he remained an avid fan.26 This love of athletics and the fierce thrill of competition were among Robert Fowles's permanent legacies to his only son.

Not until he himself was past fifty and his father had been dead for some years was John prepared to acknowledge Robert's other legacies, and then, characteristically, emotional acknowledgment came in written form. In his most moving essay The Tree (1979), John Fowles came to see Robert's "cunningly stunted trees" as emblematic of a life "severely pruned by history and family circumstance." He was "one of the generation whose lives were determined once and for all by the 1914-18 War," which had savagely narrowed his professional options, burdened him with responsibilities, and impaired his health, while at the same time strengthening some of his tastes and skills. The suburban orchard was Robert Fowles's "answer, his reconciliation to his fate - his platonic ideal of the strictly controlled and safe, his Garden of Eden."

Despite his passion for his fruit trees and gardening, Robert Fowles had no feeling for nature in the wild. Indeed, John Fowles believed, he showed toward it "a distinct hostility." His was an urban soul, tempered by the unthinkable experience of trench warfare. Robert regarded even short walks away from houses and roads as "incipiently dangerous" and would claim "he had seen enough open country and breathed enough open air in his three years in Flanders to last him his lifetime."

John Fowles came to regard his father as an example of "ghetto mentality," as having a kind of "Jewishness." While he had a "total blindness to nature," Robert demonstrated, more positively, "a keen admiration of intellectual achievement and of financial acumen . . . a love of the emotional . . . in things like poetry and classical music, of brilliant virtuoso performances . . . of quintessentially city arts." Using examples like Einstein or Spinoza, Robert Fowles was also apt to defend the contributions of Jewish intellectuals to European history against the casual, prevalent anti-Semitism of the day. He was a formidable opponent in an argument, by training as a prosecutor as well as by temperament.29 His daughter recalled that he "could be quite hard," with his "sharp tongue" and strong opinions.30 Just as the father and son competed fiercely in sport, so John Fowles grew up competing in argument with Robert Fowles. Perhaps without realizing it, he defined many of his beliefs by choosing to hold the opposite opinion from his father.

Robert Fowles had returned from Germany in 1920 with good German, in reading, if not in speaking, and a great fondness for German culture. A quarter of his reading, John Fowles estimated, was in German Romantic poetry. "He must have known many poems of Mörike, Droste-Hülshoff, the early Goethe," the son recalled, "almost by heart."31 Both Hazel and Daniel O'Sullivan also remembered her father, surrounded by volumes of German literature, reading Heine.32 His love of poetry, like his garden, was intense and private.

© 2005 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Eileen Warburton is a scholar who lives in Newport, Rhode Island.