Part 4

John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton

(Page 6 of 7)

The other three-quarters of Robert Fowles's intellectual reading was in philosophy, with which he was fascinated.33 He favored the seventeenth-century Continental Rationalists, like Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716). Both philosophers adhered to a mechanical picture of the workings of the universe and held that comprehension was possible through mathematical methods and a rational understanding of principles. Both redefined the divine and its relationship to the human search for wisdom so that it accorded with this mathematically logical universe. Spinoza viewed the universe pantheistically as a single infinite substance, which he called God. This "God" differentiates itself into particular things or "modes," even while it all remains logically and timelessly interconnected. Leibnitz, an inventor of the calculus, was also a proponent of a system called monadism. For Leibnitz, physical reality was constituted of indivisible, impenetrable units of substance called monads. Unlike the atom, the monad lacks spatial substance, thus is immaterial. Each monad is unique and a spiritual, soullike entity, while collectively also making up the appearance of the physical world. Each is dynamic and a perceptor of the whole of the universe. All monads exist in a perfect, preestablished harmony, synchronized by God. In these ordered, rational philosophical universes there is little room for human free will.

Robert Fowles was drawn to these philosophies strongly enough to have come up with his own "particular brand of monadism."34 John Fowles once wrote that in religion his father held "strange views, Victorian views, Huxleyan, a kind of out-dated Protestant free-thinker. Reform the creed, modernize the church, and so on."35 Robert Fowles called himself a Christian, but his son thought him the next thing to an atheist.

Beyond studying these European rationalists, Robert Fowles was particularly interested in the American pragmatists, especially the nineteenth-century thinkers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Pragmatism was the dominant approach to philosophy in the United States during the first quarter of the twentieth century. It is a material, anti-ideal philosophy, according to which the test of the truth of a proposition is its practical utility, the purpose of thought is to guide action, and the effect of an idea is more important than its origin. It is based in experience. "Truth" is relative to the time, place, and purpose of investigation and is as inherent in means as in ends. In other words, the test of a theory is empirical: "Does it work? Is it useful?" Although not inherently an individualistic philosophy, like the postwar French existentialist philosophy that John Fowles was to embrace, American pragmatism recognizes that truth is measured by relevance to each individual situation, therefore must be defined by each individual.

As he read these pragmatists and the other philosophers, Robert Fowles faithfully kept a notebook, a small dark-covered stationer's journal, in which he recorded short critiques and evaluations of each philosopher. His son grew up aware of this philosophic journal, with these pithy summations written in his father's neat hand.36 As John Fowles grew older, Robert Fowles argued philosophy with his son in his characteristically forceful, challenging way. The young man felt these occasions were less discussions in which his opinion was respected than painful cross-examinations, "far more forensic than Socratic."37 In his twenties, John Fowles sighed in frustration: "He has read so much, and knows so many -isms and long words which he brandishes in conversation, mystifying, confounding or embarrassing as the case may be. With me usually the latter, as he uses long words to dazzle simple people, and it seems to me like an aggressive superiority complex."38 He remembered arguments in which Robert was "arguing, hectoring, talking above everyone else," and never listening.39 Other thinkers were mustered into Robert Fowles's arguments. He admired Bertrand Russell's philosophy, not his politics. He thought highly of Charles Darwin and of Thomas Hardy, both great nineteenth-century materialists who emphasized determinism and a fateful lack of free will. Both influenced John's later work.

However important some of Robert Fowles's philosophical heroes may have become to his son, the greatest influence on the boy was simply that his father made the philosophical quest. John Fowles grew up in a home where someone asked the great questions: What is the good? What is the moral human life? What is being and what is not being? Is free will possible? He accepted that a central activity of his much-admired father was asking those questions, reading the great thinkers, and then evaluating those readings in writing in his carefully kept journal. John Fowles was the child of a diary-keeping philosopher. He was also the son of a secret writer of stories.

Although aware of his father's reading in poetry and philosophy and of his journal keeping, John Fowles was a young adult before he learned to his surprise that his father wrote fiction. Robert had produced an entire novel on his experiences in the Great War that included eyewitness descriptions of "going over the top" in Flanders and of battles like Ypres in which he had lost his brother. Although technically naïve, "stiff and old-fashioned," and "dated in language," Robert's novel was a somewhat poignant love story in which an Englishman and his German friend who loved the same girl before the war met "face to face in no-man's land," where "death and reconciliation" took place.40 In 1950-1951 Robert also wrote some short tales of village life in the manner of late-Victorian magazines.

Seen on the commuter train to London in his bowler hat and black coat, or in his cricket whites on the club pitch, the reserved Robert Fowles would have impressed as a dry, unromantic character. John could not recall his father ever embracing him. But in his garden, in his stories, in his memorized poetry, in his love of the emotional and virtuoso in music, Robert Fowles was a secret, suppressed romantic. His intellectual life, the philosophy, the writing, his intense horticultural pursuits, and his keen sports life were an accommodation to a life of diminished expectations. The daughter born to him late in life observed how he never seemed content. She wondered if perhaps he might have even "had a bit of resentment that he didn't have the opportunities that John had."

As a boy John Fowles, the brilliant student, the competitive athlete, the son that embodied the family's ambitions, also had a secret life. When alone, the shy boy could put off his public face and allow a dreamy, solitary self to emerge as he slipped away into nature or into a book of romantic fantasy and adventure. The key figure who unlocked the door to the world of nature was his mother's younger brother, Stanley Richards.

Years after his death in July 1983, Stanley Richards was vividly remembered by former students and colleagues at Alleyn Court with sincere affection and admiration. Ultimately he succeeded E. P. Noble as Senior Master, a position like Deputy Head. John Wilcox, who was both Richards's student and later his colleague, described him as "an imposing figure, tall, slim, very dark, very physically fit, a watercolorist, a naturalist, a handy cricketer, a talented all-rounder, and, above all, a gentleman." He recalled that Richards had a rich sense of humor and loved to tell jokes to the boys, although he could "look severe" when required. He was an exceptional teacher who loved the out-of-doors and was a fine athlete. Both he and his wife, Eileen Kidgell Richards, were ardent naturalists who spent their weekends on bicycle trips into the surrounding countryside. Richards could identify all the wildlife and often sketched the plants and birds they saw. He was especially talented in watercolor landscape and pen-and-ink drawing and found a ready market for his pictures.42 He taught John, who was to paint and draw regularly, if very privately, for the next thirty years.

This magical uncle took his sister's son under his wing at a very early age, long before his own children were born. He was more than a dozen years younger than John's father and was merry and enthusiastic where Robert Fowles was reserved and dry. John Fowles later wrote of Uncle Stan, "I associate him with almost all my early red-letter days." Together with his friend Mackie, another master from the school, Stanley made regular entomological expeditions into the unspoiled Essex countryside. Mackie had a little Jowett, a popular car in the thirties. With Stan's nephew John bouncing in the dickey, the open-air backseat, they motored off to spend the day searching for caterpillars and netting butterflies.44 To Uncle Stanley John "owed the thrill of hunting for lappet caterpillars among the sloe thickets of the Essex seawalls near where we lived." Expeditions for moths, especially the beautiful hawk moth, were nocturnal, and on these trips Stanley taught John the art of sugaring, "the practice of creeping round Leigh-on-Sea and Westcliff, torch in hand, patrolling at his side various wooden fences and tree trunks anointed with the sweet gunge he concocted for attracting moths."45 In his first published piece of writing, "Entomology for the Schoolboy" (1938), "J. R. Fowles" revealed that the recipe for this entrapping bait was to "mix honey and beer together to form a paste and then smear it on a fence or tree. The moths, attracted by the honey, will sip it up and the beer will intoxicate them so that they will be unable to fly." The same essay describes how John was taught to kill his specimens using "a bottle containing a small quantity of cyanide" or crushed laurel leaves.46 Uncle Stan also showed the boy how to set his collection, patiently and with an artist's flair.

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

About the Author

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