Part 5

John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton

(Page 7 of 7)

As a child John longed to escape alone into the natural green world introduced to him by his uncle and probably by his mother. Reading by this time had become an escape as well. He was an early and avid reader - a "greedy" reader, he said - with a distinct taste for heroic adventure. Two of his favorite authors were Talbot Baines Reed and George Alfred Henty, the creators of popular late-Victorian "boys' books." Reed wrote tales of bold youths off upon exotic, fantastic adventures. "Huge, menacing anacondas, gorillas as big as Kong, man-eating tigers and enormous squids and tarantulas," Fowles recalled. "I largely swallowed them whole."47 The endless supply of stories and books by G. A. Henty (more than ninety of them) was likewise delicious escapist fiction. Henty's just-out-of-school Kiplingesque heroes were deliberately fashioned to inculcate patriotism and model a code of behavior as they set out to fight injustice and establish order throughout the far-flung reaches of the British Empire.

Because it was a tale of adventure, full of hair-raising escapes, kidnapping, rescues, and true love triumphant, John also read and reread R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1869), a novel universally assigned to British schoolboys. Except for Robin Hood, he missed reading other classics of children's and youthful literature, however, until he was an Oxford undergraduate or older, when he documented each discovery in his diary. As a celebrated writer in his forties and fifties he would "remember" reading as a schoolboy such books as Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes.48 But Fowles's factual memory was poor as an adult, while his associative memory was abundantly fertile and plastic. He so constantly fictionalized his past that he often convinced himself. Read in adulthood, the classic stories of youth with their adolescent idealism and their tender appreciation of the rural world seeped into his soul like a potent green dye, permeating his earlier memories and perceptions until his recalled youth (if not his factual youth) was completely colored by them.

In reading, John created an alternative world in his mind. He once wrote that when confronted with a situation that made him uncomfortable or afraid, he treated himself "as a character in a novel. This must all be happening to someone else, it can't be me . . . or not quite me."49 When he was ten years old he discovered the literary boy that he really wanted to be and in whom he recognized his own deepest self. The book was Richard Jeffries's evocation of a country boyhood, Bevis: The Story of a Boy.50 This mythic adventure resonated through Fowles's life and work.

It may be coincidental, of course, that John entered Bevis's fictional world at the very time when he was experiencing the sorrow of being abandoned by his cousin and lifelong caregiver, Peggy Fowles, who left for faraway South Africa. Retreat into a private, imaginary domain through printed words and romantic fantasy became a coping pattern for Fowles when faced with loss, guilt, or sadness. Bevis is a deeply escapist book, and it would not be surprising if the boy, feeling the loss of this beloved woman, had first slipped away into its pages to ease his confusion.

Richard Jeffries (1848-1887) was one of the most intensely poetic naturalist writers of the nineteenth century, possessed by a kind of Wordsworthian vision into nature's transcendent and poignant immediacy. He drew on his own childhood in Wiltshire to create Bevis, a bright, sensitive, imperious boy vaguely between ten and fourteen, who has adventures on his father's farm during a long, sunlit summer. Bevis and his friend, Mark, explore, learn to swim, and build a sailing boat. They organize a full-scale Roman battle with other boys. They build a raft, make their own guns, and secretly camp out on an island in a lake for several weeks. The natural world is sharply observed and poetically rendered. The pace of the book is lazy, as the reader is a participant in the detailed, even laborious, thought processes of this young boy.

Competent and knowledgeable, Bevis has an easy familiarity with each plant, insect, bird, tree, or bend of the brook. His youthful adventures in his private rural domain are charming. What is key, however, is that Bevis is not content merely to know the prosaic landscape that actually exists. He mentally reshapes it. His imagination controls this kingdom, his perception and his will transform it, and his will and superior imagination ensure that his more practical friend, Mark, and all the other boys will accept as "reality" Bevis's imaginative projections on the landscape. When Bevis decides that the lake is the New Sea, the island New Formosa, the entering stream the Nile, and the pasture the Battlefield of Pharsalia, no one ever contradicts him. Bevis's romantic and geographic reading, his hand-drawn maps, and, most of all, his boyish powers of narrative description compel the others not only to agree but to enter into his projected vision of the natural landscape. The boy is in fact a powerful creator of fiction.

In Jeffries's rural world, boys John's age had absolute freedom to explore, to know with complete authority every tree, every bird, every insect that they encountered. It was a world where a boy might reimagine a familiar landscape in heroic patterns and master himself as swimmer, builder, sailor, warrior, and even romantic lover, shyly falling for distant beautiful maidens. It was a world that words could reshape according to a child's will.

Bevis is also a tale of escape. In the woodlands and fields, on the lake, and especially on his small secret island, Bevis slips away from parents, from supervising adults, tempting girls, and, sometimes, even his closest friend. Bevis is the story of a child-man who craves solitude and the freedom of a private natural world in which his imagination may work unencumbered by the presence of other people. Ten-year-old John, in his small suburban house in a predictable 1930s English town, loyally living up to his parents' expectations for conventional excellence, yearned with his whole hidden self to be that boy. Only in his imagination could he be. So as a child John Fowles "lived" Bevis, he would remember, reading and rereading it, sometimes turning back immediately from the final page to the first and starting over.

In July 1939, John Fowles's childhood in the bosom of his family drew to a close. In the greater world, war with Germany began to seem inevitable as Fowles prepared for the next stage of his education. Encouraged by his Alleyn Court teachers, he took the examination for a House Exhibition for Bedford School and was successful. The award gave partial tuition relief, making it possible, again with sacrifice, for Robert and Gladys Fowles to meet the annual costs of a Bedford boarding school education. Their contribution for the five years of John's residence would be a hundred pounds a year, plus books, uniforms, and personal expenses.

The school, in the town of Bedford in Bedfordshire, was only fifty miles north of London, two hours' rail journey. Still, Gladys Fowles was reluctant to let John go. Added to the normal anxiety of separation from an adored only child who was close to her were the deep dread and uncertainty of sending that son away to an unknown environment just as hostilities seemed about to erupt. However, Gladys submitted to the male authorities around her. Robert Fowles wanted to seize the opportunity for his son's education. The staff at Alleyn Court encouraged the move. Finally, the Headmaster of Bedford School made direct contact with the hesitant parents, and his interest resolved the matter. The decision was made for John Fowles to begin boarding school at the Christmas term, late September 1939.

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

About the Author

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