The Journals, Volume 2 (v. 2) [Import] [Paperback]

John Fowles (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 23, 2007

Covering the years 1965 to 1990 ending with the death of Fowles’s first wife, Elizabeth, the inspiration for some of his best work. These are his most successful years, with The French Lieutenant’s Woman becoming a bestseller. There are some fascinating entries concerning its filming.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An absolutely compulsive, often stunning and moving read. . . Like his unforgettable fictional characters, John Fowles lived large, and the publication of The Journals: Volume II constitutes an event . . . His two volumes of journals rank among his greatest achievements. [An] elegiac tone, and discursive and digressive sensibility, resonates throughout the detailed entries . . . It’s all here. The drink count. The roe deer, bats and spiders. Sales figures and gossip. Complaints and snipes. Serious illnesses and personal triumphs. Grand flights of philosophical reflection and meticulous observations of mice. Real estate prices and the bricks and mortar of literary composition. Famous writers and neighbors down the road . . . The reader of Fowles feels somehow invited to enter a clearing made by language, a privileged and charged place . . . With such access comes an opportunity to understand but also to accompany, to witness. As a result, finally the reader of these journals feels lucky to have been granted entree to the life of a man brilliantly using words to illuminate a life beyond what the words of even a great writer like ‘John Fowles’ can suggest.”
–Joseph Di Prisco, San Francisco Chronicle

“Absorbing, from beginning to end . . . The deepest impression left by The Journals is of how enervating it must have been to be John Fowles . . . There is much pleasure to be had from pursuing the various narrative strands, material and spiritual, of a life laid bare . . . His main inspiration, practically his raison d’être, is his love of nature and knowledge of ‘animals, plants, birds, insects,’ which suffused the first volume and continues here. The sections on filmmaking contain sharp, often affectionate portraits of Harold Pinter, Michael Caine, Fred Zinnemann and others . . . There is intelligent observation in abundance.”
–James Campbell, The New York Times


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

John Fowles was born in 1926 and died in November of 2005.

Charles Drazin is an editor and writer whose previous books include In Search of the Third Man and Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Classics (January 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099443430
• ISBN-13: 978-0099443438
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.2 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,669,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Honest, insightful, painful, February 4, 2006

By 

Ray Hammond (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Journals, Vol. II (v. 2) (Hardcover)

These two volumes of diaries display an unflinching honesty, a trait that was evident in John Fowles's great novels. But as Ben Johnson sagely observed of Shakespeare, `reader, look not upon the writer, but his book.'

Despite his literary triumph the man who emerges from these pages led a life that was frequently unhappy, at least up to 1990 when these journals conclude. Perhaps the most interesting frustration expressed in these pages is over Fowles's own lack of any oral articulacy to compliment the quality of his writing and the power of his imagination.

Finding huge success, especially in the United States, Fowles was catapulted into the media spotlight where he was expected to perform. But he was particularly poor at this and, in time, he came to loathe the `media shallowness' of the modern world and to become a recluse.

John Fowles was the very last of the pre-Second World War generation. Privately educated, he was at public school during the conflict, then served at an officer in the Royal Marines before reading French Literature at Oxford. Despite the new, more egalitarian mood that pervaded Oxford immediately after WWII, Fowles remained extremely class conscious and intolerant of fools. These diaries also seem to cast him as anti-Semitic, even though several of his few close friends were Jewish. Rather, I think he was `conscious' of Jewishness and its traits in a way that the British middle-classes in the 1930s would have been. In these aspects, Fowles did not change with the times.

His spectacular (and overwhelming) American success may have been helped by the very aura of `old-fashioned Englishness' that he exuded (which in the USA would have seemed very upper class), an image that played less well in the social revolution that was occurring in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.

Above all, it seems that the latter half of Fowles's life was blighted by a long first marriage which had turned bad and a stroke in 1988 that he felt affected his ability to write fiction (although the journals remain lucid and insightful).

Fowles unsparingly records his refusal to take on his wife's young daughter by a previous marriage and his own wish not to have children. This was perhaps the `pram in the hall' syndrome that Philip Larkin expressed on behalf of all artists, but it seems shabby and very mean spirited. Later it was to become a major bone of contention in the marriage.

Neither he nor his wife Elizabeth (who died in 1990) found the strength to leave the union (although the mutual desire appears in the journals) and it its heartrending to read of their antagonism and unhappiness during the years that led up to her death. In a masterstroke as exciting as the appearance of `the author' in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Elizabeth Fowles's own voice appears near the end of these journals to answer angrily her husband's many complaints about her. The naked, impotent fury that existed between the pair is laid bare.

Many entries in these journals express dolorous negativity. Fowles despaired of much - particularly the rise of the British proletariat who, when they gained economic independence and personal enfranchisement, turned out to be ugly, loud and crass. A life-long socialist, the results of the democratisation of privilege and culture for the working class dismayed the novelist. It was an irony he recognised and recorded in these journals.

Above all, John Fowles loved nature. His comfort came from his garden and the countryside around Lyme Regis where, despite Elizabeth's intense dislike of the town's provincialism., they lived for over twenty-five years, until her death.

Unsparing in criticism and self-criticism, these journals are the most wonderful, painful and rewarding insight into a life that was overwhelmed by success. Had Fowles made a living, rather than a killing, from his work, he would probably have been more productive and, perhaps, somewhat happier.

Ray Hammond