John Fowles

 

John Robert Fowles was born into a lower middle-class home in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. The characters in his novels are often unconventional, following paths that set them against society, some times successfully, but more often with unintended and unfortunate consequences. Best known for The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), Fowles is widely recognised as an important figure in the development of the novel, his handling of the form having done much to advance the art of fiction writing.

He became interested in existentialism as exemplified in the writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and found their emphasis on the importance of the individual will particularly appealing. After taking his degree in 1950 he taught overseas for several years, first in France. where he met the woman who was to become his wife, and then on the Greek island of Spetsai.

Towards the end of 1960, when Fowles was teaching in England, he completed the first draft of ‘The Collector’ in four weeks. He revised it over the next two years and it was finally published in 1963. The novel quickly became a best-seller and Fowles was at last able to achieve his ambition of becoming a full-time writer.

 
The narrative of The Collector is presented in the first person, alternating between the viewpoints of the two protagonists. The novel deals with the obsessive desire for possession and misunderstandings between people of different classes. In the story, a young working-class clerk and butterfly collector, Freddie Clegg, wins a lottery. His financial independence and collector's instinct lead him to buy a house and devote his time to trying to win a girl with whom he is obsessed, Miranda, a middle-class art student.

Freddie kidnaps Miranda and keeps her captive. They achieve a limited amount of communication, but Miranda cannot live without liberty and, like the butterflies Freddie captures for his collection, she dies. Freddie buries her and at the end of the book has already chosen his next victim.

 
In the naming of his characters Fowles makes reference to Shakespeare's last play. The Tempest. Miranda is the name of Prospero's daughter in the play and the Miranda of The Collector gives Freddie the nickname 'Caliban', the name of a monster like, sub-human character.

 
The Collector, with its mixture of realism and fantasy, and its exploration of the consequences of absolute power in the hands of an obsessive, looks forward to Fowles's second, more ambitious novel, The Magus (1966). which also has references to The Tempest. In The Magus a young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, takes a teaching job on the Greek island of Phraxos to escape from a failed love affair. From this realistic beginning, Urfe finds himself entrapped in a mythical world of fantasy and illusion, created by the Prospero-like figure of the Greek ‘magus’ or magician, Conchis. The story progresses with a magical, sometimes nightmarish. intensity, Urfe's unnerving experiences unfolding as a pageant created for his edification.

In his manipulation of the confusion between illusion and reality Fowles makes The Magus, on one level, a novel about fiction itself. He was one of the first British writers to use magic realism, which was not then part of the English novelist's stock-in-trade, and the meaning of the novel was often missed by contemporary critics. The meaning lies in the way Urfe gains self-knowledge by confronting hitherto unexplored complexities of his own character, which are presented in Jungian terms, and reassessing the history of his century, including the coming to power of the Nazis.

Fowles used his wide knowledge of Victorian novels to write a pastiche of one in The French Larutenant's Woman (1969), while at the same time deconstructing the traditional form. In the story, Sarah Woodruff, one of the protagonists, is an enigmatic figure, believed to be pining for a French soldier who is thought to have been her seducer. Fowles contrasts Sarah with his more conventional heroine, Ernestina Freeman, engaged to marry the amateur palaeontologist Charles Smithson. With a touch of literary irony, the three meet on the Cobb at Lyme Regis, where Jane Austen set the climactic episode of her novel Persuasion.

The novel is set in 1867, exactly 100 years before Fowles wrote it, and is concerned with the juxtaposition of past and present. The exactness of the historical detail, in descriptions of such items as clothes and houses, highlights the differences between the Victorian era and our own, as a background to the examination of the contrast between Victorian social mores and our own. By setting the novel in that period, and referring to Smithson's interest in fossils, Fowles also emphasised the split that had divided science and religion at that time.

 
In The French Lieutenant's Woman Fowles deconstructs the traditional elements of the novel, such as the steady development of character, the chronological progress of the storyline and the overall authority of the storyteller. Fowles introduces himself into the novel, commenting directly on the actions and views of his characters and, rejecting the neat conclusion found in most Victorian novels, offers multiple endings, the reader being free to choose the one deemed most appropriate The novelist is aware, self-conscious and makes us aware of the fictional nature of all fiction, however 'true to life' it may appear to be.

 
Fowles's experimental postmodern form of narrative, which has been called metafiction, a fiction about fiction has antecedent in the English tradition of novel writing. In Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne addresses his readers directly about his characters and the development of the plot, and at least one Victorian novel. Charlotte Bronte's Villette, has an ambiguous ending.

 In The Ebony Tower (1974), a volume of short stories, Fowles pursued the idea of metafiction even further when in the, story ‘The Enigma’ he made the characters know, themselves to be fictional.

 
In the story Ebony Tower, which owed its inspiration to 'Eliduc, a twelfth-century story by Marie de France, Fowles explores the life of an artist, William Breasley. Breasley has become a recluse, railing against both the art establishment and the abstractions of modern art. David Williams, an English art critic, comes to France to interview Breasley, becomes entangled with two young art students, Anne and Diana, with whom he lives, and, like Urfe in The Magus, finds himself caught up in a bewildering mixture of illusion and reality.

 
Fowles's later works include Daniel Martin (1977), a complex novel covering three decades in the life of the eponymous protagonist. Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist and his muse, and A Maggot (1985), an eighteenth-century mystery story which combines science fiction and history and is written in the same layered style as The Magus.

In The Aristos (1964), a work of non-fiction, Fowles discussed his philosophical ideas which are the basic tenets of his fiction. He has also written several books about Lyme Regis and served as honorary curator of Lyme Regis Museum.

The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman were all made into films, the screenplay for The French Lieutenant's Woman being written by Harold Pinter.

 

E. M. Forster

 

E. M. Forster wrote the majority of his well known books before the First World War and although he became a member of the Bloomsbury Group, gave up writing novels altogether after the publication of A Passage to India in 1924, confining his literary output to critical works, travel writing, biography and short stories. The novel Maurice appeared posthumously in 1971, having been published under the supervision of Christopher Isherwood. It was begun after Forster completed Howard's End in 1910 and went through several drafts. It was influenced by the writer Edward Carpenter, a socialist and open homosexual, and had a homosexual theme, but Forster considered its subject matter too indelicate for publication in his own lifetime.

Forster's literary career began in Edwardian times. He was writing at the same time as John Galsworthy, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, though Hardy had turned from prose to poetry at the close of the previous century and James was near the end of his productive life, publishing The Ambassadors in 1903 and The Golden Bowl in 1904. Overshadowing all of them in popular fame at that time was Rudyard Kipling, whose novel Kim (1902) earned him the Nobel Prize For Literature.

 
Kim is considered to be Kipling's best book, while A Passage to India is often considered to be Forster's best. Both novels are set in India and mark the shift in attitude between Victorianism and what we perceive as Modernity: Kipling was in the rear guard defending Empire, while Forster was in the van guard of anti-imperialism. Forster's friend Lynton Strachey mocked the great and the good of the late nineteenth century in Eminent Victorians (1918) and Forster supported the Indian independence movement.

The period 1905-10 saw the appearance of four novels: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). The Longest Journey (1907). A Room With a View (1908) and Howard's End (1910). In these novels he developed the theme of what might nowadays be called cross-cultural communication. Forster's characters are restless and unfulfilled because they are trapped by their mode of life or shackled by an insular conservatism. He made a distinction between tourists and travellers in that a traveller is prepared to come into close contact with other cultures, linguistically and emotionally, while a tourist merely observes.

Forster visited India for the first time in 1912-13 together with Syed Ross Masood who employed him as a tutor. During the First World War he served in the Red Cross and was stationed in Alexandria, Egypt, from 1915. Here he met the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and had a homosexual affair with an Egyptian tram driver. In 1921-22 Forster returned to India where he acted as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, this period giving him the material for A Passage to India.

 
The title of the novel is taken from Walt Whitman, who wrote on the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 that it heralded the meeting of East and West. The story concerns the visit of Adela Quested to Chandrapore in the company of Mrs Moore. They accept an invitation from Dr Aziz, the local British surgeon's assistant, to visit the mysterious Marabar Caves. During this visit Adela undergoes something akin to a mystical experience while listening to the echo of the caves. Mrs Moore almost faints and believes she has gone mad for a moment. Adela feels she has been sexually assaulted and Aziz is consequently arrested for rape, yet at the trial, Adela withdraws all charges and Aziz is freed. Exactly what happened in the Marabar Caves remains a mystery.

 
The philosopher G. E. Moore (1852-1933), a leading figure in the Bloomsbury Group, influenced Forster's view on the importance of personal relationships to the extent that Forster later claimed that, should he be faced with the choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country (Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951). Perhaps the well-known quote from Howard's End, ‘only connect’, is also intended to stress the importance of personal relationships, as well as the importance of making a genuine Connection with the culture in which one lives -something which Adela in A Passage to India is unable to do.

Forster was concerned to address issues such as oppression, prejudice, intolerance and misunderstanding wherever he found them, including in the culture of India under British rule. But V. S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize winner of Indian descent born in Trinidad, claimed that Forster knew little of India beyond a few middle-class Indians and the garden boys whom he wished to seduce.

Although he gave up writing novels after A Passage to India, Forster continued to produce essays and stories and was involved in P.E.N. - the international association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists - over which John Galsworthy presided. He also served as the first chairman of the National Council for Civil Liberties and campaigned against the suppression of Radclyff Hall's novel of lesbian love ‘The Well of Loneliness’ in 1928.

 In the early 1930s the Bloomsbury Group came under attack from the critic F. R. Leavis, writing in the Cambridge literary magazine Scrutiny, Leavis accused the Bloomsbury set of being dilettante and ivory tower artists, after which they lost fashionable appeal, though interest in them re-emerged in the 1960s. Forster indeed belonged to a rarefied group of intellectuals whose pursuits and lifestyles were made possible by private incomes and this was at a time of economic depression when the spectres of Communism and Fascism were stalking Europe and unemployment provoked hunger marches.

 

 

Scott F Fitzgerald

 

Scott F Fitzgerald, American short story writer and novelist, is best known for his depiction of the ‘Jazz Age’ of the 1920s. His own reckless, excessive lifestyle came to symbolise the 'Roaring Twenties', characterised first by glitter and glamour, then by the decadence and destruction of self-indulgence,which he depicted in his novels and short stories. He, along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, is now known in critical circles as one of the “Big Three” American authors of the first half of the twentieth century. The American classic The Great Gatsby is the best known and most popular of Fitzgerald's works, Written in 1925, it is a criticism of the moral emptiness and corruption of wealthy American society during the Jazz Age.

 
With the outbreak of the First World War Fitzgerald signed up for officers training, and entered the United States army as a second lieutenant. In the army he continued to pursue his literary aspirations. Convinced he would not live through the war if he saw com bat, he hurriedly wrote his first novel, The Romantic Egotist. The rejection letter from Charles Scribner's Sons praised the novel's originality and encouraged him to revise his work.

When ‘This Side of Paradise’ was published in 1920, the 24-year-old Fitzgerald became famous overnight and got married. Sudden prosperity gave them the opportunity to play roles in wealthy society. In 1920 This Side of Paradise captured the post-war disillusionment of Fitzgerald's generation and revealed the new morality of the young.

The Beautiful and Damned (1921) chronicled the decline of a beautiful and privileged couple into degeneration and damnation, foreshadowing the Fitzgeralds own downward drift. Fearing a similar end, they escaped the chaos by moving to the French Riviera in 1924. Shortly after their arrival, Fitzgerald finished his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).

The last completed novel ‘Tender is the Night’ (1934), Fitzgerald's most ambitious novel, examines the deterioration of a brilliant American psychiatrist who marries one of his wealthy patients. Through fictional alter egos, the book portrays Zelda's breakdown and Fitzgerald's decline.

 
In 1937 Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. Sheila Graham, a famous gossip columnist, became his mistress. His Hollywood experience inspired The Last Tycoon (1941), with its hero, Monroe Stahr. based on the producer Irving Thalberg. The novel was Fitzgerald's last attempt to depict his vision of the American Dream and a character who could realise it. He died in 1940, aged 44, of a heart attack, with his novel only half finished. His brief life is a tragic, eloquent symbol of the allure and calamity of self-indulgence. Zelda Fitzgerald died in 1948 in Ashville, North Carolina, in a fire at Highland Hospital. 

 

 

William Faulkner

 

William Faulkner emerged as a budding poetic talent while in high school, writing in a style derivative of Robert Burns, Swinburne and A. E. Housman. He left high school before graduating, and by the time he published his first novel in 1926.

 In 1924, with the help of his friend and literary mentor Phil Stone, Faulkner published a volume of poetry The Marble Faun. His first novel Soldiers’ Pay was written in the following year and published in 1926. Based partially on his brief experience in the RAF, it was about the homecoming of a fatally wounded aviator.

After a brief tour of Europe and the publication of a second novel, Mosquitoes (1927). Faulkner decided to write more about his native region and to use the local lore and family tales that he had absorbed during his childhood and adolescence. He fictionalised the region under the invented name ‘Yoknapatawapha County’ drawing on both regional geography and his family history, particularly his great-grandfather's military exploits. The first novel to explore this setting was Sartoris (1929), and from then on few of his works were set outside Yoknapatawpha.

 
Faulkner's next novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), shows the emergence of themes that would recur throughout his fiction. Through the account of the slow decline of a prominent family, the novel explores the decadence of the American South after the Civil War, and the slow dissolution of traditional values and authority. The technical innovation displayed in the novel shows the influence of Modernist writers (Faulkner was a great admirer of James Joyce). The four parts of the novel are narrated by three brothers, and an idiot who has a weak grasp of the concept of time. This allows Faulkner to employ a range of styles, and freely move the narrative back and forth between past and present.

 
Faulkner had written another novel, Sanctuary, earlier in 1929, but had to wait until 1931 before it was published in a heavily revised form, because of its controversial subject matter. Dealing with the abduction and rape of a young woman, Sanctuary attempts to portray the sordidness and violence which he saw as features of the South's moral degeneration. His professed reason for writing it was to make money, and indeed Sanctuary remained his best-selling book for a long time.

 

The technical experimentation of The Sound and the Fury was taken farther in ‘As I Lay Dying’ (1930), a tour de force which Faulkner claimed to have written in six weeks, without changing a word. The novel deals with the death of a matriarch in a poor Southern family, and her wish to be buried in Jefferson, ‘a hard day's ride away’ to the north. The narrative consists of the streams of consciousness of 15 characters, organised into 59 chapters, describing the death and the family's subsequent journey with the body.

Faulkner seems to have wanted to write a novel called Dark House, and his manuscripts bear evidence that he started writing it at least twice. The first attempt introduced the theme of racial difference, which gained prominence in his later works. Through the depiction of Joe Christmas, an orphan of uncertain racial origin, Lena Grove, a pregnant girl who is on a quest to find her child's father, and other marginalised characters of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner produced a tightly structured tale which was published in 1932 as Light in August.

 
The second manuscript which Faulkner originally called Dark House became an enormously complex and self-conscious narrative in which four principal narrators (one of them being Quentin Compson who is also one of the narrators in The Sound and the Fury) try to put together pieces of evidence in their reconstruction of the mystery behind the life and death of the demonic Thomast Sutpen, killed more than 40 years earlier. The novel, finally called Absalom, Absalom! (1936), can be read as addressing problems of textuality and reading strategy, an exploration of how meaning is created through interpretation.

He wrote the screenplays for Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and collaborated with Jean Renoir on the latter's ‘The Southerner’.

The publication of Go Down, Moses in 1942 is sometimes regarded as marking the end of Faulkner's so-called ‘great decade’ of writing. Faulkner insisted that Go Down, Moses was a novel, although it consisted of several short stories, many of them previously published, involving diverse characters spanning a century in the history of Yoknapatawpha County. At the centre of the book is the story 'The Bear', arguably Faulkner's best-known short work. His later works are generally considered to be weak, although Faulkner himself regarded A Fable (1954), an intricate symbolic narrative about a reincarnation of Christ during a French soldiers' mutiny in the trenches of the First World War, that took him more than ten years to complete, to be his masterpiece. Along with Pylon (1935) and The Wild Palms (1939), it was also one of the few mature works by him that did not have Yoknapatawpha County as their setting.

Among his later works is the so-called 'Snopes Trilogy', consisting of The Hamlet (1940). The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). The trilogy portrays the ruthless rise to power of a new 'redneck' middle class in the South, embodied in the character of the avaricious and ambitious Flem Snopes, which had little regard for tradition. Requiem for a Nun (1951), a semi-dramatic sequel to Sanctuary written in collaboration with Joan Williams, earned the distinction of being adapted for the stage by Albert Camus in 1956.

Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, and became an increasingly public figure, being chosen by the US State Department as a cultural ambassador and asked to undertake goodwill tours abroad. As well as several other awards and medals, Faulkner received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature twice.