John Fowles: The Journals, 1966-1990

The first volume ends with Fowles's success with his first published novel, "The collector"; and follows his most successful years commercially until his wife's death in 1990; yet we learn from the diaries that these are not necessarily equally successful in terms of peace and happiness. John and Elizabeth leave London for East England; and the tone of the journals shifts from that of an involved participant to that of an observer. This of course is not to say that one causes the other; but rather both the move and the shift are caused by Fowles's inability and unwillingness to fit into the increasingly materialistic and removed style of life - that he observes not only in London, but also in his self-imposed exile in Lyme Regis; as well as in the US in Los Angeles, Florida, and Boston.

4 January 1966, Boston
… we feel enveloped by the Roman generosity to favored guests. Once again the Roman qualities of America overwhelm one: everything based on power, on mean gold rather than the gold mean. America is in a way the inability to think of gold metaphorically.

18 January 1966
The sexlessness of American women - there is a sort of compact well-groomed hardness about them, a sexiness learned by recipe, an assertiveness that really asserts the opposite of what is intended: a queasy masculinity rather than an offered femininity. Of course men (and the whole society) must partly cause this; but it is distressing how few rebels there are. How so many women here assume their Americaneity. No quietness, no tenderness.

22 January 1966
We drove to Miami Beach, where a monstrous regiment of huge hotels stand whitely against the stale Carribean. To see the size and vulgarity of these establishments, the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc, the Doral, is the only reason to go to the place: they are so vile, so nightmarish, so (alas) American, that they cannot be missed. In a way it is the city of the dead - all the people there are old, uninspired, industrial debris. In the lifts the women of fifty and sixty stand like cattle. One has to push them aside to get out. They drift round the lounges like somnambulists, from meal to meal, from room to room, bound, chained, as the black slaves were once chained in the slave ships, to a moronic routine in a moronic world.
In a way it is a European city, a monument to the dream of countless generations of unprivileged European peasants. They dreamt of an aristocratic city like Venice, perhaps; and they translated it, when they had the chance, into Miami.

5 November 1966 Lyme Regis
The fault of our society has been to emancipate women but to refuse to furnish (to train them for) their freedom. They are to be equal to us; but the only equality offered them is ours, the male definition (in social and career terms) of the concept. So the only ones who gain are the masculine type, the ones who can copy them. All that has happened to the true women is that they have been turned out, like so many cage birds, into a world where they cannot fend for themselves.

15 January 1967 London
Dinner with Twiggy, the latest idiocy in the fashion world. Impossible, really, to dislike her. Such innocence. Once can no more blame her than a bird for pecking fruit-buds.

31 October 1968 London, upon meeting Denys Sharrocks
Then he confessed that he has written a few commencing pages of a telly play recently, but 'as soon as I was back in my office on Monday, I had all the pressure of reality on me'. It's rather like some free man saying, I couldn't do it because I had to report to the Tower to be racked. I mean there is something medieval in his determination to be determined by what he hates.

1 November 1969 Boston
We toured around antique shops that day. New England has lost its charm for me. Not that the houses and architecture are any less pretty, but I hadn't noticed before the poverty of culture - in all this area, no animals. No cows, no horses, no sheep. No fields. Nobody walking. Nobody working their gardens. Just the quiet endless flow of cars. Everybody going somewhere but arriving nowhere. They seem to me like people in a dream, quite unaware of how narrow and imprisoned their way of life is. At one antique shop there was a herb garden: a sudden human touch. Thyme, chamomile, marigold, mint. And old woman made it.

19 November 1969 San Francisco
The pleasure of seeing - we arrived about five - office-workers streaming home on foot; the scaled down buildings, even the slow-moving traffic. It is very noticeable, the humanity of people's faces here. This is still a human, a concerned, an honorable city. One that knows it is in danger; eyed, after Los Angeles's blindness.

29 December 1970 Lyme Regis, after a friend's visit
From the moment he gets up he discussed ideas, opinions, definitions - no wonder they finally gave Socrates his glass of hemlock. One can stand just so much of this furiously intellectual, mental approach to life.

24 March 1983 Lyme Regis, upon reading Matin Amis
Nausea, in the Sartrean sense, seems far from dead; and a decided cold shoulder turned on any humanist view of life - tolerance, generosity, and classical observer role for the writer. There is a marked shift away from the common reader-writer assumption into a generally waspish personal hatred of all that is not similarly waspish. A literary century gone very sour.

24 March 1988 London, upon visiting the zoo
Its cruelty, for the mammals, is what strikes one: their various cage neuroses; the jerboas springing monotonously against the glass, even the endlessly circling, pointlessly darting fish. Hell haunts so many cages, once one starts translating them into human terms; that we should condemn so many species to look like this, half-live like this.

23 May 1988 London
To London. That long south-western approach, from Basingstoke on, confirms me in my hatred of the Great Wen; the endless suburbia, overcrowding, antheap of it. Only a sick race on a sick planet could not see the folly the human race has lead itself into, the city mania, the way need for money and economic success has perverted every decent value. In London you see it also, a kind of a fixed look, half-avaricious, half-determined, in the people going home from the office; of the trapped in a certain way of life.

26 July 1989 Lyme Regis
In form I might belong to humankind; in reality I seemed one of a ravenous self-destroying horde of rats. I am glad there is no god. If there were I cannot imagine that we rampant, myopic and insatiably self-centered creatures should be allowed to survive a single day more.