The Journals: 1949-1965 - Couverture rigide

Fowles, John; Drazin, Charles

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1400044316 ISBN 13 : 9781400044313

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2005

Synopsis

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Part One
Oxford

63 Fillebrook Avenue, Leigh-on-Sea, 11 September 1949

This so dull life, mingled with hate and annoyance and pity. No attempt here at method or speed. The housework drags on all day - cleaning, hoovering, dusting, making beds, sewing, washing-up and so on. No one ever sits down before suppertime. It is wrong, but the smallness of the rooms and the house is so noticeable now. The nursery stuffed full of things, always untidy; the dining-room dark and gloomy - only the lounge is tolerable, and one never lives there. The cloistered life with no one to talk to, no one to laugh with - here I am like a hermit, and quite unnatural. An absolute craving for new faces, new meetings, new places. I would tell them so much, but a curious obstinacy prevents this. Always an air of mulish hostility.

24 September

Two beautiful things. A big, spacious sunset sky - elegant and not ostentatious, but curiously in the east, to the west nothing but a bank of low, dark clouds. The end of a Spergularia in the microscope - like a minute green saturn.1 A tiny shining ball with a ring of gauzy skin around it. Also the sails of some Thames barges half-hidden by mist. A curious thing. About to throw a piece of screwed-up paper into the yellow jug which serves as waste-paper basket, I said to myself, 'As much chance as you have of being genius.' It fell into the jug without a murmur, a 20 to 1 chance, at the least.

Another day of silence, listening to other people's trivialities - a dreadful hour at night when all the completely banal information gained from a visit of relatives is repeated and reviewed. Two mathematical impossibilities I should like to see. One, a graph of the words spoken by me each day over a year - the rise and fall would be eye-opening. Near zero here, and normal everywhere else. Two, a count of words spoken by my mother and myself - David and Goliatha!

The visit by unknown relations is frightening, slightly, to the ego, and being. I feel awkward, not because I feel superior, but because I feel that they feel I am. Probably oversensitivity. But they are definitely not at home with me.

Trying to get at oneself is a continual unwrapping - each new skin decreases steadily in beauty and value after it is exposed. Always the seed of truth, the maximum fulfilment of self, appears to be just beneath the next layer. Plainly there is no end to this unwrapping, but the sensation is damping.

Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature - a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: 'To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.'1 True, yet, poetry making is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.

25 September

3 a.m. Beautifully played New Orleans jazz, with clarinet in low register, and very jazzy tuba and cornet. Bessie Smith singing. This sort of stuff has in it the germ of music that will last.

Op. 55. Splendidly vigorous, with some of the secret lyricality of the last quartets.2

Writing fever. Can't get any university work done. Full of ideas for 'Cognac' and full of frustration at not having the time to do them. 'Cognac' must aim at being popular, with art overboard. The idea came all in two hours last night and this morning.

30 September

Another appalling half-hour of talk. When screaming was close. Talk of the utmost banality, on prices of mattresses, on Mrs Ramsey's daughter who married a doctor in Montreal. A few comments are made on poetry. So hopeless to try and explain. They would never understand. No mention of art can ever be developed in case we are 'highbrow' - God, how I hate that word! No philosophy is mentioned, without Thomas Hardy and Darwin getting dragged in. It is la mere. Her attitude to conversation is one of complete alertness. I must break in, and I must say something - and in she breaks and says something, whether she has any knowledge, real opinion or not. It is with great difficulty that I can keep my oyster silence. But I must not hurt. With le pere, it is partly a defence; modernity is ignored, age is suspicious of invention.

I feel violent with 'hate' against this bloody town. Least violent, now, against the geographical situation (once I longed for Devon), most against the way of life, and then the people who allow it to sap all the beauty of life out of them. All my sympathy goes out to the boy who ran away to be a bullfighter. I'm sure he must have 'felt' the complete horror of this place. This town can have as much horror mentally for a sensitive person as a blitzed city may have, physically, for a turnip. It is the unsociability, the not-knowing-anyone, the having-no-colour, that kills. No interesting people to talk to, no sincere people, no unusual things to do.

Then there is 'niceness' as a standard of judgement - God, how I hate that word, too! - 'a nice girl', 'a nice road'. Nice = colourless, efficient, with nose glued to the middle path, with middle interests, dizzy with ordinariness. Ugh!

Oxford, 6 October

Reread some early poems. All bad. It is like seeing oneself in a film walk naked through a crowded street.

But then to feel oneself unfolding, like a flower.

7 October

Lunch with Guy Hardy and Basil Beeston and a serious Pole.1 In the Kemp. I cannot concentrate on those with whom I happen to be. Always there are more interesting people at the next table. Beautiful women to be watched. G and BB seem so set up in the world - they sit on a terrace by the sea and I drift past, watching them, jealous, unhappy. Yet I have the jewel. I may drift to even-more-to-be-coveted terraces, and land.

*

Immortality is a convention, a white elephant. A futility. There is no logic in planning for it. No enjoyment, no beauty can come out of it. All life should be designed to be contained within life. Within the closed circle. Outside the theatre, the bouquets won't be seen. The turnip who gains fame in his life, and lives, has an immense superiority over the poet who becomes famous after his death, and obscurely exists. Immortality is the gravestone of the spirit. What use is the gravestone?

5 November

Guy Fawkes night. A great crowd of people, vaguely contented at shaking off the discipline of the world as it is. The undergraduates form the largest part, for the most part just watching, with a few active spirits shouting, calling, singing, making speeches. A certain air of forcedness about all these crowds. Fireworks shooting up, and people exploding away from them when they land. The police and the proctors standing ineffectively. Buses moving slowly, cars being rocked and thumped. Many climb up the scaffolding around the Martyr's Memorial,1 then a vague move is made to the Taj Mahal restaurant where there is a man climbing up, men shouting, and a solid mass of people. Water out of the windows.

Basically one cannot help feeling contempt for all this canaille, noisily and offensively drunk yet not doing anything positive. Most of them posturing in a ridiculous manner. A good many girls, who seem the most genuinely excited.

To a certain extent there is a vast good will that can be sensed; roughly everyone is together and enjoying themselves, with the police and the proctors symbolizing all kinds of emotion and, ultimately, the determinism in life. GH and BB both enjoy themselves, and look for some means to manifest their lawlessness. I have absolutely no desire to do anything else but watch, wanting to be everywhere and see everything, observing people's faces. Roger Hendry2 is like me but not so finely 'set', for he has to pretend to a certain lawlessness which isn't innate in him at all.

Too many of the faces are vacuous and want filling.

The sight of the girl in green, about whom I wrote the Hospital story, with a thick well set-up young man, is distressing. Above all the sight of the moon, nearly full, in a clear night sky, not particularly cold, after a dull, rainy day. I wanted very much to see one of the people who climbed the Memorial fall down to his death. The indrawn breath and sudden laugh would have been most effective.

12 November

A self-searching night at the Podges1, with Faith.

Faith, a curious kind of extrovert, conversation-dominating, with the same strident rise in pitch (when she wishes to break in on top of anyone else) as M. Confidential, bold, tomboyish - revealing about her monastic father, whom she says worries her greatly at times.

Podge and Eileen are a perfect duo; in harmony or perfect discord.

During this evening (having felt ill all day, with a certain amount of pain) I keep very quiet and feel unable to assert myself in any way. Not particularly self-conscious and oversensitive but lacking more than lost colour. Two mes: ego, thinking with and at tangents from the others, full of the right words, curious ideas and so on; and the alter ego, not being able to break into the discussions.

An empty walk home with Faith, yawning myself and she whistling and singing.3 I feel a vague need to explain myself, and also to know what she is thinking. A wet, warm, windy night.

I can feel more concretely a philosophy of life on occasions like these. To be persuasive, to watch and analyse, externally; internally, to record and create. It is absolutely necessary to remain balanced; that is, never to become submerged completely - always to have the intention of creating beauty for others, however reduced this infusion into action and socie...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In 1963, John Fowles won international recognition with The Collector, his first published novel. In the years following—with the publication of The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Ebony Tower, and his other critically acclaimed works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—Fowles took his place among the most innovative and important English novelists of our time. Now, with this first volume of his journals, which covers the years from 1949 to 1965, we see revealed not only the creative development of a great writer but also the deep connection between Fowles’s autobiographical experience and his literary inspiration.

Commencing in Fowles’s final year at Oxford, the journals in this volume chronicle the years he spent as a university lecturer in France; his experiences teaching school on the Greek island of Spetsai (which would inspire The Magus) and his love affair there with the married woman who would later become his first wife; and his return to England and his ongoing struggle to achieve literary success. It is an account of a life lived in total engagement with the world; although Fowles the novelist takes center stage, we see as well Fowles the nascent poet and critic, ornithologist and gardener, passionate naturalist and traveler, cinephile and collector of old books.

Soon after he fell in love with his first wife, Elizabeth, Fowles wrote in his journal, “She has asked me not to write about her in here. But I could not not write, loving her as I do. . . . What else I betrayed, I could not betray this diary.” It is that determined, unsparing honesty and forthrightness that imbues these journals with all the emotional power and narrative complexity of his novels. They are a revelation of both the man and the artist.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400044316
• ISBN 13: 9781400044313
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 668