John Fowles

John Fowles0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

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For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1981.

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And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

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On our Desert Island this week is the writer John Fowles.

Presenter0:34

mister Fowles, how well could you endure loneliness?

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I think fairly well. First of all, all novelists' lives are extremely lonely. I in particular have always liked solitude.

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And many years ago I seriously contemplated writing a new version of Robinson Crusoe in in which the castaway would uh his great worry would not be getting off the island, but staying on the island, not being discovered.

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How important is music in your life?

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Well, I perform very badly on the recorder. Uh this for rather peculiar reasons. I find when I'm writing that to break off and play a little music

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Is very relaxing. And I'm also very fond of Elizabethan music.

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And um so I break off every so often when I'm working very hard and play music for half an hour. Do you ever play record while you're working?

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I don't any more. Pure music's all right, but I find anything with voice in is distracting. I used to play Bach a lot. Uh, I found Bach uh but it but th then I began to feel that this was a terrible abuse of

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The man whom to my mind is the greatest composer, and I don't do it now. If I play Bach now, it's to listen to him. Do you collect records?

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In a mild sort of way, yes. What's the first one you've chosen for your solitude?

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Well, I'd like to choose a flamenco record, partly because all my generation had to wait a long time before they went abroad, because we were in our teens during the Second World War. And abroad hit us, I think, in a way that perhaps modern young people can hardly imagine. And I first went to France and Spain when I was quite well into my twenties, and I can remember the excitement of hearing sort of folk music played for the first time. And I remember going to Andalusia and hearing Flamenco played. Ever since it's worried me slightly that it's become slightly bastardised and vulgarised. But this first record I've chosen is a very old recording and it does take me back to those days.

Speaker 42:59

Caste celebrate the city.

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Belarias, the guitarist Nino Riccardo.

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Now, you were born in Essex, near the Thames estuary? Yes, at Lyoncy. Do you consider yourself a a town boy or a country boy by upbringing?

Presenter3:29

Well, uh if you were born at Lyoncy, you have to say you had a suburban upbringing. But what saved me was moving in the war to Devon, where I did live in a Devon village. And I I would say everything

John Fowles3:38

And I I would say every

Presenter3:41

About me is really more of the country than the town. Uh during term time you were at Bedford School. You had the BBC Symphony Orchestra there during the war. That's right, yes. And I have the unique honour of having once hit Sir Adrian Bolt on his bald head with a five ball. He's rather fun watching us play fives and uh one day uh a ball somehow got through a hole in the netting and struck him on the head.

Speaker 43:49

But

John Fowles3:49

In the lowest.

John Fowles3:57

You dropped

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Did you get into rehearsals? I believe they rehearsed in the Great Hall. Well, I've for a time I was head boy and uh I was lucky. We we could get in and uh I I had some, yes, marvellous music. Yes, head boy, you knew power and glory as a youngster.

John Fowles4:06

Uh

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Yes, and it put me off it for the rest of my life. Um I I was lucky, I was a kind of little gauleiter or dictator at the age of eighteen, and I've never wanted that kind of life since. Now, in wartime there was no point in having ambitions for later life. You were automatically going into one of the services. Is that how you felt?

Presenter4:38

Well, it wasn't c yes, certainly one knew one had to do national service and I personally was vague about what I would do afterwards. Um head boys were sort of supposed to go into the Foreign Service or something like that. Um and inasmuch as I had any ideas, it was um You went into the Royal Marines, you took a commission, I suppose you'd taken Cert A and all that stuff while you were at school. Yes, yes. Yes, I had a place at Oxford which um meant you could be demobilized early then. What did you do during your time in the Marines?

John Fowles5:02

Yeah.

Presenter5:12

I didn't enjoy it, if I'm I'm frank. You know, I went through recruit training. Then I did the last year in the Marines I did enjoy because I was on Dartmoor training not commandos, but Marines who'd been picked to go into the commandos. It was sort of pre-commando training. But that that meant you spent most of your life wandering over Dartmoor, which was fine. I like that.

John Fowles5:25

Software.

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So you you got out of the marines quite early, the the war was over? I had a piece of good luck. Um one day the great Lord Mayor of Plymouth, Isaac Foote, Michael Foote's father, came to our camp. I was appointed uh his A D C for the occasion.

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And I told him that I didn't know what to do, that I could go to Oxford or I could possibly stay on in the Marines. And his answer was, anyone who's so stupid as to think he has a choice deserves to stay in the Marines. And coming from famous Lord Mayor, that was a very valuable piece of advice. I took it. Right, up to Oxford. Why did you read French?

John Fowles6:05

Perhaps.

Presenter6:10

Mainly because I'd done it at school. I s have never had much aptitude for mathematics and in those days that kind of choice was decided very early for when at school. We took highest cert at the age of fifteen then, I think. And I did French and German, in fact. But when I got to Oxford, we were allowed to drop German. And so I went on with French. Let's have your second record. What shall that be? Well, it is a French record. In fact, I could take this composer's entire works, I think, because I'm very fond of him, and it's Couperin. And I like the poetry of his work and the humour.

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So I would certainly take one of his records. And the one I've chosen is called Les Barricade Mysterieuse, The Mysterious Barricades. Like many of his titles, it's slightly enigmatic, um and so is the music.

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The Mysterious Barricades from Couperin's Sweet for Harpsichord, Number six in B flat, played by Robert Veyron Lacroix. Now, apart from French, what were your interests in Oxford?

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Well, I still play cricket a lot. I always had a mania for cricket. I did a lot of natural history as an amateur. I didn't do very much work, but very few of us did in those days. I'm talking about the late forties now. And I began to have an idea that perhaps I might one day write books. But again, that w was almost commonplace, certainly in the arts faculties at october. And in the meantime, what did you decide to do?

Presenter8:39

I had no idea really. Um what in fact happened was that um a position fell open at the University of Poitiers in France, so I went off for a year to um teach English. Enjoyable? I enjoyed it very much, yes. I made some good French friends there. I wasn't competent at all. I I must have been the worst university teacher of English in France, I should think. But um I enjoyed it, yes. And after that? After that I took another job, this time in Greece, where I worked in a I suppose it's most famous public school. It called itself the Eton of Greece. And I was there for nearly two years. Whereabout? It was on the island of Spezzi, which is off the Peloponnesus. It's about six hours boat ride from Athens.

John Fowles9:19

Yeah.

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Were they all Greek boys or was it a rather cosmopolitan? No, no, they were purely Greek boys. Yeah.

John Fowles9:30

Well no no they were

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And then you were taught in London.

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And then I came back and taught at an adult education college. Then I ended up at a a college in Hampstead where I taught the um foreign girls who came there. Again, English. Had you begun to write?

John Fowles9:46

Agamemnon

Presenter9:49

I began to write when I came back from Greece. And it was the novel form that appealed to you.

Presenter9:54

Well, I d I did try a travel book, in fact, about Greece, and I sent it to a then well-known agent who later became a very good novelist, Paul Scott. And I'm very grateful to him, because he he felt the book wasn't good enough as a travel book. But one section was written in fictional terms. And he said, This is good. You're a novelist. Try fiction. And that was, again, for a young writer, a very useful piece of advice.

John Fowles10:04

Hmm.

Presenter10:22

I believe you you showed some humility in in submitting your first novels, your first completed manuscript. I had no idea what would become of it. I d I think I knew somebody would publish it, but that it would be the bestseller it in fact was, uh did come as a surprise. What was that first book? The Collector. Right. Well, before we talk about that, let's have another record.

Presenter10:45

Well, I'm very fond of all Balkan music, but I would like to choose a record sung by a gypsy, Mariah Iron. It was recorded by the great folk musicologist A. Lloyd, and it's Romanian. And I like it because I find it very well sexy and erotic. In fact, I understand the words to say that I'm very lonely, I'm very drunk, and I'm very fed up. But it's the sound of it that I've always liked ever since I first heard it.

Speaker 411:15

Pin lives des blanc.

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Color war here?

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Read about one.

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A Romanian folk song sung in Romany by Maria Ion, and I'm sure it was recorded at three o'clock in the morning. Now the collector.

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A first novel which was an international success. This was taken by the first publisher to whom you sent it.

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Yes, it went to um

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Tom Mashler, Jonathan Cope, who has an excellent eye for novels and uh yes, he took it at once. A first impression was that it was a a first-rate psychological thriller about a a rather retarded man who kidnaps a girl and keeps her locked up in a cellar with tragic results. In fact, it also demonstrated your philosophical beliefs.

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It did. It it curiously enough, it was reviewed largely in the thriller.

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But of course I never intended to write a thriller. It really was about what I see as a biological problem with the human race. That is the um enormous variety of intelligence and culture that our societies and of course genetics bring about. And so it was really the conflict between stupidity and intelligence. Yes. But uh not meaning that stupidity is to be entirely blamed, and that intelligence is necessarily always right. Uh there were faults on both sides of the situation.

John Fowles12:43

Okay.

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Your next novel, The Maggers,

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This was a reworking of one you had written before.

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Well, it's really my first novel. Um it's just that it took me years and years and years to write. I had all sorts of problems with it. And so I wrote The Collector at one point and published that. And then the Magus came next as a novel. The Magus about an Englishman teaching on a Greek island. That sounds as if, as with most novels, there was a fair amount of autobiography in it.

Presenter13:35

Well, there really wasn't in this case I mean, th inasmuch as I have been in Englishman teaching on a Greek island. Yes, that's the most obvious parallel. But it it was an attempt to blend fantasy and realism. And it was a didactic book in a way. It was a teaching book. Um it was a kind of long sermon told in terms of an adventure story. A complex book which eleven years after its publication you decided to revise. That that's an unusual step.

Presenter14:07

Well, the book, as I say, I I was trying to write it all through the 1950s and I couldn't do it. And in the end, I more or less said, to hell with it, I'd better publish it, or I'm going to spend the rest of my life fiddling about with it. And the result was five or six years, I've forgotten, you've just said, however many years later. Well, eleven was the publication. Eleven years later, I thought it still isn't right. And it would be fun to go back to this book and to try and remelt it.

John Fowles14:25

However many years ago.

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to see if you can sort of get back in into the spirit with which you w wrote it and uh alter it. I think of it as a piece of furniture, you know, the joints were all bad, so I took it to bits and uh rejointed it and polished it and so on.

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After the Maggers came The French Lieutenant's Woman, which was another great success, but this was a a Victorian novel written with twentieth century know-how. Does that sum it up?

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Yes, it was deliberately written from two points in time, contemporary time and modern time.

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Set in in Lyme Regis, where you'll make your home? Set largely in in well, certainly in the west of England, yes. Set largely in Lyme.

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Now we waited eight years for your next novel, Daniel Martin, about a group of people in Oxford seen and flashback from the present day a book covering

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Thirty years. An equal success?

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It has an almost unique record in this country, because I think of twenty major reviews, nineteen were very bad.

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In America it did much better. It was a bestseller. And in fact readers in England did seem to like it. It did sell very well over here.

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For reasons I don't fully understand, it rubbed literally every English critic up the wrong way. Um that doesn't worry me because I'm not too happy about the critical situation in this country and I think any book which they all approved of would probably have very grave uh faults.

Presenter16:04

You have a a world reputation as a novelist. In fact, you have published only four in in seventeen years. But you've written other books, of course, which we'll talk about later. Is there another novel on the stocks?

John Fowles16:13

Yeah.

Presenter16:18

Well, there's several on the stocks in the sense that they're half, or even more than that, written. Um

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If I'm honest, I don't terribly enjoy being published. I love keeping manuscripts for year after year after year because you can take them out and you can always improve them if you have. You feel they're they're never really ready. They're never really ready. Even the ones I've published are not, in my mind, uh really ready.

John Fowles16:33

Yeah, that's all.

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Record number four.

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Well, I would like to choose what I I think is the best uh bit of film music ever written, although it was written uh a long, long time before the cinema was invented. And it's the famous Adagia from Vivaldi's um Lanate, The Night. He gave it a kind of nickname. The lago is called uh Sleep.

John Fowles16:58

Mm.

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And after sleep there's a sudden waking up, which I always love.

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Why do you call this film music?

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Of course I I I do find it very atmospheric and the orchestral colour is very strange. It's not exactly visual, but it it it has a very unusually in eighteenth century music, it has a very distinct mood.

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The logo, plus a little of the following allegro, from Vivaldi's La Notte, played by the Consentus Musicus of Vienna.

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Three of your four novels have been made into films. The Collector was made soon after publication with Terence Stamp and Samantha Egar.

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Very successful commercially as a film. Did you like it?

Presenter18:52

Well, it's not, I can tell you straight from the horse's mouth, it wasn't very successful commercially because I've never got uh any percentage from it. They managed to make it cost six million dollars, which is a quite well-known accounting enigma from Hollywood. Oh, dear. Uh it was quite successful. Uh I have mixed feelings about it. I do respect William Wyler, who's the director. I don't think it's one of his best films. And I think really, if I'm honest, uh it was miscast. I admire Terry Stamp as an actor, but I don't think he was quite right in that part.

John Fowles18:57

Possibly

John Fowles19:25

Type

Presenter19:28

Now the film of the Maggers with Michael Kane and Anthony Quinn, you wrote the screenplay yourself, so you had a degree of control, did you?

Presenter19:36

Well, I wouldn't say I had a degree of control. I certainly have a degree of responsibility for what was, in my view, a terrible film. Really a disaster all the way down the line. I mean, it's sad because the producers with whom I've stayed friends and the director, I mean, all meant well, the actors all meant well, but it just didn't come together. And to be fair, we had a marvellous location in Greece. The colonels took over. We couldn't get insurance and there had to be a hasty new location in Spain, which never helps. Did you go with it? I was there for a week or ten days in Spain, just at the very early days of shooting. The only good thing in the picture are the German soldiers in one scene, because they were all genuine SS men who'd actually hold up in Majorca when we shot it, so they were very authentic.

John Fowles20:19

Yeah.

Presenter20:23

Now, they've just completed shooting the French Lieutenant's Woman. Did you write the script for that? Not at all. Um in this case I I decided I must have one control. I think the one control writers should get, which is over who should be director. And to my delight we um have got the man I chose in the very first place, which is Carol Rice. Our first choice as script writer was always Harold Pinter and by great good luck we've got him as well. So um when you've got two men of that quality and calibre then you don't interfere too much. It's been a very friendly production. I mean I know what's been going on and we have discussed the script and so on.

John Fowles20:52

Uh

Presenter21:03

Now much of it was shot in Lyme Regis where you now live, so it was right underneath your windows. Yes, in one case only a hundred yards from my workroom, which was a strange experience. You had to go and see what was going on. I did, yes, occasionally, but um one thing no film director or unit likes or actor or actress is the original author hovering in the background. So I was very discreet about that. Right, back to discs. What next?

John Fowles21:18

I did

John Fowles21:27

Background.

Presenter21:32

Well, like perhaps all my generation, there's a great jazz voice for me which is Billie Holidays. So I would certainly like one of her records. And the one I've chosen is from those marvellous years, 36, 37. And the track is This Year's Kisses. I like this one because it's got a simple and rather appealing lyric. And it's also got, I think, the best backup group she ever had. Teddy Wilson, Lester Young, Buck Clayton, and so on.

Speaker 422:08

Crop up, kiss me.

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Don't seem less sweet to me.

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This year

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Crop just miss it.

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What kisses it used to be.

Presenter22:30

Billy Holiday.

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Now your other books. One volume of poems.

Presenter22:35

Yes. Published only in America. I just wanted to see what they'd look like in print and having seen them I

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Haven't published any more.

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And you publish three illustrated books, one about shipwrecks.

Presenter22:50

Yes. Um this is partly because I've always been rather fond of photography, not not as a practitioner myself, but um I'm interested in photography. And in each case th these books have been done with distinguished photographers. Shipwrecks from a marvellous collection of photos that were taken in Victorian times in the Scilly Isles.

John Fowles23:03

Shipper.

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And a book about Stonehenge. Now, this is a a subject that's been pretty well.

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chewed over through the years. Did did you feel you had something new to say about it? Certainly not about the scientific side of Stonehenge, which has been massively covered and researched. It was rather more that I wanted to write something about our approach to it.

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Because the situation has become very polarized. You've got the sort of pure scientists on one side and the rather silly mystics and believers and druids on the other. And um this seems to be rather unhealthy that you've got these two extreme schools.

Presenter23:44

And uh it's the kind of project I enjoy, you know, researching it. Um at the same time I was helping to edit John Albury's Monumenta Britannica, which is the great seventeenth century text about antiquities in Britain. This is the brief lives, man, of course. The the famous brief uh lives merchant. Marvellous human being, he's uh full of faults but uh full of great virtues. Yes, and this has never been published before.

Presenter24:11

Well, it's a very considerable enterprise because there are two vast notebooks in the Buddley and the library and we're doing a facsimile edition and uh although archaeologists have always known about it and consulted it, um a complete facsimile edition has never been done and this really is a work of scholarship for scholars. A very expensive book I'm afraid. Record number six.

Presenter24:35

Well, I'd like to choose a record we used to hear on BBC radio a lot in the 1950s. It used to introduce a folk music programme. And I've I've always loved folk music from all over the world. And this is sung by Sarah Makeum as I roved out on a May morning. And it comes from the famous song Seventeen Come Sunday.

Presenter24:58

And I remember listening to this programme, not so much for the music as always wanting to hear this signature tune on it.

Speaker 325:04

As I roamed out on a May morning, And a May morning right early

Speaker 325:11

I met my love upon the way, O Lord, but she was rarely

Speaker 325:18

And she sang Liltadle, Liltadurd, Liltadird, Dee, And she hate Landa Dee, and she hate Landa Dee, and she landed.

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Her boots was black, and her stockings white, her buckles shone like silver.

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She had a dark and a rolling eye, And her earrings tipped her shoulder

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And she sang Liltadird, Liltadird, Little Dirdee, and she had Landa Dee, and she had Landa Dee, and she landed.

Presenter25:53

Sarah Make'em, a folk song from Ireland, as I robed out on a May Morning, or Seventeen Come Sunday.

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Now you talked about this work of scholarship that you've been.

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Occupied with John Aubrey's Monumentum Britannica, you are indeed an antiquary of some distinction. You you run or helped to run the local museum in Lion Regis. Yes, yes, I'm the honorary curator. It it's a town which has a very long and complicated history. It's uh it's really not much larger than a village now, but um it was um a major port in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, uh to be ranked with Portsmouth and Plymouth and Southampton. And we have also magnificent archives which have never been fully researched. How far do they go back? They go back uh they're very full, certainly back to about fifteen fifty and uh they're some older ones still.

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We got to record number seven.

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Well, the one I

Presenter26:53

What I'd like to have next is um one of the saddest, most poetic pieces of all jazz piano music by by the strange

Presenter27:02

Player Jimmy Yancey, who had a great influence on the development of Boogie Woogie later, but I think he's uh

Presenter27:10

Siri Generous, he's he's one of a kind, and nobody's ever played the piano quite like him. And I've always loved this little piece called At the Window.

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Jimmy Yancey playing at the window

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Do you follow any open air pursuits which could be of use to a castaway?

Presenter28:26

Could you look after yourself?

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I don't know, but as a

Presenter28:32

schoolboy and young man, I was a fanatical killer of birds, beasts and also a keen fisherman. So I think from that point I used to poach a lot, I'm afraid. So I think from that point of view I'd be all right. Your marine training of course should help.

John Fowles28:42

From that point of view

Presenter28:46

A little bit, yes.

Presenter28:48

Would you try to escape?

Presenter28:51

Don't think so. You would just enjoy the island? I think I'd just enjoy the island.

Presenter28:56

What's your last record?

Presenter28:58

Well, I would must have one piece by Bach, and I can't say that this isn't his greatest music, but it's a piece I'm particularly fond of, partly because it's played by a musician I admire very much, the great Dutch flute and recorder player, Frantz Brueggen. And it's the slow movement from one of the trio sonatas for two transverse flutes. And this particular record is is played on period instruments, so the sound is a little peculiar at times, but I'm very fond of it.

Presenter30:24

The Adagio from Bach's trio sonata for two transverse flutes, Franz Brueggen and Leopold Stasny. If you could take only one disc.

Presenter30:34

Which were baptists?

Presenter30:36

Well, if I'm being absolutely honest, it wouldn't be any I've actually chosen. Uh certainly the one I would take above all others would be um the Goldberg. Goldberg variations. Why didn't you include that in your Army? Because I feel the greatest reverence for that music, because I do also for some late Beethoven, and I've I would not allow short passages to be played from it. Um I I think music of that calibre you listen to in its entirety, not in snatches.

John Fowles30:40

Well

John Fowles30:46

We'll work variations in Park.

John Fowles30:49

Pickles.

John Fowles31:00

Probably.

Presenter31:07

and you're allowed to take one luxury.

Presenter31:10

Well, my luxury I think would be a good pair of field glasses, because my sight's not too good and I depend on them very much when I'm in the country here. One book, putting aside the Bible and Shakespeare.

Presenter31:23

Well there again I have no difficulty. I would choose the Dictionary of National Biography, which of course gives the biographies of every well-known Englishman from murderers to saints from the Erdogan. That's a good long read. Sixty something volumes, isn't it? Well no, it's now marvellously, thanks to the Oxford University Press, into microprint volumes. Oh that means to say you you've got to take a machine to read it. No, I I read it with the naked eye, but really they provide a magnifying glass with it and it it really has everything, that book. It has the whole of human life or English human life. As it's one work you can take the full scale set of volumes if you wish. Oh well uh that's very kind of you. Yes, I prefer that.

John Fowles31:49

No.

John Fowles31:53

Where does he?

John Fowles31:56

Yeah.

John Fowles31:57

Yeah.

John Fowles32:02

Yeah.

John Fowles32:03

What further

Presenter32:05

Not a bit, and thank you, John Files, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Presenter32:10

Goodbye everyone.

John Fowles32:19

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.