John Fowles apologises, especially to academics, for the "higgledy-piggledy nature" of this collection of essays and occasional pieces, yet throughout it he gives the impression that he holds all his works in the highest esteem.
"One can no more think of making fiction without onanism, or selfishness," he writes, "than of the sea without waves." He declares that he is an atheist "endlessly fascinated by religion" who plays "the godgame of writing fiction". It seems that Fowles creating novels, such as The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieu- tenant's Woman, is like a god masturbating. I merely offer a synthesis of his own statements.
A widower, a recluse (except when travelling abroad and attending literary festivals), Fowles lives alone as "a romantic in exile" in a "green, regenerative retreat", according to his editor, Jan Relf. "Solitude," Fowles says, "- in exile geographically and socially - is essential for me." But it was a fellow novelist and friend, Peter Benson, a resident of a village near Fowles's home in Lyme Regis, in Dorset, who suggested the book's title, Wormholes. In a preface, Fowles explains:
"He was, of course, using the word in the sense of the new physics, as defined in the OED: `a hypothetical interconnection between widely separated regions of space-time'. That seemed at least metaphorically appropriate, since the complex space-time I live in is, though perhaps remote from that of any modern physicist, that of my own imagination." Notice that wonderful "of course".
"All serious writers," he goes on, "are endlessly seeking for the wormholes that will connect them to other planes and worlds." Fowles is a hermit connected with the widely separated regions inside his own head and the whole universe. However, he reveals a compensatory sense of waggishness. He says he lives in an old house and collects old books, so he understands the old meaning of wormholes, and the title enables him sometimes to smile. Even serious writers enjoy moments of frivolity.
Fowles read French at Oxford and considers himself to be a European writer, "what I call a mega-European (Europe plus America plus Russia plus wherever else the culture is essentially European)". He quotes from "an obscure French novel" he translated in 1977: "Ideas are the only motherland." That sentence is "the most succinct summary I know of what I believe," but he adds: "Perhaps believe is the wrong verb - if you are without national feeling, if you find many of your fellow countrymen and most of their beliefs and their institutions foolish and antiquated, you can hardly believe in anything, but only accept the loneliness that results."
He is "an evolutionary socialist" and a feminist who hopes that the United States becomes the world's first gynocracy, but he is a non-joiner who feels that even only one person more than "Ithou" is a mob.
Like one of his few literary heroes, D.H. Lawrence, Fowles prefers art to science, feeling to knowing. He obviously enjoys slinging words around in his own idiosyncratic ways. The products are sometimes inelegant, as when he writes that "robinhoodism is a practicalisation of Nazarene Christianity", and when, like an undergraduate philosopher, he tries to make ordinary words seem more significant by tacking on the suffix "ness": "eachness", "otherness", "existingness", "echo ingness", "nowness", etc, ad nauseam.
You might well be able to save yourself from major irritation by visiting a bookshop and having a look at the jacket of Wormholes. On the back, there is a large colour photograph, a portrait of the artist as an old man, wearing a quilted jacket, a floral shirt, a polka-dot neckerchief, a wide-brimmed straw hat and a grizzled beard. Then you might ask yourself whether you really want an I-thou relationship with this literary Narcissus.
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
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