Biography: John Fowles has never believed in the Christian God or in any other god, except himself. He enjoys what he calls "playing the godgame", creating men and women in novels and making them do what he desires.
His first published novel, The Collector, is a realisation of his avowedly favourite erotic fantasy, "about imprisoning women underground".
"They rarely had a perverse feature," Fowles relates. "In their commonest and to me most pleasurable form they always constituted a sort of wooing - that is, the girl kidnapped gradually fell in love with me . . ."
Sometimes there were fantasies about a real princess. He "daydreamed of seducing Princess Margaret". He analyses that daydream as "an extreme example of the tendency to imagine a future in the most aristocratic (aesthetically and socially and artistically) of worlds".
Writing fiction, I am regrettably bound to admit, is the most selfishly introspective of the arts. There is much evidence in Eileen Warburton's admirably thorough authorised biography that Fowles, from youth to his 70s, has inhabited two worlds, the real one and the inner one of his imagination, and is narcissistically self-regarding in both.
Warburton is a resident of Newport, Rhode Island. This is her first book. It is well-written, based on access to Fowles's diaries and letters. He urged her to "tell the truth". Though she admires his novels, especially The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, and makes liberal use of his essays and other short works of non-fiction collected in Wormholes, the portrait she presents is not handsome.
Do not be bamboozled by the jacket photograph of the novelist as some sort of bohemian artist (see above). Under the wide-brimmed straw hat, the full, grizzled beard, the open collar, the loosely knotted kerchief and the exquisitely complacent smile lurks a conventionally class-conscious Englishman who claims to deplore England's obsessive class system. He squirmed under it in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, the home town he now repudiates as drearily suburban. If he acknowledged such social classification, he would have to label the parents he fled from as lower-middle-class, or just a tiny bit above that, perhaps, say, upper-lower-middle-class. His father, after legal training, sold tobacco, wholesale, of course. Fowles later advised aspiring authors to "kill your parents". Possibly a joke.
He was better educated, or at least more educated, than his father, much more than his mother, whose constant babbling he found "trivial". John went to Bedford, a minor public school, where he was head boy, entitled to cane his juniors. He read modern languages at Oxford, and did his compulsory National Service at the end of the second World War as a commissioned officer in the Royal Marines. He taught English in a provincial French university, in a boys' school on a Greek island and in a London school for young women who wanted to become secretaries.
It was in France that he read Camus and Sartre and became an existentialist, enabling him to believe he was free to do any damn thing he liked. A study of Freud caused him to feel Oedipal "nostalgia for incestuous relationship with my mother", in spite of her alleged triviality. At the Greek school he befriended an English fellow teacher and, behind his back, made love to his wife, eventually persuading her to abandon her husband and their small daughter. After agonising vacillating, Elizabeth got a divorce and John and she were married, even though he recognised that she was his social and educational inferior. He never let her meet his old Oxford friends. But she was the principal love of his life, for 31 years.
They moved to a 17th-century house in Lyme Regis, Dorset, close to a cliff overlooking the quay where the French lieutenant's woman (Meryl Streep in the movie) stood gazing out to sea. Elizabeth's commonsense literary criticism improved Fowles's fiction. The author was also greatly helped by a sympathetic editor, Tom Maschler, at Jonathan Cape. Success brought in plenty of money, yet there were domestic disturbances. Fowles complained of "the rage I feel that she will not admit that I live economically and emotionally by my imagination, her rage that I cannot see that I have 'reduced' her to a kitchen drudge".
"Elizabeth," Warburton writes, "had no love for Lyme, overrun by tourists and beachgoers in the summer and culturally desolate in the winter." In The Collector, a lepidopterist, unsatisfied by collecting butterflies, kidnaps a beautiful young woman and keeps her at his mercy in a dungeon beneath a country house. According to his journals, in his biographer's steadily worsening opinion, Fowles was "selfish, shy, icily reserved, self-absorbed, stiffly superior, harshly judgmental toward others . . ."
Elizabeth died of cancer, making Fowles feel that "He was Ulysses unbound, the sirens' prey". Not at all icily reserved, he welcomed a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate groupie into his bed. She took him for quite a ride, financially. Having married one Sarah Smith in 1998, he was able to write: "In virtually every way I am glad now I'm impotent; since at last it enables me to see women." He thought of women as "a nice, sympathetic sex", but he was determined to "resist their little tyrannies".
This is an eminently readable, good book, copiously illustrated, about what doesn't sound like a terribly pleasant man.
• Patrick Skene Catling's memoir, Better Than Working, has just been published by Secker & Warburg