John Fowles’ Desk

I was recently asked to contribute to a podcast about the John Fowles novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which it is now a huge pleasure to re-read again. The last significant reminder I had of my time working with John – on the published version of his journal – was about ten years ago, when I encountered his old desk in the reading-room of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

It was a magical desk. But quite a transformation had occurred since the previous time I had seen it. Transported five thousand miles across the ocean, snatched away from its natural habitat, it had become a dead, trapped thing. There was a “DO NOT TOUCH” sign next to the typewriter that no one was allowed to use, and acrylic glass covers prevented access to the drawers. It was hardly the fault of the Harry Ransom Center, which, after all, was only seeking to protect a famous writer’s desk for posterity – along with his literary papers and the two million words of his complete, unabridged journal – but it was sad to think that the desk’s living life was over: the black burn marks of John’s old cigarettes would remain the last signs of any activity.

It was an old fossil now, like the ones that John wrote about in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Take this description, for example, of the wretched Charles Smithson irreversibly pinning down his life, which – by one of those algorithm-defying moments of serendipity – I read only this morning at the end of the book’s shortest chapter: “He was one of life’s victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned to a fossil.”

That strange moment of auld lang syne in Texas, and reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman now, have brought back to me the time when flights of imagination from John Fowles’ desk were still possible, when I had been able to sit at it myself, having been lucky enough to get to know the writer who had put it to such good use.

And especially, I think back to a springtime day when John took me on a tour of his domain.

Overlooking Cobb Harbour and the infinity of the sea beyond,  Belmont – the house in Lyme where John Fowles once lived – seemed less to have been built than to have grown out of the hillside. It was a special place, where the lure of the sea exerted a huge force. When I stayed there, working with John on the journals – usually at that desk – I would often wander down through successive terraces of garden, and, reaching the gate in the wall at the bottom, go on yet further, down to the Cobb, then along the stone parapet to the end where the French lieutenant’s woman stood in the storm spray.

It was a fertile place for fiction, but also for orchids. One unseasonably warm day in early May, John and I had been working at a table outdoors by the kitchen. A tiny spider scurried across John’s handwriting and over one of the fossil stones that had been used as weights to stop the manuscript pages from blowing away. ‘A saltacid,’ he observed.

It seemed like a sign to take a break. John offered to give me a tour of the garden, revealing the richness of a place, which, through my town person’s ignorance, I could only imperfectly appreciate. ‘Blue-eyed Mary,’ he said as he reached for his ashplant and pointed to the wild flowers that grew in the cracks of the paving stones beneath our feet. Then ‘Pittosporum’, pointing to a climber that wrapped itself around one pole of the verandah, a plant that he had grown from a cutting he had taken in Hollywood. As we inched our way on to the lawn, a pair of  brown butterflies, with black and white flecks, spiralled past in a mad dance. ‘Speckled Woods.’

A willing teacher, who found it natural to communicate his enthusiasm, one by one he continued to identify the plants we passed on our way. The inhabitants of a previously disregarded world took on new life because John had named them, made seen what was previously unseen.

I thought he would stop once he reached the far side of the lawn. But although he had become infirm through age and illness, he wanted to venture further on down the hill. He grabbed at the wooden hand-rail that ran parallel to a flight of steps, while I held out a supporting arm on the other side. Slowly, he lowered himself down, step by step, leaning heavily into me. Then, losing his footing, he lurched forward and slumped down on to his knees. There was a weal of blood on one trouser-leg, where his shin had made contact with the stone. I heaved him to his feet again, feeling suddenly anxious, irresponsible, wondering whether it would not be more sensible to turn back. But John, careless of his own safety, was determined to press on. And so we tottered our precarious way to where the precious orchids grew.

It turned out that none were yet in flower, but just to have made it down the hill was the greater triumph – the first time he had managed to get so far that year, he confided with satisfaction.

As we turned now to face the way we had come, I thought to myself, ‘How will we ever get back again!’ Just a gentle walk back up the path, but for John, with his frail constitution, those few yards to the top lawn had the quality of an epic journey.

The next day, a friend of John, Jan Relph, came to visit. After lunch, she drove us down to the harbour. As a former curator of Lyme’s museum and easily its most celebrated resident, John enjoyed an informal Freedom of the Town that allowed us to take a usually forbidden parking space by the lifeboat shed. While Jan went along to the high street to do some shopping, I set off along the length of the Cobb. ‘Wander well,’ said John, content just to sit in the car and, from his privileged position, to watch life go by.

High over the waves, rail-free and narrow, the top of the Cobb is a giddy curve of rock and stone that threatens to pitch you into the sea. A simple walk to the end, in the buffeting wind, has the exhilaration of a dare-devil ride. As you pass around the curve, the town – hidden by a cluster of buildings – disappears from view and, in a sea-surrounded isolation, you have the sensation almost of standing on solid water.

At the very end of the Cobb now, I was on the far side of some invisible screen. Looking back the way I had come, the harbour was lost from sight and there was no sound of the town to be heard. Only the crash of waves and the screech of gulls wheeling above.

It was a removed, strangely serene place where I would have liked to linger, but a distant boom called my attention back towards the town. Hanging in the sky over the harbour was a small white puff of smoke. There was another loud report, and a second cloud that appeared to be exactly above where John was sitting in the car.

I ran back, imagining some terrible disaster – Was he OK? What could have happened? Why was I so stupid to leave him on his own? – to find the car, which had been the only vehicle outside the lifeboatmen’s hut, now surrounded by the cars of the volunteers who had arrived to carry out a rescue. John was still sitting calmly in the front passenger seat, watching the drama unfold around him. 

It was impossible to resist the thought that he had somehow brought the whole thing into being, like Conchis in The Magus conjuring up masques for Nicholas Urfe. Trapped by the lifeboatmen’s cars, we sat and watched as an amphibian vehicle with giant wheels carried the rubber rescue dinghy in its mechanical arms across the wet, low-tide sand to the gates of the harbour. The dinghy then sped off.

Critics have commented on the intellectual reach of John’s novels and their complex experimentation with form. But the memory of that day, watching him watching, makes me think that, like the journey down to the orchids, the real flair lay in a heightened sensitivity to whatever environment he found himself in. Writing for him was an intuitive process that defied intellectual analysis. The result of much mulling over time, a novel – however much shaped by the conscious intelligence – was the result of an organic process. The naturalist and the writer were indivisible – the one helping to explain the other. I think he would have struggled in that antiseptic reading-room even if he had been allowed to use his old typewriter.

The day after the sea rescue, the weather closed in. Heavy rain exiled us from the garden and we retreated to our more usual place of work, John’s study upstairs. We would both sit at his desk, from where we could look down on his greenhouse and a stone dog – Anubis, he told me – standing guard by the side door to the kitchen.

It was a house that seemed built around talismans and lucky charms. To the right of the desk, John’s collection of New Hall china was arranged on the shelves of a tall bookcase. This was the place to look for the Staffordshire teapot that, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Sarah Woodruff had once bought in Exeter, or the delicate little Toby jug that pre-dated “those garish-coloured monstrosities of Victorian manufacture”, which a century later John himself bought “for a good deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged”.

On the other side of the room, through a pair of French windows opening out on to a balcony, you could look across the lawn to where a statue of Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, reclined under a glade of trees. The view reminded me of that Charles Trenet song, “Le jardin extraordinaire”. I wonder if John knew it.

The last time I saw his extraordinary garden was about twenty years ago. I suppose it’s quite possible that I shall never see it again. But it doesn’t matter. For I can see now that it isn’t what I had once thought it to be: not the Fowles version of the lost domain of Le Grand Meaulnes – that “green ghost” of The Magus, which had so fascinated John and would haunt The French Lieutenant’s Woman too. As Trenet pointed out, all that’s required to find these precious things again is un peu d’imagination.