Brief Obit: John Fowles
by Andre Soares
Obit: British writer John Fowles, 
author of The Collector (1963), The Magus (1965), and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), died on Saturday, November 5, at his home in Lyme Regis, in Dorset on England’s south coast.
The aforementioned novels were all made into films: The Collector in 1965, directed by William Wyler, and starring Terence Stamp as a slightly psychotic man with an ardent desire to add Samantha Eggar to his butterfly collection (both Wyler and Eggar received Academy Award nominations); The Magus in 1968, a critically panned film version adapted by Fowles himself, directed by the recently deceased Guy Green, and starring Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, and Anna Karina; and The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981, directed by Karel Reisz, and starring Academy Award nominee Meryl Streep as both a 19th-century Englishwoman with a bad reputation and the actress who plays her in the film-within-the-film, and Jeremy Irons as her lover in both sections of the story. (According to the IMDb, there was also a 1986 Filipino film version of The Collector titled Bilanggo sa dilim / Prisoner of the Dark.)
John Fowles had been in precarious health for many years. He was 79.
List of films submitted to the 2005 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award
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From novelist/blogger Ron Franscell at http://underthenews.blogspot.com …
Who knows why an author becomes an author. A tricky wiring of the senses? A quest to recapture some too-brief moment in the distant past? A hubris that allows him to believe he has something worth somebody else’s attention? A wan attempt at immortality? Keener-than-normal typing skills?
I wrote “stories” when I was very young — snippets, really, without the pretention or self-awareness I now combat. I read voraciously and unwittingly collected a vocabulary that stood me in favor with English teachers. I started working on the school paper when I was 12 and never stopped.
But it wasn’t until college, when I read “The Magus” by John Fowles, that I believed I could write a book. Not because it seemed too damned easy, but because Fowles was alive and because his writing was rich beyond belief. Intensely erotic in its language, incredibly brave in its structure, and utterly asymmetrical in its intellectualism — it opened a door that had been cracked only a sliver. Here was this Brit who spoke so beautifully and viscerally and poetically when all I knew about British literature to that point was stuffy, overwrought and exceedingly long. And the ending … inconclusive, atmospheric, an unanswered question. To this day, “The Magus” remains among the two or three books that made my life better, both as a writer and a man.
Fowles’ death Saturday, then, gives me pause. We’d never met, although I had hoped someday to shake his hand and to tell him what his writing meant to me. I spent some time in his old hometown — Oxford, England — while doing some international reporting years ago, and I asked about him, but I was discouraged from knocking on his door like a troublesome literary groupie — which, I suppose, I was. After all, he was a private man and the fact that I had written two novels gave me no unique dispensation to ask him to share a pint at the corner pub and tell me a secret. I’m sorry now that I didn’t.
John Fowles did what a writer must do: He created his alternate, parallel world and invited me in. More than the others whom I admired — the literally all-American passel of Hemingway, Steinbeck, London and Fitzgerald — he showed me possibilities I hadn’t considered. His later books taught me everything I needed to know about non-linear storytelling, the free-verse that prose could be, and diabolic irony. And more than the rest, he showed me that poetic eroticism and visuality — not the strength of the Americans either — wasn’t only the country of women writers. But his mystery was no mystery at all; he knew there were no magic beans, no answers, no perfect resolutions, no knowing what comes next, except dying.
I’ll miss Fowles. And I promise: If any young writer ever knocks on my door to tell me he became a writer because of something I wrote, I’ll let him take me to the corner pub for a pint. I just won’t have any secrets to share. I’ll just hand him a copy of “The Magus.”