by John Fowles
Anthony and I originally moved from cursory acquaintance being of the same year at the same college and with a shared staircase to our rooms—to friendship precisely because of this ‘secret’. I was already engaged in burying or suppressing it, but it was still close enough in my past to be partially uncovered.
The summer term of 1948, our first university year: by chance I went into his sitting-room one day. Our shared servant was retiring and I was collecting for a leaving present for him. On Anthony’s desk I saw a flower in a jam-jar a stem of the Man Orchid, Aceras. A few moments later we discovered a common interest, though within it, as largely a memento, an echo of former days. With him it was far more serious; as with so much in his life, such an interest could be only methodical, deeply pursued, or nonexistent. Scientifically I had learnt enough botany as a schoolboy to find my way round the old copy of Bentham and Hooker we had at home; and I had in my teens fallen prey a little to the orchid mystique. I disclaimed anything more with Anthony, and thereby disclaimed the whole buried continent that nature had been for me in my adolescence. I was ashamed of it already, and nothing in his obviously much greater expertise encouraged me to reveal the truth then or later.
I had always thought Anthony priggishly above the rest of us, a typical Greats scholar. He dressed rather formally, and there was a kind of studied quickness, a purpose, when he walked across the quad that I’d always found affected. He seemed to have few friends. On the other hand (one must put it in such childish terms) he didn’t wear glasses or hunch nor did he belong to that equally disagreeable faction, the hearty. He was slightly taller than me, with very regular features and vaguely challenging eyes though I think that was simply because he had the curiously un-English habit of looking you in the face when he talked to you. I now found, as we talked about orchids, that they could also be amused and friendly eyes. He wanted to know more; where I had botanized, how serious I was. I was flattered, I suppose—this apparently fastidious and already reputedly brilliant young professor in embryo had time for me. He once said, years later, when I’d been ribbing him about a newspaper report of some flagrantly fake stigmatization in Italy, ‘I’m surprised you don’t believe in miracles, Dan. How else did we meet?’
He took me out to Watlington one day very soon afterwards; and that led to other days, and other knowledges of each other. But we first surmounted the barriers between us across orchids. Barriers there were; we were very different young men, even in college and University terms. I was already writing for magazines, had one foot in the university theatrical door; wore a frivolous (and very false) persona, did an absolute minimum of academic work. I knew a lot of people, I would have said I had a lot of friends, but they were almost all like myself, at Oxford to mix, to prink and prance, to enjoy themselves, bound far less by real affection and interest than by a common love of the exhibitionistic. My own personality had undergone a very thorough revolution since adolescence, and even since my arrival at Oxford after war service. I had rejected so much. I was writing myself, making myself the chief character in a play, so that I was not only the written personage, the character and its actor, but also the person who sits in the back of the stalls admiring what he has written. All my other ‘friends’ were also more or less on stage; the difference with Anthony was that he sat beside me in the stalls.
With the orchids, I took his view: one must keep such interests to oneself and fellow-enthusiasts, and not bore other people with them. He wasn’t a nature-lover at all, I didn’t realize that at the time. He just happened to be a crack field botanist which goes also, I suspect, for his subsequent professional work as a philosopher. But I’ve never had the patience (or the mental equipment) to read his books. When he became a don, philosophy became like botany, he wouldn’t talk about it any more to the lay world. Another even more important realization came much later: that he was a kind of father-substitute, though we were almost exactly the same age. The idea would have outraged me at the time, and killed the friendship, as I believed I had consciously ‘killed’ the spirit of my father and his antiquated world. I do not know if Anthony realized this. He was certainly sufficiently astute to have done so, though he had no time for Freud. I am trying to say that he was good for me in the sense that he resurrected, if only very tenuously and intermittently, a self or an unresolved dilemma I had foolishly tried to dismiss; and nefarious in the sense that our relationship was set in a minefield.
In our orchid-hunting I never really rose above the role of shikari: I found the game, he shot it. The thrill for me was finding the rare ones, my first (and last, alas) Monkeys near Goring, a solitary Fly under a sun-shot white-beam at the edge of a Chiltern beech-wood. His heaven was a wet meadow full of dull old Dactylorchids: counting and measuring and noting down the degree of hybridization. I wanted to find the flowers, he wanted to establish some new subspecies. I lived (and hid) poetic moments; he lived Druce and Godfery. My solitary boyhood had forced me to take refuge in nature as a poem, a myth, a catalysis, the only theatre I was allowed to know; it was nine parts emotion and sublimation, but it acquired So an aura, a mystery, a magic in the anthropological sense. I have spent years of my adult life ignoring it, but the long traumas of adolescence stamp deep. It still takes very little, a weed in flower at the foot of a concrete wall, the flight of a bird across a city window, to reimmerse me; and when I am released from deprivation, I can’t stop that old self emerging. I feared driving across America with Jenny simply because I knew we should pass so many places where on my own I should have stopped; not as a serious naturalist would have stopped, though I might have pretended that, but as a bitter and repressed child once hid in the green Devon countryside.
All that side of me remained completely overborne in Anthony’s antiseptic presence; nor did I see his single-mindedness then as a defect—it simply proved the hidden softness and greenness in myself. Lying about it all began with him… and with Nell and Jane, too.
I knew Jane only very slightly during that first year; she was already talked about, had already made a hit in the OUDS, whereas I knew myself still very immature. Nell hadn’t appeared then. One day at the Kemp, wanting to show off to Anthony, I introduced him to her. She was groaning about Descartes, some essay she had to write; Anthony began to explain. I had to go to a tutorial and I left them, secretly amused that two such unlikely people should have found anything in common. It didn’t happen overnight. I think he took her out a couple of times before term ended. They spent the long vacation apart, but apparently they wrote letters; and by the end of the calendar year, they were paired off. And Nell had arrived, my consolation prize. She was prettier than Jane, and the later sexpot persona was still hidden behind the fresh-woman’s reserve. I thought we were perfectly matched, the four of us. I enjoyed, when access was granted, Nell’s naked body very much, and throughout the second year that obscured my real feelings.
During our two remaining summers as students the two girls often came on our orchid expeditions; and always mocked us in their different ways. I mustn’t make Anthony sound humourless, but he had everything neatly compartmented in his life. All obsession was bad taste. He seldom laughed at himself, but he would always laugh at the girls’ teasing. ‘I think I’ll just sketch this labellum’ became a kind of in-joke among us. I was never quite sure what it meant, but it always made us twist with secret laughter. We used it most against other people. In a way it made Anthony the odd man out; and hid the truth. That is, I was the real outsider. For the girls, nature was an occasion for drifting walks and idle picnics, listening to the nightingales on Otmoor while Anthony and I botanized; for him, a crossword puzzle, a relief in concrete objects from abstract ideas. And for me all I would never regain.
When much later, after the divorce and the vitriol, I felt that I had finally set this side of myself in perspective, the solution seemed simple. But putting down new roots, after all that had happened, in an early landscape was much more difficult than I had imagined. I got bored at the farm in Dev
on, I grew lonely, I found the magic I remembered had somehow disappeared and that the nature of actuality verged on the repetitive and monotonous. I had of course failed to see how much the past magic had depended on past deprivation; and the present deprivation was of all that I had constructed to take its place. I began my peripatetic existence, working more and more away from Thorncombe. Only frequent exile made the place possible.
I was also trapped by a far more spurious myth and magic, since all this coincided with growing success in the film world, which presented me with a renewed opportunity akin in essence if not in detail to my reaction to Oxford to wear a mask and invent a character… once more to write myself. I let myself be dazzled by the gilt chimeras of the career: that happiness was always having work, being in demand, belonging nowhere, the jet life, the long transatlantic phone-call about nothing. I became one third American and one third Jewish; the one third English I camped up or suppressed, according to circumstances. Jenny is right: I used it as a weapon when I was bored, and disowned it when I was amused; demoted it to a Cinderella role. It was vilely exploited by the other two of me.
I even thought of getting rid of Thorncombe, I used it so little. It distressed me when I returned after long infidelities, and seemed to show those mute reproachful eyes that forsaken gardens and buildings acquire. I would see the way some tree or shrub I had planted had grown, and long for that close daily knowledge of the little world around one that only peasants understand. Then I would once more fall in love with the place. It came less to matter that I knew that within a fortnight I should feel restless again. Thorncombe felt right; and I was wrong.
Perhaps all this is getting near the heart of Englishness: being happier at being unhappy than doing something constructive about it. We boast of our genius for compromise, which is really a refusal to choose; and that in turn contains a large part of cowardice, apathy, selfish laziness but it is also, I grow increasingly certain of this as I grow older, a function of our peculiar imagination, of our racial and individual gift for metaphor; for allowing hypotheses about ourselves, and our pasts and futures, almost as much reality as the true events and destinies. Other races look at themselves in the mirror, and either live with the reflection or do something practical to improve it. We paint an ideal, or a dream, self on the glass and then wallow in the discrepancy. Nothing distinguishes us more clearly from the Americans, nothing characterizes better the very different ways we use our shared language the way they use it as a tool, even when they are being poetic, and the way we treat it as a poem, even when we are using it as a tool; and it is the same with the enormous semantic subtleties of middleclass English intonation and the poverty of nuance in even the most intellectually sophisticated American equivalent.
These two dialects seem to me two reactions to the same thing: the craving for freedom. The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices. Failure to succeed proves a moral, not a genetic, fault. ‘All men are born equal’ becomes ‘No decent society can help those who fail to stay equal’. The myth becomes so pervasive that it even ends up as the credo of those, the underprivileged, who most need to disbelieve it. I have seen it in even the most intelligent liberals there, people like Abe and Mildred, impeccably sympathetic in their attitude to things like Medicare, Black anger, environmental control and all the rest; yet still they hanker after the old and other American dream of freedom to cash in on other people’s inequality. From the beginning Americans came to America to escape two things: political tyranny and fixed odds in the struggle for life, and they have never realized that the two aims are profoundly hostile to each other—that the genetic injustice of life is just as great as the old European economic injustice. Their system dealt with the latter by assuming an equal dispensation of energy, talent and good luck to all men; and now they are smashed hard on the reef of the far deeper injustice.
All this was of course also the English assumption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But we have long abandoned it. Injustice and inequality are in the nature of things, like Virgil’s tears, and we have extrapolated freedom from all living reality. It is a thing in the mind, a Utopia we secretly retreat to from our daily ordinary world; just as I have always lived far more in the mind at Thorncombe than in reality. That is what permits in England our extraordinary tolerance of national decay, of muddling through; our socializing conservatism and our conservative socialism. Our society, and its actual state, is nothing; merely the dead real world, not the living imaginary one; and that is why we have evolved a language that always means more than it says, both emotionally and imaginatively. With the Americans it is the reverse: they mean and feel far less than they have the habit of saying. In both cases, it is to the same end: to find a place to be free. The outward cynics may live in the States; but the fundamental ones, the true quietists, live in Britain.
I am trying to exculpate myself, not explain cultures. My attitude to nature, my past, Thorncombe, must be partly a product of my own history and genetic makeup; it is also because I am English.
But to make the flight from California and Jenny, that bout of self-pity the previous night, seem some kind of positive (or American) response to all this would be very false. I had no serious desire to examine my past or recreate it in any shape or form; and of course I cheat here. One does not think coherently without a much stronger pretext than mere time to spare. Anything that makes the dozing man in the 707 that day, stuck in what is after all only a continuity shot, high over the monotonous rectangled wheatlands of the Midwest, appear in the least certain of what he was doing would be absurd.
Perhaps the only symptom of imminent life-change was a negative one. I had no project in mind after the wretched Kitchener script. I couldn’t get out of that, I was contractually committed; but both man and period, in the month I had been messing with them, bored me to death. With my daughter Caro now working and Nell long remarried, I couldn’t even pretend that I had needed the money, so I had had to look for some other motive; and I had decided that it was essentially a need to validate self-contempt, to create one last straw that broke the conditioned camel’s back.
I remember, when Anthony and Jane and Nell and I spent our summer in Rome, standing before some comically awful painting of a saint flagellating himself. Even Jane, a convert by then, found it ridiculous, Catholicism gone dotty which allowed Anthony to put us right on the principle, if not this present manifestation of it: how self-mortification was universal because it was absurd and necessary. He based a great deal on the absurd-and-necessary at that time and in that side of his life and I didn’t take it very seriously, having already made something of an art of not causing myself anything but pleasure. But here I was, over twenty years later, flogging myself over the back with Kitchener, a man I liked less the more I knew about him, and a project of formidable technical difficulties; and not even allowed to write, given the production cost of sinking old cruisers, the one scene I would have enjoyed… the old buffer disappearing forever beneath the waves off the Orkneys.
And what should follow that, I did not know. I was not really flying to New York, and home; but into an empty space.
The Umbrella
What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little less than is necessary, it goes out; f it remembers a little more than is necessary, it goes out. If only it could teach us, while it burns, to remember correctly.
GEORGE SEFERIS: ‘Man’
My mother died just before my fourth birthday, and I really cannot remember her at all; only the dimmest ghost of a bed surmounted by a tired brown face the brownness being due to the illness that killed her, Addison’s disease. My father was a hopeless incompetent on the domestic side and the unmarried of his two sisters had moved in long before the death. Being a parson’s child helped. There was no doubt, when I was little, that the brown face had ‘gone t
o Heaven’. In that at least I was lucky to be born where I was; four generations into the Church of England, with a substitute mother who would have done very well as the nicest kind of practical Anglican nun. Aunt Millie was ineffably devoted to making good, and one of the few things I regret bitterly (as opposed to merely regretting) was that I never gave her enough credit for it. She had to bear the brunt of so much that I dared not reproach my father with. When I was young, I took her for granted; when I grew up, I despised her for her dowdiness and her simplicity; at her funeral ten years ago I had tears in my eyes, and perhaps that will gain me a slight remission on judgment Day. But I shan’t have deserved it.
He always seemed old to me, more like a grandfather than a father. Having married very late, he was only a year short of fifty when I was born, and his hair was almost white by the time I begin to see him clearly. If I have to use one phrase to describe his attitude to me, it must be something like a detached and quizzical puzzlement. From the photographs it seems clear my mother was no beauty; she was thirty herself when they married, and some kind of secret I have never quite pierced lay over her. It certainly wasn’t anything sinful, but more to do with a suggestion of folly on my father’s part. He never reminisced about her; Aunt Millie did, but in the sort of kind terms (her gentleness, her respect for my father, her gift for music) that suggested some defect had to be excused. One defect was certainly of birth. She had been one of his parishioners in Shropshire, where he had a living before I came into the world, and her parents had been grocers, quietly successful ones, ‘provision merchants’ was Aunt Millie’s description. Like her son, she was an only child. She seems to have become a village spinster when they died; educated and provided for, but I suppose with the classification of ‘trade’. She played the organ in his church. I can’t imagine what happened, whether in some innocent village way she trapped my father, or whether it was a case of two profound sexual timidities, a scholarly and a genteel, taking refuge in each other’s arms.