The Collector

by John Fowles

  Even if it came to the point. He didn’t stop. I’d take the risk.

  There are two things. One’s the need to make him let me go. The other’s me. Something I wrote on Nov. 7th—“I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching.” But I’m not being to the full at all. I’m just sitting and watching. Not only here. With G.P.

  All this Vestal Virgin talk about “saving yourself up” for the right man. I’ve always despised it. Yet I’ve always held back.

  I’m mean with my body.

  I’ve got to get this meanness out of the way.

  I’ve got sunk in a sort of despair. Something will happen, I say. But nothing will, unless I make it.

  I must act.

  Another thing I wrote (one writes things and the implications shriek—it’s like suddenly realizing one’s deaf), “I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.”

  Therefore with generosity (I give myself) and gentleness (I kiss the beast) and no-shame (I do what I do of my own free will) and forgiveness (he can’t help himself).

  Even a baby. His baby. Anything. For freedom.

  The more I think about it the more I feel sure that this is the way.

  He has some secret. He must want me physically.

  Perhaps he’s “no good.”

  Whatever it is, it will come out.

  We’ll know where we are.

  I haven’t written much about G.P. these last days. But I think about him a great deal. The first and last thing I look at every day is his picture. I begin to hate that unknown girl who was his model. He must have gone to bed with her. Perhaps she was his first wife. I shall ask him when I get out.

  Because the first thing I shall do—the first real positive thing, after I’ve seen the family, will be to go to see him. To tell him that he has been always in my thoughts. That he is the most important person I have ever met. The most real. That I am jealous of every woman who has ever slept with him. I still can’t say that I love him. But now I begin to see that it’s because I don’t know what love is. I’m Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.

  Perhaps he would be dry and cold when it came to it. Say I’m too young, he wasn’t ever really serious, and—a thousand things. But I’m not afraid. I would risk it.

  Perhaps he’s in mid-affaire with somebody else.

  I’d say, I’ve come back because I’m not sure any more that I’m not in love with you.

  I’d say, I’ve been naked with a man I loathed. I’ve been at bottom.

  I’d let him have me.

  But I still couldn’t bear to see him sneaking off with someone else. Reducing it all to sex. I should wither up and die inside if he did.

  I know it’s not very emancipated of me.

  This is what I feel.

  Sex doesn’t matter. Love does.

  This afternoon I wanted to ask Caliban to post a letter to G.P. from me. Quite mad. Of course he wouldn’t. He’d be jealous. But I so need to be walking up the stairs and pushing open the studio door, and seeing him at his bench, looking over his shoulder at me, as if he’s not in the least interested to see who it is. Standing there, with his faint, faint smile and eyes that understand things so quickly.

  This is useless. I’m thinking of the price before the painting.

  Tomorrow. I must act now.

  I started today really. I’ve called him Ferdinand (not Caliban) three times, and complimented him on a horrid new tie. I’ve smiled at him, I’ve dutifully tried to look as if I like everything about him. He certainly hasn’t given any sign of having noticed it. But he won’t know what’s hit him tomorrow.

  I can’t sleep. I’ve got up again and put on G.P.’s clavichord record. Perhaps he’s been listening to it, too, and thinking of me. The Invention I like best is the one after the one he loves best—he loves the fifth, and I the sixth. So we lie side by side in Bach. I always used to think Bach was a bore. Now he overwhelms me, he is so human, so full of moods and gentleness and wonderful tunes and things so simple-deep I play them over and over again as once I used to copy drawings I liked.

  I think, perhaps I’ll just try putting my arms round him and kissing him. No more. But he’d grow to like that. It would drag on. It’s got to be a shock.

  All this business, it’s bound up with my bossy attitude to life. I’ve always known where I’m going, how I want things to happen. And they have happened as I have wanted, and I have taken it for granted that they have because I know where I’m going. But I have been lucky in all sorts of things.

  I’ve always tried to happen to life; but it’s time I let life happen to me.

  November 30th

  Oh, God.

  I’ve done something terrible.

  I’ve got to put it down. Look at it.

  It is so amazing. That I did it. That what happened happened. That he is what he is. That I am what I am. Things left like this.

  Worse than ever before.

  I decided to do it this morning. I knew I had to do something extraordinary. To give myself a shock as well as him.

  I arranged to have a bath. I was nice to him all day.

  I dolled myself up after the bath. Oceans of Mitsouko. I stood in front of the fire, showing my bare feet for his benefit. I was nervous. I didn’t know if I could go through with it. And having my hands bound. But I had three glasses of sherry quickly.

  I shut my eyes then and went to work.

  I made him sit down and then I sat down on his lap. He was so stiff, so shocked, that I had to go on. If he’d clutched at me, perhaps I’d have stopped. I let the housecoat fall open, but he just sat there with me on his lap. As if we had never met before and this was some silly party game. Two strangers at a party, who didn’t much like each other.

  In a nasty perverted way it was exciting. A woman-in-me reaching to a man-in-him. I can’t explain, it was also the feeling that he didn’t know what to do. That he was sheer virgin. There was an old lady of Cork who took a young priest for a walk. I must have been drunk.

  I had to force him to kiss me. He made a sort of feeble pretence of being afraid that he might lose his head. I don’t care if you do, I said. And I kissed him again. He did kiss me back then, as if he wanted to press his wretched thin inhibited mouth right through my head. His mouth was sweet. He smelt clean and I shut my eyes. It wasn’t so bad.

  But then he suddenly went away by the window and he wouldn’t come back. He wanted to run away, but he couldn’t, so he stood by his desk, half turned, while I knelt half-naked by the fire and let my hair down, just to make it quite obvious. In the end I had to go up to him and bring him back to the fire. I made him undo my hands, he was like someone in a trance, and then I undressed him and I undressed myself.

  I said, don’t be nervous, I want to do this. Just be natural. But he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t. I did everything I could.

  But nothing happened. He wouldn’t thaw out. He did hold me tight once. But it wasn’t natural. Just a desperate imitation of what he must think the real thing’s like. Pathetically unconvincing.

  He can’t do it.

  There’s no man in him.

  I got up, we were lying on the sofa, and knelt by him and told him not to worry. Mothered him. We put our clothes back on.

  And gradually it all came out. The truth about him. And later, his real self.

  A psychiatrist has told him he won’t ever be able to do it.

  He said he used to imagine us lying in bed together. Just lying. Nothing else. I offered to do that. But he didn’t want to. Deep down in him, side by side with the beastliness, the sourness, there is a tremendous innocence. It rules him. He must protect it.

  He said he loved me, even so.


  I said, what you love is your own love. It’s not love, it’s selfishness. It’s not me you think of, but what you feel about me.

  I don’t know what it is, he said.

  And then I made a mistake, I felt it had all been a sacrifice in vain, I felt I had to make him appreciate what I’d done, that he ought to let me go—so I tried to tell him. And his true self came out.

  He got beastly. Wouldn’t answer me.

  We were further apart than ever. I said I pitied him and he flew at me. It was terrible. It made me cry.

  The terrible coldness, the inhumanity of it.

  Being his prisoner. Having to stay. Still.

  And realizing at last that this is what he is.

  Impossible to understand. What is he? What does he want? Why am I here if he can’t do it?

  As if I’d lit a fire in the darkness to try and warm us. And all I’d done was to see his real face by it.

  The last thing I said was—We can’t be further apart. We’ve been naked in front of each other.

  But we are.

  I feel better now.

  I’m glad nothing worse happened. I was mad to take the risk.

  It’s enough to have survived.

  December 1st

  He’s been down, I’ve been out in the cellar, and it is absolutely plain. He’s angry with me. He’s never been angry like this before. This isn’t a pet. It’s a deep suppressed anger.

  It makes me furious. Nobody could ever understand how much I put into yesterday. The effort of giving, of risking, of understanding. Of pushing back every natural instinct.

  It’s him. And it’s this weird male thing. Now I’m no longer nice. They sulk if you don’t give, and hate you when you do. Intelligent men must despise themselves for being like that. Their illogicality.

  Sour men and wounded women.

  Of course, I’ve discovered his secret. He hates that.

  I’ve thought and thought about it.

  He must always have known he couldn’t do anything with me. Yet all his talk about loving me. That must mean something.

  This is what I think it is. He can’t have any normal pleasure from me. His pleasure is keeping me prisoner. Thinking of all the other men who would envy him if they knew. Having me.

  So my being nice to him is ridiculous. I want to be so unpleasant that he gets no pleasure from having me. I’m going to fast again. Have absolutely nothing to do with him.

  Strange ideas.

  That I’ve done for the first time in my life something original. Something hardly anyone else can have done. I steeled myself when we were naked. I learnt what “to steel oneself” meant.

  The last of the Ladymont me. It’s dead.

  I remember driving Piers’s car somewhere near Carcassonne. They all wanted me to stop. But I wanted to do eighty. And I kept my foot down until I did. The others were frightened. So was I.

  But it proved I could do it.

  (Late afternoon.) Reading The Tempest again all the afternoon. Not the same at all, now what’s happened has happened. The pity Shakespeare feels for his Caliban, I feel (beneath the hate and disgust) for my Caliban. Half-creatures.

  “Not honour’d with a human shape.”

  “Caliban my slave, who never yields us kind answer.”

  “Whom stripes may move, not kindness.”

  PROS… . and lodged thee

  In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate

  The honour of my child.

  CAL. O ho, O ho! — Would’t had been done!

  Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else

  This isle with Calibans… .

  Prospero’s contempt for him. His knowing that being kind is useless.

  Stephano and Trinculo are the football pools. Their wine, the money he won.

  Act III, scene 2. “I cried to dream again.” Poor Caliban. But only because he never won the pools.

  “I’ll be wise hereafter.”

  “O brave new world.”

  O sick new world.

  He’s just gone. I said I would fast unless he let me come upstairs. Fresh air and daylight every day. He hedged. He was beastly. Sarcastic. He actually said I was “forgetting who was boss.”

  He’s changed. He frightens me now.

  I’ve given him until tomorrow morning to make up his mind.

  December 2nd

  I’m to go upstairs. He’s going to convert a room. He said it would take a week. I said, all right, but if it’s another put-off …

  We’ll see.

  I lay in bed last night and thought of G.P. I thought of being in bed with him. I wanted to be in bed with him. I wanted the marvellous, the fantastic ordinariness of him.

  His promiscuity is creative. Vital. Even though it hurts. He creates love and life and excitement around him; he lives, the people he loves remember him.

  I’ve always felt like it sometimes. Promiscuous. Anyone I see, even just some boy in the Tube, some man, I think what would he be like in bed. I look at the mouths and their hands, put on a prim expression and think about them having me in bed.

  Even Toinette, getting into bed with anyone. I used to think it was messy. But love is beautiful, any love. Even just sex. The only thing that is ugly is this frozen lifeless utter lack-love between Caliban and me.

  This morning I was imagining I’d escaped and that Caliban was in court. I was speaking for him. I said his case was tragic, he needed sympathy and psychiatry. Forgiveness.

  I wasn’t being noble. I despise him too much to hate him.

  It’s funny. I probably should speak for him.

  I knew we shouldn’t be able to meet again.

  I could never cure him. Because I’m his disease.

  December 3rd

  I shall go and have an affaire with G.P.

  I’ll marry him if he wants.

  I want the adventure, the risk of marrying him.

  I’m sick of being young. Inexperienced.

  Clever at knowing but not at living.

  I want his children in me.

  My body doesn’t count any more. If he just wants that he can have it. I couldn’t ever be a Toinette. A collector of men.

  Being cleverer (as I thought) than most men, and cleverer than all the girls I knew. I always thought I knew more, felt more, understood more.

  But I don’t even know enough to handle Caliban.

  All sorts of bits left over from Ladymont days. From the days when I was a nice little middle-class doctor’s daughter. They’ve gone now. When I was at Ladymont I thought I could manipulate a pencil very nicely. And then when I went to London, I began to find I couldn’t. I was surrounded by people who were just as skilled as I was. More so. I haven’t begun to know how to handle my life—or anyone else’s.

  I’m the one who needs lameducking.

  It’s like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it’s silly. A toy I’ve played with too often. It’s a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard.

  Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.

  G.P.

  I shall be hurt, lost, battered and buffeted. But it will be like being in a gale of light, after this black hole.

  It’s simply that. He has the secret of life in him. Something spring-like. Not immoral.

  It’s as if I’d only seen him at twilight; and now suddenly I see him at dawn. He is the same, but everything is different.

  I looked in the mirror today and I could see it in my eyes. They look much older and younger. It sounds impossible in words. But that’s exactly it. I am older and younger. I am older because I have learnt, I am younger because a lot of me consisted of things older people had taught me. All the mud of their stale ideas on the shoe of me.

  The new shoe of me.

  The power of women! I’ve never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

  We’re so weak physical
ly, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we’re stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can’t stand ours.

  I think—I will give myself to G.P. He can have me. And whatever he does to me I shall still have my woman-me he can never touch.

  All this is wild talk. But I feel full of urges. New independence.

  I don’t think about now. Today. I know I’m going to escape. I feel it. I can’t explain. Caliban can never win against me.

  I think of paintings I shall do.

  Last night I thought of one, it was a sort of butter-yellow (farm-butter-yellow) field rising to a white luminous sky and the sun just rising. A strange rose-pink, I knew it exactly, full of hushed stillness, the beginning of things, lark-song without larks.

  Two strange contradictory dreams.

  The first one was very simple. I was walking in the fields, I don’t know who I was with, but it was someone I liked very much, a man. G.P. perhaps. The sun shining on young corn. And suddenly we saw swallows flying low over the corn. I could see their backs gleaming, like dark blue silk. They were very low, twittering all around us, all flying in the same direction, low and happy. And I felt full of happiness. I said, how extraordinary, look at the swallows. It was very simple, the unexpected swallows and the sun and the green corn. I was filled with happiness. The purest spring feeling. Then I woke up.

  Later I had another dream. I was at the window on the first floor of a large house (Ladymont?) and there was a black horse below. It was angry, but I felt safe because it was below and outside. But suddenly it turned and galloped at the house and to my horror it leapt gigantically up and straight at me with bared teeth. It came crashing through the window. Even then I thought, it will kill itself, I am safe. But it sprawled and flailed round in the small room and I suddenly realized it was going to attack me. There was nowhere to escape. I woke again, I had to put on the light.

  It was violence. It was all I hate and all I fear.