by John Fowles
He remained by the front door, under the dated porch, for a minute or two; and then felt a whim to be more truly in the night. He turned and took an old coat off a hook, kicked off his shoes and put on a pair of rubber boots; then went down the path to the gate of the front garden. He looked back there a moment, and saw the one lit upper window, its translucent curtained warmth subtending a faint halo in the moisture-laden mist. Jane’s bedroom; but he thought less of her than of the light, also diffused, she had unwittingly thrown on his problem. He went through the wicket, crossed the little drive from the lane up to the farm, then quietly unhooked an old gate and went into the small orchard he had once scythed as a boy, always one of his favourite places at Thorncombe. Some of the trees were too ancient to crop, and the bulk were inedible cider-apples. But he liked their twisted and lichened stems, their spring blossom, their age and always having been there. He began to walk slowly among the old trees. From the bottom there was a familiar low gurgle of water where the leat ran shallow over some stones. He did not hear it.
The obstacle was this: he was too fortunate, and this gave him, in his ‘Simon Wolfe’ projection, a feeling of inauthenticity, almost of impotence. He had sensed it as he secretly criticized Fenwick at Compton that he had no real right to criticize someone who so complacently forecast national disaster, since at a personal level he was guilty of the same crime, even though he did not predict the same disaster. And then again at Compton: all his talk of failure was only too like Nell’s presenting the place as a white elephant, a constant agony to live in and he had smiled at her for that.
In short, he felt himself, both artistically and really, in the age-old humanist trap: of being allowed (as by some unearned privilege) to enjoy life too much to make a convincing case for any real despair or dissatisfaction. How could there be anything ‘tragic’ in a central character who had some fictional analogue of a Jenny, a Thorncombe, a still warm window—just back there up the hill announcing a long-wanted reconciliation? With all his comparative freedom, money, time to think? His agreeable (despite his present grumbling) work? All artistic making, however imperfect, however tainted by commerce, was contenting compared to the work most of the rest of the world was condemned to. Even as Dan walked, he knew himself, partly in the very act of walking and knowing, and partly because of what had been happening during those last two weeks, dense with forebodings of a rich and a happy year ahead. It was as ludicrous as that: forebodings of even greater happiness as if he were condemned to comedy in an age without it… at least in its old, smiling, fundamentally optimistic form. He thought, for instance, revealing instance, how all through his writing life, both as a playwright and a scenarist, he had avoided the happy ending, as if it were somehow in bad taste. Even in the film being shot in California, which was essentially a comedy of misunderstandings, he had taken care to see hero and heroine went their separate ways at the end.
He was not wholly to blame, of course. No one, during all the script discussion about other matters, had ever suggested anything different for the close. They were all equally brainwashed, victims of the dominant and historically understandable heresy (or cultural hegemony) that Anthony had derided by beatifying Samuel Beckett. It had become offensive, in an intellectually privileged caste, to suggest publicly that anything might turn out well in this world. Even when things largely because of the privilege did in private actuality turn out well, one dared not say so artistically. It was like some new version of the Midas touch, with despair taking the place of gold. This despair might sometimes spring from a genuine metaphysical pessimism, or guilt, or sympathy with the less fortunate. But far more often it came from a kind of statistical sensitivity (and so crossed a border into market research), since in a period of intense and universal increase in self-awareness, few could be happy with their lot.
The dooming, self-accusing artist thus became like an Irish keener, a paid exhibitor of token feeling, a mourner for the unmourning. Perhaps the more real comparison in the majority of cases was with some absolutist monarch coining to cautious terms with the dawn of enlightenment; or with contemporary management going in for good labour relations. ‘Where such parallels collapsed was in the motivation. The artist was not in pursuit of unfair political or economic power, but simply of his freedom to create and the question was really whether that freedom is compatible with such deference to a received idea of the age: that only a tragic, absurdist, black-comic view (with even the agnosticism of the ‘open’ ending suspect) of human destiny could be counted as truly representative and ‘serious’.
All this had descended on Dan like an unpleasant revelation. When he had first begun to think of self-accountancy or escape through a novel (actually for some time before that day at Tsankawi) he had genuinely attributed his depression to an unhappiness at what he had become. But the mere ability to recognize this already initiated a subtle osmosis; and now he had thought more practically and though not consciously, with all his professional experience of extracting the essential from the prolix—he had realized his true dilemma was quite the reverse. He was, if he was honest, under the looking-glass of eternity, a good deal less unhappy at what he had failed to be than content to accept his lot. It was not that he discounted the failure; but simply that his ens, in the old alchemists’ sense of the word, the most efficacious part of any mixed body, triumphed over his outward biography. He had perhaps learnt to live much too comfortably with his failings but he lived in a world of far more vicious ones, both personal and public; and he knew too that at least some of the failings were so deeply imbricated with whatever virtues he had that the first could not be removed without weakening the potentialities of the second.
That, profoundly, was what puzzled him about Jane. He detected in her a potency of self-disappointment, self-slander, self-distrust, that he might in the past have aped (as he had just aped a sympathetic pessimism), but had never really felt. One part of him, the side that loved the poetries and sciences of nature, could observe and fault her; explain her, as he had done during that silence, more or less psychiatrically; and still feel sympathy for her, of course, since the ability to empathize, to see, lay at the root of his ens happiness. But another side continued to feel diminished by her… as in the past, though for different reasons now.
It may have been something in femininity, in femaleness, but she was both her own, in a way he had never quite managed, and not her own, where he only too lazily and complacently was. That was why he had issued his strange invitation; made a necessity of going to Egypt when there was none; refused the chance to drop the idea in the discussion afterwards. She was like an old enigma in his life, and she had to be solved; tamed and transcribed. Perhaps, though once again he did not think this consciously (but since characteristic structures and procedures in ordinary life do seep down and shape those of the unconscious), she had some kind of kinship with the Kitchener script: a problem to crack, to be converted to another medium, though in the emotions, not on the page.
Already he had toyed with two solutions in his other and increasingly related problem with his novel. One that he had considered, enough to make a note or two concerning it, was to give ‘Simon Wolfe’ disadvantages he did not have: an even hollower career, an unhappier family background, no Jenny in his life. He had even descended, under the real experience of Anthony (and the influence of a film he had deeply admired when he saw it, Kurosawa’s Living), to contemplating cancer in some less terminal form. Part of his present malaise, so simple is one aspect of the man, was the realization of the fact that he did not, actually, himself, have cancer; and that to claim he had it, even through a fiction, but a fiction whose inner private symbolisms he must face, would be a lie. That is, such deference to the Zeitgeist would mean that he could not honestly set out for the land that inspired the proposed voyage: himself.
The other solution he envisaged was to present a character less self-absorbed, less concentrated on his own perceptions, less inclined to root all pleasure in them,
even when they were hostile to and critical of the self; someone less conscious, in effect—and in every sense of that adverbial phrase; who saw himself as Dan suspected Jane now saw herself… largely misgrown and to be censored. But this, on reflection those eternal mirrors that dogged his life seemed what he had already always remorselessly extirpated from what he had written: the very reason the problem had arisen in the first place. Forbidding himself a real self reduced him to being a psychic investigator who began his inquiry by requesting a service of exorcism that, if it worked, would leave him no ghost to inquire about.
The least thinking reader will have noted a third solution, but it had not occurred to the writer-to-be until this moment. Dan was at the bottom of his orchard by then, just above the stream. There was an obscure scuffle in the hedge to his right; some nocturnal animal, a hedgehog perhaps, or a badger. It was too dark to see. He waited a moment or two, distracted from his self-preoccupation, listening for a further sound. But none came. He felt, transitorily, though not for the first time, a paradoxical sort of determined imprisonment compared to the existence of the small wild beast he had disturbed; almost an envy of the pleasures of a life without self-consciousness.
Free will.
And then, in these most banal of circumstances, in the night, in his orchard, alone but not alone, he came to the most important decision of his life. It did not arrive nor do most such decisions in reality—as light came on the road to Damascus, in one blinding certainty; but far more as a tentative hypothesis, a seed, a chink in a door; still to be doubted, neglected, forgotten through most of the future of these pages. However, Dan wishes, for reasons of his own, to define it as it was to grow; and to point out that though it may seem a supremely self-centred declaration, it is in fact a supremely socialist one. That it would not be recognized as such by a nearly entire majority of contemporary socialists is, or so he will come to think, a defect in contemporary socialism; not in his decision.
To hell with cultural fashion; to hell with elitist guilt; to hell with existentialist nausea; and above all, to hell with the imagined that does not say, not only in, but behind the images, the real.
Rain
The drizzle had turned to rain when the alarm-clock woke Dan the next morning. He felt tempted to turn over and go to sleep again, but he could hear Phoebe downstairs and Paul had been promised that weather wouldn’t stop their walk. So Dan tapped on his door, and spared his mother’s. There was wind now, a gale threatening, as Phoebe, who never really believed anything unless it was first announced on the wireless, needlessly warned when Dan showed his face in the kitchen. Paul appeared, and they had a quick mug of coffee.
Five minutes later they were climbing up through the beech-wood to the top. From there they were blown along to Pulpit Rock, where Dan had once lain with Nancy. It gave the best general view over the combe. The rain temporarily eased a little, but an endless grey mass of cloud, like an inverted sea, and low enough to hide Dartmoor, normally visible from this place, blew out of the southwest; the drenched countryside, the sodden dead bracken; the boy, in gumboots and an old riding-mac of Caro’s, with his previous day’s enthusiasm only too visibly dampened by the weather… Dan pointed out the faint remains of two Iron Age tumuli in one of the meadows below and the ancient plough-rigs in another. They tried to work out where the field-boundaries had changed, which might have been the oldest, but it was difficult without the deed-map in hand to compare. They wandered on for a while, over fields that were not Dan’s, along the northern lip of the combe. The landscape seemed far more dead by day than it had by night: a few leaden woodpigeons, a pair of crows torn ragged in the squally wind, mournful cattle.
Yet it was curious or seemed curious to Dan, since he had come back from his midnight stroll in the orchard under the impression that he had decided nothing… but he unexpectedly enjoyed that walk. He had felt it in the hanger, his beech-wood, though he despised the notion of possession of the old trees. They were far more a noble congregation of arboreal patriarchs, a little where the ancient upright soul of Old Mr Reed had gone. Half a dozen times during his ownership of Thorncombe sharp-eyed tree-fellers had knocked on the door and made an offer for the timber there, and Dan had evolved a reply. They don’t belong to me, he’d say; they belong to themselves. Only one man had understood; smiled, nodded, argued no more—and had promptly been granted what lesser sawing jobs had sometimes to be done about the place.
That walk brought him home to ordinariness, to simpler lives; finally home from the stale paradise of California’s eternal smog-filtered sun to a much tenderer, if damper, matrix. Such weather, drizzling and driving, interminable and salt-laden, was far commoner when he was a boy, Paul’s age. I cannot remember Dan’s ever having really disliked it, whatever his father’s and Aunt Millie’s complaints. It somehow cocooned, enwombed, always set one dreaming of all the places, both near and far, one couldn’t go to; and long before science, even in earliest childhood, one knew it was necessary—necessary not only in the sense that it bred the miraculous early springs, the celandines and violets and primroses of every banked hedge, and the rich green-tunnelled summers, but necessary also in a far profounder sense. Life was more enjoyable so, with each day’s weather always a throw of the dice, a hazard and Dan had never really become accustomed to the boredom of unchanging skies, or fallen in with the symptomatic modern fashion for equating holiday happiness with sunshine the triumph of the Majorcas and Acapulcos of this world over its true climatic poetry.
He wondered whether this would have meant anything to Paul, as they trudged along the edge of a cabbage-field, the rain driving harder again. He doubted it. For all his current interest, Paul was a town boy, and with all the new town-dominated media conforming his and his generation’s mind… even the ploughmen carried transistors in their tractor cabins now. There was a village joke about one who had got so drowned in some pop tune that he forgot to lower his shares after a headland turn and was seen driving all the way down the return furrow with his tail cocked up ‘like an ol’ pheasant’.
And anyway, who was Dan? He walked wet fields once a year, between cities; and loved it only because he so largely escaped it. Yet in a way this attachment to a climate, a landscape, was the only decent marriage he had ever made, and had perhaps been the deepest reason he had returned here in the first place—that is, the knowledge he would never make a satisfactory marriage anywhere else.
They got off to Dartington soon after breakfast. The rain had really set in, and Paul had grown silent again. They went by the main road, through Totnes; and then he and Dan were shaking hands, the latter doing his avuncular act, renewing invitations already made. Paul had the number of Thorncombe, if he ever wanted a day away from school, with a friend perhaps… Jane disappeared inside with the boy, she wanted to see the headmaster, and didn’t come back for twenty minutes.
‘Okay?’
‘They seem to think he’ll survive.’
She had rung up about her train before they left Thorncombe. There was one she could catch at half past two, she was to spend a night in London with Roz before returning to Oxford, so there was time to spare and Dan drove the slow way, over the Dart bridge at Staverton and back through the maze of lanes eastwards. They talked about Paul and the school for a while. Dan was determined not to be the first to broach Egypt again, but it must have been on her mind. She used the first lapse in their talking to return to it.
‘Dan, about last night, I must have sounded terribly ungrateful.’
‘Not at all. Don’t be silly.’
‘It did come as a shock.’
‘My fault.’
‘What I was trying to say is that I’m not really fit company for anyone at the moment.’
He smiled, his eyes on the narrow lane ahead. ‘I should let other people judge that.’
‘You must have so much to do while you’re there.’
‘Very little, physically. Bar looking at a few locations in Cairo and Aswan. On which I should v
alue your advice, anyway.’
‘Please be serious.’
He smiled again. ‘You can be as solitary as you like, Jane. As difficult as you like. As silent as you like. But I won’t take it as a reason not to come.’
She said nothing. He slowed down at a deserted blind crossroad, and looked at her face before he edged forward. ‘You won’t be in the way. Will you at least accept that?’ She bowed her head, but still did not answer, clearly embarrassed by this persistence. He left a moment or two, then spoke again. ‘What people might think?’
‘I can’t imagine Nell would see it as being in the best of taste.’
‘As her last instructions to me were to win you back to the bourgeoisie, I rather doubt that.’ She gave him a sharp look, but he concentrated drily on his driving. ‘And since when did either of us take her view of life seriously?’
‘What did she actually say?’
‘Beneath the sarcasms, that she loves you. Is genuinely worried for you.’ He waited, then went on. ‘I don’t think she really minds what you are. She does mind that you seem unhappy.’ He added, ‘I’d be only too pleased to ring her when we get home and put the idea.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t.’
‘Then why not?’
‘It’s not really Nell.’
He drove a little way in silence.
‘What Anthony said to me? I’m just being decent?’
‘I suppose… yes, partly that.’
‘So you can’t do something perfectly normal and sensible because he recommended it.’
‘Because I’m sure he didn’t mean you should put yourself out so much.’
