Imminent Victorians

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN by John Fowles. 467 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

Despite dialogue from today's cocktail parties and themes from tomorrow's headlines, too many contemporary authors still make convention do the work of invention. They are rewriting the 19th century novel without meaning to. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles rewrites the 19th century novel and means every word of it. But his is a resourceful and penetrating talent at work on that archaic form. The result is more truly inventive and contemporary than a whole shelf of campus comings-of-age or suburban wife-swapping sagas.

Fowles' technique is to take a ready-made 1860s plot and tell it from a 1960s point of view. It is like a reincarnated Thomas Hardy revising one of his tales from the vantage point of films, Freud, space shots and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On one level, this yields an engaging parody of the Victorian novel--with chatty narrator, digressions, subplots involving cockney servants and narrative juggling. The technique also enables Fowles to compensate for some of the Victorian novel's omissions and evasions, particularly that dark side of the Victorian moon, the bedroom.

Less Conclusive Conclusions. Like all parody, his is ultimately a critique of the conventions he is parodying. In one disarming aside to the reader, Fowles argues that the Victorian novelist, aided by his assumed omniscience, patted life into artificial patterns and robbed characters of reality. While the Victorians believed that "the novelist stands next to God," Fowles takes his stand next to Godot. He proclaims that the novelist's first principle is the "freedom that allows other freedoms to exist," namely those of his characters. To illustrate the point, he twice ties up his narrative strands in tidy traditional endings, then backs up and unwinds them again in tangled, less conclusive but more believable alternate endings.

The real object of Fowles' bifocal vision, though, is not so much the Victorian novel as the life it reflected. His story unfolds amid quotations from the prophets of the age (Marx, Darwin, Tennyson), factual footnotes (married farm laborers at that time, he reports, got twice the wages given bachelors), and provocative sociological speculations (the Victorians, he suggests, may have enjoyed sex even more than our own oversexed century, because they practiced it less frequently). The purpose of all this is to place his characters, as no Victorian novelist could have, in a long perspective as exemplars of the historical currents of their time.

His hero, Charles Smithson, a young model of Victorian gentility redeemed by intelligence and irony, is an amateur naturalist and a postulant for the new faith of evolution. But he is still pledged to old pieties through his engagement to the shallow daughter of a rich London merchant. Fowles' strategy is to bring the contradictions of Charles' situation--and, by implication, of the Victorian age--to a crisis.

Charles meets Sarah Woodruff, a dark, intense governess who has been ostracized by the town for having a flagrant, fleeting affair with a French naval lieutenant. For Fowles, the unrepentant Sarah embodies the qualities that Victorian society tended to repress--passion and imagination. In the forbidden love that grows between her and Charles. Fowles foreshadows the undermining of an entire epoch. In Sarah's eventual rejection of Charles, to take up a bohemian existence in the house of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fowles projects the first glimmer of a new and freer age.

Freedom, then, is what the book is finally about. Fashionably, but compellingly, Fowles sees freedom not as an escape but a return--a return to a more natural order, to a more fundamental morality of self-discovery and self-fulfillment. The same is true, Fowles seems to be saying, of the freedom of the novelist and his fictional creations.

This thesis makes relevant all of Fowles' seemingly disjointed literary games, documentary digressions and attempts to make the Victorian past appear imminent to our present. In a cunningly oblique way, the whole novel employs an old-fashioned method to draw a timeless moral. As Fowles' epigraph from Marx puts it: "Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself."

. . .

From his 180-year-old house high on a bluff in Lyme Regis, Dorset, John Fowles can look down to a curving stone jetty called the Cobb. Two years ago, he had a vision of a woman in a long Victorian skirt standing there with her back to him. It was the basis for the opening scene of The French Lieutenant's Woman and, says Fowles, "the tiny seed from which the whole book started. It was just an image that came to me in a "hypnagogic state between 'waking and sleeping."

Fowles falls into such a state often. "My mind is constantly wandering off," he says. "If they ever want to evolve a way of picking out the prospective novelists among children, this would be the aspect to go for, this drifting off."

If Fowles had it as a child, it was the only sign he did have of his future profession. The son of a suburban cigar importer, he went to an English public school. "I enjoyed it, played cricket well and was successful." In fact, he became head boy, "a very efficient little Gestapo" who punished the other boys with a cane for their misdemeanors. After school, Fowles served in the British marines, which he hated. "I also began to hate what I was becoming in life --a British Establishment young hopeful. I decided instead to become a sort of anarchist."

Bearing Fruit. Toward this end, he turned to writing, supporting himself for 15 years with teaching jobs, and wrote part or all of at least a dozen novels. "I'm a great believer in natural organic growth. You grow a lot of things for a long time, and eventually something flowers and bears fruit." The first novel Fowles submitted to a publisher was The Collector, which was made into a film. After that, he didn't have to teach any more.

"I've never missed it," he says. "The whole human condition is slavery, and self-liberation is that little flash in the darkness for the individual." That attitude is about all that Fowles' novels have in common. "In modern art we ought to get used to the idea that the world of the imagination is a kind of landscape in which a writer can go wherever he likes." Among future excursions Fowles is planning: a novel of Nabokovian linguistic experiment and two "entertainments"--a detective thriller and a science-fiction story.

For Fowles, entertainment need not be art, but art should always be in some sense entertaining. The Collector was both a taut psychological cliffhanger and a shattering study of good and evil. The Magus was both a love and adventure tale and an erudite venture into occult philosophy. Richer and more accomplished than either. The French Lieutenant's Woman seems destined to be a bestseller. It is the kind of work that helps give success a good name.

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