The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles (Nature, Culture and Literature 1) (Nature, Culture & Literature)

THE RECURRENT GREEN UNIVERSE OF JOHN FOWLES

Nature, Culture and Literature 01

General Editors: Hubert van den Berg (University of Groningen) Axel Goodbody (University of Bath) Marcel Wissenburg (University of Nijmegen)

Advisory Board: Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick) Hartmut Böhme (Humboldt University, Berlin) Heinrich Detering (University of Kiel) Andrew Dobson (Open University) Marius de Geus (Leiden University) Terry Gifford (University of Leeds) Demetri Kantarelis (Assumption College, Worcester MA) Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University College) Michiel Korthals (Wageningen University) Svend Erik Larsen (University of Aarhus) Patrick Murphy (University of Central Florida) Kate Rigby (Monash University) Avner de-Shalit (Hebrew University Jerusalem) Piers Stephens (University of Liverpool) Nina Witoszek (University of Oslo)

THE RECURRENT GREEN UNIVERSE OF JOHN FOWLES Thomas M. Wilson

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover Photo: 50396135 (RM) John Fowles, 1 Feb 1970; photographer: Terrence Spencer; Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images. Cover Design: Erick de Jong The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-10: 90-420-1989-1 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-1989-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents: Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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Chapter 1: Individuals: Sacred Combes and Islands

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Chapter 2: Our Membership in the Community of Nature

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Chapter 3: Pastoral: Down from the Hills of Greece, into the Combes of Devon

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Chapter 4: Nature Loved and Lost: Emotional Dynamics in Daniel Martin

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Chapter 5: Nature Discovered: The Scientific Outlook

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Chapter 6: Calmly, Nobly Triumphant: The Mystery of Wilderness

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Chapter 7: Science Not the Only Avenue: Fowles’ AntiPositivism

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Chapter 8: Romanticism Heals a Blinded Eye: Poetic Receptivity to Nature

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Chapter 9: Treacherous Namers and Collectors

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Chapter 10: Being, Being, Being: From Zen to D. H. Lawrence

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Conclusions

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgements John Fowles died on the 5th of November, 2005. A good man has left us. The sun keeps hurtling through its sea of thin gas. Thanks go to John and Sarah Fowles for their friendship and encouragement in my research for this project. Kieran Dolin must be thanked for his fastidious feedback on this book over the past few years. I am grateful to my father for taking me outside so often as I was growing up. I am grateful to my mother for passing on some of her responsiveness to literature and nature to me.

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Introduction In 1971 John Fowles wrote in his diary: ‘Nature, art, then life as it is lived. All those I live among have the reverse order of priorities.’ (EUL 102/1/16, 2 July 1971: 71) The natural world is and always has been at the very centre of this writer’s existence. In his introduction to Fowles’ recently published Journals the editor Charles Drazin notes that the author’s chief passion during his boyhood was for nature, and declares that ‘this love of nature would remain as central to him as the subsequent pursuit of literature’ (2003: x). Fowles’ childhood was spent in a London suburb, but the semi-pastoral Leigh-on-Sea of the 1930s contained a stream and field close to the author’s house, as well as an extended family, many of whom were enthusiastic naturalists. During the second world war Fowles’ family moved to Ipplepen, a village in the Devon countryside, allowing Fowles the pleasure of exploring secluded copses and woods when he was on holiday from boarding school as an adolescent. While Fowles was going to Oxford, and later teaching in Poitiers, Greece and London, he was determinedly plotting a trajectory of literary success, as we have evidence for in his journals. Yet all the while he aspired to greatness as a novelist, nature was a recurring theme and an abiding preoccupation. Throughout the course of his life Fowles has sought time away from cities, in rural Greece, France, Scandinavia, America and England, either as an amateur field naturalist or as as Wordsworthian lover of natural places. Since 1965 Fowles lived in rural Dorset, a haven of wooded hills and valleys within the context of densely populated southern England. This book undertakes a comprehensive examination of Fowles’ engagement with nature from an ecocritical perspective. In Fowles’ writings nature clearly does not remain diffidently outside the walls of literary construction. The Magus (1966) sets some of its drama in the mysterious northern forests of Scandinavia, as well as the silent hills of a Greek island, and both places have immense significance for the

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development of the novel’s two major male characters. The plot of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) leans heavily on the setting of the Undercliff, a wooded coastal area in south-west England, and in the context of that novel a garden of truth outside the square tenements of Victorian platitude. This historical romance from the late sixties also experimented with various metaphorical applications of Darwin’s theory of evolution to individual and political life; as well as commenting on a contrast in the protagonist’s, Charles Smithson, manner of perceiving nature, by turns, as an amateur scientist, and as an appreciator of beauty. While generically dissimilar, Daniel Martin (1977), the socially realist novel which appears to be Fowles’ thumb to the nose of commercial success (the characteristic narrative suspense of his earlier work is in abeyance here), continued to question the tension between these two epistemologies in relation to the natural world, as well as representing nature as a phenomenon best experienced alone, and presenting a picture of rural Devon as a lost domaine. The Tree (1979), a thin volume originally published alongside a collection of photographs of trees by the French photographer Frank Horvat, is a meditation on the place of nature in the author’s life more generally. This volume deftly interweaves scenes from Fowles’ life, for example his boyhood in the Devon countryside, with more theoretical material, a chief example being a consideration of the limitations of a scientific view of nature. Wormholes (1998) collects Fowles’ more important essays to date, and here it is nature more than anything else that presents itself as the author’s abiding concern. The essays, published between 1965 and 1997, cover reflections on the act of writing, cultural criticism, and literary criticism. Almost one third of Wormholes is devoted to writings on nature. I will here use the term ecocriticism to mean ‘environmentally-valenced critical inquiry’ concerning literature (Buell 1999: 699). One of the earliest texts within the field was Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), which looked at the intrusion of technology into nature in American life. The destruction of biodiversity and the warming of the atmosphere, to list two major aspects of our current crisis, have rapidly increased in pace in the last forty years. However for many years after Marx’s book was published there was only a smattering of work to appear in the field. It is only since 1992 and the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) that ecocriticism has proven itself as one of the fastest

Introduction

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growing areas in literary study. In 1999 the prestigious journal New Literary History made ecocriticism the subject of a special issue, marking a clear acknowledgement and acceptance of the field by ‘the mandarins of American literary scholarship’ (Westling 2002: 3). Ecocritics share a subject matter and a broad set of values, however within the field there is no unifying theoretical framework. Frequently ecocritics try to incorporate their work within already established theoretical schools such as feminism, Bakhtin’s dialogism, Lacanian psychology, or the philosophy of English Romanticism (Carroll 2004: 85). The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, published in 1996, provides a representative example (Glotfelty and Fromm). The essays here are typically indebted to Foucauldian ideological criticism, with a varying mix of Marxist, Freudian and deconstructive tendencies. In some cases ecocritics take the position of the deep ecologist, arguing for a radical antianthropocentrism. Throughout most of the field one discerns an awareness of the current environmental crisis, and of the urgency this crisis brings to the work of studying and writing about nature writing, as well as ecological themes in all literature. In the words of Glen Love, ‘the accelerating pace and now globalizing scale of history seems, to those of us who call ourselves ecocritics, to require a new look at literature, a fresh examination that presumably makes some sense of the human place within it all’ (2003: 13). Among the heterogeneous theoretical allegiances of differing contemporary ecocritics, I sympathise, as will become clear, with Love’s belief that a knowledge of the ecological sciences should inform the practice of environmentally-valenced literary studies. Like many traditional literary scholars, I believe a knowledge of biography, history, art and philosophy should inform literary criticism, but I also believe that a highly useful explanatory framework for literature is evolutionary theory. On this point Joseph Carroll and Ellen Dissanayake have provided much insight (2004; 2000). My view is that printed literature is but one of the more recently invented elaborations created by meaning-craving Homo sapiens with their enormous neocortex. All art forms have their precursors in the kinds of emotion-suffused, multi-modal interactions between mother and infant. As adult humans we elaborate, that is, we create songs and chants, but also, paintings, ceremonies, rituals, plays, and symphonies. These elaborations give us pleasurable feelings of mastery and understanding in a chaotic en-

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vironment (thereby bringing relief from anxiety), they bring people together in mutuality, and they serve to enhance and bring attention to perennially important human concerns and values. Narrative was traditionally embedded in orality, but since the invention of the printingpress in the fifteenth century, printed literary texts have been increasingly significant. Literary texts may use language in repetitive ways, for example, assonance and alliteration, and such repetition provides pleasurable feelings of mastery and order. Literature’s source and subject matter is evolved human nature, with its base repertoire of areas of continuing interest. These include, for example, romantic love, individual identity, social cohesion, and contempt for the abuse of power, but also an alert interest in, and emotional responsiveness to, natural environments. Postmodern sceptics hold that what we call ‘nature’ is nothing more than a recent cultural construction. Within the debate between what Kate Soper calls the ‘nature-endorsing’ view of nature and the ‘nature-skeptical’ perspective I belong to the first camp (Love 2003: 7). As is explicated in chapter nine, giving the world category labels is a very basic and highly useful aspect of our cognition, and particularly so when we are dealing with a wild biota. In this book nature is defined as ‘the physical world, including all living things, as a norm that is apart from the features and products of civilisation and human will’ (Snyder 1990: 8). The pragmatist epistemology here subscribed to, and explicated in chapter seven, allows one to say that although we ourselves are, to a certain extent, part of nature, and have changed most of the world (only fractionally at this stage) through global warming, there still exists a physical world, and particularly the nonhuman living things in it, that are usefully thought of as a norm that is apart from the features and products of civilisation and human will. This pragmatist epistemology is firmly aligned with a species-centric view of human nature. For both the species-centric view, as well as my interpretation of the epistemology of pragmatism, the aim of human life is human flourishing; what Hellenistic philosophers knew as eudaimonia (Chisholm 1999: 1). Whether a claim is ‘true’ or not is always evaluated at some level in relation to the ultimate target of human flourishing (insidious ideologues of science forget this when they condescend to the ‘soft’ sciences and to the arts and pretend that they have a monopoly on serious knowledge). Take for example the account of the biological underpinnings of categorisation in human

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cognition (presented in chapter nine). Language is a tool that is used at the level of the organism. We label birds ‘birds’ because from the perspective of a mammal of our size, with our particular visual apparatus, we can perceive middle-sized objects with wings moving through the sky and sitting in trees. If we humans existed in a different dimension of the time-space continuum, then it might make no sense to talk about ‘birds’. Because we exist in the size we do, and think at the speed we do, it is very useful for us to call birds ‘birds’. It helps us get things done. In an epistemological framework where truth, both scientific and ethical, has a direct connection to the goal of human flourishing, it makes a lot of sense to talk about nature as a norm that is apart from the features and products of civilisation and human will. ‘Nature’ is one of the many mental categories which we use to successfully interact with the world outside ourselves as embodied human organisms. Many texts might be considered ‘nature writing’ – a field guide to birds, an academic treatise on animal ethology, a ripping yarn of ecosabotage, or a reflection on the nature of the cosmos made while hanging off the crow’s nest of a sailing ship. Thomas J. Lyon’s ‘taxonomy of nature writing’ construes the genre as having three main dimensions: ‘natural history information, personal responses to nature, and philosophical interpretation of nature’ (quoted in Roorda 1998: 4). Different works within the genre will have differing weightings towards each of these different dimensions. Fowles’ nature writing clearly leans towards the third of these dimensions: philosophical interpretations of nature. In this sense he is closer to Henry David Thoreau than to John Muir as a ‘nature writer’. His non-fictional essays on nature are never eulogistic natural history essays, that is, they rarely, if ever, contain extensive factual and/or descriptive information which celebrates the natural world. Rather the author’s relevant fictional and non-fictional writings should be approached chiefly as philosophical meditations around the subject of nonhuman nature. Within the field of ecocritism much attention has been, over the last decade or so, given to the distinguished list of American nature writers. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams and Rick Bass would be a selection of those who have been discussed in the critical literature as nonfiction ‘nature writers’. However, the less discussed English tradition

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of non-fiction writing about nature is significant. The English canon might include Gilbert White, William Cobbett, George Borrow, Mary Russell Mitford, John Ruskin, Richard Jefferies, W. H. Hudson, Edward Thomas, H. J. Massingham, and George Sturt. In Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, as well as in The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate’s landmark works of English ecocriticism have reminded us that the English Romantic poets also have valuable insights to offer as nature writers (1991; 2002). The presence of an environmental imagination, to use Lawrence Buell’s phrase, in the English novel extends from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries most obviously in the work of writers such as George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Williamson, Mary Webb, John Cowper Powys and William Golding (Buell 1995). John Fowles is an English novelist and non-fiction nature writer who is well placed at the end of both of these English lists. In his veneration of the ‘ultra-human’, a term I will explicate in chapter ten, Fowles is in some ways heir to the pantheistic sensibility of Richard Jefferies. In his advocacy of living present-tense experience of nature Fowles has close connections with D. H. Lawrence late in his life. Not until the present study have Fowles’ writings been comprehensively discussed from an ecocritical perspective. Nearly all the critical literature on Fowles’ work neglects his essays. Dianne Vipond, in an introduction to a special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature devoted to Fowles’ work, expressed hope that ‘given the sheer volume of his non-fiction output and its general importance to his fictional oeuvre that readers of this special number will begin to consider it as a viable subject for future critical study’ (1996: 6). Since 1996 when Vipond made this statement there has been very little response in the world of English studies. An evaluation of Fowles as a nature writer cannot fail to examine his non-fiction. I here include within my critical ambit nearly all of the author’s writings. Importantly I have accessed the complete unpublished diaries – of which there are over two thousand pages. The diaries in particular have added valuable new insights to almost every aspect of my view of ‘Fowles and nature’. I found these numerous unpublished volumes to be full of nature writing of memorable quality. I am glad to here bring some such excerpts, ones frequently not included in the published journals, to a wider audience. In 2003 a first heavily edited

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volume of Fowles’ Journals was published. In 2004 the first biography of Fowles appeared, written by Eileen Warburton. In 2006 the second and final volume of Fowles’ Journals was published. As is evident from these facts, there has been, during recent years, a minor renaissance in Fowles’ literary presence. Fowles’ writings are rich and varied and have occasioned much criticism as a result. The range of critical approaches previously taken to Fowles’ work is extensive. The following is but a representative sample. H. W. Fawkner’s The Timescapes of John Fowles (1984) is a neuropsychological investigation into the uses of time in Fowles’ novels. An example of a gender-based approach to Fowles is Bruce Woodcock’s Male Mythologies: John Fowles and Masculinity (1984) which examines Fowles’ patriarchial tendency, and his ‘masculine ideology’. There has been much psychological criticism, mainly Jungian. Carol M. Barnum’s The Fiction of John Fowles: A Myth for Our Time (1988) unravels what she finds to be a unified body of Jungian imagery, including the archetypes of the shadow, the anima and the mandala in Fowles’ work (as well as discerning Joseph Cambell’s quest motif in the novels). Katherine Tarbox’s The Art of John Fowles (1988) also touches on the notion of finding archetypes in the novels, within a context of discerning the themes of time, freedom and morality, originally put forward in The Magus, in all of Fowles’ major novels. Susana Onega, in Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (1989), also gives a Jungian reading of A Maggot. A deconstructive reading of Fowles’ novels is exemplified by Mahmoud Salami’s John Fowles’s Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism (1992), where Mahmoud argues that Fowles’ experiments in narratology in his fiction mark him as a poststructuralist. Apart from the approaches of the usual range of critical schools in Anglo-Saxon literary studies during the eighties and the nineties, there has also been much formalist criticism. In fact the great majority of criticism has focused on the hermeneutics of meaning structures within each of the author’s fictional texts. Nearly all the book-length works on Fowles oeuvre from this sector are commentaries on his individual works, usually arranged chronologically (rather than thematically, as in the case of the present study). Simon Loveday’s The Romances of John Fowles (1985), uses some of Northrop Frye’s ideas and paints Fowles as a romancer with a realist bias. Although only an introductory survey, one of the most eloquent interpretations of Fowles’ major novels is

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Peter Conradi’s John Fowles (1982). Existentialism was a felt presence in at least Fowles’ first three novels, and early critics responded with existentialist readings, including Conradi (Palmer 1974; Wolfe 1975). James Acheson’s John Fowles (1998) continues this tradition of finding existentialist themes in the early novels. Acheson’s study rightly notes that while existentialism wanes in Fowles’ work from the early seventies onwards, personal authenticity considered more broadly remains central to Fowles’ novels. Nature is central in, and to an understanding of, Fowles’ body of work, and yet at the time of my writing this book (2001-2005) there has been no single, extended study of the subject of the natural environment in the work of this acclaimed post-war English novelist and essayist. The Nature Reader, a well known anthology of nature writing edited by Daniel Halpern and Dan Frank, included an excerpt from Fowles’ The Tree (1996). The chapter entitled ‘John Fowles, Daniel Martin, and Naturalism’ in Robert Huffaker’s John Fowles is of note in its acknowledgment of the significance of nature for an understanding of the author, but is more a short biographical account of nature in Fowles’ life than a detailed, and wide-rangingly theoretical approach to the subject (1980: 15-43). Admittedly it is an emerging field, but still, one might ask, why has Fowles not been discussed more by ecocritics during the last decade? In 1999 John Fowles and Nature, Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape, a collection of essays edited by James Aubrey, was published. The volume’s subtitle ‘Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape’ delimited its thematic ambitions. From the start the volume was a collection of articles submitted for the John Fowles Symposium on ‘Love, Loss, Landscape’ (not purely on landscape) which took place in Lyme Regis in 1996. The editor, Aubrey, was perspicacious in claiming that there is ‘a new phase in Fowles criticism’, one of ‘ecocriticism’, and some of the essays in the volume were useful during the writing of this book (1999: 26). Lisa Colletta’s ‘The Geography of Ruins: John Fowles’ Daniel Martin and the Travel Narratives of D. H. Lawrence’ has been heuristic for its analysis of Fowles’ notion of ‘whole sight’ (see my chapter ten), and Diane Vipond’s essay ‘The Landscape of Loss in the (Love) Poems of John Fowles’ is noteworthy for its fine reading of Fowles’ poem about the landscape of the Greek islands, ‘Apollo’, a reading from which I have drawn in chapter nine of the present study. However although the book is occasionally enlightening, the fourteen essays in John

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Fowles and Nature are not exhaustive in meeting the challenge of a comprehensive ecocritical reading of the English writer’s work. The following study of Fowles’ writings may be looked at as falling into three sections. Section one (chapters one to four) looks at the various representations of the natural world in the author’s work. Chapter one examines the figure of the solitary in nature in Fowles’ writings. Here Heidegger’s phenomenology supports Fowles’ love of a one-to-one relationship with nature, but in addition the work of Joseph Carroll on the influence of personality on literary meaning is explored. In chapter two the discussion is based around the notion that we, as humans, are part of a community of living beings. Fowles’ writings are of interest here in that they show to what extent we are necessarily alienated from the prelapsarian community of non-human animals, but also, they give us examples of language use that bind us back into kinship with other natural beings. Looking to the journals I align such writings with James Lovelock’s interpretation of the biosphere as Gaia. Many of Fowles’ journal entries here present a consoling picture of our belonging as part of nature in the face of human mortality. In chapter three we enter one of the significant topics of discussion within ecocriticism today, the meaning of the literary trope of the pastoral. Terry Gifford’s concept of post-pastoral, a mature environmental aesthetic that outmanoeuvres the pitfalls inherent in traditional pastoral, points the way forward to the possibility of a progressive narrative pattern encompassing humans living with the earth. As I will show, Fowles’ major novels can be interpreted as a dialectical progression which leads to the mature post-pastoral of key chapters of Fowles’ Daniel Martin. Chapter four examines the gamut of emotional responses to representations of nature in Fowles’ writings. In discussing nature as the loved other E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis proves pertinent. Nature as the lost domain is a subject well compared to Raymond Williams’ idea of nature writing as being bound up in the nostalgia for childhood. Nature as a presence not seen becomes in Fowles’ writings a satire on the nature-blindness of city dwellers. Finally, nature as a literally increasingly absent other brings us to a discussion of the range of emotional responses available to ecocrisis, from rage to elegy. In chapters one to four I am concerned with nature as it appears in Daniel Martin, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Tree, Poems and the journals. In his elaboration of metaphors for

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non-human animals that mobilise an ethic of care, in his elaboration of a post-pastoral, and in his satires upon modern alienations from the natural world, Fowles has important literary representations of the environment to offer contemporary readers. What might be considered ‘section two’ of the book (chapters five and six) looks at the science of nature and the mystery of nature; from nature known, to nature unknown. Here the discussion focuses first, on Fowles’ interest in natural history and the biological sciences as expressed in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the journals. Fowles is aligned with E. O. Wilson’s veneration of nature as viewed through the lens of natural history. Fowles has been called the priest without a faith, and in his fiction nineteenth-century man puts his hand on Darwin’s bible. Some of the more problematical aspects of adopting the natural sciences as a cosmology are discussed in this chapter. Chapter six examines the meaning of nature as a quantity beyond human reckoning as given shape in The Magus, The Tree and the journals. In placing this chapter after the previous one on science I go on to show how much of a mystagogue the author remains despite his concern with natural history. Thus from chapters one through to six the focus is on how nature is represented in Fowles’ writings. This first half of the book is essentially myself, as ecocritic, attending to Fowles’ writings, mainly novels, but also journal entries. The ‘second half’ of the book, and what may be looked at as section three (chapters seven to ten) is different. Here I actually engage with Fowles as what one might consider a fellow ecocritic. In this section of my study we look at what is the major intellectual issue in the author’s non-fiction nature writing: the tensional nature of the relationship between two contrasting epistemologies used to access the natural world: art and science. This section is not a generalised discussion of the differences between the two epistemologies, or of C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’, but rather an account of how Fowles differentiates two different ways of knowing the natural world, that used by a scientifically interested natural historian and the knowing of a Wordsworthian lover of nature. One of the central issues in modern ecocriticism is Jonathan Bate’s contention that the Romantic poets, as well as many other nature poets, have revelations of dwelling, or invaluable perceptions of the natural world, to share with us if we would live in a culture which fosters sustainability. Fowles’ nonfiction preceded Bate by twenty years in calling for a reconsideration and re-

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evaluation of the Romantic poets from a perspective of environmental praxis. Many of Fowles’ nonfictional writings about the ‘poetic’ epistemology we might use to know nature are usefully looked at in the light of Bate’s argument that poetry can, quite literally, save the earth (2002: 258). In chapter nine I discuss Fowles’ comments on the relationship between the perceiving mind and the natural world. I show that Fowles’ analysis is more balanced than a figure like Neil Evernden, who mistakenly thinks Fowles counsels forgoing any categorisation of nature in our perceptions of it (1992: 133). We then open the complex Pandora’s box of the relationship between environmental texts and their external referent. It is true that John Fowles has not tried to be John Muir. Fowles’ writings emphasise the fact that the written word entails an uncomfortable divorce between us and nature, and here his thoughts can be usefully compared with those of David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996). However Fowles has been over-hasty in rejecting his own nature poetry, what little of it there is. Here it proves useful to introduce Dissanayake’s argument, similar to Abram’s, that we in the modern West live in a scriptocentric culture. Most of us are illiterates when it comes to ‘reading’ the natural world, and we have come to invest too much epistemological authority in printed data. However, I argue that nature poetry can be more than throwing stones at swallows, and that Fowles would be wise to consider orality as a place to embed nature poetry that will not remove us from the environment to quite the same extent as writing and reading. In the final chapter we end the study with a consideration of the importance of present-tense lived experience, facilitated by contact with non-human species of life. Such experience is championed, in a manner similar to in Fowles’ writings, by D. H. Lawrence at the end of his life. It turns out that there are a surprising number of lines of literary kinship between Lawrence and Fowles as ‘nature writers’. Both exhibit an acute sense of ‘existingness’ in their late writings. Both are overwhelmingly preoccupied with the subject of ‘being’. It would be a shame to pre-empt the impact of the closing image of the study, but let me say that it is something as ostensibly prosaic as a flower in a three-acre garden in Lyme Regis. The last four chapters of the present volume, chapters seven to ten, follow a dialectical sequence and a unified argument concerning the ideal way in which to construe nature as an interested non-specialist.

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However, apart from this section of the book, I have brought together a collection of independent chapters which explore different theoretical perspectives on nature and nature writing. My reason for arranging the volume's chapters in their present sequence is that if I was to start straight into a discussion of Fowles’ non-fictional essays about the nuances of various epistemologies (the more unfied line of argument which runs from chapters seven to ten) then it might dissuade the more intellectually timid reader from persisting in their newly begun reading experience. (Although chapters seven and onwards are more philosophical in tenor than earlier chapters, let me hasten to add that they do offer, like the rest of the book, plenty of concrete imagery for the imagination to get a purchase on.) My hope is that a reader will find the early, independently framed chapters of interest, and will be subsequently drawn into following the later more theoretically unified line of argument. It is true that I use Jonathan Bate's theory of poetry as a 'revelation of dwelling' and that Martin Heidegger, and David Abram, champion ways of being in nature which I apply to Fowles’ writings elsewhere and which are closely interrelated to Bate’s theory (all are phenomenological). It is also true that I apply Gaia theory and E. O. Wilson's natural history-orientated approach in other chapters. The use of a multiplicity of theoretical frameworks is consistent with the conclusions drawn in the closing chapters about the need to apply both a scientific epistemology and a more poetic (holisitc, emotion-suffused, associative) perception when approaching nature as a curious and appreciative, non-specialist human being. I have already mentioned that the philosophy of pragmatism underlies my writing as an ecocritic. My interpretation of pragmatism suggests that whether a claim is ‘true’ or not is always evaluated in some way in relation to the ultimate target of human flourishing. If we are to remember this, then we will consider that neither the sciences nor the humanties may be said to have a monopoly on the production of humanly significant knowledge. We will consider that the application of neither Heidegger’s phenomenology nor E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis are, by themselves, the Grand Trunk Roads to useful illumination of Fowles’ various literary representations. One of Fowles’ central insights as a writer, explored and explicated in much greater depth in chapter seven, is that more than one manner of perceiving nature is needed in order for us to have a full and humanly satisfying relationship with the

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natural world. In a similar manner this volume champions the value of a multiplicity of routes towards uncovering useful knowledge about John Fowles’ writings. I live in Perth, Western Australia, a city that sits on a flat and sandy plain, 32 degrees south, on the western edge of the most geologically lethargic and infertile continent on earth. My home has a Mediterranean climate, and, where the surrounding land hasn’t been cleared for suburban development, a hyperdiverse flora evolved to endure with very little in the way of soil nutrients and long periods of hot and dry weather. Although Western Australia has diverse and beautiful flowers, birds, reptiles and marine life, it is a very different nature that I see when I leave the pavement to the one John Fowles has spent much of his life knowing, loving and writing about. The enormous difference between our two floras was commented on by the writer himself when, upon receiving The Flowers and Plants of Western Australia as a gift in 1987 he recorded in his diary (EUL 102/1/18, 25 October 1987: 94): Such flowers and flowering shrubs. They touch on what we can (just) grow here, with the Grevilleas, Banksias and so on. But most are in a dream world, imaginable only; in a sense, pleasant enough, like that, as images only, quasi-fiction. Cowslip Orchids, Sturt Peas, so many of the shrubs… they have the reality of Swift or Voltaire.

Cowslip Orchids and Sturt Peas have more than the reality of quixotic travellers of the imagination for myself. But thankfully, so does the temperate climate and deciduous woodlands of Fowles’ home. As part of my research for this book I spent time in Exeter in south-west England, where I read through the entirety of Fowles’ journals. This trip also gave me the opportunity to visit the author himself, at his home in Lyme Regis. Many ecocritics have found it useful to visit the places a nature writer has lived and written about, ‘retracing the footsteps of John Muir in the Sierra’ if one was writing on Muir for example (Glotfelty 1996: xxiv). I found it very helpful to walk through the garden below Fowles’ house, which he has interacted with on a daily basis for the past three and a half decades and professes such a deep affection for, as well as to experience for myself the character of the nearby deciduous forests, principally the Undercliff west of Lyme. When not researching primary material at Exeter University in 2003 I

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had ample opportunity to develop a first hand acquaintance with another kind of primary material, the lush greenery and mild climate of south-west England. I hope to bring some relevant bioregional consciousness to my criticism. I have had the opportunity to look around Fowles’ garden, which slopes down and away from his house towards the Atlantic ocean below and to the south. At the top of the garden, closest to the house, is an area of lawn. This area is relatively small compared to the rest of the garden and as one passes over it numerous paths are available to thread one’s way down through the trees and shrubs. There is a richness of available options for the direction of one’s stroll, manifested in the many branching paths and byways. Everywhere you move the sound of the ocean breaking on the land makes a comforting background hiss. This ‘garden’ is really a wooded nature sanctuary. The leaves rustle and shimmer and one moves down the slope through the trees. As I begin this study, we will walk alone through the leaves.

Chapter 1 Individuals: Sacred Combes and Islands In Daniel Martin the eponymous protagonist is spoken of as ‘a solitary at heart’, even though ‘that must always cripple him as a human being’ (Fowles 1977: 422). The figure of the solitary man in nature is a recurrent presence in Fowles’ major novels. Daniel Martin is the story of an English playwright and now successful screen-writer in his fifties, who has lived part of his life in England and part in America. In the chapter of the novel set in New Mexico Daniel remarks that unlike Jenny, his younger lover at that point in the novel, he is not a ‘people person’ in any deep sense (DM 330). However Daniel does have a very strong affection for nature, in particular for the landscape of the Devon countryside where he spent his childhood, and had then bought a farm later in life. Here the narrator explains his return to the country of his childhood (DM 407-8): 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.

There is a lull in the rain one afternoon at Thorncombe, the farm owned by Daniel. Daniel walks to the front door and stands outside (DM 427-8): Everything in the combe before him was stained a faint gold, the wet garden, the meadows, the glistening drops on the branches… A hidden magpie chattered from the far side of the combe, and there was an angry cawing from a pair of crows. They flew overhead, purposefully, in hue and cry, and Dan walked down the wet paving of the path to where he could turn and look back over the roof of the farmhouse. It was a buzzard, circling high over the beechwood, the soft light from the opened west catching, as in some gentle, delicate search-light, the brown-and-white underside of the bird’s wings. It mewed, majestic, golden,

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Individuals: Sacred Combes and Islands apotheosised, against a dark cloud above. Dan stood and watched till it was chased off, remembering Tsankawi. All his real but unwritten worlds; his past futures, his future pasts.

The last sentence of the above passage raises two issues I will discuss later, firstly the way in which nature resists assimilation to written records, and secondly its habit of being irrelevant to human systems of tenses. For the moment I take this passage as exemplary of Daniel’s being a solitary in his relations with nature. As Daniel stands outside his farmhouse and looks at the buzzard he is alone, and it is not incidental that Fowles here and elsewhere in his fiction depicts his characters’ encounters with nature as one-to-one relationships. Nature is rarely communally-mediated in the author’s fiction; more often it is rather seen and felt by one person. Furthermore, this one person often encounters nature, as Daniel does here with the wet and beautiful Devon countryside, while amidst a combe, or small valley. In this chapter I want to discuss the figure of the solitary individual in nature in Fowles’ life and work, and the figures of the sacred combe and island in the author’s work. As is the case in the excerpt with which I opened the chapter from Daniel Martin, the sacred combe is a space in nature that is often experienced by a solitary individual in Fowles’ writings. In an observation on the creative process in Daniel Martin the protagonist tells us of an experience of retreat or secrecy that he has when writing plays or film scripts. When he is writing he feels (DM 272): as one might feel to be the first man ever to set foot on a desert island, a new planet. No one else had yet been there, however stale the place might turn out to be when it was finally thrown open to the world.

Daniel finds Rétif de la Bretonne’s bonne vaux to be his favourite emblem for this idea of retreat to a wonderful and isolated place when engaged in the creation of imaginative literature (DM 273). La bonne vaux, a phrase from regional eighteenth-century French found in Restif de la Bretonne’s autobiography, Monsieur Nicholas, signifies a valley of abundance and fertility. It is true that this reference to de la Bretonne’s bonne vaux, or as the narrator translates it, his sacred combe, is intended to provide a metaphor at this point in Daniel Martin for the kind of place Daniel-the-writer goes to in his imagination when engaged in the creative process, as well as to suggest a more

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general retreat to a metaphorical greenwood of the English imagination. However this reference also tells us much about one of Daniel’s favourite physical conformations in the natural world. The valley of abundance and fertility is described by de la Bretonne while recounting his boyhood in a remote Burgundian village in the 1740s. The date of the scene is approximately 1744 and the place is somewhere in the Auxerre region of France. The young Nicholas takes the family flock further from the farm than he has ever been before. He enters a lonely valley (de la Bretonne 1989: 73): Il y avait au fond du vallon, sur le bord d’une ravine, des buissons pour mes chèvres avec une pelouse où mes genisses pouvaient paître comme dans le Grandpré. En me voyant là, j’éprouvai une secrete horreur, causée par les contes d’excommuniés changes en bêtes que me faisait Jacquot; mais cette horreur n’était pas sans plaisir. Mon quadruple troupeau paissait; les cochons trouvaient en abondance une espèce de carotte sauvage, que les paysans nomment échavie, et ils labouraient la terre, tandis que les plus gros, et surtout leur mère, s’avançaient du côte du bois. Je les suivais pour les empêcher d’y entrer, lorsque j’aperçus sous un vieux chêne à glands, un énorme sanglier. Je tressaillis d’horreur et de plaisir, car cet animal augmentait l’aspect sauvage qui avait tant de charmes pour moi. At the bottom of the valley, on the edge of a ravine, there were bushes for my goats and grass where my heifers could graze as in the Grandpré. In finding myself there, I felt a secret horror, caused by the tales of the excommunicated changed into beasts which Jacquot had told me; but this horror wasn’t without pleasure. My fourfold flock grazed; the pigs found in abundance a species of wild carrot, which the peasants call échavie, and they rooted in the earth, while the largest ones, and especially their mother, advanced to the edge of the wood. I followed them to stop them from entering, when I noticed under an old oak full of acorns, an enormous wild boar. I trembled with horror and pleasure, as this animal increased the wild aspect which had so much charm for me.

The word combe occurs in English from the sixteenth century onwards in the forms of ‘combe’, ‘comb’ or ‘coomb’. It is often used in the south-west of England to refer to a deep hollow or small valley, often on the flank of a hill. For Daniel the quintessence of de la Bretonne’s vision of a wooded retreat is its being (DM 273):

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Individuals: Sacred Combes and Islands a place outside the normal world, intensely private and enclosed, intensely green and fertile, numinous, haunted and haunting, dominated by a sense of magic that is also a sense of a mysterious yet profound parity in all existence.

Daniel says of this vision of nature that it is a recurrent feature in Western literature, from the Garden of Eden and the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, to James Hilton’s Shrangri-La, in his novel The Lost Horizon (DM 273). He might have added that it could be seen as a feature of the genre of pastoral, but here I hesitate, as the motif of the sacred combe I am discussing in the present chapter is more specific than the widely acknowledged cultural currency that has accreted around Virgil’s Arcadia (I discuss pastoral explicitly in Fowles’ work in chapter three). The bonne vaux denotes not a generalised Golden Age of carefree innocence in the countryside, but rather a peculiar geographical conformation, with particular significations including mystery, fertility and solitude. The sacred combe is a place of retreat, however an adequate treatment of its significance in the author’s work would not be provided by simply dismissing the trope as the escapism from complexity familiar from the anthologies of the Georgian poets which appeared after the First World War. Out of all the possible options, from the Garden of Eden to Shrangri-La, the protagonist chooses, in an act not surprising for the novel’s francophilic author, the secret valley of abundance from the eighteenth-century Monsieur Nicholas. However Daniel then admits that this vision would be more readily associated by the English with the Samuel Palmer of the Shoreham years (DM 273). What can we make of this reference to Palmer? Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) was an English artist who, particularly during an early period of his life spent living in the Kentish village of Shoreham, painted works in which the rolling landscape around him became heavy with natural abundance and otherworldly grace. Like the valleys and clearings in the paintings of Samuel Palmer, Daniel’s secret place is enclosed; it is situated in a valley. Again, as in the vision of Palmer, nature is found to be a cornucopia of natural riches; wild animals abound and acorns, carrots and the like are there for the taking in the fictional bonne vaux. Palmer’s vision was inspired partly by his Christian faith; it was God’s plenty he saw in living corners of green England. However, Daniel’s vision of a sacred combe is also similar to the green England that Palmer saw while living at Shoreham as being ‘outside the normal world’, ‘in-

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tensely green and fertile’, and ‘dominated by a sense of magic’. Admittedly in the case of the last of these epithets one would need to use ‘a sense of religious awe’ to differentiate the work of Palmer from the vision of the atheistic Daniel. While Daniel does translate la bonne vaux as ‘the sacred combe’, we can assume he uses the adjective more in the sense of sacrosanct and precious than as dedicated to a religious purpose. Elsewhere in the novel Daniel writes of the nature he had experienced during his boyhood in the Devon countryside, saying that it had ‘an aura, a mystery, a magic in the anthropological sense’ (DM 70). In speaking of a magic in ‘the anthropological sense’ perhaps the narrator alludes to a more sophisticated view of magic, as a practice encoding a human need for symbolism, for cryptic significance, a practice projecting such significances onto the natural world. In fact this view is substantiated by Daniel where he states that the vision of nature he developed ‘was nine parts emotion and sublimation’ (DM 70). If we view the ‘magic’ of la bonne vaux as largely an emotional construct (saying more about Daniel’s yearnings than the world he inhabits) then we could say that Daniel has inherited Palmer’s luminescent vision of the fields and woods of England while selfconsciously integrating it into a secular world-view. The vision of Palmer set free of its biblical reference points does not lose any of its inspired content, and it seems that Daniel’s vision of the sacred combe ‘dominated by a sense of magic’ signifies a no less enraptured conception of a natural place outside the normal world. So the literary representation of the sacred combe we are getting to know is fecund, mysterious and also numinous. The figure of the sacred combe denotes seclusion – nature as a place ‘intensely private and enclosed’. In de la Bretonne’s own literary bonne vaux it seems like the young Frenchman is the only person to have ever strayed into the wooded valley. Many such solitary retreats appear in Daniel Martin. They include Tsankawi, a Pueblo Indian mesa site in New Mexico situated on a series of rock platforms which jut out, islandlike, above ‘the sea of pines, the broken valley plains, the distant snow-capped mountains’ (DM 325) and for which Daniel has a special love; Thorncombe, the farm in Devon near his childhood home, which Daniel buys later in life; and Kitchener’s Island, a wooded island on the Nile in Egypt that Daniel visits while researching a film script and describes as a tropical bonne vaux (DM 536). Thorncombe, where I began, is especially similar to the eighteenth-century Nicho-

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las’ secret valley. The farm even has the word ‘combe’ built into its title. Daniel remembers the Thorncombe that he visited as a boy: ‘It was isolated, orcharded in a little valley of its own, backed up against a steep wooded hillside and facing south-west’ (DM 346). Both Nicholas’ valley of abundance and Daniel’s Devon farm are physically cut-off and enclosed by their valley locations. A charge of politically irresponsible escapism might be made against a writer of imaginative literature who celebrates a wilderness space such as the sacred combe in their work. Over four hundred years ago George Puttenham wrote of the function of pastoral poetry as a ‘vaile’, punning on the double signification of valley settings and a duplicitous covering over of authentic rural reality contained in the term (quoted in Gifford 1999: 23). Perhaps it is understandable that solitude would be an increasingly precious commodity in post-war Britain, with its more and more ubiquitous culture of consumer capitalism and dense population distribution. Is it not literature’s function to confront and engage with the pathologies of society? This oftenmade charge against pastoral literature (for example, Roger Sales’ charge against eighteenth-century pastoral that it is escapist in finding refuge in the country) is worth looking at in the context of Daniel Martin (Sales 1983). Daniel and Jenny’s trip to the sacred combes of New Mexico, Bandelier and Tsankawi, is made in the context of their working on the movie sets of Los Angeles. It is an escape from a highly artificial and inauthentic world. The sacred combe is indeed somewhere to escape to in this novel, a retreat. Tsankawi itself sits close to Los Alamos, the notorious atomic bomb laboratory and a site symbolising the destructiveness of the modern world. Daniel and his friend Jane’s visit to Kitchener’s Island, an ‘oasis of blue and green’, is made directly upon escaping Aswan with its ‘imposing and traffic-filled waterfront, high-rise buildings’ and horizon ‘festooned with wires and pylons, radar, all the ugly adjuncts of twentieth-century technology and war’ (DM 532). In fact as Daniel and Jane arrive on Kitchener’s Island they find that Aswan ‘was like a huge scorpion, pincered, menacing the little oasis of blue and green at their feet’ (DM 534). But it is a retreat more in the military sense of a redoubt than in the sense of a permanent hiding-place. It is a space from which the novel’s characters gather energy for change and greater perspective on their public worlds.

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This point has been well made by Jeannette Sabre (1983: 41). She notes that it is from his retreat at the Devon farm Thorncombe that Daniel decides to write the novel that will allow him to leave the inauthentic world of Hollywood. It is also at Thorncombe that Daniel makes one of his first steps into emotional maturity by asking his friend Jane to accompany him on his travels to the Middle East. It is after their visit to Kitchener’s Island that Daniel asks Jane – a woman his own age unlike his earlier, twenty-something girlfriend, Jenny - to marry him, and even after her discouragement he persists, suggesting that they extend their travels to include Lebanon. As Sabre notes it is not only energy for change that Daniel finds in sacred combes, but also perspective on the outside world: ‘at Tsankawi and Thorncombe the challenge of the real makes [Daniel] conscious of the artificiality of his relationship with Jenny.’ Daniel’s time in sacred combes helps him to see the inadequacy of having Jenny as his lover, and aids him in letting her go (Sabre 1983: 42). Thoreau wrote (1991: 66): Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord… till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality… a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.

Nature’s role as Thoreau’s ‘Realometer’, a presence that sets a touchstone of abiding reality beneath the mud and slush of contemporary illusion, is thus enabled in Fowles’ presentation of the sacred combe. In an interview Fowles said that ‘the real in the general sense, the real for me does not lie where we are now, in other words, in cities. It lies for me very much in the countryside and in the wild’ (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 179). In his essay ‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ William Cronon asserts that ‘wilderness represents a flight from history’ (Cronon 1996: 79). I would argue that Cronon is mistaken in making this assertion. The championing of wild nature can become a flight from history, but only if one construes ‘history’ very narrowly as the last ten thousand years experienced by certain agricultural societies in the world, as one might expect a historian such as Cronon to do. If we think of history

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as the history of our species, wilderness is our home, and championing it can indeed take the form of a ‘flight to history’. It is literally true that if the history of the genus Homo, 2.2 million years, was to be compressed into span of seventy years, the life of a man, humanity occupied its ancestral environment and practiced a hunter-gather lifestyle for sixty-nine years and eight months, whereupon some of us took to farming and moved into villages for the last 120 days (Wilson 2002: 136). It is only in a comparatively tiny fraction of our species’ history that we have settled down and developed agriculture and then begun to live in cities. From the perspective of evolutionary history Fowles is right, in Sabre’s words, to ascribe ‘the real’ to the country. When pressed with the accusation that he wanted to go backwards the modern poet of ecology Gary Snyder remarked that “It’s only a temporary disturbance I’m setting myself against. I’m in line with the big flow” (Snyder 1999: 106). In ascribing the real to the countryside Fowles is simply assuming a larger context to human history. Where Cronon’s essay does become useful, however, is in its pointing to the fact that odes to the glories of wilderness risk becoming insidious abnegations of our responsibility to confront environmental problems outside the wilderness space (Cronon 1996: 81). As Cronon writes: ‘By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit’ (1996: 81). The homes which we actually inhabit are likely to be filled with material possessions, such as cars, which put too heavy a burden on the earth’s resources. In this way literary visions of wilderness spaces, such as Fowles’ ‘sacred combe’ can, potentially, become implicated in a false consciousness that disregards environmentally destructive behaviours, such as driving a car, as they fall outside of the privileged island of the wilderness space. Fowles’ favourite emblem for nature, the sacred combe, risks such implication. However in some ways this is to go too far. There are phenomenological aspects of the sacred combe experience that are irreducibly significant, as I will argue in relation to a Heideggerian reading at the end of this chapter. Even on a political level might one wonder whether there is a necessary connection between celebrating wilderness as a writer of prose fiction and reneging on environmental responsibility broadly conceived? It is, one may rather think, simply a risk, not a corollary, that the first may lead to the second.

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Thus while I am not suggesting that Fowles’ employment of the sacred combe motif in Daniel Martin makes him morally guilty, I am suggesting that Cronon’s comments are very useful in that they alert us to the dangers attendant on interpreting Fowles’ use of this motif as bringing with it a world-view which unconsciously disavows environmental responsibility outside the wooded, valley space of the sacred combe. In reading Fowles on the sacred combe the reader should guard against ever thinking that the nature outside this intriguing physical conformation is any less in need of care and attention, of responsible environmental management, than the numinous green inside. I have mentioned that the farm Thorncombe is represented as a retreat, but it is also true the countryside of Devon in general has a strong association with this notion of a green redoubt for Daniel. When the character of Anthony, a friend of Daniel from his days as a student at Oxford, dies, Anthony’s wife Jane and her son Paul accompany Daniel on a visit to Thorncombe. The three characters drive through Dorset, with Paul stopping along the way to indulge an interest in medieval agriculture. They pass Dorchester and climb (DM 340): up into the coastal hills past Maiden Castle and across what is for me one of the frontiers of that mysterious entity, the West of England… the first glimpse of silvery Lyme Bay reaching down to Start Point and, on days clearer than this, of Dartmoor on the western horizon; the first smell of home, Paul’s dull old champaign England at last left behind, the green and closed, dense with retreat, ahead.

The notion of the Devon countryside being ‘dense with retreat’ is one which is apparently shared by Fowles and the fictional creation Daniel. Daniel Martin is in fact a roman à clef in many ways for Fowles himself (as Peter Conradi notes Daniel Martin’s soubriquet as a writer is S. Wolfe, which is an anagram of ‘Fowles’ (1982: 95)). In the preface to a book of photographs of the British landscape by Fay Godwin, Land, Fowles again mentions de la Bretonne’s bonne vaux. He writes that the visual imprecision of this verbal account of a French landscape is one of its merits in that it allows each reader to envision the place according to his or her own particular store of memories (Fowles 1998: 324-5). Fowles’ own boyhood experiences exploring the woods of the Devon countryside during the early 1940s gave him,

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one imagines, a store of memories that would make the passage from Monsieur Nicholas particularly meaningful and evocative. In The Tree the author celebrates the unpopulated secrecy of the Devon woods and copses of his actual boyhood. He recalls (1979: 567): The lonelier the place, the better it pleased me: its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness. I had a dream of some endless combe, I suppose almost an animal dream, an otter-dream, of endless hanging beech-woods and hazel-coppices and leated meadows, houseless and manless. It was not quite without substance in those days, such ‘lost’ valleys still existed and in some of them the rest of the world did not.

A hidden valley or enclosed congregation of trees is, as a part of wild nature, in a sense outside the world of the historical present; imputing historical dates, within a few hundreds years let us say, to nature unaltered by human impact has little relevance to such nature (although, tragically, global warming now makes such judgements less clearcut). As Fowles puts it, in the Devon of his childhood there still existed ‘lost’ valleys in which the rest of the world seemed to not exist. An important aspect of the sacred combe seems to be the fact that it is outside the normal world, it provides a redoubt from the more blatant and banal aspects of everyday reality. It is also, due to the nature of a woodland environment when in leaf, highly mysterious (I will elaborate on this theme in chapter six). Finally the young Fowles relishes the fact that he is alone when walking through such ‘lost valleys’. Fowles enters himself into a long tradition of woodland dreamers in this autobiographical excerpt. The line of woodland solitaries in English literature runs from Sir Philip Sidney in the Elizabethan period, who wrote of ‘sweete woods the delight of solitarinesse’, to Andrew Marvell in the eighteenth century who gloried in his sanctuary in the woods of Lord Fairfax at Appleton House, to William Cowper and John Clare in the nineteenth century, to Edward Thomas early in the twentieth (Hayman 2003: 181). Edward Thomas (1878-1917), particularly, advocated the English countryside in a manner similar to the way Fowles writes here. Thomas’ woods, like those of Fowles’ childhood, are free from any historical connotations (unlike John Clare’s), and although Thomas was not averse to social interactions, he did like to be in nature alone (Hayman 2003: 195). In The Heart of England (1906) Thomas described woodland as a gentle compulsion to dream

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(Hayman 2003: 194). For Thomas, the sensitive visitor ‘soon has a feeling of ease and seclusion there’ (quoted in Hayman 2003: 194) and as his wife Helen Thomas remarked of her husband: ‘almost his greatest pleasure, and certainly his greatest need, was to walk and be alone’ in the southern English counties and their woodlands (quoted in Hayman 2003: 195). In The French Lieutenant’s Woman the Undercliff, a wooded terrain to the west of Lyme Regis, and more particularly the area known as Ware Commons, is an area full of what could be considered sacred combes. The narrator of this novel describes it as ‘the nearest place to Lyme where people could go and not be spied on’ and as having ‘an obscure, long and mischievous legal history’ (Fowles: 1970b: 92). A gang of gypsies had camped in a hidden dell there for a period of months and on Midsummer’s Night young people traditionally went there to dance and carouse, among other things. Ware Commons is also the terrain of forests, ravines and combes to which the character of Sarah retreats. She goes there in order to find secrecy and solitude and a respite from the travail of service to the draconian Mrs. Poultney and more general social stigmatisation in Lyme Regis, to seek solace in spaces intensely private and enclosed. So the sacred combe is a figure encountered in Fowles’ autobiography and two of his major novels. But it is also present as a theme in his journals. In “The Vision of St. Eustace” the fifteenth-century Italian artist Pisanello paints a picture in which a man riding through a forest with his hunting hounds confronts a strange stag with a crucifix between its antlers (Syson and Gordon 2001: 157). In this painting the forest appears as a place of many dimensions, and many disparate animals run and fly through the trees. The forest in this way appears as a place full of mystery and other lives, particularly so with the otherworldly and heavily symbolic stag staring directly into the eyes of the mounted intruder. In fact the whole ensemble is reminiscent of Monsieur Nicholas’ stumbling across la bonne vaux; the scene encompasses an enclosed and magical space in nature — he is walking his horse into a wooded ravine — and there is the further parallel to be made between the symbolic function of the wild boars in the literary work and the proud stag in the work of art. The background to the mounted figure is a kind of tipped up landscape reminiscent of the side of a larger enclosing valley or combe. Of Pisanello Fowles had

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the following to say in his journal (EUL 102/1/13, 1 August 1963: 125): Over all his paintings hangs ‘the strangest poetry of situation’… I see in his paintings all I have tried so many years to do in certain poems – that is, to rise above the mere gimmickry of ambiguity of metaphor and image and to achieve a kind of meta-allegorical, the strange moment caught, as he perfectly catches the haunting and multiple mystery of the man riding through the magical forest and coming on the stag with the crucifix.

“The Vision of St. Eustace” is ‘the strange moment caught’ and the multiple mystery it evokes might well be thought of as that of a Renaissance bonne vaux. Over ten years earlier in his journals Fowles had noted down fragments of what he called ‘half-dreams, half-ideas’, but which seem to be just such ‘poetry of situation’ (EUL 102/1/6, 18 January 1952: 27). One such prose poem eloquently evokes a sacred combe (EUL 102/1/6, 18 January 1952: 27-8): Between the dark blue stems, across the green carpet of small plants, the moors exhaled pink air, pink heat, pinkly in the summer heat. The air above, through the rare interstices between the leaves, was blue, pale blue, powder-blue. Below, where he stood, among the tree-trunks, all was silent. But above the tree-trunks there was a continuous drowsy, drowsing high summer hum of many active insects, falling like soft rain on his inattentive ears. No birds sang, nothing moved. Very faintly, at the end of a long, narrow vista formed by what was perhaps once a ride, he could see dancing, hovering-gliding shadows, almost too small to distinguish, and far too small to identify. Butterflies passing at the wood’s edge. He stood still, hesitating to advance onto the pink, rolling moors, to the pale purple heather, haunt of adder and wheatsear, of breeding curlew, vast heavens and silence. Content to stay in sanctuary, in the wood’s viridian heart, shaded, in shadow, in the almost aqueous penumbra, content to stay there; and he found some wild strawberry plants with ripe fruit, and ate them slowly, tasting their small fragrance, their instant of sweetness, their passage, his eyes on the shimmering pink free expanses ahead.

It is high summer and the stillness that reigns over the wood creates a tension in the air for the reader. It is an enclosed space – the man stands ‘among the tree-trunks’. Much is made of the fact that this wooded space is a place of sanctuary, outside the world of the sur-

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rounding moors and their heat. ‘He’ hesitates to leave, is ‘content to stay in sanctuary’. The aspects of seclusion and retreat in this physical conformation are unmistakable, as they are in the pastoral retreat of Andrew Marvell’s 1681 poem ‘The Garden’. In the world of the living and breathing wood painted by Fowles the visitor is alone, just as the speaker in Marvell’s poem wanders solitary and states that ‘Two paradises ‘twere in one,/ To live in paradise alone’ (Marvell 1982: 100). In Fowles’ prose poem the sacred combe is a place of mystery, with dancing shadows just out of eye’s reach and an ‘aqueous penumbra’ draped over all. In just the same vein Marvell champions nothing more than ‘a green thought in a green shade’ (1982: 100). So the figure of the sacred combe is a place fecund, mysterious, enclosed and isolated, and it appears recurrently in Fowles’ major fiction, autobiographical writings and poetry. It is a figure that has various manifestations in Daniel Martin and the protagonist of that novel gives it further literary and artistic depth with reference to Monsieur Nicholas and the paintings of Samuel Palmer. It arises in Fowles’ autobiographical The Tree, features prominently in the guise of the Undercliff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and is the subject of the above quoted poetic fragment from the journals. The sacred combe is also a feature of Fowles’ short stories ‘The Ebony Tower’ and ‘The Cloud’. As I have repeatedly stressed, the sacred combe as depicted in Fowles’ writings is, with one or two exceptions, a place where the solitary individual meets nature in a one-to-one relationship. Fowles’ employment of this motif places him in a long tradition of solitary woodland dreamers in English letters. There is an obvious sense in which a self-enclosed valley, an ‘enisled’ copse of trees and an island surrounded by the ocean are all structurally analogous conformations. And indeed Fowles’ writings on nature also evince a love of the literal island. This connection is most obvious in the example of Kitchener’s Island – here the tropical bonne vaux and the island are one. It is also notable that Fowles chose to set The Magus on a Greek island, ‘Phraxos’, based on the island Spetsai south of Athens where the author spent two years teaching in his twenties. The central section of the novel, where the ‘magic’ is played out, occurs on Phraxos. Then there is Fowles’ essay that originally accompanied a book of photographs of the Scilly Isles by Fay Godwin: Islands (1998: 282). This essay is perhaps the most unfo-

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cussed and meandering of all the author’s non-fiction (it happily skips from literary criticism of The Odyssey to a discussion of the etymology of the word ‘labyrinth’). Of principal interest to us here is Fowles’ writing that ‘despite Donne’s famous preaching to the contrary’ in terms of consciousness every individual is an island (1998: 282). He continues, writing that the boundedness of the smaller island relates it more closely to the human body than other conformations of land, and that the marked individuality of islands is something ‘we should like to think corresponds with our own’ (1998: 282). In this, the most disjointed of all his essays, Fowles’ first port of call is the Scilly Isles, an island-chain he adduces as exemplifying how unique the character of the people can be on even closely situated islands. Traditionally the men of each island had different nicknames, e.g. those of Tresco were called Caterpillars ‘perhaps for the moonlit files of smugglers’, while those of St. Mary’s were Bulldogs (1998: 282). As Yi-Fu Tuan observes in Topophilia, ‘The island seems to have a tenacious hold on the human imagination. Above all, it symbolizes a state of prelapsarian innocence and bliss, quarantined by the sea from the ills of the continent’ (1974: 118). Interestingly the Latin for island is insula. An island is a more definite expression of the inwardturned, or insular, conformation of land I have been discussing, the sacred combe. The figure of the island then, be it an enisled copse of trees, a self-enclosed valley, or an island surrounded by the ocean, is a space frequented by, and even in the essay Islands aligned with, the solitary individual. It is no great leap to view this proclivity towards certain natural and geological conformations as in part a metaphor for the author’s attraction to isolated individuality on the human level. That Fowles has an admiration for, and sympathy with, the individual relatively isolated from his or her cultural surroundings is clear. The existentialism of the author’s earlier years was prominent in three books from the 1960s: The Collector, The Aristos, and The Magus (indeed, as these were the books with which Fowles made a name for himself, his reputation as an existential writer has endured for longer than it should have). Existentialism in its Sartrean guise is the philosophy which championed personal authenticity at all costs, and would have obviously appealed to a man who had passed through a series of highly conventional social environments (a middle-class, extended English family in the 1930s, time spent as head boy at an English boarding

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school in the early 1940s and two years in the Royal Marines), before being let loose in the unstructured and intellectually liberal world of undergraduate studies in 1940s Oxford. Fowles is attracted to literary figures, such as Thomas Love Peacock, who are outsiders in their particular society. His interest in Dissent, the ‘quality of conviction in non-conformity’, is tied to his interest in individual liberty. In the eighteenth century religious dissent is, according to the author, ‘simply a vehicle for a much deeper seachange in human self-consciousness’, that is, a speaking out for all ‘individual and social liberty of conscience, or feeling’, a belief that must have had something to do with his decision to write the novel which chronicles a movement of religious dissent, A Maggot (1998: 112). According to one of the author’s critical essays, Gerald Edward’s novel Ebenezer Le Page has a protagonist whose ‘againstness, or bloody mindedness’ is a precious human commodity in an increasingly homogenised society (1998: 168). Personal authenticity is the apparent raison d’etre for the author’s honouring the isolated human individual, however it seems clear that his praise for the uninfluenced outsider, the man or woman sequestered from the unthinking majority, is also in part a proclivity for unique and startling identities outside the conformity of population en masse. This was clearly demonstrated when he recorded in his journal in the early 1960s: ‘My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world’ (2003: 479). Although the author more often mentions the French existentialists than Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher is responsible for one of the most powerful arguments in support of this kind of a position (Raymond Tallis calls Sartre the ‘vulgariser’ of Heidegger’s ontology [Tallis 2002: 46]). Heidegger’s late philosophy has an important place within ecocriticism, most famously utilised by Bate in his book The Song of the Earth where he champions an ecopoetics of dwelling with the earth, a vision of nature poetry as exemplifying a relationship with nature that avoids the instrumentalism of technological thinking and takes the shape of a reflective attunement to the being of a place. Fowles’ engagement with the motif of the sacred combe or island is not simply dismissable from the standpoint of responsible environmental politics. Literature is not first and foremost a site for the elaboration of enlightened political programs. When literature is only

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criticised from the perspective of a single political standard or benchmark then a tediously reductive and inappropriate kind of literary criticism can be the result. As Bate points out ecopoetics is prepolitical: a poem is ‘a revelation of dwelling’ and ‘ecopoetics must concern itself with consciousness’ (2002: 266). Cronon’s critique of the concept of wilderness has some very useful points to make which we can interpret in relation to Fowles’ ‘sacred combe’ motif, however (as is often the case with good literature) there is more to the story than is demonstrated by a political interpretation, as I will now show. Heidegger’s philosophical project was an examination of the question of being, what it means to be. To be is not just to exist, but to ‘show up’ or be disclosed. Ecocriticism has mainly focussed on Heidegger’s argument that a responsible way of allowing being to disclose itself is through poetry, or through poetic language. The Heideggerian vision of the relationship between poetic language and nature is one that I will explore in chapter eight, however for present purposes I am interested in the individualism Heidegger saw as being necessary for a responsible attunement to being. His conception of the distinction between an authentic and an inauthentic condition of human life was put forward early on, in Being and Time (1927). In Being and Time Heidegger attempted a fundamental, phenomenological analysis of being, an exploration of what it means to be. When he got to the task of analysing being-in-the-world he noted that our being often becomes a being-with-one-another, and becomes a kind of everyday Da-sein in which we represent the ‘they’ more than ourselves. One’s own Da-sein, or being there, is dissolved surreptitiously into the kind of being of ‘the others’ and it is in this manner that the ‘they’ reveals its true dictatorship (Heidegger 1996: 119): We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the ‘great mass’ the way they withdraw, we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness… Overnight, everything primordial is flattened down as something to be manipulated. Every mystery loses its power. The care of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential tendency of Da-sein, which we call the levelling down of all possibilities of being… Publicness obscures everything, and then claims that what has been thus covered over is what is familiar and accessible to everybody.

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Being-with-one-another becomes the alienated self, the Man. Averageness and a levelling down of sentiment and expression encroach on our sense of being-in-the-world. All intensity is glossed over. Our ‘talk’ does not make contact with the primordial, but simply ‘passes the word along’; it is gossip and trivia. Our writing is ‘scribbling’; it is full of novelty, cliché and jargon. Our values are imposed and anonymous. Fowles has written that he prefers the I-thou relation, considering that ‘three is always a potential mob’ (1998: 8). Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of being would bolster Fowles’ remarks on attractions of the individual sequestered from the majority in nature —the attractions of facing nature in an I-thou relation. In valorising physical conformations of land that in literal or metaphorical senses stand separate from the ‘mainland’, Fowles might be said to be holding out the prospect of escape from existence conducted in terms of ‘theyness’, of existence levelled-down and trivialised by the effects of a large human collective and its surreptitiously imposed mode of being. Rather than having ‘the they’ control the way in which one’s Dasein and the world are interpreted, time alone in nature, or made doubly solitary through being within a physically isolated natural conformation such as a sacred combe, would allow a kind of being that could make contact with the primordial, with the full power of mystery. In this way one makes contact with ‘the wood’s viridian heart’, with the ‘almost aqueous penumbra’ of Fowles prose poem. Standing outside his farm in the south-west of England Daniel contemplates his private bonne vaux. No veil of ‘publicness’, of cliché and inauthentic apprehension, hovers over his perception of the natural scene before him. Rather the wet and beautiful Devon combe shines defiantly through. A Heideggerian model of being is well used in interpreting the author’s preoccupation with secluded people and places. If we were to use the terminology of Heidegger we can say that Fowles likes solitary individuals because in the case of humans they retreat from the mode of being of the ‘they’ and experience life away from the dictatorship of being-with-one-another. However, ethically virtuous authenticity is not the whole of the story. In the case of sacred combes or islands they offer places to retreat from the world of the ‘they’ and such places allow Da-sein to make genuine contact with

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itself and the power of mystery around it. Heidegger’s terminology reminds us that such a way of being is not only ethically admirable, but also exciting. A psychological explanation for Fowles’ attraction towards the figure of the island is usefully placed alongside a philosophical interpretation. The first and only biography of John Fowles, by Eileen Warburton, pictures the author as a young man as shy and dreamy (2004: 35). On 22 December 1941 Fowles began keeping his nature journals, in which he would pour close observation of the Devon countryside he and his family had been evacuated to during the Second World War, in avoidance of the German blitzkrieg. Nota Natura Res, Fowles name for the nature journals, noted, for example when and where he had, in solitude, watched blackbirds pair up, or seen goldfinches. The journal was kept while in Ipplepen, the Devon village where his parents rented a cottage during the war, however it also accompanied Fowles back to his boarding school, Bedford, in 1943. That year the Bedford science club was particularly interested in ornithology. Tellingly, Fowles did not join the club upon arrival back at Bedford. As Warburton remarks, ‘his explorations and journal continued to be a solitary enterprise’ (2004: 35). We may partly explain Fowles’ penchant for being in nature alone as due to his having a somewhat introverted personality, as his biography attests. Like many introverts, Fowles seems to happily spend time alone, and particularly so when in natural settings. I take my lead here from Joseph Carroll’s precept that the perceptions and values of individual authors are not only limited by the cultural order in which they find themselves, but also by their individual temperament (2004: 130). Such values and perceptions find expression in the work of art. For example, Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers!, is a work in which the heroine, Alexandra, has an atypical sexual psychology which causes her to eschew normative heterosexual romance and celebrate a model in which a dominant woman marries a younger, effeminate man. In his analyses of O Pioneers! Carroll invokes Cather’s biographical background, and her probable lesbianism, as an explanation for a central aspect of the novel’s meaning structure (2004: 137-9). Sexual identity is not the only factor that might abet an analysis of an author’s scheme of values as they find expression in literary represenation. According to modern personality theory an individual’s identity is constituted by, among other things, five aspects of person-

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ality: agreeableness/antagonism, neuroticism/security, conscientiousness/carelessness, curiosity/dullness and extraversion/introversion. That is to say, beyond such things as gender, class, and ethnicity, individuals vary in the degree to which they are friendly or antagonistic, emotionally stable or unstable, conscientious or careless, intellectually open or dull and extraverted or introverted (Carroll 2004: 111). With this five-factor personality system in mind, it may be that Fowles’s temperament means he is to some extent alienated from the species-typical norm of a relatively socially extroverted personality. Of course social, cultural and gender factors can also be invoked (as they more usually are in contemporary Anglo-Saxon literary interpretation), and perhaps one could argue that Fowles’ generation of middle-class, English men, born in the vicinity of 1926, were unusually fascinated by an experience of emotional privacy. However I do think that, at least using the evidence in Warburton’s biography, Fowles was more introverted than the majority of his contemporaries. At Bedford, the boarding school Fowles attended between 1939-1944, H. Boys-Stone, Fowles’ housemaster, noted that John was very reserved, and the form master worried that he was overly withdrawn (Warburton 2004: 23). Such diffidence in social settings was only encouraged by Fowles’ subsequently developed love of narrative literature and the inner world of the imagination. We have now entered the greenwood retreat and encountered a numinous, fecund, and complex environment. Let us, next, follow the figure of the individual into the combe of Fowles’ most famous novel.

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Chapter 2 Our Membership in the Community of Nature Half way through The French Lieutenant’s Woman the reader encounters an early morning rural scene. The protagonist, Charles, has spent the whole of the previous night awake. He is gloomy. He thinks he is engaged to marry the wrong girl and he has just been effectively disinherited from his ancestral demesne along with the profound sense of purpose and responsibility that were to have gone with taking over the estate. Charles has despaired of following Dr. Grogan’s advice to not see Sarah again, and is now walking out to see ‘the scarlet woman’ when he should, by all ‘respectable’ standards of the time, be leaving town. Much plays on the protagonist’s mind. And then as Charles enters into the woods around Lyme Regis the tableaux that greets him is one of serene and beautiful nature. It is described as comparable to a painting by Pisanello, the fifteenth century Italian artist referred to in the previous chapter. Charles’ path is crossed by a fox and then a quietly browsing roe-deer. The painting referred to is of (Fowles 1970b: 233): St Hubert in an early Renaissance forest, confronted by birds and beasts. The saint is shocked, almost as if the victim of a practical joke, all his arrogance dowsed by a sudden drench of nature’s profoundest secret: the universal parity of existence.

The author is gesturing towards the very same painting referred to in the previous chapter, “The Vision of St. Eustace” (see the appendix). In this painting a heavily symbolic roe-deer confronts the human figure. Pisanello’s painting is based on the Golden Legend, a story in which Placidus, a soldier of the Emperor Trajan known for his good works, meets a stag with a cross between its antlers. Christ speaks through the stag’s mouth, saying: ‘O Placidus, why are you pursuing me? For your sake I have appeared to you in this animal. I am the

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Christ whom you worship without knowing it’ (Syson and Gordon 2001: 159). Placidus subsequently converts to Christianity and changes his name to Eustace. Fowles refers to the figure in Pisanello’s painting as St. Hubert. It is true that a similar story is told of St. Hubert, although art historians agree that a more plausible attribution is to St. Eustace (the painting follows the details of the Golden Legend very closely and St. Hubert is unlikely to be painted in Italian art of the period [Syson and Gordon 2001: 159]). ‘The Vision of St. Eustace’ may have a place in a religious narrative, but it is also, as Luke Syson and Dillian Gordon note, ‘a pretext for showing Pisanello’s skill in depicting different animals and for the patron to marvel at their poetic variety and at the mystery of the inhabitants of the wooded landscape’ (2001: 160). Pisanello has painted not a Roman soldier, but an Italian prince, making the painting an even more suitable metaphor for the aristocratic Charles. Charles’ personal preoccupation, his presumption as to the importance of his own personal worries, is, as in the case of St. Eustace in Pisanello’s work, jolted by his meeting with nature. The sun is clear, the dew lies upon the grass. Charles quietly passes the roe-deer and fox (FLW 233): It was not only these two animals that seemed fraught with significance. The trees were dense with singing birds – blackcaps, whitethroats, thrushes, blackbirds, the cooing of woodpigeons, filling that windless dawn with the serenity of evening; yet without any of its sadness, its elegiac quality. Charles felt himself walking through the pages of a bestiary, and one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that every leaf in it, every small bird, each song it uttered, came from a perfect world.

As in “The Vision of St. Eustace”, with its bestiary of carefully rendered stags, doe, bear, swan and stork, pelicans and herons, the broad range of avifauna seen by Charles appear with ‘minute distinctness’ and beauty. The animals seem to come from a perfect world; as Janet Lewis and Barry Olshen comment, ‘The landscape combines the idealized quality of a locus amoenus, like the description of Nature’s glade in [Chaucer’s] The Parliament of Fowls, with the realistic detail of a naturalist’s description’ (1985: 26). The protagonist’s attention is caught by the loud voice of a nearby wren. The bird’s full-throated song fills his mind. He contemplates his situation in the context of all this non-human life, and his final emotion in the scene is one of bit-

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terness. The narrator explains that ‘He was shut out, all paradise lost. Again, he was like Sarah – he could stand here in Eden, but not enjoy it, and only envy the wren its ecstasy’ (FLW 234). Charles is shown the ‘universal parity of existence’ in this scene, he sees the peace in which the animals around him reside, despite their humble circumstances. Yet Charles, immersed in his personal, existential worry, feels shut out of this parity of existence. According to James R. Aubrey the notion of a ‘parity of existence’ is best interpreted as a Darwinian vision of equality among animal life, and one which ‘belies the vertically-organized, hierarchicallyranked links of the Great Chain of Being’ (2002: 78). Aubrey is right to contrast the medieval notion of the Great Chain of Being with Charles’ perception in this scene, however we should also note the way in which the ‘parity of existence’ is complicated due to the nature of human consciousness. Charles sees the broad range of animals on his walk and notices that these animals are just like him, they too feel emotion: thus the parity of existence. However Charles also registers their contentment with their lot, and the fact that his own sophisticated human consciousness, with its access to past and future scenarios, seems to condemn him to anxiety. The rest of nature might be our kin in some ways — there might be some kind of parity of existence, or universally shared common identity — but the rest of nature does not share our enormous potential for post-lapsarian worry. We are right to contrast a theological hierarchy with a kind of scientific parity, but we could also note why it is that the dawn of Darwinian insight is a traumatic time for the novel’s protagonist. This scene in The French Lieutenant’s Woman recalls another early morning, this time experienced by Thoreau (1992: 188): After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavouring in vain to answer in my sleep, as whathow-when-where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips.

Thoreau awakes (early, one surmises, knowing that writer’s love of early mornings) after a restless night in the Concord woods. Charles walks out soon after four in the morning into the Lyme Regis countryside having spent the night awake and brooding. Both men are met by

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nature’s ‘serene and satisfied face’, and nature greets both of them with ‘no question on her lips’. While the fictional Charles feels ‘excommunicated’ from the contented peace shared by the blackcaps, whitethroats, the rest of the natural world around him, Thoreau responds differently by abjuring the existential vexations of the night and accepting the serenity of a personified dawning nature as an admirable model. And yet we might well ask, whose prognosis is the more honest one, Fowles’ or Thoreau’s? Fowles cannot be accused of being the misty-eyed nature writer who sets up the natural world as a virtuously peaceful place, the serenity of which we should try to emulate, while silently passing over the particular qualities that make us human. The over-easy platitudes of such ‘nature corner’ sentiment are avoided in this episode from Fowles’ novel. In an interview with Fowles years after this novel had been published, Christopher Bigsby posed the following question: ‘Again and again I’m struck by the lyricism which you find in the natural world… And yet isn’t that lyricism a false standard? The natural world is beautiful, calm, and restorative precisely because it lacks the anguished self-doubt… of the human world’ (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 73). Such a question invites the riposte, had Bigsby not read The French Lieutenant’s Woman and reflected on Charles’ encounters with nature? As this central fictional episode in the narrative demonstrates, this text explicitly acknowledges that nature is a ‘false standard’ by which to measure human experience. Fowles’ fiction does not presume a world in which nonhuman nature’s calm and poise is unproblematically commensurable with human life. The author’s second book to be published was The Aristos (1964). This was a self-portrait in ideas based on philosophical notes Fowles had taken as an undergraduate. The book is arranged as a collection of pensées, presumably having been inspired by the work of 18th century French authors like Pascal and La Rochefoucauld. Here the author considers an equality of happiness to be shared by all forms of animate and sentient life in nature under normal conditions, apart from humankind (1970a: 59): Two factors establish this equality among all sentient forms of life, whether they be past or present, simple or complex, with a life-span of one hour or one of decades. The first is that they are all able to feel pleasure and pain; the second is that

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not one of them is able to compare its own experiences of pleasure and pain with any other creature’s. The single exception to this happy oblivion is man.

Fowles calls this boonful ignorance shared by the majority of the natural world, a ‘relativity of recompense’. A non-human creature may not lead a very desirable life, and yet this creature is recompensed for this state of affairs in that how much pleasure it experiences is only relative to the potential for pleasure it has in its given situation. If conditions are normal (I suppose this means basic needs are met), then its given situation will allow a potential for some pleasure. Thus, even in what we sophisticated humans would consider a not very desirable life-situation, a non-human creature may be happy. ‘All dogs, past, present and future, are equally happy. It is clear to us humans that they are not; but no dog knows this’ (1970a: 60). Humankind has the ability to dream of better worlds or imagine more satisfactory states of existence than those currently experienced, and to compare such worlds or states to those currently experienced (all of which is facilitated by human consciousness). Fowles then construes the acquisition of human consciousness, with its advanced ability to compare, as a Fall from a prior Golden Age: ‘If there had been a Garden of Eden and a Fall, they would have been when man could not compare and when he could…’ (1970a: 60). The consequence of this perspective is that the natural world, with its apparent equality of happiness or ‘parity of existence’, is seen as a kind of Garden of Eden from which we have been expelled. This notion of an excommunication from nature’s peace has famous antecedents in the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. In Shelley’s ‘To a SkyLark’ the poet writes in envy and uncomprehending admiration of a skylark’s celestial song. The poet longs to know of the world of the skylark, a world that could make it pour forth such eloquent joy (1993: 710-12): What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields or waves or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain?

The poet imagines that human dissatisfactions would be alien to the world of the skylark, and partly blames our misery on a power that the skylark does not posses, the power to compare: ‘We look before and

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after,/ And pine for what is not’ (1993: 712). For all our ‘Hate and pride and fear’ we can never approach the joy of the little bird’s disembodied song. The poem ends with the poet enviously listening to the skylark’s music. In Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ the attentive listener wishes to (1993: 791) ‘forget… What thou among the leaves has never known, The weariness, the fever and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan[…] Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

He listens to the nightingale ‘pouring forth thy soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!’, and then contemplates suicide and a release from the misery-ridden trials that seem to him endemic to the human condition (1993: 792). This poet does not actively envy the bird’s happiness, but there is still the suggestion that, unlike in prelapsarian nature, sorrow and anxiety are an integral part of human consciousness and, thus, human identity. Like the voice in Keats’ Ode, Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman actively envies the wren its ecstasy. With his power to compare his own actual life, as an inconsequential squire of leisure engaged to a frivolous young debutante, with one in which he might have made a real contribution to science and married a woman more suited to his intelligence and maturity, Charles feels condemned to dissatisfaction. As humans we are not all equally recompensed in terms of conditions which encourage pleasure in existing and it is true that, like Charles, that we are often aware of this and feel frustration as a result. How dissatisfied Charles should really have been, considering his socio-economic status, is perhaps a moot question. From the adaptionist perspective of evolutionary history such an observation on human nature is congruent. In the words of E. O. Wilson: ‘Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile’ (1999: 245). As the human species evolved it developed a very high level of intelligence, one which went beyond the instinctive responses which sustain survival and reproductive success, as shared by all animals. Prehuman populations were once like other animals, in that they too were simply guided by environmental cues which triggered behaviour patterns. Like other animals they fitted into their particular niche in the environment and eco-system very well and did not con-

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cern themselves with anything beyond their adaptations to this niche. However with the escalation in intelligence that coincided with the advent of Homo sapiens we began to be able to have a more flexible set of responses to our environment and to imagine future states, such as our own death (there is no evidence to suggest that any non-human animal can conceptualise itself existing over a period of time as a finite entity and abstractly contemplate its own death). With our high level of generalised intelligence, language and culture, we humans were given our edge over other species in the struggle for existence. This was our boon, although, as Wilson rightly points out, these acquisitions (1999: 245): also exacted a price we continue to pay, composed of the shocking recognition of the self, of the finiteness of personal existence, and of the chaos of the environment.

For Wilson an important spawn of this escalation of general intelligence (over and beyond the immediate gains it conferred in terms of survival and reproductive success) is art, the imposing of order on the confusion caused by our extremely high level of intelligence. While I am not interested in discussing or disputing Wilson’s theory of the origin of the arts in human society (in fact I agree with Joseph Carroll that they are basically right), his comments on the not always and immediately obvious evolutionary benefits of a Homo-level of intelligence are helpful. Our marked ability to process a wide range of information, to reflect on the vast array of possibilities in human life and also of the frustration of these possibilities, is at once our boon and our bane It is our bane because of the confusion and the frustration it can enable. From the perspective of neurophysiology the story demonstrates consilience. According to Susan Greenfield’s account of emotion, pleasure is characterised by fragile and small constellations of brain cells while depression and anxiety is characterised by large neural networks in the prefrontal cortex (2000). Pleasurable emotions are often states achieved through the use of various drugs, as well as sex, dancing, ‘extreme’ sports, and other activities that cause us to lose ourselves in an absorption in the here and now. Depression and anxiety are the opposite; they correspond with a minimizing of the outside world as perceived in the immediate present. In pleasure the Self or

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the mind is temporarily less dominant, and consciousness becomes flooded by the senses. In depression and anxiety the Self or mind, characterised by persistent and large neural constellations, dominates consciousness. This is relevant to a comparison between humans and animals in that while many mammals may have consciousness they do not have the massive prefrontal cortex of the human brain (200 per cent the volume one would expect for a primate of our size) and none of them have anything like the same degree of mind or Self that we humans have (2000: 144). Nonhuman animals, as well as infant humans, can feel emotions, but these emotions are not complex ones such as shame or remorse that rely on complex interpretation. Nonhuman animals might feel momentary fear, but they cannot experience anxiety or depression, states which require inner resources of memory, imagination and generalisation that only we fortunate humans possess. The upshot of all this is that like Charles, and one imagines a plethora of poets through history, we might indeed envy the wren its ecstasy, its being ideally suited to its natural habitat and not having the ability to reflect on its existence. To use the vocabulary of neurophysiology, we might envy the wren its constantly experiencing small and fragile constellations of brain cells and never large and stable neural networks. Charles felt himself walking through the pages of a book, and ‘one of such beauty, such minute distinctness, that every leaf in it, every small bird, each song it uttered, came from a perfect world.’ This world is perfect in that its members cannot feel the dissatisfactions, ennuis, anxieties and depressions that frequently infest human consciousness, that come from having a ‘mind’, a brain which can deal with more than successfully inhabiting and reproducing in a narrow section of the environment. The ‘mysterious parity of existence’ in the rest of the animal world is the peace of non-reflective sentient life. Although we as a species are barred from it, it is a ‘prelapsarian’ (if, that is, we subscribe to Fowles’ conception of the Fall) innocence to be marvelled at. Of course humans too may experience pleasure. Fowles’ insight here is simply to remind us that there is a parity among all forms of sentient life in the animal kingdom in respect of being able to feel pleasure, a parity which is complicated in the case of human beings by our anxiety-fostering high level of intelligence. The following journal entry uncovers ‘nature’s profoundest secret’ (EUL 102/1/15, 15 September 1969: 146):

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Watching a moth hovering over the night-scented stock (superb this hot summer), plunging its proboscis deep to the honey. I had a sudden vision of ecstasy. I mean that in one half minute it knew all the happiness of a human life.

In this tiny event the author correctly diagnoses an important truth about the presence of emotions in other species of animals. Even the smallest moth has the capacity to experience what we might hypothesise is great pleasure, perhaps ‘all the happiness of a human life’ for all we know, as it dips its proboscis into a night-scented flower. Humans have the capacity to experience immense pleasure too, but our capacity is often occluded or complicated by our roaming minds. Within the natural realm we are unique. And yet, to be unique within a community does not necessitate alienation from that community. The word ‘community’ refers to a group of people living together, and is often used in place of society for its more immediate sense (Williams 1983: 75). Scott Russell Sanders entitles one of his essays ‘The Common Life’, playing off one of the original senses the word ‘community’ carried, the quality of holding something ‘in common’. Sanders begins this essay with a description of an afternoon scene in which he, his twenty year old daughter and two of her friends, a pair of sisters, one five years old, the other ten, both from a neighbouring house, make bread (1995a: 65-70). Birdsong comes through an open window, the children’s voices are full of laughter and enthusiasm, one smells the yeast and anticipates the hot loaves from the oven. Sanders recounts the experience as an instance of ‘the common life’, and a time when he had a sense of his ‘being exactly where I should be and doing exactly what I should do’ (1995a: 66). He loves his fellow cooks, feels more alive and alert in their presence. The skill of making bread has been passed down from absent others for whom he feels an affection. The feel of the dough, the sound of birds and the wind brushing through an open door all contribute to the sensory experience of union with the creation. For Sanders these elements in the kitchen scene sum up what is vital in community: loving company, neighbourliness, inherited knowledge, shared purpose and union with the rest of nature. According to him such experiences of healthy, functioning community are crucial because they bind us ‘through time to the rest of humanity and through our bodies to the rest of nature’. According to Sanders, by nurturing and honouring examples of such

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common life ‘we might renew our households and neighbourhoods and cities, and in doing so might redeem ourselves from the bleakness of private lives spent in frenzied pursuit of sensation and wealth’ (1995a: 69-79). The account of human identity given by evolutionary psychology bolster Sanders’ comments. Humans evolved to prosper when co-operating in small group formations and it is not suprising that they find enormous solace through participating in functioning communities to this day. Functioning community is an important part of human life. However in its everyday usage the term ‘community’ is perhaps inadequate. In A Sand County Almanac Aldo Leopold laid the foundations of an important new ethic when he wrote: ‘We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect’ (Sanders 1995a: 84). For Leopold, as for Sanders, what we need at the present time is to radically reimagine who and where we are, to think of ourselves as truly one member in a community made up of other species of life. Although we are unique amongst sentient organisms on planet earth (human consciousness and language ensure that) we do share many things in common. Now, a time that is considered by common consent among statured scientists in the field of biology as coinciding with a great extinction spasm in the history of biodiversity, is the ideal time for us to start thinking of other species of life as fellow members in our community. Fowles’ writings help us to do so. In ‘The Blinded Eye’ Fowles argues that time spent with nature is an enormous solace when contemplating one’s mortality, in that it encourages the realisation that one is part of a universe which is cohabited and enduring (1998: 268). In his early fifties the author wrote in his diary (EUL 102/1/16, 5 December 1975: 101-2): I have now totally humanized the one potential source of despair in the life Eliz and I have made – the absence of children. For many years now that has seemed more good fortune to me than bad; at worst mere destiny, to be met stoically… I suspect my whole notion of parity of existence, the deep feeling that I co-own the land I inhabit with its birds and plants, the way, I suppose foolish, that I always feel guilt when I disturb nature here in the garden, I seem to trespass, that also lives less easily with the archetypal sense of vertical and chronological descent, authority-in-line, that parenthood sets on one. The lack of that role is my freedom.

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The author’s contentment with his not having had children is worth remarking on. He has humanized the source of despair that the absence of children might be: he has made this potential source of woe kind, gentle and tractable. He sees the lack of a fatherhood role in his life as a positive freedom, not as a source of despair at all. Not having children allows him to eschew a preoccupation with ‘authority-inline’, to be free to experience something other than a valorisation of ‘vertical’ genealogical descent. This alternative relation is one of community links with the birds and the plants of his garden. These entities hold the garden ‘in common’ with the legal human owner of the land. Fowles calls this relation a ‘parity of existence’. It will be recalled from the previous chapter that in Daniel Martin the character of Daniel says of the greenwood retreat, the sacred combe, that it is dominated by a sense of a ‘mysterious yet profound parity in all existence’. Like Rétif de la Bretonne’s Monsieur Nicholas walking in on la bonne vaux with its proud wild boar, Fowles apparently feels that he ‘trespasses’ on nature when he disturbs the life in his garden, in the same way that we trespass on the rights or property of persons in a human community (de la Bretonne 1989: 75). The use of the term ‘trespass’, suggesting that he extends, at least momentarily, the notion of personhood beyond the species barrier, indicates how profoundly Fowles exemplifies Leopold’s environmental ethic of belonging to a natural community. The use of the term ‘trespass’ suggests, I would argue, a move away from anthropocentrism in the realm of moral rights. However, in a broader conceptual scheme the ascription of legal ‘person’ status to a non-human animal would be incoherent. Take the example of mosquitoes who were not permitted to be killed and were thus allowed to flourish into massive clouds through drinking human blood. Granting the status ‘person’ to an entity presumes that they are able to partake of reciprocal duties to societal institutions, something nonhuman animals, such as mosquitoes, cannot do (Forrester 1996). The term ‘parity of existence’ in the above passage suggests kinship and sympathy for the many other species of life, the birds and plants, with whom Fowles inhabits the land. It is a tenet of ecology that we are all, as varying species of life, evolved from a common genetic ancestor if we look far enough back in time (Wilson 2002: 132). We are all in this very loose sense, kin. In some instances this sense

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of kinship has more content to it than others; for example the neurological/emotional systems of fear work in surprisingly parallel ways between humans and birds and reptiles and many other higher animals, indicating one way in which we have not diverged so radically from the rest of life as we commonly imagine (LeDoux 1998). More widely we all share in a more or less common food chain with its ultimate source of energy as the sun, and we partake in common cycles or flows of air and water. This is an even looser sense of ‘kinship’, but it too has significance. The human prefrontal cortex has undergone rapid expansion over the last 2 million years. However according to the anthropologist Robin Fox the myths that we live with today as highly intelligent modern humans draw on ‘phyletically old material in the limbic system – dreams, memory, and emotion’ (1994: 309). As creatures who possess self-consciousness and language, myths give us an evolutionary advantage in making sense of the world inside our heads that is the result of both ‘dreams, memory, and emotion’ and a highly sophisticated neocortex. In this way it shouldn’t surprise us that ‘myths are a more powerful and satisfying way of apprehending the world than is logic’ and that they will persist in the lives of all of us, acknowledged or unacknowledged (Fox 1994: 309). In her book Science and Poetry Mary Midgley stresses the significance of dominant imaginative visions of the world — myths, in other words — for example the mechanistic view of the universe in eighteenth-century Europe. She argues that the time is now ripe for the abjuration of social atomism and the reinstating of the Gaia idea, recently given strong scientific footing by James Lovelock, of the earth as one living entity (Midgley 2001: 180). Lovelock viewed life on earth as an integrated and selfsustaining natural system, in which our planet’s atmosphere, ‘an extraordinary and unstable mixture of gases’ is kept constant in composition over long periods of time, ‘at a level favourable for organisms, through the regulatory effect of life itself’ (Lovelock 1991: 22). Life on earth, in other words, is well thought of as a single entity, referred to as ‘Gaia’ (a term suggested to Lovelock by the novelist William Golding). Although this concept is gaining increasing recognition, Midgley sees an urgent need for the Gaia idea to enter with greater clarity into our social and personal thinking (2001: 176). Midgley sees an urgent need for Gaia, in other words, to become a myth for our time. She rejects as misguided the exclusive humanism (a humanism

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with its roots in Descartes’ notion of ourselves as detached observers of the physical world) that has dominated our culture of late, a view of the world that sees nature as that which is to be moulded by technology and which rejects awe at the natural world as pagan and primitive (2001: 171). Midgley also rejects political philosophies such as that of John Rawls where the metaphysical idea that only individuals are real entities is still present (2001: 185-6). The myth of Mother Earth or the Fertility Goddess has had myriad manifestations in different societies over the course of history. It is time for a reinvigoration of this myth. As Midgley stresses, this issue is not just psychological, as the imagery we use to express our thought determines which questions we do and do not ask ourselves (2001: 172). The Gaia idea or myth, and the reverent attitude toward the biosphere that goes with it, might well help us to give the environmental crisis we now face the priority in our thinking, and ultimately in our public policy, that it warrants. The notion of a human’s identifying with the biosphere, with Gaia if you will, was expressed much earlier in the history of nature writing when, in the chapter of Walden entitled ‘Solitude’, Thoreau wrote of recovering from a bout of loneliness at one point during his stay in the woods (1991: 89): In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighbourhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

Admittedly many would fault Thoreau for his omitting to explicitly stress the importance of human community in his sketch of the essences of a well lived life in Walden. However we can appreciate his highly developed sense of sympathy with nature. Like Fowles, Thoreau considered nature as kin and as community. As Lawrence Buell writes, Thoreau exhibits an ‘almost neopagan sense of the neighborliness of nature that only the Wordsworths among recent major writers had approached’ (1995: 211). Thoreau might have exaggerated when

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he wrote of the advantages of human neighbourhood as ‘insignificant’, but he seems to have come upon an important insight, and a needed environmental ethic, when he writes that ‘the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person’. This thought echoes Fowles’ claim that his not having had children had freed him to look beyond vertical descent and allowed him to give greater weight to his relation with other contemporaneous, living things. As nature writers both Fowles and Thoreau seem to me as particularly modern and relevant in their emotional revelations of something approaching kinship between humans and nonhuman life. Both writers deeply exemplify Leopold’s environmental ethic of envisaging ones’ self as belonging to a community made up of many species of life. In her most recent book, The Myths We Live By, Midgley actually starts to use the word ‘myth’ in preference to ‘dominant imaginative vision’. By myths she explains that she means ‘imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world’ (2003: 1). She explains that we in the West have inherited a myth of social atomism, ‘the social-contract image of citizens as essentially separate and autonomous individuals’, from the Enlightenment era (2003: 1). Myths are important in that: ‘the way in which we imagine the world determines what we think important in it, what we select for attention among the welter of facts that constantly flood in upon us’ (2003: 152). Unfortunately the myths we carry around with us, our patterns of moral thinking, don’t adapt immediately to the world we live in. This world has recently changed radically: we now live on a global stage, our physical resource base is threatened for the first time, and we now know that we are animals in a profoundly biological sense. We need new myths in response to the never-encountered-before world we find ourselves in. Midgley argues that social atomism is in need of replacement by a myth of the biosphere, of Gaia. However she also notes that our communal selfimage of ourselves as divorced from animality has become baggage in need of jettisoning. Our moral community has ‘shifting and shadowy boundaries’, and now that we understand some of the continuities between humans and other species we need to revise our vision of ourselves and of our moral community (Midgley 2003: 152). Susan Greenfield’s account of consciousness and the emotions is useful in conjunction with Midgley’s argument. Greenfield demonstrates that the waking consciousness of nonhuman animals is similar to our brain

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when dreaming (2000: 147). Her account of consciousness shows that the emotions are fundamental to an understanding of the brain, and that animals also experience emotions. At a very basic level, perhaps the most basic, our neurophysiology parallels that of other animals. Such proof of the deep continuities between ourselves and certain other animals is news. It is hitherto undisclosed information about the world we live in. With new knowledge such as this we do indeed need to revise our conception of ourselves, and simultaneously, our moral community. Gaia is constituted by a community of living species. Fowles’ fragments of prose detailing a sense of community with the land are important and early markers in the sea-change Midgley urges in the myths held by members of contemporary Western societies. In an interview Fowles said that ‘What most people look for in human friends and contacts, I look for in nonhuman nature’ (Vipond 1999a: 102). While this may possibly be a Thoreau-like rhetorical exaggeration, expressed for the occasion more than the truth, a reading of Fowles’ diaries gives one many examples of how the writer has felt many living beings to be as ‘old friends’ or family. In 1951, at the age of twenty- four, Fowles had recently finished his degree at Oxford, arrived in France and was teaching English at the University of Poitiers. After a walk through the French countryside he wrote (2003: 100): For me those two hours in the country were a kind of escape from exile. I was born in a town, have lived most of my life in towns, yet. Just yet. The strange thing is that I don’t have to get out of towns very often. Just once in a while I feel bottled up, and then I explode out into the country. And then I always realise that I am returning home, because I am among living things that I know. When I hear a blackcap in the vallée du Boivre, it is the same blackcap that I heard one morning nine or ten years ago, in a holly-bush, when I was riding, near Mauldon in South Devon. All the times I have ever heard blackcaps are like the times I have ever met one friend. And so for all species of all living things, except humans. Where we can distinguish individuality, we are more generally alone, among strangers, although more particularly happy, when among friends. For me a walk in the country is a walk among old friends. That seems sentimental. Naif, pastoral. An XVIII century pantheism. But I feel it very strongly, and very strongly that it is one of the sentiments that is not false, in any age. Nor is it irrelevant.

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For the young Englishman in France two hours in the country are experienced as an ‘escape from exile’, or a ‘returning home’. Fowles expresses a strong sense of his belonging with the rest of the natural world. Non-human animals are unique individuals, every one of them – particularly so in the case of the more psychologically complex nonhuman organisms – however Fowles refers to ‘where we can distinguish individuality’, and in the case of much non-human nature individuality is less apparent from a human perspective. Because, for example, birds apparently do not have the same degree of individuality possessed by humans one can more easily see each individual bird as a representative of the species, and this perspective combined with an affection and sympathy for a species of bird means that one can see each new encounter with a bird as a renewal of an old friendship. The blackcap in the vallée du Boivre is construed as the same as the one heard ten years ago in South Devon. A renewal of an old friendships brings with it a feeling of happiness. Fowles qualifies this thought by acknowledging that this might seem ‘pastoral’ in the pejorative sense of the term as bucolic or unrealistically sentimental about nature, but he then reaffirms his belief. Was the 25 year-old young man right to judge this view of a walk in the country as a walk among old friends as neither false or irrelevant? The attitude that ‘a walk in the country is a walk among old friends’ has, as it happens, continued throughout the course of the writer’s life. When, after the year at Poitiers, he went to the Greek island of Spetsai to teach at a boys’ boarding school, the author spent much time walking through the hilly Greek landscape. After one walk he recorded in his diary (EUL 102/1/6, 23 May 1952: 74): Also I saw a White-letter Hairstreak – the same, and not the same, as the one I caught (as a boy) in a western dip of the Quarry Field at Ipplepen in south Devon. Renewing an old acquaintance, two infinitesimal localities linked.

On a trip from England to Norway over a decade later the author finds himself travelling north on a ferry (EUL 102/1/14, 26 June 1964: 2 of ‘Norway’): I am touched to meet all sorts of avian friends again; puffins with their great nebs hanging over the water, razorbills and fulmars and gannets. The sudden skid-turn of a quartering gannet, so Audubon-like. Bird movements like the forgotten intonations in people’s voices.

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The reference here is to John James Audubon (1785-1851), who depicted America’s avifauna in life-size, highly dramatic bird portraits during the first half of the nineteenth century. The gannet’s movement is seen metaphorically through the lens of an artist’s vision, but also described in the language of empirical natural history observation – the movement is a ‘skid-turn’. The extent of Fowles’ sincerity in his asserting that to be among known nature is to be among old friends comes across to us here powerfully in his evocative likening of bird movements to the forgotten sounds of a people’s voices, heard again after much time has passed. Regarding the aforementioned metaphors we find that this is also the kind of imagery shift that Midgley talks of. As Fowles uses metaphors such as ‘bird movements like the forgotten intonations in people’s voices’, or in talking of a species of bird as an ‘old friend’, he causes a kind of conceptual attrition against the exclusive humanism that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. As Daniel J. Philippon writes, ‘in terms of representations of “nature”, metaphors not only explain what nature is but also structure how we perceive and think about nature and what we do in nature’ (2004: 17). Paul Bloom in his book Descartes’ Baby uses Peter Singer’s notion of the moral circle, the group of people for whom we feel affection and with whom we have bonds of trust (Bloom 2004: 135). Bloom shows how the moral circle has, starting with the reciprocal altruism of close kin, extended outwards in human history, coming to include AfricanAmericans during the civil rights movement in the twentieth century for example. One reason the moral circle has expanded, along with the realisation of mutual interdependence and the experience of direct contact with the other, is ‘persuasion through images and stories’. That is, we have used language to see individuals, till now outside our consideration, as if they were family or neighbours. Consider the application of terms such as ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’ for example (Bloom 2004: 149). We may hope that this moral circle will continue to expand outwards to include some nonhuman animals. It has been surprisingly hard for us to grant citizenship — if not in a legal sense, at least in the sense of belonging to our community — to animals (or to wilderness in general), and writings such as these excerpts from Fowles’ journals help to create the imaginative vision of non-human entities needed, I would argue, as a foundation for widespread social

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change. As Buell states, ‘the promise of the image of nature’s personhood lies in the extent to which it mobilizes… an ethics of care’ (1995: 218). To see a bird through the metaphor of an old friend motivates an ethics of care. This is not to suggest that such imagery is entirely new in nature writing. As far back as 1814 William Hazlitt had written that: ‘Nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks.’ He adds, ‘I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head’ (quoted in Mabey 1995: 72-3). For Hazlitt nature was rightly categorized as a single class, and this made it more easily identifiable as a previously known entity, in contrast to the always new because always psychologically dissimilar humans he encountered. Around twenty-five years after his meeting with gannets on the ferry to Norway, in 1987, Fowles arrives in Paris. He goes for a walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg and writes of ‘the relief, very real, of being among trees again, among family’ (EUL 102/1/18, 20 November 1987: 98). Rather than feeling alienated in a foreign land Fowles recurrently, in his diaries, records feeling among known and treasured living forms, in this excerpt literally echoing Hazlitt and his brush with ‘English’ trees in a Parisian park more than 170 years earlier. Upon arriving in Cairo in 1972 Fowles and his wife seem to suffer mild culture shock: they encounter alien noises, traffic-pollution and thousands of people. The diarist soon locates the natural world and seems to anchor himself through his discovery: ‘One delight for me at once – the black kites… flying past and gliding all along the river’ (EUL 102/1/16, January: 91). Along this same river, the Nile, the protagonist of Daniel Martin travels towards the end of that novel, and feels reassured to see a cousin of the English lapwings. Daniel recounts that ‘The earth abided, and behind surfaces and plumages there was no new thing under the sun’ (DM 508). Not for Fowles the uncanny, or unheimlich, experience of the natural world in a foreign land. A global community, a world in which no place could ever be strange again, might be termed the biosphere. Such deeply felt and succinctly expressed instances of the author’s feelings of community with the natural world, as these from his journals, provide a ideal im-

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age of how we might try to reimagine our place in nature. Such excerpts help us reimagine ourselves as belonging to Gaia. Although we are different to every other species of life in our capacity for generalisation, imagination and intelligent thought, as well as their darker spawn of peculiarly human anxiety and depression, we do share a common identity with the rest of life. These private images from the novelist’s journals are a far cry from the bitter excommunication from nature that I began this chapter with, and that Fowles sketched for the public in his 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. As a reading of the journals demonstrates, the author’s vision of a ‘parity of existence’ has been revisited later in his writing career, and this time the emphasis is more on an acceptance of our common identity and communal belonging with nonhuman nature. What if we were all to see the land through the eyes of a writer who can talk of ‘bird movements like the forgotten intonations in people’s voices’? If Midgley is wise, as I think she is, in championing Gaia as a myth for our time, then Fowles’ imaginative vision of nature as old friends, an abiding community to be found in the outdoors, is a model for the future. One aspect of community I have not yet talked much about is its taking place in a particular location. In fact so far much of my discussion has shown how Fowles’ attachment to a natural community is as that of the global citizen: the biosphere is his home. Whether he is in Egypt, on a Greek island, over the sea off Norway, or closer to home in the Devon of his boyhood, the author can look beyond the confusing diversity of human cultures and feel reassured by the presence of old friends, by the dear presence of known species, or at genuses or families, of birds or plants. And yet the importance of place is not to be underestimated, even for such a cosmopolitan natural historian as Fowles. In an essay entitled ‘Beneath the Smooth Skin of America’ Sanders laments the gradual erasure of regional identity that is concomitant with the rise of modern media, social mobility and ignorance of one’s natural surroundings (1995b: 9-21). He rejects the smooth veneer of cultural homogeneity that has been laid over the north American continent, and instead champions ‘bioregional consciousness’, bearing in mind knowledge of one’s home ground. He suggests we develop our sense of place by posing and answering questions such as: ‘What soils surround our houses and apartments and what rocks underlie them?…

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Where does the sun rise and set throughout the year, how does the light change, and how do the shadows play?… What bushes and flowers and trees blossom in that place, and when?’ (1995b: 17). The areas defined by things like a watershed, food-chain, topography and climate constitute bioregions. Such bioregions ignore and undercut many man-made labels, social boundaries, that one might find on maps or in phonebooks. For Sanders, living responsibly on earth means recognizing that our true address is ‘the one defined by the movement of water, the lay of the land, the dirt and air, the animals and plants, as well as by the patterns of human occupation’ (1995b: 21). As well as feeling a sense of community with the natural world that traverses national borders, Fowles has also developed a bioregional consciousness. In his mid-sixties, beside his home town of Lyme Regis, the author walked one April day though the Undercliff, the area of wilderness along the coast west of his home (EUL 102/1/20, 21 April 1998: 76-7): this abortive walk, which ended with me on a little bluff, seeing the cleft (at steklare level) to Pinhay Warren far below; perhaps only 2-300 yards below, but impossible. While I was there, in the scrub, I felt how lonely, yet how clean, pure, it was – and not just an unmarred solitude, hostile solitude, but one for which I felt an old affection. The trees (just coming into leaf) I knew so well, the plants of the ground cover; mercury, pendulous reed, violets, bluebells, primroses. It is not frightening in the least, this loneliness, this feeling that no one ever comes here; like meeting old friends or family after many years in another world.

The younger Fowles had indeed been correct when he wrote of ‘a walk in the country as a walk among old friends’ as not being an anachronistically eighteenth-century, or naively pastoral, sentiment. Forty years later the older Fowles relives the truth of the observation that solitude in nature does not necessarily dictate loneliness in the conventional sense. However it is also of note that the family to which Fowles feels he belongs when walking in the Undercliff is a regionally specific one: he knows the trees of the region ‘so well’, as well as the different species of ground cover plants, the ‘mercury, pendulous reed, violets, bluebells, primroses’ found in this area of south-west, coastal Dorset. Over three decades of local residence combined with a keen interest in his bioregion are clearly evident.

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In a short foreword to a painter’s depiction of the Undercliff, entitled The Undercliff, A Sketchbook of the Axmouth – Lyme Regis Nature Reserve, Fowles displays a detailed knowledge of the nature of this coastal region’s watershed, geology, and flora (Franks 1989: 7-9). According to Sanders ‘the surest way of convincing your neighbors that they, too, live in a place that matters is to give them honest and skilful writing about your mutual home’ (1995b: 163). Wallace Stegner went further than this, writing ‘no place is a place until it has a poet’ (quoted in Hooker 1996: xv). In his capacity as a writer of imaginative fiction Fowles has given the English of the south-west skilful writing about their home, most classically in his setting of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in Lyme Regis (he can’t complain too loudly of the tourist inundation each summer as he helped precipitate it) and the surrounding woods of the Undercliff. The author’s account of this part of south-west England is continued in parts of Daniel Martin, in the fictional guise of Devon, and in the description of a walk to Wistman’s Wood in The Tree. If Fowles has a responsibility as a writer, as well as as a human being, to cultivate bioregional consciousness, then he has not reneged on this responsibility. The many excerpts from his fiction included in the present study will be evidence enough of this. The present chapter has discussed the sometimes contested, sometimes supported, notion in Fowles’ writings that we are one member in nature’s community. The final aspect of Fowles’ positive support for our belonging in nature’s community is made in relation to the passing flow of time. In ‘The Blinded Eye’ the author writes that: ‘nature can take me back through time and turn history on its side’ (1998: 265). As Keats famously declared in his ode, thousands of years ago people heard the nightingale sing the same song that we hear today. This suggests to us a view of nature as ‘a system of landmarks in time’ (1998: 264). The coordinates of unchanging flora and fauna (ecology varies greatly but is unchanging at least from a human perspective) in wild nature would remind one that one exists in a biosphere which lives on in perpetuity, that the nightingale’s voice that Ruth heard we can hear today. In writing of the fact that he takes solace in the living universe being an enduring entity Fowles not only represents himself as not being a sequestered island amongst the rest of life physically, but also temporally. The psychological pain of an

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awareness of human mortality can be eased by identifying one’s self as part of a greater living web that does not cease with the death of any of its constituent parts. During much of the fifties Fowles lived in London – in those days the only place to be in England for the culturally sophisticated Englishman. He made occasional visits to the English countryside. Here he describes one of those visits (EUL 102/1/8, 5 August 1956: 248): The path lay through cornfields; heavy ears of wheat, and the dusty smell of hot barley; then into a deep, subaqueous wood; very silent and peculiar; it continued a long way, through glades of meadowsweet and marestail; a deserted, haunted, still wild area; standing in it, one was remote from all civilization; that is, it had the magic-carpet power of some places; it removed the age and actual situation.

Fowles writes of this wild piece of England as in a sense timeless, as having a ‘magic-carpet power’ to remove one from one’s actual age and situation. It is here worth making a connection with the author’s interest in palaeontology (the town he chose to move to after living in London happens to be situated on the banks of one of Britain’s foremost fossil collecting sites). In the following excerpt from the diaries Fowles observes the local fauna: ‘Two cock pheasants fighting; suddenly they became as old as the ammonites in the ground between their angry claws and erect tails’ (EUL 102/1/15, 2 March 1967: 58). Suddenly the forms of nature are seen as bridging the ages, a picture of fighting cocks is as old as fossils beneath their feet. The significance of fossils for Fowles further emerges in the following lines (EUL 102/1/17, 1 February 1977: 1): I also picked up a crystallized sponge-core; and back home, looking at it under the glass, noticed some tiny separated crystals, barely a millimetre long… Their geometric symmetry and minuteness is very beautiful; somehow patient; beyond man and his wretched second of life.

The enduring aspect of biological life when looked at through the prism of deep geological time becomes readily apparent. While each human may have a ‘wretched second of life’, the underlying form of each biological species, for example the sponge-core here viewed under a magnifying glass, endures (at least comparatively; in absolute terms even whole species sometimes go extinct). Fowles seems to

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take solace in this knowledge, derived experientially in his collecting of fossils. Although the author’s attraction to woodlands has already been commented on we can perhaps make a further connection here. The feeling of permanence that old trees can leave in a visitor to a forest is noteworthy. Trees do not leave their one physical location for the duration of their life-spans and they greatly outlive humans most of the time. As such they could be easily experienced as emblems of permanence in contrast to human transience, as, on a small scale, one of nature’s landmarks in time. Perhaps this is another reason for the tree being so prominent a figure for Fowles in his discussions of nature.

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Chapter 3 Pastoral: Down from the Hills of Greece, into the Combes of Devon Two of the figures I have already discussed in Fowles’ fiction — the sacred combe, and the prelapsarian ‘parity of existence’ — might have been discussed in the context of pastoral. However a thorough study of this genre in the author’s work merits its own chapter. In various instances in the fiction those living in close contact with the land make an appearance. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman a shepherd lounges in the town square on his crook (44). In The Magus a passing peasant girl’s song stops the protagonist from committing suicide (1997b: 61). In Daniel Martin the opening chapter fondly portrays a village community’s connection to the land as represented through its yearly ritual of harvest (5). Each of these examples finds a surprisingly secure place within the literary mode of pastoral. Narrative has been a part of human society for many thousands of years. The narrative structure which encompasses humans living with the land is known as pastoral. Among our cultural constructions of nature the pastoral narrative has an important place. As Greg Garrad writes, ‘no other trope is so deeply entrenched in Western culture, or so deeply problematic for environmentalism’ (2004: 33). Pastoral is generally thought to have had its birth in the ‘Grecian song’ or Idyll of Theocritus (c.316-260). ‘Idyll’ is derived from the Greek ‘eidyllion’, meaning small picture or image, and the term is used to describe the short poems of Theocritus which possess an idealistic quality. These Idylls were based upon the song competitions of shepherds in the author’s native Sicily and envisioned the simplicity of life in contact with nature. They were written from the vantage point of an Alexandrian scholar (Gifford 1999: 15). As to its modern usage within literary studies I here rely on Peter Marinelli’s definition, pastoral as ‘literature which deals with the complexities of human life against a background of simplicity’, that simplicity usually being a ‘country

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landscape’ (1971: 3). Thus my definition refers to a general area of content rather than a specific literary form. Pastorals remember or imagine an innocent past that has recently been encroached upon by advancing technology. This innocent past is conceived of as preferable to the harsh present. In such a way do certain of George Eliot’s novels represent rural settings anterior to the Industrial Revolution as exhibiting a blessed simplicity, for example Adam Bede and Silas Marner. Pastoral appears in many forms, for example drama, as in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale, and epic, as in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. In Fowles’ short story ‘The Cloud’ a character reads aloud a more recent example of the genre, Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Scholar-Gipsy’, a stanza of which I see as nicely exemplifying the pastoral impulse: O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Arnold’s poem is celebration of a world of lost innocence and the simplicity of a life lived amidst nature. In England, in line with an agricultural revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, those peasants who traditionally worked the land were increasingly alienated from it as landlords enclosed open fields by hedges and stone fences and evicted the remaining villagers — fuelling the ranks of the urban poor (Hart 1998: 125-6). This cycle of exile from the land and contraction to wage labour has occurred at different times in history in different societies; for example the black peasantry of Jamaica underwent a similar experience in the 1920s and 1930s (Lewis 1993: 1). It occurs today in places like Papua New Guinea, Borneo and Amazonia, where hunter-gatherer societies have their lands illegally logged or mined and are forced to migrate to the city to work in factories (Kingsworth 2003 52-55). Even in countries like England and France during the twentieth century there has been a massive exodus from the country to the city, with small farmers being undercut by large-scale, environmentally destructive agribusiness. In sum, those who practice subsistence on the land, or small-scale organic farming within a localised capitalist economy, have been a dwindling number over the past two

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hundred years. The cities of the world grow larger each year. With fewer and fewer people living in close contact with the land the ground has become ripe — excuse the pun — for the writing of pastoral. Pastoral is, as Marinelli reminds us, ‘a genre which arises only when an original beauty has been lost’ (1971: 17). Perhaps recent demographic trends go part way to explaining the undoubtedly enormous popularity of novels such as Cold Mountain and films such as Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (Gifford makes this point about Cold Mountain; 2001b: 89). Pastoral is traditionally an urban form. The essential characteristic of the pastoral, according to Marinelli, is that ‘it is written at a distance from the country and from a sophisticated point of view’ (1971: 77). As I mentioned earlier, Theocritus, the originator of the genre, was an Alexandrian scholar. This facet of the genre is clearly demonstrated in a scene from Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman. One sunny spring morning early in the novel Charles’ manservant, Sam, comes into his master’s bedroom in Lyme Regis. He opens the curtains (44): There was a patter of small hooves, a restless baa-ing and mewling. Charles rose and looked out of the window. Two old men in gaufer-stitched smocks stood talking opposite. One was a shepherd, leaning on his crook. Twelve ewes and rather more lambs stood nervously in mid-street. Such folk-costume relics of a much older England had become picturesque by 1867, though not rare; every village had its dozen or so smocked elders. Charles wished he could draw. Really, the country was charming. He turned to his man. ‘Upon my word, Sam, on a day like this I could contemplate never setting eyes on London again.’

As Michael Bellamy remarks, ‘Charles’ lack of artistic talent anticipates the modern tourists who have forgotten their cameras’ (1979: 76). The prototypical pastoral ensemble, shepherd leaning on crook, smocked elder, bleating flock, is aestheticised by Charles: he literally wishes to draw the two men and the animals, suggesting that such an aesthetic apprehension of the scene might cancel out the figures as embodied and unique minds and personalities, installing them merely as decorative aspects on a canvas. The irony of Charles’ exclamation, “I could contemplate never setting eyes on London again”, comes from the context. He says the words looking out from a comfortable bedroom where a servant is busy preparing to give him his morning

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shave, and will then retire to gather ‘a double dose of muffins’ for the master. The bleary-eyed Charles mouths the words looking down upon a shepherd who has evidently not just risen from a comfortable bed, who has probably been out since dawn when the warm morning breeze stroking the commentator’s chest may not have been quite as poetically gentle. The gentleman who could easily contemplate ‘never setting eyes on London again’ represents a whole class of English society in this novel. In a trip to his uncle’s country estate, Winsyatt, Charles revels in ‘the great immutable rural peace’ that he considers himself to be reentering. His chaise rolls up the drive and we are told of ‘the miles of spring sward, the background of Wiltshire downland, the distant house now coming into view, cream and grey, with its huge cedars’ (FLW 191). And yet with seamless continuity Charles’ view of the estate also encompasses a smith, ‘two woodmen, passing the time of day; and a fourth very old man, who still wore the smock of his youth and an ancient billycock’ (FLW 190). The narrator informs us in characteristically analytic prose that the owners of the great houses of England ‘liked well-tended peasants as much as well-tended fields and livestock’, that in fact the rural injustices and poverties of the era did not impinge upon places such as Winsyatt, but that the comparative kindnesses of such estate owners to their staffs ‘may have been no more than a side-product of their pursuit of the pleasant prospect’ (FLW 191). The scopic aspect of our introduction to the workers at Winsyatt, the way they blend smoothly into a visually stylised panorama, a ‘pleasant prospect’, does indeed place the upper class of English society as consumers of a species of pastoral. The presence of an intrusive, ironizing narrator reinforces this presentation. Some background is needed to a discussion of the ‘pleasant prospect’. Eighteenth-century landlords who encountered the paintings of Claude or Poussin while on a Grand Tour learned new ways of looking at landscape and returned to England to create such prospects on their own estates (Malins 1966: 68). The garden-landscapes of eighteenth-century improvers such as William Kent or Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who were hired by wealthy estate owners to implement their desired aesthetic effects, were 'natural' and Arcadian in the artistic tradition of Claude or Poussin. This was an important shift in taste in the history of landscape-gardening, as until then formal gardens, under French, Italian and Dutch influences, had held sway in Britain.

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Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829) influenced many landscape gardeners at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He wanted landscape scenes to be beautiful as the paintings of renowned artists were beautiful. The scene should be 'picturesque', he wrote, a term used to refer 'to every object, and every kind of scenery, which has been or might be represented with good effect in painting' (quoted in Cowell 1978: 184). The objects in the scene should be disposed with a fundamental variety and intricacy, and the texture of these objects should have a roughness and irregularity. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams stresses that the eighteenth-century landlord was a self-conscious observer, and very specifically a self-conscious owner. The revolution in landscaping in this century propelled the notion of a ‘pleasant prospect’, a view which was to be had from elevated sites like large windows, terraces and lawns, and implicitly contained an expression of control and command. This emphasis on possession from a removed and controlling vantage point is what Williams calls ‘the separation of possession’ (1985: 126). However we do not need to resort to an invocation of William’s work to notice that the creation of pleasing prospects in landscape gardening implies the value landscape gardeners, and their supporting cast of poets, painters and landlords, accorded an abstract aesthetic. In a relationship with nature in which the emphasis is all upon the visual perception and the visual perception must conform to a cultural ideal (landscapes organised to be viewed as beautiful pictures) there is a remoteness of humans from nature itself. Clearly eighteenth century estate owners and landscape gardeners were not averse to the colour green, but this is a culture in which nature is only seen from afar, and only then when it wears an agreeable face. By 1867, and the aforementioned scene from The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the great revolution in English landscape gardening had made itself an established fixture in the countryside, and the pastoral tableaux observed by Charles as he rolls up the drive towards his uncle’s pile — the ‘pleasant prospect’ with its charming peasants — would have been considered simply good taste. And yet the reader remembers that The French Lieutenant’s Woman is not a nineteenthcentury novel. We grant the author of this 1969 work more theoretical canniness than to simply and unselfconsciously present us with another pastoral idyll. This emphasis on nature and those who work it as being at all times visually charming was, as Williams contended, a

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subtle kind of exploitation in the control of a land and its prospects (1985: 126). The cream and grey of the great house, framed by its surrounding cedars and placed against a background of Wiltshire downland; the miscellaneous peasants milling contentedly along the side of the drive; all appears eminently picturesque. And yet the model of self-conscious observation that underlies Charles’ vision necessitated a fundamental separation of himself, and by implication his whole class, from nature and the actual lives of the workers. Charles sees a beautiful picture unravel as he rolls along, but it is as a consumer of pastoral rather than as an insightful spectator on rural life. Part way through his journey up the drive the narrator interjects that ‘the motives of modern management are probably no more altruistic’ than those of English estate owners in this era: ‘one set of exploiters went for the Pleasant Prospect; the others go for Higher Productivity’ (FLW 191). Unlike a pastoral scene we might expect Jane Austen to unfold, Fowles’ post-Marxist intelligence makes itself felt in the text in discerning economic relations beneath the Arcadian panorama. According to Marinelli the great characteristic of pastoral poetry ‘is that it is written when an ideal or at least more innocent world is felt to be lost, but not so wholly as to destroy the memory of it or to make some imaginative intercourse between present reality and past perfection impossible’ (1971: 9). The next instance of pastoral’s sophisticated nostalgia that I will discuss comes from The Magus. Nicholas Urfe is another Fowlesian protagonist with one foot in present reality and the other edging towards past perfection. The Magus (1966) was the third work to be published by Fowles. In this novel the reader is taken back to the very spring source of the literary mode of the pastoral. It is the late 1940s and Nicholas is an Oxford graduate who has been living in London and pursuing the life of a serial seducer and literary poseur. As Peter Conradi puts it, Nicholas hails from a world of ‘Fitzrovia Bohemians, Penguin New Writing, pony-tailed arts students, duffel coats, beatniks, and the correspondent breeze of Marxistentialism from the Left Bank over the Channel’ (1982: 42). He romanticizes his shabby treatment of women as ‘crimes’, and although he is an orphan and complains of isolation, he secretly relishes his uniqueness. Towards the beginning of the novel Nicholas decides to take a job teaching on a Greek island. After travelling across the continent he arrives in Athens and finds himself

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looking out over the city at the islands beyond, and the mountains of the Peloponnesus behind them. Nicholas is looking at Arcadia in an oddly literal sense. The Latin writer Virgil (70-19 BC) had established this generic name for all pastoral retreats in his Eclogues. Virgil located his literary construct in the alpine regions of the mountains of the Peloponnesus. Already Nicholas sees that he is in a very different kind of place from England. It was like a journey into space. I was standing on Mars, knee-deep in thyme, under a sky that seemed never to have known dust or cloud. I looked down at my pale London hands. Even they seemed changed, nauseatingly alien, things I should long ago have disowned.

The Greek sun shines the light of truth onto the townsman’s sallow features (M 79): When that ultimate Mediterranean light fell on the world around me, I could see it was supremely beautiful; but when it touched me, I felt it was hostile. It seemed to corrode, not cleanse. It was like being at the beginning of an interrogation under arc-lights; already I could see the table with straps through the open doorway, already my old self began to know that it wouldn’t be able to hold out. It was partly the terror, the stripping-to-essentials, of love; because I fell totally and forever in love with the Greek landscape from the moment I arrived. But with the love came a contradictory, almost irritating, feeling of impotence and inferiority, as if Greece were a woman so sensually provocative that I must fall physically and desperately in love with her, and at the same time so calmly aristocratic that I should never be able to approach her.

There is much to be positively excised from the sickly narcissist’s ego – the light ‘seemed to corrode, not cleanse’. Yet although there will be torment to pass through – Nicholas sees a table with straps through an open door and knows that interrogation is nigh – this meeting with the Greek landscape and with nature marks the beginning of a love relationship. The force that will compel Nicholas to examine himself and jettison those aspects which are inauthentic is love of the natural world. We note that the protagonist conceives of nature in Greece as a woman. True to womanising character, Nicholas’s first aid when reaching for metaphor is the female of the species: his vocabulary remains irredeemably sexual.

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This will be pastoral in the sense that Marinelli defined it: this is literature which deals with the complexities of human life against a background of simplicity, in this case the classical simplicity of Greek light and space. After taking the eight hour journey south of Athens in a small steamer Nicholas arrives at the island that is his destination, sitting six miles off the Peloponnesus. He describes the sight (M 50): To the north and west, a great fixed arm of mountains, in whose crook the island stood; to the east a distant gently-peaked archipelago; to the south the soft blue desert of the Aegean stretching away to Crete. Phraxos was beautiful. There was no other adjective; it was not just pretty, picturesque, charming – it was simply and effortlessly beautiful. It took my breath away when I first saw it, floating under Venus like a majestic black whale in an amethyst evening sea, and it still take my breath away when I shut my eyes now and remember it. Its beauty was rare even in the Aegean, because its hills were covered with pine trees, Meditteranean pines as light as greenfinch feathers. Nine-tenths of the island was uninhabited and uncultivated: nothing but pines, coves, silence, sea. Herded into one corner, the north-west, lay a spectacular agglomeration of snow-white houses round a couple of small harbours.

Nicholas sees the natural scene in a far less stereotyped manner than Charles Smithson views the south-west of England. The island is not ‘picturesque’ or ‘charming’, it does not arrange itself into the conventionally accepted Pleasing Prospect. Rather the island is seen for what it is: a unique and beautiful physical conformation. Further than this, the magnitude of the impression differs here from that found in The French Lieutenant’s Woman: it is an ecstatic response evoked in Nicholas (‘it took my breath away’), much more intense than Charles’ easy nod of approval. Homer had the goddess Circe, who lived on the island of Aeaea, turn the companions of Odysseus into swine by a magic potion – she is a woman, or spirit of an island, who elicits only extremes of emotion. Nicholas himself contrasts the ‘Circe-like quality of Greece’, its wild beauty, with the muted relationship the English have with ‘what remains of our natural landscape and its soft northern light’ (M 49). This, then, may not be an entirely typical instance of conventional pastoral. However, there are shepherds to be found nearby. Although in this first impression it seems even on Phraxos there is a clear division between the country and the city, and all of the islanders live

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‘herded’ onto the latter tenth of land, Nicholas soon discovers otherwise. When walking out on the hills he later reports that (M 51): One might pass a goatheard and his winter flock (in summer there was no grazing) of bronze-belled goats, or a bowed peasant woman carrying a huge faggot, or a resin-gatherer; but one very rarely did. It was the world before the machine, almost before man, and what small events happened – the passage of a shrike, the discovery of a new path, a glimpse of a distant caique far below – took on an unaccountable significance, as if they were isolated, framed, magnified by solitude. It was the least eerie, the most un-Nordic solitude in the world. Fear had never touched the island. If it was haunted, it was by nymphs, not monsters.

With the presence of the shepherd we are placed on familiar ground for the genre. In a far-flung corner of rural Greece in the early 1950s technology has barely penetrated; rather than machinery, bowed peasants and resin-gatherers are a common sight among the pine covered hills. We are returned to the motif of natural Greece as a female: although the island is largely silent and empty of humans, if there is a presence that always haunts the slopes it is that of nymphs. As in the ‘imaginary topography’ of Virgil’s Eclogues, in these woods and hills ‘myth and reality flow freely into one another’ (Loughrey 1984: 9). And then there is the townsman and his complexities. Nicholas has little in common with the other teachers at the school, and he feels isolated from the rest of the islanders with their strong regional dialect. Letters arrive from Alison, an Australian girl Nicholas had lived with and spasmodically loved back in London. He had effectively abandoned her in coming to Greece, shying clear of the responsibility that comes with a long-term relationship. The letters are passionate at first, but within a few months her love for him has faded. His own letters to her also become less and less emotional. Then one day she writes to him to tell him that she has started seeing someone else and that the relationship is over. Nicholas feels himself unexpectedly bitter. Even the winter beauty of the island does not console him. His boredom drives him to make new walks in the hills (M 56): Yet in the end this unflawed natural world became intimidating. I seemed to have no place in it, I could not use it and I was not made for it. I was a townsman; and I was rootless. I rejected my own age, yet could not sink back into an older. So I ended like Sciron, a mid-air man.

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Nicholas is a creature of the city, he feels ill at ease in this rural setting. Accustomed to deriving some obvious personal gain from everything in his life, he finds nature here does not conform, ‘I could not use it’. Assimilation with his immediate society seems impossible, while the pastoral idyll remains resistant to the entreaties of a Londoner abroad. Nicholas is Sciron, the brigand of Greek legend who preyed on travellers along the cliff road from Athens to Megara, a character suspended above the ground, a character without a legitimate home. As Marinelli writes of the pastoral, ‘a recourse to Arcadia and the sheephook does not free the inhabitants of the city from their usual perplexities’ (1971: 11). Nicholas has arrived in Arcadia, but his problems have not even led him to the nadir he must experience. Nicholas has been nurturing an ‘onanistic literary picture’ of himself as a poet (M 57). He thinks of the poetry he has been writing as ‘philosophically profound and technically exciting’. But then one bleak March Sunday he reads the Greek poems and sees them for what they are, ‘banalities clumsily concealed under an impasto of lush rhetoric’ (M 58). Nicholas realises that he is not a poet. The one aspect of himself he could always turn to as justification is gone. His lifebuoy has sunk. In the meantime he has visited a brothel in Athens, and been diagnosed with a case of venereal disease. One morning the headmaster delivers a piece of unwitting, anti-pastoral, irony, ‘“Cheer up, kyrios Urfe, or we shall say the beauties of Greece have made you sad”’ (M 59). It is of course not the sylphs of the woods that he has come to know, but syphilis. Unlike in the Golden Age of Virgil or Ovid where love was unclouded by thoughts of shame, Nicholas’ sexual lust distances him from the sinless pleasures of traditional pastoral. At this point the quotation from de Sade prefacing this first section of the novel becomes relevant: Un débauché de profession est rarement un homme pitoyable (M 13). (A professional debauché is rarely a man worthy of pity.) Nicholas feels little pity for himself; he loathes himself. He regrets giving up Alison. He can’t even use his despair as fuel for worthwhile poetry. And then, one day, he decides to kill himself. He walks into the hills with a twelve-bore rifle, sits on the ground against the stem of a pine tree and holds the barrel against his eye. He reloads the cartridge. And then (M 61): From the hills behind came the solitary voice of a girl. She must have been bringing down the goats, and she was singing wildly, at the limit of her uninhibi-

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ted voice; without any recognizable melody, in Turkish-Muslim intervals. It sounded disembodied, of place, not person. I remembered having heard a similar voice, perhaps this same girl’s, singing one day on the hill behind the school. It had drifted down into the classroom, and the boys had began to giggle. But now it seemed intensely mysterious, welling out of a solitude and suffering that made mine trivial and absurd. I sat with the gun across my knees, unable to move while the sound floated down through the evening air. I don’t know how long she sang, but the sky darkened, the sea paled to a nacreous grey.

He has heard the voice of Circe, the wild woman of Greece that he had earlier felt intimations of love for, the ‘nymphs in the woods’. It is not dulcet and domesticated tones that he hears, rather the song of this land is a full-throated one of passion. This goatherd’s song links the scene to the very origins of pastoral: to Theocritus’ first idyll where the herdsmen are singers. Comparisons with Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’, a poem in which a young woman reaps and sings to herself in a valley, are also apt. In Wordsworth’s poem the poet finds that ‘the Vale profound/ Is overflowing with the sound’, that place speaks through person more than any bird-song could, and that a ‘natural sorrow, loss, or pain’ infuses the song’s flow (1971: 98). In Fowles’ novel the placing of the schoolboy’s earlier embarrassment at the girl’s singing in association with Nicholas’ own present predicament heightens the sense that he himself is being insincere and unnatural in this context. The protagonist’s suffering suddenly appears ‘trivial and absurd’ in comparison to the passion he hears in Circe’s voice. Nicholas does not commit suicide. He sits on the ground with his back against the pine tree, and waits. And then he realises that even the death he has been plotting for himself was a spectacle, it was to have been not a moral action but a ‘fundamentally aesthetic one’ (M 62). Further, poetry and suicide had really both been attempts to escape. As he had fled London and a woman he might love, so too had his poetry and love of the grand spectacle masked a failure to cope with life as it is. His constant disavowals of responsibility mark him, in the terminology of existentialism, as inauthentic man. At this stage in the novel it is nature that has been the agent of his redemption. After placing his troubled life against a background of natural simplicity, after walking through ‘a world before the machine’, he does eventually succeed in changing more than his skies. The voice of the Greek landscape, personified in a girl’s song, causes him

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to pause at the crucial moment. As Nicholas had earlier foretold, his old self was not to hold out under the corrosive force of the Mediterranean light. Nicholas re-evaluates himself and decides to keep living, but this time with less escapism and fewer narcissistic selfdelusions. The protagonist’s journey through pastoral has been a purifying exercise. Although it has been an ordeal he has come to see which parts of himself have been excrescences, and watches them die under the Greek sun. Nicholas begins to swim more and more. He recovers from the disease. Alison contacts him. As Part Two of the novel opens it is May and he is contentedly walking in the hills: ‘It was an azure world, stupendously pure, and as always when I stood on the central ridge of the island and saw it before me, I forgot most of my troubles’ (M 67). It seems that the townsman has now learnt the ways of the country, that Nicholas has now found a place for himself among the green pines of the island. Unlike a pastoral in which the townsman’s problems are merely magnified by being placed in the context of natural simplicity, Nicholas here uses the wild beauty of Greece, its ‘Circelike quality’, as a bench-mark of authenticity by which to measure his own falsities, and as an agent to precipitate his own evolution as a man. In this way Nicholas to some extent parallels Daniel Martin, in the eponymously titled novel, and his occasional retreats to, and celebrations of, the figure of the sacred combe. Daniel gains greater perspective on his life from his sojourns in green redoubts. In The Magus nature makes the protagonist look outside his own shell of narcissism and see that there is more to live for than his own aggrandising tendencies. (This is not to discount the value women have — Alison in The Magus and Jane in Daniel Martin — as catalysing agents for the development towards maturation of the protagonists in both novels.) Here his surname ‘d’Urfe’, and the appellation’s phonetic allusion, ‘of the Earth’, become significant (from this point onwards Nicholas is to be swept up on the machinations of the Prospero-like Maurice Conchis, the magus of the novel’s title, and ‘d’Urfe’ will also be an important name for its contrastive ‘grounding’ of Nicholas in everyday reality). However the name itself, without resemblence to other words, is important. It is a family tradition that Nicholas’ ancestors included among them the French writer Honoré d’Urfé (M 91). D’Urfé (1567-1625) was author of L’Astrée, a work commonly seen as the culmination of the pastoral tradition in France, the various vol-

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umes of which were published between 1607 and 1627. Set in fifthcentury Gaul, it is the story of Céladon’s courtship of Astrée. At the start of the novel Astrée banishes Céladon from her sight in the mistaken belief that he is unfaithful. The hero attempts to kill himself in despair, builds a temple in the forest dedicated to his beloved, and is finally persuaded to return to Astrée (France 1995: 48). The Magus parallels this narrative sequence to the extent that Nicholas’ selfish motives had led him to self-imposed exile far away from Alison, his despair had led him to the brink of suicide, and in a metaphorical sense he has built a temple in the island’s wilds through his construction of a particular kind of enraptured pastoral vision. In the sense that this vision of the Greek landscape has been instrumental in Nicholas’ evolution as a person, one might even go so far as to say that this vision of nature is dedicated to Alison, a young woman who desires Nicholas, but a Nicholas without his sophisticated narcissisms. To such an extent does seventeenth-century French pastoral resonate through the plot, and as the cosmopolitan Conchis remarks, it is a narrative pattern ‘pas tout à fait sans charmes’ (M 92). So much for Fowles’ construction of Arcadia, but what of pastoralism in the non-literary sense of using land for pasture? The German ethnographer Sabine Ivanovas sees no reason to doubt that many of the practices she observes today in a small village in the mountains of Crete are unchanged in over a thousand years of Mediterranean shepherding (Gifford 1999: 14). But how Arcadian is Arcadia, as Terry Gifford asked in his journal when he visited Crete? (1999: 14). In his journals written during the early 1950s in Greece Fowles frequently records having seen shepherds wandering the hills. On an ascent of Parnassus he encounters shepherds living high on the mountain side and is amazed at their hospitality, but also the ‘gypsy simplicity’ of their small and sparsely furnished stone shelters (2003: 198). During his descent in the dark Fowles meets a young shepherd and talks with him (2003: 203): He was suffering from conjunctivitis, no wonder in that wind. Every so often he went outside and called to his sheep with a high-pitched whistle. He asked me back to his shelter, but I felt too tired to move. He went off into the night and cold wind. A strange, unreal, remote life in 1952. It is difficult to imagine what the mentality of a mountain shepherd can be like – a life of sun-hours, counting, milking, brittle stars, silences and cold winds, constant watchfulness against

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Real Greek pastoralism here wreaks havoc with a literary notion of Arcadia. This shepherd does not gambol with his flock under fluffy white clouds, but suffers conjunctivitis and the onslaught of a savagely cold wind. Silence and real wolves accompany his days, and Fowles imagines the ‘terrifying solitudes’ he must live with. But Fowles’ actual experience of Greece, as recorded in his journals, is not entirely washed clean of an idealised, literary notion of place. After a day walking in the hilly centre of Spetsai he writes (2003: 171): This is the land of the Odyssey, of the wander and effort of the ancient Greeks. Blue seas, pine-trees, and snow-capped mountains; all like iced wine; catalytic, redolent.

If Greece in winter is like iced wine, then out of its cold and limpid depths rises a nose which is redolent of Olympian legends, of the land’s native myths. Like Nicholas in The Magus, Fowles finds the island to be haunted by nothing if not nymphs (2003: 161): I had been walking for hours through the trees above the sea, not seeing a soul, and the sea, being rough, was empty of boats, and then suddenly I had a kind of flash of vivid perception of the marvellous, the poetic – a tissue of the legendary, the enchanted forest, the spirits of the places, nymphs in groves, partly French and medieval, partly Greek and classical, partly my own dreamworld.

The hills are the traditional home of the Muses in the Meditteranean, thus the reference to ‘nymphs in groves’. Yet here we get a clear sense of how the author has infused the actual Greek landscape with a mythology, but one of an idiosyncratic nature. He here refers to the Greece that is his ‘own dreamworld’. It is an assemblage of the pastoral tradition, from the enchanted forests of Europe to the genus loci of classical Greece. Elsewhere he talks of Spetsai as ‘a Treasure Island’, invoking Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of swashbuckling pirates and treasure hunts (2003: 150). Fowles, in his journals, does construct a notion of Arcadia in his encounters with nature in Greece, and it is a compound of classical Greek myth and personally meaningful imaginings and allusions.

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After his first week in Greece, on Spetsai, Fowles went on a long walk into the hills of the island and recorded his impression of the natural environment. As will be noted, his acuity of perception was still running high at this early stage in the sojourn. Looking back forty years later over this journal entry, Fowles commented in a footnote to the published edition that it may be considered ‘the genesis of The Magus’ (2003: 149). Here he has struck off the road and come to a cliff facing westwards (2003: 152): I sat on the edge of it, on a rock, and the world was at my feet. I have never had so vividly the sense of standing on the world; the world below me. From the cliff, successive waves of forest fell down to the sea, the sparkling sea. The Peloponnesus was absolutely without depth or detail; just a vast blue shadow in the path of the sun; even with field-glasses, no details could be seen, except in the snowy mountain-tops. The effect was weird and for a few moments I felt incomprehensibly excited as if I was experiencing something infinitely rare. Certainly I had never seen so beautiful a landscape; a compound of gloriously blue sky, brilliant sunlight, miles of rock and pine, and the sea. All the elements, at such a pitch of purity that I was spellbound. I have had almost the same feeling in mountains, but the earth element is missing there – one is exalted and remote. Here the earth was all around one.

As in The Magus the simplicity of the elements — salt water, light, air, space, open pine woods — is intensely apparent. The simplicity of the elements seems to evoke a similar simplicity of emotion – a euphoria. The sunlight is ‘brilliant’, not unlike Nicholas’ interrogation lights. Fowles then invokes the sublimity of alpine mountains, aligning this landscape with that sense of elevation but stressing the difference in that this Greek landscape is ‘d’Urfe’, its beauty is of the earth. Fowles feels an intense awareness of his surroundings (2003: 152): At the time I could not define what I was feeling; the impact and uplifting had made me lose myself. I was suspended in bright air, timeless, motionless, floating on a sublime synthesis of the elements. Then there was the fragrant wind, the knowledge that this was Greece, more than that, the spark which lit ancient Greece.

Here I think we have proof that the Greece Fowles encountered in the early 1950s was not purely a tissue of his imaginings, and not entirely

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an idealised notion of Arcadia. As the author writes, the impact of the landscape ‘had made me lose myself’. The environment bears down on the viewer; he has no chance at this stage in his experience of natural Greece to project preconceived ideas of the place onto present reality. It is only after this initially receptive phase that the fragrance of Greece’s ‘iced wine’, its briny winter sharpness, conjures up a pantheon of ancient Greek references. The Greek landscape is in this way given legitimacy as being, in itself, a ‘sublime synthesis of the elements’, as having many of the qualities The Magus, and Fowles’ journals from the early 1950s, attribute to it. In answer to Gifford we might conclude that a good portion of Arcadia is a real place. If The Magus chronicles the story of a young man, then the appearance of the less fantastical Daniel Martin eleven years later (1977) was of interest as a novel of middle age. The first major example of pastoral in Daniel Martin greets the reader in the opening chapter, ‘The Harvest’. This chapter is a hymn to the culture of the traditional English farm of the first half of the twentieth century. As well as being of great interest politically, this chapter of Daniel Martin is, in my personal estimate, Fowles’ greatest excursion in prose. Three men, a boy and the adolescent Daniel harvest the year’s crop of wheat from a Devon field under a blue August sky in the 1940s. This is not classical pastoral in the sense that the characters are not indolent: the human figures in the scene are not to be found ‘fleeting the time carelessly’ (Shakespeare quoted in Marinelli 1971: 17). Rather it is closer to the georgic, a genre that takes its name from Virgil’s Georgics (composed 36-29 B.C.), a series of poems that offer practical advice on gardening and animal husbandry. William Conlogue argues in Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture that farm literature is best read in relation to the Georgics and not as pastoral, in that pastoral fails to properly represent ‘the lived landscape of rural experience’ (2001: 8). As will become clear later in the chapter I think that Terry Gifford’s concept of ‘post-pastoral’ successfully negotiates the inadequacies of traditional pastoral, and as such I do not limit myself to the approach used by Conlogue, of rooting an analysis of farm literature solely in relation to the georgic vision. Gifford himself, on an essay on Rick Bass’ ‘Fiber’, notes that contemporary georgics are in some instances more usefully described as ‘post-pastoral’ (2001a: 251).

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In this chapter cut sheaves of wheat must be placed in upright bundles, in ‘stooks’. Unlike ‘Mr. Luscombe’ (his name is noteworthy being a compound of ‘combe’ and another word such as ‘luscious’ or ‘lucid’) with his ‘bronze-red hands and old brown boots’, Daniel finds the work difficult, as the thistles scratch at his arms. But then, as the narrator comments: ‘he likes the pain – a harvest pain, a part of the ritual; like the tired muscles the next morning, like sleep that night, so drowning, deep and swift to come’ (DM 5). The elision of scratched and weary bodies that is a feature of more disingenuous accounts of farming life does not occur here. The ritualistic aspect of the harvest is important: it is a tradition that binds the village community to the ways of the land and its climate, as well as providing a marker of personal intensity through labour for Daniel. The repetitive aspect of the ritual is emphasised (DM 5): And the day will endure like this, under the perfect azure sky, stooking and stooking the wheat. Again and again old Luscombe will shred an ear from its haulm and roll the grains between his heavy palms to husk them; cup his hands and blow the husk away; stare; then take a grain and bite it in half, the germ with its taste of earth and dust, and then spit it out; and carefully put the remaining grain in his trouser pocket, for the poultry, that evening.

Even the sensual pathway of taste, ‘the germ with its taste of earth and dust’, connects Mr. Luscombe to his Devon field. Part of the ritualised and somatic sense of place is created by the communal lunch that the workers share in the shade of an ash tree. Daniel drinks the cider that is passed around and ‘the boy feels the sour green swill down his gullet, down both gullets; last year’s brew, delicious as orchard shade in the sun and wheat-dust’ (DM 6). Again and again intimate knowledge of the land is exhibited by way of the repeated rituals, tastes, sights and sounds experienced by the characters. As David Abram would have it, ‘the recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded’ (quoted in Gifford 1999: 156). For the characters in the field human nature is located firmly within the framework of a particular living landscape. This opening chapter impresses the reader with its authenticity, a feeling for agrarian culture presumably based on Fowles’ experiences. From 1941 to 1942 Fowles lived in Ipplepen, a Devon village, where he and his family went in a strategy to evade the dangers of the Sec-

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ond World War (such contextual information marking this pastoral as a discourse of retreat with peculiar literalness). A horse-drawn reaperbinder is used to harvest the wheat, and the team of labourers build the sheaves into ‘stooks’. However beyond its authentic portrayal of rural culture, Fowles’ writing is also notable for its poetic use of the language. Take, for example, the men with their lunch (DM 6): They sit beneath the ash, or sprawl; out of the dish-cloth, white with blue ends, a pile of great cartwheels of bread, the crusts burnt black; deep yellow butter, ham cut thick as a plate, plate of pink meat and white fat, both sides of the bread nearly an inch thick; the yellow butter pearled and marbled with whey, a week’s ration a slice. Thic for thee, thic for thee, says doling Mr. Luscombe, and where’s my plum vidies to?

The author’s language relishes the home-made foods, so typical of dairy farmers in Devon, as well as their regional dialect and accent. The yellow butter is ‘pearled and marbled’ with whey, while Mr. Luscombe uses the archaic pronoun of the county, ‘thee’, to refer to Daniel. The narrator comments on the voices around Daniel (DM 6): The boy lies on his back, the stubble pricking, slightly drunk, bathed in the green pond of Devon voices, his Devon and England, quick and tortuous ancestral voices, debating next year’s function for this field; then other fields. A language so local, so phonetically condensed and permissive of slur that it is inseparable in his mind, and will always remain so, from its peculiar landscapes; its combes and bartons, leats and linhays. He is shy and ashamed of his own educated dialect of the tongue.

Here the accent and speech patterns of the men around him are not merely celebrated through the manner in which they appear on the page, but positively linked by the older Daniel to the rolling hills and hidden combes of green Devon. As the landscape of Devon is elsewhere identified by the narrator as being ‘dense with retreat’, so too is it ‘phonetically condensed’. As the landscape undulates, so too do the intonations of the farmers and villagers of Devon. The natural field influences the oral culture, uniquely inflecting the language of the people.

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Suddenly an engine noise is heard and then a German fighter plane flies up the long combe, shooting past only two hundred feet overhead of the group. The calm of the rural scene is rent (DM 7): …for a few world-cleaving seconds it is over them, over the upper half of the field… Balkan-crossed; slim, enormous, a two-engined Heinkel, real, the war real, terror and fascination, pigeons breaking from the beeches in a panic, Sally rearing, Captain the same and tearing loose from his tether…

There is no time for coherent syntax as the sensual stimulations tumble into the flow of the narrative. The image of ‘Balkan-crossed’ metal gives way to animal alarm. Captain, the horse, canters away across the field and it is only with much coaxing that Mr. Luscombe manages to calm the animal. An intimation of the future, a future that for Daniel will involve a disassociation from the land, and for smallscale organic farming and its culture will occasion the mechanised violence of agribusiness, has been delivered. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses various ages follow the Golden Age: in the Iron Age men dig for gold, and voyages in ships for war and trade begin to be made (Marinelli 1971: 16). The Devon that we see here is on the brink of a new age, an Iron Age of sorts. And yet, as Leo Marx made clear in The Machine in the Garden, such an episode is unique in literary history, such an episode is in fact part of a new, ‘post-romantic, industrial version of the pastoral design’ (1964: 32). By pastoral design Marx means the structure of thought and feeling entailed by the bringing of ‘a world which is more “real” into juxtaposition with an idyllic vision’ of the natural environment as providing peace and economic sufficiency (1964: 13). The new, industrial version of the pastoral design is clearly prefigured in American literature where Nathaniel Hawthorne sits in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, and records the silence and the changing impressions of the wood. He insists that the sounds of labour do not disturb the peace of the scene. But then suddenly he hears a sound: ‘But, hark! There is the whistle of the locomotive – the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens from the hot street…’ (quoted in Marx 1964: 13). As Marx puts it, this ‘‘little event’ is a miniature of a great – in many ways the greatest – event in our history’ (1964: 27). When Marx wrote ‘our history’ he was speaking of

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the history of the people of America, but his observation has universal relevance. This episode in Daniel Martin is analogously unique in pastoral design for its annuciation of a change never encountered in human history. Pastoral had always dealt with a contrast between the country and the city, but in Hawthorne’s meditation and Fowles’ idyll the city was actively and inexorably invading the country. It is true that for hundreds of years pastoral literature had played the city’s tumult and sophistication off against the country’s peace and simplicity, but traditionally the two had occupied fixed locations (even if the forces of men did encroach on the country, they would ultimately pass and leave things in immemorial harmony). The train in the woods and the plane in the field both symbolise a radical break in this conventional pastoral design. Here the incursion of industry into rural life had been clearly made; and it would never reverse and leave things as they had been before. History has altered and the parvenu is modern technology. The prescient unease of the animals in this episode from Daniel Martin is of some interest: a few seconds prior to the Heinkel’s arrival a cock pheasant ‘bells disyllabically’ up in the beech wood above the field; then there is Captain’s ‘heavy lumbering trot across the field’, whereupon ‘the old horse stops at the edge of the uncut wheat, trembling’; and finally after peace has settled again on the scene and they begin their work again Daniel hears a sound from high above, ‘The boy looks up. Very high, four black specks, rolling, teasing, caramboling into one another as they fly westward. Two ravens and their young; the sky’s eternal sleeping voice, mocking man’ (DM 7). In these three examples the natural order is represented as enframing man’s head-long dash towards futurity. In the first two examples the pheasant’s premonition and the horse’s consternation impress on us a frightened recoiling of nature from the violent steel technology of the years to come. In the third example the ravens’ ‘eternal sleeping voice’ ‘mock[s] man’ – after the fury of the Heinkel has passed, the ravens abide. It is the sky’s eternal voice that Daniel hears, and we are left with the faint suggestion that nature will always have the last laugh. (Elsewhere in the novel this suggestion is continued. The raven becomes Daniel’s symbol of the splendidly enduring freedom of the wild, for example when near Los Almos, an atomic bomb laboratory area in New Mexico, Daniel sees ravens and contradicts Edgar

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Allan Poe – ‘“He got it wrong. Evermore was the real message.”’ [DM 328]) Soon after three the field begins to fill with people; two or three old men, a young woman with a pram, a gypsy with a lurcher at his heels, seven or eight young children coming back from school. Everyone recognises and is acquainted with the personal histories of everyone else. The sense of community is palpable among those gathered in the field. The scene thus invites comparison with the ‘organic community’ of pre-industrial rural England that F. R. Leavis championed. Leavis mourned the lack of continuity he saw between the inherited wisdom of the ‘folk’, embodied in such centuries-old arts as that of the wheelwright, and the mechanisation of labour he already observed in the early 1930s (1934: 80). The ancient folk crafts, for example that of the sawyers, were a reflection of the daily conditions of rural life in England; they were an ‘organic’ extension of that life. In the old agricultural England beloved of Leavis, and of one of his preferred novelists, D. H. Lawrence, ‘villagers expressed their human nature, they satisfied their human needs, in terms of the natural environment; and the things they made – cottages, barns, ricks and wagons – together with the relations with one another constituted a human environment, and a subtlety of adjustment and adaptation, as right and inevitable’ (Leavis 1934: 91). Leavis’ attempts at upholding the memory of the ‘organic community’ of traditional rural England were criticised by Marxists, including Raymond Williams, as uncritical of rural exploitations. However in an age of chronic urban alienation, where loneliness and feelings of exclusion are significant problems for a large proportion of the members of materially prosperous and affluent Western societies, a wholesale dismissal of Leavis’ thought on the importance of traditional community would be unwise (Coupe 2000: 63). A rabbit chase is engaged, and a brace of rabbits are killed. The blades of the reaper accidentally slice off the hind legs of a rabbit. Daniel kills the animal and throws it by the wayside, ‘doe-eyes glazing, whiskers, soft ears, snowy scuts’ (DM 9). As in the landscapes of Guercino or Poussin that include a memento mori, a speaking death’shead, in a pastoral idyll, the glazed eyes of the rabbit signal that even in the midst of the fertility of harvest lurks mortality; in the traditional epigram, Et in Arcadia Ego (‘I [Death] also am in Arcadia) (Marx 1964: 26). The maturity of this pastoral composition is partly proven

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through its encompassing the reality of birth and death, growth and decay. Then the work of moving the sheaves closer together is taken up again, and all present, even Babe the gypsy, share the task for the last twenty minutes. Finally afternoon tea, back under the Ash-tree, ‘as ritual as Holy Communion’. Daniel revels in ‘the illicit scalded cream’, ‘the harvest hunger, sun, the circle of watching children, the smell of sweat. Byre and meadow and breath of Red Devons. Ambrosia, death, sweet raspberry jam’ (DM 11). This pastoral scene is almost Roman with the blood of the kill and the nectar of the gods mixed together. The narrator does not flinch in describing the brutality of the rabbit hunt, the difficulty of harvesting the wheat, or even, obliquely, the destructive potential of steel technology, and yet the overall impression this chapter leaves with the reader is of humans at one with the land. The workers live alongside the rhythms of the season, an experience of community surrounds and sustains them, the sights, even tastes, of the land are intimately enjoyed. As Daniel and the other villagers gather in the harvest in late summer they partake in a practice which links them to past generations, a continuity which stretches back unbroken for hundreds and hundreds of years. With the second chapter of the novel there is a swift translocation to present-day 1960s Los Angeles. This transition marks a radical disjunction in such long-lived societal continuity. The narrative transition in the novel, not coincidentally reminiscent of a montage crafted by someone with experience in film (Daniel, we later find out, is the putative ‘author’ and has experience working in Hollywood), to a place antithetical to regional consciousness — an assemblage of motorists, parking lots and the bill boards of multi-national corporations — highlights the way in which the older Daniel has lost his boyhood connection to the land. As Robert Pogue Harrison writes, the international hegemony of institutions such as the ‘metropolis, economy, media, [and] ideology – has led to an aggravated confusion about what it means to dwell on the earth’, to the extent that ‘for the first time in cultural memory an increasing proportion of people in Western societies are not sure where they will be buried, or where they should be buried, or even where they desire to be buried’ (1992: 198-9). Daniel is, at this stage, seemingly one of the new victims of institutional dislocation in the West. Out of the window of his L.A. apartment he sees ‘palms and poinsettias and castor-oil plants in the garden, beyond the garden. Downtown, the endless plain of trivial

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jewelled light’ (DM 12). Suddenly we have moved from the country to the city, from pastoral to the hollow glamour of contemporary conurbation, a place where even the flora is ‘rootless’ (castor oil plants are native to India and tropical Africa). The jewels of globalisation heaped up for Daniel’s pleasure are, we are invited to think, meretricious. In what can be considered the novel’s organising present tense (the 1960s) the protagonist has forged a career in script writing which has taken him from Oxford to London to Los Angeles. By the time of reaching his fifties his has been a highly urban and mobile existence. Daniel is to be found on film sets, trans-continental flights and in inner-city apartments. In fact Daniel has intentionally cut himself off from his past. One day he buys a farm, Thorncombe, set in the green Devon countryside and near the vicarage where he lived as a boy in the 1930s and 40s. The distancing frame employed by the narrator to reflect on country life thirty years ago enables much of the novel’s contemporary cultural relevance. The middle-aged Daniel is intimately acquainted with the difference between dwelling with the earth and the new forms of isolation and confusion. While staying at Thorncombe with some of his friends Daniel remembers the farm’s occupants of the 1930s, the Reed family. This extended ‘flashback’ occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Phillida’, the second major example of pastoral in the novel. In the ancient tradition of the mixed farm, a tradition abundantly present in England up until the 1950s, the Reeds produced butter, cream, milk, honey, cider and poultry. As Colin Tudge has argued in So Shall We Reap, the model of the small and labour intensive mixed farm is the solution to the dillema of how to feed the world’s population into the twenty-first century and beyond while retaining natural wilderness and ethical standards (2003). As such Fowles’ portrayal of traditional farming and good husbandry here has immense contemporary political relevance. In fact it is here, strangely enough, that this pastoral gains its greatest oppositional potential. While there are many aspects of early twentieth-century farming that would today benefit from the judicious application of science and technology, the model of a mixture of cereals, horticulture, and some livestock filling in the remaining productive space, tended by many people living in locally autonomous farming communities — the model lovingly portrayed in ‘Phillida’ — is today, according to Tudge and others, the most desirable one for feeding the

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world. In contrast to the ‘monetarized, industrialized, corporatized and globalized’ agriculture of today, ‘enlightened agriculture’, such as that represented in this Devon pastoral, results in ‘good, plentiful food for everybody for ever; a fair deal for producers; labour intensiveness – a maximal number of good jobs, giving rise to working rural communities; benign husbandry; and wildlife friendliness’ (Tudge 2003: 35255). Some critics have been uneasy with the genre of pastoral for its directing the reader’s gaze backwards, prior to what contemporary culture has to offer. Friedrich Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795-6) classically argued that by presenting an idyll in the past, pastoral led us backwards and caused us to feel loss without providing ‘nourishment’ for contemporary concerns (quoted in Alpers 1996: 34). However if we accept Tudge’s point that the fate of everything depends on how we farm and that the model of the traditional mixed farm (aided with a few of the insights of modern science) is our only hope for a desirable future on the planet, then Fowles is in this chapter of Daniel Martin directing the reader forward to future purpose and nourishment through its celebration of a picture of enlightened agriculture. As Terry Gifford has it, ‘at its best the pastoral will always imply that its vision of Arcadia has implications for a New Jerusalem’ (1999: 36). In inadvertently indicating a model for future farming practices this example of pastoral should not be construed as escapist in the face of the necessities of present and coming years. In ‘Phillida’ we learn that the boy Daniel enjoyed visiting the farm, with its thriving communal life. He is attracted to Nancy, and this chapter chronicles his first love affair with the girl, but also the agrarian values came freshly to a boy brought up in a vicarage – he enjoyed ‘living close to animals, the earth, to the tangible, not the spiritual’ (DM 347). Apart from helping with the harvest, as detailed in the novel’s opening chapter, Daniel learns the other jobs on the farm: how to scythe thistles, put hay in the byre, pick apples, collect eggs, milk cows, how ‘to use hook and hoe, how to hoy the cows in, how to wash and handle churns, how to muck out, feed the pigs, set gins for rats, there was a plague that summer; the killing hardness of some of it, the poetry of it too’ (DM 351). Rural life is not all poetry, it also has an undeniable ‘hardness’. As Richard Jefferies characterised the country scene with anti-pastoral aplomb: ‘The wheat is beautiful, but human life is labour’ (Keith 1975: 19).

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The young protagonist pursues an adolescent relationship with Nancy in deserted combes and forest clearings, hidden from the eyes of either of their families. Daniel takes his first step into the world of sexual experience with Nancy, and this aspect of the chapter also marks it as the literature of pastoral. Other pastorals of childhood, most obviously Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie paint a similar picture of ‘hedonistic and wanton innocence’ leading to the fall in the garden, and this episode follows the usual pattern. However the world of ‘Ceres and simplicity, green early sunlight in the tunnelled lanes, and Nancy’ comes to an abrupt end when the relationship is discovered and Daniel’s employment ceases (DM 360). As Katherine Tarbox notes: ‘the “Phillida” chapter is an intense, sustained pastoral, defining much of what Dan feels he has lost: home, stability, earth, love, constancy, and simplicity, all the true desires of his life that he has flouted’ (1988: 104). With this last term, ‘flouted’, Tarbox is referring to the poem that acts as epigraph and epitaph to the chapter, the last line of which reads ‘Phillida flouts me’. In many ways it is indeed Daniel who has ‘flouted’ nature, simplicity and the rest. It is particularly true that Daniel’s connection to the earth, from the vantage point of the novel’s present tense, has become a slender one. When the farm is sold due to Mr. Reed’s failing health Daniel says that he could not imagine (DM 379): Mary and Louise perched on the tractor in any other fields, any other figure but Old Mr. Reed’s… about the garden and the yard. For the first time in my life I realised how profoundly place is also people. I could live a thousand years in this house where I write now, and never own it as they did; beyond all artifice of legal possession.

Daniel is not of the place, of Thorncombe, in the meaningful sense the Reeds were. Regionalism has been particularly important in English nature writing. Unlike American nature writing in which wilderness has played a major part, England’s nature writers have built upon millennia of humans in relationship with, and working upon, the land. Thomas Hardy is the greatest regionalist of south-west England, many of his novels being set in the wild heath county of Dorset (which he called by its antique name, ‘Wessex’) and as such Hardy casts a shadow over Fowles’ portrayal of agrarian life in Daniel Martin (Begiebing and Grumbling 1990: 452). For Hardy, as for Fowles in the

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aforementioned scene, regionalism is something different from the ‘bioregional-consciousness’ that has been discussed by Scott Russell Sanders, among others (1995b: 9-21). Regionalism is here the depiction of disappearing folkways and ways of dealing with the land that rooted particular humans in particular places. For Daniel such a relationship with the land does not exist, and as such he is not ‘of Thorncombe’. Years later the now middle-aged Nancy visits Daniel at Thorncombe with her husband. She makes no reference to their shared adolescent past. In a brief moment alone Daniel asks Nancy if she misses the ‘old life’ (DM 381): “Not the same now, is it? All chemicals and machinery. Not like the old days.” She looked out the window. “Good riddance, if you ask me. The way we had to work. Don’t know how we stood it, really.” “I’ve never tasted cream like your mother’s since.” “Given all that up now. Not worth it with the Holsteins and Friesians.” She said, “All seems so long ago somehow.” I smiled. “All of it?” Just for a second her eyes drifted and cautiously met mine, then looked away with a prim little smile. “You don’t smell those rotten old cows now. That’s one thing I’ll remember till I die.”

In the opening chapter of the novel, as I have shown, ‘the illicit scalded cream’ of Devon signified the elemental poetries of the countryside for Daniel. In saying that he had ‘never tasted cream like your mother’s since’ the protagonist is very clearly referring to the loss of more than a dairy product. Both Daniel, commenting on the ‘killing hardness’ of some of rural life, and the older Nancy speaking of the smell of cow dung that pervades daily farming life, show a realism in their attitude towards agrarian culture. Farming is not all ‘Ceres and simplicity’. However there were some poetries to the farm life of the 30s and 40s in Devon and the urge to not bestow recognition on these positive aspects is represented here by Nancy’s refusal to properly acknowledge Daniel’s and her secret, adolescent love. Nancy rules the whole agrarian way of life out of court with a blunt ‘good riddance’. As she won’t speak of their long past love, neither will she mention the poetries and positive values of that long gone farm life. One traditional aspect of pastoral is ignored and the other slips by the way side. The narrator

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writes, ‘Ban the green from your life, and what are you left with?’, poetically assimilating a loss of gormless adolescent values with contact with the green of the environment. Both possessed a fertile instability. The narrator’s final words in the chapter constitute the lament: ‘Oh my England’ (DM 381-2). If Nancy is taken, as the chapter ends by suggesting, to represent a modern England, then this modern England has banned ‘the green’ from its life. This modern England will not acknowledge that alongside the contemptible working conditions of much rural existence society has also lost the earthy and fecund poetries of a way of life that was sensually rich and intimate with natural processes and cycles. The voice of Nancy in the aforementioned scene and its totalising critique is thus reminiscent of George Crabbe’s overly one-sided anti-pastoral sentiment in his poem ‘The Village’ (1783): ‘the Muses sing of happy swains,/ Because the Muses never knew their pains’ (quoted in Champneys 1988: 158). In this view of Fowles’ text the overly zealous anti-pastoral impulse, the Crabbe-like voice that denies the possibility of any music in the village, is to be lamented. If, alternatively, the phrase ‘Oh my England’ at the end of the chapter is an expression of mourning, and for England more generally, it is for the land recollected by the now middle aged Daniel. In the essay ‘Land’, written to accompany a book of photographs by Fay Godwin, the author praises the British artist Thomas Bewick for his honesty in painting the English countryside (1998: 332): The hanged human suicide over the stream is matched by the hanged dog; the thin ewe chews the besom’s twigs in the snow outside the deserted Highland croft, while her lamb tries to get milk from her; the dog pisses both on the doctor’s coat and on the hay the donkey eats… This is a hard, often bitter world, observed with humanity but not sentiment.

This is the art of satirical anti-pastoral (Gifford 1999: 120). The antipastoral is the work of literature that cuts through the conventional illusions on which Arcadia is based. From William Blake, to John Clare, to Ted Hughes, to the contemporary novels of Cormac McCarthy and many of the poems of the Western Australian poet John Kinsella, anti-pastoral constructions envisage nature as a place devoid of the easy comforts of a benign Arcadia (Gifford 1999: 120). The satirical anti-pastoral, a tradition within the anti-pastoral, reveals the

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silences in those too-comfortable visions of pastoral that are manufactured for an urban readership. In literature satirical anti-pastoral is a strain that runs from Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘The Nimphs reply to the Sheepheard’ (1600), to Byron’s Don Juan (1819), to Stella Gibson’s novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932). While feeling sympathy with Bewick’s satirical anti-pastoral debunking in his essay ‘Land’, Fowles has nothing but distrust for most of Bewick’s followers: ‘the creators of the cosy myth of the contented cottager, the countryside as humble idyll, for the delectation of those, mostly urban, who preferred to ignore agricultural and rural reality.’ According to Fowles, over these artists ‘hangs too great a sweetness, too nostalgic an interest, too comfortable a tranquillity in the past, in tradition, in flowing with the stream’ (1998: 332). Two years after writing these words the author’s sincerity as to his sturdy critical acumen concerning the discourse of pastoral was put to the test when he was asked to write a short piece to be included in Coastline, a book on the south-west coast of England, from Dorset to Cornwall. After writing the piece he recorded in his journal that ‘I fully expect them to turn it down and care not a damn’ (EUL/102/1/18, 16 June 1987: 76). In fact, to the author’s surprise, his words were published. The following is the opening paragraph (Fowles 1987: 153): I will not write of its variety and beauty. I will not write in harmony with the photographs of it selected here. I will not write that all its length, from Dorset to Cornwall, is not under threat. Countless writers close a blind eye and lie, at tourism’s behest, to please the grockles and their own sensitivity. I will not.

Fowles did indeed recoil from sentimentalising the reality of environmental degradation in the English countryside. Two months after the previous journal entry was made the book was published. Fowles wrote in his diary: ‘So many of the photographs and writers’ texts make the coast look and sound rather attractive; and don’t emphasise enough how at risk it all is through man’s stupidity. Like telling a woman with cancer she is beautiful; photographing what is still beautiful in her too much’ (EUL/102/1/18, 10 August 1987: 80). This overly-conventional vision of rural beauty hid a malignancy at its core, despite the author’s brave attempts at a corrective, anti-pastoral realism.

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Fowles’ admirably sober realism is felt in Daniel Martin. An important part of Fowles’ pastoral in Daniel Martin is his having portrayed the relationship of humanity at one with the land as something which has ended. The Reeds, originally shaped by their strong sense of place, are forced to sell their farm, and all those years later when Nancy returns to visit Daniel she appears as a city dweller whose husband works as a foreman in a factory. Daniel too has been uprooted from the land, and led an increasingly peripatetic existence, spending time in places seemingly devoid of bioregional consciousness, such as Los Angeles. Even in the depths of the Arcadian retreat a prophetic war plane, the machine in the garden, signals a future of violence through steel technology, perhaps in the shape of agribusiness. Mechanisation and dislocation are features in the contemporary cultural context this novel speaks to. Over Fowles’ pastoral then, there does not hang ‘too comfortable a tranquillity in the past, in tradition, in flowing with the stream’, the tranquillity that he rejects in many modern purveyors of the countryside idyll in painting. Daniel Martin’s Arcadian canvas does not hypostatise traditional agriculture as something that would last forever; neither does it forgo mention of what would come after the demise of this way of relating to the land. Further, this is pastoral which pre-empts the efforts of satirical antipastoral. The novel does not suggest to the reader that the rural idyll of the English countryside half a century ago was devoid of a ‘killing hardness’ for the animals and humans involved. This novel does not portray the countryside as serene idyll washed clean of the grit of agricultural reality; rather, the smell of sweat is present and the blood of the kill is displayed for all to see. In the midst of the fertility of harvest the slaying of a rabbit shows a recognition of the reality of the creative-destructive universe. The pain of the harvest labour, the tiredness that night, all is mixed inextricably with the poetry of the place and its rituals: ‘Ambrosia, death, sweet raspberry jam’. The pastoral of Daniel Martin presents a world which is unlike the pastoral vision complacently consumed by Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman as he leans out of his bedroom window one morning and looks down upon a picturesque shepherd. In fact this narrative sequence from the 1969 novel is arguably anti-pastoral due to the narrator’s implicit sarcasm and theoretical knowingness. Nicholas’ encounter with Greek light and landscape in The Magus is well described as a pastoral. However neither can we dismiss this

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novel as being tritely obfuscatory of rural reality. The phenomenology of searing Greek light, and the view of nature as a benchmark of personal authenticity, give this work enduring value. However, out of the three major incarnations of pastoral in Fowles’ fiction it is only the pastoral sequence found in Daniel Martin which can be safely vouched as doing the least to mystify human ecology. Only by the time of Fowles’ novel of middle-age, published a decade after the other two novels, in 1977, do we find that the author has graduated to the writing of a new kind of pastoral. In searching for a ‘term to refer to literature that is aware of the anti-pastoral and of the conventional illusions upon which Arcadia is premised, but which finds a language to outflank those dangers with a vision of accommodated humans’, Terry Gifford decides upon ‘postpastoral’ (1999: 149). The post-pastoral would be a ‘discourse that can both celebrate and take responsibility for nature without false consciousness’, and Gifford aligns it with the ‘mature environmental aesthetics’ sought by modern ecocritics such as Lawrence Buell (1999: 148). As Dominic Head writes of Daniel Martin, although ‘the novel is not straightforwardly nostalgic for the rural idyll that witnesses the co-operation of different social classes in the harvest ritual’, ‘the trope of an Edenic moment remains one aspect of Martin’s quest for authenticity in the post-war world’ (2002: 188). Head is right, the novel is not straightforwardly nostalgic, and neither does it completely abrogate the value of the trope of an Edenic moment in the context of Daniel’s life. There has often been an anti-urban bias in English attempts at national self-definition; famously it was not the town that was fought for in Flanders but the English countryside (Short 1992: 2). However among the fields, lanes and trees of the Georgian poets the rural poor did not achieve prominence. While many images of rurality in English culture present us with a sanitised product in one way or another, Daniel Martin is not so self-expediently selective. Fowles’ novel is of interest for its portrayal of a people at one with their place, existing in a pre-agribusiness world of farming, nourished by community and an intimacy with natural processes. It is truly a vision of accommodated humans. However, the author’s georgic realism in this novel encompasses the ‘killing hardness’ of traditional farming life, and the present threat of late twentieth century social mobility (dislocation) and industrialised agriculture. In refusing sentimentality, while not just

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taking up the facile bathos of the satirical anti-pastoral, Fowles creates in Daniel Martin a novel for the clear-sighted, a work with a mature environmental aesthetics. In outflanking the dangers of sentimentalising rural life, whist at the same time not ignoring its poetries and valuable rituals, I consider Daniel Martin a work worthy of Gifford’s epithet ‘post-pastoral’. I now return my critical focus to the ‘present tense’ of this work of fiction. When staying at Thorncombe with Jane and Paul the weather eases and Daniel’s gardener, Ben, shows Daniel what has happened in the garden in his absence. He shows him around the beans, shallots and other vegetables that are just beginning to sprout in the spring warmth. Daniel has just come from a phone conversation with Jenny, his actress girlfriend in California, and walking through the garden with Ben he recoils from the artifice that place and social milieu retrospectively represent to him. He walks through the garden with Ben and he thinks to himself ‘Yes, the real inhabits here’ (DM 421). The narrator does report that: ‘Dan is seldom actually seen spade in hand, I’m afraid’, but at least a closer relationship with the land than that represented by the world of Californian movie making seems more existentially authentic to the protagonist (DM 421). And here a national difference is proposed. Daniel has just arrived back from the America and he and Ben discuss (DM 421): The iniquities of the American vegetable-growing scene, a woeful story Ben never tired of hearing; perhaps some atavistic nineteenth-century peasant’s vision of the United States as the land of the blessed, where everything grew bigger and better, lingered in his mind, and it pleased Ben to have Dan demonstrate that he and his forefathers were wisest to have stayed put. They’ve declared the Cox and the Blenheim lost apples, says Dan; and Ben shakes his head in disbelief. He cannot really imagine a country where every man is not some sort of gardener, or at least understands the points of it.

We might well be wary of accepting Ben’s simplistic notion that the British are a nation of gardeners and while the Americans are not in an age of industrialised and globalised agriculture. However, the representation of the average person as a gardener or someone who at least ‘understands the points of it’, is worth dwelling on. Wendell Berry, the great American essayist of rural life, writes that eating is an agricultural act: ‘Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth’ (1990: 145). According to Berry, how-

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ever, most eaters do not realise that they are participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as ‘consumers’. They are passive consumers, they buy what they want (or what they have been persuaded to want) within the limits of what they can get. They are ignorant and uncritical consumers, they don’t know or query the geographical origin, freedom from dangerous chemicals, manufacturing process or freshness of the food. For most eaters ‘food is pretty much an abstract idea – something they do not know or imagine – until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table’ (Berry 1990: 146). Berry diagnoses this ‘cultural amnesia’ in relation to farming and the land as dangerous and misleading (1990: 146). It is also through eating the foods from nature, the fruits, vegetables and meats of the natural world, that Fowles has developed an intimacy with his species’ ancestral home and the surrounding ecosystem. On the many trips to France he took with his wife Elizabeth in the 1960s and 70s the author entered the dishes eaten along the way in his journal as significant events. He is impressed by the French tradition of the farmers bringing their produce into the town every week to be bought directly by the citizens, and admires the freshness of French produce in general. While staying at a friend’s house in New England however, Fowles balks at the schism between man and nature he finds (EUL 102/1/16, 16 November 1974: 227): Outside, a small bare garden round the house. The huge freezer packed high with frozen foods… it is all tins, cans, packets… a quite dreadful sense of a culture profoundly impoverished in all but the availability of manufactured ‘time-saving’ goods, and totally blind to the uses of natural things… Ned fussing like an old hen over the daring experiment of cooking fresh artichokes. Was Eliz sure she knew the correct time… It is why the so-called ‘French cuisine’ restaurants here are so lamentably awful. They have awful basic products to work with, both in meat and vegetables; the chefs can hardly be blamed, but there is also no cuisine bourgeoise, no cuisine paysanne, only some over-sauced travesty of the haute, as if pretension can hide the remoteness from the real thing.

Eating fruits, vegetables and so on through the range of nature’s bounty, is part of, another avenue for, appreciating the natural world and Fowles has lived a life in which the tastes of nature have been important. The tradition of French cuisine has been venerated by this Francophile, and, tellingly, the intense processing, packaging, and commodification of food stuffs in America is deprecated by the author

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as signalling another way in which this country, that ultimate bastion of consumer culture, has alienated itself from the land. Of course I wouldn’t want to suggest, as I seem to be doing, that America is, in Eric Schlosser’s words ‘the fast food nation’, while England remains guileless and guiltless. This highly moot assertion in an age of transnational corporations does not interest me as much as it seems to have here interested Fowles in the late 1970s. Fowles’ essay ‘Weeds, Bugs, Americans’ (1970) was another instance where the author presented a picture of English landscape and nature as undamaged by the effects of modern agriculture in comparison with poisoned and degraded natural America (1998: 245). Such hyperbole does not tally, and surely did not at the time, with the continued expansion of industrialised farming in England, an expansion that had been in process since the 1950s. In this essay Fowles is strangely xenophobic about Americans, lamenting their ‘cold indifference’ to the wilderness (1998: 245). One wonders how Fowles could so blithely have made such an assertion of the nation that has, along with its lamentable over-consumption of natural resources, produced the greatest tradition of nature writers, as well as the most powerful conservation non-governmental organisations speaking in defence of the natural environment. However, while the caricatures of English and American nationality in this essay, and in the aforementioned novel, are misguided and regrettable, the ‘modern pastoral’ of Ben’s tending the garden at Thorncombe in Daniel Martin is of interest for its divergence from the lifestyle of the majority, those who no longer know the connections between eating and the land. In the words of Berry: ‘The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived’ (1990: 148). The products of nature (in England and Australia as well as in America, one might add) are made to appear as the products of industry and the result ‘is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food’ (Berry 1990: 148). This apparent exile from biological reality is in the interests of the food industry

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in that they do not want the consumer to know that, for example, the veal cutlet on their plate came from a calf that spent its life in a box without room to turn around. Berry counsels us to grow something to eat in our backyards, as Ben does as Thorncombe. This way we will appreciate that eating is ‘an agricultural act’ and that it ends the annual drama of the food economy. The aforementioned scene in the garden at Thorncombe fits with the wider philosophy of Fowles, as sceptical of modern, ‘American’, patterns of food consumption, and appreciative of the way in which eating attaches us to the land. For Daniel after his phone conversation to California ‘the real inhabits here’, and as he wanders through the garden with Ben ‘the real’ connotes nature, living biological reality as opposed to the hyper-civilised and synthetic world of Los Angeles, but also direct exposure to the art of gardening and the origin of his food. Ben lives with his wife Phoebe at Thorncombe, the names of the two characters readily reminicent of pastoral. For its relation to pastoral in the author’s work I finish by turning again to Fowles’ essay ‘Weeds, Bugs and Americans’, an essay which contains explicit advice on how to re-establish a connection with the land in the lives of modern suburban house owners. Here he suggests that for the conservation cause to work we need to integrate nature into urban existence, into the ordinary lives of ordinary people. By planting native species in our gardens, replacing the ‘green Sahara of the lawn’ with cover for birds and insects, and banning the use of insecticides and herbicides from our gardens (this essay was published at the end of a decade rocked by Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, 1962), we can foster the presence of wildlife in our own backyards. Fowles writes of what nature means to him, saying that (1998: 257): Above all it is the familiar natural life that lives and breeds round my house – the kind of life any rarity-hunting naturalist would not even notice, it is so ordinary. But I have trained myself, partly through reading about Zen, partly through thinking on the texts of such men as Thoreau, not to take anything in my thousand-times-walked-round garden as familiar… This, I am convinced, is what practical conservation needs behind it, or beneath it, if it is to work: a constantly repeated awareness of the mysterious other universe of nature in every civilized community. A love, or at least a toleration, of this other universe must re-enter urban experience, must be accepted as the key gauge of society’s humanity, and we must be sure that the re-entry and the acceptance are a matter of personal, not public, responsibility.

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This counselled re-entry of nature into urban experience would be truly revolutionary. ‘Conservation’ would cease to be an abstract term of public policy and become a personally assumed responsibility and daily act. Thus might we begin a healthy relationship with ordinary nature. The kind of garden Fowles counsels is indeed exemplified in his own garden at Belmont House in Lyme Regis, a place where the natural world asserts its own kind of order. With this picture of the author interacting with ‘the familiar natural life that lives and breeds round my house’ we are brought to the point where I can begin the next chapter.

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Chapter 4 Nature Loved and Lost: Emotional Dynamics in Daniel Martin In a conversation with myself in 2002 John Fowles described his large hillside ‘garden’ as ‘my paradise’. Earlier in his life Fowles walked a lot in the English countryside and regarded that as ‘paradise’. The following excerpt from his journal comes from 1964 when the author was 38 years old (EUL 102/1/12, 28 May 1964: 152): A cock pheasant ‘belling’ back at distant thunder. We didn’t see another soul in this little lost bit of countryside; it was a Jefferies day, living with nature, and over everything the faint mysteriousness that inhabits rural England – as much today as it did a hundred years ago. The birds, the spiders, the flowers, the land, the silence, the thunder that lay in the West… I wandered in these things. I want no other paradise.

Although journal writing is traditionally given a cultural value as a confessional and thus ‘artless’ genre, the author’s affiliation with Romantic poetic tropes emerges in the above excerpt. Much as Wordsworth ‘wandered’ in the Lake District, Fowles wanders in a poetic unity of natural elements: flowers, land, silence and thunder. Literary reference is the shorthand used to describe the very quality of the day: ‘a Jefferies day’ is a day evocative of Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), the quintessential appreciator of English natural history and agrarian life. Jefferies’ classic novel of boyhood adventure, Bevis, was read by Fowles at the age of ten. As Eileen Warburton argues in her biography of Fowles, the young boy would have recognised his deepest self in Bevis. He is a young adventurer who escapes to a private natural world, where he knows every bird, tree and insect, and can shape the geography around him through a prism of fantasy and romance (Warburton 2004: 18-9). Like Fowles in the above quoted journal excerpt, Jefferies himself wandered alone in rural England for inspiration. In

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The Story of My Heart Jefferies’ nature mysticism becomes what might even be termed pantheism; there he holds an exalted communion with ‘the great sun burning with light; the strong earth, dear earth; the warm sky; the thought of ocean’ (quoted in Begiebing and Grumbling 1990: 467). The English countryside depicted by Jefferies is a beautiful, numinous place, prior to the advent of the car and industrial agriculture, and Fowles is heartened to find that in 1964 the same faint mystery can be found to inhere in the landscape that one might have sensed a hundred years earlier. The modern author ends this excerpt with the proclamation, ‘I want no other paradise’, exhibiting a sentiment found again and again in his work: that the proper response to the Creation is one of awe. After moving to Dorset in south-west England Fowles had much opportunity to walk in the country, particularly in the nearby Undercliff. As he became older and less able to stride about the countryside his relationship with nature became more focussed on his garden. I say ‘garden’, but the term ‘wooded nature sanctuary’ would be a more appropriate description of the area in front of his Lyme Regis home. This acre or so of land slopes down towards the sea and, apart from a small area of lawn at the top by the house, is covered with trees, bushes and vines that grow without much guidance of human hands. Birds and other wildlife enjoy the tranquillity that results from such an arrangement. This small nature sanctuary became his paradise, as he said to me. After not having written his journal for three years between 1977 and 1980, the author begins again by describing how integral his garden has become to him (EUL 102/1/17, 24 September 1980: 60): I have let the garden relapse here, these last years; not because I have lost faith, or sanctuary, relief in it. It is part of me now, or a mirror, to a degree I conceal from everyone. That is, I have relapsed myself, grown increasingly bored with ‘order’, being what people, even Eliz, expect. I know what to look for, at what season, when its secrets come: at the moment the Clematis orientalis, which flowers late this year, but is now a huge plant: the other evening I could smell its fresh-cut apricot perfume five yards away, delicious beyond description.

Fowles begins to know and relate to his garden as if it were an organic extension of himself: the garden relapses concomitantly with his own relapse into disorder. Amidst the chaos of the garden, mirrored by his own life, he knows its rhythms of renewal and creation with an ex-

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ceptional degree of intimacy. As Fraser Harrison would have it, living in the cycles of a landscape here ‘offers the most accessible and emotive representation of our own biological fate’ (Gifford 1999: 156). Seven years later, a reading of the diaries shows, the garden was still a central facet of Fowles’ daily existence (EUL 102/1/18, September 1987: 87): I cannot bear the thought of leaving this house or garden because in it I live in nature. I am conscious of every bird-call, every sound; to live without them is like living without grace.

As Fowles does not believe in a deity we can say that the ‘grace’ his garden brings to his days is more pleasure, consolation and a sacrosanct beauty of form than the quality of literally living in God’s favour. Here he is ‘conscious of every bird-call’, but it is not only the auditory sense that acts as an avenue for intimacy with nature (EUL 102/1/21, 1/10/1989: 42): A lovely, though clouded, soft evening. The Celmatis orientalis is in full bloom, a clifflt [sic] of yellow caps. The Abelia also smells, tho’ I had always thought it scentless; but quite pleasingly sweet and pervasive. The ‘secrecy’ of this garden at its richest. I feel it almost as a human being I’ve slept with – that familiarity of having slept with, been in bed with, not of sex or coupling, something more primitive.

The intimacy Fowles has with his garden has been built up over many years and is likened to the intimacy developed through sleeping with another. In specifying that he does not speak of sexual intercourse he alerts us to the way in which this relation shares aspects of the unconscious (or ‘primitive’) knowledge of the other’s presence achieved through long-term and intimate co-habitation. Further, this intimacy partakes of many senses: sound, vision and smell among them. Such diverse comprehension of natural processes seems to be the ‘recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience’, written of by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, which ‘brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded’ (1996: 65). The familiarity, ‘not of sex or coupling’, but of something more primitive spoken of by the diarist might well be understood using the notion of biophilia. Edward O. Wilson coined the term ‘biophilia’,

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meaning ‘the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike forms, and in some instances to affiliate with them emotionally’ (Wilson 2002: 134). He cites as evidence for the hypothesis that part of physically based human nature includes a ‘biophilic instinct’ the facts that, given the means and leisure, a large portion of society gardens, fishes, backpacks, and birdwatches, and that in the United States and Canada alone more people visit zoos and aquariums than attend all professional sports events combined (1992: 350). The ‘biophilia hypothesis’ posits a theory of prepared learning for human habitat selection. It suggests that humans have an innate tendency to enjoy being in environments which mimic their ancestral home (large park-like grasslands dotted by groves and scattered trees, the terrain of the African savanna). Wilson also argues that people prefer entities that are growing, and sufficiently unpredictable to be interesting (1984: 115). He sees peril for the human spirit in the colonisation of other planets in that we would be separated from our ancestral home, which is a complicated ecosystem with a great amount of biodiversity. More pressingly still he sees peril in the current destruction of the world’s remaining biodiversity. The claim that humans have an innate tendency to affiliate with a diversity of wild biological life is, it should be noted, more general than Wilson’s claim about habitat selection. Evidence in support of this first claim is manifold, for example, in a Melbourne-based study that factored out confounders such as exercise levels, diet and social class, pet ownership was found to account for a significant reduction in cholesterol, triglycerides and systolic blood pressure (Frunkin 2001). Fowles’ journal entries demonstrate his tendency towards biophilia in an era dominated by the machine. He writes of how he wants no other paradise than that found in rural England, revels in the ‘fresh-cut apricot perfume’ found one evening in his garden, and likens living without bird-call and the nature in his Lyme Regis garden to ‘living without grace’. Not just having access to eco-system services such as clean water, food and air, but regularly spending time with wild nature is, apparently, important for the author’s fundamental well-being. Considering that as a species Homo sapiens has evolved in a natural biota over countless millennia, it would indeed be strange if some affection or affiliation with wild nature did not accompany us in our very recent shift into man-made, urban environments. Granted we do exhibit an enormous degree of flexibility in our behaviour, but if the

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notion of habitat selection is relevant to other biological organisms, should we consider ourselves, also biological organisms into whose very innermost folds the characteristics of our ancestral cradle are stamped, entirely free of environmental preferences? If the biophilia hypothesis is in some sense correct then Fowles is not an eccentric nature recluse, but a human being living a well-adapted existence. A love of nature has been an important part of Fowles’ life, as I have shown. Moving on from this thought I turn to the manner in which a loved natural landscape has played its part within his work. As Sue Park notes in her essay ‘Time and Ruins in John Fowles’s Daniel Martin’, the sentence that begins Daniel Martin, ‘Whole sight, or all the rest is desolation’, is well interpreted as a maxim prioritising integration of one’s past into one’s present. For Daniel this maxim gathers symbolic force through his various emotionally significant experiences at ruined civilisations and with younger (Jenny, at Tsankawi) and older (Jane, at Palmyra) women in the novel (1985: 157-63). I will examine this argument later on, however the novel may also be looked at as a quest for Daniel to develop a ‘whole sight’ in his approach to other living beings and the natural world. While writing the novel Fowles commented in his journal that, ‘during the last stretches I thought several times of The Man of Feeling; late eighteenth century sensibility’ (EUL/1/16, 12 December 1975: 303). Henry Mackenzie’s 1771 novel The Man of Feeling has, like Daniel Martin, the form of a series of abrupt and concentrated episodes. However of more interest here is the fact that this work is considered to be the most influential ‘novel of sentiment’, a work that illustrated the alliance of acute sensibility with true virtue (Drabble 2000: 916). In recoiling from a Neoclassical emphasis on wit and satire, the ‘Age of Sensibility’ writers such as Thomas Percy and Thomas Gray emphasised the ‘affections’, spontaneity and humanitarian values (Day 1996: 49). As the title of Mackenzie’s work suggests, its hero proudly betrays a sympathetic heart. The protagonist of Fowles’ 1977 novel also develops his sensibility, his ability to feel, in this case his feeling for other human beings and for nature, over the course of the work. An emotional relationship with the natural world is accepted by Daniel as a valuable part of his life, as he cultivates a ‘whole’ vision of nature involving scientific curiosity as well as more ‘poetic’ experiences. He learns to see nature as English visionaries

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such as John Clare and Samuel Palmer had portrayed it in their arts, becoming truly a ‘man of feeling’. Jane is a middle-aged woman and the sister of Daniel’s former wife, Nell. She lives in North Oxford in a large house that Daniel visits while Anthony, her husband and a former friend of Daniel’s, is lying on his death bed. Jane’s marriage has been a bloodless affair over recent years (thanks largely to her husband and his arid Catholic intellectualism). Jane had once slept with Daniel as a student at Oxford, and she had revealed this to Anthony soon afterwards, a revelation that became a thorn of distrust in the side of their marriage (DM 199). On his visit after Anthony’s death Daniel finds a copy of Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci lying on a chair in her house, and sees how she has underlined passages that refer to personal growth through political action, suggesting to the reader that she is feeling the need for more compassion in her life (DM 194). Anthony commited suicide while Daniel was earlier visiting Jane, hinting at unresolved resentments against Daniel’s part in his marriage’s failure. Jane does not burst into tears, and her apparent ‘hardness’ surprises Daniel (DM 1999). The next day over breakfast Daniel and Jane renew some of their former sympathy and ease together. When Nell, Daniel’s former wife, and her current husband Andrew arrive in preparation for the funeral Daniel feels himself suddenly enclasped within a ‘loose, warm web of clan’ (DM 221). Daniel returns to London that night. Before going to bed in his daughter’s apartment, he looks out the window and down onto the street below. He sees a homeless man fossicking through piles of rubbish, and we are reminded of how the ‘webs’ previously referred to, and those of the chapter’s title (‘Webs’), are often broken, and of how there lurks a loneliness at the heart of urban modernity. Thus an association is made between the city and a lack of humane feeling for one’s fellow. Later in the novel Daniel and Jane take a cruise down the Nile where Daniel is researching a script he is writing. On the way they visit Kitchener’s Island, an ‘oasis of blue and green’ (DM 534). This visit is made directly upon escaping Aswan with its ‘imposing and traffic-filled waterfront, high-rise buildings’ and horizon ‘festooned with wires and pylons, radar, all the ugly adjuncts of twentiethcentury technology and war’ (DM 532). While on the lushly vegetated island in the middle of the Nile Jane says to Daniel that she wants a house on the island (DM 536). The site was formerly a botanical gar-

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den, but the power of nature to reassert its own kind of order or harmony is evident, both in the descriptions of the place — as charmingly unkempt — and in the reactions of the characters. Kitchener’s Island and its tropical profusion of life, ‘an Alhambra composed of vegetation, water, shadow’, act to open a tiny chink in Jane’s hardness and emotional disconnectedness (DM 536). The experience on the island helps her to develop her sympathy for other living creatures and the living earth. Being on the island catalyses Daniel to ask Jane to accompany him to Syria and to visiting the ruins of Palmyra. A profuse natural world is placed in not accidental association with the first development towards love between the two travellers. Daniel has arrived at a fork in his life and has chosen to express his increasing affection for Jane rather than passing on alone into his future. The two journey to Syria, but Jane maintains a distance at the core of their relationship. As they complete the last length of the journey to Palmyra the setting is sand and the occasional skeleton of a dead sheep. ‘The strip of desert beside them seemed like an ocherous snow’ (DM 582). This landscape devoid of life is the symbol of all Daniel wants to abjure: lonely desolation. Daniel tells the incipiently Marxist Jane that she is in flight ‘to the idea that what’s wrong inside you can be solved by sacrificing everything to social conscience… helping the underprivileged’ (DM 590). As Daniel probes her reasons for rejecting him as a lover we learn that ‘there was something panicstricken in her, despite the stillness of her pose and expression; doubling and doubling, trying to escape’ (DM 591). Still sore from the trials of living with Anthony and his death, Jane is frightened of opening her heart to anyone, let alone Daniel. The next morning they walk out into the dead city and its crumbling monuments. They come across a feral bitch and her two puppies. The bitch leaves her puppies and walks a short distance away from them and Jane and Daniel, whimpering. The sight of the mother abandoning her offspring upsets Jane. Yet as Daniel explains this is ‘distraction behaviour. Birds do it as well. She’s offering a trade. To be hunted and shot, if we’ll spare her young. That’s why she’s standing just out of gunshot. To lure us away’ (DM 611). The dog’s apparently strange behaviour appears to the reader as an analogue for Jane’s running away from love and intimacy for herself and running towards helping the underprivileged; it is a tactic of sacrificing self for others. Daniel explains the ostensibly selfish behaviour of the animal to Jane, and her understanding of the

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meaning of instinct is advanced. Jane buries her wedding ring in the desert. She has learnt that just as Daniel and she were no threat to the bitch, so Daniel is no threat to her. She does not need to flee his requests for sympathy and love. The canine had acted on instinct, as had Jane; she had fled. However, another instinct, another ‘right feeling’, or ‘unintellectual sense of natural orientation’, comes to dominate, and she accepts Daniel’s love (DM 609). Jane, learning from nature, realises the importance of feeling for the rest of life. She does so while standing in the midst of a biological wasteland; a framing device that could not be more unambiguous. Daniel is finally allowed permanently into her life and the two characters plan to live together in London. The chink in the emotional carapace Jane exhibited back in Oxford is definitively widened after the novel’s climactic scene at Palmyra. At the end of the novel the protagonist has decided to part with Jenny, America and script writing, and to return to England to a relationship with the older and more morally committed Jane, and begin work on a novel. It is a step in the direction of maturity that Daniel has chosen. He stands in Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath in London at this late point in his life and looks up at a Rembrandt selfportrait. Daniel likens the painting of Rembrandt to a ‘sentinel’ at the door he is passing through. It is interesting to consider what Daniel discerns in his sentinel (DM 629): He could see only one consolation in those remorseless and aloof Dutch eyes. It is not finally a matter of skill, of knowledge, of intellect; of good luck or bad; but of choosing and learning to feel.

Part of Daniel’s passing through the gates of middle-life towards greater understanding is his appreciation of the need to marry intellect and feeling. Both an advanced knowledge of the world and an advanced feeling for life in that world are conjoined in the regard of the old Dutch man. In the final paragraph of the novel, and at the end of the day in which he has viewed the Rembrandt self-portrait, Daniel decides on the last sentence of the novel he will write, and the narrator notes that he has made this last sentence his first: ‘Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.’ The seeing exhibited by Jane before her conversion in the Syrian desert had had, according to Daniel earlier in the novel (DM 607):

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no lateral or horizontal scope, it was all verticality, obsessive narrow penetration to supposed inner cores and mysteries – souls and absolutes, not skins and common sense; without self-humour, compromise, … moments of animal closeness in the night.

A view of the world which is ‘whole’, which has horizontal scope, is suggested as one in which the specious elitism of the intellect is mediated by the simplicities of nature, such as ‘moments of animal closeness in the night’. This particular phrase recalls the familiarity with nature Fowles wrote of in his diary, ‘not of sex or coupling’ but of a more primitive ‘sleeping-with’ (we might see biophilia as an aspect of ‘whole sight’). The body is signalled: horizontal seeing involves contact with ‘skins’ as well as penetration to ‘souls and absolutes’ – a point further suggesting that a sympathy for animality is an integral part of an adequate comprehension of reality. The middle-aged Daniel is echoing, consciously or unconsciously, his younger self at this point in the novel. During his time at university Daniel, Anthony, Jane and her sister, had visited the tombs of the Etruscans in Italy, and while there they had all read and been influenced by D. H. Lawrence’s celebration of Etruscan civilisation, Etruscan Places. In this work Lawrence exulted in the seeming commitment of the Etruscans, as expressed in what remains of their art, to transient animality. Commenting on the painted figures of the Etruscans, the ‘gay dancing creatures, rows of ducks, round faces like the sun, and faces grinning and putting out a big tongue, all vivid and fresh and unimposing’, Lawrence wrote (quoted in Carey 1999: 402): There seems to have been in the Etruscan instinct a real desire to preserve the natural humour of life. And that is a task surely more worthy, and even more difficult in the long run, than conquering the world or sacrificing the self or saving the immortal soul.

I earlier mentioned Sue Park’s argument that the quest for ‘whole sight’ is the quest to integrate one’s past, represented by the various ruins of ancient civilsations in the novel, into one’s present. My own argument that the quest for ‘whole sight’ is a quest to integrate a feeling for life into an intellectual outlook dovetails with Park’s argument if we consider that part of Daniel’s past was an acceptance of Lawrence’s championing of the transient animality and ‘natural humour’

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of the Etruscans. The development of ‘whole sight’ for Jane means the abnegation of an approach to life characterised by an ‘obsessive narrow penetration to… souls and absolutes’, in favour of ‘skins and common sense’ and ‘self-humour’. Jane should, according to Daniel, develop an approach to life that values that very same ‘natural humour of life’ Lawrence saw in the laughing, bare skinned Etruscans. ‘Whole sight’ is, in the novel, finally both an intergration of one’s past into one’s present, and a form of seeing inclusive of both intellect and feeling, soul and body, for the rest of the living world. Both Daniel and Jane have, over the course of the novel’s last six chapters, from their time at Kitchener’s Island to the climactic scene in the ruins of Palmyra, developed Rembrandt’s, or Lawrence’s, ‘whole sight’, that approach in which feeling is a sine qua non. Fowles, the author of Daniel Martin, may in this way be likened to ‘the historian of feeling’ that Mackenzie aimed at being in his eighteenth-century novel The Man of Feeling (Vickers 1967: xxiv). Fowles charts the development of both of his main characters’ education in the importance of sympathetic care and love, and it is nature that plays the central part in that education. Jane’s experience of the tropical paradise on Kitchener’s Island begins the process of opening the gates of her heart to intimacy; it increases her sensitivity to the beauty of the living creature, and to the beauty of life in general. Later in the desert at Palmyra, it is the humble figure of a feral dog that shows Jane the importance of ‘right feeling’ and causes her to bury her attachment to martyrdom in the lifeless desert sands along with her marriage ring. Like ‘the man of feeling’ in Mackenzie’s novel, Daniel and Jane have by the novel’s conclusion been schooled in the value of pathos for other living things, and the novel has put a particular emphasis on non-human nature as the agent responsible for mobilising this education. The erstwhile concluding sentence of the novel suggests to us that a complete attitude to life, a ‘whole sight’, includes feeling, and without such whole sight one is, perforce, left with the desolation of lifeless desert ruins. Nature elicits love for nature and then love for humankind in the final chapters of Daniel Martin. However the novel’s protagonist has always harboured a deep sympathy with natural landscapes. Daniel developed his biophilia as a young boy. In the first chapter of Daniel Martin a day harvesting wheat in a field in Devon is described with a vividness of impression appropriate to the awe-struck receptivity of

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youth. Captain, the horse, plods onwards as the labourers go about their task around him (DM 5): The crackle of the stubble, the shock of the stood sheaves. The rattle of the reaper, the chatter of the mower blades, the windmill arms above them. Lewis’s voice at the corners: hoy then, hoy’ee, Cap’n, back, back, back, whoy, whoy. Then the click of the tongue: jik-jik, the onward rattle and chain and chatter. Thistledown floats southward across the field, in a light air from the north, mounting, a thermal, new stars for the empyrean.

From the perspective of the older Daniel later in the novel this field from 1940s rural England, here portrayed through an impressionistic ensemble of images and sounds, becomes a lost domain, a place of wonder and strong connection to the land. Rural England becomes a place that added ‘new stars’ to the empyrean of Daniel’s imagination. This is the aspect of pastoral in Daniel Martin which I discussed in the previous chapter. Interestingly, Glen Love has argued, linking science and cultural criticism, that the continuing appeal of pastoral in human history is attributable to the biophilic instinct (2003: 72-83). However upon visiting Thorncombe, a farm just next to the vicarage he had grown up in as a boy, Daniel reports that (DM 129): As with all significant places on that emotion-charged map of childhood and adolescence we carry round with us in later life, my first sight of Thorncombe after so many years had been disappointing.

On his first visit to the country in which he had spent his boyhood in during the war much of the magic seems to have dissipated. The place seems smaller and duller than the memory Daniel has harboured of it. Although much of the English countryside was in decline between the 1940s and 1970s, Daniel’s disappointment is obviously more than an acknowledgement of the actual environmental changes in the region. Raymond Williams has commented on how the feel of childhood, of ‘delighted absorption in our own world’, has helped to constitute an illusory idea of the rural past as a bucolic paradise in writers such as William Wordsworth and John Clare (1983: 297). Williams postulated a ‘historical escalator’ upon which, the further back into literary history we look, the further the vision of a peaceful and contented Golden Age recedes; George Sturt looked back fondly, but then so did

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Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and so on; even writers in the middle ages were nostalgic. Pace Williams, W. J. Keith holds that the greatest of rural writers have in fact been aware of this danger. For example Tennyson knew that ‘the past will always win/ A glory from its being far’, and Edward Thomas wrote: ‘as mankind has looked back to a golden age, so the individual, repeating the history of the race, looks back and finds one in his own past’ (quoted in Keith 1975: 14). Williams claims in The Country and the City that ‘an idea of the country is an idea of childhood’ (1983: 297). This seems an oversimplification, and in some cases it could be a politically dangerous one, potentially abrogating the fact that writers in some eras, particularly the present one, are entirely justified in positing an objective decline in the countryside. Accepting this point, we can witness an interesting emotional dynamic between a natural domain being lost for Daniel and its value increasing in his heart. The narrator of Daniel Martin anticipates Williams’ critique of the pastoral of childhood. Late in life Daniel, the now rootless, ‘permanently mid-Atlantic’ writer, attempts to revisit his treasured boyhood domain (DM 33). He buys and then attempts to live at Thorncombe, partly with the aim of regaining his lost innocence after years of shortterm relationships and the loss of artistic integrity occasioned by moving from writing for the stage to writing for Hollywood. However Daniel soon finds such an attempted relocation more difficult than he had previously imagined (DM 71): I got bored at the farm in Devon, I grew lonely, I found the magic I remembered had 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 counter it.

We learn that it is not simply that the land has actually been degraded, that much beautiful nature has been lost between the 1940s and the 1970s in England, but that part of the value of nature for Daniel comes from his being periodically deprived of it. Henri Alain-Fournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes is a book that Fowles has repeatedly adduced upon being asked by interviewers for influences on his fiction (Vipond 1999a: 35; 88; 121). In this novel the narrator, François Seurel, tells of the enchantment of his friend

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Augustin Meaulnes by an old chateau, and its surrounding domaine, that he had come upon by chance. He had stumbled upon the mysterious forest estate where a festive wedding of children is being celebrated, and while there glimpsed the mistress of the manor, Yvonne de Galais. He returns to the mundane world of his school but is haunted by the mystery of the place and the girl. The French novel is a fugue on loss, with the loved girl (the princesse lointaine) and the loved piece of country (the domaine perdu) being both vibrantly absent for the majority of the book. Fournier’s story of Meaulnes’ hunt for the lost domain and unknown girl resemble Fournier’s own experience of falling deeply in love at first sight with Yvonne de Quièvrecourt, a girl he yearned for for the rest of his life despite having hardly known her. In an essay on Le Grand Meaulnes Fowles argued that for both himself and Fournier the figures of the princesse lointaine and the lost domain provide potent well-springs of creative energy (1998: 212). Daniel Martin parallels Augustin Meaulnes to the extent that his lost domain attains the immense value it does partly through its status as lost. Like the protagonist of Le Grand Meaulnes, Daniel, a typically self-analytical Fowlesian protagonist, comes to realise the increased value a thing can take when one is deprived of it. Meaulnes could not discover the road back to his lost domain. Upon finally marrying his long lost sweetheart he left her after his wedding night. This is seemingly the paradox that both Fournier and Fowles comprehend. As Fowles rephrased it in his critical essay on Le Grand Meaunles, ‘To attain ideals is to kill them’ (1998: 212). After the attempted relocation to Thorncombe, Daniel takes to the road again, spending more and more time in creatively and emotionally fruitful exile from the place. When Daniel’s girlfriend Jenny had, in a jealous comment earlier in the novel, said of Daniel that his real mistress is Loss, she had, it seems, made a devastatingly perspicacious observation (DM 239). Daniel becomes aware that his domaine perdu, both a lost boyhood and a lost land, accreted a magical aura largely because of their status as lost. Knowing this we may now have a greater knowledge of what the narrator in Daniel Martin is suggesting when he includes in his description of la bonne vaux the epithet ‘haunting’. The sacred combe is haunting because, as for both Daniel in Daniel Martin and Rétif de La Bretonne in Monsieur Nicholas, the wonder-inducing experience of the greenwood retreat discovered during boyhood has been lost with the passing of the years. Its

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‘magic’ is no longer a present reality, and yet the particular memory of the place haunts the mind of the older Daniel. This maturity in dealing with the emotional dynamic of loss is something that Fowles himself exhibits in his diaries. During the 1950s Fowles was living in London, the cultural hub of England in that period, and did not spend much time in the English countryside. Occasionally he needed a visit however (2003: 378): We had lunch in a great eighteenth century beechwood, Hampdenleaf, as noble as an endless temple; graceful elephant grey – stems soaring up into the green canopies; a silence, no birds. Bright sunlight. Gothic architecture is pure beechwood; below this wood, facing south, a clover-field in the sun; thyme, marjoram, …covered in bronze-black and scarlet burnet-moths; service-trees, beech-trees, filberts, clover; the smell of the sun on aromatic chalk vegetation. Ecology, but for me drama; some little corners of fields, of woods, are as familiar, as inexhaustibly delicious as Mozart or Marivaux, as Joyce or Donne. Also it is living away from the country; one becomes unimaginably acute when one goes back; the banal recovers for a moment the magical; even the simplest flowers and birds… There are good things that are good to ignore.

One of the first things one notices here is the author’s likening parts of a landscape or ecosystem to great works of art in their ‘delicious’ complexity or richness. Indeed thirty years later he wrote in his journal of an idea for a book entitled My Gardens, in which he would discuss his own garden at Lyme Regis but also all the other things that are metaphorically gardens, such as books and works of art (EUL 102/1/18, 22 November 1987: 102). After enumerating the elements of the scene he writes ‘ecology, but for me drama’, indicating that he sees the dynamic and enthralling space before him both scientifically and aethetically, an epistemological theme I will discuss later, in chapter eight. The reason I quote the above passage is to show-case the author’s optimism about the effects of deprivation from a loved landscape. Like the fictional Daniel, Fowles avoids the potential monotony and repetitiveness of nature by living away from it, by visiting it periodically from his London home (later in life he will live in the country and learn to see nature afresh each day). In this way ‘the banal recovers for a moment the magical’ and his perceptions of even simple flowers and birds become ‘unimaginably acute’. This point may be of some interest in a broader societal context. Considering that in the industrialised West the majority of people live in towns or

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cities, Fowles’ writings would suggest that we can benefit from this tension of contrasts in our patterns of habitation. City residents might benefit from seeing wild nature only occasionally but with especial vividness. Today nature is under threat of becoming a lost domain more literally than in the sense I’ve been discussing in the diaries and in Daniel Martin. Perhaps the tension we feel of nature’s foreboding absence in many areas will also cause us to value the natural world more. This is what, one might argue, occurred in nineteenth-century England. During the 1800s the Industrial Revolution saw the nation’s demography swing wildly, from the beginning of the century where the majority of the population lived on the land, to the century’s end where the majority of the population were city-dwellers. And yet, as W. J. Keith writes, ‘the nineteenth century, which saw the decline of the English countryside, is also the great age of nature writing’ (1975: 10). The suburban Victorian reading public voraciously consumed the work of writers like Richard Jefferies, and even contributed to the emergent popularity of earlier rural writers such as Izaak Walton and Gilbert White (Keith 1975: 10). In our own time Terry Gifford has argued that the popularity of the post-pastoral novel Cold Mountain has much to do with its audience being dominantly metropolitan and yearning for the simplicities of agrarian life (2001b: 89). More generally we might think that the flourishing of English language nature writing in recent decades is linked to an increasing disassociation between city dwellers and their ancestral cradle, a wild biota. While we in the twenty-first century don’t want nature to become a permanently lost domain, perhaps we might hope that the presently degraded state of nature is causing more people to realise what a valuable companion nature is; this would be the inference to draw from Fowles’ portrayal of the absence of a loved landscape in Daniel Martin. As the loss of nature teaches Daniel the value of nature, perhaps the prospect of losing species of life might further teach us their value in the biosphere. And yet a loved natural landscape cannot be said to be lost (not to mention loved) unless it has at some point been found, or been known. Nature is a lost domain in a third sense elsewhere in the author’s work: as a place, or area of life- experience, never discovered by many people. Fowles puts a name to the disease with aplomb (EUL 102/1/29, 8 January 1995):

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This real-life eye-sight deficiency is not uncommon, however in its metaphorical guise as a blindness to nature Fowles suggests it is everywhere upon us. As an author he has marvelled at the detachment from, and ignorance of, nature in English and American society during the second half of the twentieth century. In Daniel Martin the protagonist visits Tsankawi, an ancient American Indian site in wild New Mexico. Prior to recounting this episode he remembers his last visit to the site, when two American friends, Abe and Mildred, an older couple from Los Angeles, had accompanied him (DM 325): I didn’t forewarn them in any way that they were treading on slightly holy ground, and we climbed the half-mile or so from the road to the top of the mesa against a flood of lugubrious wisecracks from Abe, who is not a foot-orientated American. Was I sure the local St. Bernards carried a good brand of tequila, why did all Englishmen – it was rather cold – think they were Captain Scott, he loved Indians in movies, but could he please cancel the reservation… and then, when we were standing before a particularly dense honeycomb of cave-dwellings, he said, This must have been the garment district. He did finally, at the top, concede it was a great view; but still couldn’t resist asking which lot it was I wanted them to buy.

Abe’s crassness irritated Daniel, but he now realises that he shouldn’t expect everyone to have the same reaction of awed silence to the place that he has acquired over repeated visits. On the particular visit recounted at length in the chapter ‘Tsankawi’, Daniel arrives with Jenny, his Scottish, actress lover. Tsankawi is an actual place: a Pueblo cave dwelling, probably inhabited until the sixteenth century, composed of a three-storey pile of stone outlining two hundred ground floor rooms (Park 1985: 158). The site is situated on the summit of a mesa that sits upon a larger mesa. In the novel, the couple walk along the top of the cliffs, no other tourists in sight, the view below them of pines, huge valleys and snow-capped mountains. The weather is warm and as they sit out of the wind Jenny unbuttons her shirt and airs her breasts in the sun. She suggests they make love, but Daniel demurs. They walk onwards and then begin to argue about Daniel’s attitude to nature. At the end of the

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argument Jenny quips: ‘Anyway, what’s the point. My next man will probably be just as bored with the nature bit as everyone else’ (DM 329). Jenny then proceeds to collect shards from the site with which to make a necklace for a souvenir. Although he conceals it from her, Daniel takes offence over this incident, and harbours a resentment against Jenny. It is indeed at this point in the novel that he realises ‘the impossibility of weaving Jenny into any lasting future’ (DM 330). In a confessional tract about herself and Daniel, written by Jenny and included earlier in the novel, she had admitted, ‘I’ve never been a country girl (thank Christ, says she)’ (DM 33). Effectively it becomes Jenny’s insensitivity to the natural world that removes her from being the protagonist’s partner in the novel. (As Lisa Colletta notes, it is also due to Jenny’s inability to realise ‘the presentness of the past’, the importance of past experience in present life — aptly symbolised by Daniel’s attraction to the medieval native American ruins of Tsankawi — that she has no future with the protagonist [1999: 221].) Both Abe and, later, Jenny’s attitudes towards nature are in their different ways ones of bored incomprehension. Abe can only see the New Mexican wilderness as a setting for his invention of gags. Jenny’s inattentive gaze and impatience with ‘the nature bit’ require distractions such as adventurous outdoor-sex and souvenir-hunting to fill a perceived void. Daniel cannot contemplate a profound relationship with someone for whom nature will probably forever be a lost domain. Both Abe and Jenny are essentially city-slickers. In a series of articles reviewing such books as Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica in The Sunday Times, Fowles lamented the cultural loss occasioned by a diminishing acknowledgment of the spiritual value provided to us by wild nature (1996). Reviewing The Oxford Book of Nature Writing he wrote, ‘few of us are more than two centuries away from peasanthood – that once willy nilly living with the wild and the rural’ (1995). Most Westerners now live in cities, and Fowles writes of how he abhors ‘the lethal damage they [cities] have done not only to the natural world, but culturally and psychologically to ourselves’ (1996). If it is right to say that the ‘entombed-in-concrete’ have indeed suffered cultural amnesia as to the value of the natural environment, then Abe and Jenny seem like prime examples of a more general class, both hailing from the conurbation of Los Angeles and neither seeming able to appreciate the sublimity of New Mexico’s mesas and open horizons.

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The biophilia hypothesis is a theory of prepared learning. It does not posit that we are genetically hard-wired to walk to the nearest field or wood as fully grown adults and once there experience pleasure, but rather that it is easier to lay down the neural pathways of biophilia during childhood development than to learn other things such as an attraction to sitting in concrete courtyards, to pick a poignant example. Childhood psychology tells us that under the age of six children are egocentric and generally uncaring of the natural world; between six and nine they become interested in wild creatures; from nine to twelve their knowledge of the natural world rises sharply, and from thirteen to seventeen they readily acquire moral feeling towards species conservation (Kahn 1997: 1-61). But this is all assuming children are exposed to wild nature as they grow up. If they are not, if they have grown up in cities with only concrete around them and without pets, as an increasing percentage of the world’s population does, then their pre-prepared pathways of learning will not be triggered along the same lines, or with the same intensity, as those of children brought up frequently surrounded by wild nature. In sum, one should not expect all humans in an age of the machine to exhibit biophilia to the same degree. Fowles himself obviously does not exhibit deuteranopia, or ‘blindness to green’. A knowledge of the author’s biography shows that during his childhood the author’s mother kept birds, dogs and cats, took him for walks in the country; his boyhood home in the London suburb of Leigh-on-Sea boasted a stream and open field just next to his house; his uncle, Stanley Richards, was a mentor for the boy and took him on regular entomological expeditions into the Essex countryside; and as an adolescent his family escaped the war by going to live in Ipplepen, a small village in rural Devon (Warburton 2004: 3; 4; 8-9; 16; 26). This early environmental exposure, particularly in the crucial years between six and thirteen, and thus ready facility to acquire biophilia, is paralleled in the fictional life of Daniel in Daniel Martin. When not at boarding school Daniel grows up in a small village in rural Devon. Daniel’s father is a keen gardener, and as he comments (DM 80): if we were short on humour and several other kinds of light in that house, there were always flowers, a feeling that the large garden was a part of the family.

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It seems absurd now. A small boy rushing in to breakfast: The Osmanthus is out! The Clematis armandii! The Trichodenron! They weren’t Latin and Greek to me. They were like our dogs and cats, loved and very familiar.

There is the fact of the biophiliac protagonist, in this highly autobiographical work of fiction, being offended later in life by his companions’ insensitivity to the beauty of New Mexico’s wild places, but there is also the more personal record of the diaries. Returning to the diaries, we find that in his twenties, soon after arriving on the Greek island of Spetsai the author writes of an English friend on the island and his obliviousness to nature. Fowles concludes that: ‘Again and again and again I pity people who know nothing of nature; who will not let the world without man exalt them’ (2003: 257). Later, in America, Fowles the diarist also encountered what he considered a widespread and lamentable disinterest in, and detachment from, nature. Driving through Kansas he comments (EUL 102/1/16, 13 November 1974: 223): …the lack of people on foot puzzles me. No footpaths, no pedestrians, only other people in cars… which gives an overpowering sense that the country, nature, is something to be crossed, fie on all contact with it. I kept on wanting Ned to stop, so that I could stand for a minute on wild American earth; watch a blue jay, collect a few wayside seeds. I didn’t ask, though.

Driving up through New England, Fowles has an unusual reaction to evidence of hunting (EUL 102/1/16, 16 November 1974: 227): …we passed deer-hunters in their pick-up trucks; one deer, sometimes two, laid on beds of fir-branches, but never covered by them; hunterly prowess has to be shown. I should have felt angry in England; but here it was almost a relief… at least some contact with the green past is being maintained.

Regardless of whether these are adequate characterisations of American attitudes of the time towards the natural world they remain demonstrative of Fowles’ antipathy towards modern detachment from the living landscape around us. On arriving back in England he perceives a cultural difference (EUL 102/1/16, 29 November 1974: 237): Back to Lyme; it clouds over, there must have been a lot of rain, but the country is such a relief: its being used, tended, full of birds and beasts, wild and tame; al-

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In fact when Fowles wrote this in 1974 the draining of the British countryside of its carers was already well underway. The relevant period of history is the second half of the twentieth century: at the end of the Second World War British farms employed nearly a million people, but by 1994 the number of farm jobs had fallen to 120,000, of which a third were part time (Tudge 2003: 295). If we are truthful then we will admit that the massive exodus out of the English countryside over the past fifty years (equivalent to 350 people per week) has meant that nature there is in general far from properly described as ‘tended’, or treated as ‘some child’s loved play-thing’. Such characterisations are symptomatic of an overly sentimental interpretation of agrarian reality, perhaps projections of Fowles’ own preference for England against America. In Daniel Martin there is a parallel transition from America to England. Upon arriving back in England from Los Angeles, Daniel walks through the rain at Thorncombe with Jane’s adolescent son, Paul. Daniel narrates that, ‘That walk brought 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’ (DM 407). However national stereotypes are not developed further, rather Daniel’s realism as to the predicament of the contemporary English countryside is rapidly established. Daniel muses on the climatic poetry of England’s changing skies (DM 407): He wondered whether this would have meant anything to Paul, as they trudged along the edge of the cabbage-field, the rain driving harder again. He doubted it. For all his current interest [Paul is interested in medieval history and agriculture], Paul was a town boy, and with all the new town-dominated media conforming his and his generation’s mind…

The regionalism of the pre-War England Daniel lived through as a boy is now a thing of the past. Not only are England’s citizens, like Paul, more often townspeople, but ‘the new town-dominated media’ have conformed their range of interests within a band exclusive of agrarian culture. Colin Tudge, the agricultural writer and philosopher, emphasises this point: ‘the social shift out of farming this past hundred years has been among the most dramatic and significant of all human his-

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tory; noticed less by modern people than it should be because most modern people, particularly in the West, are urban, and on the whole, urban people get to write the commentaries’ (2003: 46). As more and more people become city-dwellers (the United Nations predicts that by 2050 there will be more people living in cities than now live on the whole earth) the media, and ‘the commentaries’, are increasingly centred on the city and indifferent to rural subjects and lifestyles (Tudge 2003: 46-7). Fowles himself has lived in both the city and the country and his range of interests straddle this cultural divide. Continuing on his rain-soaked walk with the young Paul, Daniel reflects drolly on current folkways (DM 407): even the ploughmen carried transitors in the 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”.

The image of ploughmen in the field of wheat portrayed in the novel’s opening chapter, ‘Harvest’, is the quintessential image of rural life: the ploughman is the central focal point where man and land make contact with each other. The transition to late twentieth-century culture and agricultural practices is here satirised later in the novel with an inversion of this classic image: a ploughman now so insulated from rural reality that, while distracted by a pop tune, he can drive his tractor up and down the field without remembering to lower his shares. The satirical anti-pastoral humour entailed by the ploughman’s motoring along with his tail cocked up “like an ol’ pheasant” has a dark side. Monocultures of wheat, occupying thousands of smooth hectares, are indeed today maintained by one or two labourers sitting in the air-conditioned cabins of tractors or combine-harvesters. It is obvious to the reader how far we have come — looking back not only from when Daniel Martin was published in 1977, but from the start of the twenty-first century — from the novel’s earlier figure of Mr. Luscombe, a man who would, while harvesting the wheat, ‘take a grain and bite it in half ,the germ with its taste of earth and dust, and then spit it out; and carefully put the remaining grain in his trouser pocket, for the poultry, that evening’ (5). The imperative of economic ‘efficiency’ (maximising yield no matter what the true cost) has installed massive and biologically impoverished fields of cereals, and drained

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the English countryside of human workers, replacing their labour with the power of machines. With the imperative of economic ‘efficiency’ holding sway there is no time to bite a grain of wheat in half and taste the germ, let alone to have any kind of meaningful relationship with the land as a farmer. With this image of a farmer immured in his tractor the alienation from nature in modern England is suggested as reaching far beyond the boundaries of the town. This was suggested in the previous chapter on pastoral where I discussed Daniel’s childhood sweetheart and her return as an adult to visit Thorncombe. Nancy has become a town girl — her husband works as a foreman in a factory — and refuses to see any worth in traditional farming life; her urge to not bestow recognition on the positive aspects of traditional mixed farming being symbolised by her simultaneous refusal to properly acknowledge Daniel’s and hers secret, adolescent love. As the poem at the end of the chapter ‘Phillida’ says, ‘Phillida flouts me’ – what has become of the rural culture of pre-agribusiness England flouts the older Daniel. When Daniel first revisits the village of his childhood with his daughter Caro later in life, they call in at the vicarage where Daniel grew up (128): That looked much the same outside; but the old kitchen garden had gone, and all its fruit-trees. Now a new village hall and half an acre of tarmac stood in its place; and for a moment that seemed a worse desecration than if they had bulldozed the church itself.

While it may be true that there are ‘good things that are good to ignore’, a complete and sustained disinterest in, and ignorance of, natural ecosystems and sustainable agricultural practices are clearly not part of the emotional dynamic of the ‘lost domain’ that Fowles explores elsewhere in his writings. Rather than existing alongside an emotional maturity such attitudes seem simply insensitive, as insensitive as the vision of bulldozing a church suggested in the above excerpt. As Daniel and Caro tour the new English countryside, they are greeted by the work of those who are more interested in the utility of an acre of tarmac than a kitchen garden. For people with such attitudes nature has, sadly, never been found, and will never have a chance to be a lost domain in an emotionally meaningful sense. Looking to Fowles’ poetry we find further evidence of the author’s concern for the damage cities have inflicted not only on the natural

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world, but culturally and psychologically on ourselves. The following poem bears witness to a kind of cultural amnesia (1974: 85): A Tree in the Suburbs I see them in their orange hosts, Frail phalanx of the nearly dead. They hang there in the window’s eye Like very ancient votive dolls Whose meanings learned men dispute. Trite yet tragic seem their fallsThat slip, that twirl, that touch And swirl – and then oblivion, The sodden grass. Meanwhile indoors We find we have no contacts left, No rites, no gods, no open lines. And every winter things get worse.

In a trope characteristic of the late anti-urban poems of D. H. Lawrence, we domesticated denizens of the indoors are likened to the ‘frail phalanx of the nearly dead’ hanging on the tree outside. For those who only perceive nature through a ‘window’s eye’, a loss of contact, a loss of ‘gods’, ‘rites’, and ‘open lines’, with the natural world means that a winter of the spirit is nigh. The fall of the leaves, like the passing of human lives in the city, seems aimless and ‘trite yet tragic’. A tree in the suburbs, a tokenistic instance of nature in a predominantly built environment, turns out to be the perfect symbol for our diminishing comprehension of the meaning and value of natural processes. Our living in a ‘disinhabitory coma’, our having ‘no open lines’ in the terms of Fowles’ poem, cannot but cause things to get worse for the land as well as for ourselves (Berg 2002: 207). In the words of E. O. Wilson (1984: 118): People can grow up with the outward appearance of normality in an environment largely stripped of plants and animals, in the same way that passable looking monkeys can be raised in laboratory cages and cattle fattened in feeding bins. Asked if they were happy, these people would probably say yes. Yet something vitally important would be missing, not merely the knowledge and pleasure that

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In a dominantly urban or suburban world that has become blind to the value of wild, green life, the human mind will not be activated to its full, evolved capacity. With potted plants and household pets, or more pertinently, trees in the suburbs, coming to act as a stand-in for our ancestral home, an often mysterious and more-than-human, wild biota, we will inevitably be left with a diminished experience of daily life. Fowles is obviously aware of loss from a more literal and broadly ecological perspective as well. The author has written angry pleas to remedy the plight of English nature in, for example, Coastline: Britain’s Threatened Heritage and Trees: a Common Ground Anthology (1987). After his friend Kenneth Allsop, noted journalist, conservation writer and environmental activist, committed suicide, Fowles became chairman of the Kenneth Allsop Memorial Trust. The Trust acquired Steep Holm, a small island in the middle of the Bristol Channel between England and Wales as a nature reserve and monument to Allsop’s life and work. The darker side of loving nature in the present time period is the anger and sadness that may be occasioned by a knowledge of nature’s destruction. Indeed this may be one of the major paradoxes of contemporary nature writing: how can one joyfully celebrate the natural world in writing at the present moment when most revelations of nature are shadowed by anger and dismay at its presently threatened or already degraded state? It is anger and frustration, as well as selfdisgust, that seems to underlie the author’s characterisation of presentday humans as a ravenous ‘horde of rats’ in a short piece he wrote for Friends of the Earth (EUL 102/1/20, 28/7/89). This sentiment is subtly echoed in the last poem from Fowles’ one volume of poetry. This poem, entitled ‘Crabbing’, follows the poet, his friend and his six year-old nephew, on an expedition in a boat to catch crabs. The day begins innocently, with the sun just risen and nothing but ‘the morning’s birds,/ The gulls, the redshanks, razorbills/ Beneath the pale young summer sky’, the ensemble composing a pastoral scene (1974: 114). The young boy watches the crabs being killed and stacked upon each other. The poet looks to his nephew, and innocence

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begins to shade into experience, pastoral into anti-pastoral (1974: 1156): I think how he, when he is old, Will make a bitter judgement throne Of this benched gunwale where he sat, Since time must teach him that this dawn Held something that we hid from him: How his had been a shadowed year In which no lucky child was born. He must remember us with rage, We three men on a dying sea Who saw the oil and slicks of scum, All the foul poison of their age Filmed out around them like a pus, Yet told him why the crabs got caught Was out of stupid greed for bait. We said they hadn’t brains, like us. Today he nods, and takes our word – But what will he do when he looks back And sees how cancerous-blind we were, How sick, how viciously absurd? Greed never trapped us in its cage. We never sat and watched time haul Earth onward to its stifled end. He must remember us with rage.

In much the same way that we may conceive of the degradation of our global commons as a tax unfairly levied on unborn future generations, so does the poet’s innocent nephew face a future where the loss of biodiversity is certain and is not his doing. Rage is the emotion appropriately summoned up out of a dying sea of ‘oil and slicks of scum’. If the crabs are stupid in their choosing an unsustainable future of bodily death, then the hubris of elders who cannot see the significant metaphorical application of greed catching an organism in a cage is far more worthy of scorn. The position of this poem as the last

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in Fowles’ book of poetry gives it a gravity and air of finality which are appropriately apocalyptic. However not all the green is yet gone. In the following excerpt from the author’s journals the mood is less angry, less fuelled by rage, and more elegiac. Here Fowles expresses faint melancholy (EUL 102/1/19, 23 April 1988: 47-8): A cuckoo and one or two swallows, but otherwise this high beech-tree and bracken-common world is birdless. We wandered until we came to the path down to the road that skirts the south side, and runs through very pleasant combe-y, swelling hillsides. The England of Nash paintings, dimly beyond that, of Palmer. That is, so isolated it is haunted still, somehow still waiting. Space, bosomcurves, springs, greenness. Lovely almond whiffs of gorse in bloom. Beyond Brimley Copse farms the lane curves into the hill, beautifully deserted. In one field two little groups of roe-deer, three in each; in another, solitary deer standing alert and suspicious in its very centre, then trotting up to a furze-brake just before the trees start. Such wildness, such isolation still, that today no one passes here… these excursions are not walks of discovery in any proper sense; much more of reconstituting loss, both in terms of cultural history and our own lives. How lovely this land can be, on such a peaceful, manless, sunlit spring evening; and how it is going, going, no one shall know it and feel it as we do.

In calling this ‘the England of Nash paintings’ Fowles brings to mind John Nash’s (1893-1977) watercolours celebrating the beauty of the English landscape. And yet could the reference be to Paul Nash, John Nash’s elder brother? Both John and Paul had been official war artists during the First World War, but the starkness of the Western Front had stayed a more prominent presence in the older artist’s paintings. If we are to think of Paul Nash’s (1889-1946) work we might see landscapes overlaid with loneliness and the grief of loss. In Paul Nash’s painting The Menin Road, for example, one sees a decapitated woodland, strafed by heavy artillery and exuding loneliness and death. However the association of combes and desirable isolation that I discussed in Fowles’ writings in chapter one, and that is found in the paintings of Samuel Palmer, is here apparent, the country is ‘beautifully deserted’. Fowles’ imagery then seems to become almost sexual, he celebrates ‘bosom-curves, springs, greenness’. Importantly nature is not characterised as a lost domain, but rather as a place where Fowles and his wife go to reconstitute the losses they have endured in their own lives. The fact that such wild and isolated parts of

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England still exist consoles Fowles and his wife. Such observations point to a more plausible comparison with the landscapes of John Nash than his elder brother. And yet even as Fowles and his then wife Elizabeth find the England of Palmer on an evening walk in 1988, the author carries the knowledge of that same England’s imminent absence. It is going and in the near or distant future ‘no one shall know it and feel it as we do’. As I have mentioned before Fowles was a young man and lover of nature in the England of the 1940s and 1950s, and experienced the intervening years up until the time of his writing this passage in his sixties. Bearing witness to the changes that took place in the English countryside during this period would have been traumatic and would give one good cause to expect an eventual complete extinguishing of green. This was the period in which, to give one prominent example, 140,000 miles of hedgerows, significant and ancient ecosystems, were cleared in England to make way for more efficient monoculture farming with its bigger machinery and massive field sizes (Maynard 2004: 27). The English countryside was altered during this small time more than it had been in the previous thousand years. In sum it is readily understandable that Fowles should in 1988 write that the English countryside is ‘going, going, no one shall know it and feel it as we do.’ He might indeed find a landscape redolent of Paul Nash-like loss and the impending grief at that loss on this evening stroll. Thus we see that an alternative literary response, besides anger, to a knowledge of nature’s loss is elegiac recollection. Fowles has fashioned a series of rich literary representations of loss in the face of nature’s current or threatened absence. As in AlainFournier’s novel Le Grand Meaulnes, he has shown, in Daniel Martin and in his Journals, that one may become more sensitive to the domaine perdu, the lost domain, through temporary deprivation of its presence. Drawing on this insight we might hope that the prospect of losing species of life might further teach us their value in the biosphere. However the ability to follow the subtle pushes and pulls of such emotional dynamics is premised on a prior biophilia, developed during a childhood in contact with the natural world. If Fowles is right that deuteranopia (blindness to green) is the most pressing sickness of modern society, then the urban majority, represented by characters like Jenny, Abe and Paul in Daniel Martin, may never have the chance to experience this complex strain of loss. For them, and for

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most of us, all that will be left will be a tree in the suburbs: channels blocked, leaves drifting dismally to the pavement. Such a conclusion may be overly pessimistic. Perhaps more people than Fowles can tell will go forth into the country to ‘reconstitute the losses’ of nature they have experienced through an elegiac encounter with the green world. Certainly there will be rage at the prospect of our creating a lost domain in the fullest, and most tragic, sense. Whatever the case, it is clear that Fowles’ public and private writings have hit all of the major notes in a song of absence; a song of our time.

Chapter 5 Nature Discovered: The Scientific Outlook Having traced the natural world as a loved other, a loved yet lost domain, and a domain neither found nor loved in Daniel Martin and in Fowles’ journals, I now turn in the present chapter to the place modern science occupies in an understanding of the author’s writings on nature. Little of Fowles’ fiction is devoted to field naturalism, or a discussion of its joys and merits. However, as I will show, a reading of the author’s journals is essential if one is to understand how important natural history is in Fowles’ scheme of values. The most significant incursion of Fowles’ interest in science into his fiction is the point where the theory of evolution enters the narrative of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. After discussing natural history in the journals, I will proceed to a reading of this 1969 novel. As I will show, the light shone by science, be it in the analysis of species diversification as witnessed in the field, or in the grander panorama of an emotionally bereft man’s personal cosmology, brings with it an enduring flicker of optimism. Where other authors have found disenchantment, Fowles only spies consolation. But first we must start with the emotional nadir. A world-view that gets along without a greater order or force benignly considerate of the destiny of humankind is obviously considered by many to be a gloomy one. In an early letter to the woman who was later to become his wife, the author admits this aspect of his philosophy (EUL 2/1, Letter from JF to EC, 29/10/53: 2-3): You see, I take a pessimistic view of life. It is a spate of pure chances. But for me the only greatness in humanity is precisely in the strength it shows in fighting chance. Especially when it knows that the whole game is phoney – that whatever way it chooses, however much it combats the determined in life, the end is not a chance. The only thing that is not a chance is death. And plainly it is a terrible kind of certainly on which to have to base one’s existence. Man’s a mouse for the

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Read in its entirety this passage tells us about Fowles’ character as a writer of what some have seen as overly earnest didacticism in fiction, but it also suggests to us how profound an influence Darwinism has been on his personal cosmology. Fowles sees the universe as a ‘realm of undiscovered scientific laws’, a phenomenon without recourse to supernatural embroidery or divine redemption. As Mary Midgley has shown, many writers and scientists who have vaunted a picture of the physical universe as vast and impersonal have, themselves, unconsciously invoked emotive social imagery (2001: 32-5). For them the cosmos is not just impersonal, but positively indifferent or uncaring in the sense of a person who is obliged to care for us but does not. In rightly rejecting animism and mythmaking, such people themselves slip into animism, one in which the cosmos is actively characterised as a bad parent (this kind of attitude even has wide currency today as a legitimately ‘scientific’ view). Fowles himself is guilty of such closet-animism in writing of the cosmos as a cat that plays with humans in its claws, a game of chance which has no concern for human welfare and provides a ‘terrible reality’ for the tormented mice. While Fowles’ main points are sound, that there is nothing ‘divine in the unknown, but only a realm of undiscovered scientific laws’, and that chance plays a huge part in human lives, he goes too far in rushing to the opposite view of the universe as actively malicious. Midgley rightly asks, why should we picture the cosmos as attacking or mocking us? ‘This cosmos is, after

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all, the one that has produced us and has given us everything that we have. In what sense, then, is it hostile? Why this drama?’ (2001: 33). Fowles is perhaps unaware of all of the meanings involved in the emotionally charged scientist’s ‘flight from meaning’ in this excerpt. Whatever the case, within the limits of this naturalistic picture in which man wins no special favours, he does admire the mouse who fights his mousy best, the proactive individual who admits he lives in a universe ultimately indifferent to his own well-being, but who all the same strives to control his own destiny out of a collection of autonomous resources. In The Magus the character Maurice Conchis counsels the novel’s protagonist to take charge of his life: ‘‘‘We no more have to leave everything to hazard than we have to drown in the sea.’ He shook my shoulder. ‘Swim!’’ (1997b: 145). Such a cosmology as that embodied by Maurice Conchis here might be construed as pessimistic, but in admiring the potential of the individual to direct his future Fowles is surely not pessimistic. However we should not rest content with this image of Fowles as the sober and disenchanted scientist. Fowles has indeed an atheistic belief in the explanation of the natural world provided by the modern physical sciences. The universe is a ‘realm of undiscovered scientific laws’. Noting such a philosophical position one might predict an author would write what Terry Gifford calls ‘anti-pastoral’, work like Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ which admits that the natural world can no longer be constructed as ‘a land of dreams’, and instead envisages nature as ‘darkling plain’ on which occurs a battle for survival: ‘And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/ Where ignorant armies clash by night’ (Gifford 1999: 119-20). For Arnold the decline in religious belief during the nineteenth century left nature ‘drear’ and ‘naked’, a disenchanted realm far from the previous conception of God’s benign creation. This anti-pastoral tradition runs from Blake and John Clare to Patrick Kavanagh and Ted Hughes. However Fowles is not an author of anti-pastorals. One belief that Fowles holds dear is in the revelatory powers of scientific method and the body of knowledge that has developed out of this method and is constituted by the various disciplines of modern science. Although he has never been a professional scientist, throughout his varied oeuvre it is clear that the author subscribes to the worth of the rigorous and fallibilistic attempts of science to explain the material universe. Further,

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while he has not been a professional scientist, Fowles has for most of his life been a keen natural historian. In the most recently published interview with the author, Fowles stated that ‘I think it is really very important that all mankind should become natural historians’ (Fowles 2002: 54). In another interview Fowles declared the evolutionary biologist and natural historian Edward O. Wilson ‘the most worthwhile living human being’ (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 233). Such a proclamation says quite a lot about the English author. In Wilson’s landmark volume Consilience we find an optimism at the heart of the scientific ethos which stands in sharp contrast to the climate of post-modernism in the contemporary academic humanities. Wilson writes (1999: 47): To Foucault I would say, if I could (and without meaning to sound patronizing), it’s not so bad. Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history.

Fowles too sees natural science and its efforts to understand the world as deeply important and provisional of meaning. Further, like Wilson, Fowles derives an optimism from the scientific endevour. In 1986 Fowles wrote in his journal of a letter he had received from a friend in hospital (EUL 102/1/18, 6 May, 1986: 72-8): She sent me a letter today describing a new disease she has, very blithely. Her own medical curiosity about the appalling blows her body has given her over these last years delights me. A triumph of science over self-pity. (From JW’s letter, May 1st): ‘The worst symptom developed after my admission and is termed cachosaria and partial anosmia. This is due to the neurotropic virus invading the olfactory tract (in the brain) and giving rise to the sensation of abnormal smells. Mine was putrid, but it might have been roses!’ And so on. That is true sanctity, I think, and a fortunate one. Happy the sapientes.

Even personal physical misfortune is shown to be dealt with more easily using the scientific model of intellectual adventure and pleasure through finding things out about the world about us. The term that the author chooses, ‘sanctity’, to characterise this attitude supports the

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idea that if Fowles the atheist were to swear by any good book it would be The Origin of Species. As in the more personal work of Wilson, such as his autobiography Naturalist, it is a profound, even emotional, attachment to the scientific ethos that the Englishman harbours. It is clear that the sapientes are not necessarily the professional scientists. In a journal entry from 1956 Fowles writes (EUL 102/1/8, 8 December 1956: 260): As I grow older, that takes the place of the older nostalgias – to have been a scientist. I read science and the Relative Anthology. But I don’t know – there’s a pleasure in being able to have only to know the principles, the skeletons. The bird’s eye view which only a layman can have – and I still think it is better to be an indifferent polymath than a brilliant scientist.

While Fowles is fascinated by science, and heartened by its eternal optimism, its pleasure in finding things out, he is still happy to be the amateur looking at the big picture rather than the professional specialist working out on one small portion of the frontier of science, digging for knowledge on one’s own tiny plot of the cutting edge. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman the character of Charles is a natural history generalist. The narrator comments on this aspect of the man: ‘The Origin of Species is a triumph of generalization, not specialization; and even if you could prove to me that the latter would have been better for Charles the ungifted scientist, I should still maintain the former was better for Charles the human being’ (53). The narrator thus counts the synthetic viewpoint of a writer like Wilson as of more value, at least in the context of an average human life, than specialist scientific expertise. Using the philosophy of John Dewey, Neil Browne has shown that when scientific knowledge is restricted to the purview of an elite few specialists a diminishment in a society’s experience of the world can be the result. We need works like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to take significant scientific findings into the lifeworld of society at large. In the words of Browne: ‘If supply is impeded by the intentional regulation of information to an elite few, that is a conscious impediment to the culture’s ability to accrue meaning’ (Browne 2004: 6). From this perspective Fowles is right to champion scientific generalization and the dissemination of biological science into the culture at large through synthetic works such as Darwin’s The Origin of Species. For nineteenth-century English culture to develop

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an acquaintance with the what, how and why of the physical environment it was necessary that there should have been gentlemennaturalists whose work combined personal experiences of nature with investigations into a wide range of scientific disciplines. Fowles’ intuition that the figure of the polymath is highly valuable is well founded. Fowles’ interest in science is manifested for the most part in his writings as an interest in natural history. Indeed the writer actually began his life with a greater interest in natural history than in literary works (2003: 550): I spent almost all my ‘intelligent’ childhood from 10 to 20 walking alone in the countryside, watching birds, looking for flowers, butterflies; I suppose I would be a better writer if I had been reading more, and learning to write at that age, instead of in my thirties. But that love affair with nature – is it all waste?

Fowles the man of letters began his life with an interest in nature, not in novels, and this love affair, as he calls it so often in his diaries, has continued throughout his life. A good part of it has been nature as seen through the lens of science. At the end of 1951 Fowles took up a job teaching young boys at a boarding school on the Greek island of Spetsai, a small patch of land south of Athens. Soon after his arrival on Spetsai Fowles entered the following in his diary (2003: 149): I went for a short walk in the morning. It was very cold with a choppy sea blowing up against the shore. I saw two kingfishers sitting on the strand, least expected of birds. A kestrel, and what looks like choughs; and several other birds. And there were many flowers. Sharrocks says there are no birds here – but there seems to me great possibilities. The variety of natural life excites me – the natural historian has a profound advantage over all other men. When I pass through a new country, the birds and the flowers and the insects mean – from the point of view of my own pleasure – as much to me as the people and their artificial world. They form a kind of ubiquitous sanctuary.

‘The natural historian has a profound advantage over other men.’ Here Fowles mentions one advantage, and a theme I will return to: wherever the travelling natural historian goes he or she has recourse to nature as a familiar and reliable pleasure. However, this is not the only advantage the natural historian has over other men. A few weeks after having made this journal entry the author is walking on Spetsi

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Poula, a small island south of Spetsai (the Sharrocks mentioned in the excerpt is a friend also teaching at the school [2003: 47]): All these cliffs, these groves, these hills, terraces and pines, this sea and sky, all these are like a paradise, a totally new discovery. Every day new flowers, new birds. The landscape is there for anyone to enjoy – but that is only one dimension. The birds and the flowers are the speech, movement and dress on the bare lifeless body. Without natural history, the world is only a fraction seen. I felt this strongly with Sharrocks, putting myself in his place, not knowing any flowers, any birds. To him, as to so many, they are meaningless hieroglyphs.

The natural historian’s advantage is that he or she sees more in nature. The natural historian sees, aided by taxonomy, the various species of flowers or birds for example, with their discrete breeding populations, particular physiology, and unique behavioural patterns. The scientific study of nature in the field is concomitant with a heightened awareness of the fine details and complex workings of the natural world, and this alone makes it of great value. Ethology, taxonomy, and evolutionary history all help one unlock the identity of what might otherwise remain ‘meaningless hieroglyphs’, chaotic surface phenomena. They introduce one more deeply to the fascinating and awe-inspiring images and motions of biological life. As I mentioned earlier, Fowles is not the author of anti-pastoral. Rather than causing him to represent the natural world as a bleak realm without divine purpose, his commitment to science has revealed to him the wonders of nature. In his diaries Fowles frequently identifies and records various species of birds, flowers and butterflies, among other things, that he has encountered in his travels overseas or in the English countryside. He also frequently theorizes about animal ethology, the study of animal behaviour. The following is a representative example (2003: 256): Hummingbird hawkmoth. One of the commonest moths here. They sometimes fly into my room. Why should such sunloving creatures fly into the shade? Watching one today, I guessed the reason. It flew round the room, hovering before each object, making an inventory. It came in search of flowers. At this time of year here, flowers grow mostly in what moisture rests in the sun-free hillsides and bottoms. How many ages to learn that? Myself as Darwin. The charm of field study is that, the effort to enter .. remote ways of existence. A kind of wanderlust. Tout comprendre.

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For Fowles, as for the English nature writer Gilbert White, the charms of natural history are many and are highly valued. Besides bringing the patterns of the natural world into sharper focus through various forms of analysis, a scientific approach to nature also allows one to travel abroad. That is, the field naturalist who hypothesises about the evolutionary adaptations of a non-human species, as Fowles does here with a hawkmoth, is shining a light into a ‘remote way of existence’, a new and unfamiliar world. The resultant experience parallels the excitement of travelling through virgin territory. So it appears that Fowles’ view of the material universe as a godless realm is not as bleak as he had suggested in the letter to his wife I placed at the beginning of this chapter. The world is a fascinating place for a natural historian. Wilson’s generalised optimism about the wonder potentially provided by the world we live in does seem an apt characterisation of this attitude. To reiterate the sentiment, perhaps once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind we will find that uncovering the workings of biological life, ourselves included, will bring us all the meaning the brain can master and all the emotion it can bear. Fowles, as I have shown, is, and has been since a very young age, witness to the value of natural history. He feels a deep sense of wonder at the physical creation, a sense of wonder that runs most famously from Darwin, who in The Origin of Species wrote ‘there is a grandeur in this view of life’, to Wilson, who in The Diversity of Life and his autobiography Naturalist presents the biosphere as the most awe-inspiring object of contemplation available in the universe (1992; 1994). Throughout his life Fowles has been excited by nature, by deciphering its hieroglyphics, by the various attempts the field naturalist makes to enter ways of life remote from our own. Scientific curiosity is even spoken of by the author as having sanctity. For the author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a book in which a character swears upon The Origin of Species, there seems to be much material here for belief. Indeed Mary Midgley has written that it does not matter very much whether we call the natural historian’s attitude of reverence ‘religious’ or not, ‘except to people who have declared a tribal war about the use of that word’ (2001: 184). Fowles, then, obviously does not mean by ‘science’ an ordered set of neutral facts, but rather, in addition, a particular spirit or attitude. However, he does not conceptualise science as a moral force that will

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result in the inevitable progress of mankind. This position, famously advanced by scientistic prophets from ‘Hobbes and Bacon to Auguste Comte and Marvin Minsky’, is as Midgley avers, simply the promotion of various uncriticised ideologies and gives a bad reputation to any talk of ‘scientific spirit’ (2003: 17). We should be clear that in his journals Fowles does not invoke ‘science’ as a hubristically ambitious moral program. Rather Fowles aligns the simple yet profound pleasure of finding things out, particularly in the field of natural history, with the scientific spirit. In his high praise for the work of E. O. Wilson Fowles is, one could argue, complicit in the enormous optimism of that thinker in relation to the scientific endeavour. However even Wilson himself cannot be accused of naively having faith in science as a human activity that will, unguided by a particular ethical framework, produce a global utopia untainted by nuclear waste, chemical weapons and the over-use of pesticides in agriculture. While I have written much on non-human nature I should add that Fowles as a writer is not uninterested in the human species. While this author does not produce work which boasts the extremity of metropolitan anthropocentrism one typically encounters in a Saul Bellow protagonist — ‘Glancing through the venetian blinds (he separated and widened the slats with shaking fingers) he saw the blossoms — just then the azaleas were coming into bloom — and found it all very well but the drama of the season lacked real interest. Not to be compared to the human drama.’ (2000: 102) — neither is Fowles unconcerned to document and explore the intricacies of human lives and dramas. Of course he would not have been the enormously successful novelist that he has been if he had written exclusively of the trees and the fields, matters admittedly peripheral to the interests of many. The presence of science in Fowles’ work is confluent with a purely human concern: the issue of human freedom. In fact, tracing the issue of how free or determined human choice and identity is through this author’s oeuvre shows us how science has over the years become increasingly important to the writer, not only as an instrument for looking outwards on the natural world but also as a framework for approaching human life. One thing most critics seem to concur on in writing about Fowles’ early work is that he has frequently staked his commitment to the importance of personal authenticity, to an attempted greater rather than lesser freedom from the sociological forces at work in the shaping of

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personal identity. This is true of those works published early in the writer’s career, as I indicated in chapter one. Conversations with John Fowles (Vipond 1999a), a recently published collection of interviews with the author, presents us with a different Fowles from the one suggested in early novels like The Collector and The Magus. In 1979 the author reported that he had come to consider existentialism, that ultimate champion of the authentic self, as only ‘a kind of literary metaphor, a wish fulfillment’ (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 73). By 1988 he had declared himself no longer an existentialist, speaking of the way his generation at Oxford had been ‘victims’ of this then glamorous French philosophy (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 174). Darwin has left a more profound impress on the author than Sartre. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman the local doctor certifies his honesty by swearing, not on the Bible, but on a more recent publication: On the Origin of Species (FLW 215). This is the supremely secular image: the good book become Darwin’s Origin, Christian cosmology ousted and the theory of evolution shepherded in as the modern touch-stone of profundity. At one point in the novel Charles Smithson and Dr. Grogan confide their Darwinian beliefs over Burmah cheroots late one night in the doctor’s Lyme Regis study. Afterwards Charles strides home, feeling a young scientific master of the universe. As he walks the darkened streets of the sea-side town, the protagonist’s recent discussion of Darwin’s groundbreaking theory buoys him. He walks and meditates. He is filled with a sense of exulted superiority (FLW 159): Unlit Lyme was the ordinary mass of mankind, most evidently sunk in immemorial sleep; while Charles the naturally selected (the adverb carries both its senses) was pure intellect, walking awake, free as a god, one with the unslumbering stars and understanding all.

Charles is naturally selected in the colloquial sense of being the obvious choice for intellectual enlightenment, but also in the biological sense of being the most well-adapted to his environment. As a reader of the novel will know, it is hubris we can see in Charles’ step on this particular midnight stroll — his character is soon to be overwhelmed by existential disorder, in the shape of Sarah Woodruff — and for this reason we may wonder if the narrator is being sardonic in making the vantage point of the biological sciences quite so graphically co-

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extensive with immense perspicacity. However it is true that in this passage the scientific outlook on the universe provides a kind of intellectual rapture to the protagonist. He and Grogan feel they are like ‘two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough’, harbingers of Darwin’s message in a complacently theological nineteenth century (FLW 158). Darwin’s theory of evolution has now been with us for some time and has, some would argue, entered into the realm of widely held cultural assumption. It no longer causes the exhilaration felt by Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman on this spring night. Prior to Darwin Charles Lyell had published his Principles of Geology (1832), a work that popularised geology with the argument that the earth was, pace the Bible’s ascription of a recent date to Creation (4004 B.C.), millions of years old. Lyell’s work was carried by Darwin on his voyage aboard the Beagle, and was indeed instrumental in allowing Darwin to formulate his own theory of evolution. And yet Lyell’s work was not widely known or his theories widely subscribed to among the general population at the time. This was understandable, as the narrator of The French Lieutenant’s Woman writes: ‘Genesis is a great lie; but it is also a great poem; and a six-thousand-year-old womb is much warmer than one that stretches for two thousand million’ (157). What had previously seemed a snugly accommodated universe was now revealed to certain members of the educated Victorian reading public as a place which put human habitation on the earth into a position of insignificance. Tennyson was one member of the reading public acquainted with The Principles of Geology and in In Memoriam A. H. H. he echoed Lyell’s words (1993: 1128): There rolls the deep where grew the tree. O earth, what changes hast thou seen! There where the long street roars hath been The stillness of the central sea.

Debating the implications of evolutionary theory, Tennyson declaimed of Nature: ‘ ‘So careful of the type she seems,/ So careless of the single life’ (1993: 1105): “So careful of the type?” but no. From scarpèd cliff and quarried stone She cries, “A thousand types are gone; I care for nothing, all shall go.

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As the narrator of the novel comments, Lyell’s ‘discoveries blew like a great wind, freezing to the timid, but invigorating to the bold, through the century’s stale metaphysical corridors’ (157). Charles is, unlike Tennyson in the above stanza, one of the bold. As Charles walks home on the aforementioned night Lyell’s findings don’t cause hesitancy or woe, but give spring to his step. The quotation prefacing the final chapter of the The French Lieutenant’s Woman gives us Darwinism in a more recent terminology than would have been available or even imaginable to the characters of the novel in its 1867 setting (440): Evolution is simply the process by which chance (the random mutations in the nucleic acid helix caused by natural radiation) co-operates with natural law to create natural forms better and better adapted to survive.

The following excerpt from The Origin of Species prefaces chapter 19 of the book and explains what is meant by ‘natural law’ (145): As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.

The ‘struggle for existence under the complex and varying conditions of life’ is essentially what is meant by ‘natural law’. It, along with, as we now know, advantageous mutations in the nucleic acid helix, direct the course of evolution for a species. An individual member of a species is born with an advantage of some kind, however slight, and it is probable that that advantage will, due to greater reproductive success, be spread out into the gene pool of the species, directing the course of the species’ evolution in the long-term. This then, in potted form, is the theory of evolution. But what does any of this have to do with the issue of human freedom? The narrative of the The French Lieutenant’s Woman is propelled by a wellsituated gentleman of leisure, Charles Smithson, and his developing affections for Sarah Woodruff (her name alludes to the sweet herb ‘woodruff’, but also the wild mystery of a ‘rough wood’), a darkhaired social outcast whose identity remains an enigma throughout the

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novel. Charles often comes across Sarah while he is walking in the woods to the west of Lyme Regis, the seaside town in Dorset that is the novel’s principal setting. A clandestine love affair begins to develop between the two characters, an affair whose encounters are, perforce, conducted largely in the secrecy of the forest wilderness known as the Undercliff. This woodland romance parallels that of Aeneas and Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid, a relationship that was only possible in the dense forest of the African coast, and that had to be terminated when Aeneas left Carthage on his quest to find Rome. In Fowles’ novel, as William Harnack points out, ‘Charles and Sarah can only be “free” to love in the secluded combes of the seacliffs; once in society, all is deception and a hiding of their true natures’ (1982: 523). The distinction between ‘wilderness’ and ‘civilisation’ has particular relevance for the character of Sarah. Sarah’s true nature only emerges on her long walks in the woods, and she assumes a mask of careful politesse when she is at home in the house of a distinguished lady of the town. Sarah in particular becomes in this way associated with the natural and the ‘honest’, as opposed to the urban and duplicitously urbane world of Lyme Regis. Suzanne Ross’s ecofeminist reading of the novel champions Sarah as ‘the Green Woman’, showing that we need not read both nature and woman in the story as the devalued other (1999: 191). Ross notes, for example, that the point at which Sarah chooses to render herself a speaking subject and tell Charles of her relationship with Varguennes (the ‘French Lieutenant’ of the title) is when she is standing in the Undercliff. As she speaks she pauses now and then and in these interstices the presence of various species of life is interjected – a crow in flight, blue-petaled milkwort, the song of a missal thrush. In this way the stories of other species of life are woven into the fabric of Sarah’s own story (Ross 1999: 191). Robert Huffaker has observed that the wildness of the Undercliff matches Sarah’s natural wildness and that as a natural location it ‘stands in absolute contrast to the hothouse where he proposes to civilized Ernestina’ (1980: 110). Commenting further on the setting, Peter Conradi writes that in the context of the novel’s narrative the Undercliff is ‘an Edenic a-historical realm of both ethical and botanic ‘joyous indiscipline’, a place of mythic release’ (1982: 64). Conradi is right to make the connection to the Garden of Eden. In Paradise Lost Milton’s Garden rejected 'nice Art/In Beds and curious knots'. It was

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entirely unlike a conservatory or any other formal garden. The Garden rather granted favour to 'Nature’s boon/Poured forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine' (quoted in Hunt 1975: 81). In the novel’s prelapsarian Undercliff there is a wild variety of terrain that mirrors the original setting in English literature of the Fall of Man. However the Biblical account of the origin of man has a fragile place in this post-Darwinian novel. In observing the ‘true’ Sarah, the narrator comments that the average Victorian gentleman would have made a morally adverse judgement on her physical features and manner of behaving; ones which constitute a thinly suppressed sensuality. Charles, in his meetings with her, does not make such a judgement. His interest in contemporary science is cited as cause of this forbearance (FLW 119): Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realised, let open the flood-gates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviourism, that is, towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane.

Strict determinism in this context would be the notion that one’s identity is preordained by one’s biological inheritance, and behaviourism would suggest the doctrine that identity is characterised by the sum of an organism’s actions. In fact many would argue that the logical corollary of Darwinism is not a determinist amoralism (altruism and love may have just as much a biological footing as individualism and competition, and cultural co-evolution also heavily influences human nature). But whatever the case, the hurricane that Charles the overly zealous determinist thinks he recognises (for right or wrong) makes him less intolerant of Sarah’s candid sensuality. He realises that Sarah is the lively and forthright young woman she is due to factors beyond her control, chiefly her physical inheritance. While the natural, in the figure of Sarah, the Green Woman, is for a moment exonerated, Victorian moral rectitude is undermined. Candour briefly creates a splash of colour in a restrained and monotonous English façade. Thus it is that the theory of evolution and the character of Sarah introduce for our contemplation the theme of biological determinism, a potential bar on human freedom, although in this instance, ironically, a valuable source of authenticity.

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A view of human life full of Darwinian refrains makes itself felt at arguably the most important juncture in the novel’s plot. This is the point where Charles is returning to Ernestina (not Sarah, but his actual fianceé) and Lyme Regis (the town where the two reside prior to their marriage) from a brief sojourn in London. Charles has recently been informed of his aristocratic uncle’s impending marriage and, previously the sole heir to Sir Robert’s title and estate, is feeling lugubrious about his now uncertain inheritance prospects. He has spoken with Ernestina’s father in London about his possible change in fortune, and has been offered work within the latter’s extensive London-based emporium chain. Charles foresees for himself an ungentlemanly absorption into Ernestina’s family’s business empire, into trade — this compounds his gloom. In private he has recently suggested to the socially stigmatised Sarah (the ‘French Lieutenant’s Woman’, often called by villagers the ‘French lieutenant’s whore’) that she leave the small seaside town of Lyme Regis, in which he has met her, for nearby Exeter. Sarah has acted accordingly, but then made the provocative move of sending him notice of her whereabouts in Exeter, Endicott’s Family Hotel. Charles has left London and as his carriage rolls towards Exeter’s city gates, en route to Lyme, he contemplates two destinies for himself. On the first split of the imaginative fork he follows the dictates of Duty. He dreams of himself passing through Exeter without contacting Sarah and heading directly out towards a life in which he is assimilated into commerce and pleasing a pretty and intelligent but too inexperienced and conventional young wife, Ernestina (her character’s representing the choice of ‘earnestness’ here is not difficult to detect). Having vividly conceptualised this scenario and followed it to its logical conclusion — the scenario of doing ‘the moral, the decent, the correct thing’ (FLW 320) — Charles’ thoughts produce a metaphor demonstrative of how seriously he takes evolutionary theory (321): There was no doubt. He was one of life’s victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned to a fossil.

In this scenario Charles is one of the organisms that wasn’t blessed with a favourable idiosyncrasy of character. By following the ‘dictates of Duty’ and marrying Ernestina Charles would be acting as his

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physical inheritance and his environmental influences condition him to. Charles’ age, its ‘iron certainties and rigid conventions’, is explicitly linked to his character’s interest in paleontology in the text (he is an amateur fossil hunter). For Charles, on this split of the fork an interest in the fossilised fait accompli trounces a commitment to the emergent adaptation in life. And yet Charles does not end up returning to his fiancée. As the train carriage rolls along this act of imagination proves a catalyst for rebellion against the forces of conformity. Charles goes to Exeter, visits, and then goes to bed with the socially undesirable Sarah. He enters an empty church late in the evening and experiences an epiphany, realising the extent to which he has previously acquiesced to his age’s inauthenticities. He returns to Lyme Regis and breaks his engagement with Ernestina in the assumed knowledge that he will live for the rest of his life with the beautiful and psychologically intriguing Sarah. (Charles is mistaken in this belief as Sarah subsequently leaves Exeter without giving further information as to her whereabouts, and he spends the rest of the novel wandering mainland Europe and America in search of her). At this crucial point in the narrative Charles thus extricates himself from what he sees to be ‘the vast movements of history’, proving that the complexity of the human mind allows humans to deviate from predictable behavioural patterns. He correctly recognises the forces of conformity directing him to marry a shallow but socially acceptable young debutante, and in an assertion of human freedom he chooses to follow the much less socially acceptable, but much more emotionally complex, Sarah. He subverts Victorian societal norms by abjuring the actions of a respectable gentleman of the period engaged to a young woman. His character’s actions prove, among other things, that the crudest determinism is not an adequate model to comprehend the complexity of human life. Of course evolution is an actual scientific theory and it does not occur within the life-span of a single organism. However, as I have been indicating, Fowles often uses the theory of evolution metaphorically within this novel: within Charles’ own life-span the cultivation of new characteristics or attitudes well adapted to the changing circumstances he finds himself in leads to success, while rigid conservatism leads to failure. The renounciation of Ernestina is supposedly an example of a bump on the road to Charles’ self-knowledge, or in other words, evolutionary success. Even in the second and final ending of

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the novel when Charles has lost Sarah forever, an intimation of his acting successfully by forgetting Sarah and moving onto another woman is given. He stands alone on an embankment of the Thames. Having ‘at last found an atom of faith in himself’ he realises that life ‘is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice’, but is rather that which we make of it within our hazard-given abilities, over the long-term (FLW 445). As with the evolution of species, the human individual’s success is dependant on their adaptations to current circumstances, not purely on such things as Providence or a once-in-alifetime encounter with a mysterious woman. The two endings of the novel, the first in which Charles and Sarah are reunited and the second in which Charles is thrown back upon the rough seas of bachelorhood, are further spoken of by the narrator as equally plausible; thus signalling that happy endings are not in the nature of things, but rather that life is nothing more than the actions of men and woman in pursuit of their ends. With the end of the novel the author is stressing that neither love nor loneliness are inevitable all of the time. The only thing perceived as inevitable is a cosmology associated with the ‘law of evolution’: a Godless universe in which we humans interact with a finite amount of hazard to shape our destinies. Thus we see how deeply the scientific attitude of British adaptionism penetrates the cosmology of the novel. Tony Jackson has argued that Stephen J. Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium is relevant to the novel. Gould’s theory stresses the abruptness of changes in species rather than the traditional gradualist story of Darwin and others. In this account, changes in evolution involve the relatively sudden emergence of radical difference in a species, the emergence of the ‘hopeful monster’. Such new organisms are ‘monsters’ because of their radical difference to already established forms of life, and ‘hopeful’ because it is only by chance that they will be in an environment favourable to their propagation. Jackson takes Gould’s theory and argues that Sarah represents a ‘hopeful monster’ of evolution in the novel: ‘She is a suddenly occurring new kind of self, and Charles is the means by which the new self secures its survival’ (1997: 227). Sarah ‘reproduces’ herself by entering into Charles’ life and influencing him to the extent that he evolves out of a Victorian self into a twentieth-century sense of self, more founded in personal authenticity than group conformity. Moving beyond the fact

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that Gould’s theory has been rejected by other evolutionists such as Daniel Dennett (1995), I see some significance in Jackson’s reading in that it is one of the only readings that has consistently and comprehensively employed an evolutionary framework to interpret the novel. Although Jackson’s reading is not perfect, it does not, like Conradi’s, interpret Charles as ‘deserted by evolution’ and then saved by existentialism (Conradi 1982: 75). Conradi is wrong to assert that existentialism ‘takes over’ as the interpretive paradigm late in the narrative. Although Sartrean existentialism is a felt presence in the novel, the metaphor of evolution is also used, as Jackson has shown, to comprehend Charles’ changes of self throughout the work. And we need see no contradiction between these two approaches. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, humans have, as a species, developed through deep time an amazing capacity for behavioural flexibility. Each of us has a special ability to individualize our identities using our uniquely powerful minds and complex life-histories. The stress of existentialism on the importance of personal authenticity is entirely consistent with a species-centric perspective. To view ourselves as a species is to view ourselves as, in the words of James Chisholm, ‘predictably unpredictable’ (1999: 50). The evolutionary metaphor follows Charles throughout the course of his movements in the novel. As I have said, the use of the theory of evolution is highly metaphorical in Fowles’ fiction – it is applied to a single individual and his actions within the course of a single lifespan. Charles sees the folly of determinism, which in the context of his life means a rigid and unthinking social conservatism. He transcends this determinism, seeing the value of adaptation to current circumstances. Charles ‘evolves’. This much is clear. And yet there is another metaphorical use of the theory of evolution in the novel, and although it is metaphorical it does not stretch the metaphor quite as far as in the case of Charles’ personal development. It is species that evolve or do not evolve, and in the novel evolutionary theory is used as a vocabulary to talk about whole classes of people, metaphorical species. I am referring to the old aristocratic order’s declining influence in Victorian England beside the new plutocracy, the mercantile sector’s growing prosperity. Charles is our exemplary member of the landed gentry. He begins the novel seeing a world ‘in which inexorable laws conveniently arranged themselves for the survival of the fittest and best, exempli gratia,

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Charles Smithson’ and his class (FLW 54). As Peter Conradi notes, in parodic testimony to this fact we discover that Charles, in a passing reference to an event prior to the main narrative, has shot one of the last great bustards of Salisbury Plain and hastened the extinction of an ‘inferior’ species (1982: 75). A morning early scene in the novel is also exemplary: Charles’ servant comes into the room to shave him: ‘Sam stood stropping the razor, and steam rose invitingly, with a kind of Proustian richness of evocation – so many such happy days, so much assurance of position, order, calm, civilization, out of the copper jug he had brought with him… All was supremely well. The world would always be this, and this moment’ (43). For this layer in the stratified society of nineteenth- century Britain ‘all is supremely well’. Whether ‘the world would always be this’ on the other hand is soon to be contested. The theory of evolution only works to the advantage of Charles and his gentrified class for so long in the novel. In one scene later in the novel Charles travels to the managerial office of Mr. Freeman (Ernestina’s father) beside Hyde Park in London, to inform his prospective father-in-law of his change in inheritance prospects. Mr. Freeman (the amalgamation of ‘free man’ betokens an increasingly socially mobile mercantile sector in the English class system) circumspectly offers Charles a hand in the running of his department store empire. As the English gentleman confronts the world of trade the familiar metaphor raises its head. In an earlier discussion Charles had met with much resistance when putting forward Darwin’s theory of evolution. And yet here Mr. Freeman refers to this earlier conversation with sympathy (FLW 277): ‘You will never get me to agree that we are all descended from monkeys. I find that notion blasphemous. But I thought much on some of the things you said during our little disagreement. I would have you repeat what you said, what was it, about the purpose of this theory of evolution. A species must change…?’ ‘In order to survive. It must adapt itself to changes in the environment.’ ‘Just so. Now that I can believe. I am twenty years older than you. Moreover, I have spent my life in a situation where if one does not – and very smartly – change oneself to meet the taste of the day, then one does not survive.’

‘The taste of the day’ here signifies the current demands of the market. However, further than this the way of life of the English gentleman of leisure is inadvertently suggested by Freeman as an evolution-

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ary anachronism, a form of life that has, through a traditional distaste for commerce, failed to adapt to an explosion in London-based consumer capitalism, an increasingly fluid social system, in sum a rapidly changing century. The metaphor of evolution now works against Charles and his class. Charles leaves this meeting with the older tycoon with a renewed appreciation for the landed gentry as represented by his uncle’s estate, ‘its age, its security, its savoir-vivre’ (FLW 278). While, for his character, ‘the abstract idea of evolution was entrancing’ its practice suddenly seemed ‘fraught with ostentatious vulgarity’ (278-9). Charles feels himself the superseded monster as he walks slowly down a busy London street away from Freeman’s mansion, and yet he feels sure that a life devoted purely to the pursuit of money is inadequate. When used as a metaphor for his own social context his character feels the blind stupidity of evolution in respect to honourable human values. This twist in the plot has some irony considering that the adaptionist account of biological life was constructed primarily by the British upper or upper-middle classes. As Richard Lewontin wrote of adaptionism in 1972: ‘In very large part this has been a British pastime, traceable to the fascination with birds and gardens, butterflies and snails that was characteristic of the pre-war upper middle class from which so many British scientists came’ (Kohn 2004: 15). Darwin himself was the archetypal image of the gentleman naturalist, basing himself securely in his large Kent house with its rambling lawns and gardens. More recently key figures in the history of British adaptionism have included John Maynard Smith (from a very wealthy family, and educated at Eton and Cambridge), Ronald Fisher (Harrow and Cambridge) and J. B. S. Haldane (Eton and Oxford [Kohn 2004 21]). In Fowles’ novel the genteel British naturalist messing around outdoors, a major driver in the development of ‘the modern synthesis’ of evolutionary theory, has its intellectual progeny turned against it in metaphorical guise. It may have been figures like Charles who precipitated the development of Darwinism, but here Fowles places such men at the sharp end of the theory’s literary implications. We might think that it is misconceived to take the evolutionary battle between actual, biological species as a metaphor for the tensions in Victorian society. How true is it to say that the causal processes in this field of biology provide a reliable pattern for the processes in nineteenth-century English society? Perhaps there were many dispa-

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rate individuals engaged in trade in London during this period and their rise as a ‘class’ did not exactly correspond with the crippling of the British aristocracy as another ‘class’ or ‘species’. As readers we might pause and resist the narrator’s use of evolutionary metaphors for class. This kind of reading might well be flawed in its hermeneutic utility. Of course, it is likely that Fowles himself is not committed to the idea, but is dramatising an important intellectual debate of the period. Whatever the case may be, my point in adducing these examples is simply to show how seriously The French Lieutenant’s Woman registers Darwin’s ideas and how widespread are the uses of evolutionary metaphor within its narrative. In Darwin’s Plots Gillian Beer notes how for many years after the emergence of a new scientific paradigm the new idea remains hypothetical and shares some of the characteristics of a fiction, before finally settling into scientific fact. In this way in the late 1850s and throughout the 1860s the theory of evolution carried a ‘remnant of the mythical’, it was an exciting new fiction through which novelists like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy attempted to read the world (Eliot quoted in Beer 2000: 2). Fowles wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1967, by which time the theory had lost much of its ability to excite an educated reading public and was more settled into the realm of scientific fact. However, this modern novel set in the Victorian nineteenth century shares with works by Eliot and Hardy an attempt to test the extent of the metaphorical uses of evolutionary ideas. Moreover Fowles has written a novel in which, as the scenes with Charles and Grogan excitedly confabulating over The Origin of Species testify, he is able as an author to imaginatively empathise with, and recuperate for the reader, much of the newly experienced glamour of Darwin’s ideas. Here we might recall the 1967 quote by Martin Gardner prefacing the final chapter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in which reference is made to random mutations in the nucleic acid helix. By the time Fowles wrote this novel, knowledge of DNA as the driving unit for evolutionary change was available, and this in itself (information entirely absent from the discourse of people like Thomas Huxley) was perhaps cause for excitement among scientifically aware intellectuals like Fowles. Darwin’s dangerous idea (to use the title of Daniel Dennett’s best known book) has over recent years been reinvigorated, first with advances in molecular genetics and, most recently, with the develop-

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ments in evolutionary psychology. It seems possible that Fowles was able to partake of Charles’ intellectual exhilaration, and to do so even after basic evolutionary insights have been part of Western culture for more than a century. The letter Fowles wrote to his fiancée in 1952, and the excerpt which I placed at the beginning of this chapter, predicted that a commitment to science would lead to a bleak and inhumane cosmology. The sentiment behind this letter lead to the prediction that Fowles would go on to be the author of anti-pastorals like Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ which envisaged nature as ‘darkling plain’. Such a prediction was, as I have shown, misguided. Science, in Fowles’ personal vocabulary, signifies a spirit of intellectual adventure and pleasure in finding things out about the world. Particularly it has led to an interest in biology and field naturalism as lenses through which to discern the wonders of nature. As I have shown, science, traditionally the great eraser of metaphysical castles, can be generative of literary and human meaning.

Chapter 6 Calmly, Nobly Triumphant: The Mystery of Wilderness Gillian Beer claims that evolutionary theory’s most powerful influence has been its ‘ability to propose a total system for understanding the organisation of the natural world’ (2000: 12). From complete understanding I turn to more shadowy comprehensions. In the present chapter I examine nature represented as a mysterious presence in Fowles’ writing, a factor beyond the grasp of any engine of human understanding. Firstly I look at the motif of the tree in the author’s non-fiction. Next I turn to a reading of an episode of The Magus set in the forests of Scandinavia as exemplifying this motif in the author’s nonfictional writings. I end the chapter with a consideration of the place this aspect of environmental aesthetics might occupy in evolutionary psychology. Collections of trees are particularly important for Fowles when he talks of ‘nature’. Indeed the title to the essay he has written, published as a single volume, on his relationship with nature is simply The Tree. Of trees and forests Fowles writes that they ‘seem to me the best, most revealing messengers to us from all nature, the nearest its heart’ (76). Fowles continues (77):

…our woodlands are the last fragments of comparatively unadulterated nature, and so the most accessible outward correlatives and providers of the relationship, the feeling, the knowledge, that we are in danger of losing: the last green churches and chapels outside the walled civilisation and culture we have made with our tools.

Firstly we note the author’s invocation of woodlands as ‘green churches and chapels’. Writers other than Fowles have described woodlands as green chapels, for example John Burroughs wrote in

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1912, ‘If we do not go to church as much as did our fathers, we go to the woods much more’ (Keith 1983: 216). In England pre-Christian pantheism had inaugurated this discourse. In the eleventh century, in an attempt to halt the worship of ‘holy’ trees, the Church in England had made it an offence to build a sanctuary around a tree (Keith 1983: 214). However a religious feeling for woodlands stubbornly persisted in the country, with green branches being carried in procession on May Day, church lands usually boasting a yew, and Gothic architecture imitating in stone the branching of a forest walk (Keith 1983: 215-6). But Fowles’ discussion, that of an atheist, takes us beyond the potentially obfuscatory quasi-religious awe at ancient trees, felt by the ‘oak priests’, the Druids. Can we assert with greater specificity what this feeling or knowledge that we are in danger of losing is? Mystery is a central preoccupation, one could say life-blood, of Fowles. In his philosophical selfportrait, The Aristos, the author writes (2001: 17): As soon as a mystery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy. If we question deep enough there comes a point where answers, if answers could be given, would kill. We may want to dam the river; but we dam the spring at our peril.

It is in large part mystery, an encounter with the unknown in the shape of a tangled green wilderness, that constitutes the feeling or knowledge that we are in danger of losing if the last ‘green churches and chapels’ are felled. Although Fowles puts great store in the revelatory powers of science and the charms of natural history he is also a great respecter of mystery. This is not contradictory of course as science constantly plays on the edge of the unknown and would lose any motivation for progress or forward movement in a completely known universe. As the above excerpt makes clear, the author makes an equation between mystery and vitality in human life. Throughout The Tree mystery is written of as a source of pleasure and a reason for living. Fowles’ interest in the vitality-bringing powers of the suggestive unknown is attested to in his love of the mysterious French novel Le Grand Meaulnes and his modelling The Magus on that work to the extent that he wanted the novel to provoke the mysterious in the reader’s mind. Wild nature can also be very mysterious. Glimpsed fractions of rustling woodland environments present beguiling suggestions of

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greater and more complex wholes. Fowles has articulated this attraction towards the mystery provoked by a group of trees. One of the things the author enjoys in narrative art, from the novel to the cinema, is, he writes in The Tree, ‘the motion from a seen present to a hidden future’, and this serves partly to explain why he likes woods (54): The reason that woods provide this experience so naturally and intensely lies, of course, in the purely physical character of any large congregation of trees; in the degree to which they hide what exists, at any given point, beyond the immediately visible surroundings.

If the wood is an emblem of wild nature for Fowles, we see how much his love of the natural world is an appreciation of mystery; the unseen but perhaps soon to be seen. As will be clear to anyone who has walked through a large ‘congregation of trees’ in temperate Western Europe, such as oaks and beeches, during the months when the trees are in leaf, a sense of always partly veiled complexity, of mystery, is imparted to the eye by such a woodland environment. Such an impression is received by Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman where the protagonist walks, early one morning, past a copse of trees beside Lyme Regis (233): On the slopes above his path the trunks of the ashes and sycamores, a honey gold in the oblique sunlight, erected their dewy green vaults of young leaves; there was something mysteriously religious about them, but of a religion before religion; a druid balm, a green sweetness over all… and such an infinity of greens, some almost black in the further recesses of the foliage; from the most intense viridian to the palest pomona.

First we notice the religious aspect of the impression: the metaphor of ‘green vaults’ signifying church architecture among other things, and thus returning us to woodlands as places of worship. Further, the canopy of the trees is described as harbouring an ‘infinity’ of shades. Such a leafy multitude is by its nature always half-seen, always to a large extent suggestive rather than exhaustively informative. The unpredictability, the possibly latent surprises to come, all the potential occurrences and changes in a flow of time that are endemic to a woodland environment attract Fowles. As he writes (T 7):

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Calmly, Nobly Triumphant: The Mystery of Wilderness I have always loathed flat and treeless country. Time there seems to dominate, it ticks remorselessly like a clock. But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times: here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous…

Such an analysis seems allied to a Bergsonian conception of time. In Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889) the French philosopher distinguished the scientific treatment of time – as a set of separable, quantifiable and spatially existing units (the spaces on a calendar for example) – from the human experience of time, as a ‘flow’ that resisted standard quantification. The experience of time is unique to each individual. It is entirely possible to experience, for example, a film as ‘long’ (tedious, boring, etc) despite the evidence of clocks. With a knowledge of Bergson’s conception of time one does not need to correct Fowles here and state that it is not time that is variegated by the trees, but rather one’s experience of it. Time as ‘flow’ is indeed one’s experience of it, and the essayist is right to say that time is given swaying and shadowed complexity by the forest around him. Thoreau famously made this connection between what is of value in nature and a human proclivity to experience, even a need for, the mysterious: ‘Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness…’ (1991: 280). For Thoreau the ‘tonic of wildness’ was partly a matter of seeing human limitations transgressed through the mirror of a roughly majestic nature. However a key constituent in the value of wilderness for Thoreau was mystery: it is the forests and meadows being unexplored which prevents the village life’s stagnation. In writing that ‘At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable’, the great American nature writer foreshadowed Fowles’ belief in the vitality-bringing power of mystery for human life and its embodiment in wild nature. In being interviewed, Fowles reported that: ‘My only sustained interest in the study of fiction concerns my own natural history (and behaviourism) as a writer, oneself as a guinea-pig’ (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 72). If we are to turn from the written text to a study of Fowles himself then the author has already provided us with guidance (Vipond 1999a: 109). I turn again to The Tree and the author’s description of his adolescent enjoyment of solitary discovery in the Devon countryside. The cost is (T 57):

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…that I have never gained any taste for what lies beyond the experience of isolated discovery – in terms of true geographical exploration, for the proper exploitation of the discovery. I have dabbled in many branches of natural (and human) history, and have a sound knowledge of none; and the same goes for countless other things besides. I like a kind of wandering wood acquaintance, and no more, a dilettante’s not a virtuoso’s; always the green chaos rather than the printed map.

Along with an appreciation of mystery goes an appreciation of discovery: fresh and varied experience. The author values mystery in nature, but also the experiential uncoverings of that mystery. This comes out most clearly in his phrase, ‘wandering wood acquaintance’, a kind of coming to knowledge that is haphazard and piecemeal. Finally we are reminded of the point I expounded in chapter one, of how an encounter with the mystery of nature is proposed as an solitary activity in Fowles’ life and writing. Mysterious nature has perhaps its most significant representation in Fowles’ second novel to be published, The Magus. This work gets its narrative drive from the machinations of Maurice Conchis, a reclusive millionaire who lives on the fictional Greek island of Phraxos and lures the protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, into an extended game of illusion and deceit, much like an old Prospero on Shakespeare’s island in The Tempest. Often in the evenings at his coastal villa Conchis recounts to Urfe a scene from his past. On one particular evening one of Conchis’ stories comes to a halt, and the narrator interpolates (149-50): He stopped speaking for a moment, like a man walking who comes to a brink; perhaps it was an artful pause, but it made the stars, the night, seem to wait, as if story, narration, history, lay imbricated in the nature of things; and the cosmos was for the story, not the story for the cosmos.

This view of the natural world inter-woven with, and sympathetic to, the human drama — the props in a human theatre as it were — has an important clause in it: ‘as if’. As with so many of the things Conchis transmits to Nicholas, this impression of a dependency of the natural world on ‘story, narration, history’ is a matter of seeming, it is a carefully calculated illusion. Of course the reality is that the story is ‘for the’ cosmos; the story, human culture and its narratives, supervenes on the cosmos, the physical universe.

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At one point in the novel Conchis leaves a book on Nicholas’ bedside table for him to read. The ‘sumptuously produced limited edition ‘Le Masque Français au Dix-huitième Siècle’, has a passage in it which has been bracketeted, and reads (165): Visitors who went behind the high walls of Saint-Martin had the pleasure of seeing, across the green lawns and among the groves, shepherds and shepherdesses who danced and sang, surrounded by their white flocks. They were not always dressed in eighteenth-century clothes. Sometimes they wore costumes in the Roman and Greek styles; and in this way the odes of Theocritus and the bucolics of Virgil were brought to life.

Conchis is the consummate impresario, and indeed the natural environment around his villa is often the stage for some literal bal masqué of his own making, with young men and women performing in a similar manner to those eighteenth-century aristocrats who played at pastoral in the aforementioned book. Nicholas might here believe, as he tempts the reader to, that ‘the cosmos was for the story, not the story for the cosmos’, but we never forget how Conchis elsewhere makes of the land around his villa a ‘scenery’ (appropriately the word was invented for the theatre before it was applied to the outdoors [Danby 2000: 47]). Conchis achieves an artificial union between human drama and the natural world by making nature always appear as a supernumerary in his spectacle. ‘Appear as’ is the appropriate qualification. In fact Ariel — nature on the island — remains free. The traditional brand of literary criticism that conceptualises landscape in a literary text primarily as a setting for human drama would have been congruent with Conchis’ approach to nature on Phraxos. However as modern ecocriticism is less anthropocentric and more ecocentric than traditional criticism, so too does the perspicacious reader of Fowles’ narrative see nature as more than a setting. One instance where ‘the cosmos’ is shown to be independent of ‘story’, where nature does, I think resoundingly, demonstrate its eternal independence from human culture in the novel, is where Conchis recounts a visit to a farm called Seidevarre in Norway. As a younger man an interest in ornithology and bird song had taken Conchis to Norway, and into the huge fir-forests that run from Norway and Finland into Russia. He had travelled along the river Pasvik through the dark forests towards the farm of a man reputed to have a knowledge of the bird-life in the area. The land is empty of human society or popu-

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lation, and Conchis finds the natural fecundity of the place at this season impressive. The description of the fir forests in this chapter takes us back to Fowles’ chosen image of mysterious nature, the tree, or more particularly the woodland environment. It also, as will soon become clear, resoundingly affirms the author’s characterisation of woodlands as ‘green chapels and churches’. While Conchis is staying with the farmer, Gustav, he discovers that the farmer has a brother, Henrik, who lives on a secluded promontory further along the river. This brother is blind and apparently ‘insane’ (this term is open to more ironic readings; perhaps, for example, he is ‘divinely inspired’). Henrik has lived in complete solitude for many years. He keeps a large copy of the Bible along with a magnifying glass in his wooden hut and believes himself to commune with God on a regular basis. Henrik seems to be a character made in the mould of the early wilderness hermits monks and hermits. The early Christian monks, greatly preceding St. Francis or the Benedictines, resided alone in caves, abandoned buildings or simple shelters in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine (Bratton 1998: 31-53). They were usually not priests, rather simply individuals who felt called to go into the wilderness to live a life of asceticism for the health of their soul. The forest became the locus of exile and salutary hardship during the middle ages when hermits and anchorites, such as the Benedictine abbot St. Romuald (c.950-1027), went to the woods in search of communion with God. Henrik had earlier in his life gone to sea as a ship’s engineer because of his love of solitude and space. Finding that this wilderness was too peopled, he retreated to his family’s farm at Seidevarre. Like the early Christian monks he considered that he was specially chosen to do battle with the torments of the world, and saw the wilderness as a place to escape petty distractions, and directly confront struggles of a cosmic scale. Inside his cabin by the river it is ‘as bare as a monastic cell’; there is no carpet, curtain or other such concessions to luxury (M 303). The most significant aspect of wild nature for early Christian monasticism was the wilderness as quiet and simplicity allowing contemplation of God or struggle with evil without distraction. In the words of Susan Bratton: ‘the desert hermit lived in a cell within a greater cell – the wilderness around him’ (1998: 48). This is surely the case for Henrik, doubly so in that he is largely blind and therefore cannot see other members of his family who come to visit him. He

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lives largely in silence, a key monastic value, with only occasional bird song emanating from near his cabin. Beyond these similarities Henrik and the early desert fathers part company. Henrik is driven by a Jansenist belief in divine cruelty, and smoulders with hate, inscribing in his own blood on the beams of his cabin this text from Exodus: ‘They encamped in the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire’ (M 304). Conchis had studied medicine as a student in France and his belief in rationality and modern science was at its apex at the time in his life he is narrating for Nicholas and for the reader. He had even started, among his student friends, The Society of Reason, the major tenet of which was ‘to eradicate unreason, in whatever form’ (M 189). Conchis hears the insane brother, Henrik, shouting one night in Norwegian ‘Do you hear me?’, and then ‘I am here’; apparently a call and answer to God. On this night Conchis asks Gustav if they can go closer to observe Henrik. They do, and they witness Henrik kneeling on the shingles of the river in an attitude of communion with an unseen presence. Conchis tells of the incident as a turning point in his life. Henrik’s religious certitude made him for the first time in his life unsure of his scientific standards and strictly rational world-view. In the words of Conchis (M 309): ‘I knew that Henrik was seeing a pillar of fire out there over the water, I knew that there was no pillar of fire there, that it could be demonstrated that the only pillar of fire was in Henrik’s mind. ‘But in a flash, as of lighting, all our explanations, all our classifications and derivations, our aetiologies, suddenly appeared to me like a thin net. That great massive monster, reality, was no longer dead, easy to handle. It was full of a mysterious vigour, new forms, new possibilities. The net was nothing, reality burst through it. Perhaps something telepathic passed between Henrik and myself. I do not know. ‘That simple phrase, I do not know, was my own pillar of fire.’

Eileen Warburton has noted that this is the moment ‘in which the young Maurice Conchis moves beyond intellectual knowledge and rationalism to an intuitive, emotional apprehension of the incomprehensible divine moving in the universe’ (2004: 62). Warburton also notes that, as for many of Fowles’ characters, the conversion to new knowledge is like Pascal’s feu (fire), a short and temporarily disori-

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entating period leading to revelation (2004: 63). Whether or not the reader credits Fowles’ representation of a transcendental religious experience as truly profound or not is of no great consequence for present purposes. I think most readers will at the very least agree that the episode is masterfully constructed. In Simon Loveday’s opinion the Seidevarre episode is ‘the finest thing Fowles has ever written’ (1985: 78). What I would like to draw attention to here is the association between this episode of human drama and its setting. The revelation of the incapacity of human sciences to fully comprehend reality takes place in the thickly forested wilderness of Norway, a place described in the novel as so vast and calm as to be indifferent to mankind. When travelling down the Pasvik Conchis had seen (M 297): Endless forest. Huge, dark firs for mile after mile after mile. The river as broad and silent as a lake in a fairy tale. Like a mirror unlooked-in since time began.

In human discourse mirrors are something to be looked into, and the paradox of this wilderness is that it is, for the most part, not used by anthropocentric beings. The dark green of the fir trees, as well as the darkness cast by their tightly bunched needles, fosters a mystery. Conchis’ revelation of hitherto unforeseen rifts in the conventional fabric of human knowledge is made directly in the context of nature perceived as a quantity beyond human reckoning. Ecocriticism, in the words of Lawrence Buell, gives ‘the biota’, more than ‘a bit part’ (1995: 85). The dense fir-forests and their teeming bird life could just be read as a device serving to support Conchis’ introspections on the subject of spiritual revelation. However as an ecocritic I am also interested in the association of event and setting from the other direction as it were; in the event colouring our perception of place. Specifically I am interested in nature suggested, by association with this strange human event, as ‘full of mysterious vigour’. In such an ecocentric reading of the Seidevarre episode the forest loses the epithet ‘setting’ and becomes a significant player in the drama. Of the northern landscape Conchis had stated earlier in his tale that (M 298-9): the beauty of the place and the extraordinary richness of its bird life overwhelmed me. I spent each day looking and listening to the rare duck and geese, the divers, the wild swans, that abounded in all the inlets and lagoons along the shore. It was a place where nature was triumphant over man. Not savagely triumphant, as one

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It is in the dense and dark fir-forests of the Scandinavian hinterlands that Conchis sees Henrik communing with the unknown, and begins to question the implacability of science’s grasp on the world, emphasising, through an association between a psychology and an ecology, the peculiarly mysterious quality of wild nature. It is true that Henrik is literally engaged in a mystical encounter in this episode, and that his life of ascetisim and isolation does not represent a particularly ‘natural’ lifestyle. However I am more interested in Conchis’ interpretation of Henrik’s revelation, and more interested still in the reader’s interpretation of this chapter of the novel. Nature is here calmly and nobly ‘triumphant over man’; ‘triumphant’ seeming to here signify ‘greater than’ and ‘surmounting of’, without any malevolent intent on the side of nature. Henrik’s pillar of fire reveals to Conchis ‘a world beyond that in which I lived’ (M 309). The greater-than-human natural world within which this revelation has been shaped has a similar function in the context of the chapter. For the reader, both place and event brilliantly support each other. As Conchis, after having witnessed Henrik’s mystical experiences, feels a ‘humility akin to fierceness’ in the face of profound mystery, so too does Fowles’ prose in this chapter of The Magus evoke awe at the mystery of the living creation (M 309). Later in the novel the reader discovers that the Seidevarre episode is one of the few relics of fact in the extended catalogue of fictions Conchis has foisted on the unsuspecting Nicholas. This piece of knowledge adds authenticity to the episode within the context of the novel, further contradicting Conchis’ chimerical effect that the ‘cosmos is there for the story’. In his early twenties Fowles travelled through Scandinavia. He and a friend from Oxford had been selected by the Severn Wildfowl Trust for an ornithological expedition, comprised of four researchers, travelling north through Sweden, into Norway and across the northern landscape of the Finmark (2004: 61). Much like Conchis’ narration in

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The Magus, Fowles’ journal entries show us how it is both the wildness and the mystery of nature that impressed him. The author visits a remote farm on an inlet of the Pasvik River, Noatun, a place described by Warburton as ‘at the edge of the world about ninety miles south of Kirkenes near the Russian border’ (2004: 62). This location is clearly the model for the farm in The Magus, and again it is nature devoid of humanity that strikes a note with the traveller (EUL 102/1/1, 1949: 7): In the evening the absolute quiet, not just in the neigbourhood, but for dozens of miles around. The kind of quiet that can be traced back to the eternal absence of man – noone has ever been here since the beginning. This is the world minus man. Sometimes the silence is frightening, as when I waded back one dusk from fishing and felt the uncanniness of all that absence welling up into the personification of loneliness, of inhumanity.

The conifer forests of Scandinavia and northern Russia constitute one of the largest wooded areas on earth and would indeed leave an impression of wild and untamed non-human life in any visitor, even today. An aesthetic based on ‘the world minus man’, what Fowles’ calls ‘the unanthropomorphizable’ in one of his Scandinavian journal entries, might well be comprehended as belonging to the sublime (EUL 102/1/1, 1949: 2) . In a series of articles in The Spectator Joseph Addison encouraged his readers to appreciate the sublime in nature, the rough grandeur, or ‘agreeable Horror’, exhibited by the Alps, a volcano, a raging sea, or a desert. However, I find eighteenth- century discussions of the sublime such as those of Addison or Edmund Burke, not to mention Kant’s highly categorical aesthetic theory and its employment of that term, unhelpful in my attempt to illuminate Fowles’ encounter with the fir forests of northern Europe. In Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, for example, a landscape is only describable as sublime if it arouses feelings of human weakness in the face of a threatening power (Burke 1996: 135). Further it is usually empty of biological life. Although Fowles here describes the forests of northern Europe as ‘lonely’, in The Magus he stresses that they are simply indifferent to humans. In neither the author’s fiction nor his journal writing is this natural world figured as actively threatening, as would be characteristic of a sublime landscape. Secondly, the landscapes I have discussed, in The Magus and in the journal entries, are not empty. Sublime

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scenes engender feelings that the universe is greater than one, but it is the inanimate universe that is usually signified in art, for example the mass of tumbling rock and rubble on a mountain side in Philip James de Loutherbourg’s painting ‘An Avalanche in the Alps’ (1803 [de Botton 2002: 162-3]). Fowles’ landscapes are, rather, full of living plants and animals, of biological life. Fifteen years after his first visit, Fowles returned to Norway with a friend to study and observe the bird life there. The two friends travelled by ship, and the diarist recorded his first glimpse of the wild north (EUL, 102/1/14, 26 June 1964: 7): At the Folda, a heavy swell. We stood on deck and watched the tiny fragile terns screaming over the grey waves; a great skua swinging ominously through the troughs. The great skua is a great sinister bird not just because of its dark shape but because of its seeming total indifference to man. Like all the skuas it always appears bent on journeys and purposes of its own; as if man is irrelevant to its existence. It is the very opposite of those species that clearly do depend on man – the sparrow, say. Even the land birds of prey are affectible; our systems of living affect theirs. But the skua is pelagic, a mystery, before us and after us, and never of us.

Here the skua becomes totemic for nature in northern Europe. Being pelagic, dwelling on the open sea, the skua ensures its ‘total indifference to man’. The perspective of this largest of predatory European gulls represents a world cut adrift from the shores of humanity. On this visit in 1964 Fowles revisits Noatun, the farm in a northern fir-forest he visited in 1949 and modelled the fictional farm Seidivarre on in The Magus. The farm environment is constituted by a grassy yard, small farmhouse, blue water and wind (EUL 102/1/14, 1964: 29): Even the house was familiar again, at once, like a shock. The old green commode, an old cast-iron stove, the bird books, the guitar, the loom, the fishing and hunting apparatus. Photographs. The unmistakably genuine Thoreau, or Jefferies, feel of the place; the mixture of simplicity, nature, and intellect, knowledge’.

The author’s admiration for the acknowledged masters of nineteenthcentury American and British nature writing is obvious. The mixture of nature and knowledge he associates with these writers is also an apt description of his own nature-related work: it too is the site of a com-

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plex confluence of natural and cultural influences. Standing by the river he continues (EUL 102/1/14, 1964: 29): I hear, far away, a strange call, and I search the river through the Zeiss [binoculars]. I see them three or four miles away, four white shapes, wild swans, swimming against the current. After a while they flap slowly off the water, dreamlike against the green fir-forest, and call again, the most beautiful of bird cries, the last and literal swansong of the European wild, and vanish into Russia.

Why talk of the last ‘swansong of the European wild’ in this undoubted wilderness retreat, the reader of the diaries wonders? One continues to read the passage, and the man who lives on the farm, Schaaning, tells Fowles that the clearing of the forests for lumber is causing the local bird populations to go to Russia to breed; the elks have returned, but elk shooting has started again. The forests are being cut ‘wholesale’ and ‘“I plant kilo after kilo of seeds to repair the damage they are doing.”’ (EUL 102/1/14, 1964: 30): I asked about the name Noatun. “My father called it after the god Njord in the myth. You know Njord said that at his house he was awakened each morning by wild swan. Before 1914, when I was a boy, I remember we always used to have two hundred wild swans out there in the lagoon. And now, what, ten if we are lucky. All is changed.”

Fowles ends (EUL 102/1/14, 1964: 30): We have only an hour with him, yet he is in his way a memorable person, a solitary, a fighter for solitude, for wild life, for trees and birds and his view of life. And somehow I feel that Noatun is a part of me in a way that very few places are, mysteriously, a dream that remains a dream even when visited, when awake, a last fragment of a better world, like those four swans wheeling in the sky and going east out of sight.

Fowles’ is strongly affected, as Conchis in The Magus is strongly affected by Henrik, by this ‘fighter for solitude, for wild life’. The dream-like atmosphere of the fictional Seidevarre episode persists in the spirit of the actual place. If this is a retreat in nature it is a highly ambivalent one: it is a ‘fragment of a better world’. It is the combination of elemental nature with intellect and knowledge that attracts the author to Noatun, a place he portrays as something like Thoreau’s

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cabin beside Walden Pond. Yet it is a ‘last fragment’, and as beautiful as the wild swans may be, there are only four of them, and in a moment they wheel in the sky, ‘going east out of sight’. Nature is being encroached upon even here by the logging industry. While enough wilderness remains to give the author an impression of wild Europe, and an avatar of a better world, the reality of environmental degradation is not hidden. Fowles’ calling the literal swans’ song of the European wild ‘the most beautiful of bird cries’ summons up the traditional elegiac symbolism of the swan’s song, highlighting the melancholy ambivalence of the situation. Fowles’ love of the mystery of wild nature is also found closer to home, in relation to the English countryside. After having lived in London for eleven years, in 1965 the author and his wife Elizabeth moved to the Underhill Farm, an old farm house in a heavily wooded area of Dorset by the sea, the Undercliff. Behind Underhill Farm and to its west the forest of the Undercliff came up to within a few metres of the farm building, as it does today. After this move from London to the country the reader of the journals remarks how much time Fowles begins spending wandering in the fields and observing fauna and flora. In his diaries one notices a new vividness of impression as the countryside comes fresh to his London-accustomed gaze and smogaccustomed senses. The shift from the human sphere of technology and built environment to a natural setting is well described by David Abram. In the absence of the sounds of automobile engines birdsong becomes audible; in the absence of street lights the Milky Way becomes visible at night; and smells, of the sea or wet earth for example, seem to have added vibrancy. Suddenly we find ‘ourselves inhabiting a sensuous world that had been waiting, for years, at the very fringe of our awareness’ (Abram 1996: 63). In such a way does a reader of Fowles’ journal from 1965 notice that as the author becomes reacquainted with organic entities such as trees, birds and hedgehogs, his senses are energised and awakened. One day Fowles writes: ‘Brown owls. They hoot round us at nights. Lovely cool sounds – mystic oboes’ (2003: 645). These night sounds, these ‘mystic oboes’, are a pertinent example of how such a ‘recuperation of the sensuous’ finds expression in the author’s writing. According to Abram the ‘mass-produced artefacts of civilization, from milk cartons to washing machines to computers, draw our senses into a dance that endlessly reiterates itself without variation’ (1996: 64).

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The rhythms and forms of the earth, on the other hand, ‘the patterns on the stream’s surface as it ripples over the rocks, or on the bark of an elm tree, or in a cluster of weeds, are all composed of repetitive figures that never exactly repeat themselves’ (Abram 1996: 64). In this way following the shapes and forms of the natural world takes our awareness in unpredictable directions. Part of the experience of mystery is an attunement to the unpredictable. Thus the sound of brown owls at night becomes further explicable as ‘mystic’: the bird’s hoots draw the author’s attention into an iterative pattern that cannot be foretold. Elsewhere Fowles writes of a similar experience in the world after dark at Underhill Farm (EUL 102/1/15, 18/12/1965: 3): A new night sound in this world of strange night sounds – a kind of fluttering, windy warble. Soft and remote, water going down a vortex and through to another world. One of the most evocative noises I have ever heard – it summons up the mystery of nature in a way that a curlew’s cry calls up its wildness. I stand at the door and it calls out of the pitch black trees behind, soft as down, old as time, a windy chur. In science? The female tawny owl.

This strange night sound had not been predicted. The owl’s ‘windy warble’ becomes totemic for the mystery of English nature in the way the enigmatic wanderings of the skua were for northern Europe. According to Abram many tribal peoples, for example the native people of the Amazon rainforest, and the Koyukon Indians of northwestern Alaska, have related to the communicative calls of non-human animals as a form of language (1996: 144-5). The wild speaks (and I will examine this notion further in chapter nine). The language of Fowles’ owl is ‘soft and remote, water going down a vortex and through to another world’. However in the above excerpt we are faced with written text, not with the actual real-life phenomenon of an owl’s call. Again following Abram, the sound symbolism of onomatopoeia in human language may be responsive to a particular ecology, and indeed it is here: if we are to read out this excerpt from Fowles’ journal we notice the assonance of ‘windy warble’, and the soft ‘c’ in ‘a windy chur’, both echoic sounds gesturing towards the owl’s expressive character. Fowles registers the mystery of wild nature with fine sensitivity, simultaneously showing how inadequate a scientific apprehension of natural phenomena can be.

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As I began this chapter by arguing, Fowles’ attraction to woodland environments is centrally an attraction towards mystery. The Seidevarre episode in The Magus, as well as Fowles’ Scandinavian journal entries, emphasise nature’s independence from human society and culture, its ‘mysterious vigour’. To further comprehend this attraction to the mystery of wild nature we can turn to evolutionary history and psychology. As I mentioned in chapter four, over the millennia certain sets of genes have emerged in the species Homo sapiens which have established certain paths of pre-learning in the human brain, responses to external stimuli which are easier to learn at a young age than other possible responses to those stimuli (which is not to say that those other responses cannot be learned). A fear of snakes seems to be one of these tendencies in the portion of human nature that is physically based. As the cards fell, more genes allowing the prelearned behaviour of fear of snakes made it through the generations as more organisms carrying those genes avoided contact with serpents and reproduced (more, that is, than those who were indifferent to the serpent image). Could a liking for wild nature, the habitat our species has spent all but the tiniest fraction of its existence living in and amongst, be another such ‘epigenetic rule’? As I earlier argued, following Edward O. Wilson, among others, it could be and most likely is. Wilson coined the term ‘biophilia’, meaning ‘the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life’ (1992: 350). One aspect of biophilia is an attraction towards wilderness and Wilson interprets wilderness as ‘a metaphor of unlimited opportunity, rising from the tribal memory of a time when humanity spread across the world, valley to valley, island to island, godstruck, firm in the belief that virgin land went on forever past the horizon’ (1992: 351). Perhaps if particular people were attracted to exploring the edge of an unknown natural environment, to mystery, in a word, and its range of latent possibilities and opportunities, then those people would be more likely to reproduce through the acquisition of new food sources or more secure dwelling places, and with the effect of natural selection their genes would spread out through the human gene pool. In the words of Wilson ‘evolutionary genetics tells us that even if just one person in a thousand survived because of a genetic predisposition to explore the unknown and persevere in daunting circumstances, then

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over many generations natural selection would have installed the predisposition in the whole human race to wonder and take the dare’ (2002: 147-8). Stephen Kaplan and Rachel Kaplan, after performing experiments on human habitat preference, found that ‘paths bending around hills, meandering streams, gaps in foliage, undulating land, and partly blocked views grab our interest by hinting that the land may have important features that could be discovered by further exploration’ (Pinker 1997: 377). So perhaps here we have an explanation for Fowles’ penchant for forming ‘wandering wood acquaintances’. In choosing to live at Underhill Farm Fowles and his then wife Elizabeth had chosen to live in what is one of the most mysterious areas of southern England: the Undercliff. This area of chaotic topography, lush flora and steep slopes extends from within a few minutes walk west of the town of Lyme Regis in Dorset six miles west along a section of almost completely uninhabited coast (a rare thing in densely populated southern England) towards the town of Axmouth in Devon. It encompasses an area of almost eight hundred acres (Warburton 2004: 279). The reason the Undercliff has remained largely wooded and uninhabited is that it comprises a narrow band of unstable and subsiding cliffs, crevices and plateaus that run between the sea shore and the last useful, flat agricultural land further up. Charles and Sarah walk in the Undercliff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Their walks would inevitably take them twisting and turning, up and down, over streams and through dells, with occasional glimpses of the sea below to the left and a continual profusion of dripping greenery on both sides of the path. The flora is temperate here for the most part, but due to the numerous springs, high rainfall, good soil, proximity of the Gulf Stream, the area being protected from the north winds and tilted towards the sun, the luxuriance of the verdure seems the closest to a tropical rainforest the British Isles can boast. Indeed in The French Lieutenant’s Woman the narrator does describe the location as ‘the nearest this country can offer to a tropical jungle’ (FLW 71). Diversity, or the promise of diversity, is an integral element in the experience of mystery, and biodiversity can in this way be experienced as mysterious. Biodiversity is highest in the tropical rainforests ringing the equator, but at least to a reader of this novel, it appears to be present in the Undercliff. Bracken, wild clematis, arbutus, ilex, and here and there some huge ashes and beeches are present. The ac-

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tual place, as well as its fictional representation, is very evocative of mystery. Every step forward or incline of the head hints at a whole green world still undiscovered. In this way the Undercliff is an agreeable site for a species with a predisposition ‘to wonder and take the dare’. Both in the northern forests sketched in The Magus and Fowles’ Scandinavian journal entries, and in the shape of the Undercliff of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Fowles’ English journal entries from the late 1960s we find substantiation of Stephen Kaplan and Rachel Kaplan’s conclusion that conformations of land or flora which partly block our view grab our interest by hinting that the environment may have significant features that could be discovered by venturing further afield. The Seidevarre episode in The Magus embodies Fowles’ affirmation in The Tree that woodlands are both the perfect symbol for the mysterious and kinds of ‘green chapels and churches’. The episode’s forceful evocation of nature as a quantity beyond human calculation, its demonstration that the cosmos is really not ‘for the story’, makes it unique and noteworthy within the author’s body of fiction. As I have shown, Fowles’ major fictional works as well as some of his unpublished journal entries register with particular clarity the attractions of the ‘world of strange night sounds’, the attractions of the incipiently known natural environment.

Chapter 7 Science Not the Only Avenue: Fowles’ Anti-Positivism I have now traced the spectrum of Fowles’ literary representations of the natural world. The progression of the study has been such: the isolation of islands and sacred combes (chapter one); our contestable status as belonging with nature (chapter two); an examination of Fowles’ engagement with the pastoral mode (chapter three); the figure of nature as a loved and lost domain (chapter four); and nature seen through the lens of evolutionary theory and natural history (chapter five). In the last chapter (chapter six) I discussed Fowles’ representations of nature as a mysterious presence. This diversity of representations of the environment in Fowles’ writings has occasioned some epistemological debate in the author’s work. In the present chapter I explore the tension and the debate in the author’s oeuvre between different ways of apprehending nature: principally, science and art. This internal debate has been conducted largely in Fowles’ nonfiction, with few relevant excerpts to be found in the journals. However it is an epistemological strain that is also heard in the novels. To start this section of my discussion, and to leaven its likely theoretical heaviness, I adduce a scene from the start of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Charles Smithson, weighed down with a assortment of cumbersome fossil- collecting apparatus, walks out to the west of Lyme Regis one unusually warm day in March, 1867. He potters along the boulder-strewn shore of Pinhay Bay, in the South West of England, in his stout nailed boots. Charles, man of leisure, competent ornithologist, botanist, and amateur palaeontologist, is in search of petrified sea urchins (‘tests’) on this glorious March morning. He becomes cut off from the path he had planned to take back along the shore to Lyme by the rising tide. Rather than return the way he had come, Charles is now forced to walk up a steep embankment into the wooded area west of Lyme Regis known as the Undercliff. He arrives at the top of the slope (FLW 71-2):

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When Charles had quenched his thirst and cooled his brow with his wetted handkerchief he began to look seriously around him. Or at least he tried to look seriously around him; but the little slope on which he found himself, the prospect before him, the sounds, the scents, the unalloyed wildness of growth and burgeoning fertility, forced him into anti-science. The ground about him was studded gold and pale yellow with celandines and primroses and banked by the bridal white of densely blossoming sloe; where jubilantly green-tipped elders shaded the mossy banks of the little brook he had drunk from were clusters of moschatel and woodsorrel, most delicate of English spring flowers. Higher up the slope he saw the white heads of anemones, and beyond them deep green drifts of bluebell leaves. A distant woodpecker drummed in the branches of some high tree, and bullfinches whistled quietly over his head; newly arrived chiffchaffs and willowwarblers sang in every bush and treetop. When he turned he saw the blue sea, now washing far below; and the whole extent of Lyme Bay reaching round, diminishing cliffs that dropped into the endless yellow sabre of the Chesil Bank, whose remote top touched that strange English Gilbraltar, Portland Bill, a thin grey shadow wedged between azures.

For a moment Charles the scientist stands on the wooded slope and takes in the beauty around him. The way in which he apprehends the natural world has been forced into ‘anti-science’. The apprehension is holistic: his field of vision encompasses the flowers in his foreground as well as those further up the slope, then the sea below him. Although some names are adduced, the ‘unalloyed wildness of growth’ foils any Linnaean attempts Charles might have made to establish an ordered view of the surroundings. Not only is his vision holistic, but his senses of smell and sound are activated: the scents of the celandines and the sound of a drumming woodpecker for example. Nature here impinges on the protagonist’s senses indiscriminately. The perception is emotionally affective — in the paragraph following this one we are told of how the scene appeals to Charles, even if the Victorian in him cannot quite rest content with an experiential and thus ‘uncollectible’ good. And yet all of this complex and rewarding if unscientific perception remains momentary. A paragraph later the narrator informs us that (FLW 73): Science eventually regained its hegemony, and he began to search among the beds of flint along the course of the stream for his tests. He found a pretty fragment of fossil scallop, but the sea-urchins eluded him. Gradually he moved through the

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trees to the west, bending, carefully quartering the ground with his eyes, moving on a few paces, then repeating the same procedure.

Here the scientific manner of perceiving nature is represented by the figure of a man ‘quartering the ground with his eyes’. The landscape is divided up and analysed, the activity driven by the power of human curiosity. Charles’ previous bout of ‘anti-science’ is now placed in contrast to this rigorously analytical procedure. A holistic and widelyreceptive perception of nature is replaced by an intellectually inquisitive and contextually limited one. It was of course palaeontology that drew Charles out into the woods in the first place on this March morning, not a desire to experience the beauty of his natural environment. However it is worth noting that more generally in the novel it is a scientific relationship with nature that dominates Charles’ experiences of the natural world; this scene is but one example. Before proceeding into a debate over the validity of varying ways of apprehending nature — the Charles of anti-science versus the student of paleontology — it will be useful to try and locate the author epistemologically. Fowles, sometimes worthy (some might say guilty) of the title ‘didactic novelist’, believes that the arts as well as the sciences search for a truth of sorts. Referring to the human journey on planet earth as ‘the cruise’, he had the following to say in his essay ‘The Nature of Nature’ (1998: 359): The arts establish their realities far less quickly, despite the instant communications of the global village; yet these slower fruits of feeling frequently affect and alter the general course of the ‘cruise’. The seeming-blind, hesitant, octopode gropings of the arts towards a more general sense of fulfilment (‘purpose’) for humanity are not all to be dismissed.

I believe that the notion of literature as being partly a site for human thinking, thinking in which there is a mediation from the particular, concrete human perspective to more generalised forms of cognition, is in many cases an appropriately conceived one. When the reception of a work of literature is performed by a reader it may, on an exploratory basis, help to illuminate that reader's life-historical situation (of course one can also derive sheer pleasure from the reading of a literary work, a derivation that is independent of our making use of the work in the broader context of our 'macro' concerns). This humanistic conception of the evaluative category ‘literature’, as a prominent ally to ethical

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thinking, is the kind of approach that is implied by Fowles’ notion of the ‘octopode gropings of the arts’. As I will argue, Fowles is a pragmatist. Richard Rorty has said of the pragmatist position that it (1982: xliii): …sees ethics as neither more 'relative' nor 'subjective' than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made scientific. Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its. Some of these inquiries come up with propositions, some with narratives, some with paintings.

The notion that ethical and evaluative discourse is a matter of trying to cope with, as Rorty puts it, various bits of the universe', ones different from those dealt with by natural scientific disciplines like physics, leads to the corollary that ethical and evaluative discourse should not be put on an inferior epistemological footing to other knowledge complexes. Rorty’s comment also contains the implicit suggestion that literature is a significant ally to ethical thinking broadly conceived. Hilary Putnam would agree, arguing that moral perplexities, for example not knowing and attempting to know how to live well, are often presented to us with great vividness and rich emotional detail in the novels of the last few centuries (1978: 96). This general pragmatist view, held also by Martha Nussbaum, would not dismiss the arts in their truth-seeking function (1990). Like science many literary works, not least obviously philosophical literature like Fowles’ own fiction, search for humanly useful, if fallibilistic, truths. Considering diverse comments Fowles makes elsewhere I have no qualms about putting the writer in such a pragmatist context. In The Aristos he affirms that ‘there is no absolute truth or reality’ (1970a: 107). In ‘Notes on an Unfinished Novel’, he writes ‘All human modes of description (photographic, mathematical, and the rest, as well as literary) are metaphorical’ (1998: 16). In The Aristos Fowles had quoted Ernst Mach, a German pragmatist who preceded the Americans, on one of the central tenets of pragmatism: ‘A piece of knowledge is never false or true – but only more or less biologically and evolutionally useful’ (2001: 85). As my present discussion is focussed on apprehensions of nature I return to Fowles’ explorations of science and art as varying ways to

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approach nature in particular. We have on the one hand the scientific, and on the other, what I will dub the ‘poetic’ manner of apprehending nature; as exemplified in the aforementioned scene from The French Lieutenant’s Woman. What is the relationship between these two ways of apprehending nature in contemporary society? What should, ideally, this relationship be? These are issues that have preoccupied Fowles for many years, most obviously in his non-fiction, but also in his fiction. Almost a decade after Charles’ walk in the woods and the historical romance of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the comparatively socially realist Daniel Martin was published. Here again, in a different generic context, we encounter the thought that science and art are different, not superior or inferior, ways to view the natural world. The eyes with which Daniel has come to see nature are ‘John Clare’s and Palmer’s… and Thoreau’s’ (DM 82). I have mentioned Palmer and will later discuss Thoreau. John Clare was a Northhamptonshire agricultural labourer and poet (1793 – 1864), who wrote verse in the idiom of his spoken English. Clare’s vision of nature was a green England of minutely observed and intimately loved plants and animals. In Fowles’ tribute poem to the long dead poet, ‘John Clare’, Clare is conceived of as a proto-ecological intelligence (1974: 89): …you were no Orthographer. But still you knew Ten thousand of their city minds Could not begin to see you clear. Your eyes, your tongue, your green Fertility and voice.

Like the ‘first violets by the west field wall’ that are the poems’ central image, Clare ‘also broke the land too soon’ (1974: 89). Indeed Clare was ahead of his time where, in poems like ‘To a Favourite Tree’ and ‘The Fallen Elm’, he laments the destruction of nature occasioned by the capitalism-fuelled march of ‘progress’ (quoted in Hayman 2003: 166). As E. P. Thompson wrote, ‘Clare may be described, without hindsight, as a poet of ecological protest: he was not writing about man here and nature there, but lamenting a threatened equilibrium in which both were involved’ (quoted in Bate 2003: 50). In poems such as ‘By Langley Bush’ Clare lamented the effect enclosure had had on places he loved: ‘By Langley Bush I roam, but the bush

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has left its hill;/ On Cowper Hill I stray, ‘tis a desert strange and chill’ (quoted in Bate 2003: 50). Misunderstood and mistreated by metropolitan gentlemen of the time, such as Lord Radstock who said his poems contained ‘radical slander’, Clare is rightly placed by Fowles in his tribute poem to the dead man as a fragile, prescient and strangely beautiful poetic voice who ‘broke the land’, or appeared in history, in an inclement environment. Clare’s, like Daniel’s relationship with nature, was often a one-toone relationship. As Richard Hayman says of Clare’s poem ‘Walks in the Woods’, Clare’s first impulse is one of escape. The poem begins when the poet enters the wood (quoted in Hayman 2003: 168): The brambles tearing at my clothes; And it may tear; I love the noise And hug the solitary joys.

As will become clear, Daniel’s attitude towards nature is full of emotional affectivity, and in this too Clare provides a parallel. Although Clare was well versed in the naturalists of the day, he wrote that ‘I love to look on nature with a poetic feeling which magnifys the pleasure’ (quoted in Hayman 2003: 169). As Jonathan Bate writes in his recent biography of Clare, ‘he despised the classification of flowers according to their formal generic status as opposed to their environmental context and medicinal use’ (2003: 103). Fowles’ novel Daniel Martin is structured not as a chronologically sequential narrative, but as a loosely arranged series of flash-backs and evasions from the present tense. In a scene from the past, placed towards the beginning of the novel, Daniel makes friends with a Catholic philosophy student, Anthony, while at Oxford in the late 1940s. The thing that initially brings the two young men together is their mutual interest in nature and, specifically, in orchid collecting. Daniel is collecting money for a leaving present for their shared servant, and happens to walk into Anthony’s sitting room. He notices a flower in a jam-jar on Anthony’s desk — it is the stem of a Man Orchid, Aceras. The two men realise that they share a common interest. However Daniel soon discovers that the fastidious and intellectually brilliant Anthony takes a ‘far more serious’ interest in nature than himself. Daniel comments on Anthony’s character that, ‘as with so much in his life, such an interest could only be methodical, deeply

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pursued, or non-existent’ (DM 68). It is worth noting the association of character types between Anthony-the-nature-investigator and Anthony-the-Oxford-philosopher. As Daniel says of his friend (DM 69): 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.

The kind of philosophers dominant in the forties at Oxford were heavily analytical. To use Fowles’ description of good lawyers elsewhere in his oeuvre, they had ‘secateurs in their mouths’ (T 19). We may presume that Anthony writes the kind of philosophy associated with figures such as Bertrand Russell. His interest in nature is, like his interest in philosophy, in establishing an ordered view of a very small area of enquiry. It is an analytically rigorous and strictly contextually limited approach to nature. In the following introspection of Daniel’s we find an elaboration of the relationships with nature Daniel supposes are held by the two Oxford friends (DM 70): 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 Godfrey [authors of British plant lists]. 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 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 re-immerse me; and when I am released from deprivation, I can’t stop that old self emerging.

Anthony’s relationship with nature is dominated by the need to name and catalogue, by the strictures of science. His approach to nature is, in comparison to Daniel’s, hostile to mystery: rather than allowing the elusive degrees of hybridisation to go unrecorded he must note them down. Daniel’s relationship, like John Clare’s, appears to us as a far more emotionally rewarding one. His is a poetic relationship with nature, it is comprised of a sequence of ‘poetic moments’, and was established during a boyhood in the green Devon countryside. Daniel’s ‘solitary boyhood’ recalls my earlier discussion in chapter one of

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the figure of the sacred combe in Fowles’ writings. The protagonist’s boyhood was solitary and it led him to nature as a theatre of mystery and magic, just as in the author’s recountings of his boyhood experiences of isolated copses in the autobiographical The Tree. The ‘magic in the anthropological sense’ Daniel refers to emphasises the aspect of the experience that was symbolic (Barfield 1997: 299). Rather than being a matter of factual representation Daniel’s ‘magical’ nature is one which satisfies psychological ends, such as a need for mystery and personal involvement. Later in the same novel, years after their university days, a middleaged Daniel is summoned from his life in California to Anthony’s death bed in Oxford. By now Daniel has been through a string of relationships. His career as a playwright has led from the theatres of England into writing screen plays for increasingly unintelligent and best-selling American movies. After a long overnight flight from America Daniel finds himself in the hospital room in Oxford where Anthony is dying. In the course of their final conversation Anthony reminds Daniel of something he had said to him in their student days. It concerns their hunting for orchids together: ‘you said that I knew only how to look at orchids – not for them’ (DM 179). This comment is followed by some melancholy self-depreciation on the part of Anthony, hinting that his subsequent career as an academic philosopher has been merely a case of ‘looking at’, and dismissively likening it to an ‘academic glass bead game’ (DM 180). What does such a distinction, between looking at and looking for, signify? I suggest that dualism is one between intellect – aligned with ‘looking at’ – and feeling – aligned with ‘looking for’. In the context of Daniel and Anthony’s hunting for orchids we could say that Anthony’s comment signified an inability in himself to appreciate the beauty and emotive attraction of the orchids. Anthony looked at the orchids, in the sense of establishing a scientifically ordered view of them, but he failed to look for them, in the sense of approaching them from personal volition and desire. He established the co-ordinates of their presence, but did not derive happiness from their being there. This distinction between looking at and looking for is a further elaboration of contrast between the poetic approach to the natural world professed (we might say confessed) by Daniel and the scientific approach represented in the novel by Anthony.

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The motif of gardening is also of interest in Daniel Martin. Daniel’s father, a parish priest, has a penchant for gardening and horticulture. This penchant has much in common with Anthony’s scientific approach to nature. It is explained by the narrator as coming from an antipathy towards wild nature: ‘He drew some analogy between horticulture and God watching over a world; in nature things happened behind your back, could not be supervised and controlled’ (DM 79). As I have mentioned, Anthony’s style of field naturalism and his style of philosophy are presented as running from the same well. Like the figure of Anthony, the mental world of Daniel’s father has little room for the unordered and the mysterious. Approached from this respect the following character traits form a complex constellation: passionate gardener/ practitioner of analytic philosophy/ vigilant field naturalist. All such figures in the novel share an underlying antagonism towards, rather than an ability to enjoy, ‘disorder’ and mystery in nature. These traits find a single point of reference in Fowles’ actual father. As he writes in The Tree, in the back garden of their house in an Essex suburb the author’s father kept a small collection of apple and pear trees, which were closely guarded and pruned. Fowles’ father had fought in the trenches during the First World War, and he had an aversion to wild nature just as he had a horror of the battlefields of France. Both were seen as hazardous, uncontrollable and dangerous. Fowles’ explanation of his father’s fruit orchard is that: ‘He had himself been severely pruned by history and family circumstance, and this was his answer, his reconciliation to his fate – his platonic ideal of the strictly controlled and safe, his Garden of Eden’ (T 19). In this context wild nature was a reprobated disorder; something to be taken into controlling hand. Fowles’ father not only loved to tend his apple and pear trees, but also to read philosophy (T 19-20): Those trees were in fact his truest philosophy, and his love of actual philosophy, the world of abstract ideas, was essentially… no more than a facet of his hatred of natural disorder. Good philosophers prune the chaos of reality and train it into fixed shapes, thereby forcing it to yield valuable and delicious fruit – or at least in theory.

Here the association between the analytic philosopher and the controller of nature is made fully explicit. One of Fowles’ father’s philosophical heroes was in fact Bertrand Russell, which allies him even

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more closely with the character of Anthony in Daniel Martin. In The Tree his father’s love of natural disorder coached into order is adduced by the writer as a fertile bed for his appreciation of the obverse: wild nature. As Fowles says: ‘My own ‘orchards’ were, from the moments I first knew them, the forgotten and increasingly deserted copses and woods of the West of England, and later, of France’ (T 20). Fowles’ garden behind his home Belmont House in Lyme Regis was until recently allowed to run wild, to be given over to his ‘cotenants’, a demonstration and proof of his happy tolerance of wild nature (T 22). In Daniel Martin the protagonist maintains a similar relationship with his father: his father’s love of gardening and the greenhouse becomes another ‘item on the bill’ of things Daniel actively avoids later in life (DM 79). The rebellious son Daniel, like the younger Fowles, prefers relating to nature in its wild state. At this point we must note that Daniel Martin does not present us with an infallible representation of the Scientist, in the figure of Anthony, and the Artist, in the figure of Daniel. Firstly one might say that Daniel Martin is a work of fiction and does not at any point claim that the character of Anthony is a representation of scientific knowing in general. If a reader’s interpretation of the work is that Fowles is suggesting this in Daniel Martin one could certainly object. Anthony’s lack of feeling (his ability to look at but not for) as well as his distrust of mystery and disorder do not seem to be essential to science per se, but rather happen to form a constellation, along with a reductionist approach to nature, in this particular character type, a character type that Fowles is familiar with autobiographically, through his father. This point should be stressed (and Fowles will be shown to err on this point in the next chapter): there is no necessary connection between an interest in science and a dislike of mystery or an inability to feel. The pleasure in finding things out about the natural world that is testified to in the author’s journals should be proof enough of this. On the other hand reductionism does seem to be essential to science. Any scientist must break down a phenomenon into its constituent parts to understand how it functions, even if he or she is to then move onwards to a more synthetic project. As an advocate of a reductionist approach to nature Anthony does seem to be representative of the figure of the scientist. In Daniel Martin the protagonist has a slim knowledge of the botanical sciences, however at the point in the novel where Daniel meets

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Anthony the reader is already aware of his boyhood spent in the Devon countryside and his love of the natural landscape thereof. In relation to his scanty knowledge of botany Daniel remarks (DM 68): 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.

Nature had been a source of profound holistic, pleasure for the younger Daniel and such an affective rapport with the natural world is temporarily experienced by Daniel as worthy of shame. The relationship between the natural scientist and nature annexes the respectcommanding epistemological position in this intellectually conservative context. A similar dynamic was show-cased at the start of the present chapter: one recalls Charles’ sudden alacrity in ‘getting on’ with the ‘serious’ task of searching for tests in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles himself is a reasonably accomplished field botanist (flowers are never simply described as ‘red’ or ‘yellow’ in his novels: ‘Everywhere there were flowers – harebells, gentians, deep magnetared alpine geraniums, intense yellow asters, saxifrage’ [M 258]) and perhaps his comments on this topic in, for example, The Tree, spring to some extent from a personally lamented tendency to overwhelmingly approach nature scientifically rather than also experience it as a series of affective gestalts. Although he has never formally studied the biological sciences – he read French at Oxford – the author’s nonfiction essays frequently evince an interest in field naturalism. While the scientific and the poetic views of nature are represented dialogically by differing characters in the author’s fiction, we can see that the tension between the two paths would be particularly acute in the mind of one who is both a Wordsworthian lover of nature and an amateur naturalist. Does Fowles the essayist think that the character of Daniel should have felt ashamed of ‘the buried continent’ of emotion and affect that nature had been to him in his adolescence? Should Charles have been brisker in getting on with the task of searching for tests? Of modern perceptions of the natural world the author writes in his essay The Enigma of Stonehenge that (1980: 125):

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It is not that we cannot see the wood for the trees; we can hardly even see the trees themselves now through all the fact-cloud of botanies, taxonomies, biochemistries – the sheer quantity of knowledge we have on them as things. Such knowledge is essential for the professional forester; what is not essential is that we should all behave like professional foresters.

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘Nature’ we find this very same metaphor (1982: 74): Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic.

The metaphor is identical: for both Emerson and Fowles, the naturelover’s sight may be obscured by an over-bearing cloud of scientific knowledge (further, the eighteenth-century notion of a ‘savant’ ought to preclude the knowledge specialisation of a contemporary figure like a ‘professional forester’). In The Tree Fowles cites Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century indexer of nature, as close to the root of a modern problem with manners of perceiving the natural world. On a trip to deliver a lecture at Uppsala University Fowles was given the choice of afterwards visiting one of the most famous libraries in Europe or going to see the garden of Linneaus. He chose the latter, for its importance in the history of modern attitudes towards nature. The cataloguing of the natural world is quintessential science: like the botanising Anthony or the figure of Charles ‘quartering the ground with his eyes’, this approach breaks down the whole into its component parts. It was, as is partly hinted by my reference to Emerson, the Romantics who were to mount the classic rejection of such an approach to nature — Blake’s image of Newton with compass makes for easy comparison with that of Charles quartering the ground with his eyes — and it is this alignment of Fowles with Romanticism that I will follow in the next chapter (Blake 1795: Tate). The delineating and categorising view of external reality is, while undoubtedly useful, not always appropriate, and Fowles has urged an acknowledgement of its frequent inadequacy in the life of the average human experiencing nature for pleasure: ‘Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total

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reality towards anthropocentrism…’ (T 26-7). This is, according to the author, ‘the bitter fruit from the tree of Uppsalan knowledge’ (T 27). To be the pedantic pragmatist one should not claim that an absolute alternative to anthropocentrism exists, but the author’s point remains true that indiscriminate applications of the analytical process, breaking down the whole into component categories with interrelated functions, can be responsible for a humanly unsatisfactory relationship with nature. Fowles states that after comprehending the inadequacy of the scientific reification of nature, he came to believe ‘…that this approach represented a major human alienation, affecting all of us, both personally and socially…’ (T 29). Such a criticism of the dominance of scientific ways of perceiving external reality was made by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Much of their discussion here was of the domination of nature by science: ‘Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them’ (1972: 77). The Dialectic of Enlightenment was a significant and influential work, but in its relentlessly pessimistic focus on scientific positivism and the negative aspects of Enlightenment it failed to provide any positive, alternative models for knowledge. By way of introduction to a discussion of other philosophies in The Aristos, Fowles wrote that (1970a: 65): We may reject some of these just as we might reject certain houses to live in; we cannot reject them as houses for anyone else to live in, we cannot deny them utility in part, beauty in part, meaningfulness in part; and therefore truth in part.

While Fowles himself is far from ignorant of the natural sciences and their methodologies (he is indeed the real ‘competent ornithologist and botanist’ and amateur paleontologist behind the character Charles Smithson), he has come to see science as dangerous when it attempts to dictate that we use the, admittedly highly productive and thus quite glamorous, ‘house’ of science as our only intellectual address. In his essay on Stonehenge Fowles took the opportunity to urge that science is dangerous when it ‘attempts to dictate our personal experience and perception of the whole’, and encouraged society not to forget that,

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apart from science, ‘other systems of perceiving, understanding and deriving benefit from external reality exist’ (1980: 124). The writings of the latter day Frankfurt School thinker, Jurgen Habermas, provide us with a wider ranging model of epistemology than that found in the work of Horkheimer or Adorno. It is heuristic here in that within this model we can situate the positivistic aspect of Enlightenment thought arguably over-emphasised in the twentieth century and here lamented by Fowles, as well as suggesting epistemological alternatives adjacent to this scientistic form of knowledge. For Habermas all knowledge is human-interest constitutive; the act of knowing is guided by what he has claimed are anthropologically deepseated, human interests. In the case of science the human interest is essentially in predictive control over the natural environment. While the human species does indeed have a ‘technical interest’ in predictive control over the natural environment, it also has a ‘practical interest’ in achieving intersubjective understanding on questions of how to order social and cultural life within common traditions. As Dilthey maintained in the nineteenth century, this practical interest is responsible for a form of knowledge different from, but not a priori less ‘rational’ and less important than, that generated by science. Fowles’ plea that contemporary society not consider the natural-scientific manner of perceiving the natural world unconditionally the most epistemologically weighty one is from this perspective entirely justified. An insidiously ideological positivism, implicitly and unconsciously endorsing science as the only field of rational discussion, is in fact only the spawn of one, the ‘technical’, human interest. Other equally important human interests exist. In relation to knowledge of the natural world these might sometimes use entirely different sets of values from those at play in the natural sciences. It is true that since the 1970s Habermas’ epistemology has evolved into a theory of communicative rationality, however even with Habermas’ shift away from the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ to an epistemology based in intersubjectivity we are still left with a very useful framework in which to place Fowles’ complaints against the dominance of science in our culture, as hinted at in Daniel Martin. Within this theory there is still a universalistic sense of rationality native to the moral-practical domain: we call someone rational who is able to (among other things), when criticised, ‘justify his action by explicating the given situation in the light of legitimate expectations’ (quoted in White 1990: 28). Using

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this theory we can say that it is undesirable for validity claims to scientific truth to condescend to other domains in life, to the entirely different field of validity claims to normative legitimacy. I have called Fowles a pragmatist and the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism is also a potential ally for the fictional Daniel in his intimidation by scientific epistemology. According to Hilary Putnam, if values such as goodness and kindness are epistemologically suspect from a narrow scientific view, so too are scientific criteria such as coherence, simplicity and justification. Rather than thinking that this means we should give up such things, and rather than continue to do what we are doing which is to reject just some of them (the ones that do not fit a narrow instrumentalist conception of rationality which itself has not intellectual justification), we should 'recognise that all values, including the cognitive ones, derive their authority from our idea of human flourishing and our idea of reason. These two ideas are interconnected: our image of an ideal theoretical intelligence is simply a part of our ideal of total human flourishing, and makes no sense wrenched out of the total ideal, as Plato and Aristotle saw' (Putnam 1990: 141). This leads Putnam to a reconstructed realism, a ‘realism with a human face’ to echo the title of one of his books. Fowles’ own pragmatism is evident when he says that science should not automatically deny value to any other system outside science: ‘No society can live by scientific bread alone, for the very simple reason that no individual can or does exist on such a diet’ (1980: 11). Putnam continues this line of thought where he writes that: ‘we make and cannot escape making value judgments of all kinds in connection between activities of every kind. Nor do we treat these judgments as matters of mere taste; we argue about them seriously, we try to get them right’ (Putnam 1994: 154). In other words, it is a fact that we are currently living on more than scientific bread, and that society also profits from moral insights. Such ethical knowledge is not conceptually precluded from possessing epistemological seriousness. I am not trying to suggest in this chapter that nature for Fowles cannot be very profitably known through the prism of scientific classification and method. This is after all the man who wrote in his diaries that, ‘the natural historian has a profound advantage over other men’, asserting that the model of finding things out about the natural world induced ‘wonder-lust’ and possessed a kind of ‘sanctity’. Science is evidently one very profitable vocabulary one can use to talk about

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nature, and not merely for purposes of material survival. Pace one possible interpretation of Daniel Martin, there is no necessary connection between an interest in science and a dislike of mystery or an inability to feel. If Fowles is suggesting this in Daniel Martin we might object, however as I have said, he need not be. Reductionism, on the other hand, is essential to the scientific method. My point here has been to show that Fowles’ comments in his essay ‘The Enigma of Stonehenge’ have a historical, philosophical context in which to be placed. It has also been to show that relying on certain epistemologies one can read Daniel Martin and assert that Daniel should not have been ashamed of his emotional rapport with the natural. Daniel should not have needed to hide from his Oxbridge contemporary the kind of environmental imagination shared with John Clare, the one that places nature primarily as a ‘catalysis’ and a sequence of poetic moments. In relation to the previously mentioned scene from The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Charles’ moment of ‘anti-science’ should not have been abrogated in such a hurry. An appeal to trends in American pragmatism (particularly the work of Hilary Putnam) and Frankfurt school philosophy (particularly the work of Jurgen Habermas) would allow us to object on behalf of these characters, against the positivistic figures in their fictional lives, that science is one human tool, which produces one set of highly useful results (centrally, predicting the outcome of physical processes), but which should not be considered as providing the only humanly meaningful knowledge of, or access to, the natural world. Using an epistemological framework in which what is true is what is, broadly speaking, useful in increasing human flourishing, the notion of reason can extend into other domains such as ethics. We might even speak of a ‘poetic’ knowledge of nature that increased human understanding without it being precluded from having epistemological seriousness. It is to such poetic knowledge that I now turn.

Chapter 8 Romanticism Heals a Blinded Eye: Poetic Receptivity to Nature Fowles’ work is suitable for an ecocritical treatment in that it contains many ecocritical tropes: pastoral in The Magus and Daniel Martin; communities of natural beings in the diaries; science in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the mystery of wilderness in The Magus, to list some of the most significant. However Fowles himself should be regarded as an ecocritic. Interestingly he has not been so regarded. Should Fowles’ nonfiction not be simply placed, by contemporary critics, in the generic context of ‘nature writing’? While Gilbert White in the eighteenth century catalogued the many birds and other natural phenomena of his parish in descriptive and analytic prose, and Richard Jefferies in the nineteenth century wrote about the ways of the rural poor and the life of the countryman, the majority of Fowles’ nonfiction nature essays — ‘Weeds, Bugs, Americans’ (1970), ‘The Blinded Eye’ (1971), The Tree (1979) and ‘The Nature of Nature’ (1995) — depart from this tradition in concerning themselves with the issue of epistemology, the matter of how we know the natural world. Such considerations mark Fowles’ relevant nonfiction as ecocritical, as reflective on the relationship between environmental imagination and place. In the last chapter I discussed the representations of a ‘scientific’ and a ‘poetic’ view of nature in Fowles’ writings, noted his comments on the tension between the two views, and then placed the author’s anti-positivism in a larger philosophical context. In the present chapter I progress to an examination of some of the author’s writings on the alternative to a scientific manner of perceiving nature. Here I look in greater depth at Fowles’ positive conception of how one might profitably approach nature as a non-specialist human being. In the

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previous chapter I adduced the critique of modernity and the Enlightenment provided by the Frankfurt school, however in a sense I need not have looked beyond the shores of green England. I am referring to the enduringly relevant challenge posed by the Romantic Revival of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English poetry. Fowles’ essay ‘The Blinded Eye’ borrows its title from John Clare’s poem ‘Summer Evening’. Fowles misquotes from this poem the following lines (1998: 259): A sparrow’s life’s as sweet as ours. Hardy clowns! Grudge not the wheat Which hunger forces birds to eat; Your blinded eyes, worst foes to you, Can’t see the good which sparrows do.

The correct quotation is (Clare 1984: 16): A sparrows lifes as sweet as mine… Foolhardy clown neer grudg[e] the wheat Which hunger forces them to eat Your blinded eyes worst foes to you Neer see the good which sparrows do

This poem begins by describing a country scene over which the sun is sinking. Bats flit by, doves coo, and shepherds drive their sheep home. The poet writes that mischievous boys often climb up to the nests of sparrows to kill them, but affirms that at his cottage they are safe and welcome; he writes that the clown (a term which meant ‘peasant’ in this age) sees the sparrow only as a pest which preys on crops, and fails to see the ways in which sparrows benefit farmers, for example in consuming insects. The peasant’s ‘blinded eyes’ are blinded by an overly selective and short-sighted view of ecology. In the context of his essay, Fowles takes Clare’s image of a crass and short-sighted view of nature as a ‘worse foe’ than actual, physical environmental hazards, and applies it to the human habit of obscuring nature with a ‘fact-cloud’ of names. Fowles’ treatment for ‘the blinded eye’ is found in his proposal that Romantic nature poetry is a significant alternative model for perceiving nature.

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In this essay Fowles writes (predating Jonathan Bate’s critical treatment of the Romantic poets as proto-ecological by almost twenty years) that we had better think twice before dismissing the Romantic movement’s theory of nature. But what is this theory of nature? According to Fowles it is that one caricatured as: ‘Nature with a capital N as an evoker of beautiful and noble sentiments’ (1998: 263). Looking beyond the caricature, M. H. Abrams notes that during the period extending from approximately the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, through the first three decades of the nineteenth century, nature ‘became a persistent subject of poetry, and was described with an accuracy and sensuous nuance unprecedented in earlier writers’ (quoted in Day 1996: 3). Writers like William Wordsworth construed physical nature as exhibiting a health and goodness that stood in contrast to the corruptions of human civilisation. Such an attitude encouraged the belief that the study of nature would grant moral goodness. In contrast to the generalisations and classical allusions of neoclassical verse, such as that of Alexander Pope, Wordsworth, in a poem like ‘Tintern Abbey’, gives detailed attention, and transcendental significance, to physical nature as observed by an individual consciousness. Not only do the ‘forms of beauty’ of a natural landscape give the poet ‘tranquil restoration’, but when amidst the woods and the meadows he has felt (1971: 23-4): A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

Nature for Wordsworth is a loved and profoundly inspirational other. Another aspect of the Romantic view of nature was the idea that the subjective mind to some extent structures what it perceives; or as Abrams puts it, the Neoclassical view of art as imitation, the ‘mirror’, gaves way to view of art as shedding light on the world, as a ‘lamp’ (quoted in Day 1996: 55). Some Romantics, such as Blake, believed that the mind could see through the material world to a greater, divine reality beyond (Day 1996: 57). Then again, Wordsworth, in The Prelude, shows an interest in an aesthetic of the sublime (Day 1996: 187). However the sentiment found in ‘Tintern Abbey’, the sense that the

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natural world has restorative and inspirational qualities, may be argued to be at the heart of the Romantic movement’s ‘theory of nature’. This is the argument of Jonathan Bate in Romantic Ecology, Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. Bate argues that Wordsworth ‘sought to enable his readers better to enjoy or endure life’, ‘by teaching them to look at and dwell in the natural world’ (1991: 4). At the start of the 1990s Bate contended that moving ‘from red to green’ in our reading of Wordsworth will bring the true force of Romanticisim to bear ‘what are likely to be some of the most pressing issues of the coming decade’, for example ‘the greenhouse effect’, and ‘the destruction of the tropical rainforest’ (1991: 9). I suggest that we follow Bate’s reading of the Romantics as proto-ecological. In doing so we will inevitably concur with Fowles in his claim that the Romantics’ view of nature should not be dismissed. Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is cited approvingly by Fowles in his essay. In this poem the poet listens in the dark to the song of a nightingale. The poet feels a dissolute happiness (1993: 790-1): That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

After alluding to Keats’ verse, Fowles goes on to caricature the Victorians, being those (1998: 262): who thought that if you knew that Luscinia megarhynchos laid eggs averaging twenty-one millimetres in their longest diameter, you were far more highly evolved in your understanding of nature than poor Keats, who knew no better than to write an ode to Luscinia – vulgarly called the nightingale.

The author’s belief is that attitudes towards nature such as the one expressed in Keats’ poem should be accorded more epistemological gravity than they are commonly; ones, even today in some forums, coming off a trivial and pejoratively ‘unscientific’ second after the attitude of the scientist. This second, scientific attitude towards the nightingale’s song would be that of the ‘blinded eye’. In The Tree the author phrases the problem as a particularly grave one. It is not the city dwelling demographics of modern society that have caused a major alienation of humankind from nature, he asserts,

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but more ‘in the way we have, during these last hundred and fifty years, devalued the kind of experience or knowledge we loosely define as art; and especially in the way we have failed to grasp its deepest difference from science’ (42). This was of course the complaint made by Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats, suggesting that it is more than 150 years now that we have failed to grasp art’s deepest difference from science, placing Fowles as the modern heir to this Romantic tradition in English letters. In The Aristos of 1964 Fowles was already ambivalent about science’s tendency towards relentless atomism, alienating because reifying categorization, and a culture that encouraged unwarranted epistemological denigration of poetry (1970a: 150). A view that does not admit of truth about the world residing in poetic statements can presuppose a view in which reality is limited to that matter studied by the physical sciences. Fowles obviously does not rest content with such a view. In relation to nature such a view sees with one eye a ‘blinded eye’. In his essay ‘The Blinded Eye’ Fowles writes that Keats’ emotional and aesthetic relationship with wildlife, as expressed in his Ode ‘decompartmentalizes the phenomenon; it discusses manbird, not just man and not just bird’. For its phenomenological revelation Keats’ poetic impression should be regarded as a significant piece of knowledge about the natural world. It is an affective, holistic and associative knowing, and if we use this Romantic epistemological template in our dealings with nature, we might heal ‘the blinded eye’ of the essay’s title. But would, as the author asserts in this essay, a visitor from outer space wanting to know the reality of the nightingale do much better with the Ode than with The Handbook of British Birds? (1998: 262). To begin with, this thought assumes that a visitor from outer space would inhabit human form, a questionable assumption. However further than this, when blatantly ‘incorrect’ impositions of anthropocentric order are made on the world in literary works, when the semantic compound of ‘manbird’ contains what some would call a misleadingly disproportionate amount of ‘man’, one could make a charge of insularity, noting the disparity between the human perception and the physical actuality. During the first half of the twentieth century ethologists discovered that the nightingale’s song is not a song of passion or ecstasy, but the song of the cock-nightingale staking out his territory against newcomers. His singing during the night is due, not to a gothic love of darkness, but rather to his having a digestive sys-

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tem which favours the intake of food every four to five hours throughout a cycle of twenty four (Huxley 1963: 98). Although Keats could not have known it in the nineteenth century, his celebration of the eternal pain and passion in the little bird’s song was perhaps an unfortunate instance of what John Ruskin called the ‘pathetic fallacy’ (Ruskin 2000: 27). Even Coleridge in his poem ‘The Nightingale’ would have been suspicious of such a work as Keats’ (quoted in Day 1996: 41): some night-wandering Man, whose heart was pierc’d With the remembrance of a grievous wrong… First nam’d these notes a melancholy strain; And many a poet echoes the conceit, Poet, who hath been building up the rhyme When he had better far have stretch’d his limbs Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell By sun or moonlight, to the influxes Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements.

Coleridge expresses the thought that we should be very wary of imputing too much human emotion to nonhuman natural phenomena, and his point seems a good one. Regardless of this being the case, we can accept the legitimacy of Fowles’ claim. It seems true to say that that, in general, personally associative as well as holistic and emotionally affective manners of perceiving nature should not a priori be considered (even if they may be in some instances) epistemologically trivial, or ‘false’, alongside the analytical and impersonal approach of the natural sciences. During the eighteenth century Newton was unofficially elected the Age of Reason’s patron saint. Atomism and a mechanistic ideology dominated mainstream thought in the period, and had for many years, with people like Alexander Pope and Erasmus Darwin eulogizing the presiding version of a scientific world picture. As Mary Midgley makes clear in her book Science and Poetry, by the time of the Romantic Revival ‘the whole spirit of the age was ready to join their voices to Wordsworth’s and say’ (2001: 52), (1971: 34): Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect

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Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:We murder to dissect.

This stanza quoted by Midgley is part of Wordsworth’s 1798 poem ‘The Tables Turned’, which is itself the companion poem to ‘Expostulation and Reply’. In this second poem the ‘expostulation’ is made by a speaker who asks why William sits alone on an old grey stone and dreams his time away when there is learning to be had and there are purposes to be engaged. The poet replies (1971: 32): “The eye – it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel where’er they be, Against or with our will. “Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.”

Thus Wordsworth demonstrates to his friend and interlocutor that in merely sitting on an old grey stone he cannot help but draw a revelation of the world. We do not need to always seek knowledge of nature, in fact in some instances, as proposed in ‘The Tables Turned’, such analysing, questing intellect may positively misshape ‘the beauteous forms’ of the natural world. Richard Dawkins wrote Unweaving the Rainbow in an attempt to correct the errors of the poets who have attacked science’s faults. Dawkins takes the inspiration for his title from Keats’ lines in Lamia that Newton had destroyed the magic of the rainbow by reducing it to its constituent prismatic colours. In fact, Dawkins contends, the Romantic poets should have developed a better founded knowledge of the natural sciences and they would have been faced with a whole new domain worthy of awed wonder and poetic expression. And yet, as Midgley writes (2001: 47): Keats and the other romantic poets who protested against the dominant mechanistic ideology were not being irresponsible or insensitive to the beauties of science. They did not need to celebrate those beauties because, by the time they arrived on

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In Unweaving the Rainbow Dawkins never properly addresses the widely held intuition, and historically rooted association, that Western science has not given great enough value to the imagination and ordinary human feeling. The scientific ethos has been associated with atomistic and inhuman currents of thought in the past – this remains to be recognised. Dawkins’ and Midgley’s contributions to this debate, along with Fowles’, ironically demonstrate that the issue is as relevant today as it was in the early nineteenth century. I return to the specific matter of an atomistic view of nature. Rather than the human habit of isolating a natural object from its background and concentrating on it, the reader is implicitly encouraged by Wordsworth in the famous lines from ‘The Tables Turned’, to withhold the ‘meddling intellect’ for a moment, and perceive a natural scene in its wholeness. We might thus refrain from the ‘dissection’ and from the death it entails. Such a commitment to synthesis and to holism in perceptions of nature is implicit in Fowles’ celebration, earlier touched upon, of the mystery that is a part of wild nature, particularly woodland environments. Here we return to the motif of the tree to explicate the connection, a motif that, not surprisingly, runs throughout the author’s essay of the same name. Fowles shares some of his father’s love of the single tree (T 25-6): But I must confess my own love is far more of trees, more exactly of the complex internal landscapes they form when left to themselves. In the colonial organism, the green coral, of the wood or forest, experience, adventure, aesthetic pleasure, I think I could even say truth, all lie for me beyond the canopy and exterior wall of leaves, and beyond the individual.

It is ‘beyond the individual’ that ‘experience, adventure, aesthetic pleasure’ are found for the author. Holism in the perception of nature is thus a prerequisite for some of the author’s key values. As earlier noted, the mystery of a forest in leaf is central for Fowles’ love of nature. Without a perception that covered the complex whole of a woodland scene such mystery, such multiple allusions to unseen realities, would be impossible to enjoy. The thought that the Romantic poet might exist happily in mystery and not be over-ready to reach after fact is expressed by Keats in his

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letters, and is even made the cornerstone of an aesthetic theory in W. J. Bate’s Negative Capability, The Intuitive Approach in Keats (1939). For Keats, excellence in literature, a quality he thought Shakespeare had, required ‘negative capability’, meaning the capability ‘of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (quoted in Bate 1939: 7). Mystery is certainly one aspect of aesthetic pleasure Fowles appreciates and thus we find in Keats’ phrase ‘negative capability’ an aspect of Romantic aesthetic theory that concurs with Fowles’ laudatory references to the actual work of poets such as Keats and Wordworth. Wordsworth wrote of how as a child he had 'held unconscious intercourse/ With the eternal beauty, drinking in/ A pure organic pleasure from the lines/ Of curling mist' (1995: 11). Such representations of affective manners of apprehending nature, centrally pleasure, are strewn throughout Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Fowles is, in his nonfiction writings, thankful for the Romantic movement’s having suggested the idea that a healthy relationship with nature is more generally a matter of art than of specialist science. I earlier mentioned Emerson’s criticism of the ‘savant’ becoming ‘unpoetic’. However, continuing on, Emerson also offered a model of what he considers a truly admirable student of nature (1982: 74): But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual selfrecovery, and by entire humility.

Emerson’s vision of an ideal relation with the natural world involves ‘sallies of the spirit’, or emotional responses to the environment. Such is the student of nature admired by both the American transcendentalists and the English Romantics. It is interesting to note that Emerson’s ‘sallies of the spirit’ are untaught. Fowles, ever the pedagogue (prior to finding success as a published author he was a teacher), disagrees with Emerson by urging that we are educable in a preferable manner of approaching nature (1998: 256). On this point he concurs with Bate, who enjoins that Wordsworth ‘sought to enable his readers better to enjoy or endure life’, ‘by teaching them to look at and dwell in the natural world’. Bate himself is echoing John Stuart Mill here.

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In his Autobiography (1873) Mill recalls how in his youth, during a severe bout of depression, he had read Wordsworth for the first time (quoted in Bate 1991: 14): In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery… Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott does this better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling and thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in search of… I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this… The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.

Although he is in the same camp in his reading of the Romantics, Fowles goes further than Mill or Bate, in expressing the belief that the education of today’s children should incorporate the work of literary and visual artists in its attempt to explain the dynamics of a healthy relationship between humankind and nature (1998: 264). At this point in his argument Fowles seems to be implying that Keats and Wordsworth would be ideal candidates in the presumed syllabus. But what is art for Fowles and, what, therefore, is he suggesting that the young learn in the way of perceiving the natural world? According to the author ‘Art, even the simplest, is the expression of truths too complex for science to express, or to conveniently express… …Art is a human shorthand of knowledge’ (1970a: 151). What is more, the simplest purpose of the artist ‘is to describe the outer world; his next is to express his feelings about that outer world, and his last is to express his feelings about himself’ (1970a: 189). In defining art it will help if we place it in contrast to science. While the aim of the scientist is to systematically simplify descriptions of human experience, thus rendering such experience amenable to analysis, the literary artist has a very different goal. In the words of Aldous Huxley (1963: 14): When the literary artist undertakes to give a purer sense to the words of his tribe, he does so with the express purpose of creating a language capable of conveying,

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not the single meaning of some particular science, but the multiple significance of human experience, on its most private as well as on its public levels.

In each utterance the literary artist may conflate and conjoin a number of different levels of significance, just as in most semantically multidimensional human experiences. As such, rather than using the highly purified languages of ornithology and bio-chemistry, a poet might describe a nightingale with a language dense in allusive harmonics and subjective ethico-philosophical associations. Such would be an explication of Fowles’ statement that ‘art is a human shorthand of knowledge’, and his view that the artist’s productions combine a view of the outer world with his or her feelings about that world and about himself or herself. This also accords well with Edward O. Wilson’s more recent statement that ‘the love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science’ (1999: 59). The principle which says that every sentence in a scientific exposition shall say one thing, and one thing only, at a time, does not operate in polyvalent literature (Huxley 1963: 17). Rather, literary art may often be, as Fowles says, a shorthand for human knowledge, condensing various levels of meaning into single expressions; be these expressions at the micro level of single sentences or at the macro level of the structure of whole novels, poems or plays. To return to the author’s proposed model of pedagogy, we may now see how a ‘healthy’ relationship with nature could be taught through experiencing works of art, in particular reading works of poetry such as those of Keats. Such works of poetry would merge the multiple significances of human experiences of nature into single artistic forms. They would give us the descriptive content of holistic, affective and personally engaged relations with nature. Thus such works would provide us with instances of how to be receptive to nature, rather than how to know the natural world analytically. Huxley, another novelist whose background education and interests frequently traversed C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’, presents an educational policy along similar lines in his utopian novel Island: ‘Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol manipulation. Both kinds of training are absolutely indispensable. If you neglect either of them you’ll never grow into a full human being’ (1962: 218). Fowles’ implicit suggestion of adding Romantic nature poetry to a curriculum that would seek to educate in apprehending the

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nature seems to be concerned with just such a ‘training in receptivity’. It is an educational policy that is in fact now gaining credence. In, for example, Our Common Illiteracy: Education as if the Earth and People Mattered Rolf Jucker recently wrote of how the humanities have a role to play in helping us to develop empathy, awe and love for nature, saying that ‘literature, if a supplement to real experiences of nature, can help us to appreciate the poetry of the biosphere’ (2002: 309) John Elder is a contemporary ecocritic who has stressed the need to combine the teaching of nature writing with actual field trips into natural environments (1999: 649-660). Seeing nature poetically need not connote over-easy Nature Corner sentiment, or the anthropomorphic scripts of Disney nature films. Rather, someone who has learnt from the attitudes and vision of the many great painters and poets who have treated nature will see what Fowles calls ‘the moth’s uncurled proboscis and the ancient glacier bed, the smallest and the largest; and all in one glance. He will see forms, colours, structures; see personal, artistic, and literary allusions; see whole poetries where the pseudo-scientist sees only names and matter for notes’ (1998: 256). Someone who is educated to see nature in this manner is perhaps less likely to be indifferent towards the natural world and its plight than someone purely schooled through classes in biological taxonomy. This, at least, seems to be Fowles’ argument. In ‘The Blinded Eye’ Fowles records for us an instance of one of his own apprehensions of nature, presenting us with some of the substance behind his theorising on a ‘poetic receptivity’ to nature (and showing us a picture of an eye ‘healed’ by Romanticism). This excerpt is also of considerable interest as the author rarely describes the natural world in any kind of extended prose. Fowles sees wildlife initially through the lens of scientific knowledge (1998: 265): If I see a bird, its name (or my uncertainty about it) is my first reaction; then the typicality and likely explanation of its behaviour, assessed against my previous knowledge of the species. But unless it or its behaviour is very unusual, this scientific processing is very rapid – a second or two at most. From then on I let the poetry take over. This has to do with pure movement, sound, shape, colour; it has to do with the framework, blue sky for this buzzard, bramble thicket for this warbler, in which the bird is. It has to do with what other birds are about and what flowers, what awareness of the place I have, what season it is – the migrant’s arriving or departing – what mood I am in. It has also very much to do with previous history, since just as nature can take me back through time and turn history on

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its side, so can many species of bird, butterfly, and flower lead me back through the maze of my own life.

As I have mentioned earlier, Fowles is a field naturalist and indeed champions the virtues of natural history, so it is not surprising that the author’s first apprehension of a bird is accompanied by scientific classification. However this only lasts ‘a second or two at most’ and then he lets the poetry take over. Poetic receptivity to sound, shape, movement and colour is then obvious. What is more, associations of nature with personal history, being led back ‘through the maze’ of one’s own life through encounters with natural forms, are placed as central to this ‘poetic’ seeing. In a scene from the protagonist’s childhood in Daniel Martin we find an example of such a ‘poetic’ rapport being established. Daniel walks down a back lane of his village on a hot May afternoon (88): A woodlark sings over the huge hedge, in the distance somewhere, bell-fluting trisyllable, core of green, core of spring-summer, already one of those sounds that creep into the unconscious and haunt one all one’s life’.

The older Daniel knows that this is a sound which has haunted him all his life, a sound which always recalls a particular kind of place and time of year. In the writings of Richard Jefferies nature is also personally associative. In an essay on wild flowers Jefferies writes, as an older man, of how the first flower he identified was the bird’s-foot lotus (1948: 186): The bird’s-foot lotus is the picture to me of sunshine and summer, and of that summer in the heart which is known only in youth, and then not alone. No words could write that feeling: the bird’s foot lotus writes it.

Like the fictional Daniel and the song of the woodlark, the bird’s-foot lotus is a sure calligraphy for Jefferies for youthful happiness. For Fowles, as for Jefferies, nature is entwined with the thread of one’s personal development as an individual. In ‘The Blinded Eye’ the author goes on to describe an actual autobiographical instance of his perceiving wildlife. Note how soon the identifications and classifications end and the personal associations and personally meaningful metaphors begin. In fact, the majority of this recollection is in the

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manner of the ‘poetic’ (holistic, emotionally affective and personally associative [1998: 266]): A North London garden. Winter. A spot of cerise, grey, and black, in an old pear tree. I am standing at a window, there is snow on the ground. A cock bullfinch. A sporadic winter visitor to outlying city gardens: not unusual. Looking for clematis or forsythia buds; or honeysuckle berries. A week ago, in Dorset, I counted twenty seven cock bullfinches in a grove of bullace. The bullace in blossom. Bullace jam. ‘Whistling’ bullfinch – I could do it as a boy. A Devonshire combe and our cottage there. Waking up and hearing the whistles very close and looking out and seeing six cock bullfinches sitting in the first sunlight on an apple tree. That apple tree, with its yellow green, smoky tasting apples no one ever knew the name of. That same bullace grove in summer. I lie in the shade there and a bullfinch sings overhead: its strange, monotonous little five-note fluting chant. Like Webern. Like a last cardinal, in the freezing wind on the dying pear tree. The future, a jet heading for Heathrow, whines over. I feel depressed. I have a busy day I don’t want ahead. I hate cities, and summer will never come again. The bullfinch drops down into the garden. A flash of white rump. Then nothing, I can’t see it anymore. A squirt of green memories, like a brief taste on the tongue. But enough to keep me going, the bitter and dull day through.

With the pared-down economy of a film director’s script notes, the passage begins by locating the observer by a window giving onto a London garden. The writer sees a bird, identifies it as a bullfinch, and quickly analyses its ethology, the function of its behaviour. After this comparatively brief piece of scientific analysis the passage continues, assuming the form of a stream of consciousness. The scene is rife with triggers to personal association. In the manner that reading a poem suggests multiple metaphors in the reader’s mind, the observer of the garden scene finds his surroundings rich in personally significant allusions. His mind travels haphazardly from personal association to personal association, moving from lying in a grove of trees in summer in Devon where the writer had listened to a bullfinch’s ‘fivenote fluting chant’ to seeing a parallel between the song of the bullfinch and the music of Webern. Or further, seeing the bullfinch as a ‘last cardinal’ on the dying pear tree, representing the lost golden summers of the writer’s youth, with a jet flying overhead, representing the increasingly urbanised future of England from the vantage point of 1971. As is clear, nature, for the writer, is invested with a plenitude of personally significant associations. Apart from the aspect of the

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stream of consciousness presentation, it is also worth noting that the perception of nature expressed here is holistic: it encompasses an awareness of the entire garden scene, the old pear tree, the snow on the ground, the sky above (sound also being part of the perception: the jet’s noise). Lastly, the perception is emotionally affective: the experience of seeing the bullfinch gives the writer a feeling of happiness, one that will keep him going through the dull London day ahead. In the above excerpt we come to see ‘poetic receptivity’ to nature as an apprehension of nature that is holistic, emotionally affective and rich with personal associations. This kind of ‘poetic’ knowledge we might liken to Heidegger’s interpretation of the Greek word poiesis: a bringing into presence, a kind of aletheia, or fundamental disclosure. While modern technology discloses objects as stock for our use (a living forest may show up as merely a ‘standing reserve’ of timber – Bestand), poesis, as Greg Garrad explicates, leads us closer to being, and is concomitant with a ‘letting-be’ or reflective attunement to being (2004: 31). The essence of beings is that they are autonomous and resistant to our purposes, and so poetry as a mode of proper ‘lettingbe’, would involve a language that was equally resistant. Poetry teaches us that ‘Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being’ (Heidegger quoted in Garrad 2004: 31-2). Fowles is not advocating nature poetry in ‘The Blinded Eye’, but rather a ‘poetic’ manner of knowing nature. Is this poetic knowing well characterised by Heidegger’s interpretation of poesis? Heidegger stresses the need to acknowledge the resistance of beings to our purposes, yet Fowles argues that a poetic knowing of nature should be full of personal associations. Such a stress on ‘personal associations’ might perhaps be considered as compromising the autonomy of natural beings; as a coercion of beings to human purposes. And yet we should make a distinction between a technical interest in literally seeing beings as objects to be used, and a consideration of natural beings as implicated in our personal history in a less utilitarian fashion. If such a distinction is made and Fowles is seen as still advocating man as ‘the shepherd of being’ in this essay, but simply with an involvement of personal history in this being, then we might still assert that Heidegger’s poesis makes for a rough analogue with Fowles’ ‘poetic’ knowing of nature. We can also see how such a stress on personal associations in poetic perceptions of nature corresponds with the earlier discussed idea that language and metaphor are important tools in persuading humans to

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expand their moral circle to include more of nonhuman nature. The intimacy Fowles exhibits with natural beings, in for example the line ‘‘Whistling’ bullfinch – I could do it as a boy’, is part and parcel of the trend towards imagining nature’s personhood found in the author’s journals. As we, with our personal histories, become more deeply implicated in the natural order around us we feel part of a community which is made up of more than just humans. In the last chapter of his book The Song of the Earth Jonathan Bate takes up Paul Ricoeur’s view of writing, following on from Heidegger’s, that in reading writing we come to understand a ‘project’, an outline of a new way of being in the world (2002: 250). For Bate, reading poems, such as those of John Clare, William Wordsworth, or Les Murray, may allow us to imagine a new sense of dwelling on the earth. Thus far Bate’s view is a useful comparison to Fowles’ in his essay ‘The Blinded Eye’, as Fowles too advocates the great nature poets of the past as ideal models for how we should try to envisage nature and our dwelling amongst it. However Bate goes on to assert, with Ricoeur (and Heidegger), that language provides the building blocks of our ‘world’ and that only through a particular kind of language, poetry, can we experience ecological belonging; thus Bate’s title, poetry is The Song of the Earth (2002: 251). This move is a conceptual leapfrog over the dangers attendant on naming nature (thereby causing reification) that I will explore in the next chapter. However it does let Bate echo Heidegger with the argument that ‘poetry can, quite literally, save the earth’ (2002: 258). This is a major strand of thought in ecocriticism, and for this reason alone it is worth mentioning here. Fowles’ own model of relating to nature is not to write poetry literally (here it differs from Bate’s model), but to use the patterns of seeing of the great nature poets and artists as templates for how we should see nature, how we ourselves should experience ‘poems’ of nature. But, as I suggest, Heidegger’s ideal of ‘dwelling’ accords with Fowles’ vision: in both schemes we could achieve being by standing in a site, ‘open to its being’ (Bate 2002: 261). I agree with Bate that ‘ecopoetics should begin… as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell with the earth’, and measured by this standard Fowles’ comments in ‘The Blinded Eye’ are a significant contribution to ecopoetics. From a neuro-scientific perspective, Susan Greenfield’s account of consciousness, mentioned in my second chapter, teaches us that pleas-

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urable states are those in which the outer world impinges strongly on our consciousness and our inner resources are comparatively less dominant. And as Bate explains, Rainer Maria Rilke, like Heidegger, aspired to a mode of being that he called the ‘open’, a state where there is no division ‘between nature and consciousness’ (2002: 263). In the eighth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies this state is enjoyed by a gnat and felt by a child (Bate 2002: 263). It is a state in which one shares one being with a tree and a singing bird. This sounds very much like the abrogation of Self in favour of a more immediate and less selfconscious state of consciousness that Greenfield claims is synonymous with the brain states of children and animals, as well as with the experience of pleasurable emotions in adult humans (2000: 96). The ecopoetics of dwelling are also explicable from the perspective of neuro-physiology as brain states characterised by small and fragile neural constellations. Such brain states would, we would expect, coincide with subjective feelings of pleasure, as one is immersed in the here and now, the sound of a bird and the look of a tree for example. Fowles’ emphasis that his own holistic and personally associative impressions of nature are emotionally affective in a positive sense is well supported by this scientific view. In ‘The Blinded Eye’ the final twist in Fowles’ argument is that the notion of entwining nature with our personal histories is a useful tool for conservation in that if more people were to relate to nature in this ‘poetic’ manner then more people would be committed to defending wildlife. According to the author a personally associative relationship with nature, not a scientific one, cultivates in us a desire to make physical contact with nature and this is the only route to widespread support for conservation (1998: 267). Admittedly ‘the human in the street’ does need to form a personally meaningful relationship with the nature available in his or her environment. But, we might ask, need that relationship exclude science? Why must we conceptualise a scientific approach to nature as precluding an emotionally coloured rapport with wildlife? Surely alongside relating to nature in the ‘poetic’ manner Fowles sketches here, in the majority of his encounter in a London garden, one would also find much pleasure through analysing the natural world through the lenses of science. If the scientific field naturalism were to dominate it would exclude valuable epistemological factors, but it need not dominate overwhelmingly. In this essay from the start of the 1970s, ‘The Blinded Eye’, the author, I

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would claim, exaggerates the deficiencies of science in achieving an intimacy with nature. His argument is inconsistent with his valuations of the scientific method in his diaries and, arguably, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. His argument also fails to properly register the deep love of nature developed through an understanding of its workings that is found in a figure such as Edward O. Wilson. I earlier mentioned how Fowles had aligned the binary of intellect/feeling alongside the science/art dualism in Daniel Martin, within the context of Daniel’s and Anthony’s lives if not with more general valency. Fowles’ most recent comment on this divide was made in the 1995 essay ‘The Nature of Nature’. This essay has something of an elegiac note about it, as if it were written, as indeed it was, in the twilight of the author’s writing career. Although most of Fowles’ non-fiction has a rambling quality about it, this piece, written when he was 69 (seven years after he had suffered a serious stroke) is a particularly strong demonstration that the idea of forming a wandering wood acquaintance lies behind his creative process. The essay crosses much ground. Among the many subjects touched upon we find Fowles responding to Snow’s essay The Two Cultures. For Fowles the central problem raised by this essay resides in getting feeling and knowing ‘to marry and bear fruit’ (1998: 345). Indeed this was the problem for many of the Romantic poets. Although I may have earlier given the impression that these poets were anti-intellectual and committed solely to synthesis and feeling, Keats, for example, saw the need to build bridges between science and art. He wrote: ‘Every department of knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this that I am glad at not having given away my medical books, which I shall again look over’ (quoted in Midgley 2001: 55). Like Fowles in ‘The Nature of Nature’, Wordsworth and Coleridge thought that the conflicting antitheses, such as science versus literature and thought versus feeling, could be resolved, as Midgley notes (2001: 55). In attempting to get feeling and knowing ‘to marry and bear fruit’ Fowles is again in accord with the Romantics. At the end of the essay the author describes, in the first person, a walk down the hill to the bottom of his garden in Lyme Regis to where a few stems of the woodcock orchid, rare so far north as England, grow. This transition from the abstraction of the intellect to the represented immediacy of nature is typical of Fowles; for example it

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recalls the last ten pages of The Tree. The woodcock orchids at the end of Fowles’ garden are Ophrys scolopax. The orchids are also cherished by the author so much that ‘they would make me cry, if I were the crying kind.’ Then come the final words of the piece: ‘I look at them now, knowing they are and that I am, in love and silence’ (1998: 361). The reader is left, in silence, to ponder this event. This small moment of existential epiphany marks the resolution of a tension in Fowles’ work. If a major problem for the author resides in getting feeling and knowing, art and science, to join and bear fruit, then he seems to have accomplished his aim in this simple event at the bottom of his garden. Here Fowles the natural historian and Fowles the nature lover are united in one figure. Recalling Daniel Martin, the Englishman looks both at and for the woodcock orchids in one glance. Fowles complains in the essay that ‘I shall die hopelessly short of entelechy’, however in his veneration of the wild, in the form taken by his bearing witness to this ‘apotheosis of the recurrent green universe’, he has reached a profound fulfilment of potentiality (1998: 361). In this way the notion that neither science or art are, by themselves, sufficient for an adequate relationship with nature is represented using the vocabulary of intellect and feeling. One can, as the author does here, marry one’s knowledge of the natural world with one’s feeling for the natural world in a single perception, only thus achieving an adequate relationship with nature. In The Tree Fowles had already written of his discovery that (39): There was less conflict than I had imagined between nature as external assembly of names and facts and nature as internal feeling; that the two modes of seeing or knowing could in fact marry and take place almost simultaneously, and enrich each other.

The author proves this in his identification of and love for the woodcock orchids at the bottom of his garden in Lyme Regis. Earlier in life, after spending a day walking in the French countryside, Fowles had recorded in his diary (2003: 99): I felt vividly aware of everything, full of sympathy, happy. To be artist and naturalist is the perfect blend. The one supplies the deficiencies of the other, and together they augment the pleasure.

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This statement, made in 1951, seems a more plausible evaluation of science and art than that found in ‘The Blinded Eye’. Here the naturalist and the poet, as personified elements of a single human being, are visualised as synergistic factors in a proper appreciation of nature. This is again the ‘whole sight’ that Daniel in Daniel Martin comes to develop over the course of that novel.

Chapter 9 Treacherous Namers and Collectors One of Fowles’ abiding concerns over the years has been the relationship between linguistic categorisation and the natural world. An examination of Fowles’ writings leads one through an interesting dialectic in questioning the worth of naming nature. As I will show, we would be wrong to think that we could ever meaningfully renounce the practice of naming in relation to the natural world. Fowles’ journal writings are also of interest for their questioning the worth of formal nature writing, and for their raising the issue of how written descriptions of the natural world can lead to a defamation or misrepresentation of the environment. In examining one of Fowles’ own poems I hope to show that the author’s pessimism as to the worth of nature poetry is understandable but based on a confusion of categories. In ending the chapter I will discuss the practice of collecting, a closely interrelated habit in Fowles’ oeuvre. Before turning to written language I will first discuss Fowles’ treatment of the practice of naming in the context of the perceiving mind. What is the relationship between linguistically mediated perception and nature? This problem has been explored in two of the author’s own poems. Both of these poems come from a section of Fowles’ Poems which he entitles ‘Epigrams’, and are less lyrical and more philosophical than the poems of the volume’s other two sections. A distrust of giving names to objects in the natural world is expressed in ‘Naming’ (1974: 41): Naming Like a blur of rain on the real world. And no one denies the great utility For comptrollers of imperial households, For quartermaster-sergeants,

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Treacherous Namers and Collectors For grocer’s assistants, For museum curators; For taxonomists and schoolboys, Pundits and critics. And if the name becomes the thing, The rain it raineth every day And anyhow: could we bear it? Could we bear the light of a world? Of things without names?

The first stanza of the poem associates the urge to name the world and its contents with a cluster of types (a comptroller is one who keeps a counter-roll so as to check a treasurer’s accounts; a quartermaster is an officer who looks after the equipment of a regiment and a quartermaster-sergeant assists a quartermaster). Many of these types might potentially connote pejorative qualities. Think of the pedantic nature of the activities of a comptroller (along with the pomp of working for an ‘imperial household’); the petty station and duties of not just a quartermaster, but a mere quartermaster-sergeant; the banality of the classificatory duties of a grocer’s assistant; the morbidity of the tasks of a museum curator; and finally, the emotional immaturity of a schoolboy. The association of the human tool of naming with this particular flotilla of lamentable and inter-related personality types implicitly speaks to us of the author’s preferred type: one who is able to move beyond lists, accounts and systems, and to ‘grasp the transience of being’ (1998: 341). For such a person it would be unnecessary to put the present on curatorial record, and most important of all, for such a person the experience, not the assignation of description, would be the final good. Fowles himself has been by turns a collector of insects, a hunter of wildlife, a searcher after rare orchids, a collector of fossils and a museum curator. As the reformed smoker intimately knows the evils of smoking and is avidly contra the cigarette, so too with Fowles and his past relationships with nature. As one of the former ‘taxonomists and schoolboys’ Fowles well understands the seductions and traps of naming, and in this first stanza of the poem ‘Naming’ he places the habit in a harsh light, associating it with pedantic, petty and banal people and practices. The second stanza of the poem opens with a reminder of the alienation from experience that is the outcome of ‘the

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name becoming the thing’. If this were to happen the rain would ‘raineth every day’, the object would be forever occluded by its label. The line ‘the rain it raineth every day’ is telling. In its source in the epilogue of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night a clown sings this line while iterating a litany of inevitable human errors and misconducts (1998: 1215). Thus the reader is alerted that although we are in error to allow the name to ‘become the thing’, it is an error of an everyday kind. This is also commented on in Fowles’ closely related poem ‘How It Begins’. Before completing my reading of ‘Naming’ I would like to discuss this brief and obviously interrelated poem (1974: 42): How It Begins The small whirled eddy Of the dull October leaves. Two passing boys. And one: “Whirlwind.” Not “Whirlwind!” But “Whirlwind.” Period. Eminently normal voilà, So to speak. There. I grow, I pin you, Having seen you pinned before. You thing, you stupid Pinnable, nameable thing.

Here two passing boys notice an eddy of leaves on the ground. One of them states: ‘Whirlwind.’ The notion that linguistic reification is equated with regrettable alienation from the world is represented by the ridiculously supercilious boy, perhaps one of the school boys from the previous poem, and his trite victory, through ascription of name, over an eddy of wind. The linguistic aspect of the reification is stressed in the first stanza through the bringing of our notice to, firstly, the fact that ‘Whirlwind’ is a written sign with appropriate punctuation – ‘Not “Whirlwind!”/ But “Whirlwind.” Period.’ – and secondly by the reflection that the French term for ‘here it is’ is a particular kind of speech pattern – ‘Eminently normal voilà,/ So to speak.’ Linguistic reification is also responsible for a banalisation of the world: the speaking of “Whirlwind.” covers up the freshness of the event, the small marvel of a swirling shower of autumn leaves, making it ‘Emi-

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nently normal’. The wind, or human breath, is the original medium of communication in oral, indigenous cultures (a point made by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, and one I will raise later in the chapter), and only with the advent of formal language have we been able to seal our cultures off from the exhalations of the animate world with such hermetic success. Only formal language, signalled in this poem by the insertion of a self-conscious period and the phrase ‘so to speak’, can so successfully shut down our access to nature’s actual voices. The age of the namer in this poem is of note: the poem is entitled ‘How It Begins’, and the fact that the namer is very young indicates that he is a novice in the human practice of naming the world. The self-satisfied attitude towards this worldly phenomenon presented in the second stanza – ‘There. I grow, I pin you,/ Having seen you pinned before’ – as well as the pettily hostile attitude towards the named – ‘You thing, you stupid/ Pinnable, nameable thing’ – appear as the imputed attitudes of the boy. The poet associates the practice of assigning names with emotional immaturity. The boy has conquered the eddy of leaves by giving it a classification in his system of language, but only someone personally insecure in the face of a threatening outside world, like a small boy, would feel the need to actually gain a victory over the outside world in this sense. By the end of the poem an over-ready absorption of attention in the ‘name’ as opposed to the ‘thing’ has been represented as both obscuring our view of the physical world and as having emotionally suspect origins. I mentioned that only someone personally insecure in the face of a threatening outside world, like a small boy, would feel the need to conquer the world by assigning names to it with untoward alacrity. Towards the end of the first chapter of Daniel Martin the boy Daniel is analysed by his older self along such lines (11): The sun in the extreme west, as he likes it best. Its slanting rays reveal the lands in a pasture-field on the other side of the valley, the parallel waves where an oxplough once went many centuries before; and where he must pay a visit soon, childish, but another of his secret flowers, the little honeycomb-scented orchid Spiranthes spiralis, blooms on the old meadow there about now. He clings to his knowledges; signs of birds, locations of plants, fragments of Latin and folklore, since he lacks so much else.

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Among Daniel’s ‘knowledges’ are ‘fragments of Latin’, such as the name of this orchid that he is soon to visit. It is, according to the narrator, the personal inadequacies of a young boy that cause him to be so eager to attach fragments of Latin to beautiful orchids. His emotional inexperience – at this point in the novel Daniel has had no experience of heterosexual love – as well as the more general distance he feels between himself and manhood, creates in the protagonist a deficit of confidence which makes him act similarly to the boy in Fowles’ poem ‘How It Begins’. He clings to his classificatory systems as the few weapons he has to deal with an otherwise uncontrollable world. Later in Daniel Martin, in another scene from Daniel’s boyhood, the protagonist walks down a back lane in his Devon village, playing with a parsley stem as a make-shift blow-pipe (88): Now a plane drones slowly over, high in the azure, very different from the futurehidden Heinkel, and I stop and watch it. A Tiger Moth. Another name. I also know the real (though do not know that in that unconscious “real” my redeemer cometh) tiger moth: the fluttery, zigzag-striped, chocolate-and-cream, black and red-orange Jersey Tiger. We catch some every year in the garden. The airplane is more interesting. I’m good at names. I shoot it down with a grass stalk.

Here the notion of a small boy using an assignation of name as a weapon against the outside world is again represented. Daniel identifies a Tiger Moth plane flying overhead. His naïve pride at his act of classification, ‘I’m good at names’, is placed alongside his shooting down the Tiger Moth with a grass stalk, suggesting that the assignation of name allows him to score a victory over the physical world, but that this victory is a trite and unrealistic one. If the boy Daniel thinks his habit of naming signifies a profound engagement with the physical world, then he is as bumptiously idealistic as Daniel imagining himself to have shot down an airplane with a piece of grass. The central point made by the above poems and excerpts from Daniel Martin, that naming causes a kind of reification and occlusion of the natural world, is made repeatedly in Fowles’ long essay The Tree. However in the 1950s Fowles became interested in Zen theories of seeing, of, as he writes in The Tree, ‘learning to look beyond names at things-in-themselves’ (38). He also learnt from Zen that, with practice, one can float, seemingly without identity, in front of a perceived object, placing all sense of identity in the thing one looks at. Gary Synder, a contemporary of Fowles more heavily influenced by Zen

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Buddhism, explains eloquently this Zen technique of perception (1995: 179): The twelfth-century Zen Buddhist philosopher Dogen put it this way: “To advance your own experience onto the world of phenomena is delusion. When the world of phenomena comes forth and experiences itself, it is enlightenment.” To see a wren in a bush, call it ‘wren’, and go on walking is to have (selfimportantly) seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, be in the bushy shadows, maybe then feel ‘wren’ – that is to have joined in a larger moment with the world.

With his gloss of a fragment of Zen Buddhist philosophy Synder points out an alternative to a linguistically-mediated apprehension of nature. Instead of pinning the wren-as-thing with the turn of phrase, ‘wren’, one might experience the world and its phenomenon in a more quietly receptive manner. In Synder’s words, one might forget one’s self for a moment, be in the bushy shadows and maybe feel ‘wren’. Such an experience is preferable, allowing one access to a less regressively language-bound way of being in the world. It is also the approach to nature that Christopher Hitt has argued is well conceptualised as the ‘ecological sublime’ (1999: 603-23). Hitt sees the sublime as ‘a particular cultural and/or literary expression of something that is indeed universal: human beings’ encounters with a nonhuman world whose powers ultimately exceeds theirs’ (1999: 60910). Although critics have usually concentrated on the aspect of ‘humbling fear’ in the sublime, an enobling humility before nature is also a part of Burke and Kant’s conception (Hitt 1999: 606-7). Hitt uses Neil Evernden’s argument in his book The Social Creation of Nature that we should try to move beyond language and reason and see nature as ‘a unique and astonishing event’, which is therefore experienced as ‘wholly other’ (Evernden 1992: 117). Rather than explain the phenomenon, we move outside conceptualisation and, ‘there is no room, no time, for reflection. We are seized by the relationship; we cannot think about it as we would an object. It is here, now, and while it lasts, there is only now’ (Reed quoted in Hitt 1999: 614). This sounds like the moment with a wren that Snyder adumbrates, and that I adduced as representative of the Zen alternative Fowles mentions to the maligned practice of naming. One steps outside the logos and experiences nature unmediated by both language and a conception of the subject-object dualism. According to Hitt such an experience is well

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termed ‘the ecological sublime’. The ecological sublime, Hitt writes, is given quintessential expression in Thoreau’s essay ‘Ktaadn’, where Thoreau made an ascent of Mount Katahdin in New England. Thoreau wrote in this essay: ‘Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!’ (quoted in Hitt 1999: 615). In transcending linguistic conceptualisation Thoreau truly reveals nature, at least in Hitt’s interpretation. But are writers like Hitt wise to champion ‘the ecological sublime’? I return, after having made a circuitous deviation, to my discussion of ‘Naming’. In the second stanza of that poem we find a hint of Fowles’ realisation that life without the practice of naming, the practice of discursive conceptualisation, would be impossible. This post-Zen realisation of the impossibility of living without names, and thus of language, is seen in the last three lines of the poem, where life without naming is suggested as unbearable: ‘And anyhow: could we bear it?/ Could we bear the light of a world?/ Of things without names?’ The poet seems to be asking us, could we bear the senseless and chaotic over-load of perceptions of life linguistically-unmediated? Living in a world of things without names, it is suggested, might well be beyond human capabilities. This is a view well articulated by the natural history writer Sue Hubbell (quoted in Phillips 2003: 14): The bits and pieces of life are so numerous that we need to order and classify them before we can think about them. Our sort of brain cannot handle the world in the raw. We have to arrange all the bits into piles, and if there are too many piles we arrange those into clusters. Without ordering systems, which is what taxonomies are, we can’t think, live, or work with our world.

Hubbell answers Fowles (and Snyder and Hitt and Evernden) that we could not bear the light of a world without names. Such a ‘world in the raw’ would prevent us from successfully interacting with our environment. According to Steven Pinker, a series of representations do underlie our thinking, but they are not synonymous with language. Words do not determine thoughts. Any thought in our mind embraces a huge amount of information, but when we want to communicate this information to another person we can only encode a small percentage of it

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in the form of sentences to be spoken or written. We do not think in language, as some mistakenly believe, but in what Pinker calls ‘mentalese’ (2000: 78). As studies on babies, monkeys and adults without language have shown, the human mind can practice advanced kinds of conceptualisation without any form of language (Pinker 2000: 61-4). For physicists, thinking is geometrical, and many creative people report thinking in mental images (Pinker 2000: 65). So, to return to my discussion of naming, we do order the chaotic streams of inputs into our minds from the natural environment around us into ‘piles’ and ‘clusters’ as Hubbell phrases it. It is just that these ‘piles’ and ‘clusters’ are more accurately referred to as ‘categories’ than as ‘names’. We perceive categories of objects, such as robins, lakes and mountains. Giving things a category label allows us to infer properties that are not directly observable in a thing before us. For example if we are to label something a bird we will infer that it has wings even if the bird may not exhibit this part of its anatomy to us just as we are looking at it. Giving words to concepts allows us to share our discoveries about the world with the less experienced or less observant. As Pinker points out: ‘even a wordless thinker does well to chop continuously flowing experience into things, kinds of things, and actions (not to mention places, paths, events, states, kinds of stuff, properties, and other types of concepts [2000: 161]).’ Whenever we intentionally perform any kind of action, such as riding a bike, for example, we are using categories. In the case of riding a bike we are employing our knowledge of a particular kind of motor activity that is largely a matter of moving one’s legs up and down, as well as sitting atop a metal frame with wheels. Giving the world category labels is a very basic and highly useful aspect of our cognition. As George Lakoff points out ‘without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social or intellectual lives’ (1987: 6). Even if the Zen-influenced naturalist wanted to, he or she could not enduringly renounce classification of nature at a fundamental level. Further than this, the assignation of category labels to reality may be said to be even more fundamentally a part of human cognition when we focus on plants and animals. Pinker hypothesises that there is an adaptive mental module one might call ‘intuitive biology’ (2000: 465). Hunter-gatherer societies have hundreds of names for different plants and animals and their ecology, life cycle and behaviour. The

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anthropologists Scott Atran and Brent Berlin found that: ‘universally, people group local plants and animals into various kinds that correspond to the genus level in the Linnaean classification system of professional biology’, and ‘since most locales contain a single species from any genus, these folk categories usually correspond to species as well’ (quoted in Pinker 2000: 469). People’s classifications of the organisms into higher-order life forms (trees, birds, fish, etc) mostly corresponded with the biologist’s classification of class. The structure of our intuitive biological concepts is different to the way we organise classification of other objects. For example ‘whereas people everywhere say that an animal cannot be both fish and fowl, they are perfectly happy with saying’, ‘that a piano can be both musical instrument and furniture’ (Pinker 2000: 469). Human infants make a distinction between living and nonliving things, which takes the form of seeing a difference between inanimate objects pushed around by billiard-ball physics and organisms which are self-propelled (here and elsewhere Pinker’s discussion demonstrates that Evernden is wrong to claim, as he does in The Social Creation of Nature, that the childhood encounter with the otherness of nature is simply a matter of absorbing undifferentiated, sensual imagery [Evernden 1992: 114-5]). Soon children’s thinking about living organisms takes on a structure which is different from thinking about other objects. For example they assign hidden essences (a snake cannot be made a lizard even if you glue legs to it) and understand reproductive continuity within species (horses cannot have cow babies). Our classifications of nonliving objects does not assume such logical structure. Thus not only is giving category labels to the world one of the most basic pieces of mental apparatus we inevitably acquire, but assigning natural kinds to plants and animals may even be said to be a cognitive module that is easily activated in the developing mind. Zen theories of seeing that would help one look beyond the name at the thing-in-itself might be edifying, Fowles suggests in his poem ‘Naming’, but while it may be good to be aware of the dangers of linguistic reification causing us to cease paying close attention to the ‘thing-in-itself’, a renunciation of language in some form or other, be it mentalese or English, is impossible. Fowles remarks in The Tree, published in 1979, that he had concluded after a period of interest in Zen philosophy in the 1950s that: ‘living without names is impossible, if not downright idiocy, in a writer; and living without explana-

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tion or speculation as to causality, little better’ (39). As the author makes clear in this remark, the practice of assigning names to things is imbricated with the aims of science: to explain and order. While Fowles would not follow Zen to the logical conclusion of not giving names to the natural world, neither would he abjure the tenets of science in his relationship with nature. Language shapes how we see the world, and if Pinker and others are right, particularly how we see plants and animals. However, while all apprehensions of nature will be made with some basic level of classification in mind, we might acknowledge that some apprehensions will be less dominated by classificatory strategies than others. Some apprehensions of nature will be comparatively, if not in the absolute sense of Zen doctrine, open and receptive to the physical environment. This is the difference between the ‘quiet passivity’ associated with the seeing of William Wordsworth, in contrast to the much more intellectually proactive and deliberative knowing associated with Carl Linnaeus. Notwithstanding some kind of classificatory mediation, landscape may well be a gestalt that can impress itself on the mind in a fundamental way, as Barry Lopez holds (Buell 1995: 83). In the uncertain borderland of culture and nature there are degrees of absorption in our own ways. In contrast to Evernden’s totalisingcritique of category-laden perceptions of nature – ‘once defined, the nonhuman other disappears into its new description… the wild disappears the instant it is demystified’ – Fowles acknowledges both the dangers of an absorption in the name occluding the thing named, as well as the inescapable necessity of living with names (Evernden 1992: 131). Having discussed the relationship between categorisation-mediated perceptions of nature and nature itself, I move now to a discussion specifically of the written word in the context of Fowles’ ecocritical writings. How wide is the gap between ‘presence’ and ‘representation’ in nature poetry? How wide must it be? In his essay ‘The Nature of Nature’ Fowles approvingly quotes Virginia Woolf’s words: ‘Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy…they tear each other to pieces’ (1998: 352). The English author has used Woolf’s notion as an explanation for why he has not been as prolific on the subject of nature as other writers with an interest in the natural world. Evernden writes that it is speakers such as ‘John Fowles’, who ‘may help us acquire the vocabulary needed to accommodate wildness and

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extinguish the technological flashfire of planetary domestication’ (1992: 133). However Evernden is perhaps overly optimistic: the English author’s longest continuous published description of wild nature is found in the ten pages at the end of The Tree. Further, very few of the poems in his one collection of poetry constitute revelations of dwelling in the natural world. If Fowles will secure a place in the literary history of nature writing, then it is not as a latter-day John Muir, as one who has spent much time fashioning a plinth for nature’s glories, but rather as one who would turn us away from written records. Justification for Fowles’ not having written much nature poetry during his writing career is found in The Tree, as I will discuss in the next and final chapter, however it is also commented on in his journals. In 1965, after having recently moved from the built environments of London to Underhill farm in rural Dorset, Fowles received a vivid impression of the natural world, coming as it did freshly to his city-accustomed eyes. During this period he wanders around the fields enjoying his immediacy of impression, but does not feel inclined to write poetry about nature (EUL 102/1/15, 31 January 1966: 24): Though lines of poetry come, no poems come… in a way this is like Greece, it is too immediate, too constituted by poems of phenomenon, a constant flux of actual poetic events – the linnets that haunt the garden (because I am a bad gardener and the fescue is rampant) with their fine Stravinsky-like songs and their ancient Chinese harp flight calls – the first pale, huge violets on the big ‘step’ down to the sea – finding a bed of moschatel in the woods – the wonderful owls that haunt our nights – a flock of fifty oystercatchers, black, white, coral-red against a pearl-grey sea – the grey-black depths in a watching rabbit’s eyes – these things are poems in their language, and in a way to write poems in mine about them is not creative, but merely a matter of translation.

In Lectures on the English Poets William Hazlitt, in the nineteenth century, expressed a similar view to Fowles’, writing that poetry is ‘the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself’, and that ‘wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that “spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun,” – there is poetry, in its birth’ (quoted in Bate 1991: 17). Fowles aligns himself with the Romantics, as I demonstrated in the previous

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chapter, and as Bate comments, ‘in Romantic poetics, poetry is to be found not only in language but in nature’ (1991: 17). Fowles writes ‘lines of poetry’ about the natural environment in the above excerpt, for example the description of the linnets ‘Stravinsky-like songs and their ancient Chinese harp flight calls’. He despairs of writing complete poems, asserting that the ‘poems of phenomenon’ have pre-empted any greater creative effort he might muster. The ‘poems of phenomenon’ that may come to us when we are in nature are irreducibly different from the brief representations of nature that Fowles gives us here in poetic language, where he likens birdsong to humanly created music. It is true that nature poetry shares more in common with the ‘poems of phenomena’ in its assumed epistemology than does science (both are holistic, and personally associative). Yet nature poetry remains embedded in printed language, as well as having all the trappings of poetic form, such as metre, alliteration and the like. Fowles’ terminology is correct: nature poems remain ‘translations’ of poetic experiences rendered into verse. Four years later another entry in his journal demonstrates that the author has not changed in his inability, or refusal, to write poems about the countryside (EUL 102/1/16, 15 July 1970: 7): Not being able to write poetry because you see too much of it every day. All the poetries in this garden; words like throwing stones at swallows. Both mean and futile.

The otherness of nature evades adequate description as the agile and fleetingly present swallow evades the ineffectually lobbed stone. But does writing poems about nature really have the meanness and futility of throwing rocks at swallows? It is true that writing cannot fully describe reality: the lived present tense experience, with all its intellectual and affective qualities, remains irreducible. As, to use a notion popularised by Martha Nussbaum in relation to writing fiction, literary writing is a matter of trying to get the whole human picture in, the whole texture of reality, its ‘surprising variety, its complexity and mysteriousness, its flawed and imperfect beauty' (1990: 3), it is understandable that Fowles has consequently often felt, as he reported in an interview, ‘condemned to a sort of vulgar futility, or eternal secondbest’ when writing novels’ (Vipond 1999a: 103). If we are to believe Fowles from this journal entry, the same inbuilt obsolescence may be

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part of the process of writing poems about nature. When it comes to the poetry of nature, translation may be traducement. One of Fowles’ favourite nature writers, who has also barracked for the supremacy of the lived present while commenting on the experiential inadequacies of recorded descriptions of nature, is Thoreau. Here, in Walden, Thoreau listens to the first signs of life at the close of a New England winter (1991: 274): The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations?

The literary artist or poet, even one with greatness, still only provides a second-hand and unfortunately re-presentational perception of nature. Fowles seems perspicacious in noting that Romantic poetry can be heuristic in offering a more emotionally affective, holistic and personally associative model of perceiving the natural world than that offered by science. However, while such poetry can be edifying in its assumed epistemology, ultimately it is neither recorded science nor art, both Thoreau and Fowles suggest, but rather lived experiences of the outer world that have ultimate value. According to David Abram, in tribal and indigenous societies humans have a participatory experience of non-human animals and the earth. With the transition to iconic writing systems, some remnant of sensory participation in nature was evident. However after the adoption of the phonetic alphabet and the Greek appropriation of this alphabet, language’s referents were tied purely to text. Hence, ‘the highly anthropocentric (human-centered) mode of experience endemic to alphabetic cultures spread throughout Europe in the course of two millennia’ (Abram 1996: 138). Abram, like Fowles, sees the written word as creating a distance between humans and the natural world. Unlike Fowles, Abram analyses this split historically. Abram claims that while plant-based, indigenous cultures ‘read’ the ‘language’ of the trees, winds, and waters in a sense contiguously with their comprehension of oral language (into which nature’s influence also happens to penetrate in the form of echoic and gestural resemblances), today’s industrial Western societies have transferred much of their sensory participation to the written word, cutting themselves off fur-

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ther from nature (1996: 139). While the logos was originally infused with the carnal, today our darting attention is drawn to text (and electronic media) and divorced from the shapes and patterns of the trees and open skies. For Abram, the expressive medium common to both natural phenomena and human language prior to the written word was the air. As the written word came to be used more and more, the voice of the natural world began to fade: ‘and only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath’ (Abram 1996: 254). The ‘forgetting of the air’ is concomitant with the internalisation of human awareness, a process whereby humans can contemplate their own language and thoughts in isolation from the surrounding natural environment (Abram 1996: 255). So Abram, in a similar vein to Fowles, claims that written language ‘significantly solidifies the ephemeral perceptual boundary… between the human body and the sensuous world’ (1996: 256). However Fowles’ intuitive remarks lack Abram’s historical sweep in his diagnosis of an ‘exile in the word’. Abram can make the historical comparison and see that, compared to many oral cultures, we who have formal language and the written word are today existing in a world of our own making; we are, comparatively, sealed in a ‘hall of mirrors’ (1996: 257). At the end of Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous he asks the question, ‘but what, then, of writing?’ (1996: 273). In answer he writes that our task is ‘writing language back into the land’; ‘freeing words to respond to the speech of things themselves’; and ‘spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape’ (1996: 273). Abram closes his work by claiming that language can be made more responsive to the natural world. The ethologist of the arts, Ellen Dissanayake, concurs independently with Abram. Dissanayake also sees the rise of scriptocentric modernity as having a dark side, fostering the alienation of modern Westerners from experiences of both social interaction and the natural environment. Only with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century did Western societies begin to see the world in terms of ‘information’ or ‘data’ (2000: 88). For nearly all of our species’ almost two hundred thousand year history we lacked literate vocations, and yet the lives of our ancestors were surely full and satisfying. According to Dissanayake, ‘ancestral environments encourage biologically relevant abilities such as skilful tool making, tracking or navigating, using one’s body for work, play, and locomotion, telling and

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responding to stories, dancing and making music, and conciliation and other socially useful skills’ (2000: 91-2). Here I am interested particularly in our deeply ingrained tendency to find satisfaction in ‘telling and responding to stories’. Like Dissanayake, I would argue that the imposition of aesthetic form on the material of human life, for example a narrative pattern or the creation of repetition in a poem, provides pleasurable feelings of mastery and order imposed on a chaotic universe. Such things are well suited to our adapted neurophysiology, a generalised intelligence with a limbic system persisting beneath our massive neocortex. Stories have been with us for thousands of years of our species’ history, and will continue to be for thousands more. They will always be more satisfying as ways of understanding the world than, for example, mathmatics. But, as both Abram and Dissanayake make clear, ‘language’ skills are these days considered to inhere in reading and writing, not in a stream of utterance or the ‘invisible breath’. The fact that most Western culture is scriptocentric facilitates further disassociation from the natural environment. Building on the work of people like Jack Goody and Walter J. Ong, Dissanayake writes that: ‘Nonliterate persons who have never seen words written and thereby separated from the stream of utterance and made into visual things, assume that the words they hear are what they refer to: the word (sound) for oak or elephant is inseparable from the oak or elephant itself’ (1992: 206). Nonliterate people still tell stories about nature, but they do not make their references to ‘oak’ or ‘elephant’ into visual things, and are, as a consequence, less alienated from natural entities. In interviews Fowles has expressed an admiration for poets whose work describes nature, such as Seamus Heaney, Norman MacCaig and Ted Hughes (Vipond 1999a: 200; 237). Perhaps he considers such writers to have somehow surmounted the dangers of nature and letters ‘tearing each other to pieces’. Fowles has published one volume of poetry, Poems (1973). He has said in an interview that: ‘the tragedy of my own life is that I am not a great poet’ (Vipond 1999a: 200). Should we rely on the author’s assessment of his lack of talent as a poet? In an essay on Fowles’ poetry Dianne L. Vipond quotes Lawrence Durrell’s description of Fowles as ‘a great poet’, and writes that ‘serious critical consideration of Fowles’ poetry is long overdue’ (Vipond in Aubrey 1999b: 238). Many of Fowles’ poems are at least of great interest. As a test-case for Fowles’ ability to portray the natural

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environment through language I turn to ‘Apollo’, one of the poems the author wrote in Greece in 1952 (1974: 18-9): Apollo the stones the pines the shadow of pines on the singing stones gurgle of stones turned in the sun by the silent water the water like glass pale glass the sun on the water the stones in the water the pines and the stones the salt stones singing and the sea singing and the pines and the sun singing a yellow sea-poppy sun and shingle sea and silence shrike screams I come

The lack of grammatical correctness and punctuation in the very first line of the poem, ‘the stones the pines’, directs the reader into thinking that this poem will present the physical environment pure and unmediated. However the irony of the poem, making it the perfect example of Fowles’ nature poetry in this context, is that its very title, Apollo, god of the arts, alerts us to the writer’s status as an active creator, not merely a scribe for the scene. The sea-shore landscape is, being in Greece, literally the domain of Apollo, but it is also figuratively the domain of Apollo in the sense that the poem is not an instantiation of Greek landscape, as the simplicity of the syntax initially might cajole

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us into believing, but primarily a humanly crafted artifact, an assemblage of printed words. The last line of the poem, ‘I come’, emphatically declares to us that these words are the passionate expulsion of a creator, like the scream of the island bird, the shrike. (The line ‘I come’ might also be interpreted in relation to Apollo’s occasional guise as sun god. In this reading one could see the poem as the lovemaking of Apollo to his landscape, with the land’s ecstatic ‘singing’ indicating that it is in the throes of sexual pleasure, and the final ejaculation of the sun-god bringing the harmony of elements to a heightened, epiphanous moment.) This poem is almost haiku-like in its simplicity of natural imagery. Its very spare elements — light, sea, stone and pines — remind one of the pastoral simplicity sought and found by Nicholas in The Magus. For Nicholas the light of Greece (phenomenological before cultural — and hence classical — in its simplicity) was an agent of redemption, corroding away his narcissism and leaving him clean. For Fowles himself the genesis of The Magus lies in a journal entry from 1952 telling of his experience of nature in Greece (‘a compound of exquisitely blue sky, brilliant sunlight, miles of rock and pine, and the sea’, causing the young man to experience ‘an all-embracing euphoria’ [1998: 58; 61-2]). Read in this way the poem ‘Apollo’ chronicles the moment that the creative seed of the idea for The Magus, that peculiar pastoral, was spilt. If we focus again on the way nature is represented by the language of the poem we notice how, as Vipond explains: ‘the sibilance of the recurring s sounds emulate the sound of water running over stones, the background noise of the sea, and an implicit whispering of wind “singing” in the pines’ (Vipond in Aubrey 1999b: 242). The repetition of the images of stone, sun, sea, pines and shadow, impresses the enduring reality of the land over a flow of time on the reader. The reiteration in the lines ‘the sun on the water/ the stones in the water/ the pines and the stones’ structurally echoes the lapping of the sea against the land’s edge. Although very few of his poems are properly described as nature poems, Fowles can evoke nature well using the English language, as he proves here in ‘Apollo’. Fowles’ lack of confidence about there being a potentially satisfactory relationship between his nature poetry and nature may be unwarranted. In the chapter of The Environmental Imagination entitled ‘Representing the Environment’ Lawrence Buell writes that: ‘the ca-

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pacity of the stylised image to put the reader or viewer in touch with the environment is precisely what needs stressing as a counter to the assumptions that stylisation must somehow work against outer mimesis or take precedence over it’ (1995: 97-8). Buell quotes Annie Dillard’s words that ‘language need not know the world perfectly in order to communicate perceptions adequately’ (1995: 101). For Buell stylisation helps to give reality to a landscape. He gives as one example a botanical passage from Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain. In Austin’s text one finds a description of a flower’s opening overnight as making a rustling noise when in fact such slow movement would cause no literal sound in the human ear. In the words of Austin: ‘One hears by night, when all the wood is still, the crepitatious rustle of the unfolding leaves and the pushing flower-stalk within, that has open blossoms before it has fairly uncramped from the sheath’ (quoted in Buell 1995: 99). The flower that is opening up in this passage is the false hellebore, a plant Austin characterises as having rude vigour. Her image may be an invention and a stylisation, but it is precisely in her power as a writer to invent and stylise that Buell thinks she is enabled to pursue ‘a decidedly referential project’ (1995: 99). Buell’s argument gives persuasive force to the view that nature writing may be valuable as a representation of the environment. Having read Fowles’ journal entries about ‘poems of phenomena’ not being well translated into the written word, one might be tempted to think that our perceptions of the natural world cannot be communicated adequately by written language. However as Fowles’ own poem ‘Apollo’ demonstrates, stylisation can be a powerful heuristic in helping one to develop an acquaintance with a landscape. In ‘Apollo’ the haiku-like simplicity of the natural imagery evokes the elemental simplicity of wild Greece; the onomatopoeic alliteration of words beginning with the letter ‘s’ evokes the sound of the wind scything through the trees; and the repetitive cadence of the verse hints at the sea’s repeated caressing of the shoreline. Although ‘Apollo’ is most classically the domain of cultural creation, it is also a significant and effective invocation of an actual place. Agreeing with this claim does not mean that we cannot also agree with Dana Phillips’ statement that ‘landscapes in words… lack the complexity and biodiversity that make natural landscapes compelling’ (2003: 19). Descriptive prose about the natural world must create, as Abram and Dissanayake argue, a significant disassociation between

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human attention and the sensuous world. Fowles captures Greece in his poem ‘Apollo’, and yet he also fails to capture it. Part of the problem is that ‘Apollo’ is a printed artifact, not a spoken-word event. Onomatopoeia can make language more responsive to the soundscape of a particular bioregion, and yet onamatopoeic words in the case of this written poem remain symbolic abstractions on printed paper, far from the world of actual swaying pines and immobile stones, or even the invisible breath of an embodied human speaker. From this perspective we should be wary of writing nature, but this does not mean that we should be wary of composing nature poetry. When presented as a spoken word performance nature poetry has a different, less distancing, relationship with the physical environment. It may be true that modern literates can never entirely enter the thought patterns of primary oral cultures, but we can still appreciate the way language as a mode of action may do less to remove us from dynamic, living ecosystems, than does a focus on static, printed nature poems. Reading such poems we are thrown back into our private lifeworlds, away from the breath of the speaker and of the passing winds in our environment. Fowles’ has swung far from the belief that language helps us to know nature in a profound sense. His practice of Zen techniques of perception placed him, for a time, alongside writers like Hitt who champion ‘the ecological sublime’ and eschew names in their relationship with nature. However, as I have shown, Fowles did come to realise the impossibility of living without names when perceiving the natural world. In The Tree, and in his poem ‘Naming’, he conceded that, as Pinker has shown, living without categorisation would be futile, particularly so when perceiving nature. However Fowles remains wary of descriptive nature writing, marking him as unusual among contemporary ecocritics, in some respects closer to Phillips than Bate or Buell. Fowles’ belief that we should look away from writing towards present tense being in our relationship with nature does have persuasive force. However the writer’s position on the relationship between nature poetry and nature fails to comprehend the positive advantages of stylisation, as discussed by Buell. Even a thinker as wary of the potential of the written alphabet to alienate us from the sensuous world as Abram can see that nature writing is valuable when it is sensitive to, and in some way or another echoically registers, the soundscapes of particular ecosystems. As Dissanayake’s work sug-

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gests, nature poetry might retain its value as art without further encouraging Western society’s scriptocentric disassociation from the natural environment if it was spoken aloud rather than written down on the page. Fowles’ estimation of the worth of his own nature poetry is overly pessimistic. If he was to make a distinction between nature poetry as spoken-word event and nature poetry as written, then he could make a more comprehensive assessment. He could assert that his nature poetry had value as art in both spoken and written form, but that when presented to the public in written form it also further encouraged a regrettable alienation from nature. The relationship between nature poetry and the physical environment, ‘outer mimesis’ in Buell’s words, need not in all instances be a matter of throwing stones at swallows. The reification of nature caused by language is a concern for Fowles’, as I have made clear in the present chapter. However, what reification comes to mean in the context of time has also been a theme in his work. According to Fowles, nature should, as often as possible, be met in present tense terms, not apprehended through a template of past classification. If one relegates an experience of nature ‘to an automatic pastness, a status of merely classifiable thing, image taken then’ (T 51), then one will not do justice to something that ‘waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness’ (T 52). Rather, in some way, describing or cataloguing one will have ‘cast a mysterious veil of deadness, of having already happened, over the actual and present event or phenomena’ (T 50). A ‘blur of rain’ will have intruded itself between the namer and the named. Thus reification is analysed by Fowles in The Tree in terms of a diachronous process. It does not just alienate us from non-human nature, but can alienate us from non-human nature as located in the present tense. Thus far I have said surprisingly little about collecting, a subject Fowles is famous for having written a novel on (The Collector). In fact the author has often in his writing career stressed the importance of accepting that the best in life may be an ephemeral experience that cannot be latched down in physical or semantic actuality. The character of Charles feels this that warm March day in the woods next to Lyme Regis in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Charles enters the wooded area known as the Undercliff, described by the narrator as ‘an

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English Garden of Eden’ and contemplates the natural beauty around him (FLW 71). He experiences the beauty of the scene, with its primroses and deep green drifts of bluebell leaves with a lack of what one assumes one would feel in such circumstances: uncomplicated happiness. In fact the gentleman feels curiously incongruous (FLW 72): It is true that to explain his obscure feeling of malaise, of inappropriateness, of limitation, he went back closer to home – to Rousseau, and the childish myths of a Golden Age and the Noble Savage. That is, he tried to dismiss the inadequacies of his own time’s approach to nature by supposing that one cannot re-enter a legend. He told himself he was too pampered, too spoilt by civilization, ever to inhabit nature again; and that made him sad, in a not unpleasant bitter-sweet sort of way.

Rousseau’s belief that the human race was contented when it dwelt in an original state of nature, but was not so contented when civilised, is Charles’ excuse for not feeling joy or pleasure in this idyllic location. However the narrator gives us a different explanation. Charles’ sadness is analysed by the narrator as springing from, not Victorian cultural sophistication, but another, more insidious, trait prevalent in the era. His melancholy originates in an inability to realise (FLW 72): that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. His statement to himself should have been, ‘I possess this now, therefore I am happy’, instead of what it so Victorianly was: ‘I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad.’

Charles’ problem is an inability to reconcile himself with the importance of the present tense in his contact with nature. The narrator here aligns this inability with the Victorian era, and we might be suspicious of Fowles’ ascription of a pattern of thinking to a whole age of British society. At least one might think that the urge to put lived experience on curatorial record is a more widely spread human characteristic. Indeed, of this Fowles’ own treatments of the theme elsewhere are sufficient proof. The moral formula, ‘desire to possess, bad; desire to experience, good’, was shown as difficult to accept not only for Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but also, earlier, with the character of Fred Clegg in Fowles’ first published work of fiction, The Collector (1963). Fowles was 37 when The Collector was published. In it the

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principal character, Fred Clegg, presents us with a case of a modern man living in mauvaise foi, in bad faith. Clegg kidnaps a college art student one night in London and keeps her locked in the cellar of his country house. Miranda, the student, eventually dies. Like Sartre’s smoker who doesn’t smoke but likes the occasional cigarette, Clegg ends the novel by admitting to the reader that he is not a determined kidnapper, but thought he would improve the amenities of his cellar anyway. Despite its limited theme of entrapment which surely must make this rate as a work of immaturity, this novel explores the mentality of the collector, the character who, by acquiring physical objects, would seek to take experience from the ephemeral and somehow translate it into the immutable. Clegg is a butterfly collector. His desire to possess beautiful life comes to perverted consummation when he kidnaps Miranda and keeps her locked in the basement of his isolated country house. The novel is divided into three sections: firstly a monologue by Clegg, secondly the journal of Miranda, and lastly, a return to the crazed diatribe of the collector. From the very beginning of Clegg’s narration he describes Miranda in terms taken from entomology. While standing in a queue and observing her anonymously from behind Clegg documents the colour of her long hair: ‘It was very pale, silky, like burnet cocoons’ (1986: 9). As the novel progresses the parallel between the young woman and Clegg’s butterflies doesn’t become any more subtle. At one point Clegg allows Miranda to come out of the basement and look around the house. She notices Clegg’s three cabinets (1986: 54): ‘Aren’t you going to show me my fellow victims?’ Of course I wanted nothing better. I pulled out one or two of the most attractive drawers – members of the same genus drawers, nothing serious, just for show, really.

The irony of Miranda’s question passes the sociopathological Clegg by. Although some of the points that are made about the urge to possess in this extended fictional metaphor are interesting, for example the emotional selfishness implicit in the collector, I am concerned here particularly with what the novel has to say about the mentality of

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Clegg in relation to the passing flow of time. Miranda poses the problem (1986: 203): It’s when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants.

Clegg would have the worth residing in the lived present, in this case represented by his beautiful female prisoner, somehow recorded and inscribed — ‘latched down’ — for all time. Of course this is an impossibility. The entity that is Miranda is a matter of changing moods, physical motion, independent volition, all that is entailed by the identity of a continually living human being under normal circumstances. Clegg’s quest to hold onto the qualitative worth of the lived present, dramatised through the kidnapping and imprisonment of a beautiful young woman, is thus doomed from the start. Unless he ‘pins’ her like his other specimens, that which she is will not be fixed immutably. And yet if he does kill her then that which she is will cease to exist. Clegg does come upon the idea of photographing Miranda, and yet we are pre-warned of the futility of this exercise when Clegg first shows Miranda his portfolio of photographs and her immediate response is ‘They’re dead’ (1986: 55). Generally in this novel — be it in the motif of photography, or in the eventual outcome of the plot (the heroine’s death) — we notice how curatorial actions, attempts to latch down ephemeral present tense experience, ultimately bring a deathly quality to their intended object of desire and admiration. The younger Fowles himself had been guilty of trying to lock present tense life down into a form of past tense actuality. During his childhood in the1930s in Leigh-on-Sea, a suburb of London at the mouth of the Thames, Fowles’ uncle, Stanley Richards, began to encourage the boy to take an interest in entomology. Richards also took the young Fowles on occasional butterfly collecting expeditions into the country. In June 1940 Fowles’ parents, Robert and Gladys, moved to a village in Devon as part of the evacuation of civilians from London after the fall of France. During the autumn of 1941 Fowles took a term off from his private boarding school in Bedford to join his parents in Devon. The house in which the family lived was beside the farming community and former apple growing village, Ipplepen. The Devon countryside became Fowles’ private playground in this period,

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and he was able to enact the kind of adventures indulged in by the protagonist of Richard Jefferies’ Bevis. Apart from helping the farmers with their work in the fields, this period of his boyhood in the south-west of England also involved hunting animals and collecting as an amateur field naturalist. Thanks to a local gentleman in the village, Fowles was taught how to fish and shoot, occasionally even engaging in poaching when alone. Years later however, Fowles confessed to regretting this particular episode in his history. In an introduction to a work on ecology he wrote (1998: 341): My own painfully slow progress from the sick days of my own little schoolboy Wunderkammer during the entre-deux-guerres has shown me that nature is in fact not about collecting at all, but about something infinitely more complex and difficult: being.

It is the acceptance of loss as endemic to the transience of being that is now urged by the reformed collector. Naming too can of course be seen in the context of time as an act driven by the need to make immutable that which remains ephemeral. Naming can also be seen as a form of collecting. Writers may be partly, if not exclusively, motivated by the desire to leave something of themselves behind before they die. Fowles has stated in an interview that ‘Deep down, I write today because I shall die tomorrow’, repeating a sentiment frequently expressed in English literature, famously in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 207; Shakespeare 2003: 241). However, whatever the motivation, the dangers of letting the name occlude the real world remain the same. My earlier discussion of the poem ‘Naming’ here has relevance. The urge to record lived experience before it is forever lost may result in a kind of linguistic reification and an alienation of the language user from that he/she desires. To look back over the past few chapters, I have looked at science as one way of knowing nature. I have provided theoretical support for seeing this approach to nature as incomplete by turning to American pragmatism and Frankfurt school philosophy. After tracing and delineating the links between Romantic poetry, Heidegger’s notion of dwelling, and the ‘receptivity’ to nature counselled by Fowles in his essay ‘The Blinded Eye’, I turned to The Tree where the author con-

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cludes that knowing nature fully ‘is an art as well as a science’ (in this way he, like Blake, is wary of single vision). In the present chapter I have traced the permutations in the author’s writings on the idea that records — written records (naming) and physical records (collecting) — do not constitute an adequate encounter with nature. To return to Daniel Martin, the young protagonist gives us an example of the kind of being in nature Fowles’ non-fiction writings seemingly counsel. At the end of the first chapter of the novel, ‘Harvest’, Daniel has spent the day harvesting wheat in a Devon field. As evening comes he makes his way into a beech wood above the field. The boy Daniel stands in a combe, a special conformation in Fowles’ writings. Daniel ‘clings to his knowledges’ of binomial Latin names for orchids, for example Spiranthes spiralis, found in a pasture-field that he can now see on the other side of the valley, ‘since he lacks so much else’. However he can also experience nature unmediated by language. Although this excerpt is presented in formal language it strains against the protocols of its semantic context (DM 11): The leaves of the beeches are translucent in the westering sun. A wood-pigeon coos, a nuthatch whistles somewhere close above. He sits with his back to a beech-trunk, staring down through foliage at the field. Without past or future, purged of tenses; collecting this day, pregnant with being.

The author’s shift to a participial mode as the character of Daniel leans against a beech-trunk indicates to us that the protagonist is fully absorbed in his present, even while he ‘collects’ this day. As Simon Loveday points out, the last five sentences of this chapter are without tensed verbs of any kind, an effect which serves to convey the intense immediacy of reality (1985: 106-7). Even as the young Daniel feels a continuity with the rest of the day, the 21st August, 1942, the woodland encourages a ‘purging of tenses’ in his experience of the place.

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Chapter 10 Being, Being, Being: From Zen to D. H. Lawrence I will spend the last chapter of this study discussing Fowles’ commitment to the importance of present-tense being in his relations with nature. His interest in Zen Buddhism is one aspect of this commitment, however, as I will show, it is more D. H. Lawrence who has guided Fowles in this area, and it is more Lawrence that we should look to if we seek a heuristic comparison between the author’s work and its cultural and philosophical antecedents. Fowles has exhibited many sympathies with Zen philosophy. I have already discussed the techniques of seeing Fowles found in Zen in the context of my discussion of his poem ‘Naming’. In an interview with Raman Singh, Fowles confessed an admiration for the Zen archery ceremony in which a monk picks up an arrow, fits it to his bow, draws the arrow very slowly to full stretch, and then, at the point ‘where every Westerner would shoot at the target’, very slowly decontracts the pressure and puts the bow down (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 92). The ritual’s symbolic portrayal of the value of process over end productivity parallels Fowles’ dislike of perceptions of nature weighted towards nature’s use-value, as expressed in The Tree (53). At the end of his essay ‘Islands’, written to accompany Fay Godwin’s photographs of the Scilly Isles, he likens the Scillys to ‘one huge Zen garden of the Atlantic’, emphasising the way the simple forms and textures of the stones on these islands provide relief from the artifice and prolixity of modern civilization (1998: 320). Much of Zen philosophy and anecdote is concerned with returning the mind from the world of abstraction and speculation as well as from the realm of the second-hand image or experience, to living, present tense reality. In one recorded interview from a Zen monastery a young monk came to his master with some philosophical speculations on the secret of Zen. The master, Shih-kung took hold of the monk’s nose and gave it a sharp pull. The point of such a response was an em-

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phatic demonstration that Zen is actual, living reality (Watts 1992: 97). Fowles’ project of an ‘art’ of being in the natural world has affinities with Zen philosophy then, in that he too encourages a move away from the speculative intellect, away from the second-hand image or experience, and into the living, non-purposive present tense. Thoreau is a writer Fowles reports as having learnt from in his attitudes to nature, and a writer to whom I have recurrently compared Fowles in this study (Fowles 1998: 260). A reader of Walden finds the Englishman in accord with many of the New Englander’s ideas. Here Thoreau writes of his first summer in the Concord woods (1991: 98): There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amongst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time.

Here Thoreau renounces an instrumental attitude to his natural surroundings, as well as the work ethic of his Protestant society. He stops seeing the forest around him as something to be acted upon or manipulated. While assuming such a non-purposive stance towards nature, he embraces the present tense. In forgetting about the passage of time he is unconcerned with cares hailing from outside the moment. Further, he does not try to record his lived experience. Thoreau then remarks on the similarity of such a state of sitting in nature to eastern practices of meditation by saying that he then ‘realised what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works’ (1991: 99). Thoreau’s absorption in the present tense paralles Fowles’ goal of existing in the present while in nature. While the way of being in nature that both Fowles and Thoreau, with slight differences, advocate, does share some similarities with the meditation practiced in Mahayana Buddhism, or Zen, there remains the major difference that, rather than being entranced by a forest scene around them, practitioners of Zen would aspire to meditate and cultivate a state of ‘emptiness’ in their minds. This point highlights Fowles as a writer in the Western tradition. His encounter with Zen Buddhism in the 1960s was one in which he

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took a few techniques or ‘aids’ for seeing and experiencing, and rejected the body of its cosmology. Interviewed about his interest in Zen he had this to say: ‘I have no interest in its theology. I dislike all transcendental religion, and especially the oriental kind’ (quoted in Vipond 1999a: 79). Zen involves a cosmology in which the self is considered an illusion in a world where everything is transient. Attachments to personal identity are, considering that the self like everything else is in the process of passing away, bound to cause misery and should be renounced. Rather an acceptance of the greater world around us as the locus of identity should be practiced. This is come upon through disciplines of meditation. This central facet of Zen, the renunciation of the self and the revelation of identity with a greater and transient world – a world ‘full of emptiness’ – is abjured by Fowles, placing him apart from the company of Gary Snyder, four years Fowles’ junior and the greatest of twentieth-century nature writers to have incorporated Japanese Zen Buddhism into their vision of the natural world. Rather, Fowles the atheist and Romantic sees value and importance in the achievements, aspirations, joys and pains of embodied, individual selves — he has, after all, bothered to write novels full of them. In the following statement of Fowles’ from his intellectual selfportrait, The Aristos, I take the term ‘lamaism’ as inclusive of Zen Buddhism (1970a: 111-12): Lamaism tells us to make a sustained attempt to achieve oneness with ‘God’, or nothingness. Living, I must learn not to be, or to be as if I was not; individual, I must lose all individuality; I must totally withdraw from all life and yet be in total sympathy with all life. But if we were all lamas it would be as if we were all masturbators: life would end. ‘God’ is in contrast to us; it is our pole. And it is not by imitating it, as the Tao Te Ching recommends, that we honour it; nor does it need honouring.

Thus the author rejects the central claims of Zen as a body of metaphysics. While for some religious thinkers nature is ultimately apprehended as ‘by the Buddha and Mahakasyapa’, Fowles does not seem to have an interest in an abjuration of the ego in the face of the perceived environment (Huxley 1962: 218). I will in a moment make a comparison with Lawrence’s embracing of the present tense in his poetry. However, the poet’s reply to his friend Mathew in Wordsworth’s poem ‘Expostulation and Reply’ is another instructive char-

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acterisation of Fowles’ own position. After being asked why he sits alone and ‘dreams his time away’ on an old gray stone, Wordsworth tells the questioner that ‘we can feed this mind of ours/ In a wise passiveness’ (1971: 32). The transcendental cosmology of the Zen practitioner is fundamentally different to the notes towards an art of being in nature provided by an atheist appreciative of both the present tense, ‘receptive’, lived experience and the value of human subjectivity. Like Fowles’ much later and perhaps valedictory essay on the subject, ‘The Nature of Nature’, The Tree ends by bringing us down from the thin-aired altitudes of theory to the rough-textured ground of lived experience. At the end of this long essay the reader is moved suddenly from discursive theory to first-person narration. In the following excerpt Fowles describes a visit to Wistman’s Wood, a secluded fragment of primeval forest on the northern edge of Dartmoor in Devon, with his now dead wife Elizabeth. For once Fowles-the-spinnerof-stories is the protagonist of his own narrative (T 80-1): We set off north-west across an endless fen and up towards a distant line of tors, grotesque out-crops of weather-worn granite. Though it is mid-June, the tired grass is still not fully emerged from its winter sleep; and the sky is also tired, a high grey canopy, with no wind to shift or break it. What flowers there are, yellow stars of tormentil, blue and dove-grey splashes of milkwort, the delicate lilac of the marsh violet in the bogs, are tiny and sparse. Somewhere in the dark and uninhabited uplands to the north a raven snores. I search the sky, but it is too far off to be seen. We cross a mile of this dour wasteland, then up a steep hillside, through a gap in an ancient sheep-wall, and still more slope to climb; and come finally to a rounded ridge that leads north to an elephantine tower, a vast turd of primary rock, Longford Tor. At our feet another bleak valley, then a succession, as far as the eye can see, of even bleaker tor-studded skylines and treeless moorland desert. My wife tells me I must have the wrong place, and nothing in the landscape denies her. I do, but not with total conviction. It is at least thirty years since I was last in this part of the Moor. We walk down the convex slope before us, into the bleak valley, I begin to think that it must indeed be the wrong place. But then suddenly, like a line of hitherto concealed infantry, huddled under the steepest downward fall of the slope near the bottom, what we have come for emerges from the low grass and ling: a thin, broken streak of tree-tops, a pale arboreal surf.

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Wistman’s Wood is a half-mile chain of rare primeval forest, growing amongst a broken litter of granite boulders. Part of the miracle of this wood comes from its context, being situated on a moor, which is itself in this excerpt beneath a blank cover of stratus cloud. We then learn from the author that, unusually for this altitude, the predominant tree in the wood is English Oak. Here the oaks only grow to five metres tall and their branches grow laterally in an interlocking maze. The branches are clothed in ferns and the granite floor is covered in moss and lichen (T 86-7): We enter. The place has an intense stillness, as if here the plant side of creation still rules and even birds are banned; below, through the intricate green gladelets and branch-gardens, comes the rush of water in a moorland stream, one day to join the sea far to the south. This water-noise, like the snore of the raven again, the breeding trill of a distant curlew, seems to come from another world, once one is inside the wood. There are birds, of course… an invisible hedgesparrow, its song not lost here, as it usually is, among all the sounds of other common garden birds, nor lost in its own ubiquity in Britain; but piercing and peremptory, individual, irretrievable; even though, a minute later, we hear its prestissimo bulbul shrill burst out again. My wood, my wood, it never shall be yours. Parts of all the older trees are dead and decayed, crumbling into humus, which is why, together with the high annual humidity, they carry their huge sleeves of ferns and other plants. Some are like loose brassards and can be lifted free and replaced. The only colour not green or bronze or russet, not grey trunk or rich brown of the decaying wood, are tiny rose-pink stem-beads, future apples where some gall-wasp has lain its eggs on a new shoot. But it is the silence, the waitingness of the place, that is so haunting; a quality all woods will have on occasion, but which is overwhelming here – a drama, but of a time-span humanity cannot conceive. A pastness, a presentness, a skill with tenses the writer in me knows he will never know; partly out of his own inadequacies, partly because there are tenses human language has yet to invent.

The reader notices how extensive is the author’s knowledge of field naturalism; he recognises and identifies a large number of plant and bird species. And yet this scientific knowledge seems to happily coexist here with a ‘poetic’ seeing of the wood. Nature is seen as a whole as well as a conglomerate of parts: the author is able to speak of something as unscientific as the ‘quality’ of the wood. The military metaphors in use remind the reader of Fowles’ past experience of training marines on Dartmoor as a young man: the line of tree-tops

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come into sight as ‘a line of hitherto concealed infantry, huddled under the steepest downward fall of the slope’, and upon closer inspection the trees carry ‘brassards’ of ferns and other plants. These metaphors do not just add to our image of the oaks as having dignified strength and being sources of tireless resistance (proving that, pace Fowles’ impatience with the genre, the stylisations of nature writing may represent nature very well), but also demonstrate how the author’s experience of nature is inflected with a history of personal associations. In the previous passage the author notices the sound of a raven snoring; this is a personally meaningful sound as during the Fowles’ boyhood there had been many more ravens than in contemporary Britain, and he has come to associate ravens with the freedom of wild nature. From the beginning of the second passage we also notice the qualities Fowles has expressed a love of in wild nature elsewhere. There is the secrecy and seclusion of being inside a bonne vaux: Wistman’s Wood is hidden within a valley, and the sound of a moorland stream and the trill of a curlew seemingly ‘come from another world’, the one outside the wood. The wood is mysterious with its network of ‘intricate green gladelets and branch-gardens’, and its many pendulous ferns. It is also very fertile, with a high annual humidity and an abundance of rich greens and browns. The author’s affirmation of the transience of lived experience emerges when he calls the song of the hedgesparrow irretrievable, ‘even though, a minute later, we hear its prestissimo bulbul shrill burst out again.’ The bird’s song is also called ‘peremptory’ and ‘individual’, raising the notion of unmediated being, which I will discuss presently. The drama of the wood, the process of evolution, is described as occurring in a time-span impossible to conceive. If we recall the image that I opened the first chapter of this study with, of Daniel watching a circling buzzard and thinking of his ‘past futures, his future pasts’ in natural environments, then we will see that nature’s incompatability with human-assigned tenses is something which has persisted in Fowles’ thought (DM 427). The trees stand firmly in their past growth rings, and their identity sits firmly in the past vagaries of deep, evolutionary history, and yet every sway of every leaf in the forest is irreducibly and simultaneously present-tense. The life around the walker, at once both ancient and new, decaying and evolving depending on the view-point taken, confounds the easy segregations of past, present

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and future imposed by the English language. Further, the wood is found to be haunting by the author. Perhaps the contrastive immanence of his own loss of life against the permanent ‘waitingness of the place’ produces this effect. Whatever the case the wood has a strong, even ‘overwhelming’, emotional affect on Fowles. Finally it is being that the author finds in Wistman’s Wood. He walks up the slope away from the copses of trees, losing sight of them and thinking that the forest has already become a memory and a thing to be used in his prose. And then he delivers the last, rueful line of the essay: ‘An end to this, dead retting of its living leaves’ (T 91). This description of the reader’s now finished reading experience reflects back on Fowles’ nonfictional nature writing with a wry, selfdeprecating nod of admittance: The Tree has employed the epistemology it finally rejects. Not by chance the longest actual description of a wild biota in Fowles’ body of writings is constituted by the ten pages at the end of The Tree, quoted from above. For the reader the book is over, and the author would seemingly have books on the subject of nature always over. This seems a good reason why he has not written more on the subject that he called ‘the key to my fiction’ (T 31). The dangers of a reification of nature through language, and particularly through written language, that I discussed in the previous chapter discourage the author from writing further. The Tree effectively finishes with an entreaty to the reader to go and spend some time, some non-reifying and present tense time to be specific, with nature, or more pedantically still, with ‘the strange phosphorus of life, nameless under an old misappellation’ (T 90). What is of value in “nature” ‘can be apprehended only by other present being, only by the living senses and consciousness’ (T 90). This sentiment concurs with that of evolutionary psychologist and ethologist of the arts, Ellen Dissanayake: ‘especially today, what we need to learn most from books is what life was like before books… As humans, we were evolved over millennia to find meaning not only in language-mediated ideology but in the affordances of our human world, in such things as stones, water, weather, the loving work of human hands, the expressive sounds of human voices’ (1992: 220). Many of the writings on nature Fowles has produced, I refer specifically to The Tree, ‘The Blinded Eye’, and ‘The Nature of Nature’, can, at least to the extent that they contain anti-positivist theorising, be considered like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ladder. Such a metaphorical

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ladder might have to be climbed, but upon arriving at the top of it the device should be thrown away. That is to say, these writings may be necessary as therapy to take us to a certain point (what life was like before books), but once one has arrived at this point they become superfluous. For Wittgenstein ‘the real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to’ (1997: 51). So too for Fowles in relation to his thoughts on apprehending nature: the real discovery is the one that allows him to stop writing about the natural world. For the reader of The Tree the real discovery is the one that makes him or her put down the book and go and have some present-tense experience of a wild biota. Although Fowles agrees with Woolf that ‘Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy’, he has said that, for him, D. H. Lawrence, especially in his poetry, has come closest to ‘penetrating that strange otherness about it’ (1998: 352). Lawrence’s poetry has an acute sense of the present tense about it, so crucial for an adequate perception of nature. Lawrence himself wrote, in a preface to the American edition of New Poems, of his admiration for the free verse of Walt Whitman. Lawrence’s appreciation of Whitman here is revealing of his own philosophy and art. Lawrence wrote that ‘the clue to his utterance lies in the sheer appreciation of the instant moment, life surging into utterance at its very well-head’ (1969: 87). One may say the same of Lawrence. Lawrence himself proclaimed in this same piece of writing: ‘Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now’ (1969: 86). Lawrence is also referred to in the author’s fiction, chiefly in Daniel Martin. When Daniel and his friends spend a six-week holiday in Italy during their time as students at Oxford the protagonist notes that, although Anthony and Jane were interested in the Catholic side of the country (DM 109): The real bible that summer, for all four of us, was Sea and Sardinia. Imperial Rome, we agreed, was vulgar beyond belief. All good lay with Lawrence and the Etruscans. We pursued them wherever their sites lay in range. We were playing pagan, of course; and eternal Oxford aesthetes.

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Interestingly a reading of Fowles’ diaries shows that while at Oxford he had read Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia and Etruscan Places. At that time he wrote of Etruscan Places: ‘Genius for sensing the mood of a place, for blossoming at the slightest germination’ (EUL 102/1/3, 12 April 1950: 73). Like Lawrence, the students in Daniel Martin prefer the preRoman civilisation of the Etruscans to the domineering stone monuments of imperial Rome. In the eyes of Lawrence, unlike the heavy and immutable stone architecture of later Rome, the wooden architecture of the Etruscan cities was a transient and thus organic part of the natural landscape. In Etruscan Places Lawrence looks to the ruins of Etruscan civilisation for evidence of ‘the balance of blood and mind consciousness’ (quoted in Colletta 1999: 216). He pictured the Etruscans as having a religion that lived ‘by the mystery of the elemental powers of the Universe, the complex vitalities of what we feebly call Nature’ (Lawrence 1993: 2108). Little is known about the precise identity of the Etruscans, the most important of the pre-Roman inhabitants of Italy, and this gave Lawrence a chance to hypothesise and dream. The Etruscans dominated most of Italy between 900-500 B.C., but unlike the Greeks and Romans they left behind a sparse written record. Etruscan art survived because it was buried in tombs. Greek and Roman historians tell us that the Etruscan language was alien to that of their neighbours and that their customs were spiritual and sensual. Etruscan art is noteworthy for its frequent portrayal of loving men and women, sometimes erotic couplings (Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 255). It was Easter of 1927 that Lawrence and his friend Earl Brewster travelled from Rome northwards, visting Etruscan tombs and cities and enjoying the Italian countryside. The sketches Lawrence made during the week-long tour eventually took shape in Etruscan Places. Lawrence’s interpretation of Etruscan civilization relied heavily on imagination. For example walking through the museum at Tarquinia, the cultural capital of Etruscan civilisation, he notes the effigies carved on top of stone sarcophagi of men holding patera, round saucers with raised knobs in the centre representing the germ of heaven and earth, for Lawrence, ‘the eternal quick of all things’ (1993: 2113). Thus it is that Fowles’ judgement of Etruscan Places, as ‘blossoming at the slightest germination’ becomes comprehensible. The merest potential sign sends Lawrence into interpretive mode.

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When the students in Daniel Martin visit the Etruscan chamber tombs at Tarquinia, tombs which have provided a rich source of information about the lives and deaths of the Etruscans and the walls of which are painted with murals depicting festivals, dancers, lovers, and birds on the wing, the protagonist finds their art to be ‘sad, but in a noble, haunting, fertile way’. He sees the experience as an ‘avatar of so many things I had derived from the Devon countryside as a boy’ (DM 109). In allying himself with Lawrence’s view of Etruscan civilisation Daniel admits that he had been ‘playing pagan’, flirting with a pantheistic view of the natural world. Indeed, although Daniel’s father had been the village vicar and Daniel had sat ‘so many Sundays’ through the ‘fusty absurdity’ of the ‘Apostles and Elders on the rood screen’, it is nature that acts as his real church as an adult (DM 128). Like the people depicted in the ‘Tomb of Hunting and Fishing’ mural (530-520 BC, Tarquinia), with their outstretched arms mirroring the spread wings of birds in the sky above them, Daniel worships nonhuman life (see illustration in Borrelli and Targia 2004: 34-5). As Lisa Colletta notes, it is no coincidence that prior to the group’s departure for Italy, the play that Daniel gets accepted is called The Empty Church, the title signalling his eventual break with the Catholic Anthony and Jane (1999: 215). However what Colletta does not note is that the aptness of the play’s title is confirmed by the chapter’s culminating episode, where all four friends take a midnight swim in the sea by Tarquinia. As it did for Lawrence, Italy here enables at least some of Fowles’ characters to shed their English beliefs and conventions (even as they shed their clothes). The sea is phosphorescent and the four link hands in a circle, floating in the deep water. The water is like the primordial fluid our species’ ancestors once crawled out of; the characters’ immersion in it a reversion to a original state of nature. In the spirit of Lawrence’s version of the Etruscans, Daniel feels a moment of ‘mysterious union’, ‘no more durable than the tiny shimmering organisms in the water around us’. Anthony on the other hand sees the episode as nothing more than a faintly embarrassing game (DM 110). In the vocabulary of Lawrence, Daniel would be aligned with the Etruscans and Anthony with the Romans: the Etruscans, according to Lawrence, were in essence appreciative of ‘the alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness’, while the Romans lusted after ‘imposing deeds, imposing buildings’ (quoted in

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Carey 1999: 402). Daniel is able to share in a sacred moment with nature, a moment of phosphorescent transience, while Anthony remains to all effects obtusely insensitive. Thus pantheism, as momentary and fleeting as it may be, is here represented as exposing Anthony’s aridly intellectual Catholicism; finally suggesting to us the title of the play, ‘The Empty Church’. Fowles’ own view of the Etruscans had already made itself felt in a poem from his 1973 collection Poems (1974: 76-7): By the Appian Way A white wind blows from the distant sea And the Alban hills are lost in heat. We march, you remember, we march The straight black road and the broken tombs, Then sit on this mound in the shade of pines And see its straightness, Its arrogant endless Roman straightness. And the broken tombs. The sadness is there is no sadness. Only a dryness, a dry contempt. Night was what destroyed the legions; Waterclocks drowned the hafted eagles. Science and law are the errors of empire; The barbarians were never the enemy. The enemy does not fight, but dances. Oh wind. As each Etruscan knew. At Tarquinia such Greenness combs the cool brown earth; Even a painted dog brings tears. When I remember all my age, When I remember all we wanted, When the wind moves as now it moves We live and I touch your sleeping hair.

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The poet echoes Lawrence’s dislike for the ‘arrogantly’ grand and enduring public works of Roman civilisation, such as a straight road. The road is indeed an appropriate symbol for the representation of Roman civilisation as primarily military in this poem, as the Romans built their roads for military purposes, and their straightness enabled armies to move as quickly as possible into Etruria (Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 267). All that is left of the Romans now is the road and the crest-fallen symbol of their ‘broken tombs’. The legions of imperial Rome were not destroyed by warring human foes, the poet suggests, but rather by the passing of time, by ‘night’ and ‘waterclocks’. Dance is one of the most frequently encountered motifs in Etruscan art (Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 251). The poet aligns himself with Lawrence in his interpretation of the Etruscans, as knowing that the ‘enemy’ of order and law is spontaneous dance, as well as an intimacy with natural processes, with ‘greenness’ combing ‘the cool brown earth’. The exclamation ‘Oh wind’ affirms the reality of change, putting the lie to the apparently enduring public-works of the Romans. The wind will ultimately turn even these to blown dust. The poem is spoken by the poet to his lover. In the last stanza of the poem the poet recalls the past of his generation, in much the same way that the rest of the poem recalls the history of lost civilisations. And then come the final two lines of the poem: ‘When the wind moves as now it moves/ We live and I touch your sleeping hair’. If we look at the structure of the last stanza as mirroring the structure of the preceeding verse, we see the way in which the Etruscans trump the Romans (even though it was the Romans who, starting in 273 BC, actually colonised and displaced the Etruscans), and the living present of the poet, his touching the sleeping head of his companion, trumps his recollection of his own history and its multitudinous desires (Barker and Rasmussen 1998: 262). The poem gives the last word to the living present and animal-like sociability, and the wind, symbolic of change and natural force. Fowles’ affinity with Lawrence runs still deeper. To return to the author’s fiction, Lawrence has direct relevance a second time in Daniel Martin where the protagonist visits New Mexico. Daniel’s director is shooting a Western there, and his and Daniel’s script discussions are to be in the evenings, leaving the day for explorations of the surrounding environment. Of the landscape which borders the last frag-

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ments of the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico Daniel writes (DM 323): There are more spectacular ones in the United States, but none has quite the pure balance, the classical perfection and nobility, almost the Greekness, of the ranges that border the Rio Grande between Santa Fe and Taos fifty miles to the north… [The abandoned, medieval Pueblo Indian sites are pedestaled on] cliffs of pink volcanic tufa over the endless green pine-forests and vast plains. Their horizons are ringed with mountains, whose basal conifers dissolve into the amber-gray of the higher aspen-woods, then the snow and the dustless azure of the sky. The views are infinite, of a kind most city-dwellers have forgotten exist; of another gentler and nobler, as yet unvitiated, planet.

In Daniel’s expressing his attraction to ‘the classical perfection’ of this place, the reader of Fowles oeuvre recalls the classical simplicity of Greek light and space that figures as a redemptive force for Nicholas in The Magus. Daniel’s exultation in the New Mexican landscape seems to impute a sense of sacredness to the place, recalling another visiting Englishman from the annals of literary history, Lawrence, and his description of New Mexico in his essay of that name. Lawrence wrote much on New Mexico, but this essay in particular, included in Phoenix, The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, captures what we might think of as the essence of writer’s response to place (1961: 143): All those mornings when I went with a hoe along the ditch to the Canon, at the ranch, and stood, in the fierce, proud silence of the Rockies, on their foothills, to look far over the desert to the blue mountains away in Arizona, blue as chalcedony, with the sage-brush desert sweeping grey-blue in between, dotted with tiny cube-crystals of houses, the vast amphitheatre of lofty, indomitable desert, sweeping round to the ponderous Sangre de Cristo, mountains on the east, and coming up flush at the pine-dotted foot-hills of the Rockies! What splendour! Only the tawny eagle could really sail out into the splendour of it all. Leo Stein once wrote to me: It is the most aesthetically-satisfying landscape I know. To me it was much more than that. It had a splendid silent terror, and a vast far-andwide magnificence which made it way beyond mere aesthetic appreciation. Never is the light more pure and overweening than there, arching with a royalty almost cruel over the hollow, uptilted world.

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Like the fictional Daniel, Lawrence exults in the purity of the light of the high desert, a light ‘arching with a royalty almost cruel’. For Daniel the vista seems to be of a nobler, ‘as yet unvitiated, planet’. When Lawrence writes of the land’s ‘vast far-and-wide magnificence’, he says that it is a quality ‘which made it way beyond mere aesthetic appreciation’. We would not be misguided to surmise that Lawrence is here imputing a sense of the divine to the landscape (that which lies beyond ‘mere aesthetic appreciation’ might be an experience of the sacred) and Daniel’s response to New Mexico moves along similar lines. For Daniel ‘some skylines will not be forgotten’, and like a skyline from his childhood by the edge of Dartmoor, the contours that he sees now, for reasons he can’t explain, ‘always haunted my dreams’ (DM 323). Fowles’ protagonist feels that the mountains and limpid skies of this region, particularly the site of Pueblo ruins at Tsankawi, have an ineluctable significance. According to Lawrence ‘New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had’ (1961: 142). He had, prior to arriving in the state, spent time in former Ceylon, in Sicily, Australia, Tahiti and California, but none of these places had moved him so profoundly as his experience of the deserts around Santa Fé. In his travels Lawrence had been searching for an experience of the religious and, though he met many people and cultures that he considered sincerely religious, it was only when he arrived in New Mexico and encountered the tribes of native Americans that he was personally to experience an abiding sense of the religious. The fictional Daniel from Fowles’ novel is strongly attracted by the Pueblo Indian mesa sites in the ranges near Santa Fé, and he notices that (DM 323): their atmosphere is paradoxically very European – to be precise, Etruscan and Minoan… that is, they are haunted by loss and mystery, by a sense of some magical relationship, glimpsed both in the art and what little is known of their inhabitant’s way of life, between man and nature. This must have been what so attracted Lawrence.

In fact Lawrence was attracted to the living tradition of the native Americans in the region, not to the remnant shards of an earlier civilisation as the fictional Daniel suggests here. And yet the noting of a continuity between the Etruscans and the Pueblo Indians and a shared appreciation of the living present tense is not unwarranted. In the later

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sections of his travelogue Mornings in Mexico Lawrence recounts his experiences living in New Mexico in the 1920s. He admires the way the native Americans forged a relationship with ‘the wonderful shimmer of creation’ through a song to make the corn, a dance in imitation of the deer, bear and wolf, and a dance in which the men held rattle snakes in their mouths (1956: 51). As in relation to the Etruscans, Lawrence here admittedly fabricates much of the native Americans cosmology, working up a picture of the ‘magical relationship’ between man and nature from his own imagination when he didn’t know something for a fact. According to Lawrence these people had no God but rather the wonder of the whole of creation, and ‘virtue [for the native Americans] lies in the heroic response to the creative wonder’, an example being the Hopi Indian snake dance as a brave gesture of conquest, the snakes lying ‘nearer to the source of potency, the dark, lurking, intense sun at the centre of the earth’ (1956: 53; 68). The native Americans were in Lawrence’s view vividly alive to the mysteries, dangers and wonders of the living creation. In a critical commentary on Lawrence’s novel The Man Who Died, Fowles celebrates the writer’s (1998: 234): …acute awareness of being, a sensitivity like that of a Geiger counter aroused and evoked by and in all that existed, though most strongly in simple nature and the primitive worlds remotest from high culture – that is (we lack an exact word for it), the ability to feel and venerate the existingness in things.

Fowles differentiates the ‘existingness’ of things from Duns Scotus’ medieval ‘haecceity’ and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘thisness’. Rather than the separate individuality of all things, it is their mere being that is the case in point. Fowles’ view of Lawrence is similar to that of the Lawrence critic Dolores LaChapelle. LaChapelle sees Lawrence as engaged in a search to reunite humanity with simple nature, and that rather than making him nostalgic for a lost era, this marks him as a ‘future primitive’ (1996). The Man Who Died receives surprisingly meagre actual critical comment in Fowles’ putative ‘commentary’. In 1927, in Italy and just prior to beginning work on the sketches that were to become Etruscan Places, Lawrence wrote a short story entitled The Escaped Cock. This short story subsequently became the novella The Man Who Died. As Laird Clark points out, all of the Etruscan writings attempt to answer

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the question of ‘how the magnificence of life could be lengthened into death’ (1980: 399). In this novella Lawrence effectively made ‘the coming forth of the Son of Man like an Etruscan afterlife, a continuance of the glory of this life’ (Clark 1980: 399). Given the close relationship between Lawrence’s Etruscan writings and The Man Who Died it is understandable that Fowles, years after publishing the Etruscan Places-influenced Daniel Martin, should choose to write an essay on this particular novella. The novella is a retelling of the story of Christ’s resurrection (the fact that it was Easter when this work was conceived is obviously not incidental). Lawrence thought of himself as a kind of Christ-like figure, someone who might redeem society, and yet he was hostile to the life-denying aspect of Christianity. As Jeffrey Meyers writes: ‘Lawrence’s relation to Christianity was essentially negative, for he disapproved of its dreary repression and used its imagery in an attempt to lead society back to a pre-Christian, pagan awareness of vital possibilities’ (1982: 150). Lawrence’s recreation of the Christian myth in this novella replaced the survival of the spirit with ‘the resurrection of the body’, and achieved ‘the promise of salvation while on earth’ (Meyers 1982: 150). Beyond the misogynism of the novel we can see Lawrence’s attitude of faith in the splendour and potency of simple physical life. From the bruised rubble of his life Christ resurrects a hermetic self which values the wonder invoked by the phenomenal world. As Anne O. Ehlert has argued, there is an increasingly confident vision of anti-anthropocentrism in the literary works Lawrence published throughout the years (2001: 182). In Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Lawrence’s collection of poems from 1923, one finds many poems which record the lives of nonhuman species with startling sympathy and accuracy. However rather than discussing the major fiction at this point, or Birds, Beasts and Flowers, I turn the reader’s attention to a poem from Lawrence’s late collection Pansies. As Sandra Gilbert notes: ‘what critics object to most in Lawrence’s Pansies [is]… the polemical and confessional directness that gives the poems their power… Yet directly stated, hortatory verse is, after all, as old or older than Horace’s ‘Integer vitae scelerisque purus’ and as new as Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’’ (quoted in Laird 1988: 213). The particular pensée (in French this word means both ‘thought’ and ‘pansy’) or imagethought, I wish to draw the reader’s attention to is entitled ‘Lizard’ (Lawrence 1957: 259):

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Lizard A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening no doubt to the sounding of the spheres. And what a dandy fellow! the right toss of a chin for you and swirl of a tail! If men were as much men as lizards are lizards they’d be worth looking at.

This brief and apparently inconsequential poem reiterates many of the attitudes of Lawrence. An attitude of impatient misanthropy (not to mention misogyny) is evident in many of Lawrence’s poems, and this poem is no exception. The animal kingdom is celebrated for its nonintellectual manner of being, in which living forms, such as this lizard, entirely absorb themselves in their physical and sensual realities. Such a grasp of one’s identity as a physically embodied, living lizard, located in the present tense, with all the swirling of tails and tossing of chins that goes with this identity, is represented as a cause for pride — it is ‘worth looking at’. The last line of the poem measures man against such a grasp of one’s identity and tacitly finds him lacking: ‘If men were as much men as lizards are lizards/ they’d be worth looking at.’ The suggestion is that human beings rarely embrace their particular status as physically incarnate, human creatures, and so much the worse for them. In Pansies, Lawrence’s strong dislike of the middle classes, of materialistic capitalism, and of some other aspects of modern industrial civilization, such as film and radio, is readily apparent. Lawrence saw such things as removing us from our own abilities to live our own lives fully; to experience sex, feel the sun and the rain on our backs, to relish our sensual realities, to embrace present tense experience, and to assert our own enjoyment and peace in living as individual, free and embodied men and women. Rather than seeing worth in ‘grey successful men/ so hideous and corpse-like, utterly sunless,/ like gross successful slaves mechanically waddling’, or in ‘paltry-looking people’, ‘in their rag garments scuttling through the streets,/ or sitting stuck like automata in automobiles’, Lawrence loved ‘the sun in any man/ when I see it between his brows/ clear, and fearless’ (1957: 266). Non-human nature was, in many ways, exemplary: ‘think how wild

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animals trot with splendour/ till man destroys them!/ how vividly they make their assertion of life!’ (1957: 266). Non-human life is frequently represented in Lawrence’s poetry as having not lost its grasp on the joys and revelations of present-tense, first-person existence, and thus being in some ways ahead of a supposedly far more sophisticated human society. In his essay ‘Pan in America’ Lawrence repeated this sentiment, arguing that the Greek god Pan, symbol of the magnificent spirit of nature, had died with the advent of technology and its conquest over nature. Rather than to do as the lumberman does and ‘walk about in an inanimate forest of standing lumber, marketable in St. Louis, Mo.’, it is, according to Lawrence, ‘truer’ to open the ‘doors of receptivity in oneself’ and ‘know with a pantheistic sensuality, that the tree has its own life, its own assertive existence, its own living relatedness to me’ (1990: 501). Fowles shares an appreciation of a sense of ‘existingness’ in the physically animate universe with Lawrence, citing such appreciation, in his essay on Lawrence, as the cause for his originally becoming a natural historian (1998: 235). We can infer that Fowles’ deep love of forests, birds, and wildlife in general, is held for, amongst other things, similar reasons to Lawrence’s reasons for appreciating and celebrating ‘the primitive worlds remotest from high culture’. That is to say, because non-human nature has a strong sense of its ‘existingness’, it has not lost, through social customs and absorption in the intellect, an acute sense of present tense being. However it is not only the fact that humans have purposes based in a hypothetical future that makes them different from other members of the biosphere. In his commentary on Lawrence’s The Man Who Died Fowles states that (1998: 235): the manifold manners of life that most of us have given ourselves (or more often, that society gives us) are deeply hostile and inimical to this sense of existingness...Our philosophies and religions, and pleasures and pastimes, both our cultural and commoner routines and habits…it is almost as if they were deliberately (devilishly!) to blur and obscure the fact that I exist.

Perhaps the almost emotional dependency Fowles seems to have on the natural world is partly explicable by non-human nature’s not being ‘cluttered’ with the cultural paraphernalia that screens a direct awareness of existing in live, mortal form; an awareness that both Lawrence

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and Fowles value so highly. Fowles’ comments in The Tree that ‘the key to my fiction lies, for what it is worth, in my relationship with nature’. A body of fiction which covers as many political, cultural and personal matters as Fowles’ does not and cannot have a single interpretive key. However this grandiloquent affirmation might be at least partly comprehensible if we understand the value the author attaches to profound, present-tense encounters with being, made in natural environments, and demonstrated in central moments of epiphany from The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and Daniel Martin. In order to explicate this point I will briefly discuss how The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and an excerpt from his short story ‘The Cloud’, are influenced by the writings of Lawrence. Firstly I refer the reader to the role birds play in signalling a respite from the neuroses and over-sensitivities of modern humans in the short story ‘The Cloud’. Here the setting is central France in late May, and the action revolves around a group of English friends picnicking in the countryside. Throughout the narrative the tangle of intellectual and emotional preoccupations of the garrulous English group is punctured and interrupted with the sound of bird calls. Nightingales suddenly burst into song and kingfishers flash azure as they skim past. This peremptory birdsong provides a series of contrasts between the lifeworld of the English and the wildlife of France — a nature/human contrast that is further heightened by the differences in national identities. Sandwiched between the two most theoretically stolid paragraphs in the story springs a bird call (1997a: 2623): whether the other diners are dressed properly and the bloody tablesetting looks nice and clean, we confuse terribly… ‘Listen’, says Bel. ‘There’s an oriole.’ And for a moment, Paul stops. They hear the liquid whistle from across the river. Bel says, ‘You never see them.’ ‘Go on,’ says Peter.[…] Paul means we confuse quite ludicrously a notion, a myth of centralized France, ever since Versailles, and the actual contempt of the Frenchman…

We hear the oriole, but within seconds Paul has continued his bombastically intellectual tirade. If Paul and his interlocutors (typical members of Lawrence’s hated English bourgeoisie) ‘confuse’ any-

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thing ‘quite ludicrously’ it is the relative importance of the bird’s song and the verbose confabulation of seated men. The bird interjects the fact of its presence, reminding these ‘hyper-sensitive’ beings of the fact of their being. Here, as in Daniel Martin, birds bring humans, if only momentarily, out of abstractions and symbols to the local and the present. And indeed it does seem true that non-human nature, or particularly, time spent with non-human nature could easily remind one of the fact, the fact that Lawrence was so intent on stressing in his writings, that we are ‘alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos’ (quoted in Fowles 1998: 240). Next I turn to a scene from The Magus. Fowles has approvingly quoted Richard Jefferies’ pronouncement of nature as ‘ultrahuman’, that is, as existing wholly without regard to human life (Fowles1998: 352 from Jefferies 1923: 244)). What is more, in his fiction the natural world has been, at key points, presented to the reader as going beyond the human. I have demonstrated this in my discussion of Fowles’ fictional and biographical encounters with the wilds of Scandinavia in chapter six. A pertinent instance of this comes half-way through The Magus when Nicholas, and his former Australian lover Alison, climb the mountain Parnassus, near Athens. Nicholas is an Oxford graduate who has gone to teach English at a boarding school on a small Greek island. He meets Alison in Athens and they decide to climb Parnassus, mountain of the muses, together. As they crest the peak they find themselves high above the rest of Greece. On the other side of the peak a chasm of two thousand feet yawns below them. The sky is cloudless and the two walkers have the impression that they are standing far above the world, far above all human towns and society, ‘all drought and defect’ (M 258). They look out at the world around them (M 258): Below, for a hundred miles in each direction, there were other mountains, valleys, plains, islands, seas; Attica, Boeotia, Argolis, Achaia, Locris, Aetolia, all the old heart of Greece. The setting sun richened, softened, refined all the colours. There were deep-blue eastern shadows and lilac western slopes; pale copper-green valleys, Tanagra-coloured earth; the distant sea dreaming, smoky, milky, calm as old blue glass. With a splendid classical simplicity someone had formed in small stones, just beyond the cairn, the letters !"# - ‘light’. It was exact. The peak reached up into a world both literally and metaphorically of light. It didn’t touch the emotions; it was too vast, too inhuman, too serene; and it came to me like a shock, a delicious intellectual joy marrying and completing the physical one, that

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the reality of the place was as beautiful, as calm, as ideal, as so many poets had always dreamed it to be.

It is true that at this point in the plot the vista provides a brief refuge from the morass of emotional complications both Nicholas and Alison are dealing with in their lives. However, regardless of this it is worth noticing how the natural world, in the guise of the light of Greece on Parnassus, is here portrayed as definitively outside of humanity. Here the mountain landscape and the light of the sun join to impress on the narrator a sense of the physical world’s glory, and this sense of otherness shocks Nicholas, reminding him that he exists. Admittedly Nicholas is a city slicker with little experience of nature — earlier in the novel he wanders the island, saying: ‘With no company but my own boredom, I began for the first time in my life to look at nature, and to regret that I knew its language as little as I knew Greek’ — but even so his experience in, and of, the light on Parnassus seems more than a simple case of startled inexperience (M 52). We might say that Nicholas experiences a moment of the sublime, but there is more to the episode than this. As Simon Loveday notes, the Parnassus episode is structurally the exact centre of the novel, a point lending added strength to its thematic intensity (1985: 33). Nicholas is laid bare before a different reality on the peak of Parnassus, and experiences a moment of undiluted awareness of his existence. This episode from The Magus has its origins in a similar experience Fowles himself had after climbing the mountain while living in Greece in 1952. His journal entry on the event is remarkably similar to the passage in The Magus and is worth including here (2003: 2012): There were no clouds within twenty miles and the sky was of the purest, most serene blue, I felt immeasurably high. Surrounded by air, remote from all towns, societies, troubles, beliefs, times, a central point in the universe; having entered, achieved it and now being rewarded. A natural monastery of the spirit. There were other mountains, valleys, plains, seas in all directions, but I had no desire to know their names, only to be aware of their limitless presence below. Alpine swifts split the air down into the chasms and shadows to the east... Someone else had written, with a splendid classical Greek, the letters !"# light – in stones beside the cairn... The air was chilly, the sun began to sink. Still I was spellbound by the height, the absence of earth, mundanity, the majestic, divine solitude.

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Being, Being, Being: From Zen to D. H. Lawrence One of the moments one continues to live for. They repay all the months in the desert, the years in darkness. To rise out of time, to be absorbed into nature, to feel oneself completely existing among existence, as godlike as mortality can imagine.

Unlike Nicholas, Fowles was alone when he climbed Parnassus outside of his imagination, on the rocky slope of an actual mountain. Indeed Fowles’ fictional characters more usually are alone when they have significant encounters with the natural world. In classical mythology Parnassus is frequented by the Muses, but ironically it is the ‘ultrahuman’ phenomenology of undistored Greek light which gives Fowles inspiration, not a facet of any human tradition or body of myth. The sense of ‘completely existing among existence’ is even more accentuated in this passage than in the one from The Magus. This notion, I should say this fact, of being is a point of confluence for a number of the issues I have been discussing in this study of Fowles’ corpus. Before I mention these, I refer the reader to the following passage from Fowles’ 1995 essay, ‘The Nature of Nature’ (1998: 356): What has struck me about the acutely rich sensation of beingness is how fleeting is its apprehension. It’s almost as transient, as fugitive, as some particle in atomic physics: the more you would capture it, the less likely that you will. It refuses all attempts at willed or conscious evocation, it is deaf to pure intelligence alone, it envelops you in a double or twinned feeling. One is of intense nowness, the other of realizing that you (oneself) alone, in your individuality, are infinitely fortunate to experience it, perhaps in nothing so much as its seeming to fall from something whole and unindividual on your separateness. It is being, being, being… a perpetual miracle, so vivid and vital that ordinarily we cannot bear it; always rare enough to be a shock, no similes or metaphors can convey it; like a sudden nakedness, a knowing of oneself laid bare before a different reality.

In this passage a number of the points I have been explicating reemerge. Pure being cannot be captured by writing, or any attempt at recording the lived present. Being is incomplete when experienced solely with the intellect; feeling must be conjoined to knowing. Being is unique to each of us; and it occurs only in the present tense. Lastly, an experience of pure being is an impressive revelation. At the beginning of the second chapter, I discussed an early morning scene in The French Lieutenant’s Woman in which Charles leaves

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Lyme Regis for the surrounding countryside. Charles walks towards a meeting with Sarah and thus an involvement with something his status as a respectable Victorian gentleman forbids: a woman rejected by society, a potentially extra-marital liaison. Charles’ visage is solemn: moral and social ‘entanglements’ painfully crowd his mind. The sun is just rising upon the green world, and the trees around Lyme Regis are thick with singing birds (FLW 233-4): A tiny wren perched on top of a bramble not ten feet from him and trilled its violent song. He saw its glittering black eyes, the red and yellow of its song-gaped throat – a midget ball of feathers that yet managed to make itself the Announcing Angel of evolution: I am what I am, thou shalt not pass my being now. He stood as Pisanello’s saint stood, astonished perhaps more at his own astonishment at this world’s existing so close, so within reach of all that suffocating banality of ordinary day. In those few moments of defiant song, any ordinary hour or place – and therefore the vast infinity of Charles’s previous hours and places – seemed vulgarized, coarsened, made garish. The appalling ennui of human reality lay cleft to the core; and the heart of all life pulsed there in the wren’s triumphant throat.

Charles perceives in this encounter: ‘a priority of existence over death, of the individual over the species, of ecology over classification’ (FLW 234). While I have spent much time discussing the last observation — with my observations on the characteristics of a scientific as opposed to a ‘poetic’ epistemology — the first is of primary interest here. Pure existence trumps non-existence. The wren’s being is the whole point in this scene. The narrator’s depreciation of ‘the appalling ennui of human reality’ seems to echo Lawrence’s oft repeated dislike of the supposedly civilized middle classes: ‘grey successful men/ so hideous and corpse-like, utterly sunless,/ like gross successful slaves mechanically waddling’. The symbol of this singing wren announces to us an ethic in which directly experienced and apprehended existence is a good. Lawrence sketched this good as the ultimate moral good in his work Apocalypse. The relevant quotation appears at the end of Fowles’ essay ‘The Man Who Died: A Commentary’, and is described by LaChapelle as the point where Lawrence ‘succeeded in pulling together his entire life’s effort of trying to show the unity of humanity and nature’ (1996: 172). In the words of Lawrence (quoted in LaChapelle 1996: 173):

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Being, Being, Being: From Zen to D. H. Lawrence For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.

Although Fowles, novelist of ideas as he is, would probably not go as far as the anti-intellectual Lawrence, his attraction to the natural world partakes of this admiration for ‘perfectly alive’ being, as does the narrator’s appreciation of New Mexico and Etruscan civilisation in Daniel Martin and ‘By the Appian Way’. A strong sense of existingness, as demonstrated by simpler life forms such as birds, would be encouraged through spending time with non-human nature. Turning to the journals a reader finds the final elaboration of Fowles’ Lawrentian sympathies. On a visit to Spain in the early 1950s Fowles watched a bull fight. He writes of bullfighting (2003: 228): It is primitive, barbaric even; but I welcome it as a missing ingredient in the frozen modern man; the man who is all psychology, all mind, and not at all animal, the unbalanced twentieth-century ghostman. A dram of liquor on a Welsh Sunday.

Despite the savage cruelty to the bull necessitated by this sport, Fowles welcomes the gamble with death, the fight against fate that the man’s struggle with the animal represents. This is a typically Lawrentian sentiment, however Fowles does acknowledge that primitivism is here more ‘barbaric’ than progressive. Forty years later the reader finds an entirely different example in the diaries. Walking along the street in Lyme Regis the author hears birdsong (EUL 102/1/21, 14 February 1990: 110): Walking up Broad Street, a mild dusk, a blackbird singing from an old ash in Laurence Whistler’s old garden: balanced, limpid, plangently beautiful as ever. Every so often cars rushed past: the notes, then a roar of machinery, the notes, machinery. A remarkable contrast in differences in quality of passing time. The one stately, immemorial; the other brutal and interrupting; the one in possession of itself, the other possessed by other things. It is this in nature: that it possesses

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itself, it is ultra-human in that way also. We are possessed, both literally and in the common idiomatic sense, that is, half-mad. This is why I see ‘innocence’ in birds and flowers; it is their not being possessed by other ends and values, their existing for themselves.

The blackbird’s song is sufficient unto itself; its raison d’etre is not reliant on a time or purpose beyond the present moment. Like Lawrence, Fowles appreciates the fact that non-human animals represent a contentedness to remain in the present and not be forever using the present moment as a make-shift crutch with which to pass onwards, elsewhere, to more important events and places. In one of his more recent journal entries (1990), Fowles reflects on his Lyme Regis garden (EUL 102/2/4, 18 October 1990): this intensity of being, locked in the sanctuary of this garden, suddenly comes back to me with all the gathered force of my having ignored or almost forgotten it these past months. No one[…] begins to understand it, its strange bursts of the existential, almost like flowers.

Like the biota of Wistman’s Wood, the garden of Belmont House inculcates an ‘intensity of being’ in the perspicacious student. We should take the author seriously when he uses the metaphor of the garden’s ‘bursts of the existential, almost like flowers’. Fowles has for many years been interested in spotting wild orchids. His journals are littered with records of his findings, in rural France particularly. The author indicates that nature is a great teacher of the importance of the living present tense, and his interest in orchids might be related to his appreciation of the fleetingness of existence. As Lawrence wrote, ‘Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystallisation. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness’ (1969: 85). The orchid is a delicate flower, beautiful in its colours and formations, but ephemeral in its presence. As such it would seem an ideal totem for a writer appreciative of the way nature teaches us to value and return to the living present tense.

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Conclusions We stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In a matter of a very few decades we have found ourselves in the midst of the greatest extinction spasm in the history of biodiversity on earth since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Even supposedly ‘educated’ Western democracies seem intent on prioritising economic growth over sustainable use of eco-system services. It is well to understand how influential the way we perceive the natural world is on the way we treat it. In a chapter aligning Jane Austen’s novels with the sensibility of Romanticism, Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth wrote: ‘William Blake said that the tree which moves some to tears of joy is to others nothing but a green thing that gets in the way. Poets and Jane Austen heroines are alike in being troubled by the moment when an ancient tree ceases to be permanent, when it is uprooted not because it is diseased but because it gets in the way’ (2002: 12-3). Never more so than in the present have we scriptocentric and selfish Westerners needed to learn to see, aided by the poets amongst us, ‘the green thing that gets in the way’, as a beautiful and ancient tree. I wrote this book because I believed that the planetary ecocrisis largely precipitated by the over-consumption of members of marketdriven, technocratic, Western nation-states will not be remedied purely by resource management and political decision-making. Humans have told stories for thousands of years. They will continue to do so for thousands more. The stories humans tell reflect and influence what they do and do not think is important. In engaging with the English prose and poetry of a gifted contemporary story-teller who has manifested his relationship with the natural world in a range of genres, I thought my book could, in some way, help to feed the Western environmental imagination. In a biodiversity crisis, the bringing to notice of hitherto under-appreciated and highly sensitive attitudes, images and narratives concerning nature which are expressed in elo-

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quent language is, put simply, worth doing. As Lawrence Buell has said, ‘ecocritics have every right to believe that if they do their jobs right – not, of course to be taken for granted – they will… have a basis to consider themselves participants in a pandisciplinary inquiry of the first order of historical significance’ (1999: 709). I am surprised, and saddened, that the great majority of literary critics continue to politely fiddle at their desks, ignoring both ‘nature writing’, and the state of their species’ ancestral home outside the library window. However, although I think ecocriticism has an extremely important job to do in reconsidering literature of the past that celebrates the natural world, this book has not confronted the theme and representation of nature in John Fowles’ works with a morally-committed agenda which predetermined my finding only homages to beautiful trees. Heavily politicised readings can betray an insensitivity to structural elements within the texts under examination that do not clearly and easily fall within the critic’s chosen brand of sociopolitical theory. A fellow critic, attempting to define what made Frank Kermode the great literary critic that many people see him to be, said that it was 'his acute responsiveness to a great variety of texts' (quoted in Ellis 1997: 46). I am concerned about the state of nature at the start of this new century and I do not believe literary critics, those investigators into our culture’s stories and its imaginative visions of the world, can, or should, ignore the crisis we now face. Writings such as Fowles’ have a potentially important part to play in influencing the perception-shift that is needed among contemporary Westerners, and I am glad to bring to attention relevant ecocritical tropes in the author’s body of work. This said, it is an ‘acute responsiveness’ to the issues, relating broadly to nature, weighed and sifted in a writer’s irreducibly unique writings, that I have attempted to exhibit in the preceding pages. Figures such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Aldo Leopold are traditionally considered nature writers. Their nonfictional works contain, at least in part, large amounts of natural history information and personal responses to nature. In the blurb to the collection of essays, John Fowles and Nature, we read that ‘John Fowles is a nature writer as well as a novel writer’. But we should at least be equivocal about branding John Fowles a ‘nature writer’. This is so because Fowles parallels David Abram in his diagnoses of our being exiled from nature in our absorption in the word, and does not often

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perform the traditional part of a nature writer in his nonfiction essays. The descriptive prose he has written about the natural world is to be found mainly in journal entries made over the years (there is also occasional material in the fiction, ten pages at the end of The Tree, and at least three poems). A typical Fowles reader can be excused for not having noticed this aspect of the author’s work as the relevant journal entries were not published until 2003 and 2006, and many of them remain unpublished outside the pages of this study. An important aspect of Fowles’ having imagined nonhuman species as kin, in his journals is, as I have argued in chapter two, the contribution he thereby makes towards shifting our ways of relating to the world away from exclusive humanism and ‘deuteranopia’, towards, at least metaphorically, giving citizenship to wilderness. I would argue that the biggest idea now transforming Western thinking is that we are biological entities who exist in a community of other biological entities. Among other things, this idea leads to the myth of Gaia, which Mary Midgley champions in her writings. It is the myth, the network of emotionally significant symbols, that we might hope to see replace the worn-out vision of social atomism that dogs us still. Fowles’ journal entries describing, for example, a recognition of ‘bird movements like the forgotten intonations in people’s voices’, shift us closer to a felt Gaia-politik, an awareness of our kinship with nonhuman life. In making the changes Midgley discusses, away from social atomism and towards the adoption of the Gaia myth, our culture will need to deploy language and metaphor in the way Fowles has done in this little noticed aspect of his journal writing. The author’s love for nature is expressed in his journal writing, marking him as a biophiliac. But, as I showed in chapter three, it is also deliberately expressed in the pattern of maturation the central characters in the Fowles’ novel of middle age, Daniel Martin, undergo, in Daniel and Jane’s journey towards sympathy with the rest of the biosphere. The author’s love of nature has led him to write in his journals of the benefits of periodic deprivation from nature, enabling a tension of contrasts. However it is deuteranopia, a complete not a periodic blindness to the colour green, that Fowles has more observed in contemporary Western society. For nature to be loved it must first be known, and with modern demographic trends seeing a massive increase in the concentration of the world’s population living in cities,

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Fowles’ satirical critique of deuteranopia, in Daniel Martin and in his journal writing, becomes more and more disturbingly salient. Fowles is an author whose oeuvre is profitably viewed through an ecocritical lens. Aside from Fowles’ fictional and poetic elaborations of biophilia and deuteranopia, one thing that has become overwhelmingly clear over the course of writing on his body of work is that Fowles is not the author of pastoral in its most conventional and unreconstructured sense. His notion of ‘the universal parity of existence’, found in, for example, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, sees a kinship between humans and other animals, however it does not set up the natural world as a calm and serene standard that we sophisticated primates should endeavour to emulate. Rather, like Charles in the aforementioned novel, we are represented in Fowles’ novels as exiled from a prelapsarian innocence by our complex mind. This view of human consciousness is in accord, as I have shown, with recent accounts from evolutionary history (E. O. Wilson) and neurophysiology (Susan Greenfield). Neither does Fowles emulate the traditional pastoral design in his fiction without pausing to consider the false consciousness that it might occasion. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman an anti-pastoral theoretical cunning frames the presentation of the eighteenth-century country estate as aethetically conceived idyll. The Magus is the novel that most closely fits traditional understandings of pastoral as literature which explores the complexities of human life against the simplicities of a country landscape. In this novel the protagonist Nicholas travels to Arcadia in an almost literal sense, and his view of the Greek island he inhabits is frequently shot with references to myths and nymphs in groves. However here it is the simplicity of Greek light and space which affects his development as a man, and this phenomenological aspect of the novel marks it as pastoral in a sense different and separate from pastoral as myth-mongering obfuscation of real shepherding. Only by the end of the 1970s, with the publication of Daniel Martin and its presentation of the traditional English mixed farm, however, does the traditional yet revelatory pastoral of The Magus and the polemical anti-pastoral of The French Lieutenant’s Woman find its Hegelian synthesis in the species of progressive post-pastoral recently championed by Terry Gifford. Starting with The Magus in the midnineteen sixties, Fowles’ sequence of pastorals became more and

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more mature. In Daniel Martin the blood, sweat and faecal odours of a working farm in the 1940s are presented alongside the community and intimacy with natural cycles experienced by the people of the country, and all is framed by the distancing perspective of 1960s England. This modern perspective encompasses the reality of destructive industrialised agribusiness and the depopulation of the countryside. Although this post-pastoral does not meet all of the aspects of post-pastoral enumerated by Gifford in his work Pastoral, it does, centrally, avoid the illusions on which Arcadia is traditionally based, and presents us with a vision of accommodated humanity. Perhaps most important here is the political agency entailed by a loving presentation of the model of the traditional, labour-intensive mixed farm in the contemporary context of agribusiness that destroys wildlife and rural communities, and erodes ethical standards for the treatment of animals. Here we see, noting the continued acceleration of industrialised agribusiness, that a novel from 1977 is even more topical at the start of the twenty-first century than when it was first published. An important ‘lost domain’ has yet to be recovered. If a large part of ecocriticism is to be a re-evaluation of literature of the past from an ecological perspective, then this last major novel by Fowles has, until now, suffered overly from critical neglect. In the preceeding pages I hope to also have shown that in important senses Fowles’ nonfiction marks him as an ecocritic avant la lettre. That is, in various contexts, Fowles has practiced environmentally-valenced critical inquiry concerning literature. As has become evident over the course of the last four chapters, Fowles’ championing of a pragmatist and a Romantic (anti-positivistic) epistemology is made in the context of an attention, in his fiction and in his nonfiction, to nature. With reference to recent developments in German and American philosophy I have shown that Fowles’ anti-positivistic leanings are conceptually justified. Thinkers like Jurgen Habermas and Hilary Putnam have shown that all knowledge ultimately only makes sense in relation to the goal of human flourishing. After surveying the breadth of the author’s works we can see that he supports ‘poetic’ perceptions of nature; that is to say, personally associative, emotion-suffused and holistic perceptions of nature. Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’ is perhaps a good characterisation of this position. Perhaps more interestingly within the field of contemporary ecocriticism though, it is a position that has similarities to Bate’s Heideg-

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gerian ecopoetics of dwelling. According to Bate’s view, reading poems, such as those of John Clare, may allow us to imagine an outline of a new way of being in the world, to acquire a new sense of dwelling on the earth. For both Fowles and Bate, great nature poets of the past are ideal models for how we should try to envisage nature and our dwelling amongst it. Fowles is, it should be remembered, a keen natural historian, and his journal writing testifies to the value of the practice of field naturalism. Further than this, the scientific spirit itself, defined very minimally as the pleasure in finding things out, has sanctity for the journal writer and for the narrator of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Although I have stressed over the last few chapters the various ways in which Fowles champions a Romantic epistemology, we should be clear that he is also the proud advocate of the natural sciences as agents which help us to love, as well as to know, nature. Indeed Fowles has argued that a feeling and a knowing for nature should marry in what is referred to in Daniel Martin as ‘whole sight’. Although Fowles’ essay ‘The Blinded Eye’ was, I have argued, misguided in its over-emphasis on the importance of a ‘feeling’ for nature, Fowles’ more balanced judgement is found in the journals where he writes: ‘To be artist and naturalist is the perfect blend’ (2003: 99). This is a significant insight. As a whole a democratic culture, even one replete with nature poets, would become etiolated and impoverished if deprived of scientific explanations of natural phenomena. On the other hand, a culture which came to be informed about nature purely by science (perhaps a more likely scenerio in today’s public sphere?) would be one which unconsciously installed a positivistic view in which the only real and weighty kind of knowledge about nature was analytical and empirical in tenor. Neither is satisfactory. In Daniel Martin it is the figure of the Wordsworthian lover of nature that is embattled, and the figure of the scientist-naturalist which is dominant. Perhaps today’s intellectual climate has changed, but we should still be wary of either of these attitudinal poles coming to shoulder out its opposite in our approaches towards the natural world. In the chapter which I placed after the one on ‘Fowles and science’, I drew attention to more shadowy comprehensions. The thematic couplet of chapters five and six was intended to represent nature known and then nature unknown in the author’s work. I wanted to show that while a determined natural historian, at the same time the

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author is a determined mystagogue in his relations with nature. The greatest monument to this mystagogy is the Seidevarre episode in The Magus. This episode embodies Fowles’ affirmation in The Tree that woodlands are both the perfect symbol for the mysterious and kinds of ‘green chapels and churches’. The episode’s forceful evocation of nature as a quantity beyond human calculation makes it noteworthy within the author’s body of fiction. As I argued in chapter six, Fowles’ major fictional works as well as some of his unpublished journal entries register with particular clarity the attractions of the ‘world of strange night sounds’, the attractions of the incipiently known natural environment. However, in the last two chapters of my study, chapters nine and ten, I turn away from both literature and science, and towards Fowles’ lauding of present-tense personal experience. In chapter nine I placed Fowles alongside Neil Evernden and his argument from the end of The Social Creation of Nature that nature should not be perceived through a culturally fabricated template of knowledge, but should be met as wholly other presence or event. This is the ‘ecological sublime’ championed by Hitt, and the quiet, Zen receptivity to nature written of by Snyder. As I have shown, Fowles’ poem ‘Naming’ and his comments in The Tree, demonstrate that the English author accepts how deeply ingrained, as well as how necessary, categorisation is in human cognition. In this way Fowles parts company with Evernden. We cannot entirely forgo categorisation of the natural world, setting wildness free from our ‘conceptual imprisonment’, as Evernden would like us to do (1992: 130). Even a perception of the chaotic wild as a dynamic event still employs the category ‘event’. Particularly in the case of biological life, an element of categorisation will always persist in our perceptions. However, as I have claimed, there are degrees of absorption in our own ways, and some perceptions of nature will be comparatively open and receptive to the natural environment. Fowles obviously places more hope in our category-laden perceptions of nature than Evernden in that he champions a Romantic epistemology of knowing nature through a template of poetry, as I explicated in chapter eight. Fowles is, in summary, more balanced than thinkers such as Evernden in his assessment of the ills of nature categorisation. Fowles’ account of nature poetry differs from Bate’s ecopoetics of dwelling in its mistrust of the value of written language as a revelation of nature, and is shown as in accord with the more hostile account of

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printed language given by Abram and Dissanayake. While The Tree, ‘The Blinded Eye’ and key excerpts from the journals show a wariness of written descriptions of nature, we should be clear that the author’s admiration for the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats, an appreciation of the Romantics very similar to John Stuart Mill’s, and, in some ways, to Bate’s in his Romantic Ecology (although here Fowles has presaged many of Bate’s claims by twenty years), clearly mark Fowles as not entirely dismissive of nature writing. Further, while we may follow Fowles in seeing that ‘poems of phenomena’ are not always well translated into the written word, as he writes in his journal, we might also argue that this marks a confused pessimism in the author. Nature poems satisfy human attention through devices of, for example, repetition, such as alliteration and assonance. But literacy and the alphabet have changed the way humans think. The spoken word is an event which takes place through a flow of time. The written or printed word lies inert on the page. We should heed the influence that the comparatively recent technoligizing of the word has had on our habits of thinking. In the words of Walter Ong: ‘The highly interiorized stages of consciousness in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal structures are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never have reached without writing’ (2000: 175). Although literacy is consciousness-raising in many ways, it does have a darker side. I’m not suggesting that we give up on books, but Abram and Dissanayake are right to argue that an absorption in text tends to remove us from ‘reading’ the sensuous world around us. We can understand Fowles’ hesitancy about describing nature in written language: language can be reductive when describing complex ecosystems, and such descriptions can ironically encourage a disassociation from their intended object of affection and focus through catering to and fostering a scriptocentric culture. However, if nature poetry is understood in the form of a spoken-word event, then we may achieve the benefits of art, or what Dissanayake calls ‘making special’ or ‘elaboration’, providing pleasurable feelings of mastery and order imposed on a chaotic universe for the speaker and listener, and minimize encouraging a scriptocentric bias in modern Western culture. Fowles’ pessimism about writing nature is understandable, but I suggest that it fails to comprehend a path forward for those who would compose art about nature using language.

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It is right that we should find much force in Fowles’ Abram-like hostility to all those technologies and habits of thinking which remove us from the living present tense. It is only in the last few hundred years of Homo sapiens’ almost two hundred thousand-year history as a species that printed text has been widely focused upon by members of any human society. Fowles is like Abram and Dissanayake in his valuation of the living present as revelatory of the sensuous world, and in his diagnoses of the living present as rarely experienced in the modern, urban West (cf. Abram 1996: 201-3). However it is D. H. Lawrence at the end of his writing career, and at the end of his life, who is of special interest in characterising this aspect of Fowles the ‘nature writer’. In the manner that Lawrence champions the living present tense in these works, so too do Fowles’ writings place him as an English novelist, and occasional poet, cognizant of the canons of high culture and suspicious of a culturally sophisticated absorption in the worries of yesterday or tomorrow. Both in the ‘therapeutic’ nonfiction, particularly The Tree, and in the fiction, particularly Daniel Martin, The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, presenttense existence is lauded against a background of non-existence. While the eminently cultured and polymathic figure familiar to readers of his fiction and his essays might belie it, Fowles work marks him, like Lawrence, as a ‘future primitive’ (to appropriate LaChapelle’s term for Lawrence). The evolution of Fowles’ interest in nature, as manifested in his writings, starting from Nota Natura Res, his boyhood jottings of wildlife made in the early 1940s, has come far. Having traced the trajectory of the author’s writing career from the 1940s to the 1990s from an ecocritical perspective, I hope to have demonstrated just how far his writing has developed from those early and eager series of impressionistic and name-obsessed recordings in field botany. This is a writing career that has, in fact, traversed many of the concerns of the emerging dicipline of ecocriticism, for example, increasingly sophisticated instantiations of the pastoral design in fiction; an argument for the utility of viewing nature through a poetic lens; and an interrogation of the very worth of writing nature. If we return to where I began, to the garden of John Fowles at his home in Dorset, then we can see that the writer’s affection for, and curiosity about, his ‘co-tenants’, those that sway, sing and scramble around his house, is much more than another jewel for the magpie’s attention. In recent discussions of

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ecocriticism the name ‘John Fowles’ has rarely been mentioned. Having written this study, I welcome an important guest into the vestibule of our expanding conversation about the relationship between language and nature.

Bibliography

Works by John Fowles Abbreviations DM: Daniel Martin FLW: The French Lieutenant’s Woman M: The Magus T: The Tree EUL: (Exeter University Library Special Collection) Journals. Published 1970a. The Aristos. Boston: Little, Brown and Company [first published 1964]. 1970b. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Cape [first published 1969]. 1974. Poems. New York: The Ecco Press [first published 1973]. 1977. Daniel Martin. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1979. The Tree. New York: The Ecco Press. 1980. The Enigma of Stonehenge. With Barry Brukoff. London: Cape. 1986. The Collector. Reading: Pan Books [first published 1963]. 1987. Contribution to: Coastline: Britain’s Threatened Heritage. Peter Melchett (ed.) London: Kingfisher in association with Greenpeace: 153. 1995. Review of The Oxford Book of Nature Writing in The Sunday Times. 5 March, 7.8. 1996. Review of Flora Britannica by Richard Mabey in The Sunday Times. 20 October, 7.9. 1997a. The Ebony Tower. London: Vintage [first published 1974]. 1997b. The Magus. London: Vintage [first published 1966, revised edition 1977]. 1998. Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings. London: Cape. 2003. The Journals: Volume 1. Charles Drazin (ed.). London: Jonathan Cape.

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Index Abram, David, 166, 210-21, 225, 267 Adorno, Theodor, 183-4 Age of Sensibility, 107 Agribusiness, 68, 85, 95, 124, 263 America, 23, 91, 98-100, 118-9, 121-22, 246-7 Anagram, 31 Analytic philosophy, 179 Anthropocentrism, 11, 139, 183 Anti-pastoral, 90, 93-7, 124, 127, 133, 152 Apollo, 222-5 Audubon, John James, 58-9 Austen, Jane, 259 Arcadia, 26, 73, 76, 79-82 Aristos, The, 46, 154, 174, 183, 191, 235 Arnold, Matthew, 68, 133, 152 Artist, 26, 33, 44, 59, 93, 128, 180, 205 ASLE: Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, 10 Bate, W. J., 195 Bedford, 40-1, 229 Being and Time, 38 Bellow, Saul, 38, 139 Benedictine, 159 Bergson, Henri, 156 Berry, Wendell, 97 Biography, 11, 15, 40-1, 104, 120, 176

Biophilia, 17, 20, 105-7, 111-2, 120-1, 129, 168 Bioregional, 22, 61-3, 95 Biosphere, 55-6, 60, 62-3, 117, 129, 138, 261 Blake, William, 93, 182, 189, 231, 248, 259 'Blinded Eye, The,' 52, 63, 188, 190-1, 198-9, 201-3, 206, 239 Bonne vaux, 24, 26-7, 33-5, 39, 53, 115, 238 de la Bretonne, Rétif, 24-5, 27, 31, 53, 115 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’, 70 Buell, Lawrence, 14, 55, 60, 96, 161, 223-4, 226, 260 Byron, George Gordon, 94 Carroll, Joseph, 11, 17, 40-1, 49 Category, 214-6 Charles Smithson, 74, 95, 140, 142, 149, 171, 183 Circe, 74, 77-8 Clare, John, 32, 93, 108, 113, 133, 175, 177, 186, 188, 202 Claude, Claude Lorrain, 70 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 192, 204 Collector, The, 36, 140, 226-8 Communicative rationality, 184 Community, 17, 51-3, 55-7, 60-1, 83, 87-8, 100, 202 Conchis, 78-9, 133, 157-62, 165

280 Consciousness, 45, 47, 50, 54, 57, 202-3 Consilience, 49, 134 Cosmology, 132-2, 140, 147, 152, 236, 247 Cowper, William, 32 Crabbe, George, 32, 93 Cronon, William, 29-31 Daniel Martin, 23, 27, 31, 35, 53, 60, 63, 82-97, 107-24, 176, 17980, 186, 199, 204, 210, 231, 2402, 248, 251, 256 Dartmoor, 31, 236, 246 Darwin, Charles, 18, 45, 132, 135, 138, 140-2, 144-5, 149-51 Darwin, Erasmus, 192 Da-sein, 38-9 Deuteranopia, 118, 120, 129, 261 Devon, 9, 23-4, 27-9, 31-2, 39-40, 58, 82-8, 114, 120, 181, 200, 229 Dissanayake, Ellen, 11, 220-1, 224-5, 239 Donne, John , 36, 116 Dorset, 9, 31, 62, 91, 94, 104, 143, 166, 169, 200 Durrell, Lawrence, 221 Ebony Tower, The, 35 Eclogues, 73, 75 Eden, 26, 45, 47, 143, 179, 227 Edward, Gerald, 37 Eliot, George, 37, 68, 114, 151 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 182, 195 Enigma of Stonehenge, The, 182, 186 Enlightenment, 56, 59, 183-4, 188 Escapism, 26, 28, 78 Ethic, 18, 52, 56, 60, 174 Etruscan Places, 111, 241, 247-8 Etruscans, 111-2, 240-4, 247

Index Evolution, 30, 48-9, 52, 54, 137-8, 141-2, 146-52 Existentialism, 16, 36, 140, 148 Fall, the, 50, 91, 144 First World War, 26, 128, 179 France, 25, 57, 78, 98, 132, 160, 180, 229, 251, 257 French Lieutenant's Woman, The, 18, 33, 43, 45, 48, 61, 63, 67, 69, 74, 95, 131, 135, 140-2, 151, 155, 169-70, 175, 181, 226 Gaia, 54-7, 61 Garden, 19, 22, 35, 53, 70-1, 88, 95, 97, 100-1, 103-6, 116, 124, 179-80, 200, 205, 257 Georgic, 82 Gibson, Stella, 94 Gifford, Terry, 17, 79, 82, 90, 96, 117, 133 Golding, William, 54 Grand Tour, 70 Great Chain of Being, 45 Greece, 73-82, 222-3, 225, 252-3 Greenfield, Susan, 49, 56, 202-3 Guercino, Giovanni Francesco, 87 Habermas, Jurgen, 184, 186 Hardy, Thomas, 91, 114, 151 Henri, Alain-Fournier, 114-5, 129 Hazlitt, William, 60, 217 Heidegger, Martin, 37 Homo sapiens, 48-9, 106, 168, 267 Horkheimer, Max, 183-4 Hughes, Ted, 93, 133, 221 Huxley, Aldous, 196 Industrial Revolution, 68, 117 Instrumentalism, 37 Ipplepen, 9, 40, 58, 83, 120, 229 Jefferies, Richard, 90, 103, 117, 187, 199, 230, 252

281 Keats, John, 47-8, 63, 190-2, 195, 204 Kent, William, 70 Kermode, Frank, 260 Kinship, 53-4, 56 Kitchener’s Island, 28-9, 35, 1089, 112 Landscape gardening, 70-1 Lawrence, D. H., 87, 111, 125, 240, 245-51 Leavis, F. R., 87 Leigh-on-Sea, 9, 120, 229 Leopold, Aldo, 52 Linnaeus, Carl, 182, 216 Locus amoenus, 44 London, 9, 64, 72, 110, 116, 150, 166, 200, 228 Love, Glen, 11, 113 Lovelock, James, 54 Lyell, Charles, 141-2 Lyme Regis, 16, 21, 33, 44, 62-3, 104, 106, 140, 180, 205, 226 Mach, Ernst, 174 Mackenzie, Henry, 107 Magus, The, 67, 72, 78, 81-2, 95, 133, 140, 153-4, 157, 162-4, 168, 170, 223, 245, 252-4, 262 Marvell, Andrew, 32, 35 Marx, Leo, 85 Marxist, 11, 72, 87 McCarthy, Cormac, 93 Midgley, Mary, 54-7, 59, 61, 132, 138-9, 192-4 Mill, John Stuart, 195, 266 Monsieur Nicholas, 24, 26, 32-3, 35, 53, 115 Muir, John, 19, 21, 217, 260 Myths, 54, 56-7, 80, 227 Naming, 207

Index Narrative, 12, 17, 41, 67, 174, 176, 221, 236 Nash, Paul, 128 Naturalist, 9, 100, 136, 139, 176, 179, 181, 199, 206, 230, 264 Negative capability, 195 Neural networks, 49-50 Neurophysiology, 49-50, 57, 221 New Mexico, 23, 27-8, 86, 118, 119, 121, 244-7, 256 Newton, Isaac, 182, 192 Norway, 58, 60-1, 158, 161-4 Nota Natura Res, 40, 267 Nussbaum, Martha, 174, 218 Odyssey, The, 36, 80 Onomatopoeia, 167, 225 Orchids, 178, 205, 208, 211, 231, 257 Oxford, 9, 31, 37, 57, 72, 89, 108, 110, 140, 176-8, 240-1 Pagan, 55, 240, 242, 248 Palaeontology, 64, 173 Palmer, Samuel, 26-7, 35, 108, 128-9, 175 Parenthood, 52 Paris, 29, 50, 60 Parity of existence, 43, 45, 50, 523, 262 Parnassus, 79. 252-4 Pascal, 46, 160 Pastoral, 17, 26, 58, 67-102, 114, 126, 152, 158, 223 Peacock, Thomas Love, 37 Peloponnesus, 73-4, 81 Personality theory, 40 Personhood, 60, 202 Phraxos, 35, 74, 157-8 Pisanello, 33, 43-4, 255 Pleasant prospect, 70-2 Poe, Edgar Allan, 87

282 Poem, 34-5, 38-9, 48, 68, 77, 91, 93, 124-5, 175-6, 188-9, 192-3, 200, 208-10, 213, 221, 223, 225, 243, 249 Poesis, 201 Poitiers, 9, 57-8 Pope, Alexander, 189,192 Pragmatism, 12, 20, 174, 185-6, 230 Price, Uvedale, 71 Poussin, Nicolas, 70, 87 Pueblo Indian, 27, 245-6 Putnam, Hilary, 174, 185-6, 263 Puttenham, George, 28 Ralegh, Walter, 94 Reification, 94, 183, 202, 209, 211, 215, 226, 230, 239 de la Rochefoucauld, François, 46 Romans, 241-2, 244 Romantic, 11-2, 19, 72, 85, 103, 182, 187-206, 217-9, 230, 235 Rorty, Richard, 174 Ruskin, John, 14, 192 Russell, Bertrand, 177, 179 Sacred combe, 24, 26-42, 53, 67, 78, 115, 178 de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, 76 Sales, Roger, 28 Sand County Almanac, A, 52 Sanders, Scott Russell, 51-2, 61-3, 92 Sartre, Jean Paul, 37, 140, 228 Scandinavia, 9, 153, 162-3, 252 Schiller, Friedrich, 90 Shakespeare, William, 26, 68, 82, 157, 195, 200, 230 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 47 Shepherd, 67, 69-70, 75, 79-80, 95, 201

Index Shrangri-La, 26 Sidney, Philip, 32 Snow, C. P., 18, 197, 204 Snyder, Gary, 30, 212-3, 235 Social atomism, 54, 56, 261 Spetsai, 35, 58, 80-1, 121, 136-7 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 80 Sturt, George, 113 Suicide, 48, 67, 77, 79, 93, 108, 126 Taxonomy, 13, 137, 198 Tennyson, Alfred, 114, 141-2 Theocritus, 67, 69, 77, 158 Thomas, Edward, 32, 114 Thompson, E. P., 175 Thoreau, Henry David, 13, 29, 45, 55-7, 100, 156, 164-5, 175, 213, 219, 234 Translation, 217, 219 Tree, The, 10, 16, 19, 22, 32, 35, 63, 153-6, 170, 172-82, 187, 190, 205, 211, 215, 217, 225-6, 230, 233, 236, 238-40, 250-1, 261, 265-7 Tsankawi, 24, 27-9, 107, 118-9, 246 Two Cultures, 18, 197, 204 Undercliff, 10, 21, 33, 35, 62-3, 104, 143-4, 166, 169-71, 226 d’Urfé, Honoré, 78 Victorian, 10, 117, 141, 144, 1468, 150-1, 172, 227, 255 Vision of St. Eustace, The, 33-4, 43-4 Walden, 55, 166, 219, 234 Ware Commons, 33 White, Gilbert, 117, 138, 187 Whitman, Walt, 250 Williams, Raymond, 17, 71, 87, 113

283 Wilson, Edward. O., 17-8, 20, 48, 125, 139, 262 Wistman’s Wood, 63, 236-9, 257 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 239-40

Index Wordsworth, William, 77, 103, 113, 189, 190-6, 202, 2-4, 216, 235-6, 263, 266 Wormholes, 10 Zen, 100, 211-6, 225, 233-5