JOHN FOWLES

Illuminating life of the author of such works as The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

The “two worlds” of the subtitle could be subdivided, multiplied, and variously reassigned: John Fowles the country gentleman, the Hollywood bon vivant, the London sophisticate, the cosmopolitan philosopher, the archivist and preservationist of village green and lea. For Warburton, who has enjoyed access to the famously private Fowles’s dairies and letters, the two worlds that matter are those of Fowles the living writer and Fowles the living person, and she does a fine job of capturing him in both guises. (For his part, Fowles has grumbled, “I know many writers fight fanatically to keep their published self separate from their private reality. . . . But I’ve always thought of that as something out of our social, time-serving side; not our true artistic ones.”) On the ordinary-life side, she explores Fowles’s childhood and early adulthood, marked by illness and checkered episodes in boarding school and the military, as well as the influence of his wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was married for 37 years and who appears, if obliquely, in many of his works. On the literary side, Warburton ably charts the course of Fowles’s evolution as a writer, one who seems not to have sought recognition until he had practiced a long and exacting apprenticeship; by the time his first book, The Collector, was published in 1963, she tells us, Fowles had written and shelved “nine or ten other novels.” Those who aspire to a soft life of literary fame will find Fowles’s example salutary, for no sooner had he become celebrated than did Fowles begin to reject the world of cocktail parties and seminars—though not the money that came with the job, and especially not the money that came from Hollywood, which won him the “rather spectacular Georgian house” on the English Channel that served as the focal point for his later life and figured in many of his later books.

A hard-working life of a hard-working, justly honored writer, very well told.