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John Fowles’s frustrated screenwriter? That’s me!

In his 1977 novel ‘Daniel Martin’, an Englishman is compromised by Hollywood

By Julian FELLOWES

When I first read John Fowles’s 1977 novel Daniel Martin some years ago, it was with an extended shock of recognition. I suppose I felt that Fowles understood me. The eponymous hero is taken over, and in some ways changed, by the film industry in Hollywood. Its values may be at odds with his own deepfelt, and very English, beliefs, but Daniel is not entirely proof against them. There is something compelling and controlling about the film industry that you cannot resist absolutely if you want to progress in it. Whether he likes it or not, Daniel does want to be part of the industry. And so did I.

Like me, he strives to live in the present, but cannot: “When I was your age, I could only look forward,” Daniel tells his younger girlfriend, Jenny, at the beginning of the book. Again, over the past 20 years, I have come to find it increasingly hard not to compare life now with life before. I often think of episodes, whole passages of life, that I lived through earlier; they feel like rather different lives, in fact, and they are difficult to explain to the young.

For the whole book, Daniel is trying to finish a screenplay about Lord Kitchener, an icon of Empire who fought in the Boer War before governing in Egypt as Sirdar, and later built Kitchener’s Army, which fought in the Great War. My own marriage has been very much Kitchener-based. My wife is the last of that branch of the family, and presides now over Kitchener charities and Kitchener scholarships. We have the chair he sat in when he was the Sirdar, and the pith helmet he wore. We have paintings and letters and mementos galore of this curious, enigmatic man and how he lived more than a century ago.

Whatever the contemporary verdict on his imperial achievements, he was a giant, and Daniel Martin is trying to capture his essence in a 100-minute film. This presents an impossible challenge, and one with which I am only too familiar: to do justice to a person, an event, or any kind of great work, using a medium that can only ever be approximate and is, usually, shallow.

Kitchener illustrates Daniel’s frustrations with the limits of cinema as well as the falseness of what he has chosen as his main career; Daniel yearns to write books and plays that people, including himself, would value more. This struck a powerful note, as it seems to me inevitable that popular success palls, leaving you wanting something more elevated, dignified and praiseworthy, but, in the end, when that is the kingdom you have entered, it is hard to leave.

This leads me to one of the great pleasures of this book, and of all of John Fowles’s work, in fact, because Fowles, unlike Daniel Martin, is not writing for the cinema. So many novels today seem to be published with a possible film in mind, but that is not true here. In truth, I think the book could be adapted into a good film, which I have every ambition of making one day (I’ve already written a script), but the fact that Fowles is apparently free of that ambition means he can dive into the characters’ inner workings – their hesitations; their changes of intention; their muddled emotional longings – without troubling himself as to whether or not the scene in question is cinematic.

Daniel Martin, like John Fowles, attends Oxford. Daniel is taken from his modest but decorous childhood as the son of a vicar in a Devon farming community and propelled into a new social and intellectual world at university. In large measure, it is at Oxford that he reviews his own background – his dull but honest father; his family’s place in that provincial

village – and in this re-examining, he finds himself.

Daniel Martin the screenwriter could not have stepped one day out of the vicarage and taken a flight to Hollywood. There are moments in the process of growing up where society allows us a legitimate “period of adjustment”, as it used to be called, and university, for many of us, is one of these times.

I went to Cambridge, and the lectures and the friendships Fowles writes about, along with the illjudged love affairs, the hope, the disappointment and the general self-awakening, were all quite recognisable to me. My early years had followed a fairly predictable pattern, with a childhood in London, then boarding prep in Yorkshire. In the holidays, we’d buy clothes and supplies in London, and see the main film of the moment – Ben Hur, El Cid, Cleopatra – before we were put on the train at King’s Cross and taken north for another term.

Like most children, I never really questioned our existence. It was comfortable enough without being, as we thought, especially luxurious. Now, of course, I know that my youth, with its ponies and birthday parties, and an island my father had bought off the coast of Kerry where we spent our summers, added up to an extremely privileged existence. It was at Cambridge that, like Daniel Martin, my eyes were opened to the many lives that were being lived in this country and beyond that were nothing at all like mine.

I had spent my teens very much in the shadow of my next brother up (we were four boys, altogether), who was not only much better looking, but also far more attuned to the era of the 1960s than I was. He would travel to India and Nepal, and study under a Maharishi, and dance at the Hundred Club on Oxford Street and be completely in step with what was happening for the Me Generation.

None of this was true of me, as a trip to South America to visit an aunt in the months before I went up to Cambridge had made me contemplate. I travelled there in a slow oil tanker (thanks to my father’s job at Shell) and so I had weeks to ponder my social failure when I was away from my family. At the same time, I realised that my aunt and my cousins had not seen me for many years; I was free to get off the ship as anyone I wanted to be. So I did. I came down the tanker’s gangplank as a talkative, funny, essentially social being, and when I travelled home, months later, I resolved to hang on to this advantage.

Daniel Martin is transformed through the people he meets at Oxford. He knows he is no longer the son of the vicarage, and he takes steps towards change. It so happened that not long after I started at Cambridge, I met a rather strange man called Peter Townend, who organised what was still then called the London Season. Actually, Peter was very kind to me, and he decided to add my name to the list of young men he would distribute to anxious mothers looking for more men to “make up numbers” at their daughters’ parties – and so I was on my way.

Since the farrago of white tie and black tie and ball dresses and house parties and cocktails located everywhere, from the House of Lords to Battersea Fun Fair, was anathema to my handsome brother, it meant that I was my own master, alone, no longer overshadowed. I could at last fly, by myself and without comparison.

I know in these egalitarian days, it is correct to denounce the whole experience as snobbish and despicable, but it set me free, and I will always be grateful for that. It gave me the confidence to embrace a very different future from that of most of the girls with whom I had twisted round the ballroom, or their brothers who were bound mostly for the City or the army. Instead, when I graduated, I enrolled in drama school.

Of course, nothing in life is simple and, paradoxically, this period of my past (quite a distinct one, belonging spiritually, as it did, to an era before my own) prompted me to examine the world I had grown up in. It was the first time, perhaps because of the counteracting influences of university and the debutante season, I had started to question the values of the Establishment of which I was a member by birth. I became conscious of a sense of alienation, an awareness of ridiculousness that made me feel as if I were looking at my own people through binoculars turned the wrong way round, so that they appeared to be a long, long way away from me.

I suspect it was this, as much as anything else, that made me choose a career that was out of step with my contemporaries, who generally considered it mad. In all of which, I am only following in the footsteps of Fowles, who found, by the end of university, that he had become not so much a committed left-wing agitator as an anarchist or a nihilist, of which we hear echoes in Daniel Martin’s contempt for the path he has chosen. His young lover, Jenny, allows him to reject his own past for a time, until he is forced, as so many of us are, to recognise the power of the years that formed him, which refuse to be set aside, even for something better.

I love Fowles’s honesty. I don’t know enough about him to be able to judge the extent to which the book is autobiographical, but there are moments when Daniel speaks and it has an authenticity that must surely mean it is a thought, or an emotion, that comes direct from his creator:

Popular success palls, leaving you wanting something more elevated and dignified

It was less anything personal that I had always disliked in Barney, in fact, than that he was a critic. No creator can like critics. There is too much difference between the two activities. One is begetting, the other surgery. However justified the criticism, it is always inflicted by someone who hasn’t, a eunuch, on someone who has, a generator; by someone who takes no real risks on someone who stakes most of his being, economic as well as immortal.

Swallowing the insults of (one suspects, often rather jealous) critics is part of the life of any artist. To voice a protest at the system is to forfeit, immediately, all claims to the moral high ground.

I never met John Fowles. I might have done, since he died when I was 56 and living in the same part of the country. I wish I had known him, although I suspect he would have found me rather less interesting than I would have found him. I certainly cannot see him enthralled by the vicissitudes of life at Downton Abbey. But I would have liked the opportunity to tell him what I most sincerely believe: that he was, and remains, one of the greatest novelists of our own, or any other, era.

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2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

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