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INTERVIEWER
You have said that you wanted to be known as a writer and
not simply a novelist. You continue to make it difficult for us to
separate the fiction and the nonfiction in your work. Is this a result
of the early humanistic idealism—being a “renaissance man,” a
generalist, rather than a devotee in any single genre?
FOWLES
I’ve always felt that expressing myself in other literary forms
is natural and desirable. Or putting it most generally, that all novelists
should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal
one. That is perhaps why my taste in fiction is towards a fair
degree of realism in style and my taste in nonfiction (say in what
scientists and academics write) is towards those who can exhibit
qualities like tolerance of hypothesis, dislike of the rigid interpretation,
a general fluidity of attitude, and a basic sympathy towards
a subject . . . a touch of ordinary humanity, in a phrase.
Very important for me also is the collection of “old” books I
have gathered over the years. I am a lousy bibliophile in the proper
and normal sense. What I like about picking up old books is their
enormous variety and the glimpses they can give into past and lost
worlds and cultures. I do this quite indiscriminately, with whatever
takes my fancy; the returns, in a literary sense, are infinite,
but difficult to categorize. An American student to whom I mentioned
this asked if she might have a list of what I had read or collected
over the years. I told her it was impossible. I keep no such
list. But this very miscellaneous reading I have done over the years
has become a major influence for all its maddening vagueness for
the students. Students nowadays seem to want to “place” precisely,
to locate precisely, everything about a writer’s work: what
he is, what has made him or her what they are, and so on. It seems
to me that to imprison it is to deny something very essential about
writing. Rather the same thing has taken place in nature, or natural
history—the mania to place everything in a precise species or
subspecies, to discover exactly how it works, all the rest. I am
opposed to the scientization of nature, the reducing of it all to
species, ecological distributions, biochemical mechanisms, and so
on. I feel this very strongly about writing and writers too. The
world wants us caged, in one place, behind bars; it is very important
we stay free.
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