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stories within stories of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s
Woman bespoke Fowles’s promise as a short story writer. They
already demonstrated his capacity for rapid portraiture, immediate
evocation of mood and atmosphere, and brief but striking narrative
effects. John Fowles turned out the first drafts of all short stories
of The Ebony Tower in just a few days.1
In “A Personal Note,” the author explains that the working
title he used for this collection of stories was: “Variations,
by which I meant to suggest variations both on certain themes in
previous books of mine and on methods of narrative presentation....”2
These comments emphasise certain important aspects of the volume.
They suggest, firstly, that Fowles sees The Ebony Tower as integral
to his œuvre and not as the aberrant and rather peculiar experiment
with the short story form, which some critics have taken it to be.3
Fowles himself ironically signals this fact in self-referential
detail in the title story: Anne, “the Freak,” is reading
The Magus, which David Williams dismisses as about “astrology”
and “all that nonsense” (61). The informed reader is
implicitly invited to associate the story, and even the volume that
contains it, with Fowles’s second novel. The Ebony Tower is
thus consciously placed in line with major work of the author’s
corpus.
Fowles’s observations in his “Personal Note” can
be used effectively as a model for discussing the element of “variation”
between these stories and his previous novels.
These variations are best depicted through the structural motifs
that recur throughout the collection. The motifs include the situation
of one man torn between two women and the clash between existential
choice and loyalty to conventions and static principles. Another
important motif involves the disappearance of characters or texts
as a means of allowing freedom to others, and probably the most
important motif is the failure of communication among characters
as a sign of misunderstanding among human beings.4 A motif that
unites all the stories of The Ebony Tower but also this volume of
short stories with other works by Fowles is the setting, which recalls
the lost domain, the forest motif that we witnessed in The Magus.
Since all five stories in The Ebony Tower share thematic and structural
variations, I shall analyse them thematically, mainly to avoid repetition
and the constant shifts from one theme to the other in every story.
The desire to retreat from commitment – commitment to authenticity,
to other people, or to life itself – plagues most of the protagonists
in The Ebony Tower. Carol Barnum observes that, in contrast to the
majority of protagonists in Fowles’s novels, the protagonists
of these stories, each in his own way, she observes, gives in to
despair, a condition underscored by numerous allusions to Eliot’s
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste
Land.”5 The lack of commitment characterising the inhabitants
of the wasteland is a symptom, Eliot suggested, of a deeper deprivation:
the absence of belief, purpose, community and communication.
The writing of woman as a mystery and as an object of quest is best
illustrated through Catherine in “The Cloud.” The main
narrative of this story involves a group of characters who spend
a day beside a river in a forest (another Celtic and romantic setting)
in “Central France and late May” (222-223). They are
two families: Paul (a writer), his wife Annabel, their two children
Candida and Emma, and Catherine, Annabel’s sister. The other
family consists of Peter (a television producer), his girlfriend
Sally, and his son Tom. Catherine becomes very quickly the centre
of attraction for all the characters. She is an intellectual woman,
an artist, and a writer who is editing a translation of Barthes’s
Mythologies. She is in mourning for her late husband who died mysteriously.
Catherine’s insoluble mystery is epitomized in her silent
and eternal waiting at the end of the story. Her ambiguous waiting
resembles that of the princess in the parable who awaits the return
of the prince. Indeed Catherine’s constant silence could be
attributed to the death of her husband; it is only the princess’s
story she is interested in and wants to tell to the other characters.
Her deep depression is aggravated by the fact that no one desires
to listen to her except little Emma. She links the romantic story
of the princess to her own situation with her late husband (the
prince) for whom she is waiting in silence. This image of silent
waiting can be compared to Sarah’s constant waiting in her
own forest near the sea in The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
as she waits for her Lieutenant to come back and rescue her. The
story shares an Edenic setting and a variation of the absconding
god/satan with the other stories in the collection. It is set in
a timeless forest setting in France, and references to snakes, lizards,
and serpents abound.
The question of disappearance is a central motif in the stories
of The Ebony Tower. The godlike figure (author or character) disappears
in order to allow freedom to others and to create balance among
other characters. For example, Breasley disappears towards the end
of the story to allow David the possibility of choice; the burglar
in “Poor Koko” absconds in order to allow the narrator
to write about him; and both Catherine and Fielding disappear in
order to allow freedom to other characters. Fowles in fact emphasises
the importance of disappearance of such godlike figures in his personal
text, The Aristos: “If there had been a creator, his second
act would have been to disappear.”6
The disappearance of character is then considered as the exercise
of an existential choice to free oneself from all forms of domination.
“The Ebony Tower” reflects the themes of The Magus.
In an interview Fowles confirms this close reference: “In
a way I wanted to demystify The Magus which I think was altogether
too full of mystery. This is a kind of realistic version of The
Magus.”7 This suggests that “The Ebony Tower”
is less mysterious and that is probably the case. But whether or
not it is a realistic text is doubtful since it is a fantasy of
the same type as The Magus. In this story, the protagonist, David
Williams, fantasises a journey of self-discovery through a magic
land and its female inhabitants. He faces a similar dilemma to that
of Nicholas Urfe. David has to choose between his dream world with
Diana and his wife, who is the representative of the real world.
Indeed this question of reality in Fowles’s fiction is always
problematical since this reality itself is fictional and illusory.
This conflict between reality and illusion is a major motif that
recurs in all Fowles’s fiction, and as I shall argue later,
it becomes the subject of “The Enigma.”
A further similarity between “The Ebony Tower” and The
Magus is in fact concretized by Breasley, the magus figure, who
echoes Conchis himself. Breasley is an artist of high reputation;
like Conchis, he helps David to achieve self-realisation after visiting
Coetminais, which is a striking parallel to Nicholas’s journey
through Conchis’s domain. David’s brief encounter with
Diana and Anne reflects that large-scale encounter of Nicholas with
Julie and June. Julie’s challenge to Nicholas’s power
foreshadows Diana’s own challenge to David’s abortive
attempts to manipulate her sexually.
Henry Breasley and David Williams are both artistic types and realistically
drawn individuals. The contrast of the two men contributes to the
theme, already well established in The Collector and further developed
in The Magus. In every way Breasley is a contrast to Williams: the
contrast becomes a conflict between reality and abstraction. Reality
and Breasley stand for life, passion, and mystery; abstraction and
Williams stand for convention, security, and death. Breasley tells
Williams: “Don’t hate, can’t love. Can’t
love, can’t paint” (40). Diana translates for him: “Making
is speaking... Art as a form of speech. Speech must be based on
human need, not abstract theories of grammar” (40). The challenge
has been made to David: throw off your conventions, your abstractions,
and embrace reality and all its mystery. Conchis offers Nicholas
the same challenge in The Magus when he forces Nicholas to see life
as reality and to stop viewing it as art, as if he were a character
in a novel. Conchis finally teaches Nicholas that man “needs
the existence of mysteries. Not their solutions” (223). David
never fully grasps this truth, although he is plunged into self-knowledge.
Breasley is a god figure (like Conchis in The Magus, which Fowles
wanted to title The Godgame), standing for a counterpole of existence
for David to compare himself with. David at the end of the novella
feels like “the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his
true lost self ... . Underlying all this there stood the knowledge
that he would not change” (96). David remains Adam; he falls
only briefly: “a moment’s illusion; her reality just
one more unpursued idea kept among old sketchbooks at the back of
a studio cupboard” (98).
David is married to a loving and faithful wife. He is torn between
his duty to her and his desire for the other. The scene is an already
familiar one in Fowles’s oeuvre, erotic but unconsummated.
Diana ultimately rejects him, though her motive is less than crystal
clear. Perhaps it is David’s hesitation, perhaps her realisation
that the relationship would never grow into anything more, or perhaps
– as Lorna Sage suggests – it is a matter of their “wanting
each other in successive moments, coming achingly close, but never
coinciding.”8 The scene provides the climax, or anti-climax,
of the novella, following which is a weighty scene of recognition
and self-analysis. Emerging quite clearly is David’s sense
of loss and failure: “He had failed both in the contemporary
and the medieval sense; as someone who wanted sex, as someone who
renounced it” (93). The dynamic power of Breasley finally
and fully impresses itself upon him. At first the old artist is
merely an object of curiosity, a subject for an essay. The weekend
encounter, however, proves traumatic for the young man. His life
and his art have been harshly tested. Both unfortunately attest
to the “jettisoning of the human body and its natural physical
perceptions” (96). This is the principal message of the story.
Driving away from the enchanted forest, toward the plane that will
take him back to his wife and family, David ultimately realises
that nothing will change him or his painting: “... he would
go on painting as before, he would forget this day, he would find
reasons to interpret everything differently ... He was crippled
by common sense, he had no ultimate belief in chance and its exploitation,
the missed opportunity would become the finally sensible decision,
the decent thing: the flame of deep fire that had singed him a dream,
a moment’s illusion; her reality just one more unpursued idea”
(97-98).
Unlike The Ebony Tower, The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s
Woman end with their protagonists’ awareness of expanded horizons
and new directions because they stress the translation of important
perceptions into freely chosen acts. The point here seems to be
that without action, the insights are lost and the transformation
of personality not possible.
As “The Ebony Tower” recalls The Magus, so “Poor
Koko” takes us back to The Collector. The story is told in
retrospect by the elderly victim of a burglary. This narrator is
staying in an isolated cottage belonging to friends and working
on a book about nineteenth-century novelist Thomas Love Peacock.
When he hears a burglar downstairs, he remains quiet, but the burglar
discovers him in bed. As the burglar continues to work, he treats
his victim kindly and engages him in conversation about crime, society,
even Joseph Conrad. Before the burglar leaves, without explanation,
he ties up the narrator and burns his notes and manuscript while
the writer watches. Then he gives a thumbs-up gesture as he leaves.
The last ten pages of the forty-page story is the narrator’s
attempt to understand why the burglar destroyed his book. The narrator
rejects his friends’ belief that the burglar was a Marxist,
like their son, who saw the old man as a parasite on an outmoded,
bourgeois novelist-host. He also rejects the explanation that the
burglar was schizophrenic. He constructs a theory based partly on
the cocked-thumb gesture, that the burglar may have felt that they
were in a contest with each other – and that he was the underdog.
The burglar burned the book, in part, because he resented and was
even afraid of the seemingly magical power of its writer, someone
far abler than he to use the language.
The story is a variation on The Collector, with an artist imprisoned
by a criminal. Like Clegg, the burglar is aware of the insurmountability
of the gap between the many and the few, but he seems to understand
much better than Clegg does the nature of the gap. The burglar’s
situation is not just the result of a “wrong” class
accent, the narrator concludes, but of an inability to wield language
in ways that could empower him. Understanding his situation makes
him resentful. He concedes that he was not entirely blameless for
what took place but deep down his outlook has not changed. He has
not learnt that “a life devoted to biography is a wasted life.”9
He has finished rewriting his book on Peacock and refuses to see
the real meaning of his ordeal.
The settings and situations of the two works are similar. Both depict
an episode in the class conflict and both give the victory to the
philistine. Miranda Grey in The Collector and the anonymous author
in “Poor Koko” are too weak to fight their antagonists
effectively. Their hatred of violence, even when necessary for self-defence,
proves totally enfeebling in the circumstances in which they find
themselves.
The next story of the collection, “The Enigma” begins
with the mysterious disappearance of John Marcus Fielding, a prominent
English businessman, a family man of strict character and habits,
and a member of Parliament. He was last seen entering the British
Museum, but Scotland Yard can find no further evidence of his whereabouts.
When solving the case is beginning to seem hopeless, a young detective
named Michael Jennings is assigned to it because his public school
accent will better enable him to deal with the upper-class family
and friends of Fielding. His interviews turn up little new but solidify
the impression that Fielding was a responsible, upstanding person.
The last part of the story is Jenning’s interview with the
former girlfriend of Fielding’s son, Isobel Dodgson, a graduate
student in English. They have a long talk in Hampstead Heath, and
she decides to reveal that she told Fielding on the night before
he disappeared that she would be working in the British Museum the
next day. He might have drowned himself in the pond near his house,
in the woods he knew well, and might have passed through the British
Museum just to signal her that he knew that she knew that there
was more to him than others had discerned. When Jennings offers
this explanation to Scotland Yard, no one is interested in such
a psychological theory, without evidence.
The story ends with a dinner date and lovemaking between Michael
and Isobel, which the narrator observes was caused by an enigma
that had walked out.
The idea of walking out has been mentioned earlier in the story,
as “God’s trick,” which Fielding has imitated
by writing himself as an open-ended mystery story. Isobel explains
that if he is found, he will cease to “write” who he
is and start to “be written” by others, be labelled
as a victim of a “nervous breakdown. A nut case. Whatever”
(214). What Isobel calls “God’s trick” (214) is
reminiscent of the final move in the godgame of The Magus. Also
not dissimilar to the image of God in The Aristos and The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, he is compared to “the God who went
missing,” who walked out on his creation. Fielding will gain
a sort of immortality by never being discovered: “The one
thing people never forget is the unsolved. Nothing lasts like a
mystery” (213).
When Sergeant Jennings meets Miss Dodgsons, the focus of “The
Enigma” begins to shift from the problem of Fielding’s
disappearance to the mystery of love. Abandoning search for the
solution to an abstract problem, Jennings recognises the priority
of the enticing mystery before him: “The act [Fielding’s
disappearance] was done; taking it to bits, discovering how it had
been done in detail, was not the point. The point was a living face
with brown eyes, half challenging and half teasing; not committing
a crime against that” (209). Part of Isobel’s attraction
for Jennings is her inscrutable air of independence. Her effect
on him in some ways resembles Sarah’s on Charles Smithson:
“Something about [Isobel possessed something that he lacked:
a potential that lay like unsown ground, waiting for just this unlikely
corn-goddess; a direction he could follow... An honesty” (208).
The power Jennings perceives in Isobel is associated with the source
of growth, fertility, or fruition in nature. A “corn-goddess”
whose vital power promises to nurture new life in him, Isobel recalls
Lily de Seitas, who appears before Nicholas, the seeker in The Magus,
“like Demeter, Ceres, a goddess” on her “corn-gold”
throne.
Isobel is one more lovely variation on the intelligent, sensitive,
and independent female who plays so active and essential a role
in the dramatis personae of the Fowles canon.
Hampstead Heath is to London what the Undercliff is to Lyme Regis,
and Isobel’s revelations during her meeting there with Jennings
parallel an idea that is implicit in The French Lieutenant’s
Woman, that the “real” Sarah lies somewhere behind the
labels that people or the doctors assign to her; like Fielding.
Sarah must remain difficult to label – enigmatic – if
she is to be herself. Fielding’s scrapbook about his life
reminds Isobel of the way actors behave, and she guesses that he
may have finally overcome the sense that he was on stage, playing
some role expected by others instead of writing his own script –
the same breakthrough Nicholas experiences at the end of The Magus
when he realises that no one is watching him any more.
The final message of the story is that the search for the absconding
god is irrelevant besides being impossible. Reality, the human relationship,
is what is important. Fowles ends the story with a poetic flourish
in stark contrast to the way he began: “The tender pragmatisms
of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish
or demean – indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk
out” (218).
The final piece, “The Cloud” ends the way “The
Enigma” begins, with a disappearance and possible suicide,
this time that of the inscrutable Catherine. The events take place
in central France, where a group of English acquaintances are relaxing,
on vacation. Paul Rogers is an English writer, a Francophile-Anglophobe.
His wife, Annabel, is a placid, nurturing mother to their daughters,
Candida and Emma. Annabel’s sister Catherine has recently
lost her husband to suicide and is subject to bouts of depression.
A divorced television producer named Peter has with him his son,
Paul, and a girlfriend named Sally. As they converse, their personalities
are revealed. The men consider Sally sexy, whereas the sisters consider
her vapid. Rogers is a would-be intellectual who likes to explain
everything, and he delivers a lecture on why he likes the French
better than the English. Catherine is taciturn but is drawn into
a discussion in which she tells the others about Roland Barthes.
Peter, who is always looking for marketable idea, asks her to give
him a script. The children play and argue. Catherine takes Emma
to a secluded spot and makes up a story for her about a princess
who falls asleep in the woods and then is awakened by a prince and
helped by a magician-owl. The prince’s parents, however, reject
her as a bride. Catherine refuses to end the story, leaving the
princess waiting in the woods for her prince to return.
The last part of the story takes place in the afternoon. As Paul
reads “The Scholar Gipsy” to Annabel, Peter goes climbing
among the rocks. He finds Catherine; she does not resist his sexual
advances. Peter returns to the others and lies about having seen
her; one of his remarks suggests that she may be dead. As they prepare
to leave, to avoid a thunderstorm that suddenly and mysteriously
has started to build up, Catherine does not respond to their calls.
They leave, and the story concludes: “The princess calls,
but there is no one, now, to hear her” (274). Catherine is
unaffected by the clichés that help ordinary, that is, less
sensitive and more compromising, people to maintain their emotional
balance and their ability to carry on. She is a lost ‘island’
in a ‘limitless sea.’
There is a complex life of feeling beneath the surface of this picture,
always pulsing, occasionally correlated with a gesture or a word,
but difficult to articulate with precision. This is the soul of
the piece, evoked by words that hint at states of being for which
words are ultimately inadequate. The basic clash in “The Cloud”
is between the rippling surface illusions and the dark and deep
undercurrent of emotional realities. If, as Fowles has reiterated
in The Aristos and elsewhere, existence is the tension of the opposites,
then this short, delicately fashioned piece, with its uncharacteristic
absence of didacticism, may constitute a slice of life as he sees
it.
By late afternoon the cloud has come, mysteriously, ominously from
the south, making the still peaceful, sunny sky immediately overhead
appear “eerie, false, sardonic, the claws of a brilliantly
disguised trap” (272). As we observe the subtle interactions
of the group, we come to realise that its relative calm and gaiety
is as sardonic as the trap which is the sky overhead. It forms a
false impression, at first unrevealing of the emotional storm beneath
the surface. The gathering cloud is an epiphany in James Joyce’s
sense of the immediate and potent spiritual manifestation associated
with an object or an event, the significance of which the observer
suddenly apprehends. In this connection, Fowles has remarked that
he perceives in “The Cloud” a feeling of “The
Dead”, the last story in Joyce’s early collection entitled
Dubliners.10
The impromptu sex act, which has ambiguous elements of rape and
seduction, is a variation on the crucial episode between Charles
and Sarah at Exeter in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The
discussion of Barthes, too, is an elaboration of a theory of discourse
referred to in Chapters 13 and 55 of The French Lieutenant’s
Woman and underlying some of Fowles’s rhetorical decisions.
Paul’s diatribe against the English behaviour, which is a
variation on an important theme in Daniel Martin, the novel Fowles
had been working on for several years before he wrote “The
Cloud.”
What separates The Ebony Tower from the majority of Fowles’s
novels is that the protagonists of these stories are less and less
able to take the mythic journey of self-discovery because they are
trapped in a contemporary wasteland which bewilders and confounds
them. The title story describes a quester who inadvertently stumbles
into the realm of myth, only to find that he cannot rise to the
challenge and is therefore ejected from the mythic landscape. The
other three stories by Fowles all centre on enigmas (one is titled
“The Enigma”) or mysteries of modern life that arise
because “mystery” in the sacred sense no longer appears
valid in modern man’s existence.
Although the general tone of these stories is dark, Fowles’s
view of life is not one of despair as his novels The Magus, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman and Daniel Martin attest, each treating
protagonists who break out of wasteland existences into self-awareness
and understanding because of their ability to take the mythic journey.
As Robert K. Morris writes: “Fowles’s intent as a novelist,
and as a writer of these fictions, is to strike the sane balance
between art and life at a time when both, seem vulnerable to excess,
and neither seems susceptible to control. Perhaps only when art
descends from the ebony tower will it be able to light up Fowles’s
cheerless “bottomless night” and once more tell us,
as it has in the past, something about life.”11
Even though the collection’s original title was abandoned,
Variations is nonetheless an appropriate and illuminating title
in that the stories do reflect the overall pattern of Fowles’s
fiction: modern man’s quest for wholeness or individuation.
Notes:
1. David North, ‘Interview with Author John Fowles,’
Maclean’s 90 (14 November 1977): 6; and John F. Baker, ‘John
Fowles,’ Publisher’s Weekly 206 (25 November 1974):
6.
2. John Fowles, The Ebony Tower (Toronto: Little, Brown and Company,
1974), 117-19. All other page references appear in the text and
are to this edition.
3. Critical reaction to The Ebony Tower has itself been rather peculiar.
While critics like Conradi and Huffaker devote chapters to it in
their books and treat it as part of the Fowles canon, others, like
Woodcock and Fawkner, mention it only in passing. See H. W. Fawkner,
The Timescapes of John Fowles (Toronto: Associated University Presses,
1984).
4. Simon Loveday, The Romances of John Fowles (London: Macmillan,
1985), 87.
5. Carol Barnum, “The Quest Motif in John Fowles’ss
The Ebony Tower: Theme and Variations.” Texas Studies in Literature
and Languages 23 (1981): 147.
6. John Fowles, The Aristos (1964; rpt. London: Triad/ Panther,
1981), 18.
7. Robert Robinson, “Giving the Reader a Choice: A Conversation
with John Fowles”, The Listener, 31 October, 1974, 584.
8. Lorna Sage, “Profile 7: John Fowles,” New Review
1 (October 1974): 37.
9. Loveday, op. cit., 100.
10. James Baker, “An Interview with John Fowles.” Michigan
Quarterly Review 25, no. 4 (1986): 661-83, 671.
11. cited in Carol Barnum, op. cit., 149.
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