arbour.

"The place is probably alive with snakes."

"Like Eden."

She stepped out of her jeans and her white pants. Then she reached up and snapped a dead cone off one of the arbour branches and held it out to me. [268]

Nicholas takes the cone and yields to Alison's temptation, believing that he glimpses Eve "through ten thousand generations." The tenderness he feels for Alison at that moment seems a fragment of the same tenderness that had inspired their mythic ancestors's first physical passion. Nicholas soon lapses into his boorish Adam-self again, but during his brief reunion with Alison, he "made love, not sex" (269). Love poses a difficult challenge for the protagonists of Fowles's novels, but each man's Eve proves to be a patient persuader who is ultimately successful in her aim.

Because creation can begin only after Adam has fallen from his false paradise, Fowles banishes his major protagonists from their comfortable, indolent worlds. They land on the stony ground of their underdeveloped feelings, which they must fertilize and nurture. They are postlapsarian Adams who find themselves, in Gully Jimson's words, in "the real world . . . hard as rocks and sharp as thorns" where they have to build their own gardens, "make the bloody things and pile up the rocks and keep the roses in beds."² However, Fowles is not only concerned with the development of his characters after their falls. He also fully characterizes the lazy, prelapsarian Adam, content with innocence and afraid of letting his Eden go. This hesitating male who scolds his Eve and recoils from her temptation is the character who opens each of Fowles's novels and who peoples all of his short stories in The Ebony Tower. David Williams in The Ebony Tower, for example, will not take the apple. In a scene that resembles the Parnassus episode in The Magus, with characters lunching naked beside a clear pool in a place David calls the Garden of Eden, Mouse offers David an apple. Although the offering disturbs David, it does not move him. Hence, the apple winds up in an "old-fashioned English blackberry-and-apple pie" (75), a symbol for the domesticity into which David retreats to hide from forbidden knowledge. Conformity and conservatism are this Adam's loadstones, exerting their force against independence and change. The power of stasis has a magnetism that insists on its negative autonomy, and it pulls with Charybdian strength at the best intentions of Fowles's protagonists. The protagonists of the novels ultimately overcome this inertia; the protagonists of the short stories do not.

An understanding of protagonism in Fowles's work begins with an examination of this deadening and irresponsible human stasis that he meticulously characterizes. In the novels, Fowles's protagonists eventually leave this condition behind to pursue a quest initiative, usually defined by a woman. However, Fowles also draws character portraits of people who are hopelessly grafted to stasis and unable to evolve. These portraits he has collected in The Ebony Tower: David Williams in the title story, Marcus Fielding in "The Enigma," the scholar in "Poor Koko," and Catherine, the Adam-woman of "The Cloud." These characters, like James Joyce's Dubliners, have removed themselves from life's evolutionary current and withdrawn into shadows, corners, and "ebony towers" where life can be waited out.

Fowles blackens the familiar ivory tower because he perceives an individual's withdrawal from the lifestream as anything but an ascension into lofty white heights. Such a retreat is a black death-like removal that cuts the individual off from the life-source of human community. The tower as metaphor is explicitly defined in The Ebony Tower's title story. Mouse tells David Williams, the young art critic who has come to interview the famous painter with whom she lives, that the ebony tower is what Breasley believes has taken the place of the ivory tower. For Breasley, the expression stands for anything that is "obscure because the artist is scared to be clear" (50). Later, after his rejection of Mouse in the garden, David learns that in addition to obscurity and fear, the symbol stands for weak indecision, complacency, and selfishness.

Fowles's "Personal Note" to the reader of The Ebony Tower contributes some additional observations that help to explain this important symbol. Fowles claims to have inserted the medieval tale Eliduc into the collection to remind the reader of three "real-life systems": feudalism, Christianity and amour courtois. All were supported by codes of trust that insisted that humans keep their promises to each other. In fostering greater honesty and trust among people, these institutions helped to civilize human relations. Feudalism "laid a vital importance on promises sworn between vassal and lord"; all civilized life depended on "a man being as good as his word." Christianity placed responsibility for the immortal soul on the human heart and human actions. And courtly love stressed keeping faith in love and was an attempt "to bring more civilization (more female intelligence) into a brutal society." Eliduc is "anachronistically told" in The Ebony Tower to remind the reader of the defilement or loss of trust in most aspects of contemporary human intercourse—from love and sex to language and art (122).

Although none of the protagonists in The Ebony Tower successfully evolves into what Fowles calls the aristoi, the plot of each story turns upon the small progress they do make. However, their advances are made only within the province of knowledge, not action. In the Fowles world, to see and to know are not enough; the individual must also act and change. "Cleggness" reappears in The Ebony Tower as a veneer hiding an Arnoldian buried life. For the scholar in "Poor Koko" and Marcus Fielding in "The Enigma," the veneer has become highly polished over the years. They have lived hollow and complacent lives well into middle age. Their sudden acknowledgement of failure comes too late to reanimate fossil-hard possibilities that might have made them other than what they became. Catherine in "The Cloud" still has the youth these men have lost but is victimized instead by a deep-seated despair over her husband's death, which mires her in the past. However, in The Ebony Tower, Fowles most straightforwardly characterizes the failed artist-protagonist in the slick and glib David Williams.

David Williams is a painter-turned-art critic visiting Coetminais to learn Henry Breasley's "sources" and the "secrets" of his originality. Because David is himself a highly derivative painter, influenced by many sources and formal training, he has trouble understanding Breasley's almost instinctual approach to art. Breasley tells David that he "Painted to paint . . . Like shitting," asserting that he has severed himself from his roots in other artists' work (77-78). David mistrusts Breasley's claim and presses him to come clean. However, David is met by challenges from this master, which make him and not Breasley the object of the novella's investigation.

The tables are turned on David at dinner, where Breasley issues him his first challenge. With an obvious contempt for abstract painting, the kind of painting David does, Breasley opens the attack:

"Footsteps of Pythagoras, that right?"

The old man stayed intent on his soup. David glanced for help at the girl opposite.

"Henry's asking if you paint abstracts."

Eyes on his laden spoon, the old man muttered quickly, "Obstructs."

"Well, yes. I'm afraid I do."

He knew it was a mistake before the Mouse's quick glance. The old man smiled up.

"And why are we afraid, dear boy?"

David smiled lightly, "Just a figure of speech." [37]

Afraid, rooted and "static" (113), David makes a poor showing at dinner. This young artist who paints without honesty or feeling is scorned by Breasley for his betrayal of art, a betrayal which the old painter calls the "triumph of the eunuch." So-called artists like David place commercial value, good taste, and critical approval above human content in their work. They have extracted the human "fundaments" from art, warm flesh and "spunk" (41-42), and replaced them with formal logic and geometry.

Once a painter of abstracts like David but newly influenced by Breasley, Mouse has learned to take artistic risks, painting trellises of flowers in "pinks and grays and creams, a palette of dangers." David "would have been afraid of it himself, the inherent sentiment, the lack of accent" and chooses "autumn and winter" colors, the colors of death (86). "You did not want how you lived to be reflected in your painting" (109), David believes. Abstraction also governs David's use of language, encumbering the verbal as well as the pictorial expression of human truths. In another scene between Breasley and David, as David studies the new "Kermesse" painting in Breasley's studio, the young art critic becomes aware that the final imago had been accomplished through a "constant recomposition and refinement away from the verbal." All of the literalness had progressively disappeared through the working sketches until it had been eliminated completely. Ironically, David's job will be to put Breasley's art back into words. The mysterious "inwardness" (26) of the painting, which remains after the exorcism of the verbal, will be translated back into "tawdry words," obscuring the unsaid human mysteries (112).

Language becomes an insurmountable barrier between Breasley and Williams. Although Mouse serves as translator, she is unable to translate what needs to be communicated. Breasley finally throws up his hands and yells, "What the hell's he talking about?" after one of David's dissertations on technique, but David is too busy counting obscenities and grammatical mistakes to hear the attempt at contact in Breasley's frustration. Breasley appeals—"Trying to tell you something"—to which David replies, "I know." But David doesn't know. He does not understand that "making is speaking," that "speech must be based on human needs" (45-46), that "bodies means more than words" (100).

Thus, David fails with Breasley; but the second challenge from Mouse in the garden shows David failing even more miserably. Again, in language as abstract and obscure as his painting, David demonstrates that he is bound to conventions of morality as well as to conventions of art. Mouse is Eve offering herself and a "new existence" (112) to this Adam who is too afraid to accept. "It was here, the unsaid. He knew it in every nerve and premonitory fiber. His move: he withdrew back into speech" (99). So David speaks, and the delay, the choosing not to act, damns him. Possession and security are the authorities in his life. Sex with Mouse would have to be a quick "sinking, knowing, possessing, release" (102) so that the "crypto-husband" (51) could get back home and make certain that his wife had no other man in bed with her: "His real fear was of losing that certainty" (97).

Human facts and feeling must be in art, in speech, and in sexual relations. "We're not brutes," Mouse tells David (101). But David does not understand until Mouse turns away from him and he is expelled from Coet that his brutality lies in his violation of love, not law. The Middle Ages fathered the belief that mutual trust should underpin all male-female relationships. But the same period also spawned a bastard in believing that chastity could insure this trust. David's practice of fidelity is a spurious destroyer of real love. It metaphorically castrates him and makes him unable to respond when love is offered. David is the "eunuch" in the garden at Coet, forsaking human needs for conventional morality.

Still, David is able to glimpse beneath the "phony shine" of his conventional armor (100) the man inside him who would not renounce the knowledge that Mouse offers. He is also left, at the end of the story, in a waiting room, reminiscent of Nicholas Urfe's SALLE D'ATTENTE in The Magus. The airport waiting room is an ambiguous symbol that can represent David's arrival at a terminus, consistent with Fowles's characterization of him in the story, or his point of departure, still possible because David is young, intelligent, and sensitive enough to change. Youth and change are inextricably joined in Fowles's fiction, and as long as David possesses qualities of the aristoi—and he does, generally—with time enough to mature them, there is hope for him. Not so with Fowles's Peacock scholar in "Poor Koko" and the conservative MP of "The Enigma." In the second and third stories of The Ebony Tower, Fowles makes untypical use of old men, who appear to be offering us a backward glance over lives already lived as David Williams is likely to live his. Although each man musters courage enough to perform a single important action, neither can correct a life already lived so poorly. Illustrating this best, and most ironically, is yet another waiting room, the cloakroom of the British Museum in "The Enigma." There Marcus Fielding leaves his briefcase, full of the papers and schedules that have defined his life, before abandoning that life altogether.

By contrast, the scholar in "Poor Koko" only temporarily puts aside his life's work. Before returning to the dreary reconstruction of his book on Thomas Love Peacock, he grants the young burglar his wish to be written about. "Poor Koko" is an examination of the boy who presents himself to the scholar as a living and therefore preferable subject for study. However, the story is also the scholar's fairly honest examination of himself. The self-probing lies in the older man's consideration of the linguistic craft and wit he has at his disposal. He may use them as he chooses in "serious" studies of dead authors like Peacock or in amusing stories like "Poor Koko"; but his writing of the latter ironically reveals that Peacock was more deserving of his wit and the boy of his seriousness.³

Wit is the villain of this tale. In the scholar's life, wit has protected him from criticism and disapproval. When he was hated for his puny size and bookworm ways, he could turn his weapon of wit on his critics and disarm them with humor. Over the years, his layers of self-protective wit thickened into an armor of cynical condescension, which made him impervious to any human contact, either critical or friendly. Appropriately, the scholar's greatest work is The Dwarf in Literature, a title reflecting his own diminutive size and character. Early in the story, he admits that books have been his whole existence: "writing them, reading, reviewing, helping to get them into print—have been my life rather more than life itself (147).

Like the "word-twister" (44) critic David Williams, the scholar has used language as an exclusionary medium, sharing it with few and denying it to many. As a result, he is both ill-equipped and unwilling to respond seriously to questions and challenges from his assailant. Deaf to the burglar's appeals, the scholar bates and belittles the young man with words, both spoken and written. The ironic result is that the burglar feels more victimized than his victim. Thus, he retaliates by gagging the scholar and, in silence, incinerating his weapon of words. The scholar is left with only a myopic remembrance of the burglar's victorious upturned thumb and the echo of his grievance, which the scholar later perceives covered a "cry for help": "Man, your trouble is you don't listen hard enough" (184).

It is intentional that the title "Poor Koko" and its epigraph in Old Cornish are "incomprehensible" so that we can see how willingly the scholar now comes to our linguistic aid. He translates their meaning for us, explaining that Koko is a Japanese word meaning "correct filial behavior, the proper attitude of son to father." This ironic appellation reminds him that although he is childless and an old man, he could have shown a father's love and responsibility to the deprived young man. The epigraph translated reads: "Too long a tongue, too short a hand; / But tongueless man has lost his land." With this couplet, he reminds himself that language is a gift to be shared, not hoarded. The gift-giving opportunity missed, the scholar is left a "poor clown"—another definition he offers for "poor Koko"—his wit and humor of little comfort to him in his barren old age (186-87).

Marcus Fielding of "The Enigma" also approaches the end of his career a foolish old man in his own estimation. Certainly, he has not been a political, financial, or social fool, but humanly and emotionally, he has been foolish indeed. The narrator tells us that it was against all "social and Statistical probability" that a man like Fielding would have disappeared (191). And Fielding's life was probable. His life was carefully planned and predictable, as the testimonies of his family, employees, and colleagues confirm. The expanse of reportage that opens this short story is somewhat reminiscent of Tolstoy's biography of Ivan Illych. Both men, moving always through "proper channels" (208) and controlled entirely by their duties, lead lives that read like catalogues or inventories, with no highs or lows, no passion or change, no defeat or exultation.

If we can believe Isobel—another of Fowles's fictionalizing magi—Fielding's death or disappearance has the harakiri quality of face-saving. A Clegg-like collector of mementoes, pictures, and press clippings of himself, Fielding has had to have evidence that he lived because he felt no other sense of it. Finally, she suggests, a better buried life percolates up through his pretentious "lifestyle" and sets off a battle between self and soul. Unable to admire the man whose career decorated the pages of his carefully assembled scrapbooks, Fielding chooses to save the face the scrapbooks never revealed. Therefore, he walks out of his life. He also walks out of Isobel's story of him as well, for although much of Isobel's fiction rings true, there is no evidence that her speculations are true. Still, neither the unrevised fact of Fielding's past nor the revisable fiction of his present and future have any power over him. He is pure mystery, unique and provocative for the first time in his life.

In fact, however, Marcus Fielding becomes a protagonist in this story only because Isobel's fiction-within-a-fiction has made him one. The protagonist of the frame fiction is, of course, Michael Jennings, the detective, who, unexpectedly, must respond to her fiction by becoming something of a literary sleuth or critic. The real world, not surprisingly, wants nothing of his. "what-if" speculations about Fielding's disappearance and will not let him act on his and Isobel's intuitive conjecturing. Jennings is another sketch of the Ebony Tower protagonist, whose initial complacency as a detective is developed with some irony. As one reader comments, "the challenge Isobel presents to him with her fictions and her female kinetic force and Jennings' awakening to a more difficult and engaged life" is central to this story.⁴ Though his interest to this story is paler than Fielding's, who is the "enigma," Jennings is more important as a character because of his living and even jaunty potential as an aristoi, which is restored and enlivened by a love affair, a mystery, and his own valuable self-searching and discovery. Jennings is the one hopeful portrait of a protagonist that Fowles gives us in this collection.

However, the most interesting portrait in The Ebony Tower is that of Catherine in "The Cloud," the story that Fowles believes is the best in the collection.⁵ Stylistically unique from anything Fowles has done, and more difficult than the other stories, "The Cloud" presents a characterization of a sensitive and potent writer who is "without will" (299). This artist is also especially unlucky since she does not meet a magus who can help her. The only magus in "The Cloud" is a make-believe wise owl, which Catherine invents for a fairy tale she tells her niece.

In "The Cloud," Catherine is with her sister's family and their friends on a day's outing in France. However, because of the recent death of her husband, she is tearful and distraught. As she tells her sister Bel, her husband's death has shattered her "continuity" and left her afraid of "being left behind and of going on" (260-61). This uncertain present threatens Catherine with a terrifying and lonely freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre recognized such freedom as the necessary angst that precedes responsible creation. Certainly Nicholas Urfe, Charles Smithson, and Daniel Martin all lost or gave up safe relationships before they found freedom; and only after much frustration and loneliness did they discover opportunities for self-creation in the freedom they acquired. Catherine, however, will not accept the freedom to define herself once she loses the relationship that had defined her in the past. She tries to protect herself from her past loss and future uncertainty by preserving that definition. She tells her brother-in-law that the time before her husband's death keeps crowding into her present: "Nothing has happened yet. Now is still before it happened." When past reality is allowed to move in and take over the present, past reality becomes present "fantasy," as Catherine clearly understands. But although Catherine realizes that her present reality is counterfeit, she is too weak to "do anything about it" (268).

Like Fowles's other protagonists, Catherine is weakened by the flaws of pride, insecurity, and arrogance. She is a talented and intelligent woman but is consumed by a despairing pessimism that fights against her few attempts to break with the past. To Catherine, the world seems a hopeless wasteland. Its mediocrity and ugliness make her unwilling to build anything new in it. Even the most "acceptable atom" she sees in it, the family, is not a safe and harmonious construct. Just as she begins to feel some security in her family, the atom shatters. Its composition has a transient unity, adhering one moment and disintegrating the next. A scrupulous observer, Catherine watches the atom compose and then decompose itself:

The sparkling water, the splashing feet; the dragonflies and butterflies; the buttercups and oxeyes and little blue flowers like splashes of sky. The voices, movements; kaleidescope, one shake and all will disappear. Bel's freckled-milky skin as she smiles, her vacant Juno smile, beneath the wide brim of her rush hat. . . . Nuclei, electrons. Seurat, the atom is all. The first truly acceptable island of the day. En famille; where children reign. For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy. . . .

'It's lovely,' bawls Candida back at them, with her usual ineffably judicious authority. 'Come on. We don't want to eat yet.'

'I wish 1 believed in hitting children,' murmurs Bel. [262-63]

Catherine despairs at reality's imperfection and is alienated by it. Candida's bawling and Bel's muttered threat shake the kaleidescope of Catherine's aesthetic vision. So much clashes that Catherine turns away from her companions and retreats, leaving the wasteland behind her:

Catherine . . . begins to wander away, pretending to look at flowers, her back to the voices, the shouts, the damns and buggers. Oh, that's a beauty. Bags him tonight. Hurry up please it's time. Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight. Goodnight. [264]

The shallow activities of her companions offend Catherine. But although she despises the silly flirtations, exploitive business interests, and "husks of talk" (275), she is guilty of similar wrongdoing. Bel correctly points out that Catherine "undervalues" everything (257). She snubs reality because it can be unpleasant and painful, and she dislikes people because they are not what she thinks they should be. However, the specific crime of which she is guilty is her dishonest use of language. She is like Peter, the glib TV producer who uses language as commercial Camouflage to hide truths that are too difficult or real to be marketable. Unconcerned that she represents accurately the significance of Barthes and semiotics in a script he wants her to write, Peter asks Catherine only for a consumable distillation that can be "got across on telly" (280). Although Catherine does not share Peter's shallow commercial interests, she does share his impulse to hide truth beneath a fabric of fantasy and manipulation. Almost before she knows what she is doing, her thoughts follow an irrevocable sequence of "words, shards, lies, oblivion" (298).

The "sort of true" (285) story Catherine tells her niece Emma is an example of the kind of fantasy that Catherine has erected between herself and the ugly but true tragedy of her husband's death. Catherine's fable is about a princess who gets lost in the forest after wandering too far from where her family is picnicking. Her family looks for but cannot find her, so she is left behind. The princess, of course, is Catherine. Both women are brown and naked, and they wait in the forest for their lost lovers to return. The owl in Catherine's story magically freezes the princess in time so that she will still be young and beautiful when the prince returns. Catherine also believes herself unchanged as she strains her imaginings to peer into the "black hole" of death, where her own prince now resides.

Emma insists on a "happily-ever-after" conclusion to the tale and then leaves to join her family. For Catherine, however, the story is what she is living and therefore has no ending. She remains behind, stretching herself out on a rock like a "corpse," and tries to imagine a reunion with her dead lover:

One lies in one's underclothes, behind dark glasses and fast-closed lids, aware of process . . . hidden and waiting. It must be close. One thought of it even with Emma, since he is there, also waiting, every moment now. That is why one can't stand other people, they obscure him, they don't understand how beautiful he is, now he has taken on the mask; so far from skeleton. But smiling, alive, almost fleshed; just as intelligent, beckoning. The other side. [297-99]

Now that her husband is there, the "other side" seems a far more congenial place to her than the life she presently lives in and hates. Catherine thinks of suicide, but nothing in the story suggests that her suicide is likely. She is described only as passive and inert, dreaming futile dreams of a restored past or afterlife reunions.

"With tears of self-pity, hand hidden in furtive hair," Catherine masturbates in a pitiful attempt to make love to the dead (298). She surrenders completely to a necro-philic dream vision but soon pays dearly for her capitulation. Vulnerable and half-naked, she is discovered by the "hunting man" (288), an incarnation of the hunter who terrifies the princess and the forest animals in Catherine's story. Peter, who is life's inevitable exploiter of the weak-willed, stalks and overpowers the self-pitying dreamer. His real flesh comes between Catherine and her ephemeral vision, obscuring her smiling, beckoning dead lover. When he uncovers Catherine's "black-shuttered" eyes and presses down on her, her vision shatters like another view in the kaleidescope. With no strength or courage to resist reality's rape, she lies "self-defiled" under Peter, an accessory to this crime against herself (298-99).

When Peter leaves, Catherine turns "quietly and submissively" onto her stomach, buries her face in the ground, and "waits" (304). Catherine will continue to wait, hoping for some change but never changing herself. She lies in her forest of illusion afraid to admit so many painful truths: the prince will not return, she cannot kill herself, and she does not believe that she can create a new life alone. Fowles might say of Catherine what he said of Miranda Grey in The Aristos: "If she had not died she might have become something better, the kind of being humanity so desperately needs" (10). However, Catherine's death is spiritual and moral, not physical. She has Miranda's talent, intelligence, and feeling but not her courage and will. She is more like Virginia Woolf's character, Clarissa Dalloway, who perceives life as "dangerous." Thus, Catherine lies pressed and mounted on the last page of The Ebony Tower like one of Clegg's beautiful but lifeless butterflies. An artist fearful of truth and scornful of life, only able to create death-in-life with her fertile imagination, Catherine is an unredeemed artist of the ebony tower. Fowles therefore abandons her in a forest of false fiction: . . . composing and decomposed, writing and written. Young dark-haired corpse with a bitter mouth; her hands at her sides, she does by thinking of doing (299).

The Ebony Tower is a collection of working sketches of characters who reappear in Fowles's novels. The major characters in the four short stories, David Williams, poor Koko, Marcus Fielding, and Catherine, resemble respectively Nicholas Urfe, Daniel Martin, Charles Smithson, and Miranda Grey. However, the similarities all these characters share make them variations on a theme—the reason, perhaps, that Fowles first planned to call this collection Variations (121). The rubric for protagonism in all of Fowles's fiction is the main character's struggle against emotional, moral, or artistic paralysis, the Fowlesian "fatal flaw" which can undermine the other aristos qualities in the individual. The broader canvas of the novel allows Fowles time to correct this flaw in his novels's protagonists. However, in The Ebony Tower, mainly negative portraits are collected of characters who become aware of their paralysis as a condition they cannot change or cure. They will not risk a venture into the fast-running evolutionary stream but retreat into black "ivory towers" to escape the world they should be serving. Fowles's battalion of magi characters is charged with toppling this tower of fears, vanities, and deception, but the magi of The Ebony Tower are not as successful as their counterparts in the novels. Although they are able to make the protagonists of the stories aware of their deficiencies, they cannot make them change. The protagonists are only able to see themselves in double exposure with their failed selves overlying dim images of better buried lives. Sharing the twin faults of deficient will and meager courage, these characters make up Fowles's collection of human fossils who are unable to evolve even to rescue themselves from extinction.

Notes

¹ References to works by Fowles, cited in the text by page number, are to these editions: The Aristos (Boston: Little, 1970); The Ebony Tower (Boston: Little, 1974); The French Lieutenant's Woman (Boston: Little, 1969); The Magus: A Revised Version (Boston: Little, 1977); Mantissa (Boston: Little, 1982).

² Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth (London: Joseph, 1944) 173.

³ In his introduction to the Modern Fiction Studies 1985 special issue on Fowles, "John Fowles and the Crickets," William J. Palmer elaborates on Fowles's mistrust of critics, a profession or interest that all of his Ebony Tower protagonists pursue.

⁴ I am grateful to Timothy C. Alderman for his helpful comments in evaluating this essay for publication.

⁵ Fowles, personal interview, 20 August 1977. My interview with Fowles at his home in Lyme Regis was arranged by William J. Palmer, Professor of English at Purdue University, and was supported by a grant from the Purdue Research Foundation.