No life,
no art
Benny Green
There are five stories in John Fowles's The Ebony Tower*, but although all five are, in their *.,very different ways, beautifully turned, it is the "de story, a novella of perhaps thirty-thousand Words, which intrigued me most. Of course, by ,.how we are only surprised by Fowles when he
'ails to surprise us, for he is 'surely the most
unpredictable literary artist of any consequence working today. He does tend to come it bit sometimes with philosophy; I think it was H. M. Tomlinson who once confessed that Plato had been the finish of him, as a novelist, and the reader will no doubt be able to provide his own list, as long as a hammer-thrower's arm, of novelists whose narrative gift finally ran into the sands of philosophical speculation. Wish, therefore, that Fowles wouldn't take the philosopher in him too seriously. He remarked the other day, for instance, that he did not think novelists should make value judgernents, although he knows perfectly well that the rejection of value judgements is itself a value judgement of the sternest kind. He has also claimed to study people as an ornithologist studies birds, which is another very rickety Proposition, as very few ornithologists write roinantic make-believe about the creatures they watch. It was philosophical daydreaming winch very nearly wrecked that great book, The French Lieutenant's Woman, whose Perverse non-ending, a hall of cracked pre-Raphaelite mirrors, was a gambit no doubt fortified by Fowles's insistence that the reader has to do some of the work. I cannot believe any ,artist would abdicate his authority in this way, oUt if Fowles really believes it, then he ought surelY to come to some more equitable arrangement with his publishers for the distribution of his royalties. el-However, 'The Ebony Tower' seems to me to :ty violently in the face of its author's theories. Not only does it embody a value judgement, not „°111Y is that value judgement of a more sternly Unbending kind than I remember reading for Years but that value judgement IS the story. ,too Ebony Tower' is an impassioned cry "„gainst Abstraction in painting, and a protest "Lgainst the feeble critical cowardice which it tongue in the presence of pretentious teUdo-artistic garbage. Fowles is saying that
which has been dehumanised is inhuman
and he is very careful to equate the fierce squ, lstic independence of the old painter in his rY with sexual vitality, equally careful to ;,..uate the aridity of the painter's visitor, a :, pig painter-critic, with sexual diffidence. or, 'le critic comes to France to write a thesis si; an old Gully Jimsonic roué living in defiant theWith two young aspiring lady artists, each of rrl Possible objects of the visitor's mild t—olual ambition. The old painter, who appears io.,"ave read his Somerset Maugham, swears a insults other painters a lot, humiliates his of'ltor a lot. There is much talk about subtlety aft'une and brusqueness of impasto, and when Mser two days the critic goes back to surburbia a ve_areer has been smashed into tiny pieces. As wrYev it is captivating, with the donkey-reader t'heer quite being allowed to sink his fangs into Tsex-carrot of the-girls-and-the-visitor. whin;vards the end, over comes the moral, iloti`l'.11 is that "All art is amoral". As all art is mowing of the kind, and Fowles is one of the acutely intelligent novelists alive, it The Ebony -on), Tower, John Fowles (Jonathan Pe £2.50)
sounds a pretty strange conclusion to arrive at. Perhaps he means, and I hope he means, that the processes by which art is arrived at are amoral. In other words, the arrant old bohemian of 'The Ebony Tower' is of no consequence in himself, so let him commit what are sometimes called sins as much as he pleases, so long as his art is passionate and noble, etc, etc. It is a plea for humanist art and a hint that the only people who can create that art must reject what those who don't reject it call respectability.
But the plea Fowles is making for painting also applies to the other arts. It would be madness to assert that the confluence of abstract painting with the anti-novel and electronic music is a coincidence. Those artists who respect form, and know that to attempt to create content without it is as impossible as filling a suitcase without any sides, these are the workers who must feel distinctly ill-at-ease in a society which buys portraits of baked bean cans and recordings of music where there is nobody at the keyboard. How this cry for the traditional disciplines of art matches up with Fowles's idea that the reader should do some of the work I do not know, because the anti-novel is precisely that kind of fraud where the reader: has to do more work than the novelist. Of course, Fowles could defend himself by explaining that the views in The Ebony Tower' are those of his hero, not those of John Fowles; . but if that is indeed his defence then it will set every cat in the kingdom laughing.
What is especially interesting is that the dilemma of the traditionalist in an avant garde society is precisely the dilemma which pushed Fowles himself back to the stiff buckram bindings of the Victorian novel in an attempt to find a form. Because The French Lieutenant's
Woman combined the conventions of a classic Victorian tale with an acknowledgement that people do not end at the waist, that book was stronger in structure and more powerful in impact than all those contemporary "experimental" souffles which become so flat by the time they reach the reader. Fowles is a writer in a million, whose message — although he would deny the possession of anything so vulgar and inartistic, anything in fact so redolent of value judgement — may well be contained in the curious incident at the end of 'The Ebony Tower' where a weasel is run over and killed by the critic's motor car. Life is sacred and the internal combustion engine is not, perhaps?
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