‘The Immortal Puzzle’: Hardy and John Fowles

Abstract

John Fowles has been as great an admirer of Alain-Fournier as of Thomas Hardy, and for much the same reason. In an interview in 1974, when asked about the importance of Le Grand Meaulnes to his fiction, Fowles replied: ‘I was brought up really in a French tradition in literature.’¹ Fowles was quite possibly recalling his work at Bedford School, where French was his favourite subject, as well as his studies at New College, Oxford, where he read French, achieving his BA in 1950. In yet another interview (in 1964), he stated that his knowledge of French literature ‘makes me feel by acquired instinct more interested in what I say than how I say it; it makes me impatient with the feeble insularity of so much English writing. France is, among other things, what we were always too hypocritical or too puritanical or too class-ridden or too empire-minded to be.’² The French element in Fowles’s education probably affected his attitude toward Hardy, for in 1969, while at work on The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he acknowledged Hardy’s influence (in the remark quoted in the epigraph) and observed that Hardy’s later novels stand out among nineteenth-century English novels for their candour: they exhibit ‘how [men and women] made love, what they said to each other in their most intimate moments, what they felt then’.³

The shadow of Thomas Hardy, the heart of whose ‘country’ I can see in the distance from my work room window, I cannot avoid. … I don’t mind the shadow. It seems best to use it. …

(Fowles, 1969)