“Writing is clearly a form of madness,” John Fowles wrote to me in the summer of 1996. It was a parenthetical aside in a letter about his recent visit to America—his pleasure at meeting naturalist writer Barry Lopez, his regrets about buying books that proved to be “sinking ships,” our mutual friendship with his editor in the States, and personal matters largely unrelated to the nature of writing. But while his letter was memorable in other ways, what stayed with me most clearly over the years was this “old theory” of his that linked writing and madness.
If writing, I wondered, was born of a kind of madness, could it not equally be seen as the art form most suited to exploring madness in all its rich intricacies? Did Fowles believe that madness was the genesis of writing or its outcome, or both? And, given my interest in gothic fiction, a genre whose roots were centered around narratives of alienation, twisted psyches, moral entropy, the darker side of human behavior, I found myself wondering if the very act of writing about madness wasn’t the writer’s best hope of escaping its clutches—a hope that did not always (Poe leaps to mind) come to pass.
While The Collector—Fowles’s singular tale of obsession and madness—was his debut novel, it was not the first he’d written. As his future editor Tom Maschler described their initial meeting in his memoir, a diffident, disheveled Fowles showed up on a rainy day at the Bedford Square offices of Jonathan Cape, wearing a “dingy, damp mackintosh” (Publisher, 108), which he preferred not to remove. Maschler expressed his admiration for the book, and when he asked if it was Fowles’s first endeavor, the author responded, “Good God, no,” saying he’d written nine others (this number varies, depending upon who tells the story and when). We’ll probably never learn how many early works he’d penned, but it’s true that Fowles had composed extensive drafts of The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman during the 1950s, as well as passages of The Aristos, along with novels that would never see the light of day. Fowles may have known that several of these other projects would eventually come to fruition, but the story of Frederick Clegg’s abduction of Miranda Grey was, at the time, the only one he felt had achieved enough coherence to share.
Even before Maschler arranged this meeting and offered to publish The Collector, Fowles had developed an unwontedly strong belief in the book. As it was being prepared by a professional typist for him to give to an agent, he wrote in his journal on 30 March 1962:
“The confidence I feel in it is inexplicable. . . . I can’t imagine any publishers, readers or, if it gets so far, contemporary critics, liking it. And yet I feel it is complete, it says what I want to say. Details are wrong, could be improved, no doubt, but it’s like a poem. I know the backbone is right.” (Journals, 501)
No matter that his wife, Elizabeth, didn’t like the book. Or that his longtime trusted friend, Fred “Podge” Porter, disappointingly refused to comment after reading only fifty manuscript pages. Or that, out of concern for his teaching post at St. Godric’s, an all-girls college in Hampstead, given the novel’s subversive nature, Fowles decided it was best to submit it under the pseudonym Richard Whitton, combining the maiden names of his mother and spouse. Still, his firm conviction that it was ready overcame these apprehensions. He was now past his middle thirties. It was time to publish something after so many years working “without method” (Conversations, 2) at his writing table. It was time to publish something after so many years working “without method” (Conversations, 2) at his writing table.
As with his other novels, The Collector developed out of a single image or idea more than a plot line. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles recounted in interviews, arose from the vision— “like a cinema ‘still’” (Conversations, 171)— of a woman standing by herself on the Lyme Regis quay gazing at a turbulent sea. Daniel Martin was sparked by the image of a lost woman in an unknown desert, weeping and alone—a reverie that would inform the book’s ending. The Collector had its origins in a newspaper story about a London man’s abduction of a girl whom he incarcerated for weeks in an air raid shelter at the foot of his garden. This situation, which reminded Fowles of the Bluebeard fairy tale that had interested him since youth, provided his central scenario.
Unlike those other novels, however, which usually took Fowles years to complete, The Collector was written in a single month. Of course, he’d go on to make revisions after this draft was finished. He would ponder and wisely reject the advice of his agent, James Kinross— “a sort of amiable old Etonian elephant,” as Fowles described him (Journals, 507)—who questioned the novel’s dual narrative structure, proposing he consider either intercutting the Clegg and Miranda narratives, or else switching them so that Miranda’s story preceded Clegg’s. Tom Maschler, on the other hand, offered some precise and useful editorial suggestions, including that Fowles tighten the opening (which Stephen King later praised as achieving “a speed that is almost breathtaking”), revise the ending so that Clegg narrates in the past rather than present tense, and that the pseudonym be scrapped.
Things moved rather quickly after that. Little, Brown bought the American rights for a large advance; film and foreign rights deals were made; Pan Books secured paperback rights for a record amount. At first, Fowles, always careful about money, felt confident enough to splurge on a new overcoat and suit, a second-hand Retinette camera, some New Hall teapots, and such. But after 6 May 1963, when The Collector was published to strong reviews—Guy Davenport deeming it “as resonant as a myth” in the National Review—and quickly became an international bestseller, he left London, having already quit his teaching post, and, in 1966, purchased a seaside house in Lyme Regis, where he would devote the rest of his life to writing.
The story of a placidly deranged clerk and butterfly collector who kidnaps a lovely young art student with whom he’s become infatuated, The Collector has been called a psychological thriller, a postmodernist narrative, a suspense novel, a novel of ideas, a horror novel, and—by Columbia Pictures which brought out the film version in 1965, directed by William Wyler, who turned down The Sound of Music to take it on—“almost a love story.” A credible argument can be made that it fits to some degree into every one of these categories. To my mind, The Collector is also one of the most compelling and archetypical of all twentieth-century gothic novels. It displays such a broad range of traditional plot elements and stage properties that characterize a gothic that it can be seen as a descendant of many of the genre’s earliest triumphs. In his essay “I Write Therefore I Am,” Fowles cites Defoe, Austen, Peacock, Sartre, and Camus as being among those he looked to for inspiration, going on to insist, “It is only very naïf critics who think that all one’s influences must be contemporary. In the noosphere there are no dates; only sympathies, admirations, allergies, loathings” (Wormholes, 8). And so it was, whether consciously or not, that other early literary predecessors who rose to fame not long after Defoe’s death clearly influenced The Collector as well.
There are striking resemblances to Ann Radcliffe’s pioneering gothic, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), in which the orphaned Emily St. Aubert is spirited away to the gloomy, remote Castle Udolpho, where—lonely, entrapped, terrified—she doubts she will ever see freedom (or the man she loves) again, where—lonely, entrapped, terrified—she doubts she will ever see freedom (or the man she loves) again. Similarly, inspired by Udolpho and written when the author was only nineteen, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) still has the power to shock a modern audience as it follows the fate of a virginal young woman, Antonia, who suffers grisly depredations at the hands of the title character, Ambrosio, who imprisons her in the church crypt. Udolpho and The Monk, following The Castle of Otranto (1764), Horace Walpole’s even earlier gothic with its own “woman-in-the-dungeon” theme, as Fowles put it (Journals, 513), mark the emergence of a literary lineage that would lead through Austen’s parodic Northanger Abbey, the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and many others, to Fowles’s The Collector, almost exactly two centuries later. But whereas The Monk was a great succès de scandale in the late eighteenth century, The Collector proved to be a twentieth-century succès sans scandale. Both books were popular beyond their authors’ dreams, but while Lewis and his publisher soon found themselves embroiled in legal battles and The Monk’s most offensive, sensational passages were expunged from later editions, Fowles’s transgressive novel sailed into multiple printings, its text unadulterated, its publisher delighted, its author hailed as an important new voice.
Different eras, different readers. Or possibly Fowles’s audience had, in part due to the continued popularity of gothic fiction and films based on it—James Whale’s Frankenstein, Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, to cite just a handful—become accustomed to the disquieting motifs employed with such mastery in The Collector.
As is often the case with gothic narratives, the action takes place in autumn, the emblematic season of All Hallows’ Eve in which nights grow longer, the last flowers die off, and leaves fall from trees as the natural world withdraws against the wintry months ahead. Gothic weather is gloomy weather, and The Collector has its share of dreary rainy days. An atmosphere of dread, crucial to the genre, suffuses every page of Miranda’s diary, as her mood shifts from introspection to hope to anger to terror.
Among the most familiar of all gothic tropes is the isolated old house, usually in disrepair and variously haunted, with architectural details that harken back to medieval times. Thornfield Hall in Eyre, Poe’s House of Usher, the storied Manderley in du Maurier’s novel are a few. The 1621 timbered house Clegg purchases in rural Sussex (listed for sale by the estate agent as “Far from the Madding Crowd,” with a literary nod to Thomas Hardy, one of Fowles’s favorite writers) is no exception. That its nearest neighbor is three-quarters of a mile away; that its two prior owners met their deaths in quick succession, hinting the house is cursed; and that it had been constructed with vaulted cellars that served as an underground hideout for smugglers as well as an outlawed priest’s secret chapel, only add to the gothicism of The Collector’s setting. Clegg himself confesses that he finds the lower subterranean chamber “frightening,” but it doesn’t deter him from readying it—installing electricity, a toilet, a bed, art books—for Miranda, his soon-to-be imprisoned “guest.” In traditional gothics, such a chamber is meant to recall the tomb, the sepulcher, and is used as a metaphor for hell itself. This is certainly how Miranda experiences it, calling her claustrophobic locked room a “foul little crypt.” Her loneliness is the natural result of the double isolation she suffers “in the Bluebeard’s cell beneath his lonely house” (the House of Caliban, one might say), as Fowles describes it in “Hardy and the Hag” (Wormholes, 148).
Indeed, the Bluebeard tale, in which an innocent woman is imprisoned underground by a controlling, murderous male, is a precursor to Miranda Gray’s story, although in a reversal of motives, Miranda is being punished for Clegg’s curiosity rather than her own. Fowles’s fascination with the Bluebeard syndrome predates the London premiere of Béla Bartók’s expressionist opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, which he attended. The recurrent image of the so-called “damsel in distress,” held hostage by a sinister male, further binds The Collector to those other, earlier works.
Cruelty, solipsism, an absence of ethics, and staggering selfishness are, further, among Clegg’s classically gothic personality disorders, as well as the habit of inverted thinking—in which up is down and down up. Of this, our antihero is the perfect epitome, from his early opinion that “not having any real friends was lucky,” as it allowed him to follow his sordid plan in private, to the ultimate aberration in his outrageous line near the end of the book, where he assures us, “I finally forgave her.”
From the very first paragraph of The Collector, Fowles neatly lays out the complex psychopathy that drives his male protagonist. In the calm, sometimes eerily toneless voice of a man incapable of empathy or self-reflection, Clegg—ever the skilled lepidopterist—notes sightings of his prey, her habitat and habits, her comings and goings, in his observations diary. Comparing Miranda’s silky, pale red hair to a Burnet butterfly cocoon when he sees her wearing it loose one day, he further likens it to a mermaid’s. By doing so he both objectifies and mythologizes his victim, seeing her as desirable and simultaneously not quite real. In his eyes, Miranda is both a dehumanized specimen and a fabular creature. And readers will suspect at once—even before witnessing what inevitably unfolds between observer and observed, collector and collected—that they are entering the world of a sexually confused, self-confidently stubborn, unnervingly polite, and stunningly dangerous sociopath. Fowles has created, in deft strokes and with disarming ease, a narrative in which predation and dominance and cool evil are so deeply ingrained in Clegg’s behavior that he hasn’t the capacity (or will) to see these traits in himself. “Of course,” he likes to say. “Of course I am not mad.”
The Gothic revolves around dichotomies—good and evil, light and darkness, sanity and sociopathy, hope and desolation—and The Collector explores them in a number of compelling ways, not the least of which is the utter yin and yang of its protagonists.
Clegg is working class; Miranda upper-middle. Clegg comes from a broken family. His drunken father, dead at the wheel of a car when he was only two, and unstable mother afterward having abandoned him to run off with another man, are his archetypical absent parents that readers of the Gothic will recognize from works like Jane Eyre and Bleak House. And Clegg, raised by a capricious aunt, is their archetypical damaged child. Miranda Gray, on the other hand, is the well-adjusted daughter of a doctor and his wife. Clegg loathes the “la-di-da” denizens of those born into privilege, while Miranda longs to be an artist, a pacifist, an idealist, and sees the good in others—even, at times, her captor—much as her namesake in Shakespeare’s The Tempest does. Clegg is directionless, socially inept, an enigmatic cipher; Miranda is adored by family, friends, suitors, and seems to have a sunny future. Clegg—referred to as “the monster” in Fowles’s journals and “Caliban” in Miranda’s diary—is inward, delusional, repressed, weirdly unaware of the world around him, whereas Miranda is a woman in step with her time, using hipsterisms like “don’t you dig this?” and calling Clegg a “square,” while also being brutally observant about herself and her jailor.
Early in her captivity, Miranda listens in disbelief as Clegg declares, “you’re all I’ve got that makes life worth living…There’s never been anyone but you I’ve ever wanted to know.” His words are the stuff of amateur love poetry or syrupy pop songs, but Miranda interprets them for the pathetic, perilous sentiments they really are, the cri de coeur of a dangerously bereft soul. Her responses are at once candid and sincere. “You need a doctor,” she tells him, simply. “I feel sorry for you.”
All collectors are, to different degrees, addicts. And if Clegg’s butterfly collecting is, as it were, a gateway drug to his collecting of Miranda—using the same pads soaked with chloroform and CDC to anesthetize both—his deadly hobby seamlessly devolves into a whole different register. Lepidopterology morphs into misogyny, a hobbyist’s entomology into the full-blown obsession of a serial killer in the making. Being as removed from reality as he is, without any hope of finding a mechanism or alternate course of action that might save him—and his captive—from the otherwise unavoidable tragedy of his behavior, Clegg is as trapped as his victim, and infinitely guiltier.
One of Fowles’s most frank and revelatory journal entries, written a month before The Collector was published, returns to the subject of the novel’s inception (Journals, 543-544). Elaborating on the single-image origin of the book, he briefly lists the air-raid shelter incident and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. But he also cites having experienced adolescent fantasies not entirely dissimilar to those of his fictional “monster” Clegg. He writes that “these fantasies have long been exteriorized in my mind, of course,” which suggests to me that they were at least partly vanquished through the catalytic act of writing. Nor should we forget that his literate character, Miranda—whose importance in The Collector is equally voiced and weighted as Clegg’s—uses her diary to examine people and moments from her past; to analyze Caliban and plot escape plans; to record her days in captivity, her hopes, her terrible loneliness, her increasing apprehension that she may not survive. Above all, however, she writes simply in order to keep herself from going mad.
In that letter Fowles sent me a quarter of a century ago, he surely meant that writing is a form of madness in every imaginable way. It is an art that comes from the same depths of spirit and thought that madness itself does. The process of writing can be maddening, yes, but it can also sometimes save the author from his or her own personal demons. For Fowles, as for any writer, composing a novel like The Collector was an essential act of exorcism, one forged in the difficult gesture of creating serious fiction. Certainly, this bleak yet luminescent novel of many genre stripes achieves a high level of literary sophistication, psychological insight, and unfettered artistry that makes John Fowles such a significant voice among major novelists in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Works Cited
John Fowles. The Collector. London: Jonathan Cape, 1963.
Wormholes. Essays and Occasional Writings. Edited by Jan Relf. New York: Henry Holt, 1998.
The Journals, Volume I. Edited by Charles Drazin. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003.
Stephen King. The Collector. A New Introduction. Issued as separate pamphlet for the Book of the Month Club, 1989.
Tom Maschler, Publisher. London: Picador, 2005.
Dianne L. Vipond, ed. Conversations with John Fowles. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999.