Perhaps it was because the eulogies and brief reminiscences revolved around a splendid author that they seemed so waxy. Of course, with no time for considered statements, and no mandate to do anything justice, the media that published the respectful demi-paragraphs like so many plastic rosaries worn to display its righteousness could hardly be expected to make more of a fuss. But somehow this week’s trickle of eulogies for John Fowles seemed to contain unusually clumsy thoughts, unusually clumsily expressed.
What struck one most, however, was not the quality of the lock-touching and cap-doffing that went on in the West’s better publications, but the faintly resentful artifice of it. Like a popular pretty teenager being summoned to the graveside of an ancient and fierce great-uncle, it stood by, looking calculatedly sombre for a few minutes and mumbling some last respects, gauging just how long it would need to loiter to prevent recriminations. An imperceptible nod from a parent, a first spot of rain, the final discoloration of the gum being clandestinely chewed, and it saunters away, relieved that it no longer has to pretend that it ever knew the old bat.
Indeed, nothing conveyed more clearly the compulsory and pubescent nature of our relationships with artists — perhaps with most celebrated people — than the ubiquitous introductions that said something about “author John Fowles” having died. Despite the many kind words written, festooned with punctuation that conspired to produce almost audible sighs, nobody seemed to question the dumbing-down presented by that little word “author”. After all, if you know about Fowles’ work, you know that he’s an author, and if you don’t, then why would you possibly care that he had died?
Of course, this is not a criticism of those who needed the “author” prefix: we all have the right to be as illiterate as we wish. Instead, it is evidence of a peculiar modern trait. In the land of public opinion, it seems, there is only one thing worse than speaking ill of the dead, and that is not speaking of the dead at all. Flights of angels once sang us to our rest. Today, not even writers are spared, dragged down by flurries of leaden words.
The very first quote about Fowles in the very first obituary to appear in The New York Times was by Ellen Pifer (you know, the Ellen Pifer, the one who wrote that thing), who wrote that “Fowles’ success in the marketplace derives from”. At which point Dear Reader’s eyelids curled shut, the sheer awfulness of the sentiment having caused an ocular spasm and a mild literary embolism. (Luckily, the piece picked up, revealing in a dutifully biographical paragraph that the author’s mother was “the former Gladys Richards”, and therefore not to be confused with Gladys Richards the Latter, or indeed with Gladys Knight and her ragtag gaggle of Pips.)
Those websites that allow readers to post their views were swamped with dissentient sentiment. English readers suggested that Fowles will be sorely missed. This is simply not true. He was almost entirely obscure to his readers, a group he actively eschewed. His last real contact with any of them — the publication of his most famous works — took place almost more than 30 years ago. If vicarious friendship is what his readers sought through absorbing his latest work, then they’ve been missing him for more than a decade already.
Others expressed the hope that a reported smattering of unpublished novels might be fished out (presumably by some sort of literary cat-burglar in black beret and inch-thick bifocals) and circulated. This is much like wishing that the estate of Audrey Hepburn will one day edit together old Super-8 footage of her shaving her armpits and sitting on the loo while reading a Women’s Weekly. Unpublished books are unpublished for a reason.
The truth is that Fowles’ death at 79 (an age that demonstrated once again that he was the master of knowing when to stop) has changed nothing in his relationship with his readers. His novels have lived independently for a generation, grown-up books for grown-ups, eternally separate from and infinitely superior to the world of Harry Potter and He’s Just Not That Into You. They remain as firmly rooted in the mystical flirtations of the 1960s and the postmodern awakenings of the 1970s as they ever did, and like a notorious great-uncle, briefly met and never known, their creator is as looming and yet distant as he ever was.
As for the readers who either needed the “author” prefix or didn’t, they remain divided into two happy camps: those who have read The Magus, and can always look back on those days or weeks as if on a strange and wonderful relationship that can never be repeated, and those who have not yet read it — and still have one of life’s great pleasures in store for them.