John Fowles was twenty-three when he wrote this journal entry in 1949. Just a few years after spending two years in the military, he was now navigating his final year at Oxford, and as the festive season descended he found himself back at home, enveloped in the annual Christmas preparations, a stark contrast to his longing for the quiet embrace of classical music. Soon, Fowles would embark on a journey to Greece, where he would teach English, start writing poetry, and meet the woman who would become his wife. These experiences were just the beginning of a journey that would lead to the publication of his debut novel, The Collector, fourteen years later.
The Diary Entry
Leigh-on-Sea, 16 December
Spasm of hate. Trying to listen to Mozart 465 Quartet, when M[other] seems, almost deliberately, to spoil it. Mounting unease and fury and sense of martyrdom. Partly the fury is the fact that all (fundamentally and now in this incidental environment) is arid to them, and all reproach creates a guilty conscience. Finally (in the middle of the third movement) the decision that the decorations should be put up: ‘Everyone else has put them up. The Farmers have put them up.’ We are out of line, horror! Father, up till now, a passive spectator, infuriates because he remains passive, i.e., instead of saying, ‘Whenever! It can wait,’ he mumbles, ‘Better get it done,’ and starts fiddling about with the streams of coloured paper. Partly I feel this is to annoy the highbrow in me. I switch off the wireless, and help in a savage, couldn’t-care-less way. For some time I feel willingly that I could like killing them. When they remonstrate about burning some barren strips of holly, I find joy in burning it deliberately, to show that I think it nonsense and that hanging Christmas decorations is for me a duty, not a pleasure. Hazel [his younger sister] begins to cough and cry, she is ill. I feel an accession of pity, and in a way the spirit of Christmas immanent in the decorations, though only very vaguely, releases my fury. I help carry coal to light a fire and so on. F scorches a hole in his new flannel trousers against an electric fire. I cannot help laughing when he tells me this. A thing I inherit from him – amusement at minor pains and misfortunes. It is the point of absurdity which pricks the situation, and the progress of the evening ends up on a Beethoven sonata and the feeling that an ugly series of incidents have resolved themselves.
Further Reading
John Fowles’ diaries live at the Special Collections Archives, Exeter University Library and stretch to a million words. To date, two volumes have been published:
Also…
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