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DV: You call this An Unholy Inquisition; don't you like being closely questioned? JF: About as much as a resistance fighter being interrogated by Gestapo or an atheist by Inquisition! But I don't, as some seem to think, just blindly disregard academics. Certainly not so much as that little gibe I put in dedication to Behind Magus essay (For CIRCE and all other tomb-robbers) might suggest. The Circe there is real, charming Kirki Kephalea who teaches at Athens University, but by the other tomb-robbers I was sniffing like a fox at other academics. Most academics want facts, facts, facts, and of course I know that their pursuit is profoundly useful. It's just that my daily, present world sometimes seems very remote from theirs. Novels are like old love affairs, there is so much, not all bad, that one doesn't want to talk about, so much one can't. A great deal of all novels' beauty and excitement for writer lies in now in which they were or are being written. Like most I am a bit manic depressive, though poles for me seem to lie much more between a writing self and a non-entity. One self knows profoundly it is neither important nor socially relevant at all; another, far rarer, seems sometimes possessed. I feel identity with average tribal shaman. DV: How do you feel about state of arts, especially novel, at end of millennium? JF: I should guess I'm more optimistic than most. I don't like way pessimism - black, absurdist view - has so often become fashionable - a supposed proof that artist really understands world - during this century. This isn't to dismiss its only too real and manifold cruelties and horrors, just to question whether black view isn't being exploited because it's so much easier to maintain and defend than its opposite. Optimism, however slight, always relies on an element of rational, of realism. I don't believe we shall ever achieve valid art through formlessness and unthinking hazard. We need less of would-be all-comprehending vision, and more of honest craftsmanship. Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche sent this century, almost as much by being misunderstood as reverse, through a prolonged typhoon, but there seem signs that planet is trying to right itself from wreckage. Many of our changes of direction already seem wrong in retrospect, and we now realize better what a dangerous evil-fascinated species we are. I am torn, believing arts must be allowed to evolve. Attempts to stop that are futile. At moment I'm just reading a very good new poetic novel (Philip Marsden's The Bronski House, 1995) about history of Poland during this century: its endless and catastrophes, destruction of all stable family life . . . yet somehow something seems to survive amid horrors and holocausts. In a way it resembles that of poor old novel, how in spite of countless invasions by visual arts it still makes a nonsense of that silly question I've been hearing most of my adult life: Is novel dead? Like Poland, it isn't! DV: In past, you have indicated that you have half a dozen or so unfinished novels. If I recall correctly, Daniel Martin once fell into such a category. Do you have any plans for revising and publishing any of these? Your readers are anxiously awaiting next Fowles novel. Do you have any plans for a new novel? JF: I can't pretend I sit on a hoard of unfinished books and am obsessed with being published. I should loathe being so bound. There are two possibilities. I have talked publicly of one, usually a sure way of aborting any project. It is a novel set in a quasi-mythical Balkans. I've been fiddling with that for nearly a decade now and my feelings towards it remain impossibly mobile and fluid. I reconceive it every month or so. This is a pleasant experience for a unique and only reader (myself), but a nightmare for anyone else, including publishers. …
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