16. Philip Larkin – a poet, a novelist and essayist.

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in the family of Sydney and Eva Larkin. He attended the City's King Henry VIII School between 1930 and 1940. He started writing contributing to the school mag­azine. His first poem Ultimatum was published in the national weekly Listener in 1940. Three other poems A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb, Mythological Introduction, and I Dreamed of an Out-thrust Arm of Land appeared in 1943 in the collection Oxford Poetry (1942-1943). Then he was educated at St John's College in Oxford where his friends were Kingsley Amis and Bruce Montgomery. He gradu­ated in 1943 with a First Class Honour in English and soon was appointed Librarian at Wellington where he studied to qualify as a professional librarian and continued writing poetry which in 1945 he included in the collection The North Ship.

While working in Belfast as Sub-Librarian at Queen's Universi­ty Larkin privately published a small collection of poetry XX Po­ems. It was followed by his next collection The Less Deceived (1955). The collection won him reputation of one of the foremost figures in the XXth century poetry.

In 1964 Larkin published the collection of poems The Whitsun Weddings which was well received, widely acclaimed, and brought him the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. His next collection High Windows was published in 1974 and it confirmed Larkin as one of the finest poets in English literary history.

Philip Larkin is also known as a prose writer - a novelist and essayist. His two novels Jill and A Girl in Winter came out in suc­cession in 1946 and 1947 respectively. His reviews of jazz record­ings which he wrote for the Daily Telegraph were published in 1970 under the title All What Jazz: a Record Diary 1961-1968. He also edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse which was published in 1973.

Philip Larkin received many awards and prizes and he had been an Honorary Fellow of the Library Association and was made a Professor of the University of Hull. He was awarded the Order of the Companion of Honour but was unable to attend the ceremony at Buckingham Palace because of serious illness.

Philip Larkin died of cancer at the age of 63 on December 2, 1985.

17. John Robert Fowles

John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as op­pressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says "I have tried to escape ever since."

Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service and within two years was promoted to lieutenant.

Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer.

Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing in English liter­ature at the University of Poitiers, France; two years teaching Eng­lish at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and final­ly, between 1954 and 1963, teaching English at St. Godric's College in London, where he ultimately served as the department head.

The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, con­sidering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy. In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he submitted it to a publisher; it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing.

The Aristos, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature and other subjects, appeared the following year. Then in 1965, The Magus was published. Among the seven novels that Fowles has written. The Magus has perhaps generated the most enduring interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the U.S.

With parallels to Shakespeare's The Tempest and Homer's The Odyssey, The Magus is a traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom, hazard and a va­riety of existential uncertainties. Fowles compared it to a detective story because of the way it teases the reader: "You mislead them ideally to load them into a greater truth... it's a trap which I hope will hook the reader,” he says.

The most commercially successful of Fowles’ novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman, appeared in 1969. It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner. Winner of several awards it is the book that today's casual readers seem to most associate with Fowles.

In the 1970s Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects, including a series of essays on nature, and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry, Poeme. He also worked on translations from French, including adaptations of Cinderella and the novella Ourika. His translation of Marie de France's 12^th century story Eliduc served as an inspiration for The Ebony Tower, a novella and four short stories that appeared in 1974.

Daniel Martin, a long and somewhat autobiographical novel spanning over 40 years in the life of a screenwriter, appeared in 1977 along with a revised version of The Magus. These were fol­lowed by Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist's struggle with his muse; and A Maggot (1985), an 18^th century mystery which combines science fiction and history.

In addition to The Aristos, Fowles has written a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews. He has also written the text for several photographic compilations, including Shipwreck (1975), Islands (1978) and The Tree (1979).

Since 1968, Fowles has lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbour town of Lyme Regis (the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman). His interest in the town's local history re­sulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.

A book of essays, Wormholes was published in May 1998, devot­ed to literature, conservation, natural history and a variety of other interests.

The Collector is 4he story of the abduction and imprisonment of Miranda Grey by Frederick Clegg, told first from his point of view, and then from hers by means of a diary she has kept, with a return in the last few pages to Clegg's narration of her illness and death.

Clegg's section begins with his recalling how he used to watch Miranda entering and leaving her house, across the street from the town hall in which he worked. He describes keeping an "observation diary" about her, whom he thinks of as "a rarity," and his mention of meetings of the "Bug Section” confirms that he is an amateur lepidopterist. On the first page, then, Clegg reveals himself to pos­sess the mind-set of a collector, one whose attitude leads him to regard Miranda as a beautiful butterfly, as an object from which he may derive pleasurable control, even if "collecting" her will deprive her of freedom and life.

Clegg goes on to describe events leading up to his abduction of her, from dreams about Miranda and memories of his stepparents or coworkers to his winning a "small fortune" in a football pool. When his family migrates to Australia and Clegg finds himself on his own, he begins to fantasize about how Miranda would like him if only she knew him. He buys a van and a house in the country with an enclosed room in its basement that he remodels to make securable and hideable. When he returns to London Clegg watches Miranda for 10 days. Then, as she is walking home alone from a movie, he captures her, using a rag soaked in chloroform, ties her up in his van, takes her to his house, and locks her in the basement room.

When she awakens, Clegg finds Miranda sharper than "normal people" like himself. She sees through some of his explanations, and recognizes him as the person whose picture was in the paper when he won the pool. Because he is somewhat confused by her unwilling­ness to be his "guest" and embarrassed by his inadvertent declara­tion of love, he agrees to let her go in one month. He attributes her resentment to the difference in their social background: "There was always class between us."

Clegg tries to please Miranda by providing for her immediate needs. He buys her a Mozart record and thinks, "She liked it and so me for buying it." He fails to understand human relations except in terms of things. About her appreciation for the music, he com­ments, "It sounded like all the rest to me but of course she was musical." There is indeed a vast difference between them, but he fails to recognize the nature of the difference because of the terms he thinks in. When he shows her his butterfly collection, Miranda tells him that he thinks like a scientist rather than an artist, some­one who classifies and names and then forgets about things. She sees a deadening tendency, too, in his photography, his use of cant, and his decoration of the house. As a student of art and a maker of drawings, her values contrast with his: Clegg can judge her work only in terms of its representationalism, or photographic realism. In despair at his insensitivity when he comments that all of her pictures are "nice," she says that his name should be Caliban, the subhuman creature in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Miranda uses several ploys in attempts to escape. She feigns appendicitis, but Clegg only pretends to leave, and sees her recover immediately. She tries to slip a message into the reassuring note that he says he will send to her parents, but he finds it. When he goes to London, she asks for a number of articles that will be difficult to find, so that she will have time to try to dig her way out with a nail she has found, but that effort also is futile.

When the first month has elapsed, Miranda dresses up for what she hopes will be their last dinner. She looks so beautiful that Clegg has difficulty responding except with cliches and confusion. When she refuses his present of diamonds and offer of marriage, he tells her that he will not release her after all. She tries to escape by kicking a log out of the fire, but he catches her and chloroforms her again, this time taking off her outer clothing while she is uncon­scious and photographing her in her underwear.

Increasingly desperate, Miranda tries to kill Clegg with an axe he has left out when he was escorting her to take a bath upstairs. She injures him, but he is able to prevent her from escaping. Finally, she tries to seduce him, but he is unable to respond, and leaves, feeling humiliated. He pretends that he will allow her to move upstairs, with the stipulation that she must allow him to take pornographic photo­graphs of her. She reluctantly cooperates, and he immediately devel­ops the pictures, preferring the ones with her face cut off.

Having caught a cold from Clegg, Miranda becomes seriously ill, but Clegg hesitates to bring a doctor to the house. He does get her some pills, but she becomes delirious, and the first section ends with Clegg's recollection: "I thought I was acting for the best and within my rights."

The second section is Miranda's diary, which rehearses the same events from her point of view, but includes much autobio­graphical reflection on her life before her abduction. She begins with her feelings over the first seven days, before she had paper to write on. She observes that she never knew before how much she wanted to live.

Miranda describes her thoughts about Clegg as she tries to un­derstand him. She describes her view of the house and ponders the unfairness of the whole situation. She frequently remembers things said by G. P., who gradually is revealed to be a middle-aged man who is a painter and mentor whom Miranda admires. She recreates a conversation with Clegg over, among other things, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She gets him to promise to send a con­tribution, but he only pretends to. She admits that he's now the only real person in her world.

Miranda associates Clegg's shortcomings with "the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England," and she begins to lose hope. She gets Clegg to read The Catcher in the Rye, but he doesn't understand it. Miranda feels more alone and more desperate, and her reflections become more philosophical. She describes her reasons for thinking that seducing Clegg might change him, and does not regret the subsequent failed attempt, but she fears that he now can hope only to keep her prisoner.

Miranda begins to think of what she will do if she ever gets free, including revive her relationship with G. P. on any terms as a com­mitment to life. Miranda becomes sick with Clegg's cold, literally as well as metaphorically. As she becomes increasingly ill, her entries in the journal become short, declarative sentences and lamentations.

The third section is Clegg's, and picks up where his first left off. He tells of becoming worried over her symptoms and over her belief that she is dying. When he takes her temperature, Clegg realizes how ill Miranda is and decides to go for a doctor. As he sits in the waiting room, Clegg begins to feel insecure, and he goes to a drugstore in­stead, where the pharmacist refuses to help him. When he returns and finds Miranda worse, Clegg goes back to town in the middle of the night, to wake a doctor; this time an inquisitive policeman frightens him off. Miranda dies, and Clegg plans to commit suicide.

In the final section, less than three pages long, Clegg decides that he is not responsible for Miranda's death, that his mistake was kidnapping someone too far above him, socially. As the novel ends, Clegg is thinking about how he will have to do things somewhat differently when he abducts a more suitable girl that he has seen working in Woolworth's.