Reviews for Nicholas Mosley's Life and Art: A Biography in Six Interviews

The average rating for Nicholas Mosley's Life and Art: A Biography in Six Interviews based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-21 00:00:00 Harvey Bates I'm a great admirer of Fowles and have read all his novels (though admit to giving up on 'A Maggot'), so I took up eagerly this first volume of his journals (effectively intermittent diary entries) which cover the portion of his life running up to the publication and immediate huge success of 'The Collector' and 'The Magus'. At the personal level the volume covers his Oxford years, his teaching years on a Greek island and in various schools in and around London, his first marriage, and his early struggles to get published while living in relative poverty. It has to be said that this volume must set some sort of record for its misanthropy and its 700-odd pages of virtually non-stop jeering and sneering. Fowles, like Hamlet, makes it abundantly clear that man delights not him, no, nor woman neither. Apart from the artists and writers whom he regards as his mentors - Jane Austen, rather unexpectedly, gets a very good press - no one and nothing is spared. His parents, particularly his mother, are attacked for their triteness and mindlessness in terms which most intellectually pretentious adolescents grow out of when they hit their twenties. There are regular verbal assaults on his wife (it seems a miracle that his marriage survived until his wife's death), his few friends, his workplaces and his teaching colleagues. He reserves his greatest venom and the best of his scathing, atrabilious wit for Hollywood and his involvement with the filming of 'The Collector'. Indeed, it is fairly surprising that some of the entries survived the legal inspection that they were surely given by the editor and publisher, for, after all, some of the people who attract Fowles' contempt, like the publisher Tom Maschler, are still very much still alive. (Perhaps some entries didn't: this volume, the first of two, is condensed from a much longer MS.) On the other hand ... Fowles' gift of psychological penetration and exactitude of description which one sees in his novels is very evident here. For example, his baleful inspection of how the people closest to him reacted to his overnight success moves into territory most men in such a position might scruple to explore so carefully on paper. And throughout Fowles is just as hard on himself as he is on others, and is unflinchingly analytical about his own failings. 'The Journals' offer little insight into the actual processes of inspiration behind and composition of his creative works - in some ways it's as though they were written by a different man. But there is a great deal of fascinating material drawing on his wide intellectual interests and his love of the natural world. There are also a lot of amusing, or at least memorable, anecdotes, nearly always to the discredit of the people starring in them. Fowles was a man one might well have steered clear of, a man who took himself with utter seriousness to a comical degree, but his highly idiosyncratic view of life and his ineradicable belief in himself as a writer is bracing rather than depressing. Despite everything, I was gripped from the first page to the last.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-09 00:00:00 Ilia Cladadakis If you like Fowles (I obviously do) this is an introspection into his real persona, a fascinating account of a discreet intelligent man with a very rich spiritual life, I enjoyed his journal and felt really close to some of his experiences.