Revision and the Style of Revision in The French Lieutenant's Woman

Frederik N. Smith

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 1985, pp. 84-94 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.0126

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REVISION AND THE STYLE OF REVISION IN THE

FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN

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Frederik N. Smith

John Fowles refers in The French Lieutenant's Woman to the Victorian "mania for editing and revising, so that if we want to know the real
Mill or the real Hardy we can learn far more from the deletions and

alterations of their autobiographies than from the published versions." Much can be learnedhe suggestsif we can dig beneath "the petty detritus of the concealment operation" (369). This sounds like an invitation. Surely much can be learned about Fowles himself by having
a look at his own deletions and alterations, as Elizabeth Mansfield has

demonstrated in her enlightening discussion of the conclusion of The French Lieutenant's Woman as it appears in manuscript. We discover that the novel originally had only a singular, happy ending, and that on the urgings of his wife ("my sternest editor") Fowles reconceived the conclusion of his novel, adding the second, less pat, less optimistic ending, and thus preserving the feel of irresolution that the book seems determined to leave us.1 An even closer look at the manuscript underscores

the significance of Fowles's "mania for editing and revising."

Ian Adam refers to Fowles as "an author who has turned revision

(and in this work, editing) virtually into a first principle of composition"

'Fowles refers to his wife in these terms in his note at the top of Elizabeth Fowles's five pages of typed commentary on the novel in draft. Her evaluation is kept alongside the manuscript at the
University of Tulsa.

Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 1985. Copyright by Purdue Research Foundation. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. 85

(346). Barry and Toni Olshen have described The French Lieutenant's Woman as "a self-reflexive, experimental work concerned with the fictionwriting process itself (iv). But just how deep this self-reflexiveness goes is worth pointing out. What I would like to do is take up Fowles on his challenge to critics: "I have long felt that the academic world spends far too much time on the written text and far too little on the benign psychosis of the writing experience; on particular product rather than general process" ("Hardy" 29). As an author, Fowles admits to being "much happier in the fluid polymorphic livingness of the process than in the 'dead' imperfection of the being in print" ("Lettre-Postface" 61-

62).2 The primacy in Fowles's mind of the writing process over the finished product suggests the potential value of studying that process as
it appears in the manuscript of The French Lieutenant's Woman, and only afterward returning to interpret the novel in terms of what is discovered there. I have done this.3 Here I shall report on a connection I found
between Fowles's revisionas he talks about it and as I have observed

his actual practiceand the style of the published book; I want also to

mention how that peculiar style is related to one of the book's most
important themes: life as something in the process of evolving versus
life as fixed, dead.

We do Fowles a disservice if we ignore his consistent and quite

articulate comments on the writing process. He has repeatedly referred

to the duality of the process, emphasizing always the clear division

between the initial, spontaneous, exciting pushing forward into the unknown, and the subsequent, retrospective, laborious revision of what one has already written down. "You have to distinguish," he says, "between two kinds of writing":
most important is first-draft writing, which to an extraordinary degree is an intuitive

thingyou never quite know when you sit down whether it's going to come or not, and you get all kinds of good ideas from nowhere. They just come between one line and the next. But revision writing's very differentyou have to turn yourself into an academic
and mark yourself (Campbell 456)

Fowles speaks of the "marvelous element of pure hazard" to the first stage of writing, which he calls "organic" (Singh 188). The second stage of writing, however, is more painful, even masochistic: "You sit over
'^Elsewhere Fowles says: "My whole interest is in the act of writing itself. Being published is a kind of death" (Author Speaks 50).

1In light of several of the above statements made by Fowles, I can make no sense whatsoever
of his response when asked if he would object to people looking at his manuscripts: "No; but I regard

this side of literary research as very unimportant" (Singh 195). 86 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

yourself like a schoolmaster" (Hall 92).* Of course the organic and

schoolmasterly stages are both theoretically present, in sequence yet recursively, each time one writes; Fowles refers to an ideal "amalgam
of unconscious nature and conscious mind" that is, for him at least,

the source of all creativity ("Lettre-Postface" 51).5 In any case, the

frequency with which he returns to this idea of the almost schizophrenic

process of composingintuition countered by revisionbetrays its importance to him. There is, I believe, an important connection between Fowles's em-

phasis on the duality of the writing process and the literal structure and
style of The French Lieutenant's Woman. The two endings of the novel (not

three, if we discount the humorously ironic tying up of loose ends in Chapter 44) have understandably attracted much critical attention. They are the book's most puzzling feature. Charles Smithson is presented finally with a personal and epoch-wrenching choice, and Fowles thus gives us two credible endings, each one incorporating an option for
Charles and an optional resolution for the novel. A more conventional

novelist would have considered two different endings but would ultimately have chosen one or the other; Fowles has not chosen. As it

stands, the double conclusion is thoroughly modern in its uncertainty

and yet true to the Jekyll-and-Hyde Victorians as the author has depicted

them throughout the book. "Every Victorian had two minds," he tells
us (369). But the bifurcated conclusion is only the most obvious formal char-

acteristic of a novel bifurcated on every page. The sense of choice presented to us at the end is actually the culmination of a formal principle
governing the whole book. In his Preface to The Magus: A Revised Version

Fowles admits that "one of the (incurable) faults of the book was the
attempt to conceal the real state of endless flux in which it was written"

(6). In the novel after The Magus, he everywhere stresses the writing process that presumably lies behind the shape the book finally assumed.
The leisurely, digressive progress of The French Lieutenant's Woman, the

professed authorial ignorance ("I am not at all sure where she is at the
moment"), the reference to casual research as a source for the cultural

background ("I was nosing recently round the best kind of secondhand bookseller's . . . "), plus the frequent use of ellipses to break off a thought, of "and . . . but" constructions, and of metafictional paren-

4Fowles's metaphors for the composing process are interesting in themselves. Referring to the first stage of writing, he says: "writing is plant-growing; a very, very similar activity" (Singh 193). Referring to the second, he speaks of the "highly conscious, both calculating and calcular (or quasialgebraic) side to novel-writing " ("Lettre-Postface" 51). soliciting" (405).

'See The French Lieutenant's Woman: "In my experience there is only one profession that gives that particular look, with its bizarre blend of the inquisitive and the magistral; of the ironic and the
87

THE STYLE OF REVISION

theses, asides, and footnotesall create an impression of composition

by "hazard." Tellingly, the phrases "that is," "to be exact," and "to
be precise" occur innumerable times in the novel, as do apologies such
as "I had better add that ..." and "I do not mean that. ..."

And in Chapter Thirteen Fowles alludes to what he had planned to

write but now cannot: "Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteenunfolding of Sarah's true state of mind) to tell allor all that matters. But I find myself suddenly ..." (96).6 The book seems to be evolving
as we read.

In this context, Charles's own process of composing a letter to Sarah assumes some interest. Fowles carefully documents his protagonist's process of writing, treating it (the attitude is not unfamiliar) with friendly irony: we are told that Charles before dinner was "rehearsing the words" for a future meeting with Sarah (369); we are then given a reproduction

of the letter itself, which includes a postscript (370-371); we are next

informed after the fact that Charles's "anabatic epistle was not arrived at until after several drafts," and that he "re-read the letter several

times" (371); and finally we hear, belatedly, that "upon his ninetyninth re-reading of his letter that previous night," Charles had decided to add a second postscript (373). Charles, like Fowles in so many ways, seems to fret over his writing, to revise extensively, and to have difficulty resisting the urge to elaborate.7 At the level of style, one of the most peculiar features of The French Lieutenant's Woman is its frequent hesitation over this or that expression.

Repeatedly, Fowles uses a word or phrase and then quite explicitly

substitutes another that he for some reason prefers. What emerges is a

style of accretionwhat I would like to call a "style of revision"in

which a first expression is found to be wanting in some way, is qualified, made more precise, or pulled back from, and then this new expression permitted to remain in the text alongside the old.8 The resulting sentence

is of course less concise than the original, but also (at least this is the impression the reader is left with) more accurate, more appropriately complex. Not that this style of revision is unique to John Fowles; I could point to examples in the work of almost every author of every period. Nonetheless, the frequency with which this verbal stuttering
*In fact the two chapter outlines kept with the typescript at the University of Tulsa do not refer to "Sarah's true state of mind"; rather the subject of Chapter Thirteen is in both cases listed as
"Novel Digression."

7The typescript (508) shows that originally Charles's letter did have two postscripts but that Fowles struck through the first and revised the second. Compare the compuisiveness suggested by Fowles's reaction to the completion of the first draft of his novel: "It is about 140,000 words long, and exactly as I imagined it: perfect, flawless, a lovely novel. But that, alas, is indeed only how I imagine it. When I re-read it I see 140,000 things need to be changed; then it will, perhaps, be less
imperfect" ("Notes" 175).

"My study of the typescript has failed to substantiate Fowles's contention that "Most of my
textual revision has to do with clarification and simplification, rather than the reverse" ("LettrePostface" 55).

88

MODERN FICTION STUDIES

occurs in The French Lieutenant's Woman draws attention to itself, the

author's seeming revisions turning the reading of the book (in spite of its periodically polemical tone) into something akin to reading a novelist's manuscript. "Behind every . . . form of expression one does finally choose," Fowles has said, "lie the ghosts of all these that one did not" ("Seeing Nature Whole" 62). In this novel those "ghosts" show up
surprisingly often in the published text. Here the manuscript of the bookactually a composite typescript

now at the University of Tulsais particularly relevant. I have found that many of the stylistic options in the published text were indeed options for Fowles himself, alternative choices that he refused to make
either for himself or his reader, preferringas with the double ending

to let both expressions fight it out. One example of this stylistic oddity is the following: "Sam could, did give the appearance, in some back taproom, of knowing all there was to know about city life" (131); the Tulsa typescript reveals that Fowles in fact first typed "could" and then later, in ink, caretted "did" above the line (TS 166). This apparent afterthought was a real afterthought. And an even more curious example of what I am talking about is the following: "The conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the inconclusive
ending" (405, TS 488). In the Tulsa typescript only the past tense "allowed" appears, indicating that Fowles added the present tense "al-

low" sometime between the typescript and publication. That in revising

Fowles should respond almost as a reader to the connotations of what

he had previously written, and then elect to change a word, is certainly

not unusual; what is unusual is that in the published text both tenses
are permitted to stand side by side. Why would Fowles not simply
substitute one word for the other? Of course the shift in tense dramatizes

the double perspective of The French Lieutenant's Woman; the novel tries awfully hard to be a Victorian novel, but remains, by definition, a modern perspective on the conventions of fiction in the last century. More

significantly, the inclusion of this revision in the text lends to the published version the feel of a book in the process of being written: upon

coming across this sentence, most readers would assume, I believe, that
the twentieth-century author (immersed in Victorianism) had unwittingly spoken of himself as one actually writing in the Victorian age, then had caught himself and replaced the present tense "allow" with the past tense "allowed"; because we know Fowles really did the opposite, however, we can only speculate that he has here deliberately fictionalized his own writing process. Yet the point is not what is real or what is fictionalized (we have seen an example of each)the point is rather that
in both of these instances Fowles comes across as a novelist who has

momentarily forgotten himself, thinking Sam could do such-and-such (no, did, because I am the author and I say it is so) and that Victorian
THE STYLE OF REVISION 89

conventions allow (no, allowed, because I am in fact writing in the

twentieth century). Obviously, Fowles has wanted to dramatize this lack of absolute control, even at the level of an isolated choice of word, perhaps as a way of showing his reader what elsewhere he talks about

quite explicitly: "that is why we [modern novelists] cannot plan. We

know a world is an organism, not a machine. We know also that a

genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its panning) is a dead world" (105). In the two sentences discussed here the boundary between actual practice and the dramatization of the practice becomes extremely moot. Of course the Tulsa typescript contains ample evidence of stylistic revison in the interest of an increased clarity, a more vivid image, a keener sense of authorial voice, or anything else one might expect to
discover in the draft of an exceptionally word-sensitive writer. But there

are in addition many instances of the sort of verbal building-up of the text that I have termed the style of revision. In the following examples
from the published novel I have italicized the words Fowles inked into the typescript:
such a key concept in our understanding of the Victorian ageor for that mailer, such a

wet blanket in our own. (29, TS 33) their sense of isolationand if the weather be bad, desolationcould have seemed so great.
(67, TS 75)

Looking down on her back, he felt tinges of regret. Not to see her thus again . . . regret and relief (183, TS 245) The hard/ woutd rather catt it soft, but no matterfact of Victorian rural England was. . . . (270, TS 370) it had once been his official decision (rejection might be a more accurate word) to go into Hoiy Orders. (340, TS [463])

At first glance, it is difficult to see much similarity of purpose here: in the first example the addition makes us aware of the on-going comparison

between the Victorian age and our own, in the second the addition sets
up a clever pun, in the third the addition lends a further dimension to Charles's character, and so on. But the technique is similar even if the effects are somewhat different; actual revisions in the typescript are permitted to look like revisions in the text as it was published. In fact the last two revisions boldly announce themselves as just that. Other actual enhancements of the typescript do the same. "I need hardly add," adds Fowles in ink, "that at the time the dear, kind lady knew only the other, more Grecian nickname" (29, TS 23). Fowles, working in the tradition of Swift, Sterne, Beckett, Nabokov, and Robbe-Grillet, has discovered his own approach to the genre of the book-being-written. The peculiar style of his novel seems in large measure to have been created during the process of revision. The author's reactions to what he himself

has written have been allowed to become part of the text he is composing.
90 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

One interesting effect of the style of revision in The French Lieutenant's

Woman is to put the reader in the position of watching over Fowles's

shoulder as he works. We need not have access to his drafts to recognize

that this is one thing he is after. "She bore some resemblance to a

white Pekinese. . . ," he first wrote of Mrs. Poulteney. He then revised this description to read: "She bore some resemblance to a white Pekinese; to be exact, to a stuffed Pekinese . . . " (31, TS 35 verso). The "to be exact" phrase is thus a real addition, although it is not so much an attempt to be exact as it is a compounding of the irony. Similarly, in

this one last example, it is interesting that both of the seeming revisions were indeed revisions and that both require something more of the
reader: "Charles and Ernestina did not live happily ever after; but they lived together, though Charles finally survived her by a decade (and earnestly mourned her throughout it). They begat what shall it belet us say seven

children" (337, unnumbered "Miscellaneous draft pages"). The new

information about Charles's outliving Ernestina, including the pun on

her name ("earnestly mourned"), has the effect of pinching the reader
to see if he is still awake, for this would have Charles survive to an improbable one hundred and ten. And the addition of "what shall it be let us say seven children" goes so far as to involve the reader in the composing process itself, putting him in the position of conspiring with the author in dreaming up a supposed fact.

On the other hand, there are many, many seeming revisions in The
French Lieutenant's Woman that do not appear as revisions in the Tulsa typescript. Because Fowles works recursively, however, revising his type-

script in ink, then retyping certain heavily revised sheets and destroying
the originals, we have no way of knowing for sure whether these stylistic

revisions were literal revisions at some earlier stage.9 I would suspect that many of them were. Of course it is also possible that in the process of revising the novel Fowles recognized the style of revision he had earlier established and then self-consciously enhanced this impression. But in the long run I am not sure it matters precisely how each seeming revision came about. The point is that the source of the novel's style is to be found in the author's actual practice and that this style contributes
on every page to the novel's peculiar ambivalence.

"I have always liked novels with a fluctuating quality." Fowles told Donald Hall (94). Certainly he worked hard to create this quality in The
French Lieutenant's Woman:

9As Fowles explained in a letter to me, dated 21 October 1982: "I kept no earlier drafts. I usually go through a number of these, retyping heavily corrected pages, incorporating less 'bad' ones in the next new complete draft, but destroying the originals and the retyped ones. Thus a 'good' firstdraft page may survive to the penultimate draft and through several intermediary ones; but this is rare. The Tulsa TS undoubtedly has many pages from various previous drafts." THE STYLE OF REVISION 91

so many long hours of hypocrisyor at least a not always complete frankness. . . . (24)
I said "in wait"; but "in state" would have been a more appropriate term. (91) he had become a little obsessed with Sarah ... or at any rate with the enigma she presented. (128) Charles felt dwarfed, pleasantly dwarfed as he made his way among them towards. . . . (136) I have now come under the shadow, the very relevant shadow of the great novelist who. . . . (271)

an aesthetic sense; or perhaps it was an emotional sensea reaction against. . . . (277) he might not unnaturallythat is, with innocent motivehave come to believe. . . . (328)
aura of self-confidenceor if not quite confidence in self, at least a confidence in his judgment of others. . . . (404-405) It was of a female nude, nude that is from the waist up, and holding an amphora at her hip. (445)

In these instances and others like them the writing is occuring before

our eyes. The two steps of the writing processat least as Fowles has
described themare shown to be in contest and clearly delaying our pro-

gress. The dash or ellipsis, the comma or semicolon, is intended in each

case to represent the synaptic leap between one verbal possibility and another. We get the impression of a novelist who is meticulously at-

tempting to locate the precise word or words he needs to describe what

he sees or understands; and, because in most of these instances (as so often throughout the book) he is describing human feelings, he is finding language especially intractable. And each of these revisions involves not just a qualification but a re-vision of the initial perception. The reader is left with a choice between directness and expansiveness, brevity and greater precision, an outdated perception and one altogether recent. Disarmingly, however, Fowles sometimes toys with his own style of revision. Thus here he pretends to have caught himelf being less than

friendly to one of his characters: "Not even the sad Victorian clothes
she had so often to wear could hide the trim, plump promise of her

figureindeed, 'plump' is unkind" (75). "Plump" may be unkind (perhaps used for the easy alliteration); but is there another word in English that would be any more apt? Here Fowles mocks himself for
being (as he so often is) indirect: "A man and a woman who hurried past spoke French; were French" (291). If they were speaking French,

were they not likely to be French? And in the final chapter of the novel
Fowles even permits Charles to revise him and then protests the revision:

"he has got himself inor as he would put it, has got himself in as he really is. I shall not labor the implication that he was previously got in as he really wasn't ..." (461, Fowles's italics). Such playfulness does not diminish the point I am making here. The conventions of this novel repeatedly bend back on themselves. And compensating for Fowles's sometimes irritating polemical tone is his winning ability to laugh at
himself. 92 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

Fowles contrasts art and nature (fiction and reality) in terms of the degree of "choice" one finds in each:
Even the most "unreadable" woods and forests are in fact subtler than any conceivable fiction, which can never represent the actual multiplicity of choice of paths in a wood, but only one particular path through it. Yet that multiplicity of choice, though it cannot

be conveyed in the frozen medium of the printed text, is very characteristic of the actual writing, of the constant dilemmapain or pleasure, according to the circumstancesits
actual practice represents, from the formation of the basic sentence to the larger matters

of narrative line, character development, ending. ("Seeing Nature Whole" 62)

In a sense Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman has attempted the impossible. Inconceivable though it may be, this multiplicity of choice, unsympathetic to the form of fiction, is what he has labored so mightily (we must accept the paradox) to capture in his novel. There he endeavors to trick the "frozen medium of the printed text" into betraying the "constant dilemma" of the writing process that brought it into being. Ultimately, I think, Fowles's attitude toward the writing process and its relation to literary form sheds light on the peculiar double ending of his novel. Whereas Charles finds himself trapped between the sponta-

neous, individualistic, mysterious Sarah Woodruff and the rigid, conventional, predictable Ernestina Freeman (the names border on the
allegorical), Fowles finds himself trapped between the two poles of the writing processbetween the initial, organic, exciting composition by pure hazard and the necessity of subsequent revision, which he finds so tedious. Of course Charles as a person must according to the rules of Western monogamy choose Sarah or Ernestina. But Charles as a character need not. And in preserving his own freedom of choice as a writer, Fowles can simultaneously permit Charles both to have Sarah and not to have Sarah. In life Occam's razor applies; in fiction it does not have to. The

dilemma for the reader, however, cannot be dismissed so easily; although he is seemingly invited to choose an ending (in spite of the author's refusal to do so), the choice of one ending over another necessitates turning a blind eye on the endless flux of the book just completed. But
we need not choose. All the talk about how to conclude the novel, the

primacy of final pages, and the flipping of coins is nothing more than a taunting of the unsuspecting reader of The French Lieutenant's Woman. The best advice on how to take the endings is Fowles's process-oriented comments on writing and the novel's own fluctuating style. If ever there
was one, surely this is a novelist who dislikes the closure of the printed

text. To look upon either ending as somehow the "correct" ending would require us to be a lot more single-minded than Fowles wants for
himself or for us. As twentieth-century readers we should resist our
THE STYLE OF REVISION 93

Victorian nervousness in the face of inconclusiveness and strive rather

to be satisfied with the luxury of a modernand purely fictional

ending. We should not choose.

WORKS CITED

Adam, Ian, Patrick Brantlinger, and Sheldon Rothblatt. "The French Lieutenant's Woman: A Discussion." Victorian Studies 15 (1972): 339-356. Campbell, James. "An Interview with John Fowles." Contemporary Literature 17 (1976): 455-469. Fowles, John. The Author Speaks: Selected Publisher's Weekly Interviews, 1975-1976.
New York: Bowker, 1977. 50-53. -----The French Lieutenant's Woman. Boston: Little, 1969. ____The French Lieutenant's Woman. Rare Books and Special Collections. The

University of Tulsa. (In a note dated 1977 Fowles describes this as "the oldest extant 'state' " of the novel.) ____"Hardy and the Hag." Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years. Ed. Lance St. John
Butler. Totowa: Rowan, 1977. 28-42. ___"Lettre-Postface de John Fowles." In Etudes sur "The French Lieutenant's

Woman." Caen: Centre National de Documentation Pdagogique, 1977. 5157.

___The Magus: A Revised Version. Boston: Little, 1977. ___"Notes on an Unfinished Novel." Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels. Ed. Thomas McCormack. New York: Harper, 1969. 161-175. ___"Seeing Nature Whole." Harper's Nov. 1979: 48-68. HaII, Donald. "John Fowles's Gardens." Esquire Oct. 1982: 90-102. Mansfield, Elizabeth. "A Sequence of Endings: The Manuscripts of The French

Lieutenant's Woman." Journal of Modern Literature 8 (1980-1981): 275-286.

Olshen, Barry N., and Toni A. Olshen. John Fowles: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1980.

Singh, Raman K. "An Encounter with John Fowles." Journal of Modern Literature
8 (1980-1981): 181-202.

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