Revision and Style of Revision

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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

rrfrFrederik 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 realMill or the real Hardy we can learn far more from the deletions andalterations of their autobiographies than from the published versions."Much can be learnedhe suggestsif we can dig beneath "the pettydetritus of the concealment operation" (369). This sounds like an in-vitation. Surely much can be learned about Fowles himself by havinga look at his own deletions and alterations, as Elizabeth Mansfield hasdemonstrated in her enlightening discussion of the conclusion of TheFrench Lieutenant's Woman as it appears in manuscript. We discover thatthe novel originally had only a singular, happy ending, and that on theurgings of his wife ("my sternest editor") Fowles reconceived the con-clusion of his novel, adding the second, less pat, less optimistic ending,and thus preserving the feel of irresolution that the book seems deter-mined to leave us.1 An even closer look at the manuscript underscoresthe 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 pagesof typed commentary on the novel in draft. Her evaluation is kept alongside the manuscript at theUniversity of Tulsa.

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

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(346). Barry and Toni Olshen have described The French Lieutenant'sWoman as "a self-reflexive, experimental work concerned with the fiction-writing process itself (iv). But just how deep this self-reflexiveness goesis 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 spendsfar too much time on the written text and far too little on the benignpsychosis of the writing experience; on particular product rather thangeneral process" ("Hardy" 29). As an author, Fowles admits to being"much happier in the fluid polymorphic livingness of the process thanin the 'dead' imperfection of the being in print" ("Lettre-Postface" 61-62).2 The primacy in Fowles's mind of the writing process over thefinished product suggests the potential value of studying that process asit appears in the manuscript of The French Lieutenant's Woman, and only

afterward returning to interpret the novel in terms of what is discoveredthere. I have done this.3 Here I shall report on a connection I foundbetween Fowles's revisionas he talks about it and as I have observed

his actual practiceand the style of the published book; I want also tomention how that peculiar style is related to one of the book's mostimportant themes: life as something in the process of evolving versuslife as fixed, dead.

We do Fowles a disservice if we ignore his consistent and quitearticulate comments on the writing process. He has repeatedly referredto the duality of the process, emphasizing always the clear division

between the initial, spontaneous, exciting pushing forward into the un-known, and the subsequent, retrospective, laborious revision of whatone 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, andyou get all kinds of good ideas from nowhere. They just come between one line and thenext. But revision writing's very differentyou have to turn yourself into an academicand mark yourself (Campbell 456)

Fowles speaks of the "marvelous element of pure hazard" to the firststage of writing, which he calls "organic" (Singh 188). The second stageof 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 akind of death" (Author Speaks 50).

1In light of several of the above statements made by Fowles, I can make no sense whatsoeverof his response when asked if he would object to people looking at his manuscripts: "No; but I regardthis side of literary research as very unimportant" (Singh 195).

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yourself like a schoolmaster" (Hall 92).* Of course the organic andschoolmasterly stages are both theoretically present, in sequence yetrecursively, each time one writes; Fowles refers to an ideal "amalgamof unconscious nature and conscious mind" that is, for him at least,

the source of all creativity ("Lettre-Postface" 51).5 In any case, thefrequency with which he returns to this idea of the almost schizophrenicprocess of composingintuition countered by revisionbetrays its im-portance 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 andstyle of The French Lieutenant's Woman. The two endings of the novel (notthree, if we discount the humorously ironic tying up of loose ends inChapter 44) have understandably attracted much critical attention. They

are the book's most puzzling feature. Charles Smithson is presentedfinally with a personal and epoch-wrenching choice, and Fowles thusgives us two credible endings, each one incorporating an option forCharles and an optional resolution for the novel. A more conventionalnovelist would have considered two different endings but would ulti-mately have chosen one or the other; Fowles has not chosen. As itstands, the double conclusion is thoroughly modern in its uncertaintyand yet true to the Jekyll-and-Hyde Victorians as the author has depictedthem 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 choicepresented to us at the end is actually the culmination of a formal principlegoverning the whole book. In his Preface to The Magus: A Revised VersionFowles admits that "one of the (incurable) faults of the book was theattempt to conceal the real state of endless flux in which it was written"(6). In the novel after The Magus, he everywhere stresses the writingprocess that presumably lies behind the shape the book finally assumed.

The leisurely, digressive progress of The French Lieutenant's Woman, theprofessed authorial ignorance ("I am not at all sure where she is at themoment"), the reference to casual research as a source for the culturalbackground ("I was nosing recently round the best kind of secondhandbookseller's . . . "), plus the frequent use of ellipses to break off athought, 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 quasi-algebraic) side to novel-writing " ("Lettre-Postface" 51).

'See The French Lieutenant's Woman: "In my experience there is only one profession that givesthat particular look, with its bizarre blend of the inquisitive and the magistral; of the ironic and thesoliciting" (405).

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theses, asides, and footnotesall create an impression of compositionby "hazard." Tellingly, the phrases "that is," "to be exact," and "tobe precise" occur innumerable times in the novel, as do apologies suchas "I had better add that ..." and "I do not mean that. ..."

And in Chapter Thirteen Fowles alludes to what he had planned towrite but now cannot: "Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thir-teenunfolding 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 evolvingas we read.

In this context, Charles's own process of composing a letter to Sarahassumes some interest. Fowles carefully documents his protagonist's pro-cess of writing, treating it (the attitude is not unfamiliar) with friendlyirony: we are told that Charles before dinner was "rehearsing the words"

for a future meeting with Sarah (369); we are then given a reproductionof the letter itself, which includes a postscript (370-371); we are nextinformed after the fact that Charles's "anabatic epistle was not arrivedat until after several drafts," and that he "re-read the letter several

times" (371); and finally we hear, belatedly, that "upon his ninety-ninth re-reading of his letter that previous night," Charles had decidedto add a second postscript (373). Charles, like Fowles in so many ways,seems to fret over his writing, to revise extensively, and to have difficultyresisting the urge to elaborate.7

At the level of style, one of the most peculiar features of The FrenchLieutenant's Woman is its frequent hesitation over this or that expression.Repeatedly, Fowles uses a word or phrase and then quite explicitlysubstitutes another that he for some reason prefers. What emerges is astyle of accretionwhat I would like to call a "style of revision"inwhich a first expression is found to be wanting in some way, is qualified,made more precise, or pulled back from, and then this new expressionpermitted to remain in the text alongside the old.8 The resulting sentenceis of course less concise than the original, but also (at least this is the

impression the reader is left with) more accurate, more appropriatelycomplex. Not that this style of revision is unique to John Fowles; Icould 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 referto "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 thatFowles struck through the first and revised the second. Compare the compuisiveness suggested byFowles'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 Iimagine it. When I re-read it I see 140,000 things need to be changed; then it will, perhaps, be lessimperfect" ("Notes" 175).

"My study of the typescript has failed to substantiate Fowles's contention that "Most of mytextual revision has to do with clarification and simplification, rather than the reverse" ("Lettre-

Postface" 55).



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occurs in The French Lieutenant's Woman draws attention to itself, theauthor's seeming revisions turning the reading of the book (in spite ofits periodically polemical tone) into something akin to reading a novelist'smanuscript. "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 upsurprisingly often in the published text.

Here the manuscript of the bookactually a composite typescriptnow at the University of Tulsais particularly relevant. I have foundthat many of the stylistic options in the published text were indeedoptions for Fowles himself, alternative choices that he refused to makeeither for himself or his reader, preferringas with the double endingto let both expressions fight it out. One example of this stylistic oddity

is the following: "Sam could, did give the appearance, in some backtaproom, of knowing all there was to know about city life" (131); theTulsa typescript reveals that Fowles in fact first typed "could" and thenlater, in ink, caretted "did" above the line (TS 166). This apparentafterthought was a real afterthought. And an even more curious exampleof what I am talking about is the following: "The conventions of Vic-torian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the inconclusiveending" (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 revisingFowles should respond almost as a reader to the connotations of whathe had previously written, and then elect to change a word, is certainlynot unusual; what is unusual is that in the published text both tensesare permitted to stand side by side. Why would Fowles not simplysubstitute one word for the other? Of course the shift in tense dramatizes

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

significantly, the inclusion of this revision in the text lends to the pub-lished version the feel of a book in the process of being written: uponcoming across this sentence, most readers would assume, I believe, thatthe twentieth-century author (immersed in Victorianism) had unwittinglyspoken of himself as one actually writing in the Victorian age, then hadcaught himself and replaced the present tense "allow" with the pasttense "allowed"; because we know Fowles really did the opposite, how-ever, we can only speculate that he has here deliberately fictionalizedhis 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 thatin 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



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conventions allow (no, allowed, because I am in fact writing in thetwentieth century). Obviously, Fowles has wanted to dramatize this lackof 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. Weknow a world is an organism, not a machine. We know also that agenuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a plannedworld (a world that fully reveals its panning) is a dead world" (105).In the two sentences discussed here the boundary between actual practiceand the dramatization of the practice becomes extremely moot.

Of course the Tulsa typescript contains ample evidence of stylisticrevison in the interest of an increased clarity, a more vivid image, akeener sense of authorial voice, or anything else one might expect to

discover in the draft of an exceptionally word-sensitive writer. But thereare in addition many instances of the sort of verbal building-up of thetext that I have termed the style of revision. In the following examplesfrom the published novel I have italicized the words Fowles inked intothe typescript:

such a key concept in our understanding of the Victorian ageor for that mailer, such awet 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 . . . regretand 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: inthe 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 toCharles's character, and so on. But the technique is similar even if theeffects are somewhat different; actual revisions in the typescript arepermitted to look like revisions in the text as it was published. In factthe last two revisions boldly announce themselves as just that. Otheractual enhancements of the typescript do the same. "I need hardly add,"adds Fowles in ink, "that at the time the dear, kind lady knew onlythe other, more Grecian nickname" (29, TS 23). Fowles, working inthe tradition of Swift, Sterne, Beckett, Nabokov, and Robbe-Grillet, has

discovered his own approach to the genre of the book-being-written. Thepeculiar style of his novel seems in large measure to have been createdduring the process of revision. The author's reactions to what he himselfhas written have been allowed to become part of the text he is composing.



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One interesting effect of the style of revision in The French Lieutenant'sWoman is to put the reader in the position of watching over Fowles'sshoulder as he works. We need not have access to his drafts to recognizethat this is one thing he is after. "She bore some resemblance to a

white Pekinese. . . ," he first wrote of Mrs. Poulteney. He then revisedthis description to read: "She bore some resemblance to a white Pekinese;to be exact, to a stuffed Pekinese . . . " (31, TS 35 verso). The "to beexact" 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, inthis one last example, it is interesting that both of the seeming revisionswere indeed revisions and that both require something more of thereader: "Charles and Ernestina did not live happily ever after; but theylived together, though Charles finally survived her by a decade (and earnestly

mourned her throughout it). They begat what shall it belet us say sevenchildren" (337, unnumbered "Miscellaneous draft pages"). The newinformation about Charles's outliving Ernestina, including the pun onher name ("earnestly mourned"), has the effect of pinching the readerto see if he is still awake, for this would have Charles survive to animprobable one hundred and ten. And the addition of "what shall it belet us say seven children" goes so far as to involve the reader in thecomposing process itself, putting him in the position of conspiring withthe author in dreaming up a supposed fact.

On the other hand, there are many, many seeming revisions in TheFrench Lieutenant's Woman that do not appear as revisions in the Tulsatypescript. Because Fowles works recursively, however, revising his type-script in ink, then retyping certain heavily revised sheets and destroyingthe originals, we have no way of knowing for sure whether these stylisticrevisions were literal revisions at some earlier stage.9 I would suspectthat many of them were. Of course it is also possible that in the processof revising the novel Fowles recognized the style of revision he hadearlier established and then self-consciously enhanced this impression.

But in the long run I am not sure it matters precisely how each seemingrevision came about. The point is that the source of the novel's style isto be found in the author's actual practice and that this style contributeson every page to the novel's peculiar ambivalence.

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

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



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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 shepresented. (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 beforeour eyes. The two steps of the writing processat least as Fowles hasdescribed themare shown to be in contest and clearly delaying our pro-gress. The dash or ellipsis, the comma or semicolon, is intended in eachcase to represent the synaptic leap between one verbal possibility andanother. We get the impression of a novelist who is meticulously at-tempting to locate the precise word or words he needs to describe whathe sees or understands; and, because in most of these instances (as sooften throughout the book) he is describing human feelings, he is finding

language especially intractable. And each of these revisions involves notjust a qualification but a re-vision of the initial perception. The readeris left with a choice between directness and expansiveness, brevity andgreater precision, an outdated perception and one altogether recent.

Disarmingly, however, Fowles sometimes toys with his own style ofrevision. Thus here he pretends to have caught himelf being less thanfriendly to one of his characters: "Not even the sad Victorian clothesshe had so often to wear could hide the trim, plump promise of herfigureindeed, 'plump' is unkind" (75). "Plump" may be unkind

(perhaps used for the easy alliteration); but is there another word inEnglish that would be any more apt? Here Fowles mocks himself forbeing (as he so often is) indirect: "A man and a woman who hurriedpast spoke French; were French" (291). If they were speaking French,were they not likely to be French? And in the final chapter of the novelFowles 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 hereally is. I shall not labor the implication that he was previously got inas he really wasn't ..." (461, Fowles's italics). Such playfulness does

not diminish the point I am making here. The conventions of this novelrepeatedly bend back on themselves. And compensating for Fowles'ssometimes irritating polemical tone is his winning ability to laugh athimself.



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Fowles contrasts art and nature (fiction and reality) in terms of thedegree of "choice" one finds in each:

Even the most "unreadable" woods and forests are in fact subtler than any conceivablefiction, 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 cannotbe conveyed in the frozen medium of the printed text, is very characteristic of the actualwriting, of the constant dilemmapain or pleasure, according to the circumstancesitsactual practice represents, from the formation of the basic sentence to the larger mattersof 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 endeavorsto 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 ofhis novel. Whereas Charles finds himself trapped between the sponta-neous, individualistic, mysterious Sarah Woodruff and the rigid, con-

ventional, predictable Ernestina Freeman (the names border on theallegorical), Fowles finds himself trapped between the two poles of thewriting processbetween the initial, organic, exciting composition by

pure hazard and the necessity of subsequent revision, which he finds sotedious. Of course Charles as a person must according to the rules ofWestern monogamy choose Sarah or Ernestina. But Charles as a characterneed not. And in preserving his own freedom of choice as a writer, Fowlescan simultaneously permit Charles both to have Sarah and not to haveSarah. In life Occam's razor applies; in fiction it does not have to. The

dilemma for the reader, however, cannot be dismissed so easily; althoughhe is seemingly invited to choose an ending (in spite of the author'srefusal to do so), the choice of one ending over another necessitatesturning a blind eye on the endless flux of the book just completed. Butwe 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 thana taunting of the unsuspecting reader of The French Lieutenant's Woman.The best advice on how to take the endings is Fowles's process-orientedcomments 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 printedtext. To look upon either ending as somehow the "correct" endingwould require us to be a lot more single-minded than Fowles wants forhimself or for us. As twentieth-century readers we should resist our



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Victorian nervousness in the face of inconclusiveness and strive ratherto be satisfied with the luxury of a modernand purely fictionalending. We should not choose.

WORKS CITED

Adam, Ian, Patrick Brantlinger, and Sheldon Rothblatt. "The French Lieutenant'sWoman: 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 "theoldest extant 'state' " of the novel.)

____"Hardy and the Hag." Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years. Ed. Lance St. JohnButler. Totowa: Rowan, 1977. 28-42.

___"Lettre-Postface de John Fowles." In Etudes sur "The French Lieutenant'sWoman." Caen: Centre National de Documentation Pdagogique, 1977. 51-57.

___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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