The Ebony Tower by John Fowles

First published: 1974

Type of work: Romantic realism

Time of work: Two days in September, 1973

Locale: Manoir de Coetminais, in Brittany near Rennes, and Orly Airport outside Paris

Principal Characters:

• David Williams, the protagonist, age thirty-one, a British painter, lecturer, and art critic who is married with two daughters
• Henry Breasley, a famous, seventy-seven-year-old expatriate British painter who is living in France
• The Mouse (Diana), a young, gifted artist and dropout from the Royal College of Art, Breasley’s companion for the past three or four months
• The Freak (Anne), a less gifted former art student, a friend of Diana and also Breasley’s companion
• Jean-Pierre, and
• Mathilde, Breasley’s servants

The Novella

Very little action is involved in the two-day span that constitutes the plot of The Ebony Tower, the title novella in a collection with four short stories. Presented from the point of view of limited omniscience, the novella concerns the thoughts and reactions of David Williams, as he contrasts his domestic and predictable life in London with the unconventional world he encounters at Henry Breasley’s estate in France, the Manoir de Coetminais (“the forest of the monks”).

David has come to Brittany to interview Henry in preparation for writing a biographical and critical introduction to a volume of the older painter’s work. On his arrival at the secluded, fifteenth century estate, he encounters two naked young women-nicknamed the Mouse and the Freak-whose presence seems to validate the reputation of the painter, a notorious iconoclast and womanizer. After being introduced to Henry, David smugly but enviously is taken on tour of the artist’s collection of modern art. Later that evening at dinner, the two men have a serious discussion and almost an argument about contemporary art, hindered by Henry’s increasing drunkenness but aided by the Mouse’s role as interpreter for the generally inarticulate Henry. Henry abhors abstract art, the “decorative” style for which David has become moderately famous.

Helped to bed by the two women in an apparently familiar domestic ritual, Henry is repentant the next morning, and all four go on a picnic for lunch. In a scene suggestive of Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1863), the women lounge and swim in the nude while the men converse, and, after their meal, while Henry sleeps, the other three swim again. David begins to revise his formerly dismissive opinions of the Mouse and the Freak, recognizing their complexity and intelligence, learning the circumstances of their arrival at Coet, and becoming sexually attracted to the Mouse.

That evening after dinner, David goes with the women to the Mouse’s room to view her paintings, which are technically and aesthetically similar to his own, and the level of intimacy among the three increases. The Freak retires, leaving David and the Mouse alone, and during a walk in the gardens they both admit an emotional and sexual attraction for each other. The Mouse retreats to her room, however, followed by David, who pleads that she sleep with him. She refuses, perhaps reluctantly, and, the next morning, the Freak reveals that the Mouse left a note saying that she had gone to Rennes to shop until after David must leave to meet his wife at Orly Airport.

David parts amiably from the two, but on the trip back to Paris he realizes the poverty and safety of his own life in comparison to the world he has experienced for the last two days. Yet he does not seem to profit from the experience, for as he arrives at the airport to pick up Beth, his wife, he surrenders to the only thing he has left, abstraction, and tells her that he has merely survived the visit. Unlike most of John Fowles’s work, The Ebony Tower holds little promise in its conclusion.

The Characters

David Williams is a familiar figure in Fowles’s fiction: the smug, bourgeois young man who believes that he has a superior control of his own existence and a sophisticated and sensitive understanding of life in general. The security and comfort he has attained, however, have been at the expense of passion, vitality, and creativity. Like Nickolas Urfe in The Magus (1966), David is shaken from his sterile complacency, learning that he is not the success he thinks, but, at best, only “a decent man and eternal also-ran.”

Significantly, his background is conventional in all respects. From his architect parents, he gained a minor appreciation for the arts and the intellect, and after an ordinary education, he became a teacher, a painter, a lecturer, and a critic. He paints small, precise, geometric abstracts, for which he has enjoyed considerable success, but even he is aware that much of the appeal of his canvases is their decorative, not aesthetic, value. Even before coming to interview Henry, he has made up his mind about the older painter and has in fact already drafted his introduction to the book, so sure is he of his own values and beliefs. The fixity and sterility of his stance have never occurred to him.

When he arrives at Coet, his sense of superiority surrounds him like a cloud. He dismisses the Mouse and the Freak as art groupies whose primary function in Henry’s household is sexual. While he admires Henry’s work, he does not really understand it, and he is puzzled about how such paintings can be produced by what he considers to be an inarticulate, lecherous has-been.

As he comes to know Henry, however, he begins to lose his fixity of opinion, for Henry is neither the man of his public image nor the man of David’s reductive assessment. Henry is almost a force of nature, a pure creative genius who has never compromised his own values for those of society. He resists any set of formulas for art, as for life, and he simply creates. His art is generated by his flesh; David’s is from his intellect. Henry sees the success of David’s work, and all cold abstraction, as the “triumph of the bloody eunuch,” and he tells David that the younger painter is “afraid of the human body.” Slowly, through his exposure to Henry and his interaction with the women, David becomes aware of the reality of his life through contrasts; his rejection by the Mouse makes him realize intimately one of Henry’s credos: “For the first time in his life he knew more than the fact of being; but the passion to exist.” To Henry, the unfelt, safe life is not worth living.l Only after David leaves Coet and begins to meditate on the experience does he come to realize that for which Henry truly stands:

The old man’s secret, not letting anything stand between self and expression; which wasn’t a question of outward artistic aims, mere styles and techniques and themes. But how you did it; how wholly, how bravely you faced up to the constant recasting of yourself.

The conclusion, however, suggests that David, while aware of this essential truth, will be unable to act on it.

If Henry is the source of this revelation, the women are the instruments. The Mouse, Diana, has been so named by Henry in an obscene play on “muse” with the addition of an “o” to represent her sexuality. Henry has proposed to her and needs her, but she has not decided what she will do. Having abandoned, or postponed, a promising career as an artist, she, like David, is beginning to learn a lesson in vitality and honesty of being, but while she is learning she has not yet abandoned her bourgeois background. David sees part of himself in her, and the part that has assimilated Henry’s philosophy attracts him. She is poised halfway between the two men.

Yet the Mouse is also shy and reserved, and while she can be Henry’s interpreter for David, she shows little warmth. That role belongs to the Freak, Anne, who is both emotional and trusting, genuinely concerned about her friend’s well-being and willing to open up to David. The Freak is less cerebral than the Mouse, more extroverted and physical. By her intercession, David gains access to the Mouse, making him feel; emotion and sexual attraction make him consider the Mouse’s beliefs, which in turn give him access to Henry’s system of belief. David and Henry are so polarized that only by the intermediary steps of intimacy with the women can David approach an understanding of what Henry’s life and art represent.

Critical Context

Fowles has said that he intended to produce a realistic version of The Magus in The Ebony Tower, and in essence, the novella is exactly that: a condensed examination of the same themes without the mystical overlay of the earlier novel. Coming at the first peak of his critical and popular acclaim, The Ebony Tower was a significant success and a summary of his concerns up to this point; it makes accessible the often elusive ideas in his earlier works while anticipating several yet to come, such as the function of the muse, explored in depth in Mantissa (1982).

The novella reinforces Fowles’s beliefs about the necessary demands of freedom and the responsibilities of choice in a world governed by hazard, or contingency-outlined in his philosophical work, The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas (1964)-and it furthers his experimentation in narrative technique and his explorations into the failure of linguistic systems. Philosophically, it is a masterful variation on Fowles’s personal version of existentialism.

Bibliography

Conradi, Peter. John Fowles, 1982.

Fawkner, H. W. The Timescapes of John Fowles, 1984.

Morrow, Lance. Review in Time. CIV (December 2, 1974), p. 110.

The New Yorker. Review. L (December 23, 1974), p. 83.

Newsweek. Review. LXXXIV (November 25, 1974), p. 120.

Olshen, Barry N. John Fowles, 1978.

Solotaroff, Theodore. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXI (November 10, 1974), p. 2.

Wolfe, Peter. John Fowles: Magus and Moralist, 1976.