Читать книгу Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 26

The serious-minded novelist John Fowles, four years older than Princess Margaret, shared the obsession of Pablo Picasso. In real life, as it were, he might well have cold-shouldered the Princess, as he had long considered himself an intellectual with no truck for social snobbery. But he cherished her as a fantasy object, particularly when comparing her with his more down-to-earth current girlfriend, whom he referred to in his diary only as ‘G’.

‘Physically I criticize her,’ he writes of poor Miss G on 13 March 1951. ‘That way I cannot blind myself. She is warm, nubile; but not beautiful. And I see her growing old quickly, fat, with the Jewish, Mediterranean strain coming out in her. I see her in all sorts of conditions – whenever they entail “chic”, she disappoints me. She has all the DH Lawrence qualities, heart and soul and heat, humanity, intelligence, and simplicity when it is needed, the qualities of peasant stock, but no aristocratic traits. And aesthetically I need a little more aristocracy, a little carriage, fine-bred beauty.’

Later in the same entry, he declares that ‘I think it would do me good to marry G just for this one reason. That I should then limit myself, and achieve a certain humility which is lacking at the moment. Shed some of my aristocratic dream-projections. For example, I have day-dreamed of seducing Princess Margaret. I suppose many men must have done that. For unattached men she must be an obvious evasion out of solitary reality.’

A year later, Fowles completed his first novel, The Collector, which he went on to sell for a record sum. It is the tale of a creepy man who kidnaps a beautiful young art student and keeps her imprisoned in his basement. In a letter to his publisher, Fowles explained that ‘the whole woman-in-the-dungeon idea has interested me since I saw Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle’. He had also been intrigued, he said, by a news story concerning ‘a man who had kidnapped a girl and imprisoned her for several weeks in an air-raid shelter at the bottom of his garden’.

In all his public utterances, Fowles took pains to express a more high-minded blueprint for his artistic purpose. In an essay on The Collector, he stated that by making his victim die in captivity,

I did not mean by this that I view the future with a black pessimism: nor that a precious elite is threatened by the barbarian hordes. I mean simply that unless we face up to this unnecessarily brutal conflict (based largely on an unnecessary envy on the one hand and an unnecessary contempt on the other) between the biological Few and the biological Many … then we shall never arrive at a more just and happier world.

But to his diary, he confided that the novel had also been inspired by

My lifelong fantasy of imprisoning a girl underground. I think this must go back to early in my teens. I remember it used often to be famous people. Princess Margaret, various film stars. Of course, there was a main sexual motive, the love-through-knowledge motive, or motif, has been constant. The imprisoning, in other words, has always been a forcing of my personality as well as my penis on the girl concerned.