Fowles, John

comprising the portion of the text written for The Magus: a revised version, almost every page with autograph cancels, revisions, or corrections in black ink, c.30 leaves with additional typescript material on pasted slips, each leaf numbered in the upper right corner in a sequence referring to the pagination of the existing print edition (running from 59A to 613G), and with a new foreword (9 pages), 331 pages, 4to, 1976, loose in a manila folder with an autograph note on the upper cover ("The Magus Separately typed new inserts and new passages to go into old text as indicated"), occasional nicks and creases; with: 'Behind the Magus', photocopy of corrected typescript, 13 pages, 1994, stapled

Condition is described in the main body of the catalogue, where appropriate
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"...Though this is not, in any major thematic or narrative sense, a fresh version of The Magus, it is rather more than a stylistic revision. A number of scenes have been largely rewritten, and one or two new ones invented. I have taken this somewhat unusual course not least because - if letters are any test - the book has aroused more interest than anything else I have written..."

The final draft of the revised Magus. The book was first written in the mid-50s and published in 1965, but eleven years later Fowles took the exceptionally unusual step of undertaking a wholesale revision of his very successful published novel. Fowles was dissatisfied with both the novel itself and by how it had been interpreted by readers, and when he came to check the French translation "suddenly the story, the idea of the book, catches me again" (John Fowles, The Journals: Volume 2, p.188) and he decided to undertake a wholesale revision of the text. He recorded in his journal that: "It is humbling - to see how badly one wrote, how messy the plot in places. And enjoyable: fixed situations melt, the characters live again, present new choices" (p.190). As well as improving the writing, he revised the plot, strengthened the erotic element in the central section of the novel, and recalibrated the presentation of personal freedom, moving away from the individualistic existentialism that - much to Fowles's dislike - many readers had taken from the novel. Maschler agreed to publish the new text. He was also so fascinated by Fowles's decision and artistic process of revision that he persuaded the author to make him a gift of this typescript.

Tom Maschler
This lot is from the personal archive of Tom Maschler (b.1933), one of the leading figures of modern British publishing and identified by the Bookseller as one of the ten most influential figures in publishing of the twentieth century. As editorial director at Jonathan Cape from 1960, he was responsible for shaping the literary scene through the publication of authors including Joseph Heller, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Philip Roth, as well as many of the best English novelists to emerge in the 70s – Amis, Barnes, Chatwin, McEwan, Rushdie. Under his leadership Cape published some 15 Nobel laureates, and his forays into children’s books included bringing together Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. The ten lots from his collection (lots 188-197) give significant insights into his varied career and literary interests, from Declaration, the collection of essays that made his name, to correspondence with two very different writers with whom he developed a particular rapport – John Fowles and Doris Lessing. They also include a small number of letters by an earlier generation of authors (Raymond Chandler and Malcolm Lowry) that were acquired by Maschler.