Fowles: "I Learned To Value What I Couldn’t, Over The Years, Forget"

   "As a student of French at Oxford, I read omnivorously, though much more out of ignorance than intelligence.  I had very little notion of my real tastes, having swallowed the then prevalent myth that only one’s teachers had a right to personal preferences.  This is not an approach I would attempt to sell to any student today, but it did have one advantage.  Likes and dislikes were eventually formed on a strictly pragmatic basis; I learned to value what I couldn’t, over the years, forget.  One such obstinate survivor was Alain-Fournier’s Le Grande Meaulnes.  A number of young thesis writers have now told me they can see no significant parallels between Le Grande Meaulnes and my own novel The Magus.  I must have severed the umbilical cord—the real connection requires such a metaphor—much more neatly than I supposed at the time; or perhaps modern academic criticism is blind to relationships that are far more emotional than structural."

John Fowles,
from “A Personal Note” to his translation of Marie de France’s “Eliduc”
in his collection of short stories The Ebony Tower, pages 109-110: