The Collector

A writing group task about collecting led me to dare to open the pages of this short novel once more, and reflect on collecting animal specimens.

I don’t know how old I was when I first read The Collector. Too young, probably. I had a habit of working my way through my oldest sister’s bookcase, reading through the novels that she has acquired as an English student, and this was why, when I was thirteen, my mother casually let drop that she knew I had a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover stashed under my bed. 

Anyway, The Collector stuck in my mind, as it has for many other readers. It is the story of a bank clerk called Fred Clegg who collects butterflies and believes he has fallen in love with Miranda Grey, an art student. After unexpectedly coming into money, Clegg’s plans coalesce. He chloroforms and kidnaps Miranda, takes her to an isolated house he has bought and entraps her in a cellar that he has soundproofed. If this sounds familiar, it is because this book has inspired other writers – and possibly some real-life stalkers and killers. 

The Collector was written in 1963, and shortly after publication, a reviewer in the New York Times declared John Fowles a very brave writer, because in putting us in the mind of this obsessive person ‘there is no room for the slightest false note.’  Fowles’s kidnapper Clegg, written in the first person, is an utterly convincing example of the banality of evil, a dull loner who dislikes his colleagues and family, furnishes the cellar thoughtfully and goes shopping to buy his victim treats. In a bold shift, the second part of the book is narrated by Miranda. We enter her perspective and learn about her own naïve fixation with an older artist. As the story unfolds, the carefully paced writing builds both empathy with, and distrust of, each narrator. There are flashes of beauty in the writing, especially in the few times that Miranda dreams of the natural world or is allowed a glimpse of it: ‘So living, so full of the thousand mysterious wet smells of the night’. We breathe fresh air anew with her. 

The pace is careful, but compelling. Picking up the book after several decades, out of curiosity to see what it said about collecting, I read it all in the space of an evening. There is not a lot about actual butterfly-collecting – in fact, the novel is just as full of references to The Tempest, and John Fowles said it was principally about class differences – but of course collecting is what gives the book its whole impetus. The collecting metaphors are sparse and would have been obvious even to my teenage self, but this time I wanted to see whether, as well as entering the mind of someone clearly unbalanced, Fowles would give some insight into why someone would collect insects, or any other creature. It is not an instinct I understand. 

I am not fond of ‘things in jars’ nor many of the displays in natural history museums. I don’t like my nature stuffed and snarling, nor my birds frozen in mid-flight. I don’t care for sad pelts and glass eyes. I prefer butterflies not to be motionless. I find bits of bone, beaks and teeth in a glass case neither artistic nor attractive. It’s quite possible that my dislike of these collections comes from my early literary encounter with John Fowles’s novel. 

I always wonder about the motives and methods of the collectors. In the nineteenth century, before photography and film, this was how natural history was done; specimens were collected and killed for study. In the eleven years that Henry Bates spent in the Amazon during the 1850s, he sent back over 14,000 species, donating his collection to the Natural History Museum in London. I wonder if one day we will think of stuffed animals and egg collections in the same way as we now do about the shrunken human heads now removed from view in Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum. Or perhaps these specimens will be vital resources to help maintain threatened species, for example by retrieving their DNA. 

Here is what The Collector has to say about collecting, and in these short excerpts you might follow the thread of the novel. 

• Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity…a Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance.
• It was like catching a specimen you wanted in your first and second fingers… And it was twice as difficult with her as I didn’t want to kill her. That was the last thing I wanted.
• What she never understood was that with me it was having. I just wanted to have her, and safe at last.
• I am one in a row of specimens. I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me to be living-but-dead. 
• He showed me one day what he called his killing-bottle. I’m imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass.

Although it is a stifling and uncomfortable read, The Collector never descends into violence. The tragedy ultimately lies in inaction, and this in turn, is fed by the driving desire to collect, to keep, and to hold forever.