*From The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s Man: Novelist John Fowles by Richard B. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, the novel. In response to a gentle letter from a New York lawyer, dying of cancer in a hospital, who said he very much wanted the couple to be reunited, Fowles wrote back, “Yes, they were.” On the same day he got a “horrid” letter from an American woman who angrily demanded, “Why can’t you say what you mean, and for God’s sake, what happened in the end?” Fowles replied curtly: “They never saw each other again.”* Widely considered John Fowless masterpiece, The Magus is a masterwork of contemporary literature. In fact, Fowles himself is not averse to ownership of multiple interpretations of the ending (a quality he subsequently demonstrated, literally, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Although ultimately, as Fowles has noted, it is up to the reader to come up with his or her own interpretation. It seems fairly clear that Fowles is indicating, through the quote, his preferred resolution to the story as it pertains to Nicholas and Alison. The opening lines of an anonymous Latin lyric titled The Vigil of Venus (3rd century A.D.), it translates to: “Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved he who has loved, let him love tomorrow.”Īn alternate translation, submitted by Professor Andrey Kravtsov of New Mexico State University, is: “Let those love now who’ve never loved let those who’ve loved, love yet again.” So, in order to save time (for both those asking the question and us), here’s the scoop: cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet Perhaps the best thing about Fowle's revised edition of The Magus is his new introduction, in which he discusses the novel in some detail.

“What does the quotation at the end of The Magus mean?”

One question in particular keeps popping up again and again: We receive lots of e-mail at this site, much of it asking questions about John Fowles and his work.

The Magus by John Fowles