Fowles’s The Ebony Tower is a sendup of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Although a boat is in the background, it is uncertain how Manet’s picnickers arrived for their dejeuner sur l’herbe. Fowles’ version of the picnic is definitive; the picnickers walk. The morning after Henry Breasley, a famous painter with goatish qualities, gets very drunk at a dinner party, he contritely suggests that his guest David Williams accompany him and his muses on an outing: “Gels suggest a little déjeuner sur l’herbe. Good idea, what? Picnic?” Williams agrees. “By eleven, they were en route. The girls Diana and Anne (stylish, beautiful, and twenty-ish), leading the way with baskets, down a long forest trail; then Williams carrying Breasley’s blue recliner on an aluminum frame ( portable sofa for the senile, as Breasley disparagingly calls it) and then Breasley bring up the rear, a coat folded over his arm, a raffish old wide-brimmed Panama on is head, “engagingly seigniorial, pointing at shadows with his walking stick; lights, special perspective qualities of his forest.”
If you’ve ever wondered what Manet’s picnickers talked about, Fowles guess is as good as any. Williams and Breasley talk Medieval literature, Chretien de Troyes, Tristan, Merlin, Lancelot, and The Eliduc, a Breton lay by Marie de France.
After arguing about the right path, they arrive at the picnic site, a grassy area on the edge of a pond. But as soon as they are settled, the old man insists that the women take off their clothes and go swimming. The men remain behind to watch the women undress: “Pity you’re married,” said Breasley. “They need a good fuck.”
Food is simple fare: French bread, the little cartons of food contents unknown. Beasley drinks Vichy, the women drink milk, and Williams sips a beer.
Featured Image: Robert Knights. The Ebony Tower (1984). Screenplay by John Mortimer based on Fowles’ novel. Laurence Olivier as Henry Breasley, Greta Scacchi as Diana (aka The Mouse), Toya Wilcox as Anne (aka The Freak), and Roger Rees as David Williams
See John Fowles. “The Ebony Tower.” In The Ebony Tower. Boston: Little Brown, 1974.