The Magus, A Revised Version (2 page)

*Another, and curious, novel about the school exists: Kenneth Matthews,
Aleko
(Peter Davies, 1934). The French writer Michel Deon has also published the autobiographical
Le Balcon de Spetsai
(Gallimard, 1961).

The Magus
1

Un d
é
bauch
é
de profession est rarement un homme pitoyable.

De Sade,
Les Infortunes de la Vertu

I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.

I had long before made the discovery that I lacked the parents and ancestors I needed. My father was, through being the right age at the right time rather than through any great professional talent, a brigadier; and my mother was the very model of a would-be major-general
’
s wife. That is, she never argued with him and always behaved as if he were listening in the next room, even when he was thousands of miles away. I saw very little of my father during the war, and in his long absences I used to build up a more or less immaculate conception of him, which he generally
–
a bad but appropriate pun
–
shattered within the first forty-eight hours of his leave.

Like all men not really up to their job, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility. If I ever dared
– I
seldom did
–
to argue with him, he would produce one of these totem words and cosh me with it, as no doubt in similar circumstances he quelled his subalterns. If one still refused to lie down and die, he lost, or loosed, his temper. His temper was like a red dog, and he always had it close to hand.

The wishful tradition is that our family came over from France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
–
noble Huguenots remotely allied to Honor
é
d
’
Urf
é
, author of the seventeenth-century best-seller
L
’
Astr
é
e.
Certainly
–
if one excludes another equally unsubstantiated link with Tom Durfey, Charles II
’
s scribbling friend
–
no other of my ancestors showed any artistic leanings whatever: generation after generation of captains, clergymen, sailors, squire-lings, with only a uniform lack of disti
nction and a marked penchant
for gambling, and losing, to characterize them. My grandfather had four sons, two of whom died in the First World War; the third took an unsavoury way of paying
off
his atavism (gambling debts) and disappeared to America. He was never referred to as still existing by my father, a youngest brother who had all the characteristics that eldest sons are supposed to possess; and I have not the least idea whether he is still alive, or even whether I have unknown cousins on the other side of the Atlantic.

During my last years at school I realized that what was really wrong with my parents was that they had nothing but a blanket contempt for the sort of life I wanted to lead. I was
‘
good
’
at English, I had poems printed pseudonymously in the school magazine, I thought D. H. Lawrence the greatest human being of the century; my parents certainly never read Lawrence, and had probably never heard of him except in connection with
Lady Chatterley
’
s Lover.
There were things, a certain emotional gentleness in my mother, an occasional euphoric jolliness in my father, I could have borne more of; but always I liked in them the things they didn
’
t want to be liked for. By the time I was eighteen and Hitler was dead they had become mere providers, for whom I had to exhibit a token gratitude, but could muster very little else.

I led two lives. At school I got a small reputation as a wartime aesthete and cynic. But I had to join the regiment
–
Tradition and Sacrifice pressganged me into that. I insisted, and luckily the headmaster of my school backed me, that
I
wanted to go to university afterwards. I went on leading a double life in the Army, queasily playing at being Brigadier
‘
Blazer
’
Urfe
’
s son in public, and nervously reading
Penguin New Writing
and poetry pamphlets in private. As soon as I could, I got myself demobilized.

I went to Oxford in 1948. In my second year at Magdalen, soon after a long vacation during which I hardly saw my parents, my father had to fly out to India. He took my mother with him. Their plane crashed, a high-octane pyre, in a thunderstorm some forty miles east of Karachi. After the first shock I felt an almost immediate sense of relief, of freedom. My only other close relation, my mother
’
s brother, farmed in Rhodesia, so I now had no family to trammel what I regarded as my real self. I may have been weak in filial charity, but I was strong on the discipline in vogue.

At least, along with a group of fellow odd men out at Magdalen, I thought I was so. We formed a small club called Les Hommes
R
é
vo
lté
s, drank very dry sherry, and (as a protest against those shabby
duffel-coated last years of the
‘
forties) wore dark-grey suits and black ties for our meetings. There we argued about being and nothingness and called a certain kind of inconsequential behaviour
‘
existentialist
’
. Less enlightened people would have called it capricious or just plain selfish; but we didn
’
t understand that the heroes, or anti-heroes, of the French existentialist novels we read were not supposed to be realistic. We tried to imitate them, mistaking metaphorical descriptions of complex modes of feeling for straightforward prescriptions of behaviour. We duly felt the right anguishes. Most of us, true to the eternal dandyism of Oxford, simply wanted to look different. In our club, we did.

I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic than my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope
–
an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford
’
s greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one
’
s past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature; only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn
’
t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.

Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world. My father hadn
’
t kept Financial Prudence among his armoury of essential words; he ran a ridiculously large account at Ladbroke
’
s and his mess bills always reached staggering proportions, because he liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol. What remained of his money when the lawyers and the tax men had had their share yielded not nearly enough for me to live on. But every kind of job I looked at
–
the Foreign Se
rvice, the Civil, the Colonial,
the banks, commerce, advertising
–
was transpierceable at a glance. I went to several interviews. Since I didn
’
t feel obliged to show the eager enthusiasm our world expects from the young executive, I was successful at none.

In the end, like countless Oxford men before me, I answered an advertisement in
The Times Educational Supplement.
I went to the
place, a minor public school in East Anglia; was cursorily scrutinized,
then
off
ered the post. I learnt later that there were only two other applicants, both Redbrick, and term was beginning in three weeks.

The mass-produced middle-class boys I had to teach were bad enough; the claustrophobic little town was a nightmare; but the really intolerable thing was the common-room. It became almost a relief to go into class. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. And it was real boredom, not my modish ennui. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility … or so I began to feel during my second term.

I could not spend my life crossing such a Sahara; and the more I felt it the more I felt also that the smug, petrified school was a toy model of the entire country and that to quit the one and not the other would be ridiculous. There was also a girl I was tired of.

My resignation, I would see the school year out, was accepted with resignation. The headmaster briskly supposed from my vague references to a personal restlessness that I wanted to go to America or the Dominions.

‘
I haven
’
t decided yet, headmaster.
’

‘
I think we might have made a good teacher of you, Urfe. And you might have made something of us, you know. But it
’
s too late now.
’

‘
I
’
m afraid so.
’

‘
I don
’
t know if I approve of all this wandering
off
abroad. My
advise is, don
’
t go. However …
vous
l’
avez voulu, Georges Danton.
Vous
l’
avez voulu.
’

The misquotation was typical.

It poured with rain the day I left. Bu
t I was filled with excitement,
a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn
’
t know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and, although I couldn
’
t have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.

I heard that the British Council were recruiting staff, so in early August I went along to Davies Street and was interviewed by an eager lady with a culture-stricken mind and a Roedean voice and vocabulary. It was frightfully important, she told me, as if in confidence, that
‘
we
’
were represented abroad by the right type; but it was an awful bore, all the posts had to be advertised and the candidates chosen by interview, and anyway they were having to cut down on overseas personnel
–
actually. She came to the point: the only jobs available meant teaching English in foreign schools
–
or did that sound too ghastly?

I said it did.

In the last week of August, half as a joke, I advertised: the traditional insertion. I had a number of replies to my curt
off
er to go anywhere and do anything. Apart from the pamphlets reminding me that I was God
’
s, there were three charming letters from fundless and alert swindlers. And there was one that mentioned unusual and remunerative work in Tangiers
–
could I speak Italian?
–
but my answer went unanswered.

September loomed: I began to feel desperate. I saw myself cornered, driven back in despair to the dreaded
Educational Supplement
and those endless pale-grey lists of endless pale-grey jobs. So one morning I returned to Davies Street.

I asked if they had any teaching jobs in the Mediterranean area, and the woman with the frightful intensifiers went
off
to fetch a file. I sat under a puce and tomato Matthew Smith in the waiting-room and began to see myself in Madrid, in Rome, or Marseilles, or Barcelona … even Lisbon. It would be different abroad; there would be no common-room, and I should write poetry. She returned. All the good things had gone, she was terribly afraid. But there were these.

She handed me a sheet about a school in Milan. I shook my head. She approved.

‘
Well actually then there
’
s only this. We
’
ve just advertised it.
’
She handed me a clipping.