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THE MAGUS by John Fowles1965FIRST EDITIONOn the table in front of the Magus are the symbols of the four Tarot suits, signifying the elements of natural life, which lie like counters before the adept, and he adapts them as he wills. Beneath are roses and lilies, the _flos campi_ and _lilium convallium_, changed into garden flowers, to show the culture of aspiration.ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE, _The Key to the Tarot_Part One_Un d�bauch� de profession est rarement un homme pitoyable._DE SADE, _Les Infortunes de la Vertu_1I 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 jobs, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalised 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 coshed his subalterns. If one still refused to lie down and die, he lost, or loosed, his temper. His temper was like a violent 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� d'Urfe, author of the seventeenth-century bestseller _L'Astr�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, squirelings, with only a uniform lack of distinction and a marked penchant for gambling, and losing, to characterise 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 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 realised 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 had 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 for whom I couldn't feel much 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 demobilised.I went to Oxford in 1948. In my second year at Magdalen, soon after a long vacation during which I hardly saw them, 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 on 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 strong in the discipline. We formed a small club called Les Hommes R�volt�s, drank very dry sherry, and (as a protest against those shabby dufflecoated last years of the forties) wore dark grey suits and black ties for our meetings; we argued about essence and existence 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 realise 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 pseudo-aristocratic, seeingthrough-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 civilised 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 that 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 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 taxmen had had their cuts yielded not nearly enough for me to live on. But every kind of job I looked at--the Foreign Service, the Civil, the Colonial, the banks, commerce, advertising--was transpierceable at a glance. I went to several interviews, and 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 generations of 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, I was interviewed, I was offered the post. I learnt later that there were only two other applicants, both Redbrick, and term was beginning in three days.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 that 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 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 advice 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. But 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 wor... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]