by Bryan Magee
My fourteenth birthday was a landmark for me in many ways. Because fourteen was the age at which most people left school and started work, that birthday was treated by most of the population as a staging post on the way to adult life, a sort of miniature twenty-first; and in keeping with that it was accompanied by especially good presents. For me, the day itself fell during a weekend spent in the market town of Shaftesbury, in Dorset. My father had taken me there to visit his old friend Fred Griffin, his regular companion for opera and ballet at Covent Garden before the war. Fred was a highly skilled craftsman who made, by hand under a microscope, minute springs that were used in aircraft controls. To ensure that he should not himself be bombed, the authorities had ordered him to leave London, so he was now living in Shaftesbury’s Grosvenor Hotel, with an office and workshop a few yards away in the main street. By our standards he was well-off financially, and he had built up over the years the biggest collection of records I had ever come across. It was his custom to play these all day on a state-of-the-art record player while he was working. He loved Wagner above all, and had almost every Wagner recording that had ever been issued. That weekend I was given free run of the collection, and felt I was in paradise – until, that is, my father made an announcement.
He said there was something special he wanted to talk to me about, and that he and I should go for a country walk (a unique occurrence). On this walk he told me, speaking with difficulty, that he and my mother were going to get divorced. He looked straight in front of him while he was talking. I tried to ease things for him by saying: ‘I know.’
His manner turned suddenly to sharpness. ‘How do you know?’ I can still see the expression on his face as he snapped it towards me.
This was unfair. Here was I trying to help him, and his response was to make it impossibly difficult for me.
‘Mum told me,’ I said. It was true. I was acutely embarrassed.
‘What did she say?’
This was terrible, but I had to reply.
‘She said you had someone else.’
He swelled up and went bright red with anger, and I thought he was going to burst. But he subsided again, and said in an unnaturally quiet voice, again looking straight in front: ‘Absurd.’
Then he started in an oddly scrambled way to assure me that Joan and I would be properly looked after. What I wanted to know (but did not ask) was why the two of them were getting divorced, what had happened, was anyone else involved, where and how was each of them going to live. But to my frustration he talked about none of these things, merely about how Joan and I would not need to worry about anything – a concern that was not in my mind.
He died three years later. He was a chain-smoker, and died of cancer of the lung at the age of forty-five. I lived through the whole of those three years expecting him and my mother to break up at any moment in the next few days or weeks. But they never did, and nothing more was said on the subject. In that age, children did not put personal questions to their parents: they waited to be told. I never dared to ask what was happening, or indeed if anything was happening. I was consumed by the questions, but never knew the answers. Had the whole situation changed again? Were they going to stay together after all? In recent years I have asked my aunt Peggy, and she says that the marriage was unquestionably coming to pieces, and would have done so had my father not died. Why there was this delay, neither she nor I knew.
My relations with my mother had never been good, and I was now of an age when she thought I should be earning my living. It riled her that she and my father were keeping me even for those short periods when I was at home from school, and she missed no opportunity of referring to me as a kept person, a parasite. Further education, in her view, was a waste of time, a load of nonsense: real life was what counted: everything else was airy-fairy. But at the same time she did not accept that I was growing up. She was exceedingly upset when I bought books about politics with book tokens that I had been given for my fourteenth birthday. Not only was she disapproving, she was emotionally disturbed – as she had been by my taking harmless adult novels out of the library in Market Harborough. She looked distraught, as if something terrible had happened, and said things like ‘Oh dear!’ in a frightened voice. I have always been seriously unable, then and now, to understand what the trouble was. When I asked her, she said: ‘At your age you ought to be reading story-books.’ She tried to make me take the books back, but I refused very firmly, saying that the shops would not dream of accepting them.
My sister, too, seemed alarmed at my growing up. She was a more emotional person than I was, more aware of the feelings of others, and more caring about them. But the downside of these strong feelings was that her judgements were distorted by them to the point where her view of everything was almost completely subjective, a generalisation from the single instances of her own experience. If she met a Dane for the first time, and he struck her as a handsome man, she would say ever afterwards that Danes were a good-looking people. What she supposed to be her factual view of the world was built up almost entirely in this way. She did not at all have a logical mind. And although she was emotionally better developed than I was, I was overtaking her intellectually. This frightened her. She was three and a half years older than me, and had been used all her life to being ahead of me in every respect, so she viewed the new situation as a threat. She became hostile and competitive, and started trying to put me down.
One way and another, then, I was having a troubled time at home. Family conflicts with adolescents are commonplace, and this was the form they took in my life. But they made me all the more determined to go my own way and do my own thing – which again is typical for an adolescent. Even so, and in spite of it all, Joan and I still did a number of things together, as can easily happen within a family. I went to the ballet with her so often that I became familiar with the whole Sadler’s Wells Company and repertoire. Margot Fonteyn was in her prime, with Robert Helpmann as her leading man. He was a versatile artist: not a great dancer but a good one, with a special gift for comedy; a successful choreographer; and a talented actor. In 1944 I went twice to see him play the lead in a six-week run of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (not his ballet of the same name, to Tchaikovsky’s music) with the Old Vic Company.
During the forties I was quite a ballet-lover. There was one week in 1946, not long after the Covent Garden theatre reopened from its wartime closure, when I went to the ballet there every night, sitting on those narrow, backless, armless benches at the very top of the gods. The intensity with which I reacted to it is revealed by the clarity and detail of the memories I still have of individual performances. But as I emerged into adult life I felt as if I outgrew it. I can never say this to a ballet-lover, but in all honesty that is what it felt like to me. In any case, ballet is primarily a visual art, and I am primarily an aural person. But in those years there were times, which alas have never recurred, when the beauty of a movement, seen usually as a line alive, would give me the full aesthetic physical response: my whole body would freeze, my skin would stand up into goose pimples all over, and my scalp would prickle.
I enjoyed being an observer of the groupie world that my sister was part of, and rather looked up to it. They were nearly all teenage girls who spent every penny they had on ballet, devouring magazines and books about it, collecting photographs, and so on. They would crowd round the stage door after each performance, surging forward to get their programmes autographed by each of the dancers in turn as they came out. The stars always came out last. The girls would giggle and scream, and bunch round in a tight knot. I never bought a separate programme, but at school during bookbinding lessons I had been given the task of making an autograph album, so I now used this to collect autographs. Having started with ballet dancers, I went on to pick up autographs of other performers at other theatres, and soon had most of the leading figures, from Laurence Olivier and Noël Coward downwards. I was struck by the fact that although they were always nice to me, and exchanged friendly word
s as they signed, they did not actually register my existence. I had still not met them, nor they me. I did not mind this, but the nullity of it made the activity pointless, and I stopped doing it. (I have never had the collector’s instinct anyway.) The only one of them I took against was David Niven, who emerged from the New Theatre one evening in army uniform, not having performed, but as a friend of one of the performers. He made show-off remarks to the groupies, who of course had not been waiting for him at all, about being in battledress and being about to catch a night train to France. He played the hero to them with a narcissism and vulgarity that I found nauseating. And he had not even been in the play.
Engrossed as I was in the performing arts during my time in London, I lost nearly all of my interest in sport. School was turning me off it anyway. I would go to sporting events with my father, or with Norman Tillson, if they suggested it, but I was no longer interested enough to suggest it myself, still less to go alone – except to Thurston’s, the Mecca of billiards and snooker. I loved those games more than I have loved any others. We had a local billiard hall in the main shopping street of Southgate, and Norman and I started spending more and more of our time and money there. We called it Burton’s because it was over a men’s clothing shop with that name, and in fact I do believe it belonged to the shop: Burton’s was probably the biggest chain store in the country that sold men’s clothes, and above many if not most of their high-street shops there were billiard halls. The amount of time Norman and I spent in this particular one was limited only by how much money we had. We were addicts. There was one Christmas Eve when – being flush with money because it was Christmas – we played for six hours and forty minutes, and were still reluctant to leave. Billiards was our great passion: we would start all our sessions by playing billiards until we felt it was time for a change, and then we would turn to snooker. This made snooker feel like the dessert at the end of a meal, a light-hearted, colourful contrast; and sometimes we did not get that far. Not surprisingly, we became quite good while remaining fairly ordinary – the highest break I ever got at billiards was 38, and at snooker 34 (the same as my highest innings at cricket). Occasionally my father would join us. He was in a different class from us, elegant and pleasing to watch, a consistently high scorer. It was he who taught us most of what we knew. When I remarked to him that I was lost to the world while playing, he said: ‘You could have all the troubles in the world on your shoulders, and while playing billiards you wouldn’t be aware of them.’ There was something extraordinarily deep and special about this feeling: inexplicably, it was not unlike how I felt when I listened to music. When, many years later, I discovered that Mozart was addicted to billiards, and would hum new musical ideas while playing it, I felt I understood.
Another game at which my father excelled was poker. He was a regular player in a weekly school where the stakes were high; and although, inevitably, he sometimes lost, on average he won more than his week’s wages; so during those years the family’s standard of living was dependent on Father’s poker. I never became anything like as good as he was, in fact I was never much of a poker player at all, but I loved it, and have always regarded it as the king of card games, and one of the greatest games of any kind.
1 It was sourly remarked on at the time how many people who were at the apex of Britain’s artistic and intellectual life spent all or part of the war in the United States: in addition to Laurence Olivier and his wife, Vivien Leigh, there were Bertrand Russell, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Benjamin Britten, Sir Thomas Beecham and John Barbirolli, to name only a few of those who were of interest to me as a teenager. It gave rise to bitter comment from ‘ordinary’ people, who tended to see them as ‘dodging the war’, and gave less credit than they should have done to those who came back while the war was still on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
IN MY TEENS I became increasingly fascinated by questions about the nature of reality – and by the word ‘reality’ I mean, simply, what there is. These were philosophical questions, but at that time no such thought entered my mind: they presented themselves to me as basic questions about what directly confronted me. I would find myself looking at an object immediately in front of my face – it could be anything: an apple, a book – and thinking: ‘What is it? I can see its size, its shape, its colour, its texture, and all the rest, but what is it – what is the something that has those characteristics?’ And I was baffled. Despite long periods of concentrated attention I failed to crack the mystery.
If I closed my eyes the object would ‘disappear’. When I opened them it came back again. Of course I knew that it was there all the time, that only my image of it disappeared; but what this seemed to tell me was that I was directly in contact with the image and not with the object. It meant that when I could see the object I was reading off details of its colour, texture and all the rest of it from the image; and when I closed my eyes and there was no image I could apprehend nothing, and was not in contact with anything, even though the object itself was in the same place. In other words I was not in contact with the object. Following on from this, I realised that my apprehension of everything was inside my head (where else could it be?). Increasingly there were occasions when I was panicked by this. The first important one happened at school, in chapel, and I had to go out in the middle of the service. The second, not unlike it, occurred in London during the school holidays. I was coming out of a cinema when the realisation hit me that everything I could ever be aware of throughout my whole life was inside my head, while reality itself was outside my head and I could never have direct contact with it. The feeling was of being permanently cut off. In that instant I actually thought I was going mad. I stood in the foyer gasping, drowning, fighting for life. After the hugest struggle, I calmed down. But I had come within a hair’s breadth of some kind of breakdown.
Until this time my childish metaphysical reflections had been, on the whole, enjoyable. It is true that they had been baffling and frustrating as well, but at the same time they were intriguing, and I had normally got at least a troubled satisfaction from pursuing them. But from my middle teens I began to find them unpleasant in a way that was somehow sick. They frightened me. Those to do with perception were often nauseating, as if these images in my brain might be hallucinations, and as such symptoms of illness. I could have a new insight, be convinced of its truth, indeed it might be true, and yet the perception was accompanied by mental disturbance. My terrors took partly the form of an intellectual conviction of the truth of certain propositions. It was a bizarre combination, indeed identification, and made fighting off the disturbance difficult – I did not want to fight off the truth. The whole problem was that it was not delusions I was grappling with but truths, or possible truths, and my struggles took me to the limits of my endurance. Why I was so churned up and terrified at the thought that certain things were true or might be true, I cannot explain, but I was. It is surprising that I never broke down. I came close to it several times.
Insight and terror proceeded not only hand in hand but as the same thing. The more deeply my gaze penetrated into these problems the more panic-stricken I became. The worst moment came one night in bed, in the dark, in my little room in Arnos Grove. A lot of the Marxisant writings I was reading reiterated that theirs was a materialist philosophy, and that all that existed was matter, so I was lying there wondering if materialism could be true, and what reality must be like if it were. Suddenly I achieved an insight into precisely that: reality conceived as material only. Inexplicably, the thought was all-pervadingly evil, and of the most rampant, all-gobbling hideousness. It was the only thought I have ever had that was accompanied by, literally, a stink as a part of itself. It was an abyss, and I was in it. I was gripped by horror rather than terror, a compound of disbelief, shock, dread and bottomless despair. In the instant of experiencing it I knew that it would not be supportable even for a short time, and I summoned all the forces I possessed to divert my thoughts. As they receded, an ocean of
nausea flooded through me and washed them away from me. The whole experience was the ultimate in pure evil, the intolerable. For years I lived in dread of its return, knowing I could not survive it. Never again did I seek to recover that fully achieved insight into the nature of materialism, but I bear to this day the psychological scars. There are no words to articulate it – though I knew that it was what was being referred to when, many years later, I came across these sentences in a book by a philosopher: ‘That the world has only a physical and not a moral significance is a fundamental error, one that is the greatest and most pernicious, the real perversity of the mind. At bottom, it is also that which faith has personified as Antichrist.’ The philosopher was Schopenhauer, who, like me, was not a Christian, and did not believe in God, still less in hell.
Today it seems obvious that I was an already insecure person whose insecurity was being screwed up to pathological levels by my own persistently radical questioning of my nature, and of the world around me. I was imposing on myself insecurities that I could not bear. My personality was not strong enough to cope with the positions I kept putting myself in. But at the time, all I was aware of were the questions themselves, and the terror they plunged me into. In any case, my questioning was involuntary: I tried to stop myself from doing it, but was only patchily successful. It was a curse of which I could not rid myself, and which visited me every day – in fact my internal nickname for it became ‘the curse’.
Luckily for me, although most of my wonderings had this terrifying character, not all of them did. Some were compellingly interesting, and I tried to take refuge in those. One day I was sitting in our living room gazing idly at the standard lamp when the thought wandered into my mind that if it were sentient it could not possibly appear as an object to itself, and therefore could not be an object in its own world. It would be able to see everything else in the room, just as I saw it, but would not be able to see itself. In what terms, then, could it conceive its own existence? There it stood before me, with its wooden base, tall stem and big shade, and I could form no notion of that particular standard lamp in any terms other than these – what they looked like, would feel like, and so on. Allowing for the laws of perspective, it would look the same for any other observer in the room, in any position – any position, that is, except one, the position the standard lamp itself occupied. To the standard lamp, thought of as being itself the observer, no standard lamp was to be seen anywhere in the room, and therefore no wooden base, no tall stem, and no big shade. Only if there had been, which there was not, a mirror in which the standard lamp could see itself would it have had any way of knowing what it looked like. Having no arms, it could not feel its own shape. So if it had spent its entire existence in this room it would never have experienced, and would have no way of conceiving, what were in fact the only elements out of which I could form any conception of it. If it was aware of its own existence this awareness would have to be in terms that were unrecognisably different from those of the only apprehension I could form of its existence. What could such terms be? Could it know even that it was a standard lamp? I did not see how. Perhaps all it could do was be, inside itself, without any understanding of what or why it was.