by Bryan Magee
I was transfixed by this realisation of the disjunction between being and knowing. Every object in the room would be equally incapable of knowing its own nature if it were sentient. And this must be true of everything everywhere. Then, of course, the penny dropped. It must be true of me. I was a material object, and if I had been born without eyes and arms I would be just as incapable of knowing what I looked like, or what my own shape was, as the standard lamp. Even with eyes, it was only because of mirrors, reflections and photographs – images external to myself, images outside me – that I knew what my face looked like. What all this meant was that no sentient being, purely from inside itself, could possibly know, still less understand, its own nature.
For some reason I did not find this frightening – if anything, it gave me a kind of hope. There was something welcome in the fact that there must be more to me than any idea I could form of myself. For a long time, something like a couple of years, I thought about it obsessionally, but nearly always with regard to other objects. I would look, for instance, at a building. There it was, a huge great thing: it unquestionably existed. No one could deny that the building was. But what was it to be the building? I could see its details, and its overall position and size and shape; but the building itself could not be aware of any of these things; yet nevertheless it existed, it was doing something. What was it doing? Being, evidently. But what was that? Whatever it was, I could not get my mind round it – and nor would the building itself have been able to either. I never made an inch of headway out of this impasse. But that fact kept me aware that I was in it.
I have difficulty even now in expressing any of these thoughts in words, and at that time I was quite incapable of doing so. The insights themselves were not in words: they went much deeper than that. So I did not try to talk about them to anybody. But this meant that in some respects a disconnection developed between my outer life and my inner (rather as with the other things I was so obsessionally thinking about). My inner life was partly a cauldron of what I can see now as neuroses and pathological terrors – even what were not terrors were still obsessions. But little or none of this showed on the surface. I was reasonably good at coping with life and getting on with other people. No doubt I often seemed self-absorbed, but that is common, even normal, among adolescents. Perhaps one or two others caught hints of the highly charged goings-on inside me, but I do not think many did, and even they can have had no idea of their nature, extent, depth, power or intensity. I continued much of the time to be with companions at theatres and cinemas, sporting events and social occasions. I was hyper-communicative about everything else, always talking nineteen to the dozen, and being teased about it. An observer’s eye would have seen me as a social creature, actively bound up with several other people in many different activities. This disparity between inner and outer became normal to me, and has continued ever since. To this day I have an intense inner life that goes on all the time, and sometimes has a neurotic dimension to it; and yet I reveal very little of it to anyone else. I cannot talk about it to anyone because the words in which it would be possible to do so do not exist. But I continue to function well enough in working and social relationships – for instance, I have never taken a day off work because of it, and my work has always been done as it should be. However, it does make intimacy difficult for me. This fearsome inner world dominates much of my life, and I cannot help that, but there is no way in which any other human being could enter it.
Because I was already so full of terrors, as a young teenager, when the bombing of London started up again in 1944 I found it almost unmanageably frightening. This was in complete contrast to my insouciant enjoyment of air raids only four years earlier. I was offered a way out of this situation, but did not take it. Christ’s Hospital made arrangements for boys whose families lived in areas that were being bombed not to go home during the school holidays but to spend that time with other boys’ families in safer parts of the country. My mother wanted me join in the scheme, but I refused. The life I lived in London had become indispensable to me, and I could not, even at this price, bring myself to forgo it. I returned to London for every school holiday, bombing or no bombing. Nevertheless, I was frightened out of my wits by the V-1s. If I heard one coming and was alone in the flat I would get under the living-room table and crouch there in mortal terror, listening to the ever-approaching bomb and convinced that I was about to die. Most of the bombs exploded south of us, in central London, but you could never be sure they were going to – quite a few got as far as us and beyond; and I could always hear them coming. One seemed to cut out its engine immediately outside the window, and I thought it was about to plunge into our block of flats and blow me to bits, but it passed over.
The V-2s were even more frightening. Because rockets travelled faster than sound, you heard them coming after you heard them explode. That was ghostly as well as ghastly. There would be an almighty explosion, completely unexpected and out of the blue, and then you would hear the swoosh of the rocket as it approached through the sky. It chilled my blood each time I heard it – though the fact is, of course, that if you heard it you were all right. During the V-2 bombings I moved around central London half expecting to be snuffed out instantaneously. Once, just as I was stepping out into daylight from Oxford Circus underground station, there was one of these huge explosions frighteningly close, and for a moment I felt like turning round and going straight back underground and returning to Arnos Grove – but I did not, I stayed in the West End. And that is how I managed to carry on, combining extreme terror with an obstinate attachment to my pursuits.
But it meant I was in a fairly fraught state for most of the time when I was at home, and that must have aggravated the normal difficulties of adolescence. I was rubbing up against my parents in all the usual ways. In the rows that erupted they hurled at me the fact that I was incredibly lucky, free to come and go as I liked, generously provided by them with pocket money out of their three or four pay packets whenever I was at home. All this was true. But I was painfully conscious that the whole set-up was theirs, not mine, created by them, belonging to them, run by them; and that I had no alternative but to fit in; so I did not feel anything like as free as they said. I was powerless. And I hated Arnos Grove: the truth is I did not want to be there at all. As is usual for adolescents, I wanted to throw off my family’s influence on my attitudes and outlook, and establish my independence of thought and behaviour; so I opposed them and contradicted them unnecessarily. Inevitably, it was my father, whom I loved most of all, and whose influence on me had been so much greater than anyone else’s (and also, I could have added, so much more beneficial), that I felt most need to free myself from. So I started behaving badly towards him.
My relationships with the other close members of the family were not good. My mother disapproved of the fact that I had passed the school-leaving age without leaving school, and she saw me from now on as a layabout who should be earning his own living. I was constantly reminded by her of the fact that she and my father were standing on their own feet when they were my age, and this grated with me especially, because of the sense I already had of my lack of independence. Even so, I took the necessity for a good education for granted, and thought my mother was wrong about that. But then there was also my sister, bitterly resentful for opposite reasons. She was deeply jealous of the fact that I was getting a better education than she had had. One way and another, I was disapproved of by all of them.
By now I rarely had occasion to go to Hoxton any more. I was keeping up with the remaining members of my family during the school holidays by visiting them on Sundays at their homes in Southgate. Often I would spend the first couple of hours of the afternoon with my grandparents and their daughter Hilda – she being my maiden aunt and godmother – and then call in on the Petts, my aunt Peggy and her husband Bill. The two households received me very differently. At the first my grandparents and Hilda would ply me with questions about my life at school, and be interested in the
answers. Then they would ask what I was doing now, during the holidays, and be interested in that too. The Petts, on the other hand, took the view – which I heard Bill formulate openly – that to tell somebody something is to exert a kind of dominance over him, while to be told something is to be subjected to the other person’s dominance. So they tried to avoid being told anything. The example Bill cited when he urged this course of action on me was: ‘You don’t want to just sit there saying nothing while he tells you all about the wonderful holiday he’s just had: you tell him about your holiday.’ They applied this principle to me. As soon as I started telling them anything about what I was doing, Bill would interrupt and insist on telling me what they were doing. He was even given to telling me what people unknown to me were doing. ‘Oh, I know,’ he would interrupt. ‘Our friends the So-and-so’s have a son at Highgate, which is just like Christ’s Hospital, and he …’ So instead of sharing my life with them, which is what I was longing to do, I would find myself sitting there while they told me about the doings of some total stranger. Peggy’s practice was even odder. She would tell me what I myself was doing. ‘Oh, I know,’ she would interrupt. ‘I can just imagine you sitting there and …’ Given that she knew nothing about what I was telling her, her resourcefulness in keeping up a flow of uninterrogative talk was a phenomenon. ‘You must be thinking … What you’re bound to want is … Anyone in your circumstances would naturally … Believe me, I fully understand how …’ and so it would go on. And on. And on. There was something mad about it. I spent hour after hour, year in and year out, listening to a lot of rubbish about my own life from people who knew almost nothing about it and were refusing to let me tell them.
Peggy continued this practice for almost, but not quite, the rest of her life, which was another half-century or more. When I joined the army, she told me what life was like in the army; and when I went to Oxford, she told me about life at Oxford; and so on, with every succeeding stage, until she was in her eighties and I in my sixties. Only in the last few years of her life, before she died at the age of ninety-two, did she ask me questions and listen to the answers. Until then, however determinedly I tried to share anything with her, she interrupted with undiminished determination and stopped me. It was pathetic, of course, and exasperating, but also tragic in its way, because it meant that she and Bill remained almost entirely ignorant of my life. Because they would never allow themselves to be told anything, they never knew anything. After a few years of this I had become a stranger to them. The only consolation was that it was what they wanted, and indeed were insisting on. They behaved like it to other people too. Decades later, when they found themselves in New York on a visit to my sister, the person who tried showing them round found that while he was pointing out the spectacular sights of Manhattan they were not looking or listening at all, but were deep in conversation with one another about their life in Southgate.
Because my family was so disunited the only people we knew in common were one another. Apart from that we each had our own friends, and our own lives, and went our own ways. There were no other families that we visited together, or who visited us. However, my bit of the family would go out quite often together, as indeed we always had, to places of public entertainment – sometimes without my mother, though only at her insistence. Joan got a job in Frith Street, Soho, and from then on the rest of us would meet her in one of the Soho restaurants called Fava, and have dinner before going on to a performance. I was still not allowed to choose freely from the menu in any public eating place – my father always read out to me a choice from the cheapest dishes – and at Fava’s my choice was between two, each of which cost four shillings and sixpence. One of these was Vitello Milanese, a veal escalope with spaghetti, and I loved that. We never had veal at home, or spaghetti, so I ordered it every time we went to Fava’s, and never got tired of it. Occasionally, at another table, we would see Tony Turner, the Hyde Park orator, with his friends, but we never spoke to him. Years later, when I got to know him, he told me that Fava’s had remained his favourite restaurant even after he read in a newspaper that it had been prosecuted for selling horse meat. For years, well into my twenties, it was the Soho restaurant I preferred to all others; and in my memories of those years it figures almost as a character in its own right.
Joan’s new job was a turning point in her life, and brought new interests into mine. It was with a printing firm, the Shenval Press, which acted as a publisher in the way printers in the eighteenth century had also been publishers. She was secretary to its boss and owner, James Shand, known to everyone as Hamish. He was intensely interested in everything to do with design, starting with the typefaces of his own printing; and among other things he published a quarterly journal concerned with the relationship between technical design and the arts, whether in industry, architecture, interior decoration, furniture, or popular art such as posters and advertising. The journal was called Art and Technics (for which the in-house nickname was Tarts and Technics). He also published a journal about printing. Joan brought these home, and talked about her work. And it came to me as a new kind of education.
I had taken the physical objects in my environment for granted, just as they were: the furniture, the books, everything from the vacuum cleaner to the telephone; also public objects such as tube stations and trains. Now I realised that for each and every one of them a host of conscious decisions had been taken by individuals before they were able to come into existence, not just the decision that they should be produced but what their design was to be, what material they were to be made of, how big they were to be, and so on down to the smallest detail. It could never have started out with the decision to produce this vacuum cleaner or this telephone, because each was itself the outcome of multiple choices. Each time I picked up a book, there was someone who had consciously decided not just to publish it but what format it was to have, what typeface, what quality and thickness of paper, what materials in the binding, what colours in the jacket. Everything had been decided and designed. And in every case someone was responsible, if only by default. I looked at things in a new way, down to each box of matches, and the matches in the box. It was a revelation.
I had a honeymoon period with this, and enjoyed it with all the excitement of discovery. I am not primarily a visual person, and I do not respond to visual experiences with anything like the same depth as I do to music and words. There was to come a time when I had become used to seeing things in terms of their design, and the bloom and freshness of the experience faded. But I never went back to taking the look of everything for granted. The way I saw things had been permanently changed.
While Joan was with the Shenval Press it published a magazine called Ballet, and with this she was in her element. She was, so to speak, secretary to the magazine, so the editor and contributors were continually in and out of her office. She found herself moving deeper into a world she already knew and loved. The venture was successful, so the firm launched a sister publication called Opera. This has since become the international house magazine of the opera world, and is thriving today. I have a friend, Richard Law, who contributed to the first issue and is still writing for it more than half a century later; and I have written for it myself, many times.
My sister, though living permanently with our parents – not just for a few weeks at a time, like me – was developing a distinctive life of her own. But my parents also had their separate lives. Whether there was more to my mother’s than met the eye I doubt, but my father may have been having an affair during those years – I almost find myself hoping so, for his sake. If he was, it may well have been with someone of whose existence I was ignorant. But there is a woman I think it might have been. She had been a colleague of his in Civil Defence, and I had met her when I visited him at his depot – she was always around when I was there, and I found her unusually likeable. She was sexy and warm, and seemed to have a certain softness for my father, and also to show more than a normal interest in me. I must have known her n
ame at that time, but all I can remember now is her nickname, Speedy.
A big change that occurred in my life during this period was that I started getting vacation jobs. Although it was my father who gave me my pocket money it was my mother who insisted that I get a job during the school holidays. How I found the job I no longer remember, but I became a temporary junior clerk in the income tax office in Tottenham. The people there wanted me to start work on a Saturday morning – all offices worked on Saturday mornings in those days, but it was the time people most wanted to take off, which is why they wanted me there then. On my first day I was instructed to man the enquiries counter and deal with the public – who, they said, arrived in maximum numbers on Saturdays. When I protested that I would not know the answers to any of their questions I was told that this did not matter. ‘The important thing is to send them away happy. You talk nicely, and you’ve got good manners, so you can do it. Just tell them that we know all about their problem, and are dealing with it, and that they’ll hear from us very soon. Take a note of their name, and let us have it, and we’ll then deal with it. There’s nothing anyone can do across the counter anyway. If there’s anyone who won’t take this from you, fetch Mr So-and-so, and he’ll deal with them. But you’ll find you’ll be all right.’ And I was. I had no knowledge of tax matters whatsoever, none at all, and to begin with no knowledge of the workings of the office either, but none of this made any difference. And the fact that I was only a teenager, which I expected in itself to annoy the people who came with their problems, appeared not to matter. I was tall, and seemed well educated; and in those days these things in themselves were enough to evoke respect. The whole experience was an eye-opener, if a saddening one. I soon learnt how the office worked, and absorbed some of the basic lessons about how bureaucracy operated at its interface with the public. Most of the individuals who passed their lives in that office were decent, well-intentioned people with a normal sense of fairness; but at the same time they were little people: unimaginative, blinkered, governed by the rule-book, and inclined to laziness. Above all they were fearful for their jobs, and therefore terrified of putting a foot wrong. What governed their behaviour more than any other consideration was fear of doing something that would open them to serious criticism from their colleagues or superiors.