Growing Up In a War

by Bryan Magee

  Working on the counter was the most interesting job I was given. Most of the others were mechanical and mindless, like altering with a pen a single digit on each of a pile of out-of-date printed forms, so that they could go on being used – there was no office machinery except for typewriters and telephones. This was an introduction to the realities of life for the lowliest of the people who worked in offices. There were still millions of people doing jobs like that. When I came across Bernard Shaw’s remark that, of all the damnable wastages of human life, clerking was the worst, I knew what he was talking about. (So did he. It was an abyss into which many writers, trapped in a way that I was not, had stared.)

  What made it bearable was the presence in the office of another temp of my own age, and a congenial one, Ken Connor. He was a local grammar-school boy on the way to becoming an art student. We were often set to the same task in an otherwise empty room, so we spent whole days in animated talk. He loved music, and went to concerts, so we sometimes went off together in the evenings. I also visited his family. His mother was intelligent but authoritarian, formidably harsh-tongued, and his father a bus-driver. Father was haunted by the fact that someone had committed suicide by throwing himself under his bus. His inability to get this out of his mind communicated itself to me, and in his presence I felt the touch of a finger of inconsolable yet resentful melancholy. Ken and I remained friends for a number of years. When my first book was published – a volume of embarrassing poems written in my teens – it was he who designed the jacket. His cover is better than my poems, and is now what makes the book worth having.

  It was in my mid-teens that I started to write poetry. My conscious mind had little to do with the process. The poems came to me spontaneously, under some sort of pressure from within, and the only self-aware thing I did was write them down and punctuate them, and occasionally polish one of them up a bit by altering a word here or there to remove an obvious fault. I would always know when a poem was on the way: I would be overcome by a broody, heavy, full, drowsy feeling that I experienced at no other time. This would cause me to withdraw into myself, and then the poem would push its way into my mind. In that sense it was authentic poetry, even if, at the same time, not very good. It is extraordinary that all this versification, with its rhyming, scansion, division into stanzas and the rest of it, can happen unconsciously, but it does. And the fact that the poems are not very good makes it more rather than less surprising. The nearest thing to it I can think of is the tightly plotted structure of some of my dreams, with their intricate organisation and vivid detail, which are also creating themselves spontaneously and involuntarily in an unconscious mind.

  It was nearly always in London that I wrote my poems, not at school, because only at home could I find the necessary solitude for uninterrupted parturition – a paradoxical benefit to get from being in London. Altogether, the richness of my London life was extraordinary. In some ways I think of it as the nodal point of my whole development as a human being.

  However, and of course, although being in London was so special for me, it was not special to the other members of my family, who lived there all the time. They had a perfectly normal need to get away from it for holidays, sometimes when I was with them. By this time they had taken to going away separately, my mother usually to Bristol. My sister would take charge of the flat while Mother was away, and go off with her friends at another time (perhaps to Stratford-upon-Avon to see some plays). There was one summer – I think it was immediately after the end of the war in Europe – when my mother, sister and I went for a holiday in Bournemouth. I enjoyed it. I have always liked resorts, for the same reason as I have always liked circuses and pantomimes: they are showbiz at its most basic, and are fun. The one special memory I retain is hearing a young Australian pianist called Noel Mewton-Wood play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra. He was altogether exceptional, and became internationally recognised as such. But he committed suicide while still very young, over a homosexual love affair.

  I was still in London with my parents at the end of that summer when the war against Japan came to an end, and with it the Second World War. It happened precipitately, because of the dropping of the two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The public had been given no hint of the existence of these weapons, and we were all expecting the war to go on for another year or two. I was as astounded as everyone else. But I had done enough physics and higher mathematics to understand the popular-science explanations that some of the newspapers and magazines were giving, and it was now a question of me explaining things to my father rather than the other way round. It was obvious to everyone that a new historical era had opened. If ever the term ‘cataclysmic change’ had a literal meaning, it was now. No other public event in my lifetime has imposed with such iron certitude the instant feeling that the world would never be the same again. These astonishing weapons had suddenly, out of the blue, ended the war, and we were all glad of that – we had been expecting tens of thousands more deaths on our own side, which did not now occur. But there had already been two world wars in quick succession, and if there should ever be another, these weapons would be what the combatants would start with. To us, who had just lived through six years of world war, and found the outbreak of another easy to envisage, the prospect was ungraspable. But our very inability to imagine it froze our blood. It was instantly clear that the need to avoid atomic war would exercise an altogether new kind of dominance over world politics.

  Meanwhile there was uncontrollable joy that the Second World War had ended, and without the terrible further casualties on our side that we had been steeled for. On VJ Day my family felt an overwhelming need to celebrate with other people, just to go out and do something – shout, sing, laugh, dance about, punch the air, we did not know what or where. Guided by our atavistic Londoners’ intuition we made our way to Trafalgar Square, where we found tens of thousands of other people who felt the same way. What we did with the time we spent there was bizarre – stroll around arm in arm with total strangers, exchange garments with them, hug people, do silly little dances with them, fall about in a lot of physical joking, shriek with laughter, sing songs, yell with bliss, work off our energy, make ourselves tired. The grown-ups around us went in for endless kissing, and anyone of either sex in a uniform was smothered with embraces. According to later analysis this scene was a prelude to massively profligate copulation between total strangers. Hundreds of new human beings must have been conceived that night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  UNTIL I WENT to Oxford I had little idea of rational thought as anything different from the sort of activity you engaged in when you read a novel, or saw a play, or argued about politics. These things engaged the whole of you, part of which was your mind. But analytic thinking as itself the mode of engagement – or the primary one, the cutting edge, and a disciplined activity – was something I did not properly understand until I found myself being trained in it. Then I discovered that, used as an additional tool, it increased my understanding of everything, and usually by an enormous amount. I have valued it exceedingly – and done a great deal of it – ever since. However, the academics who trained me in it seemed to imagine that in itself it constituted the whole and sole correct approach, and this was a view that impoverished their understanding. So a crucial distinction needs to be made between the defectiveness of the academic approach when allowed to be the only one, and the immensely valuable enrichment it can bring to a fuller understanding when that is rooted at deeper levels.

  For me the earliest stirrings of this sort of thinking occurred at Christ’s Hospital, not in a classroom but in the school library. If I visit that library now, my spirit soars as I walk in, because this was where my mind awoke. In classrooms I was reacting, responding to instruction, doing what teachers required me to do; but browsing at liberty in the library I was pursuing my own interests, going spontaneously where curiosity led, and this was so much more enlightening. A lot of th
e time I followed my nose and grazed, ruminated, then wandered off to the next grazing point. Frequently I came across things by accident, as when a book just happened to stand next to another on the shelf, and my eye was caught by the colour of its binding. It gave me deep inner happiness to spend a Sunday afternoon browsing like this, with the library to myself; and I would often drop in there for shorter periods on other days.

  The first book I read there that made a lasting impact on me was called The Bible of the World. It consisted, it said, of the essential passages in the scriptures of each of the world’s main religions. What impinged on me most was the first section, consisting of Hindu scriptures. Some of the things it said were things I had thought but did not know anyone else had. Chief of these was that what actually existed was, in itself, something it was impossible to make any direct contact with, and therefore impossible to imagine. The Hindu scriptures said that all you ever had were images. These, being images, were insubstantial and ephemeral. Only what was behind them was real and lasting. But this, being not image, could never be in a mind. I was astonished that this thought had been thought thousands of years ago, and written down in what were now, it would seem, classic writings. It gave me reassurance. It was my first realisation that mine was not an oddball view, slightly mad, but a solidly based approach that was shared by large numbers of people. This took me out of the isolation I had felt myself to be in and made me feel part of something wider. But these Hindu writings went on to give an explanation that had not occurred to me. The lasting reality behind the images, they said, did not consist of what were somehow the same things only in a different, perhaps invisible, form: the real mountain, the real tree, the real house. There was just one big, unimaginable something. All real reality was one, and this was veiled from us by the itemised world of experience. It was only in the world of experience that separate items existed. We ourselves, individually, had emerged from the single oneness of everything at our conception, and would return to it when we died. In between, our lives were a sort of aberration, like amputations, some kind of mistake, or a sort of delusion.

  I did not know what to make of this. Even on its own showing we could not know if it were true, I thought. Nor could we know if it was untrue. I could see no reason for rejecting it, but felt no inclination to believe it either. I was passionately attached to the life that it told me was illusory, in fact I held it more dear than anything else; but I knew only too well that it was ephemeral; so I had to concede that it could not, in itself, be lasting reality. I was left agnostic on the question of how, if at all, this life and what was not this life were related. Even so, what had spoken powerfully to me was the fact of the distinction: the fact that an uncrossable gulf exists between this world of ours and whatever else there is, such that from within this world we cannot get much conception of the rest. There is a sense in which I have been trying ever since to fight my way out of this impasse, but although such efforts have enriched my understanding of the problem, they have not carried me as far as a solution. Wittgenstein maintained that anyone who penetrated the problem to the bottom would find that it evaporated, and that there was, properly understood, not really a problem at all; but I am as sure as I can be of anything that this is wrong. The more one truly understands the problem the more substantial it becomes, and the more baffling and frustrating. It is the fundamental problem of experience, and of all human existence.

  I suppose this must have been the first time I found myself reading about what could be called philosophical problems. I also came across two books by Nikolai Berdyaev, an actual philosopher, an exiled Russian who at that time was alive and publishing new work. These books appealed to me even though I did not understand them. They were very Russian, I thought, and although they were socialist they were anti-communist, mystical, even a bit religiose. It is possible that if I read them today I would find them mushy, but at that time I found them elusively moving – moving in a way I would not have expected writing about ideas to be.

  The experience of finding that something was interesting even though I did not understand it was one I had with a lot of my reading, and was at its most intense with contemporary poetry. I discovered modern poetry because of the thinness of the volumes. When my eye first fell on them on the shelves I was startled to see volumes that were so big in format, with stiff covers, yet had so few pages. I would not have expected them to be published as books at all, but as pamphlets. I took some of these thinnies down and found that they contained poems, although it was not poetry as I had encountered it, nor had I heard of any of the poets. Poem after poem was unintelligible, yet tantalising. I re-read those that tantalised me most, then read them again – and again. Parts lodged in my mind, and I would find myself saying them over to myself at other times, especially in bed at night – still not understanding them. Why were they so interesting? It was as if these poems were enjoying a joke at my expense by playing with my curiosity, and there was something playful in my response to them, as someone might feel who was labouring at difficult but witty crossword puzzles. I became addicted. And the more I understood the poems, the more seriously I found myself taking them, until I grew into a fully fledged devotee of what was then contemporary poetry. One of the unknown writers stood out above the others, T.S. Eliot; but W.H. Auden was jolly good, and there were people called C. Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice. All of them were not only alive but in the prime of their lives – Eliot was in his fifties, Auden not yet forty – and producing new work. This fact itself excited me – it was all happening now. For years after that I marinaded in the writings of these poets, trying out new ones and occasionally adding another to the central canon, the chief of these being Dylan Thomas. That kind of poetry played a more important part in my inner life than any other sort of writing for a considerable period. The nature of the poems I wrote myself was changed by it, and from having been an old-fashioned romantic I became a modern.

  Because this poetry meant so much to me I started digging around in its references – because Yeats was so dear to Auden I read Yeats; and because Hardy meant so much to Dylan Thomas I read Hardy. I read Dante in translation because Eliot treated him with such deference. I also started reading criticism of the writers I most enjoyed. My discoveries spread outwards all the time. I became an excited tracker-down and looker-up of things from one book to another, and a user of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and dictionaries of quotations. When I found the names of the same contemporary novelists cropping up again and again I dug their books out of the library and found myself reading E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham – also D.H. Lawrence, who was the recently dead writer most often referred to. I read all Forster’s novels while still at school.

  In all this I felt an involvement and enthusiasm quite different in kind from anything I felt in classrooms, where we pursued no such matters. I talked about it excitedly to my friends, but most of these were not especially interested. Many thought it all a bit arty-farty. So in this respect, at least, I found myself again in a world of my own.

  The feeling that I myself was a writer in the making began to grow in strength and confidence. I started to publish poetry in school magazines, indeed to think of myself as a future poet, and perhaps a novelist too. At no time did it enter my head to think of such things as connected with classwork, or having anything to do with school. I saw writers as being different sorts of people from academics. Real writing, it seemed to me, was creative writing – poetry, plays, novels, short stories – and people who wrote other things did so because they could not manage the real thing. Biographers, historians and the rest were in this sense failed writers, usually novelists manqué.