The Magus, A Revised Version Read Free

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