Making the Most of It Read online

  making the most of it

  Also by Bryan Magee

  Crucifixion and Other Poems

  Go West, Young Man

  To Live in Danger

  The New Radicalism

  The Democratic Revolution

  Towards 2000: The World We Make

  Aspects of Wagner

  One in Twenty: A Study of Homosexuality in Men and Women

  The Television Interviewer

  Modern British Philosophy

  Popper

  Facing Death: A Novel

  Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy

  (later Talking Philosophy: Dialogues with Fifteen Leading Philosophers)

  On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan

  (later Sight Unseen)

  The Philosophy of Schopenhauer

  Confessions of a Philosopher

  The Story of Philosophy: The Essential Guide to the History of Western Philosophy

  The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy

  Wagner and Philosophy

  Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood

  Growing up in a War

  Ultimate Questions

  making the most of it

  Bryan Magee

  © Bryan Magee 2018

  The right of Bryan Magee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Independently published by Studio 28

  ISBN 9781980636137

  Please visit

  www.curtisbrown.co.uk/bryan-magee

  for further information

  Contents

  Book One: My Oxford

  1 Overview

  2 Caroline

  3 The Oxford Union

  4 Friends

  5 Writers

  6 Colleges

  7 Vacations

  8 My Last Year

  9 Going Down

  Book Two: The Turning Point

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Book Three:

  My Second Go at Life

  1 Guinness is Good for You

  2 Running for Parliament

  3 Young Man in London

  4 Starting in Television

  5 Cutting Free

  6 Becoming a Member

  of Parliament

  7 About the House

  8 My Forties

  9 Becoming a Full-Time Author

  Book One

  My Oxford

  to

  Robin Burke, Robin Schur

  and Robin Hallsmith

  with love

  to you all

  1

  Overview

  The Oxford I went up to in 1949 was different from its normal self. During the Second World War, 1939-45, young men of university age were nearly all in the armed services; and most of those were not released immediately when the war ended. British forces continued to occupy Germany and Austria for several years, and were committed in other parts of the world too, so compulsory call-up at eighteen continued well into the 1950s. Meanwhile the post-war Labour Government, having made full employment its priority, was careful not to flood the labour market by demobilizing too many servicemen at any one time. So the release of those who had fought in the war was phased out over a couple of years. The first to be let go were older men with families, and those who had jobs waiting for them, or skills that were in demand. Younger men without any of these, having also served less time than the older ones, were made to wait.

  So for some years after the war, Oxford was taking in ex-servicemen who could be any age up to about twenty-four when they arrived. This meant that undergraduates in their third or fourth years could be twenty-seven or twenty-eight. The President of the Union in my first summer term, Robin Day, was twenty-six, and had been in the army in Africa during the war. This was typical. Most students had served overseas, and many had seen actual fighting. So they were exceptionally mature to be students. The whole atmosphere of the university was transformed by them. Many of the time-honoured rules and regulations, such as students not being allowed to go into pubs, collapsed for ever. Their relationships with their tutors were close to being on an equal footing – one or two of the third-year men were older than their tutors. Everything became more open and free, and it was a strangely optimistic time. The war, after years of struggle, and millions of dead on both sides, had been won. The undergraduates felt they were survivors, and wanted to build a new life for themselves in a world which they hoped to make a better one. There was a grown-up idealism among them, not the callow idealism of youth but one edged with practicality, and charged by experience of war.

  Because the university needed to find places for students of so many different ages it was not able to offer them to boys straight out of school. Girls were in a different situation. There being no call-up for them, they went straight from school to university. Boys, however, even though the war was over, had to join the armed forces at eighteen and do up to two years of military service. Only in special circumstances would colleges take them otherwise. And this was the position I found myself in, typical of my student generation: I had won an open scholarship from school to Oxford, but my college would not accept me until after I had completed military service.

  I have told elsewhere (in Growing Up In A War) how, when I joined the army, I was sent unexpectedly into the Intelligence Corps. They trained me at the School of Military Intelligence, and sent me to Austria’s frontier with Slovenia, which was then part of Yugoslavia. My job was to interrogate illegal frontier-crossers, some of whom were Yugoslav secret agents. For an eighteen-year-old it was heady stuff. In my late twenties I wrote a novel set in that world, called To Live In Danger. Its background is entirely authentic, though its plot and characters are fictitious. When I was nineteen I was shifted to my local headquarters in Graz (the second city in Austria after Vienna) to interrogate newly returned Austrian prisoners of war from Soviet Russia. A huge number of Germans and Austrians were still being held there, more than four years after the war had ended. I found the work fascinating – and my out-of-hours life was almost as colourful and interesting. I had a girlfriend to whom I was devoted. My social life with colleagues of my own age was more uninhibited than it would have been in England. We were under the command of older men, but they allowed us an amazing degree of latitude, socially as well as professionally. So long as we did our jobs well, and did not cause them embarrassment otherwise, they did not care what we did. So we lived with great personal freedom. And then, of course, there were the attractions of Graz itself. Of particular interest to me was its opera house, which I went to frequently. (I saw my first Tannhäuser there, and my second Tristan). I spent my leaves in Vienna, whose opera company was then going through a golden age which remains a legend even today, and which I visited almost every night regardless of what they were performing.

  It was from this life that I went up to Oxford as an undergraduate. There was something known as a Class B Release that soldiers with places earmarked for them at universities applied for: if you got one, it meant you left the army early to catch the beginning of an academic year instead of having to be demobilized in mid-year and then hang around for several months. I got one of these, as did most of my colleagues, and that meant that from my first day at Oxford I had friends in several colleges. (The University of Oxford is a federation of many self-governin
g colleges – more than two dozen then, more than three dozen now.) One acquaintance, a music-lover working with the Intelligence Corps in Vienna, enjoyed his life there so much, gorging on opera at a level of performance not to be found anywhere else at that time, that he deliberately did not apply for a Class B Release, and spent a whole extra year there before joining us in Oxford. None of the rest of us – to my surprise, now that I look back on it – thought of doing that.

  For many of us, Oxford was a let-down at first. It was so much less exciting than the life we had left in order to go there. No doubt our expectations were unrealistic. Mine certainly were. I had imagined Oxford to be full of people who were passionately interested in ideas, perhaps especially political ideas; and also in the arts, especially literature. I had expected to find myself surrounded by such people, either arguing formidably or chattering amusingly into the small hours night after night, floating down rivers of wonderful talk. I had, in other words, imbibed the romantic image of Oxford peddled in novels, plays and films, and perhaps been encouraged in it by one or two personal acquaintances. The reality was otherwise. Most people at Oxford were not particularly interested in ideas, nor in politics; nor did they have any particular interest in the arts. This was as true of the dons as it was of the undergraduates. There were plenty of parties, though, and for a freshman these were the most enjoyable thing that Oxford had to offer. But I cannot say that the conversations at them were special: drink and girls were what parties were chiefly about. I took as much advantage as I could of both, and derived a lot of enjoyment from them. But my life as a whole was not what I had expected Oxford to be.

  My home town was London, and I had grown up accustomed not only to the scale, diversity and vivacity of a capital city but also to its standards. I loved Vienna – and Paris, which I had got to know when I was a boarder at the Lycée Hôche in Versailles in 1947. In all these cities I had feasted on music. Of course, and inevitably, there was no counterpart to them in Oxford. How could there be? I hankered for London, and kept on going there, and also carried on nostalgic correspondences with now-distant friends in Austria and France, half wishing I were still in those places. It was a year or more before Oxford drew me into itself. During that time my ties elsewhere were almost as strong. I would go up to London to take part in events of which Oxford remained oblivious. For example, in my first year I went to the world premiere of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs at the Albert Hall (sung by Kirsten Flagstad and conducted by Furtwängler). Even afterwards I knew of no one in Oxford who had been there – some were, no doubt, but I never heard it mentioned. That was typical of Oxford as I perceived it when I first went there: provincial, out of the mainstream of life, and uncaring that this was so.

  One or two undergraduates I knew decided for reasons such as these that Oxford was not for them, and chose to leave at the end of their first year. I never contemplated doing that – I would not have known where to go, or what to do with myself. But I did make a conscious decision at that point that in the hope of getting more out of Oxford I would put more in to it. In my second year I threw myself into Oxford life in a new way, with an active desire to get everything out of it that I could.

  A contributory reason for my alienation had been that my college had not allowed me to study the subject of my choice. I had come up on a history scholarship, but wanted to change to music, and the college would not let me. So by my third term I found myself deep in the study of medieval English constitutional documents, and not getting enough out of them to stave off boredom. I made a milestone decision. I would study only things I found rewarding. Those parts of the history syllabus that interested me I would tuck into with relish, but the rest I would deliberately let go, and would read instead whatever else interested me. This would, I thought, maximize (given my circumstances) the educational value to me of the work I did, and would keep me interested in what I was doing. Inevitably, it would mean that when my final exams came I would not do well in those papers for which I had skipped the work; but I had no intention of becoming an academic, and thought that the class of degree I would get could make no difference to my life. There was a good deal of history that I found richly nourishing. For my special subject I chose the Italian Renaissance, and for my special period of international history the years 1871-1939, and my studies in those were to become a valued and lifelong possession. But I let a lot of the rest just go.

  Once I had made these decisions I felt liberated, and was able to enjoy Oxford. There were some things, of course, that I had enjoyed from the beginning – party life for one, which I slipped into as a duck into water. Oxford’s best hotel, the Randolph, had a huge bar in those days, and if I met a man at a party whom I found simpatico I would arrange to meet him at the Randolph. It was in every way the best drinking hole for undergraduates. A world of its own had developed there that was like a perpetually on-going party in itself. Most of the regulars knew one another, and I remained in touch with them throughout my years at Oxford, alongside other and very different activities, and the other worlds I moved in. Among its various delights it was a magnet for attractive women who were otherwise alone in Oxford. There were families in British colonies, and other English enclaves abroad where ‘acceptable’ husbands were thin on the ground, who sent their grown-up daughters to Oxford for a couple of years, ostensibly to study at one of the private language schools, or to train as secretaries or nurses, but in fact in the hope of finding a young man with good prospects. We thought of these girls as camp followers. They came from all over the world, and included some of the most likeable and interesting people I knew at Oxford. They tended to latch on to the more outstanding of the undergraduates, who would introduce them around, so they would often pass from one to another: typically they would be hanging from the arm of a young man who was himself a person admired by the rest of us. They were an invaluable part of the Oxford scene, and one or two remained my friends for ever after.

  Undergraduates in those days were especially in need of mature girlfriends. As ex-soldiers we were used to having sex lives, but not many of the female undergraduates straight from school were ready to join us in that, at least not immediately. In any case there were far fewer women than men: the colleges were all monosexual, and only five of them out of twenty-something were for women. So we had to find our partners elsewhere, at least to begin with. Our biggest source of supply was the hospitals. In addition to its teaching hospital, Oxford had several others, so the nurse population was helpfully large; and nurses, being used to coping with people’s bodies and bodily functions, tended to make good sexual partners in those inhibited days. Then there were the language and secretarial schools, the former full of enterprising foreign girls who were alone, far from home. Together, they equalled our needs – though inevitably this had the effect of leaving out most of the female undergraduates from that side of our lives, until such time as they chose to join us – which, during the course of their three or four years at the university, large numbers did, including, I think, most of the most interesting ones. The outcome of all this was that first and second year men usually had extra-mural girlfriends, whereas third and fourth year men were often involved with female undergraduates.

  Another thing that I enjoyed from the beginning at Oxford was the opportunity to see and hear, in the flesh, public figures in whose work I was already interested, especially writers and politicians. Undergraduate life was teeming with clubs and societies, organized by the students themselves around every imaginable one of their interests and pursuits, many of them not at all intellectual, some arcane; and these societies would hold meetings which they invited well-known figures from outside to come and address. During term there would be several such meetings every evening in different parts of the university. Most would be of little interest to me, but there were some that interested me very much. I could be one of a group listening to, say, a well-known poet or novelist talking about his work, and I could then question him. There was always a coffee
break at these meetings, and if I had a question I wanted to pursue I could talk to the speaker over coffee, or after the meeting. Before, I had always thought of such people as inhabiting a different world from me. Once, when I was younger, my sister Joan had seen T. S. Eliot sitting in the back of a taxi stuck in traffic in Soho; and I had been awe-stricken at the very thought. How incredible, how unimaginably marvellous, to see T. S. Eliot. It bordered on the impossible, I imagined, because such people lived in a different dimension from the rest of us. Their real habitation was not ‘here’ at all, but on some other plane. Well, in Oxford, we were all on the same plane. And I found it fascinating to meet them and talk to them, above all about their work.

  Like quite a few students, I joined all the main political clubs so that I could see and hear the country’s leading politicians in all parties, and put questions to them. For the first time I became used to thinking of them as fellow human-beings, people I could meet and talk with. I know now from long experience that most people never think of them in that way. But what began for me at Oxford was later to become everyday experience. After leaving university I earned my living chiefly in television, and then became a Member of Parliament, and in both capacities I was meeting well-known people all the time. So, inevitably, I came to take it for granted. However, at Oxford I did not as yet take it for granted, and found it new and exciting. By the end of my fourth year I had had one-to-one conversations with a considerable number of poets, novelists, Cabinet Ministers and the rest, and was familiar with the experience. Cumulatively, it made up part of my education that I would never have got anywhere other than in Oxford. (Not even in Cambridge: Oxford is so much easier to visit from London that visitors are more willing to go there; and its Union operates on a higher level.)