The Magus

by John Fowles

It was the world before the machine, almost before man, and what small events happened – the passage of a shrike, the discovery of a new path, a glimpse of a distant caïque far below – took on an unaccountable significance, as if they were isolated, framed, magnified by solitude. It was the least eerie, the most un-Nordic solitude in the world. Fear had never touched the island. If it was haunted, it was by nymphs, not monsters.

Each in his little bed conceived of islands … Where love was innocent, being far from cities.

I stared down at those careless, drunken scrawls; felt the immediacy of the man; and the terrible but necessary alienation of genius from ordinariness. A man who would touch you for ten francs, and go home and paint what would one day be worth ten million.

I wished there was someone beside me, an Alison, some friend, who could savour and share the living darkness, the stars, the terrace, the voice. But they would have had to pass through all those last months with me. The passion to exist: I forgave myself my failure to die.

That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.’

Knowing, willing, being wise, being good, education, information, classification, knowledge of all kinds, sensibility, sexuality, these things seemed superficial. I had no desire to state or define or analyse this interaction, I simply wished to constitute it – not even ‘wished to’ – I constituted it. I was volitionless. There was no meaning. Only being.

She stepped out of her jeans and her white pants. Then she reached up and snapped a dead cone off one of the arbour branches and held it out to me. I watched her run nakedly through the long grass to the pool, try the water, groan. Then she waded forwards and swanned in with a scream. The water was jade-green, melted snow, and it made my heart jolt with shock when I plunged beside her. And yet it was beautiful, the shadow of the trees, the sunlight on the glade, the white roar of the little fall, the iciness, the solitude, the laughing, the nakedness; moments one knows only death will obliterate.

‘I am suggesting nothing. There was no connection between the events. No connection is possible. Or rather, I am the connection, I am whatever meaning the coincidence has.’

There is something erotic in all collusion. Perhaps I should have known a more real guilt and remembered a more deeply hidden pair of eyes in the forest of my unconscious; perhaps I did know them, for all my outward oblivion, and found an extra relish still.

He thought the girls and I were green, innocents; but we could outperfidy his perfidy, and precisely because we were English: born with masks and bred to lie.

It seemed, in some peculiar way, foolish to be angry about the way the thing had been done when the staggering fact was that it had been done at all.

It was as if at this moment, when I most wanted to be clean, I had fallen into the deepest filth; most free for the future yet most chained to the past.

As something too small to mourn; the very word was archaic and superstitious, of the age of Browne, or Hervey; yet Donne was right, her death detracted, would for ever detract, from my own life. Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, or for myself, because only extraverts cry twice; but I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.

The fear I felt was the same old fear; not of the appearance, but of the reason behind the appearance. It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.

I remembered those moments of relief at Monemvasia and on the ship coming back to Phraxos, moments when the most ordinary things seemed beautiful and lovable – possessors of a magnificent quotidianeity. I could have found that in Alison. Her special genius, or uniqueness, was her normality, her reality, her predictability; her crystal core of non-betrayal; her attachment to all that Lily was not.

IF ROME, A city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse. I had forgotten the innumerability of the place, its ugliness, its termite density after the sparsities of the Aegean. It was like mud after diamonds, dank undergrowth after sunlit marble; and as the airline bus crawled on its way through that endless suburb that lies between Northolt and Kensington I wondered why anyone should, or could, ever return of his own free will to such a landscape, such a society, such a climate. Flatulent white clouds drifted listlessly in a grey-blue sky; and I could hear people saying ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’

‘Are you daring to preach to me, Mrs de Seitas?’ ‘Are you daring to pretend that you do not need the sermon?’