The Magus

by John Fowles

stored away that plural; one day I would mimic it to someone.

turned, apparently drying her loins and watching herself in the mirror at the same time. I was remembering Alison, Alison wandering about the flat naked, singing, like a child. It was an unforgettable painting; it set a dense golden halo of light round the most trivial of moments, so that the moment, and all such moments, could never be completely trivial again.

did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.’

Calculating frankness is very different from the spontaneous variety; there was some fatal extra dimension

But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

Love is the mystery between two people, not the identity.

had always believed, and not only out of cynicism, that a man and a woman could tell in the first ten minutes whether they wanted to go to bed together; and that the time that passed after those first ten minutes represented a tax, which might be worth paying if the article promised to be really enjoyable, but which nine times out of ten became rapidly excessive.

Her mistaking that for love, her not seeing that love was something other … the mystery of withdrawal, reserve, walking away through the trees, turning the mouth away at the last moment. On Parnassus of all mountains,

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.

leaning on one hand, dimpled then grave; a child of sixteen, not a girl of twenty-four; but because I was seeing through all the ugly, the unpoetic accretions of modern life to the naked real self of her – a vision of her as naked in that way as she was in body; Eve glimpsed again through ten thousand generations.

‘I haven’t had syphilis. It’s all a lie.’ She gave me an intense look, then sank back on the grass. ‘Oh Nicholas.’ ‘I want to tell you –’ ‘Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.’ And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been far wiser.

Love is pretending to go to work but going to Victoria. To give you one last surprise, one last kiss, one last … it doesn’t matter, I saw you buying magazines. That morning I couldn’t have laughed with anyone in the world. And yet you laughed. You fucking well stood with a porter and laughed about something. That’s when I found out what love was. Seeing the one person you want to live with happy to have escaped from you.’ ‘But why didn’t

‘I wasn’t to know.’ She turned away. ‘I wasn’t to know. Christ!’ Violence hung in the air like static electricity. ‘Another thing. You think love is sex. Let me tell you something. If I’d wanted you just for that, I’d have left you straight after the first night.’

That little girl with the boil. It made you furious. Alison showing how good she is with kids. Doing the mother act. And shall I tell you something? I was doing the mother act. Just for a moment, when she smiled, I did think that. I did think how I’d like to have your children and … have my arm round them and have you near me. Isn’t that terrible? I have this filthy disgusting stinking-taste thing called love … God, syphilis is nice compared to love … and I’m so depraved, so colonial, so degenerate that I actually dare show you

‘More important things.’ She touched the small spoon in the saucer beside her cup. ‘I should have thought nothing was more important.’ ‘Than one’s attitude to what one will never know? It seems to me a waste of time.’ I felt for her foot, but it had disappeared. She leant forward and picked up the box of

Nicholas.’ He smiled at me. ‘I felt very much as you do when I was older and more experienced than you are. Neither of us has the intuitive humanity of womankind,

‘She doesn’t need protecting from me.’ ‘I just mean that she’s always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.’ ‘Prose and pudding?’ ‘I don’t expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.’

mouth, mocking herself ‘I should have learnt my lesson. I hid in a garden shed and knocked this what looked like a long stick off a peg … and put up my arm to shield myself.’ She mimed it. ‘It was a scythe.’ ‘You poor thing.’ I kissed the wrist again, then once more drew us close, but after a while left her mouth, kissed the eyes, the neck, the throat, along the curve of the dress above the breasts; then found the mouth again. We explored each other’s eyes. There was something still uncertain in hers; yet something melted as well. Suddenly they closed, and her mouth reached towards mine, as if she could speak better with lips now than in words. But just as we were becoming drowned in each other, unaware

account of her abortive love affaire: the delicate balance in her of physical timidity and sensual imagination … the first must have made the man attractive to her initially, the second had condemned him when it came to the point – all of which gave her a genuinely nymphlike quality; one her sister, despite her playing of the part that night, lacked. This girl did quite literally flee the satyr and invite him on. There was a wild animal in her, but a true wild animal, intensely suspicious of wrong moves, of too obvious attempts to tame.

why she lied; that she couldn’t lie, in simple fact. Of course it made her, in daily terms, dull and predictable, rather tediously transparent. What had always attracted me in the opposite sex was what they tried to hide, what provoked all the metaphorical equivalents of seducing them out of their

century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda,

love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women – and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.’

far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical.

of lightning I glimpsed the expression on her face – a kind of intent seriousness, like a child undressing a doll. She forced the shirt, and the jacket I was still wearing, back away from my body. Then she clasped her hands behind my neck, as she had in the sea at Moutsa, and sat away a little. ‘You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ ‘You can’t see me.’ ‘Felt.’ I bent and kissed her breasts, then pulled her against me and found her mouth again. She was wearing some strange scent, musky and faintly orange, like cowslips; and it seemed to match something both sensual and innocent in her, a growing abandon to passion that was also a willed attempt to be what she felt I must

remembered an old Urfe law: that girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education. But I saw some delicious instruction ahead in this case.

she turned fully on her back. A few moments later I was deep inside her. It was not like any other such moment of first entry I had ever gained; something well beyond the sexual, there was such a fraught, frustrated past, such a future inherent in it; such a possession. I knew I had won far more than her body. I lay suspended

judge only in name. Like all judges, I was finally the judged; to be judged by my own judgment.

could almost think of her, the light-phase her, as one thinks tenderly but historically of the moments of poetry in one’s life; and yet still hate her for her real, her black present being.

perhaps a greater, but in no way a different, pleasure from any other. He would tell you that it is only one part – and not the essential part – in the relationship we call love. He would tell you that the essential part is truth, the trust two people build between their minds. Their souls. What you will. That the real infidelity is the one that hides the sexual infidelity. Because the one thing that must never come

is disgusting. Very well. But remember that there is another possible explanation. She may have been being very brave. Neither I nor my children pretend to be ordinary people. They were not brought up to be ordinary. We are rich and we are intelligent and we mean to live rich, intelligent lives.’