Behind 'The Magus.' - John Fowles Issue

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1996

For CIRCE and all the other tomb-robbers.

I had spent the 1950-51 academic year as lecteur d' anglais, a faintly glorified kind of assistant, at the University of Poitiers in France; but was rather firmly told at the end of it that my services would not be required during the following year. It was not quite being sacked, but it felt like it; and, moreover, deserved to be it. I had been a truly awful "reader," not least because I then knew a good deal more about French literature than the English I was supposed to be teaching. I still remember vividly describing during my first lecture how Rupert Brooke had died among the poppy-fields of Flanders, while my blundering through Eliot's Four Quartets must have beaten all records in making the rather obscure totally incomprehensible. I still wake with a shiver of horror when I remember how I must have confused and misled the Poitiers students of English during that year. To worsen bad, I fell in love with the faculty professor's favorite student. A true firing had been completely earned, on both personal and academic grounds.

I didn't at all enjoy what I was reduced to after Poitiers, aged 25 and still living at my parents' suburban home at Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, endlessly poring over the grey, grey columns of the Times Educational Supplement. Nothing lured me at all, perhaps because I still didn't fully realize that I had absolutely no vocation at all for academic teaching. I had only my second in French from Oxford, and a first-class loathing of suburban England; and, on top of that, a near lethal illusion that I was intended (as if there were a God and life could show intentions) to be a poet.

Eventually, late in the autumn of 1951, something came unexpectedly to the rescue. The British Council had been appointed the agent of a boarding-school in Greece, supposedly based on Eton and enshrining the spirit of Byron. The Anargyrios and Korgialenios College had been built and founded in 1927 and was under royal patronage. I am pretty sure no-one there had any real notion of what Eton was like, and quite sure they had no comprehension at all of "Byron's spirit." However, all the other good teaching posts had by then gone, and I was in a field of only two or three other broken-down horses. I duly won the job.

I barely knew Greece or the Greeks at all, and had next to no understanding of their terrible recent history, first under the sadistically cruel Nazi occupation of 1941-44 and then during the multiple horrors of the Civil War of 1945-49. Above all I knew nothing of the foul horse-mongering that had gone on in the wretched "Percentage Agreement" between Stalin and Churchill. I certainly didn't realize what a dangerous old man the latter had become, driven by his fear of communism and hopelessly anachronistic vision of a renascent British Empire. I didn't even realize that a distinctly conservative right-wing government had taken over in Greece, aided and abetted by a patronizing and very misguided Anglo-American alliance. Greek women were not to get the vote till 1952, and a king had been re-instated in 1947 (against the wishes of most ordinary people in the country, though not those, officially, of the direction at the school to which I was going). The worst new horror was not to come until 1967, yet the dreaded day of the abominable colonels already lay pent in the air, like so many other latent fascisms in human history.

I had perhaps one small saving grace - though far more personal than literary. I had, ever since leaving Oxford in 1949, kept something I then called Disjoints . . . a sort of broken and very personal record of what was happening to me. This journal truly was almost entirely about myself, and in no sense a decent historian's version of matters. Its only value lay in the clumsy and often distinctly callow account of a young Oxford student born in 1926. That value, it seems to me, must largely lie in its nakedness, by which I don't mean its honesty. "Honest novelist" is almost an oxymoron. But perhaps it will one day have some value as an account of mid-century innocence, if not downright foolishness. At any rate while I was in 1993 attempting to transcribe its barely legible manuscript pages, I came on the passage that follows. I had totally forgotten it.

I had arrived at the boarding-school on the island of Spetsai (in katharevousa, the so-called "pure" form of Modern Greek; it is Spetses in the domotic) at the beginning of January 1952. If Athens, then still some way from its present hideously polluted and overcrowded condition, had impressed me, the six-hour boat voyage from the Piraeus to the island, in the armpit of the Peloponnesus, had neighbored heaven. The five blocks of the school, a mile or two outside the small main village, were very nearly grotesque (actually and architecturally much more so than I made the place in The Magus, the novel I was much later to write about the island), yet I found it all both moving and amusing . . . to be only a glance away from the hills above Epidauros, and those near Mycenae and Tiryns; and above all, to be so miraculously remote from the suburban deserts of Essex.