Bryan Magee [Magee - Making the Most of It

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

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

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 Austrias 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 Tannhuser 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-governing 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.