The Magus

Consensus seems to be building that Benjamin has special powers. Armed with only puff, sparkle, and droop, he weaves his wild snares, fly-casting for souls with smile upon wail upon wide-eyed bovine gaze. His nature is sweet, but beneath that lovable, dopey fatboy exterior lies a dour, dyspeptic homunculus, a small George Burns who in his crotchety and opinionated way is forever wondering where he left his cigar. In the chaos of his passage, stewardesses forget their dignity, committed dog-owners consider upgrades, and passers-by stall and gawk. He is, in short, a kind of micro-magus: a wielder of arcane and potentially dangerous power in whose wake madness, passion and black pinfeathers eddy in ominous circles.

The Magus Theory of Benjamin (MTB) did not materialize from nowhere, of course: I have been reading the John Fowles novel of the same name. Actually, I'm not reading The Magus, I'm reading The Magus: A Revised Version, which is not quite the same thing. We (I) tend to think of literary productions, once published, as fixed things: we can decide if they are good or bad, but we don't expect to be asked to adjudicate that question twice. There are notable exceptions to this rule: Whitman's Leaves of Grass grew from a small chapbook into the sprawling compendium of man-love that today we consider the standard edition, and as far as I know, both posterity and coetaneity were cool with that. But there is a basic difference between a collection of poems and a novel. Adding new material to a compendium makes it an expanded compendium, unread portions of which can be quickly flagged by scanning the table of contents. But sharpening up a novel just produces a book you're not sure if you've read at all, and probably don't want to (if you liked it before, you are outraged that it has changed, and if you didn't, you're hardly about to give the author a second chance.)

Fowles, in my opinion, is about as great a novelist as one can be while having no sense of finish. His track record on endings is horrible. The French Lieutenant's Woman was a mesmerizing novel about the pleasures of being a dilettante (a theme dear to my heart), and it had me in its grip until the last page. And then Fowles, horrible Fowles, he dropped the curtain: he started talking about himself, his 'imagined' characters, the ineluctable indeterminacy of formal narrative. How very modern. How very wretched. I either wanted to know what happened, or to be left artfully hanging, but under no circumstances did I wish to be reminded that this was only fiction, and that I was just a reader, and that's how the world works, blah blah, ad vomitum. And now I'm 50 pages into the Magus, and though it's a fine book, I'm nervous. The title betrays a fatal stutter, a basic indecision: a crippling obliviousness to the fact that once a story is in the public domain, it is no longer yours to correct.

This is not just about stories, of course. Can you imagine Jackson Pollock asking the MOMA for one his paintings back so he could add a little more magenta spackle to the upper left hand corner? Or saying to a girl you've been wooing hey, would you mind scratching last night's soliloquy, I've refined the phrasing and would like all your impressions to be based on this new (and much improved) version? There are some productions which, once in the public domain, sever themselves completely from any proprietary relation to their producer.

Interestingly, as much as I curse Fowles when he pulls these stunts, in my dark heart I enjoy them. Perfection is a cold and seamless chamber: flaws open up the world, admit light, suggest change. An aging Leonard Cohen grumbles "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," and I believe him, precisely because of his stripped voice, his cheesy backup, his simple melodies. None of these flaws is essential, just as Fowles' pecadillos don't compromise his basic gifts as a story-teller: knowing he will piss me off, I continue to read his work, and find it great. Nor is this some sick literary co-dependency. Rather, it suggests (to my mind) Art's robustness to cosmetic perturbations. We can polish a piece until it shines or leave it cracked, caked, and grimey, neither has any essential bearing on its status as Expression.

The Magus is the creator, the weaver of pretty illusions. But it is also the creation itself, the Pygmalian pull of a beauty that bears the fortuitous imprint of the self. And the challenge, in art as in parenting, is to know when to cut the bonds. Whitman had only one child and kept it in the house forever. Fowles tries to get his works to comb their hair long after they've left home, married, and reproduced. Toews worries about his kid every time he leaves it alone with the Nanny. All these worriers, these clucking, revising, self-enthralled parents: why can't they just call it done, hang it up, step back and admire?