I think, therefore I write

Bryan Magee has been a poet, academic, critic and MP. But the former cockney boy who brought philosophy to television just wants to keep writing. With publication of his memoirs, he talks to Nicholas Wroe about Wagner, Popper and growing up in the east end of London

Bryan Magee

Born: April 12 1930, London.

Education: Christ's Hospital School; Keble College, Oxford.

Married: Ingrid Soderlund 1954, divorced (one daughter, Gunnela).

Career: Army Intelligence Corps 1948-49; MP for Leyton1974-83; lecturer or visiting fellow at Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Sydney, LSE; music and theatre critic; newspaper columnist.

Some broadcasting: Conversations with Philosophers Radio 3 1970; Men of Ideas BBC2 '78; The Great Philosophers BBC2 '87.

Some books: Crucifixion and Other Poems 1951; Go West Young Man '58; The New Radicalism '62; One in Twenty '66; Aspects of Wagner '68 (revised '88); Modern British Philosophy '71; Popper '73; The Philosophy of Schopenhauer '83 (rev. '97); Confessions of a Philosopher '97; Clouds of Glory '03.

The transformation of Hoxton in east London from neglected inner-city neighbourhood to hub of the British contemporary art scene has been remarkable. Bryan Magee, born and bred in pre-war Hoxton, had just began work on a memoir of his childhood as the process got into its stride in the 1990s. He watched with astonishment. "My Hoxton" - despite having acquired an RP accent over 60 years ago he still pronounces it "Oxton" - "was already a vanished world when I started the book," he explains. "First the Blitz and then slum clearance ensured that that world was physically not there any more. But the idea that Hoxton might become fashionable was simply unthinkable."

Magee's own transformation has been just as remarkable. In his first nine years he was just another local boy who had barely been outside this tiny part of working-class London. In the next 10 years he experienced life in the English countryside, as a boarder at a public school, as a spycatcher on the cold-war frontier and as a student at Oxford. "It was a many-sided preparation for life, for which I have been abidingly grateful," he writes in his memoir, Clouds of Glory . And it prepared him for an equally diverse career. Magee has been a poet, novelist and distinguished music critic with particular expertise in Wagner. He has also been a pioneer of globe-trotting television journalism, an academic, a writer and broadcaster on philosophy and a member of parliament, first for Labour and then the SDP.

William Rees-Mogg, an Oxford contemporary, recalls that "we never knew which way Bryan would jump. And as his life later demonstrated, there was always a question of whether he was basically at heart an intellectual or someone inter ested in public life. So it wasn't a surprise that he went into public life, but the intellectual was really the predominant element in his personality and the books seemed to represent the real Bryan more than the political activity did."

The sheer breadth of his intellectual curiosity and activity has made Magee stand out from his contemporaries. The MP and former minister Robert Jackson has known Magee since the mid-70s and says he is that increasingly rare creature, "a Serious Man. Part of that might mean he can sometimes take himself too seriously. But consistently over a long time in public life he has tried to bring serious thought into a debate. In a way he is slightly a figure out of our time. There is a sort of high seriousness about Bryan which is almost Victorian and is highly admirable."

Magee's past is undoubtedly a good example of LP Hartley's dictum about it being a "different country", but his memories of it remain startlingly vivid. He has almost total recall of a local dairy, complete with cow, the market trader's patter and infant-school teachers and friends. And among the memories are glimpses of the man he would become. The three primary areas of his career - politics, music and philosophy - all formed part of his childhood. His father was a socialist and a Wagner fanatic and Magee remembers even as a young child being puzzled by the world around him and tentatively asking "the same sort of questions about the nature of being as did ancient philosophers".

He is still probably best known to the public for his television dialogues with philosophers in the 70s and 80s. Rick Lewis, editor of the journal Philosophy Now, says this work, for a general audience, "was extremely good. It was useful to get so much information about great philosophers. Magee was very good at taking com plex ideas and re-phrasing them in a more easily digestible form."

Although Magee says he has never viewed the various strands of his career in hierarchical terms, "I've always regarded myself primarily as a writer of books. That is my real work. But for nearly all my life I had to earn a living doing something else because books didn't make enough for me to live on. But I never let anything else take over all my time." He describes his latest book as, partly, "benign psychoanalysis. When you're younger you move away from your origins as you expand and explore. But there comes a time when your life ceases to be exploratory and venturesome and you start to reflect on old journeys. You try to work out who you are and how you got here."

Magee was born in Hoxton in 1930 within a few hundred yards of where his paternal grandparents were born. He went to the same local primary school as his father. He says the family origins are probably French or German and he can become slightly testy when people insist he must be Irish. "I know, I know, you might as well be called Franz Schmidt and not be German."

He was brought up in a flat above the family menswear shop where he shared a bed with his sister, Joan, who is three years older. He was very close to his paternal grandfather and father, who was a great admirer of Shakespeare as well as Wagner, and who would queue for amphitheatre seats at the theatre and opera most weeks. "It wasn't about self-improvement," explains Magee. "He just did these things because he liked them. Although he wasn't formally educated he was a naturally intelligent and cultured man. He was an enjoyer."

Magee's relationship with his mother was difficult and he describes her as "a very damaged person". In his memoir, he writes how most people found her impossible; she had no affection for anyone, including her children, he had to disguise any sense of enjoyment of life from her and she had a habit of hitting him in the face. She died when he was in his early 20s.

"I know a lot of people won't like me writing like that, but I thought there was no point unless I told the truth," he says. "I adored my father. I really loved him from the bottom of my heart. His death was a cataclysm for me when I was at boarding school. After his funeral we went back to the house very depressed and slumped into chairs. The very first thing my mother said was 'If you think I'm going to keep you, you are mistaken. As far as I'm concerned you're on your own'."

In fact Magee had been away from day-to-day contact with his mother and Hoxton from the age of nine. When war broke out he was evacuated to Sussex and then Leicestershire. Aged 11, in 1941, he won a London County Council scholar-ship to Christ's Hospital boarding school in Sussex. His sister, meanwhile, was at a grammar school. She went on to work in advertising and publishing before she met an American in Paris and married him. She is now a US citizen.

While Magee was away at school, the Hoxton shop was damaged by a bomb and the family moved to Arnos Grove in north London where Magee would visit in the holidays. But by this time, he says, he was already on "a kind of escalator: a first-class education which would probably be followed by Oxford".

When he first went to Christ's Hospital he made the "fantastic discovery" that he had a cockney accent. "People literally had difficulty understanding what I was saying. But as about a quarter of the boys came from state schools with all sorts of regional accents, I was not that remarkable and within about two years I talked like everybody else."

The writer Richard Cavendish met Magee on their first day at Christ's Hospital. Cavendish remembers him as "a cheerful cockney; very full of himself with above average brightness and above- average bolshiness". Cavendish also remembers how hard it was for Magee when his father died. "I imagine things have changed now, but it wasn't a sympathetic atmosphere and he was standing there in utter misery in the chapel with the tears rolling down his face. No one quite knew what to do. It was an awful sight," Cavendish says.

Magee says though he was "ravaged" by his father's death, he still enjoyed his school career. "I was happy there, which might have been something to do with my relationship with my mother. I was happy as an evacuee too and I never suffered from homesickness." Academic work came easily but his real interests were music and politics. He had witnessed Mosley's blackshirts in action in Hoxton, where William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, had once come into his father's shop canvassing. "I'd got socialism like a religion and expounded it."

Immediately after school, Magee volunteered for early national service, as much as anything because his mother's antipathy meant he didn't have anywhere else to go. He joined the intelligence corps and was sent to the Yugoslav-Austrian border where Yugoslav spies were among the refugees heading west. "By crossing the frontier they had all committed a crime and so were arrested," he explains. "We interrogated every single person to find out what was going on in Yugoslavia and also to decide whether they were okay or not. We never knew how many spies got through, but we do know that we caught an amazing number." Magee wrote a spy novel in 1960, To Live in Danger , which he says drew heavily on his experiences.

The journalist Richard Sarson met Magee in the army. "We had this extraordinary life-and-death power over people considering we were so young," he says. "If we sent them back over the border they'd get shot." Sarson remembers Magee going to the opera at Graz and even then being a ruthless debater. "There was one man who was deeply upset and angry after hearing Bryan speak about why Christianity was a load of nonsense."

After national service, in 1949, Magee went to Oxford, reluctantly, on a history scholarship. He asked, but was not allowed, to change to music. While he was there, however, he discovered his passion for philosophy. After completing his first degree he took a second one in PPE, in just one year, for which he was awarded a first. "I found Oxford a bit of a let-down," he says. "I'd been having a rather exciting time in the army and I sort of expected Oxford to be full of witty and brilliant people and when I got there I didn't think it was. But I got to love it for what it was."

Friends there included Robin Day, Jeremy Thorpe and Michael Heseltine, and Magee became president of the Oxford Union. But he mixed with poets as well as politicians and in 1951 published a volume of verse through the Fortune Press, which didn't pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies. Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin were all first published under the same deal. "I'm rather ashamed of the poems now," says Magee, "although I have written poems since which I haven't published, which I secretly think are rather good. It has always been a dimension of what I do."

The poet Alan Brownjohn recalls browsing in Blackwell's and coming across Magee's book. "I remember it was dedicated to Wagner," says Brownjohn. "There were a lot of good poets there at the time and while Bryan wasn't the equal of some one like Geoffrey Hill I do remember a poem of his which really was rather fine."

Magee says that despite the later eminence of many of his circle there was little sense of an overtly competitive environment. Rather, its members took it for granted that they would succeed. "If you had told me then that Jeremy Thorpe would be leader of the Liberal party in his 30s, William Rees-Mogg would be editor of the Times in his 30s and Michael Heseltine would be in the cabinet, I would have said 'of course'. It sounds horrible, but that's what we thought and it had a bearing on the way we conducted ourselves."

In 1953 Magee was appointed to a teaching job in Sweden. While there he met and married Ingrid Soderlund who was a pharmacist in the university laboratory. They had one daughter, Gunnela, and they now have three grandchildren. "The marriage broke up pretty quickly and it was a fairly disastrous period of my life," says Magee. "I came back to Oxford as a postgraduate. But since then Sweden has been a part of my life. I go there every year and my daughter visits me. I always assumed that sooner or later I'd get married again but it never quite happened, although I had some very long relationships. And now I don't want to get married again. I like the freedom." He lives alone near Wolfson College, Oxford, where he is a fellow.

At university Magee realised he didn't want to pursue a normal academic career but wanted to be an MP and a writer. He abandoned his doctorate and took up a fellowship at Yale. From the beginning he had felt out of sympathy with Oxford philosophy and found that the approach at Yale suited him better.

"I have a certain view of philosophy which affects the way I do it. I think the right way to approach philosophical questions is through their history. Through examining what the great minds of the past have said about a problem, which you then critically evaluate, discard what you think is mistaken or not relevant now and then carry on from there. The other way is ahistorical. You take the problem as you face it and you take it to pieces. It has always seemed crazy to me to consider problems that people like Plato and Socrates have considered without taking into account what they have to say about it. You end up reinventing the wheel half the time."

He says he went to the US with a complete set of left-wing anti-American prejudices. "But after a while I had an increasing sense of unease as I believed passionately in social equality, opportunity for everybody, high living standards for the mass of people and America had far more of all these things than Britain or anywhere else in Europe. The idea that America was more like the country I believed in than England was a terrible shock to me." In 1958 he published a travel book about the country, Go West Young Man , and returned to Britain with a view to becoming a Labour MP. However, he lost, in safe Conservative seats, at both the 1959 general election and a by-election the following year and instead became a reporter for the ITV current affairs flagship programme This Week.

"We said to ourselves that we were making Guardian content available to a Mirror readership," he explains. "And we were sort of successful in that. All television figures were huge in those days, but we were watched by about a third of the population." Fellow presenters included James Cameron and Desmond Wilcox and Magee made a speciality of reporting on the decolonisation of Africa, American politics and eastern Europe.

Another presenter, Judith Jackson, says Magee "didn't have the common touch in the way that someone like Desmond Wilcox did. Bryan had a more intellectual approach and perhaps the philosophy programmes were more his natural habitat. While he's very good- natured and has lots of friends, he doesn't want to sit down and make a consensus, he is much more solitary."

Alongside his television work, Magee also became a music and theatre critic for Musical Times and The Listener. For some years he took lessons in composition but says while he could produce tunes that were "whistleable", he concluded that they were "inherently sentimental" and he was better suited to being a consumer, rather than a producer of music. "My father was a Wagner junkie and my sister and I reacted in opposite ways. She thought we were having Wagner shoved down our throats but to me it was like mother's milk. I adored it." He published Aspects of Wagner in 1968 (revised 1988) and Wagner and Philosophy in 2000. Magee illustrates how contentious the subject can be when he recalled how a "good-natured, intelligent and musical friend" responded to seeing his record collection by saying, "I had no idea Bryan was a bit of a Nazi".

"My position is that I don't think the anti-semitism gets into the works in any significant way," explains Magee. "The fact is that anti-semitism was very widespread in European culture, with the result that an enormous number of very famous writers and artists were anti-semites. But in most cases it doesn't significantly affect their work and with Wagner I think it is demonstrably the case."

Although not in parliament, Magee was politically motivated throughout the 1960s. His book The New Radicalism , about British society, came out in 1962 and two years later The Democratic Revolution , about the third world. " The New Radicalism is really New Labour, give or take," he says. "It was an attempt to persuade the Labour party to adopt social democracy." Robert Jackson says Magee was the first person to seriously apply the ideas of Karl Popper to contemporary politics. Popper's work on totalitarianism in the 1940s had seen him listed on the anti-communist side in the cold-war intellectual reckoning.

"But what Bryan did was show the relevance of Popper to the Crosland-ite project of Labour reform," explains Jackson, citing in particular the proposed abandoning of Clause 4 of the Labour party constitution, ultimately carried out by Tony Blair in 1996, that committed the party to the state ownership of "production, distribution and exchange". "Bryan played a large part in domesticating Popper as a figure of the social democratic left. But ultimately I think the diagnosis of Popperism as being a rather conservative world view was correct and Bryan is a Popperian. It leads to an approach that is piecemeal, anti-ideological, anti projects of total transformation. It is the politics of adjustment and conciliation."

Magee, who knew Popper and wrote a book about him in 1973, describes him as "a major philosopher but not really a very likeable man. I hugely valued my relationship with him, but to be honest I never really liked him." Instead Magee picks out Bertrand Russell as the most impressive individual he met, "because of his extraordinary intelligence. Anything you say about it will sound like a cliché, but it was extraordinary."

During the 60s Magee made documentaries about sex in Britain. The subjects included prostitutes and their clients, adultery, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion and homosexuality, which was then illegal. Magee went on to write a book about homosexuality called One in Twenty . "British society was illiberal in a number of areas that are now taken for granted," he says. "Roy Jenkins changed them and he was bitterly opposed by the Tories. But if you were liberal with a small L there was a menu of social change and I believed very strongly in that whole liberal agenda."

Magee set about another attempt at getting into parliament in the early 70s. He had been "inching" to the right from a non-communist Labour left starting-point and by the time he won Leyton in east London in 1974 he describes himself as a "mainstream" Labour MP. But with the election of Michael Foot as Labour leader in 1981 he found himself out of tune with the party and, after some prevaricating, he left to join the newly-established SDP, under whose banner he lost his seat in 1983.

He says now that it was probably a mistake to go into the Commons at all. "I think it was a residual ambition that had been in my head since I was a schoolboy and I hadn't critically reassessed that vision of my future as I should have done." John Horam, fellow Labour and SDP - and now Conservative - MP, says that while Magee could be a good speaker and was active in some high-profile parliamentary debates "I don't think his heart was really in it and you need that to carry on because it is such a crazy profession otherwise. But he had the same strengths as Roy Jenkins in being ruthlessly clear. Although with Bryan there can sometimes be a social cost to that in that he doesn't dissemble."

Magee says that even as an MP, the thing he cared about most was his writing. It is a commitment that has affected his personal, as well as professional life. "While I've led a full life and had a lot of relationships, I was never prepared to sacrifice my writing," he says. The most important of these relationships was with the painter Maria Rossman, with whom Magee was involved for 11 years in the 70s and 80s, although they didn't live together. Rossman had children from a previous marriage. "That she lived in one place with her kids and I lived somewhere else was a way of keeping the whole thing going," he explains. "If we'd lived together it would have come apart. I always felt that if I lived with a woman the conflict between her and my work would become unmanageable, whereas if she had a home of her own and a life of her own it would be easier for her to accept what I was doing. I couldn't really have chosen not to write and would have been deeply disturbed if I'd done anything else. One's commitment to the writing is fundamental to one's sense of self."

Judith Jackson, a friend for more than 40 years, agrees that Magee has made sacrifices in terms of his relationships. "He's never been the sort of person you'd go on a picnic in Richmond Park with, so he does miss out on that side of life to a degree. But he loves academic life and university life and he spends a lot of time searching his own mind and other people's minds and that gives him pleasure."

In 1977, while still an MP, Magee published a long novel, which started life with a working title of Love Story but was eventually published as Facing Death as he followed his philosophical inclinations. It had been turned down by 15 publishers before it was finally published by William Kimber. It was shortlisted for the Yorkshire Post fiction award that year. The following year he made the television series Men of Ideas , which comprised 15 dialogues of 45 minutes each with leading contemporary thinkers such as AJ Ayer, Isaiah Berlin and Herbert Marcuse about their work. A decade later he used the same format to discuss the great philosophers of the past. Magee won a Royal Television Society award and acknowledges that "if I'm remembered for anything it will be those philosophy programmes. I still get a little of, 'aren't you the chap who?'"

Magee calls his 1983 book The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (revised in 1997) the closest "to my academic magnum opus" and hopes that his contribution to philosophy has come through his presenting the work of other thinkers and then adding something to it. In his 1997 intellectual memoir, Confessions of a Philosopher , Magee launched a robust attack on Oxford analytic philosophers and expected equal opprobrium in return. For the most part the counter-attack never came; instead, he was attacked far more for being dismissive of religion. It is an issue that cuts to the heart of what he thinks philosophy is for.

"I see religion as a way of avoiding fundamental problems that have arisen because we don't know certain very basic things about our own lives which I think are unknowable. I'm against that kind of false self-consolation. It prevents people really confronting the harsh reality of our situation." He says that as a child an early appreciation of this harsh reality would upset him. "I sometimes used to feel it was threatening my mental health. But I feel we ought to grapple with things and not evade and I certainly feel that about philosophers. I feel there is a professional obligation not to seek consolation. This is certainly part of what philosophy is for."

For many years Magee undertook "great and good" roles on boards and committees. Most dramatically he resigned as chairman of the Arts Council music panel in 1994 when pressured to make cuts. But he has now withdrawn from most outside obligations to concentrate fully on his writing. He says he has several books planned, including another novel and a second volume of memoirs. "I'm conscious of my age and I don't know how much good working time I've got left. I think the last five or six years have been my most productive and I want to keep going and spend that time on my own projects. I've worked out that if I work full-time it will take me into my 80s and there are still a lot of books I want to write."

· Clouds of Glory is published on June 12 by Jonathan Cape, price £16.99. To order a copy for £14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.

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