Маг


W. Somerset MAUGHAM





                THE MAGICIAN







CLASSICAL LITERATURE


Подготовка текста, комментарии и словарь Ю.В. Гадаевой







ИЗДАТЕЛЬСТВО
СЗЙР©

Санкт-Петербург

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
    М87












     Моэм У.С.
М 87    Маг: Книга для чтения на английском языке. — СПб.:
     КАРО, 2010. — 384 с. — (Серия «Classical Literature»).

     ISBN 978-5-9925-0548-1.

         Уильям Сомерсет Моэм — один из выдающихся английских писателей XX века, подаривший миру множество пьес, эссе и романов.
         Роман «Маг» — самое таинственное произведение автора. Захватывающий сюжет о любви, преданности, дружбе, предательстве, колдовстве, алхимии, мистике, в сочетании с красивым и одновременно легким языком Моэма делает роман интересным и увлекательным для широкого круга читателей, изучающих английский язык и совершенствующихся в нем.
         В книге представлен неадаптированный текст романа, снабженный комментариями и словарем.
УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

ISBN 978-5-9925-0548-1

© КАРО, 2005

            A FRAGMENT
            OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY


   In 1897, after spending five years at St Thomas’s Hospital¹1 passed the examinations which enabled me to practise medicine. While still a medical student I had published a novel called Liza of Lambeth which caused a mild sensation, and on the strength of that I rashly decided to abandon doctoring and earn my living as a writer; so, as soon as I was qualified’, I set out for Spain and spent the best part of a year in Seville. I amused myself hugely and wrote a bad novel. Then I returned to London and, with a friend of my own age, took and furnished a small flat near Victoria Station². A maid of all work cooked for us and kept the flat neat and tidy. My friend was at the Bar³, and so I had the day (and the flat) to myself and my work. During the next six years I wrote several novels and a number of plays. Only one of

     ¹ St Thomas’s Hospital — больница Св. Фомы в Лондоне

     ² Victoria Station — вокзал Виктория (главная станция Западного округа Лондона)

     ³ the Ваг — адвокатура

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   g these novels had any success, but even that failed to make щ the stir that my first one had made. I could get no manager to take my plays. At last, in desperation, I sent one, which I called A Man of Honour, to the Stage Society, which gave two performances, one on Sunday night, н another on Monday afternoon, of plays which, unsuitable й for the commercial theatre, were considered of sufficient g merit to please an intellectual audience. As every one О knows, it was the Stage Society that produced the early g plays of Bernard Shaw. The committee accepted A Man < of Honour, and W.L. Courtney, who was a member of it, j thought well enough of my crude play to publish it in The Fortnightly Review¹, of which he was then editor. It was a feather in my cap.²
        Though these efforts of mine brought me very little money, they attracted not a little attention, and I made friends. I was looked upon as a promising young writer and, I think I may say it without vanity, was accepted as a member of the intelligentsia, an honourable condition which, some years later, when I became a popular writer of light comedies, I lost and have never since regained. I was invited to literary parties and to parties given by women of rank and fashion who thought it behoved them to patronise the arts. An unattached and fairly presentable young man is always in demand. I lunched out and dined out. Since I could not afford to take cabs, when I dined

       ¹ The Fortnightly Review — «Фортнайтли ревью», английский историко-политический журнал

       ² It was a feather in my cap. — Это была особая честь для меня.

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   out, in tails and a white tie, as was then the custom, I went and came back by bus. I was asked to spend weekends in the country. They were something of a trial on account of the tips you had to give to the butler and to the footman who brought you your morning tea. He unpacked your Gladstone bag, and you were uneasily aware that your well-worn pyjamas and modest toilet articles had made an unfavourable impression upon him. For all that, I found life pleasant and I enjoyed myself. There seemed no reason why I should not go on indefinitely in the same way, bringing out a novel once a year (which seldom earned more than the small advance the publisher had given me but which was on the whole respectably reviewed), going to more and more parties, making more and more friends. It was all very nice, but I couldn’t see that it was leading me anywhere. I was thirty. I was in a rut. I felt I must get out of it. It did not take me long to make up my mind. I told the friend with whom I shared the flat that I wanted to be rid of it and go abroad. He could not keep it by himself, but we luckily found a middle-aged gentleman who wished to install his mistress in it, and was prepared to take it off our hands. We sold the furniture for what it could fetch, and within a month I was on my way to Paris. I took a room in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank¹.
      A few months before this, I had been fortunate enough to make friends with a young painter who had a studio in the Rue Campagne Premiere. His name was Gerald Kelly. He had had an upbringing unusual for a

THE MAGICIAN

     ¹ Left Bank — имеется в виду левый берег р. Сены

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WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM

painter, for he had been to Eton and to Cambridge. He was highly talented, abundantly loquacious, and immensely enthusiastic. It was he who first made me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures had recently been accepted by the Luxembourg. To my shame, I must admit that I could not make head or tail of them¹. Without much searching, I found an apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the Lion de Belfort². It had two rooms and a kitchen, and cost seven hundred francs a year, which was then twenty-eight pounds. I bought, second-hand, such furniture and household utensils as were essential, and the concierge told me of a woman who would come in for half a day and make my cafe au lait³ ⁴ in the morning and my luncheon at noon. I settled down and set to work on still another novel. Soon after my arrival, Gerald Kelly took me to a restaurant called Le Chat Blanc¹ in the Rue d’Odessa, near the Gare Montparnasse⁵, where a number of artists were in the habit of dining; and from then on I dined there every night. I have described the place elsewhere, and in some

       ¹1 could not make head or tail of them — я ничего в них не смыслил

    ² Lion de Belfort — (фр.) Бельфорский лев (барельефная скульптура льва, воздвигнутая в городе Бельфор знаменитым французским скульптором Фредериком Бертольди; зд. уменьшенная копия скульптуры, установленная в Париже на площади Денфер-Рошро)

       ³ cafe au la.it — (фр.) кофе с молоком

       ⁴ Le Chat Blanc — (фр.) Белый кот

       ⁵ Gare Montparnasse — (фр.) вокзал Монпарнас в Париже

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   detail in the novel to which these pages are meant to serve as a preface, so that I need not here say more about it. As a rule, the same people came in every night, but now and then others came, perhaps only once, perhaps two or three times. We were apt to look upon them as interlopers, and I don’t think we made them particularly welcome. It was thus that I first met Arnold Bennett and Clive Bell. One of these casual visitors was Aleister Crowley. He was spending the winter in Paris. I took an immediate dislike to him, but he interested and amused me. He was a great talker and he talked uncommonly well. In early youth, I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on weight, and his hair was thinning. He had fine eyes and a way, whether natural or acquired I do not know, of so focusing them that, when he looked at you, he seemed to look behind you. He was a fake, but not entirely a fake. At Cambridge he had won his chess blue¹ and was esteemed the best whist player of his time. He was a liar and unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the things he boasted of. As a mountaineer, he had made an ascent of K2² in the Hindu Kush, the second highest mountain in India, and he made it without the elaborate equipment, the cylinders of oxygen and so forth, which render the endeavours of

      ¹ had won his chess blue — букв.: получил форму темно-синего цвета (спортивную форму университета), т. е. попал в команду университета по шахматам

      ² К2 — К2 (высшая точка горной системы Каракорум в Центральной Азии)

THE MAGICIAN

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WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM

the mountaineers of the present day more likely to succeed. He did not reach the top, but got nearer to it than anyone had done before.
   Crowley was a voluminous writer of verse, which he published sumptuously at his own expense. He had a gift for rhyming, and his verse is not entirely without merit. He had been greatly influenced by Swinburne and Robert Browning. He was grossly, but not unintelligently, imitative. As you flip through the pages you may well read a stanza which, if you came across it in a volume of Swinburne’s, you would accept without question as the work of the master. ‘It’s rather hard, isn’t it, Sir, to make sense of it?’ If you were shown this line and asked what poet had written it, I think you would be inclined to say, Robert Browning. You would be wrong. It was written by Aleister Crowley.
      At the time I knew him he was dabbling in Satanism, magic and the occult. There was just then something of a vogue in Paris for that sort of thing, occasioned, I surmise, by the interest that was still taken in a book of Huysmans’s, La Bas¹. Crowley told fantastic stories of his experiences, but it was hard to say whether he was telling the truth or merely pulling your leg². During that winter I saw him several times, but never after I left Paris to

      ¹ La Bas — «Там, внизу», роман французского писателя Жориса Карла Гюисманса, в котором автор исследует современный сатанизм в связи с сатанизмом средневековым, описывает черную мессу и т. п.

      ² or merely pulling your leg — или просто морочит вам голову

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return to London. Once, long afterwards, I received a telegram from him which ran as follows: ‘Please send twenty-five pounds at once. Mother of God and I starving. Aleister Crowley.’ I did not do so, and he lived on for many disgraceful years.
    I was glad to get back to London. My old friend had by then rooms in Pall Mall¹, and I was able to take a bedroom in the same building and use his sitting-room to work in. The Magician was published in 1908, so I suppose it was written during the first six months of 1907. I do not remember how I came to think that Aleister Crowley might serve as the model for the character whom I called Oliver Haddo; nor, indeed, how I came to think of writing that particular novel at all. When, a little while ago, my publisher expressed a wish to reissue it, I felt that, before consenting to this, I really should read it again. Nearly fifty years had passed since I had done so, and I had completely forgotten it. Some authors enjoy reading their old works; some cannot bear to. Of these I am. When I have corrected the proofs of a book, I have finished with it for good and all². I am impatient when people insist on talking to me about it; I am glad if they like it, but do not much care if they don’t. I am no more interested in it than in a worn-out suit of clothes that I have given away. It was thus with disinclination that I began to read The Magician. It held my interest, as two of my early novels, which for the same

THE MAGICIAN

    ¹ Pall Mall — Пэлл-Мэлл (улица в центральной части Лондона)

   ² for good and all — окончательно

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g reason I have been obliged to read, did not. One, indeed, щ I simply could not get through. Another had to my mind О some good dramatic scenes, but the humour filled me with mortification, and I should have been ashamed to see it republished. As I read The Magician, I wondered н how on earth I could have come by all the material й concerning the black arts¹ ² which I wrote of. I must have g spent days and days reading in the library of the British О Museum. The style is lush and turgid, not at all the sort g of style I approve of now, but perhaps not unsuited to < the subject; and there are a great many more adverbs and j adjectives than I should use today. I fancy I must have been impressed by the ecriture artiste¹ which the French writers of the time had not yet entirely abandoned, and unwisely sought to imitate them.
        Though Aleister Crowley served, as I have said, as the model for Oliver Haddo, it is by no means a portrait of him. I made my character more striking in appearance, more sinister and more ruthless than Crowley ever was. I gave him magical powers that Crowley, though he claimed them, certainly never possessed. Crowley, however, recognized himself in the creature of my invention, for such it was, and wrote a full-page review of the novel in Vanity Fair³, which he signed ‘Oliver Haddo’. I did not read it, and wish now that I had. I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose.

       ¹ black arts — черная магия

       ² ecriture artiste — (фр.) артистическая манера письма

       ³ Vanity Fair — известный американский журнал

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