The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  We must ask two closely related questions, then, about art and life in this book. First, if there is a true and generous vision of Julian Baffin in this book, whose vision is it? That of Bradley the lover, or that of Bradley the recollecting artist? Would a true vision of an individual be possible to someone who is a lover without being, later, an artist of his love? Second, if the vision that animates the text and that is given Apollo’s authority belongs to the artist, not the lover, or to the lover only insofar as he retains, in his solitary life of art, traces of his former loves, what does this say about the role of Julian, the real woman in the work before us? Is there, after all, anything like a true vision of a particular woman here, or is the particular awkward reality simply source material for the creation of a work that goes beyond her? (Both of these questions are central for Proust as well.)

  To the first question, we must reply that the vision that is validated in the work is the vision of Bradley the recollecting artist. The proof of the truth of his vision is in the story he tells, so rich and variegated and deep, by contrast to the crudeness of the four Postscripts. And repeatedly he draws attention to moments of illusion, anxiety, and error in Bradley the man, in such a way that we do not ever have stable confidence in the vision of the man as he goes through his bewildering adventures. We do acknowledge that eros has opened his eyes. But the fruit of that initial experience, the fruit that is really valuable, is the work of art before us, and the vision that it contains. As he says in his own Postscript, “The book had to come into being because of Julian, and because of the book Julian had to be.... This is her deification and incidentally her immortality. It is my gift to her and my final possession of her” (381). Only in the work of art has Bradley finally shaken off fog and anxiety.

  What this means, too, is that it is the artwork, or the artist as creator of the artwork, who possesses moral virtue and the capacity to see another truly, which is the essence of Murdochian virtue. The man never gets this far—until he is separated from all human society by imprisonment, left in solitude to write his own love story. Thus the Murdoch of the novel seems to agree with Proust’s narrator, who holds that our loves must be studied by reflection in a condition of detachment from love, before the literary work of art that recaptures them can ever come into being. The vision of love itself is inherently unstable and inconstant. Only through the life of art do we ever succeed in possessing all that we have loved, in the sense that only then does our mind embrace the past experience with unerring specificity and sureness.

  This being the case, we must now ask our second Proustian question: where in the erotic work of art is the real-life loved one? For Proust, “infidelity toward the individual” is a prerequisite of the appropriate creative posture. The artist is delighted not by this or that particular love, but by a general form of love and desire that emerges from all the concrete experiences. Reaching back to a particular love in memory, the artist will now view the beloved as a model who has “quite simply been posing for the artist at the very moment when, much against his will, they made him suffer most.”

  Now, Murdoch is in many respects less austere than Proust, as is the novel she has written. She does not suggest, that is, that the artist must abstain from dwelling on the particular loved one in order to search for general forms, and she represents Bradley as obsessed with the memory of just one beloved, Julian, rather than as engaged in a search for essences through the recovery of several previous loves. Julian, in consequence, appears in the text with a clarity and specificity that is always denied Proust’s Albertine, whose individuating traits fluctuate inconstantly through the novel. Loxias’s account of art, moreover, seems more inclusive and generous than that of Proust, more open to the idea that art can contain the messiness of a real particular. In Metaphysics, similarly, Murdoch stresses that art (unlike moral theory, she says) can tell the truth about “the whole entity,” the human being, with all the idiosyncrasy and contingency that characterize a real life. It does so in large part by being funny, since the funny is “a great redeeming place of ordinary frailty.”

  So the case is not simple. And yet, I believe that there is reason to see in The Black Prince the Proustian view that the main point of the particular loved one is to be served up in the work of art. Given that the work, and not ordinary life, contains the vision of truth, what else could Bradley say? Julian, as he well says, had to be in order for the novel to be, and it is in the novel that she most is. Even though it is also true that the novel is inspired by her and could not be without her (something that may not be true for Albertine), nonetheless, her real being is ultimately of interest primarily insofar as it does contribute to the vision of the work.

  I connect this problem, very tentatively, to my personal experience of Iris Murdoch. I did not know Murdoch well. I met her when I gave a speech in her honor at the New York Art Club in 1985, and she then invited me to lunch at the house in Charlbury Road, Oxford, where she and John Bayley lived at that time. I went round to the house, very nervous and awkward, and sat for two hours in the chaotic kitchen being scrutinized, as I felt it, by her sharp, probing eyes. We talked about Proust and Henry James, about post-modernism and current developments in ethical thought, about Charles Taylor, whom she admired, and R. M. Hare, whom she did not. All the while, I felt that her very intense gaze went, as it were, straight through me, to something that was not me at all, but to which I was somehow related. More than once I had a Julian-like thought: “You don’t really see me.” I cannot forget those predatory eyes, and the way they attended to something of immense importance that was, as I say, not exactly outside of me, and that was perhaps more real than me, but that was not precisely me either. Nor can I ever forget the essential mysteriousness of her face, so much more alive than most people, so blazing with uncompromising passion, so intent upon things that were not exactly in the room. (I remember thinking a sad thought: that this was going to be the hoped-for friendship with a brilliant woman, but it is after all an encounter with just another predatory man. Erotic control and artistic control: where did one leave off and the other begin?)

  If the gaze of art is in this way both intent on the person and at the same time intent on the creative work that appropriates and goes beyond the person, the question is whether this gaze can ever be, in the fullest sense, a humanly loving gaze, exemplary of the virtue that Murdoch’s philosophy describes. Why not? It sees more truly than most loving people see. I had no doubt, for example, that Murdoch could have described me, after an hour, far more precisely than any lover of mine after some years. In that sense, Proust seems right when he says that art is the fully-lived life, life without patches of deadness and obtuseness.

  And yet I think there is something more to loving vision than just seeing. There is, for example, a willingness to permit oneself to be seen. And there is a willingness to stop seeing, to close one’s eyes before the loved one’s imperfections. There is also a willingness to be, for a time, an animal or even a plant, relinquishing the sharpness of creative alertness before the presence of a beloved body. Does the artist’s vision have about it these aspects of vulnerability, silence, and grace? Or does the artist’s eye, like an eagle’s soaring above us, look down with something like disdain at the muddled animal interactions of human beings with one another, so obtuse and so lacking in nuance?

  But I believe that The Black Prince in the end knows and embraces all this, too—and that its endorsement of the vision of art is qualified by a very explicit awareness of the limits of that vision. Although both Bradley and Loxias seem at times to claim that art can contain the whole of a life, Bradley’s most genuinely loving moment is one in which he yields before the elusive reality of the real Julian, acknowledging that she has a being that is not encompassed by his work:And I would not wish it to seem at the end that I have, in my own sequestered happiness, somehow forgotten the real being of those who have figured as my characters.... And Julian. I do not, my darling girl, however passionately and intens
ely my thought has worked upon your being, really imagine that I invented you. Eternally you escape my embrace. Art cannot assimilate you nor thought digest you. I do not now know, or want to know, anything about your life. For me, you have gone into the dark. Yet elsewhere I realize, and I meditate upon this knowledge, that you laugh, you cry, you read books and cook meals and yawn and lie perhaps in someone’s arms. This knowledge too may I never deny, and may I never forget how in the humble hard time-ridden reality of my life I loved you. That love remains, Julian, not diminished though changing, a love with a very clear and a very faithful memory. It causes me on the whole remarkably little pain. Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears. (384)

  And this means that there is a real sense in which the conclusion of this love story, and of its celebration of love, is written in the silence after this conclusion, and in the artist’s solitary and for once inarticulate tears.

  To Ernesto De Marchi

  Editor’s Foreword

  I am in more than one way responsible for the work that follows. The author of it, my friend Bradley Pearson, has placed the arrangements for publication in my hands. In this humble mechanical sense it is through my agency that these pages now reach the public. I am also the ‘dear friend’ (and such) who is referred to and at times addressed in the book. I am not however an actor in the drama which Pearson recounts. My friendship with Bradley Pearson dates from a time in our lives posterior to the events here narrated. This has been a time of tribulation when we needed and happily found in each other the blessings of friendship. I can say indeed with confidence that were it not for the encouragement and sympathy which I was able to give to Bradley, this story would probably have remained untold. Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world too often weary, fall silent, or come to doubt their own wit. Without my help this could have been so with Bradley Pearson. He needed someone to believe him and someone to believe in him. He found me, his alter ego, at the time needful.

  What follows is in its essence as well as in its contour a love story. I mean that it is deeply as well as superficially so. Man’s creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story. What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man’s searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand. And yet: what can be simpler than a tale of love and more charming? That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom. It has been the doom of Bradley Pearson. And in a quite different way it is my own.

  My task as editor has been a simple one. Perhaps I should more justly describe myself as – what? A sort of impresario? A clown or harlequin figure who parades before the curtain, then draws it solemnly back? I have reserved for myself the last word of all, the final assessment or summing up. Yet I would with better grace appear as Bradley’s fool than as his judge. It may be that in some sense I am both. Why this tale had to be written will appear, in more senses than one, within the tale. But there is after all no mystery. Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

  P. A. Loxias

  Editor

  Bradley Pearson’s Foreword

  Although several years have now passed since the events recorded in this fable, I shall in telling it adopt the modern technique of narration, allowing the narrating consciousness to pass like a light along its series of present moments, aware of the past, unaware of what is to come. I shall, that is, inhabit my past self and, for the ordinary purposes of story-telling, speak only with the apprehensions of that time, a time in many ways so different from the present. So for example I shall say, ‘I am fifty-eight years old’, as I then was. And I shall judge people, inadequately, perhaps even unjustly, as I then judged them, and not in the light of any later wisdom. That wisdom however, as I trust that I truly think it to be, will not be absent from the story. It will to some extent, in fact it must, ‘irradiate’ it. A work of art is as good as its creator. It cannot be more so. Nor, such as he in this case is, can it be less. The virtues have secret names: they are, so difficult of access, secret things. Everything that is worthy is secret. I will not attempt to describe or name that which I have learnt within the disciplined simplicity of my life as it has latterly been lived. I hope that I am a wiser and more charitable man now than I was then-I am certainly a happier man – and that the light of wisdom falling upon a fool can reveal, together with folly, the austere outline of truth. I have already by implication described this ‘reportage’ as a work of art. I do not of course by this mean a work of fantasy. All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth. I have endeavoured in what follows to be wisely artful and artfully wise, and to tell truth as I understand it, not only concerning the superficial and 'exciting’ aspects of this drama, but also concerning what lies deeper.

  I am aware that people often have completely distorted general ideas of what they are like. Men truly manifest themselves in the long patterns of their acts, and not in any nutshell of self-theory. This is supremely true of the artist, who appears, however much he may imagine that he hides, in the revealed extension of his work. And so am I too here exhibited, whose pitiful instinct is alas still for a concealment quite at odds with my trade. Under this cautionary rubric I shall however now attempt a general description of myself. And now I am speaking, as I explained, in the persona of the self of several years ago, the often inglorious ‘hero’ of the tale that follows. I am fifty-eight years old. I am a writer. ‘A writer’ is indeed the simplest and also the most accurate general description of me. In so far as I am also a psychologist, an amateur philosopher, a student of human affairs, I am so because these things are a part of being the kind of writer that I am. I have always been a seeker. And my seeking has taken the form of that attempt to tell truth of which I have just spoken. I have, I hope and I believe, kept my gift pure. This means, among other things, that I have never been a successful writer. I have never tried to please at the expense of truth. I have known, for long periods, the torture of life without self-expression. The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait. Art has its martyrs, not least those who have preserved their silence. There are, I hazard, saints of art who have simply waited mutely all their lives rather than profane the purity of a single page with anything less than what is perfectly appropriate and beautiful, that is to say, with anything less than what is true.

  As is well known, I have published very little. I say ‘as is well known’, relying here for my fame upon publicity deriving from my adventures outside the purlieus of art. My name is not unknown, but this alas is not because I am a writer. As a writer I have reached and doubtless will reach only a perceptive few. The paradox perhaps of my whole life, and it is an absurdity upon which I do not cease to meditate, is that the dramatic story which follows, so unlike the rest of my work, may well prove to be my only ‘best seller’. There are undoubtedly here the elements of crude drama, the ‘fabulous’ events which simple people love to hear of. And indeed I have had, in this connection, my own good share of being ‘front page news’.

  I will not attempt to describe my publications. They were, in the context to which I alluded above, much talked of, though not I fear read. I published a precocious novel at the age of twenty-five. I published another novel, or quasi-novel, at the age of forty. I have also emitted a small book of ‘texts’ or ‘studies’, I would not exactly call it a work of philosophy. (Pensées perhaps.) Time has not been given me in which to become a philosopher, and this I but in part regret. Only stories and magic really endure. How tiny one’s area of understanding is art teaches one perhaps better than philosophy. There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to
recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it. But for most of us the space between ‘dreaming on things to come’ and ‘it is too late, it is all over’ is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt by blinking and moving quickly on. I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already ‘done’ them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. Projects would change in a second from hazy uncommitted dreams into unsalvageable ancient history. Whole novels existed only in their titles. The three slim volumes which have emerged from this wrack may seem a meagre foundation upon which to rest the sacred claim of being ‘a writer’. But in fact (I feel inclined to say ‘of course’) my faith in myself in this respect, my sense of the absoluteness of this destiny, this even doom, has never weakened or wavered. I have ‘waited’, not always with patience, but, in recent years at least, with an increasing confidence. I have felt ever behind the veil of the future that a great achievement was hidden still. Let those smile who have endured as long. And if it should turn out that this small story about myself is all that my destiny is for, is the crown after all of my expectation, shall I feel myself cheated? Not cheated surely, for against that darkness one is bereft of rights. No man has the right to exercise divine power. All that one can do is to wait, to try, to wait again. The elementary need to render a truthful account of what has been so universally falsified and misrepresented is the ordinary motive for this enterprise: and to tell of a wonder which has thus far remained secret. Because I am an artist this story takes the form of a work of art. May it be worthy of those deeper motives which it also owns.