The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  I wondered if these were the views of the late Oscar Belling. ‘It’s a long hard road, Julian, if that’s what you believe.’

  ‘Well, it’s what you believe, and I admire you for it, I’ve always admired you, Bradley. But the point is this, will you teach me?’

  My heart sank again. ‘What do you mean, Julian?’

  ‘Two things really. I’ve been thinking about it. I know I’m not educated and I know I’m immature. And this teachers’ training place is hopeless. I want you to give me a reading list. All the great books I ought to read, but only the great ones and the hard ones. I don’t want to waste my time with small stuff. I haven’t got much time left now. And I’ll read the books and we could discuss them. You could give me sort of tutorials on them. And then, the second thing, I’d like to write things for you, short stories perhaps, or anything you felt I should write, and you’d criticize what I’d written. You see, I want to be really taken in hand. I think one should pay so much attention to technique, don’t you? Like learning to draw before you paint. Do please say you’ll take me on. It needn’t take much of your time, not more than a couple of hours or so in a week, and it would absolutely change my life.’

  I knew of course that it was just a matter of choosing a way of getting out of this gracefully. Julian was already grieving over the wasted years and regretting that she had not much time left. My grief and my regret were a rather different matter. I could not spare her a couple of hours a week. How dare she ask for my precious hours? In any case, the child’s suggestion appalled and embarrassed me. It was not just the display of youthful insensibility. It was the sadly misplaced nature of her ambition. There was little doubt that Julian’s fate was to be typist, teacher, housewife, without starring in any role.

  I said, ‘I think it’s a very good idea and of course I’d like to help, and I do so agree with you about technique – Only just now I’m going to be abroad for a while.’

  ‘Oh, where? I could visit you. I’m quite free now because my school has measles.’

  ‘I shall be travelling.’

  ‘But, Bradley, please, couldn’t you just start me off before you go? Then we could have something to discuss when you come back. Please at least send me a book list, and I’ll read the books and have a story written too by the time you come home again. Please. I want you to be my tutor. You’re the only sort of possible real teacher in my life.’

  ‘Well, all right, I might think about some books for you. But I’m no creative-writing guru, I can’t give time to – What sort of books do you mean, anyway? Like the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, or like Sons and Lovers, Mrs Dalloway – ’

  ‘Oh Iliad, Divine Comedy, please. That’s marvellous! That’s just it ! The big stuff!’

  ‘And you don’t mind poetry, prose – ?’

  ‘Oh, no, not poetry. I can’t read poetry very well. I’m keeping poetry for later on.’

  ‘The Iliad and the Divine Comedy are poems.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course they are, but I’d be reading them in a prose translation.’

  ‘So that disposes of that difficulty.’

  ‘You will write to me then, Bradley? I’m so terribly grateful. I’ll say good-bye to you here because I must look in this shop.’

  We had stopped rather abruptly a little short of the station outside the illuminated window of a shoe shop. High summer boots of various colours made out of a sort of lace occupied the front of the window. Slightly put out by the brusqueness of my dismissal I could not think of anything suitable to say. I saluted vaguely and said ‘Ta-ta’, an expression which I do not think I have ever used before or since.

  ‘Ta-ta,’ said Julian, as if this were a sort of code. Then she turned to face the lighted window and began examining the boots.

  I crossed the road and reached the station entrance and looked back. She was leaning forward now with her hands on her knees, her thick hair and her brow and nose goldened by the bright light. I thought how aptly some painter, not Mr Belling, could have used her as a model for an allegory of Vanity. I watched, as one might watch a fox, for some minutes, but she did not go away or even move.

  My dear Arnold, I wrote.

  It was the following morning, and I was sitting at the little marquetry table in my sitting-room. I have not described this important room adequately yet. It has a powdery faded brooding inward quality, strongly smelling, perhaps literally, of the past. (Not dry rot so much as something like face powder.) It was also rather stubby, being truncated by the wall of my bedroom, which curtailed its former spread, so that the green panelling aforementioned clothed only three sides of the room. This false proportion sometimes made it feel, especially at night, as if it were part of a ship, or perhaps a first class railway carriage of the sort one might have found upon the Trans-Siberian railway about 1910. The round marquetry table stood in the centre. (Often this had a potted plant upon it, but I had just given away the current incumbent to the laundry lady.) Against the walls variously: a tiny velvet armchair with what Hartbourne, who was too stout to sit in it, called ‘frilly drawers’; two frail-legged lyreback chairs (Victorian copies) with petit-point embroidery seats, various (one with a sailing swan, the other with tiger lilies); a tall but rather narrow mahogany bureau bookcase (most of my books live on simple shelves in the bedroom); a red, black and gold lacquered display cabinet in the Chinese style, Victorian; a mahogany night-table with tray top, badly stained, possibly eighteenth century; a satinwood Pembroke table, also stained; a walnut hanging corner cupboard with curved doors. Then: drawn up against the table with me sitting on it, a curvaceous ‘conversation chair’, with upholstered arms and a greasy balding seat of red velvet. On the floor, a carpet with large amber roses on a black ground. Before the fireplace, a black woolly rug simulating a bear. Upon it a blowsy chintz armchair (Hartbourne size, usually known as ‘his’ chair) needing a new cover. The wide-shelved chimney piece was made of a dark slatey blue-grey marble, and the cave of the grate beneath was framed by a design of black cast-iron rose garlands, complete with veined leaves and thorns. Pictures, all tiny, hung mainly upon the ‘false’ wall, since I could not bring myself to pierce the wood, and the existing hooks upon the panelling were too high for my taste. Small oils these were, in thick gilt frames, of little girls with cats, little boys with dogs, cats upon cushions, flowers, the innocent heart-warming trivia of our strong and sentimental forebears. There were two little elegant northern beach scenes, and, in an oval frame, an eighteenth-century drawing of a girl with loose hair, waiting. Upon the chimney piece and in the red, black and gold lacquered display cabinet stood the little items, china cups and figures, snuff boxes, ivories, small oriental bronzes, modest stuff, some of which I may describe later since two at least of these objects play a role in the story.

  Earlier that morning Hartbourne had telephoned. Unaware that I was about to depart, he had suggested luncheon. We had been long accustomed to lunch together when I was at the office, and had continued this custom during my retirement. I was at that moment still undecided about whether or not to delay my departure in order to consolidate my peace with the Baffins on Sunday. I gave Hartbourne an evasive reply, saying I would ring back, but in fact his call prompted me to decide. I resolved to go. If I stayed until Sunday I would be caught back into the idle casual pattern of my London life, of whose ordinariness poor Hartbourne was a symbol. This was everything that I wanted to be done with, the relaxed banality of life without goals. And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic home-sickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations. After a dream on the previous night I had hidden several of the more valuable things: hence the need to rearrange the others. The stupid thought that they would stand here silently on guard during my absence almost brought tears into my eyes. Exasperated with myself I decided to leave later that morning, catching an earlier train th
an the one I had aimed at yesterday.

  Yes, it was time to move. I had felt, during recent months, sometimes boredom, sometimes despair, as I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle, now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art. The trouble was that the dark blaze, whose absence I had deplored in Arnold’s work, was absent here as well. I could not fire and fuse these thoughts, these people, into a whole thing. I wanted to produce a sort of statement which might be called my philosophy. But I also wanted to embody this in a story, perhaps in an allegory, something with a form as pliant and as hard as my cast-iron garland of roses. But I could not do it. My people were shadows, my thoughts were epigrams. However I felt, as we artists can feel, the proximity of enlightenment. And I was sure that if I went away now into loneliness, right away from the associations of tedium and failure, I would soon be rewarded. So it was in this mood that I decided to set forth, leaving my darling burrow for a countryside which I had never visited, and a cottage which I had never seen.

  However it was necessary first to settle certain things by letter. I am, I must confess, an obsessive and superstitious letter-writer. When I am troubled I will write any long letter rather than make a telephone call. This is perhaps because I invest letters with magical power. To desiderate something in a letter is, I often irrationally feel, tantamount to bringing it about. A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. (And, it must be admitted, of passing the buck.) It is a way of bidding time to stop. I decided that it was quite unnecessary to visit the Baffins on Sunday. I could achieve all that I wanted by a letter. So I wrote:

  My dear Arnold,

  I hope that you and Rachel have forgiven me for yesterday. Although summoned I was nevertheless an intruder. You will understand me and I need exclaim no more on that point. One does not want witnesses of one’s trouble however ephemeral it may be. The outsider cannot understand and his very thoughts are an impertinence. I write to say that I have no thoughts, except for my affection for you and Rachel and my certainty that all is well with you. I have never been an adherent of your brand of curiosity! And I hope that at least here you will see the charm of this lowering of the gaze! I say this in the gentlest way, and not as a reminder of our perennial argument.

  I also write to ask you, as briefly as possible, a favour. You were of course interested to meet Francis Marloe, who by the weirdest accident was with me when you telephoned. You spoke of meeting him again. Please do not do so. If you reflect you will see how hurtful to me any such association would be. I do not propose to have anything to do with my former wife and I do not want any connection to exist between her world, whatever that may turn out to be, and the things of my own which are dear to me. It would of course be characteristic of you to feel ‘interested’ in probing in this region, but please be kind enough to an old friend not to do so.

  Let me take this chance to say that in spite of all differences our friendship is very precious to me. As you will remember, I have made you my literary executor. Could there be a greater sign of trust? However, let us hope that talk of wills is premature. I am just now leaving London and will be away for some time. I hope I shall be able to write. I feel that a most crucial period in my life lies ahead. Give my fondest love to Rachel. I thank you both for your consistent cordiality to a solitary man; and I rely upon you absolutely in the matter of F.M.

  With all affectionate and friendly wishes,

  Yours ever

  Bradley

  By the time I had finished writing this letter I found that I was sweating. Writing to Arnold always, for some reason, provoked emotion: and in this case there was superadded the memory of a scene of violence, which, in spite of my bland words, I knew the chemistry of friendship would take long to assimilate. What is ugly and undignified is hardest of all, harder than wickedness, to soften into a mutually acceptable past. We forgive those who have seen us vile sooner than those who have seen us humiliated. I felt a still unresolved deep ‘shock’ about it all; and although I had been sincere in telling Arnold that I was not ‘curious’, I knew that this was not, for me either, the end of the matter.

  Refilling my pen, I began to write another letter, which ran as follows:

  My dear Julian,

  it was kind of you to ask my advice about books and writing. I am afraid I cannot offer to teach you to write. I have not the time, and such teaching is, I surmise, impossible anyway. Let me just say a word about books. I think you should read the Iliad and the Odyssey in any unvarnished translation. (If pressed for time, omit the Odyssey.) These are the greatest literary works in the world, where huge conceptions are refined into simplicity. I think perhaps you should leave Dante until later. The Commedia presents many points of difficultly and needs, as Homer does not, a commentary. In fact, if not read in Italian, this great work seems not only incomprehensible, but repulsive. You should, I feel, relax your embargo upon poetry sufficiently to accommodate the better known plays of Shakespeare! How fortunate we are to have English as our native tongue! Familiarity and excitement should carry you easily through these works. Forget that they are ‘poetry’ and just enjoy them. The rest of my reading list consists simply of the greatest English and Russian novels of the nineteenth century. (If you are not sure which these are, ask your father: I think he can be trusted to tell you!)

  Give yourself to these great works of art. They suffice for a lifetime. Do not worry too much about writing. Art is a gratuitous and usually thankless activity and at your age it is more important to enjoy it than to practise it. If you do decide to write anything, keep in mind what you yourself said about perfection. The most important thing a writer must learn to do is to tear up what he has written. Art is concerned not just primarily but absolutely with truth. It is another name for truth. The artist is learning a special language in which to reveal truth. If you write, write from the heart, yet carefully, objectively. Never pose. Write little things which you think are true. Then you may sometimes find that they are beautiful as well.

  My very good wishes to you, and thank you for wanting to know what I thought!

  Yours

  Bradley

  After I had finished this letter and after some reflection and fumbling and excursions to the chimney piece and the display cabinet, I began a further letter which went thus:

  Dear Marloe,

  as I hope I made clear to you, your visit was not only unwelcome but entirely without point, since I do not propose under any circumstances to communicate with my former wife. Any further attempt at an approach, whether by letter or in person, will be met by absolute rejection. However, now that you appreciate my attitude I imagine that you will be kind and wise enough to leave me alone. I was grateful for your help chez Mr and Mrs Baffin. I should tell you, in case you had any thoughts of pursuing an acquaintance with them, that I have asked them not to receive you, and they will not receive you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Bradley Pearson

  Francis had, on his departure on the previous evening, contrived to thrust into my pocket his address and telephone number written upon a slip of paper. I copied the address on to the envelope and threw the paper into the wastepaper basket.

  I then sat and twiddled for a bit longer, watching the creeping line of sun turning the crusty surface of the wall opposite from brown to blond. Then I fell to writing again.

  Dear Mrs Evandale,

  it has been brought to my attention that you are in London. This letter is to say that I do not under any conceivable circumstances wish to hear from you or to see you. It may seem contradictory to send you a letter to say this. But I thought it possible that some sort of curiosity or morbid interest might lead you to ‘look me up’. Kindly do not do so. I have no desire to see you and no interest in hearing about you. I see no reason why our paths should cross, and I should be grateful for the continuance of our total non-co
mmunication. Please do not imagine from this letter that I have in this long interim been speculating about you. I have not. I have forgotten you completely. I would not be concerned about you now were it not for an impertinent visit which I have received from your brother. I have asked him to spare me any further visits, and I hope that you will see to it that he does not again appear on my doorstep as your self-styled emissary. I would appreciate it if you would take this letter as saying exactly what it appears to say and nothing else. There is nothing of a cordial or forward-looking import to be read ‘between the lines’. My act of writing to you does not betoken excitement or interest. As my wife you were unpleasant to me, cruel to me, destructive to me. I do not think that I speak too strongly. I was profoundly relieved to be free of you and I do not like you. Or rather I do not like my memory of you. I scarcely even now conceive of you as existing except as a nastiness conjured up by your brother. This miasma will soon pass and be replaced by the previous state of oblivion. I trust that you will not interfere with this process by any manifestation. I should, to be finally frank, be thoroughly angered by any‘approach’ on your part, and I am sure that you would wish to avoid a distressing scene. I derive consolation from the thought that since your memories of me are doubtless just as disagreeable as my memories of you, you are unlikely to desire a meeting.

  Yours sincerely,

  Bradley Pearson

  PS I should add that I am today leaving London and tomorrow leaving England. I shall be staying away for some time and may even settle abroad.

  When I had finished writing this letter I was not only sweating, I was trembling and panting and my heart was beating viciously. What emotion had so invaded me? Fear? It is sometimes curiously difficult to name the emotion from which one suffers. The naming of it is sometimes unimportant, sometimes crucial. Hatred?