The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘I suggest that you and I settle down to construct a friendship, nothing clandestine, all cheerful and above board – ’

  ‘Cheerful?’

  ‘Why not? Why should life be sad?’

  ‘I often wonder.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t we love each other a bit and make each other happier?’

  ‘I like your “a bit”. You’re such a weights and measures man.’

  ‘Let’s try. I need you.’

  ‘That’s the best thing you’ve said yet.’

  ‘Arnold could hardly object – ’

  ‘He’d love it. That’s the trouble. Sometimes, Bradley, I wonder whether you have it in you at all to be a writer. You have such naïve views about human nature.’

  ‘When you will something a simple formulation is often the best. Besides, morals is simple.’

  ‘And we must be moral, mustn’t we?’

  ‘In the end, yes.’

  ‘In the end. That’s rich. Are you going to leave Priscilla with Christian?’

  This took me aback. I said, ‘For the present.’ I could not decide what to do about Priscilla.

  ‘Priscilla is a complete wreck You’ve got her on your hands for life. I’ve had second thoughts about minding her, by the way. She’d drive me mad. Anyway, you’ll leave her with Christian. And you’ll go there to see her. And you’ll start to talk with Christian and you’ll start discussing how your marriage went wrong, just like Arnold said you ought to do. You don’t realize how confident Arnold is that he’s the centre of every complex. It’s little people like you and me who are mean and envious and jealous. Arnold is so self – satisfied that he’s really generous, it’s real virtue. Yes, you’ll come to Christian in the end. That’s where the end is. Not morality but power. She’s a very powerful woman. She’s a great magnet. She’s your fate. And the funny thing is that Arnold will regard it all as his doing. We are all his people. But you’ll see. Christian is your fate.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘You say “never”, but you smile secretively all the same. You’re fascinated by her too. So you see, our friendship can never be, Bradley. I’m just an appendage, you can’t separate me, you’d have to focus your attention on me very hard to do that, and you won’t. You’ll be thinking about Christian and what’s going to happen there. Even in our thing you were really just jealous about her and Arnold – ’

  ‘Rachel, you know this is all very unworthy and unkind and also completely dotty. I’m not a cold schemer. I’m just a muddler hoping to be forgiven, same as you.’

  ‘A muddler hoping to be forgiven. That sounds humble and touching. It would possibly be very effective in one of your books. But I’ve got a kind of misery that makes me blind and deaf. You wouldn’t understand. You live in the open with all of you spread out around you. I’m mangled in a machine. Even to say it’s my own fault doesn’t mean anything. However don’t worry too much about me. I expect all married people are like this. It doesn’t prevent me from enjoying cups of tea.’

  ‘Rachel, we will be friends, you won’t run away into remoteness? There’s no need to be dignified with me.’

  ‘You’re so self – righteous, Bradley. You can’t help it. You’re a deeply censorious and self – righteous person. Still, you mean well, you’re a nice chap. Maybe later I shall be glad you said these things.’

  ‘Then it’s a pact.’

  ‘All right.’ Then she said, ‘You know there’s a lot of fire in me. I’m not a wreck like poor old Priscilla. A lot of fire and power yet. Yes.’

  ‘Of course – ’

  ‘You don’t understand. I don’t mean anything to do with simplicity and love. I don’t even mean a will to survive. I mean fire, fire. What tortures. What kills. Ah well – ’

  ‘Rachel, look up. The sun’s shining.’

  ‘Don’t be soppy.’

  She threw her head back and suddenly got up and started off across the square like a machine which had just been quietly set in motion. I hurried after her and took her hand. Her arm remained stiff, but she turned to me with a grimacing smile such as women sometimes use, smiling through weariness and a self – indulgent desire to weep. As we neared Oxford Street the Post Office Tower came into view, very hard and clear, glittering, dangerous, martial and urbane.

  ‘Oh look, Rachel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The tower.’

  ‘Oh that. Bradley, don’t come any farther. I’m going to the station.’

  ‘When shall I see you?’

  ‘Never, I expect. No, no. Ring up. Not tomorrow.’

  ‘Rachel, you’re sure Julian doesn’t know anything about – anything?’

  ‘Quite sure. And no one’s likely to tell her! Whatever possessed you to buy her those expensive boots?’

  ‘I wanted time to think of a plausible way of asking her to say she hadn’t met me.’

  ‘You don’t seem to have employed the time very profitably.’

  ‘No I – didn’t.’

  ‘Good – bye, Bradley. Thanks ever..’

  Rachel left me. I saw her disappear into the crowd, her battered blue handbag swinging, the plump pale flesh on her upper arm oscillating a little, her hair tangled, her face dazed and tired. With an automatic hand she had scooped up the hanging shoulder strap. Then I saw her again, and again and again. Oxford Street was full of tired ageing women with dazed faces, pushing blindly against each other like a herd of animals. I ran across the road and northwards towards my flat.

  I thought, I must get away, I must get away, I must get away. I thought, I’m glad Julian doesn’t know about all that. I thought, maybe Priscilla really is better off at Notting Hill. I thought, perhaps I will go and see Christian after all.

  As I now approach the first climax of my book let me pause, dear friend, and refresh myself once again with some direct converse with you.

  Seen from the peace and seclusion of our present haven the events of these few days between the first appearance of Francis Marloe and my Soho Square conversation with Rachel must seem a tissue of absurdities. Obviously life is full of accidents. But to the intensity of this impression we contribute too by our anxiety and fear. Anxiety most of all characterizes the human animal. This is perhaps the most general name for all the vices at a certain mean level of their operation. It is a kind of cupidity, a kind of fear, a kind of envy, a kind of hate. Now, a favoured recluse, I can, as anxiety diminishes, measure both my freedom and my previous servitude. Fortunate are they who are even sufficiently aware of this problem to make the smallest efforts to check this dimming preoccupation. Perhaps without the circumstances of a dedicated life it is impossible to make more than the smallest efforts.

  The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagara – force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say ‘apparently’ because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness. Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word ‘good’ here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self – destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery, but by what is called grandly ‘duty’ and more accurately ‘habit’. Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego’s natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life – long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.

  With these obs
ervations I introduce an analysis of my recent (as it were) conduct which I now wish, my dear, to deploy before you. As far as Rachel was concerned, I acted out a mixture of rather graceless motives. I think the turning point was her emotional letter. What dangerous machines letters are. Perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red – hot evidence. It was a long time since I had received anything resembling a love letter. And the very fact that it was a letter and not a viva voce statement gave it a sort of abstract power over me. We often make important moves in our life in a de – individualized condition. We feel suddenly that we are typifying something. This can be a source of inspiration and also a way of excusing ourselves. The intensity of Rachel’s letter communicated self – importance, energy, the sense of a role.

  I was also moved, as I have said, by the idea of scoring off Arnold, especially by excluding him from a secret. This instinct too can often lead us into ill – doing. To see someone as not in the know’ is to see them as diminished. My resentment against Arnold was not entirely concerned with our general and time – honoured relationship. It derived also from the shock which I had received when I saw Rachel lying on her bed in the curtained room and covering over her face with the sheet. It was then that I conceived the strong pity for her which, though it was contaminated as perhaps all pity is by feelings of superiority, represented the tiny fragment of moderately clean emotion in the amalgam. Did I believe Arnold when he said it was ‘an accident’? Perhaps I did. Perhaps in the darkness of my egoistic pity, I was nevertheless beginning to see Rachel through Arnold’s eyes, as a faintly hysterical and not always truthful middle – aged woman. When dealing with a married couple one can never be neutral. The hot magnetic power of each one’s view of the other makes the spectator sway. Also of course I felt resentment against Rachel because she had made me behave in a ridiculous way. Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

  Vanity and anxiety had involved me with Rachel, and envy (of Arnold) and pity and a sort of love and certainly an intermittent play of physical desire. As I have explained I was even then (and of course without any particular merit) generally indifferent to bodies. I experienced them involuntarily and without positively shuddering in crowded tube trains. But on the whole I did not now concern myself much with these integuments of the soul. Faces, of course, my friends had, but as far as I was concerned the rest could have been ectoplasm. I was not by nature a toucher or a starer. So it was that I was interested to find that I wanted to kiss Rachel, that I wanted, after a considerable interval, to kiss a particular woman. This was part of my excitement in the idea of playing a new role. In kissing her I had however no thought of proceeding further. What happened afterwards was just an unintentional muddle. Of course I did not disown it and I thought it might have serious consequences. And it did.

  I suspect that I have not yet succeeded in purveying the peculiar quality of my relationship with Arnold. Perhaps I should attempt once more to describe this friendship. I was, as I said, his ‘discoverer’ : at first his patron. He was my grateful protégé! I can even remember at that time thinking of him as a pet dog. (Arnold resembles a terrier.) There was even a ‘dog’ joke between us, now lost in history. Only gradually did the poison get in, deriving mainly from the fact of his (worldly) success and my (worldly) failure. (How hard it is for the best of us to be genuinely indifferent to the world!) Even then we were, to a remarkable extent, gentlemen about this. That is, I feigned a magnanimity and he a humility which in part we genuinely felt. Such feigning is essential in the lives of us imperfect beings. Our relationship in fact was never idle. It was obvious that we constantly thought about each other. He was (but of course not in Marloe’s sense) the most important man in my life. And this was noteworthy, since I had many male acquaintances, persons in the office such as Hartbourne and Grey – Pelham, also literary and journalistic persons, lawyers and scholars, whom I do not mention simply because they were not actors in this particular drama. It would not be too strong to say that Arnold fascinated me. There was a sort of gritty not quite ‘engaging’ feel about our friendship which gave me a sense of reality. A conversation with him always stimulated a fresh flow of thought. Also, and paradoxically, he sometimes seemed like an emanation of myself, a strayed and alien alter ego. He made me laugh deeply. I liked his doggy greasy humorous face and pale ironical eyes. He was abrasive, always slightly teasing, always slightly aggressive, always slightly (I cannot avoid the word) flirting with me. He was well aware of being the disappointing and even slightly menacing son – figure. He played the role wittily and usually with kindness. Only in later years, and after several open quarrels, did I begin to feel him the cause of such pain that I had to withdraw a little. His remarks now all seemed ‘needles’. And as my life passed on without the great visitation in which I believed, I became more and more irritated by Arnold’s facile success.

  Am I unjust to him as a writer? It is possible. Someone said that ‘all contemporary writers are either our friends or our foes’; and it is certainly hard to be objective about the contemporary crew. The scandalized annoyance which I could not prevent myself from feeling when I saw one of Arnold’s books favourably reviewed had of course its base sources. But I had also, at various times, tried quite hard to reflect rationally upon the value of Arnold’s work. I think I objected to him most because he was such a gabbler. He wrote very carelessly of course. But the gabble was not just casual and slipshod, it was an aspect of what one might call his ‘metaphysic’. Arnold was always trying, as it were, to take over the world by emptying himself over it like scented bath water. This wide catholic imperialism was quite alien to my own much more exacting idea of art as the condensing and refining of a conception almost to nothing. I have always felt that art is an aspect of the good life, and so correspondingly difficult, whereas Arnold, I regret to say, regarded art as ‘fun’. This was certainly the case in spite of the sort of ‘mythological’ pomposity which has made some critics take him seriously as a ‘thinker’. Arnold never really worked on his ‘symbolism’. He saw significance everywhere, everything was vaguely part of his myth. He liked and accepted everything. And although he was ‘in life’ a clever man and an intellectual and a tough arguer, ‘in art’ he went soft and failed to make distinctions. (The making of distinctions is the centre of art, as it is the centre of philosophy.) The cause of his failure was, in part at least, a kind of enthusiastic garrulous religiosity. He was in a somewhat shadowy way a disciple of Jung. (I mean no special disrespect to that theorist, whose work I just happen to find unreadable.) For Arnold, the artist, life was simply one big gorgeous metaphor. I think perhaps I will forbear to characterize him further here, as I can already hear the venom creeping into my tone. My friend P. has taught me much about the absolute spiritual necessity of silence. As an artist I knew of this in humbler ways and instinctively at an earlier time and my knowledge informed a kind of contempt which I always felt for Arnold.

  My relations with my sister were much simpler and also much more complex. Sibling relationships are usually complicated and yet also so taken for granted that unsophisticated participants are often unconscious of being caught in such a spider’s web of love and hate, rivalry and solidarity. As I explained earlier, I identified myself with Priscilla. My horrified distress at Roger’s happiness was a reaction of self – defence. I was affronted by the impunity with which this husband had exchanged his elderly wife for a young girl. That is every husband’s dream, no doubt: only in this context I was the elderly wife. Indeed in an odd way my sympathy for Rachel derived from my sympathy for Priscilla, despite the fact that Rachel was such a different case, so much tougher, more intelligent, more interesting and more attractive. On the other hand, Priscilla irritated me to the point of ruthlessness. In general I cannot stand weepers and whimperers. (I was moved when Rachel spoke of ‘fire’. Affliction should strike sparks, not induce self
– pity.) The silence which I have always valued has included a determination to keep the mouth shut under blows. Nor do I encourage tearful confidences. The readers will have seen how promptly I shut Francis Marloe up. This was another point on which I differed from Arnold. Arnold, even affirming that this was part of his ‘job’ as a writer, constantly encouraged people quite indiscriminately to tell him their troubles. (He exercised this talent on Christian the first time they met.) This had of course more to do with malicious curiosity than with compassion and often led to misunderstandings and subsequent bitterness. Arnold was a great ‘leader up the garden’ of persons of both sexes. I despised this. To return however to Priscilla, I felt very troubled by her afflictions and yet very unwilling to be involved. I have always felt that a realistic sense of one’s limitations as a helper is an essential part of being a good neighbour. (Arnold entirely lacked this sense.) I was not going to let Priscilla interfere with my work. And I was determined not to view her, as Rachel did, as ‘done for’. People are not so easily destroyed.

  Christian’s take – over of Priscilla, though utterly ‘obscene’, was already becoming more of a problem than an outrage. I was more inclined to let the situation ride. Christian would get no profit from her hostage. But I did not think that she would therefore abandon or ‘drop’ Priscilla. Perhaps here again I had been influenced by Arnold. In some people sheer will is a substitute for morality. What Arnold called ‘grip’. When she was my wife Christian had employed this will in an attempt to invade and conquer me. A lesser man would have surrendered in exchange for a marriage which might even have been a happy one. One can see many men who live happily, possessed and run (indeed manned, the way a ship is manned) by women of tremendous will. What saved me from Christian was art. My artist’s soul rejected this massive invasion. (It was like an invasion of viruses.) The hatred for Christian which I had nursed all these years was a natural product of my struggle for survival and its original spear – head. To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate. Now however, no longer really threatened and with an incentive to be more objective, I could see how well, how intelligently, Christian had organized herself. Perhaps learning that she was Jewish had altered my vision. I felt almost ready for a new kind of contest in which I would defeat her casually. The final exorcism would be a display of cool amused indifference. But these were shadowy thoughts. The main point was that now I felt ready to trust Christian to be business – like and reliable about Priscilla, since I felt like being neither.