The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  Christian was one of the stars of the case. She always dressed with great care, wearing, as the papers soon noticed, a different ensemble every day. ‘A smart rich woman’ was just what the journalists wanted, and she even achieved during the days of the trial a kind of fame which stood her in good stead later when she decided to set up in business in haute couture. In fact she probably developed the idea at this very time. She was very concerned about me. (She too quite evidently believed me guilty.) But she just could not help enjoying the trial. She was in all appearance a ‘good witness’. She spoke clearly and firmly and lucidly, and the judge, who patently found her attractive, complimented her on her evidence. The jury liked her too, there were several men who always exchanged glances when she appeared. However, in the hands of a clever public prosecutor she was easily made to damage my case without even noticing. Questioned about our marriage, she was made to convey the impression that I was a thoroughly unstable person if not indeed a ‘nasty bit of work’. (‘You would describe your former husband as an intense man?’ ‘Oh awfully intense!’) At one point her sheer idiotic self – satisfaction moved me so much that I shouted out ‘Good old Chris!’ The judge reacted as to a molester of virtuous womanhood. A Sunday paper offered her a large sum of money for her ‘story’, but she refused.

  Rachel, for whom everyone felt such lively sympathy, was not made to appear very much. When she did there was a sort of sigh of reverent appreciation. And the odd thing is that I too, even then, felt a kind of reverence for her as if she were the instrument of a god. At the time I thought that this feeling was an aspect of some frivolous sense of guilt. Later on I saw it differently. There was something magnificent about Rachel. She did not avoid my eye or act in the mechanical or dreamlike way which might have been expected. She behaved with a modest simplicity and an air of gentle quiet exact truthfulness which moved everybody, myself included. I remember when she had said: There is fire in me, fire. I had not then conceived how fiercely and purely that fire could burn.

  It never entered anyone’s head that she could have had a motive for killing her husband. Marriage is a very private place. I had myself destroyed the only piece of solid evidence for such a view. (Arnold’s letter about Christian.) The excellence of her marriage, assumed by all, was piously touched upon by some witnesses. It was unnecessary to stress it. Equally, it was never suggested that I had any designs upon my victim’s wife. Delicacy, everywhere so manifest in this model trial, forbade any such notion, though it might have seemed obvious enough as a speculation. Even the newspapers, so far as I know, did not pursue it, possibly because the idea that it was Arnold whom I loved was more amusing. And delicacy, as it so often does, usurped the place of truth.

  More felicitously, as a result of a spontaneous conspiracy of silence, Julian’s name was simply not mentioned at all. No one had any reason to bring her in since, on the one hand, I was in bad enough trouble anyway, and, on the other, that story could only do me harm. So Julian vanished. It was as if the whole fantastic scene in the Old Bailey court room, the robed and wigged celebrants, the sober yet histrionic witnesses, the quiet gleeful public, were all part of a machinery of magic designed to dematerialize her and make her as if she had never been. Yet at moments her paramount reality in that scene was such that I wanted to shout out her name again and again. However I did not. This silence at least which was enjoined was also achieved. Those who know will understand how in a curious way I was almost relieved to think how she had now been made perfect by being removed into the sphere of the impossible. This idea indeed provided a focus of contemplation which alleviated the awful sufferings of that time.

  In a purely technical sense I was condemned for having murdered Arnold. (The jury were out of the room for less than half an hour. Counsel did not even bother to leave their seats.) In a more extended sense, and this too provided fruit for meditation, I was condemned for being a certain awful kind of person. I aroused horror and aversion in the bosom of the judge and in the bosoms of the honest citizens of the jury and the sturdy watchdogs of the press. I was heartily hated. In sentencing me to life imprisonment the judge gave general satisfaction. It was a mean crime of an unusually pure kind: to kill one’s friend out of envy of his talents. And poor Priscilla, risen from the grave, seemed to point her finger at me too. I had failed as a friend and I had failed as a brother. My insensibility to my sister’s plight and then to her death was attested by several. The defence, as I said, did their best to use this as proof of mental unbalance. But the general view was simply that it proved me a monster.

  It is not, however, my purpose here to describe the trial, or even to attempt in any detail to describe my state of mind. On the latter subject a few words will suffice. Anyone who is quite suddenly on public trial for a murder he has not committed is likely to be in a disturbed state. Of course I protested my innocence. But I did not (and this too may have influenced the jury) protest it with quite the frenzied passion which might have been expected from an innocent person. Why? The notion of actually assuming Arnold’s death (and ‘confessing’) did occur to me an aesthetic possibility. If I had killed him there would have been a certain beauty in it. And to an ironical man what could be prettier than to have the aesthetic satisfaction of having ‘committed’ murder, without actually having had to commit it? However truth and justice alike forbade this course. And (as ought to have been obvious to the judge and jury) it is psychologically impossible for a man of my temperament to lie in a moment of crisis. Of course it was partly that I felt I was guilty of something wicked. This picturesque explanation certainly had some force, perhaps simply because of the appeal of the picturesqueness to my literary mind. I had not willed Arnold’s death but I had envied him and (sometimes at least) detested him. I had failed Rachel and abandoned her. I had neglected Priscilla. Dreadful things had happened for which I was in part responsible. During the trial I was accused of being unconcerned that two people had died. (At some moments, as the defence pointed out, the prosecution seemed to be accusing me of two murders.) The court saw me as a callous fantasy – ridden man. In fact I meditated profoundly upon my responsibility. But guilt is a form of energy and because of it my head lifted and my eyes glowed. There are perhaps moments in any man’s life when there is no substitute for the discipline of guilt. Much later, my dearest friend, it was you who pointed out to me that, without realizing it, I surrendered myself to the trial as to a final exorcism of guilt from my life.

  I gave myself up to the course of events with a certain resignation and without screams of protest, for another and deeper reason too, which had to do with Julian. Or perhaps there were two reasons here, one lying above the other. Or perhaps three. What did I believe that Julian thought about what had happened? In a strange way I was almost entirely agnostic about what Julian thought. I did not imagine that she saw me as a murderer. But neither did I expect her to defend me by accusing her mother. My love for Julian had somehow brought about this death. (This piece of causality I was quite clear about.) And my responsibility for it I was prepared to lodge for ever in the mystery of my love for Julian and her love for me. That was part of it. But I also felt something like this, that the emergence of my life out of quietness into public drama and horror was a necessary and in some deep sense natural outcome of the visitation with which I had been honoured. Sometimes I thought of it as a punishment for the failure of my vow of silence. Sometimes, shifting the same idea only very slightly, it seemed more like a reward. Because I loved Julian something huge had happened to me. I had been given the privilege of an ordeal. That I suffered through her and for her was, in addition, a delightful, almost frivolous comfort.

  The court saw me, as I have said, as a fantastical man. Little did they know how fantastical I was, though not in their crude sense. It is the literal truth that the image of Julian was not absent from my mind for a single second during the waking hours of those terrible days. I apprehended at the same time her absolute presence and her absolute absence. Ther
e were moments when I felt as if I were being literally torn to pieces by love. (What must it be like to be eaten by a large animal? I felt I knew.) This pain, from which I almost fainted, once or twice came upon me when I was addressing the court, and abruptly stopped my utterance, thereby giving comfort to the insanity lobby. Perhaps the only thing which made me survive this period of thinking about Julian was the complete absence of hope. A grain of hope present at that time would have killed me.

  The psyche, desperate for its survival, discovers deep things. How little most so – called psychologists seem to know about its shifts and its burrowings. At some point in a black vision I apprehended the future. I saw this book, which I have written, I saw my dearest friend P.L., I saw myself a new man, altered out of recognition. I saw beyond and beyond. The book had to come into being because of Julian, and because of the book Julian had to be. It was not, though indeed time matters little to the unconscious mind, that the book was the frame which she came to fill, nor was she the frame which the book filled. She somehow was and is the book, the story of herself. This is her deification and incidentally her immortality. It is my gift to her and my final possession of her. From this embrace she can never now escape. But, and this is not to belittle my darling, I saw much more than this in the black glass of the future. And this is, if I can express it, the deepest reason why I accepted the unjust judgement of the court.

  I felt that every single thing that was happening to me was not just predestined but somehow actively at the moment of its occurrence thought by a divine power which held me in its talons. At times I felt almost as if I were holding my breath in case some tiny movement of my own should interfere with the course of this divine possession. Though in the same thought I also knew that I could not now, by the most frenzied struggling, ever escape my fate. The court room and the judge and the condemnation for life were mere shadows of a much huger and more real drama of which I was the hero and the victim. Human love is the gateway to all knowledge, as Plato understood. And through the door that Julian opened my being passed into another world.

  When I thought earlier that my ability to love her was my ability to write, my ability to exist at last as the artist I had disciplined my life to be, I was in the truth, but knew it only darkly. All great truths are mysteries, all morality is ultimately mysticism, all real religions are mystery religions, all great gods have many names. This little book is important to me and I have written it as simply and as truthfully as I can. How good it is I do not know and in a sublime sense I do not care. It has come into being as true art comes, with absolute necessity and with absolute ease. That it is not great art I daresay I am aware. What kind of thing it is is dark to me as I am dark to myself. The mechanical aspects of our humanity remain obscure to us until divine power has refined them absolutely, and then there is no anxious knower any more and nothing to be known. Every man is tiny and comic to his neighbour. And when he seeks an idea of himself he seeks a false idea. No doubt we need these ideas, we may have to live by them, and the last ones that we will abandon are these of dignity, tragedy and redemptive suffering. Every artist is a masochist to his own muse, that pleasure at least belongs to him intimately. And indeed our highest moments may find us still the hero of such conceptions. But they are false conceptions all the same. And the black Eros whom I loved and feared was but an insubstantial shadow of a greater and more terrible godhead.

  About these things, my dear fellow, we in our seclusion have often spoken, in our times of quietness together, with words whose meaning glowed out of an ineffable understanding, like flames upon dark water. So friends, so spirits, ultimately converse. It was for this that Plato, in his wisdom, forbade the artist. Socrates wrote nothing, neither did Christ. Almost all speech which is not so illumined is a deformation of the truth. And yet: I am writing these words and others whom I do not know will read them. With and by this paradox I have lived, dear friend, in our sequestered peace. Perhaps it will always be for some an unavoidable paradox, but one which is only truly lived when it is also a martyrdom.

  I do not know whether I shall see the ‘outside world’ again. (A curious phrase. The world is, in reality, all outside, all inside.) The question is of no interest to me. A truthful vision finds the fullness of reality everywhere and the whole extended universe in a little room. That old brick wall which we have so often contemplated together, my dear friend and teacher: how could I find words to express its glowing beauty, lovelier and more sublime than the beauty of hills and waterfalls and unfolding flowers? These are indeed vulgarisms, commonplaces. What we have seen together is a beauty and a glory beyond words, the world transfigured, found. It was this, which in the bliss of quietness I now enjoy, which I glimpsed prefigured in madness in the water – colour – blue eyes of Julian Baffin. She images it for me still in my dreams, as the icons of childhood still haunt the visions of the ageing sage. May it be always so, for nothing is lost, and even at the end we are ever at the beginning.

  And I found you, my friend, the crown of my quest. Could you not have existed, could you not have been waiting for me in this monastery which we have inhabited together? That is impossible, my dear. Were you there by accident? No, no, I should have had to invent you, and by the power which you yourself bestow I should have been able to. Now indeed I can see my life as a quest and an ascesis, but lost until the end in ignorance and dark. I was seeking you, I was seeking him, and the knowledge beyond all persons which has no name at all. So I sought you long and in sorrow, and in the end you consoled me for my life – long deprivation of you by suffering with me. And the suffering became joy.

  So we live on together here in our quiet monastery, as we are pleased to call it. And so I come to the end of this book. I do not know if I shall write another. You have taught me to live in the present and to forswear the fruitless anxious pain which binds to past and to future our miserable local are of the great wheel of desire. Art is a vain and hollow show, a toy of gross illusion, unless it points beyond itself and moves ever whither it points. You who are a musician have shown me this, in the wordless ultimate regions of your art, where form and substance hover upon the brink of silence, and where articulate forms negate themselves and vanish into ecstasy. Whether words can travel that path, through truth, absurdity, simplicity, to silence I do not know, nor what that path can be like. I may write again. Or may at last abjure what you have made me see to be but a rough magic.

  This book has been in some way the story of my life. But it has also been I hope an honest tale, a simple love story. 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. I will mention two. Priscilla. May I never in my thought knit up the precise and random detail of her wretchedness so as to forget that her death was not a necessity. And Julian. I do not, my darling girl, however passionately and intensely 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.

  Four Postscripts by DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Postscript by Christian

  Mr Loxias has kindly shown me the manuscript written by my former husband and has asked me if I wish to make any comments on it, these to be published with the book itself. I do not think I have many comments except that the whole book seems to me to be sort of off key. I think many things are in the eye of
the beholder. I was not at all ‘self – satisfied’ during the trial, but very upset indeed, for instance. It would have been very heartless to be self – satisfied then. Bradley has a way of seeing everything in his own way and making it all fit together in his own picture. Perhaps we all do that, but we do not write it down in a book. He does not give a very fair picture at all of the time of our marriage. I do not want to be nasty to him, I am very sorry for him indeed. It must be very depressing to be in prison, though he is putting a brave face on it I must say. (It is rather funny that he calls it a monastery. Some monastery.) In fact I cannot imagine anything more awful, and I think it is a great achievement that he has managed to write this book at all. I can say nothing about its value, I am not a literary critic, I mean its value as a novel or whatever it is. But that it is not a very true picture of the bits I know about it is all I can say. Bradley never hated me during our marriage. I think he never really hated me at all, but because I left him (which he does not say in the book) he had to pretend that he did. He describes how I dominated him or stole him from himself or something, these are very eloquent parts of the book and very well written I dare say. But it was not ah all like that in real life. The trouble with our marriage was that I was young and wanted more fun and happiness than Bradley was able to give me. Because he is quite witty sometimes in the book and makes things funny (sometimes he makes things funny which are not really) a reader might think that he was an amusing person to be with, but this is not so, even when he was young. There was no sort of battle between us at all as he tells in the book, I just got very depressed and so did he, and I decided to leave him though he begged me and begged me to stay, which he does not tell us. Our marriage had been a mistake. I was much happier in my second marriage. I did not say the horrible things about my second husband that Bradley says, though I may have made a joke about him. Bradley has never been very good at seeing when things are jokes. He says somewhere in his book, I cannot now find it, that he is a puritan and that I think is the truth. He could never understand women. And I think he was jealous of my second marriage, people never like to think their wife was happier with someone else. Of course he is quite wrong when he thinks that after I came back to London at the beginning of his ‘novel’ I was really interested in coming together with him again. I was not. I came to see him because he was about the only person I still knew in London and also because I was curious to see what had happened to him in the between time. I was cheerful and happy and I just wanted to look him over, so I stopped by. I did not need him!! But it was jolly clear at once that he needed me, and this bit he did not tell at all properly. He was after me at once. And when I told him I just wanted to be friends in a friendly casual sort of a way, he was pretty furious and put out and then I expect he wrote those things about hating me and about my being so awful like a sort of female spider as a kind of revenge because I was not friendly enough to him when I came back to London. Really it is obvious I think from the book that he was in love with me again, or had always been in love with me. It was a great shock to him when I came back and when he found that I rejected him a second time. I think it was this that finally unsettled his reason and brought on the kind of insanity which my husband was so anxious to prove at the trial. Both his sister and his mother were very unbalanced and neurotic, incidentally, they could have done with analysis, all the family. I do believe that Bradley was really mad when he killed Arnold Baffin, it was a brain storm, and he forgot about it all afterwards as if it had been a dream. Those sleeping pills he took make people forget things. I think the death of his sister upset him terribly too, though he did not seem to be very upset, and he certainly abandoned her though he must have seen what a state she was in, and left her to me to be looked after, which he was glad enough to do. Perhaps it was something to do with money, he was always a bit of a mean man. And what he says in the postscript of his book about his sister does not seem to me to be real feeling, but rather that he was feeling guilty, which he so often did, though it does not seem that it made him behave any better. As for the part about Miss Baffin, that must embarrass her a lot, as it was obviously mostly in his mind. I am rather surprised that the book is to be published. I think all that story was to veil his loving me. Anyway, people never fall in love suddenly like that except in novels. I think the trouble with Bradley was that he never really got over his background. He is always going on about ‘the shop’, and I think he felt ashamed of his parents and of not having had a proper education, I think that is the key to a lot. I am afraid he is a bit of a snob, which does not help anything. My husband thinks Bradley is not really a writer at all, but should have been a philosopher, only he was not educated enough. Bradley is wrong too to say that the idea of haute couture only came to me during the trial, I do not know why he says that. I was never going to take on women’s underwear with Mr Baffin, and had planned my existing salon even before I arrived back in London. He is right about one thing though, that I am good at business, as witness the fabulous success of the salon in a few years. My husband too has taken to business like a duck to water and his knowing about tax is so useful, so one good thing came out of that trial, though as I said at the begining I was very unhappy indeed and very sorry indeed for poor Bradley. (And for Mr Baffin too of course.) I would like to say to Bradley now if he ever sees this piece that I am very sorry for him and think of him with affection. There is no point in writing him letters any more. That poor Bradley is still quite mad is shown by the postscript to his story, where he seems to think that he has become a mystic or something. That part was rather creepy I thought and really like what mad people write. And why all this fuss about art anyway, we can live without art I should think. What about social workers and people who work on famine relief and so on, or are they all supposed to be failures or not all there? Art isn’t everything, but of course Bradley would think what he’s taken up with is the only important thing. At any rate he is getting another publication out at last. I think by now everyone must know that ‘ Mr Loxias’ is really a well – known publisher who hopes to make a lot of money out of publishing Bradley’s memoirs, which I hope that he will. The Sunday papers will publish them too I am told. I do not know if people in prison can draw royalties at all. So the person Bradley talks of as his ‘teacher’ and so on and whom he seems to think so much of must be somebody else, or else that bit is probably made up as is obviously much else in the story. I would like to say again, how sorry I am for Bradley and how I hope that he is not too unhappy in prison. Perhaps being a bit out of your mind is a merciful thing if it makes you think that you are happy when you are not.