Under the Net

by Iris Murdoch

  From that moment on Hugo and I fell into a conversation the like of which I have never known. We rapidly told each other the complete story of our lives, wherein I at least achieved an unprecedented frankness. We then went on to exchange our views on art, politics, literature, religion, history, science, society, and sex. We talked without interruption all day, and often late into the night. Sometimes we laughed and shouted so much that we were rebuked by the authorities, and once we were threatened with separation. Somewhere in the middle of this the current experimental session ended, but we forthwith enrolled ourselves for another consecutive one. We eventually settled down to a discussion the nature of which is to some extent germane to my present story.

  Hugo has often been called an idealist. I would prefer to call him a theoretician, though he is a theoretician of a peculiar kind. He lacked both the practical interests and the self-conscious moral seriousness of those who are usually dubbed idealists. He was the most purely objective and detached person I had ever met - only in him detachment showed less like a virtue and more like a sheer gift of nature, a thing of which he was quite unaware. It was something which was expressed in his very voice and manner. I can picture him now, as I so often saw him during those conversations, leaning far forward in his chair and biting his knuckles as he picked up some hot-headed remark of mine. He was, in discussion, very slow. He would open his mouth slowly, shut it again, open it again, and at last venture a remark. ‘You mean ...’ he would say, and then he would rephrase what I had said in some completely simple and concrete way, which sometimes illuminated it enormously, and sometimes made nonsense of it entirely. I don’t mean that he was always right. Often he failed utterly to understand me. It didn’t take me long to discover that I had a much wider general knowledge than he on most of the subjects we discussed. But he would very quickly realize when we were, from his point of view, at a dead end, and he would say: ‘Well, I can say nothing about that,’ or ‘I’m afraid that here I don’t understand you at all, not at all,’ with a finality which killed the topic. From first to last it was Hugo, not I, who conducted the conversation.

  He was interested in everything, and interested in the theory of everything, but in a peculiar way. Everything had a theory, and yet there was no master theory. I have never met a man more destitute than Hugo of anything which could be called a meta-physic or general Weltanschauung. It was rather perhaps that of each thing he met he wanted to know the nature — and he seemed to approach this question in each instance with an absolute freshness of mind. The results were often astonishing. I remember a conversation which we had once about translating. Hugo knew nothing about translating, but when he learnt that I was a translator he wanted to know what it was like. I remember him going on and on, asking questions such as: What do you mean when you say that you think the meaning in French? How do you know you’re thinking it in French? If you see a picture in your mind how do you know it’s a French picture? Or is it that you say the French word to yourself? What do you see when you see that the translation is exactly right? Are you imagining what someone else would think, seeing it for the first time? Or is it a kind of feeling? What kind of feeling? Can’t you describe it more closely? And so on and so on, with a fantastic patience. This sometimes became very exasperating. What seemed to me to be the simplest utterance soon became, under the repeated pressure of Hugo’s ‘You mean’, a dark and confused saying of which I no longer myself knew the meaning. The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it. Yet at the same time Hugo’s inquiries rarely failed to throw an extraordinary amount of light on whatever he concerned himself with. For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious. During these conversations I began to see the whole world anew.

  During the early part of my discussions with Hugo I kept trying to ‘place’ him. Once or twice I asked him directly whether he held this or that general theory — which he always denied with the air of one who has been affronted by a failure of taste. And indeed it seemed to me later that to ask such questions of Hugo showed a peculiar insensitivity to his unique intellectual and moral quality. After a while I realized that Hugo held no general theories whatsoever. All his theories, if they could be called theories, were particular. But still I had the feeling that if I tried hard enough I could come somehow to the centre of his thought; and after a while my passion became to discuss with Hugo not so much politics or art or sex, but what it was that was so peculiar in Hugo’s approach to politics or art or sex. At last we did have a conversation which seemed to me to touch on something central to Hugo’s thought, if Hugo’s thought could be said at all to have anything so figurative as a centre. He himself would probably have denied this; or rather, I’m not sure that he would have known what it meant for thoughts to have an orientation. We arrived at the point in question by way of a discussion about Proust. From Proust we were led on to discuss what it meant to describe a feeling or a state of mind. Hugo found this very puzzling, as indeed he found everything very puzzling.

  ‘There’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,’ said Hugo. ‘All these descriptions are so dramatic.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said.

  ‘Only,’ said Hugo, ‘that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt “apprehensive” — well, this just isn’t true.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I didn’t feel this,’ said Hugo. ‘I didn’t feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards.’

  ‘But suppose I try hard to be accurate,’ I said.

  ‘One can’t be,’ said Hugo. ‘The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try descailing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you ...’

  ‘Touch it up?’ I suggested.

  ‘It’s deeper than that,’ said Hugo. “The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.‘

  ‘Suppose then,’ I said, ‘that one were offering the description at the time.’

  ‘But don’t you see,’ said Hugo, ‘that just gives the thing away. One couldn’t give such a description at the time without seeing that it was untrue. All one could say at the time would be perhaps something about one’s heart beating. But if one said one was apprehensive this could only be to try to make an impression — it would be for effect, it would be a lie.’

  I was puzzled by this myself. I felt that there was something wrong in what Hugo said, and yet I couldn’t see what it was. We discussed the matter a bit further, and then I told him, ‘But at this rate almost everything one says, except things like “Pass the marmalade” or “There’s a cat on the roof”, turns out to be a sort of lie.’

  Hugo pondered this. ‘I think it is so,’ he said with seriousness.

  ‘In that case one oughtn’t to talk,’ I said.

  ‘I think perhaps one oughtn’t to,’ said Hugo, and he was deadly serious. Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking of how we had been doing nothing else for days on end.

  ‘That’s colossal!’ said Hugo. ‘Of course one does talk. But,’ and he was grave again, ‘one does make far too many concessions to the need to communicate.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All the time when I speak to you, even now, I’m saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That’s so even between us - and how much more it’s so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one’s so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.’

  ‘What would happen if one were to speak the truth?’ I asked. ‘Would it be possible?’

  ‘I know myself,’ said Hugo, ‘that when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mou
th absolutely dead, and I see complete blankness in the face of the other person.’

  ‘So we never really communicate?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose actions don’t lie.’

  It took us about half a dozen cold-cure sessions to reach this point. We had arranged by now to have the cold alternately, so that whatever intellectual diminution was entailed by it should be shared equally between us. Hugo had insisted on this; though I would willingly have had all the colds myself, partly because of a protective feeling I was developing towards Hugo, and partly because Hugo made such an infernal noise when he had the cold. I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on us earlier that we didn’t have to stay in the cold-cure establishment in order to continue our talks. Perhaps we were afraid of breaking the continuity. I don’t know when it would have occurred to us to leave of our own volition; but eventually we were turned out by the authorities, who feared that if we went on having colds much longer we might do some permanent injury to our health.

  By this time I was completely under Hugo’s spell. He himself never appeared to notice the extent of the impression he made on me. In conversation he was completely without any sort of desire to score points, and although he often silenced me, he seemed unaware of having done so. It was not that I always agreed with him. His failure to grasp certain kinds of ideas often filled me with annoyance. But it was as if his very mode of being revealed to me how hopelessly my own vision of the world was blurred by generality. I felt like a man who, having vaguely thought that flowers are all much the same, goes for a walk with a botanist. Only this simile doesn’t fit Hugo either, for a botanist not only notices details but classifies. Hugo only noticed details. He never classified. It was as if his vision were sharpened to the point where even classification was impossible, for each thing was seen as absolutely unique. I had the feeling that I was meeting for the first time an almost completely truthful man; and the experience was turning out to be appropriately upsetting. I was but the more inclined to attribute a spiritual worth to Hugo in proportion as it would never have crossed his mind to think of himself in such a light.

  When we were turned out of the cold-cure establishment I had nowhere to live. Hugo suggested that I should come and live with him, but some instinct of independence forbade this. I felt that Hugo’s personality could very easily swallow mine up completely and much as I admired him I didn’t want this to happen. So I declined his offer. I had in any case to go to France about this time to see Jean Pierre, who was making a fuss about one of the translations, so our conversation was interrupted for a while. During this interval Hugo returned to work at the Rocket Factory, and began to develop his great ingenuity with set pieces, and generally resumed the pattern of his London life. His attempts to break out of this pattern always took some eccentric form or other; his inability to take a normal comfortable expensive holiday was the nearest thing to a neurotic trait that I ever discovered in him. When I got back from Paris I took a cheap room in Battersea, and Hugo and I resumed our talks. We would meet on Chelsea Bridge after Hugo’s day’s work, and wander along the Chelsea embankment, or make the round of the pubs in the King’s Road, talking ourselves to exhaustion.

  Some time previous to this, however, I had made a move which turned out to be fatal. The conversation of which I have given a small extract above had interested me so much that I had made a few notes of it just to remind myself. When I glanced at these notes again after a little while they looked very scrappy and inadequate, so I added to them a bit, just to make them a better reminder. Then later still when I looked them up it struck me that the argument as it stood on paper didn’t make sense. So I added some more, to make it look intelligible, still drawing on my memory. Then when I read the thing through it began to occur to me that it was rather good. I’d never seen anything quite like it. I ran through it again and made it look a bit more elegant. After all, I am a natural writer; and since the thing was now on paper it might as well look decent. So I polished it up quite a lot and then began to fill in the preliminary conversation as well. This conversation I found wasn’t so clear in my memory, and in reconstructing it I drew on a number of different occasions.

  Of course, I didn’t tell Hugo about this. I intended the thing as a private and personal record for myself, so there was no point in telling him. In fact, I knew in my heart that the creation of this record was a sort of betrayal of everything which I imagined myself to have learnt from Hugo. But this didn’t stop me. Indeed, the thing began to have for me the fascination of a secret sin. I worked on it constantly. I now expanded it to cover a large number of our conversations, which I presented not necessarily as I remembered them to have occurred, but in a way which fitted in with the plan of the whole. A quite considerable book began to take shape. I kept it in the form of a dialogue between two characters called Tamarus and Annandine. The curious thing was that I could see quite clearly that this work was from start to finish an objective justification of Hugo’s attitude. That is, it was a travesty and falsification of our conversations. Compared with them it was a pretentious falsehood. Even though I wrote it only for myself, it was clearly written for effect, written to impress. Some of the most illuminating moments of our talk had been those which, if recorded, would have sounded the flattest. But these I could never bring myself to record with the starkness which they had had in reality. I was constantly supplying just that bit of shape, that hint of relation, which the original had lacked. Yet though I saw the thing quite plainly as a travesty I didn’t like it any the less for that.

  Then one day I couldn’t resist showing it to Dave Gellman. I thought it might impress him. It did. He immediately wanted to discuss it with me. Not much came of this, however, as I found myself quite incapable of discussing Hugo’s ideas with Dave. Greatly as I was moved by these ideas, I was totally unable to reproduce them in talk with anyone else. When I tried to explain some notion of Hugo’s it sounded flat and puerile, or else quite mad, and I soon gave up the attempt. After that Dave rather lost interest in the book; nothing is true or important for Dave which can’t be maintained in an oral discussion. However, he had during this time, and contrary to my instructions, showed the book, which he had taken home to finish, to one or two other people who were also very impressed by it.

  Since I knew how much the whole project would displease him, I had felt myself bound to conceal Hugo’s identity. I had presented the thing to Dave as a dramatic exercise, rather remotely based on conversations which I had had with a variety of people. But now in a little while I found myself being regarded in certain circles as a kind of sage, and many of my friends pressed me to let them see the manuscript. Eventually I did show it to a few more people and began to get used to the idea that it should circulate a little. All this time I was still working on it, and drawing additional matter from my current conversations with Hugo. I had continued to keep my friendship with Hugo completely secret from all my other friends. I did this at first out of a jealous desire to keep my remarkable find to myself, and later on also because I feared that Hugo might discover my treachery.

  People were now constantly suggesting to me that I should publish the thing, at which I just laughed. But the notion was attractive to me all the same. It was attractive at first in the way something can attract one when one knows one will never do it As publication was so absolutely out of the question I felt it was quite safe to brood upon it in imagination. I thought what a remarkable book it would make, how original, how astonishing, how illuminating. I amused myself inventing titles for it. I would sit holding the manuscript in my hands, and then I would fancy it reproduced a thousand-fold. I suffered continually at that time from a fear of losing the manuscript, and although I typed out two or three copies I still felt it very likely that somehow or other they would all be destroyed and the thing lost for ever — which I couldn’t help thinking would be a pity. Then one day a publisher approached me directly with a proposal for its publication.

  This took me by surprise
. I had never been spontaneously approached by a publisher before and such condescension rather turned my head. It occurred to me that if this book were a success, which I couldn’t doubt, this might smooth my way considerably in the literary world. It’s easier to sell junk when you’re known than works of genius when you’re unknown. If I could leap to fame in this way my career as a writer would be made. I set this idea aside, telling myself that the project was an impossible one. I couldn’t palm off Hugo’s ideas as my own. Most of all, I couldn’t use material drawn from my intimacy with Hugo to present the public with a work which would fill Hugo himself with repulsion and disgust. But the idle dreams of publication which I had nourished earlier now unmasked themselves as a real will. I became obsessed with the notion that I would publish. A sort of fatality drew me towards it. I saw all my past acts as leading inevitably to this end. I remembered a drunken evening during which I passed in fantasy through every stage of the process which should bring the dialogue into print. By then the idea had too great a reality in imagination for it to be long before it should become actual. I rang up the publisher at his home.

  He knew of my reluctances, and arrived early the next morning with the contract, which I signed with a flourish of abandon and a splitting headache. After he had gone I took out the manuscript and looked at it as one looks at the woman for whom one has lost one’s honour. I entitled it The Silencer and added an author’s preface to the effect that I owed many of the ideas contained therein to a friend who should be nameless, but that I had no reason to believe that he would approve of the form in which I was presenting them. Then I sent the thing away and left it to its fate.

  While this crisis had been gathering, Hugo had begun to put his money into films. He started to do this in a vaguely philanthropic way, in order to give the British film industry a leg up. But then it all began to interest him, and by the time Bounty Belfounder was founded Hugo knew his way about pretty well in the film world. He was in fact a remarkable man of business. He inspired universal confidence and had an iron nerve. Bounty Belfounder went ahead like wildfire. It had an experimental stage, if you remember, largely I think inspired by Hugo himself, when it produced a lot of silent films of the kind which used to be called ‘expressionist’; but it soon settled down to making quite ordinary films, with occasional experiment departures. Hugo didn’t talk to me much about his film ventures, though we were seeing each other frequently all this time. I think he was a little ashamed of being so successful. I, on the contrary, felt proud of him for being so versatile, and took an especial pleasure in going to the cinema to see, before the credit titles, the familiar shot of City Spires, and hear the crescendo of City Bells, while the words Presented by Hugo Belfounder grew solemnly upon the screen.