A Word Child

by Iris Murdoch

  May I for a moment speak about myself? It is a relief to do so. This is the only context in which I can speak, you are the only person to whom I can speak. I have carried this thing silently and alone all these years and the burden has not become less. I am not even sure what the name of the burden is. Naming might help, only words are defeated. Guilt, sin, pain, repentance, remorse? Not repentance, for repentance would somehow change the thing, and it is its unchangedness which utterly spoils life and precludes joy. Forgive this exercise in self-pity, which may seem hideously out of place. What claims have I here, what can I hope to be but the merest instrument? And yet as I reflect, and especially after the horror of Gunnar’s presence at that dinner, I feel that if sense is to be made of this I must consider my own needs too, they must be there, accepted as part of my motives. Accepted: yet by whom? I can hardly ask Gunnar to ‘accept’ them, to allow that the thing which may do him good may do me good. It would be too much to expect that his pity for me should heal both of us. I cannot, somehow, even expect him to know that I have suffered — and suffer and will suffer. So I suppose the person to whom I address this plea is either God or you. Therefore you. Please forgive me. It is already some infinitesimal kind of alleviation to be able to say to you that this thing is to me like yesterday, and that it has ruined my life down to its last details. It may seem ‘cowardly’ to have let such devastation come about, and now to force the unsavoury spectacle of it upon someone who should particularly be spared it. Yet such things happen to men, lives are thus ruined, thus tainted and darkened and irrevocably spoilt, wrong turnings are taken and persisted in, and those who make one mistake wreck all the rest out of frenzy, even out of pique. Only your gracious kindness to me, your notice of me, your, dare I say it, need of me has made a place where this statement can be made, this gruesome truth at last paraded. For a moment light can fall upon an obscene and awful wound. And for that, whatever happens, I am grateful to you, and by that, whatever happens, I shall be helped.

  I dare to say these things to you because of the extraordinary opportunity which you have, it seems knowingly, given me, and also because our meeting is of necessity something absolutely momentary, so momentary as scarcely to exist as a meeting of two people, although it enormously exists as an event. Obviously no ‘friendship’ can ever be between me and Gunnar. So much has happened in my mind since we talked in the park. I believe at first I imagined that there could perhaps be a ‘relationship’. I now see that this is impossible. I will do whatever you want, I will do if I can what is needful, and then I shall disappear. I shall pass like a comet. I think in fact, now in my later clearer vision of it, that there is little, though there is possibly something, that I can do for Gunnar. (And, alas, little that Gunnar can do for me.) And I certainly do not expect that you will remember me with gratitude. I shall, soon, have gone. Only an event will have occurred, an event which your grace and your courage made to be. And I will remember your kindness to me and even if there is nothing else for me to carry away I shall carry that away — and it will be precious to me in the long years to come and the horror, the dreadful wound, will perhaps, who knows, become a little better after all.

  One other thing, since I feel that as I write this I must keep nothing back. I have broken off my engagement to Mrs Uhlmeister. In fact I was never really engaged to her at all. You may not even recall this matter, but I thought that I would mention it as Mr and Mrs Impiatt were rather jocular about it during dinner.

  Please please forgive this letter. It is, I am sure, the only letter I shall ever write to you. The relief of writing it has been immense, cosmic. You have already done so much for me. To do your will, to be of service to you and Gunnar, is the only wish of a man destined to vanish. Accept my gratitude, my homage. I will await your instructions about what to do next, and I will do whatever you tell me. I hope with all my heart that Gunnar will be willing to see me again, or at any rate has not decided that he will not. I do not expect any communication from him of course. If you think it best I will again approach him in the office, or else write to him. Your good wishes are as prayers in the light of which I can now almost pray myself.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Hilary Burde.

  It was three a.m. and I was sitting up in a damnably cold bedroom in a small hotel near Paddington. I was in a frenzy. My heart was beating so hard that I had at times to press my two hands against it as if this were the only way to prevent it from breaking through the flesh. My blood raced, my head swam. I had decided, well it was scarcely a decision, not to go home and face Tommy. I went early from the Impiatts and telephoned Crystal from Gloucester Road to tell her not to expect me. I did not say why and she did not ask. Her voice on the telephone echoed sadly, echoed with loneliness, though she spoke only words of love. I took the Inner Circle to Paddington and went at random into one of the cheap hotels in Sussex Gardens. I got some writing paper from the porter and then sat in my room composing.

  I wrote the letter several times over, perhaps five times, making additions and minor changes of wording. I wrote fast, there was no lack of inspiration. The first draft was full of colons and semicolons which I excised in the second draft in favour of dashes, and then in subsequent drafts changed most of the dashes into commas and reinstated a colon or two. I noticed (I was not exactly drunk but had drunken symptoms) that I had scarcely mentioned Gunnar at all in draft one. I felt divinely possessed but also profoundly confused about what I was supposed to be doing and what all the commotion was for. It was as if there was no one in the universe except me and Kitty. (She had, in fact, been ‘Kitty’ in my thoughts for several days now.) Something terrible had happened, yesterday, years ago, before the world began, but what was it? Something had to be done, there was some ordeal, some service to be performed, but what? All I knew was that she had ordained it. I was to do her will and then die. I was a man destined to vanish, and in vanishing to achieve my all: to serve, and then to disappear into solitude.

  That I was in love with Kitty and that this was a love letter was clear to me well before one o’clock. I had, I suppose, been in love with her for some time. The beginnings of love are always temporally baffling. I had seen her now, including this evening, five times: twice in the office, once in the park with the horses, once in the park alone, and now at the Impiatts. I suppose I could not really have fallen in love with her at first sight, yet when I talked to her at Peter Pan my veneration, my adoration was already old. Writing to her was like writing to an old friend. ‘Forgive this letter, my dear’ I had thoughtlessly written in the first draft. My darling. Of course the letter reeked with self-pity, it was full of absurdities, even pomposities, ‘the only wish of a man destined to vanish’ and so on. But however undignified, the eloquence was necessary, the self-revelation essential. This was the only chance I would ever have to express these things.

  Was I destined to vanish? Was this the only letter I would ever write to Kitty? These questions concerned a future which, to my three a.m. mood, was inconceivably remote. I had a deep relieved happy consciousness of surrender to her will. She would decide everything. She had already decided to send Biscuit to me on Saturday, and before the far future of Saturday came there was the wonderful whole of Friday to be lived through in her service. And perhaps Biscuit would bring me another precious letter from her mistress. The light shed by this conception quite sufficiently blotted out the yet farther distant time when it should be incumbent on me to vanish.

  At about half past three I went to bed and to sleep, and the thought of Kitty spread a tent of quietness above my dreaming head. She was so kind to me, oh she was so kind.

  In the morning (Friday) I had breakfast in Paddington main line station, at the buffet on platform one, eating toast and marmalade at a table out on the platform, near to the most moving war memorial in London which represents a soldier of the first war, dressed in his trench warfare kit with his greatcoat over his shoulders, standing in a calm attitude and reading a letter from home.
I sat there on the platform for some time and watched the departure of the seven-thirty for Exeter St David’s, Plymouth and Penzance, the seven-forty for Bath, Bristol Temple Meads and Weston-Super-Mare, the eight o’clock for Cheltenham Spa, Swansea and Fishguard Harbour, and the eight-five for Reading, Oxford and Worcester Shrub Hill. I felt now much less exalted and much more frightened: not frightened really of anything that could happen in the world, but frightened of my own mind, of sudden vistas of new kinds of pain. How could I so love someone whom I could never see or know, the person indeed who was of all the farthest from me, the most ineluctably separated? What awful suffering, not yet felt, not yet revealed, would this involve? Was this the punishment, the expiation, the end, the dark hole into which I would finally disappear? Yet even then I knew that from myself I would not disappear. I would go on indestructibly, day after day, week after week, year after year, and I would not break down and no one would ever hear me scream. That was the worst of it. And with this worst was interwoven the fact and miracle of love with all its gentleness and its vision and its pure joy.

  I tried desperately to keep these terrors as vague as possible, and I was helped in this by the idea that today was Friday, and tomorrow was Saturday and tomorrow Biscuit would come. Even here there was already the calming pattern of a routine. Ought I then to give Biscuit the letter which I had written last night? Somewhere outside the great arched galleries of the station the daylight was trying to come, but within was a yellow darkness penetrated by electric light and the smell of sulphur. As the inevitable trains departed one after another I reread and considered carefully the final draft of the letter. Ought I to send it, should I rewrite it, ought I not to sober it up considerably? To me at any rate the ecstasy was visible, the stretching out of uncontrollable and yearning arms. Was it necessary to be so picturesque about my ruined life? And could I really tell Kitty quite so baldly that I had broken with Tommy? Was this not undignified, gratuitous, mean, manifestly indiscreet and unkind? Why should it matter whether or not Kitty thought of me as ‘engaged’? Of course it mattered frightfully, but did this mattering matter? Why should I assume that Kitty would be interested in this sordid information? Would it not make a bad impression, this eagerness to assert my solitude, ostentatiously to shake Tommy off? The Impiatts’ silly witticisms at dinner had seemed to make it essential. I could not bear to let Kitty imagine me as involved in a vulgar brawl or lovers’ tiff yet unresolved. Better the awkward truth than that. I had to let her know that I had regained the purity of being alone. I decided to let that stand, I decided to let the whole letter stand. I had written it in some sort of mad inspired state. Let Kitty have it and, in her wisdom and her mercy, make of it what she would.

  The dinner table had indeed been a place of horror. Freddie had started up at once talking to Gunnar about the pantomime. He had then realized with embarrassment that, given my latest non-relations with Tommy, this was not a tactful subject. He tried to change it, but Laura picked it up and with manifest intent began to tease me about Tommy, whom she called my ‘young woman’, implying that any coolness between us was of course momentary and that Tommy would act in the pantomime as planned. ‘Hilary insisted on bringing his young woman in.’ ‘I didn’t.’ ‘Hilary is the most fearful liar, but of course you’ve known him for ages.’ ‘We can’t have Hilary quarrelling with our star, can we, Freddie?’ The Impiatts could not intermit their custom of making me a butt of simple-minded jokes, and I could not slip out of my role of clown, however agonizing it was to play this role to this audience. ‘What do you bet Hilary’s wearing odd socks again? Hilary, show your socks at once!’ It was Hilary this and Hilary that until I was red and boiling with embarrassment and grief and rage.

  Reflecting upon it afterwards, Laura’s behaviour was in fact tiresome to the point of oddness. She was uneasy, excited, drinking and laughing more than usual, and seemed almost to be anxious to make a fool of me in front of her guests. She certainly went out of her way to present me as a man with a long-established mistress. ‘Oh we know all about your quarrels with Tommy and how long they last!’ This was particularly exasperating and cruel as there was nothing which I could say in reply. Laura was in a positively malicious mood which I could not interpret. Perhaps after all she was a bit in love with me? A possessive woman will warn another woman off her territory, however unlikely it is that the other may prove a rival. The process may be almost mechanical. It was in any case impossible that Laura should not see Kitty as a richly endowed competitor for Laura’s little world. Was Kitty being informed that, contrary to appearances, I was not a lonely accessible bachelor, and that in so far as I belonged to anybody other than Tommy I belonged to Laura? Or did Laura’s weird state of mind conceivably arise out of some knowledge of my former relations with Gunnar? The notion that Kitty might become friendly with Laura came to me suddenly during the bauf Stroganoff and made me choke. Supposing Kitty were, at least, to take Laura into her confidence? Why not? The idea of Kitty receiving Laura’s picture of me made me feel very ill indeed. Not that Laura, in reality, disliked or despised me; but she would inevitably make me appear absurd.

  It was Kitty who (seeing my pain?) rescued the pantomime conversation by making it more general. Gunnar, who had either become pompous through being grand, or was so now out of nervousness, made a speech to Freddie to the effect that of course Peter Pan was about parents and being unwilling to grow up, but what made it sinister was that childishness had been invested with spirituality. ‘The fragmentation of spirit is the problem of our age,’ Gunnar informed Freddie. ‘Peter personifies a spirituality which is irrevocably caught in childhood and which yet cannot surrender its pretensions. Peter is essentially a being from elsewhere, the apotheosis of an immature spirituality.’ Gunnar addressed himself to Freddie, sometimes to Laura. So far as possible he ignored me. I was sitting between Laura and Kitty. I did not know what to do with my eyes or my hands or my feet. My head ached with not looking at Gunnar. Laura, making jokes, more than once laid her hand on my knee. The green silk was inches away.

  And now I was sitting on Paddington platform one, watching the departure of the nine-five for Birmingham New Street, and thinking, as it was about time to do, about Gunnar; and as I thought about him I felt my racing mind becoming quiet, as someone who after appeals and hopes contemplates as a reality his irrevocable sentence at last. I could have no dealings here with dreams. In this sterner context my ‘feelings’ about Kitty were indeed the merest feelings and I knew that I could be harsh with them. They existed as something beautiful but totally irrelevant, like a flower one might notice on the way to the gallows. Nor must I even tell myself that my task here was one which Kitty suggested and imposed. This flattery too must be denied me. Life, or truth, something deep and hard which could not be evaded, suggested and imposed this task. And the only hope which existed for me at all was one which I could not pursue, should not perhaps even conceive, and which must be merely a by-product of my striving, the hope, which I had mentioned in such melodramatic terms to Kitty, that I might be able by helping Gunnar to help myself.

  Yet could I help Gunnar? How was it to be done? Was the fundamental problem one that concerned him or one that concerned me? The origin of it all was that I had done something. But what had I done? Had I punished myself simply because I had been so terribly punished by fate? I had been extremely unlucky. If Anne had got out of the car on that evening and gone home to her husband … What might now seem in retrospect a small sin had become a monumental sin by what seemed in the strictest sense to be an accident. A death is the most terrible of facts. This fact lay between me and Gunnar, poisoning my life with guilt, his with hate. And nothing could take that fact away. Time could not do it. Had time done anything, changed me so that I was a different person? Was I still and forever the person who … ? Even a law court lets you off at last.

  That I should never forget the fact was something for which I must almost pray. Had I begun to forget it? In the years that had passed
I had not forgotten Anne. Her face even now, her moist lips, her radiant eyes, hung before me upon the foggy curtain of the sulphurous air. Oh Anne, oh my darling, I have not forgotten you, my heart at this moment beats for you, my hands tremble and move as if to embrace you. But the fact — have I forgotten that I killed her, have I changed that into something huge and dark, wrapping it round as the years went by with my misery and my guilt: the burden which I had told Kitty that I could not name? Was this the thing which, for Gunnar, I must unwrap? The thing which he too had wrapped about, with misery and hate and empty dreams of revenge.

  Anne had never really been a part of my life. Gunnar’s life had been ripped apart, and I had done it, entering from outside as a cruel ruthless invader. If God had existed and we could have stood together in His presence and looked together without falsity at what had been done, and then looked at each other, might not some miracle have occurred? ‘This is what I did.’ ‘I know.’ But there was no such scene, only two sodden semi-conscious psyches wrestling with each other in the dark. Could anything ever be clarified, could anything be really done here? Had not my feelings, whatever they were, for Kitty simply misled me with a momentary vision of a new heaven and a new earth? I had wrecked my life and Crystal’s by a guilt which was itself a kind of sin. Could that be cut away? The idea of forgiveness, pardon, reconciliation, seemed here too fuzzy, too soft for what was needed. If Gunnar and I could be even for a moment simple, sincere, together … But that was the way of hope, and there must be no hope, only a task, only the truth itself if one could but discern it and hang on.