The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I’m more popular than ever now that I’ve killed my wife,’ said George.

  ‘I am not amused.’

  ‘Well, I had a good try. Better luck next time.’

  ‘You ought not to speak like that about her,’ said Diane. Her mission to ‘save’ George scarcely now extended beyond such improving remarks, which pathetically hinted at a complicit superiority. Who was she to tell George how to behave, or to indulge in cries of ‘poor Stella’? Sometimes it seemed as if George were prompting just such admonitions so as then to crush them with violent sarcasm.

  ‘I hoped she’d drown, but alas it was not to be.’

  ‘Don’t talk silly.’

  ‘I’ve had several more of those letters from women. Bash your wife and get sympathetic letters from women. Shall I read you one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘“Dear George McCaffrey, I feel I must write to express my sympathy. I have thought a lot about you and feel I know you well. People are so unkind they don’t try to understand. I know you are a lonely unhappy man, and I feel sure that I would be able to —”’

  ‘Oh stop!’

  ‘“Please feel free to telephone me —”’

  ‘Horrid, stop!’

  ‘Why horrid? It’s well meant.’

  ‘Well meant!’

  ‘Maybe a kind word does help. Maybe we don’t say enough kind words.’

  ‘You despise kindness.’

  ‘You would like to think so.’

  ‘I don’t mean — ’

  ‘Lonely women sitting in lonely rooms. You ought to be sorry for them.’

  ‘I am a lonely woman sitting in a lonely room. I am sorry for myself.’

  ‘I think I’ll ring her up.’

  ‘Go on then, there’s the telephone.’

  ‘God bless women, they never write a man off. Men judge, women don’t. What would we do without them? That women’s world of quietness and forgiveness to which we return battle-scarred. You soothe and animate our images of ourselves.’

  ‘What about our images of ourselves?’

  ‘You have none. Yours are illusions.’

  ‘You think that women — ’

  ‘Oh don’t, women’s problems are so boring, they even bore women.’

  ‘When you get those letters — ’

  ‘Oh damn the letters. It’s no fun, I can tell you, being the local âme damnée. What’s the matter with you, kid? You seem nervy today.’

  ‘Nervy! God!’

  Diane wanted to cry, but she knew that George hated tears. Curled into a little black ball like a disturbed spider, she tucked her black-stockinged feet in and fingered the jagged metal necklace which they laughingly called her ‘slave’s collar’.

  ‘When is Stella coming home?’ she asked.

  ‘Buzz buzz. Hickory Dickory Dock.’

  ‘I suppose she is coming home?’

  ‘You dream that one day she won’t. You dream that she will get fed up and leave me one day. That day will never come. Stella will never leave me. She will cling to me with the little steel claws of her love until violent death ensues for her or for me.’

  ‘Violent death?’

  ‘All death is violent.’

  ‘I’ve stopped expecting her to leave you.’

  ‘Stella would like me in a wheel chair and her pushing it.’

  ‘Do you really think — ’

  ‘Oh shut up about her, I told you to, didn’t I? Say something interesting, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Let’s go to France, I’ve never been out of England, let’s go to that hotel in Paris, the one you mentioned, where you used to go as a student, I always remember that hotel, I think of it in the night — ’

  ‘Well, don’t. You’ll never go there. Forget it.’

  ‘Oh do sit down, darling, wild beastie, stop walking like that, stop padding and pacing, you make me want to scream, come and hold my hand. I’m full of darkness today.’

  ‘I’m always full of darkness.’

  Westwold, where Diane’s flat was situated, is a ‘mixed’ area of small shops and modest suburban houses and cottages, tucked in between the river Enn and the railway, with Druidsdale on one side and Burkestown on the other. The railway, I should explain, passes beneath the common in a long tunnel, another feat of Victorian engineering. It emerges on the Burkestown side of Ennistone where the railway station is situated, most inconveniently for the inhabitants of Victoria Park, whose ancestors insisted on this remote siting. Westwold, together with the part of Burkestown round St Olaf’s Church (fourteenth century, Low Church of England), contains some of the oldest houses in Ennistone, none unfortunately of any size or interest. There is also a pub called the Three Blind Mice. Diane’s flat was not far from here in a quiet street of two-storey terraced houses, above a small Irish-linen shop where an elderly man quietly unfolded large white towels for infrequent customers.

  The area in which George was now walking was cluttered up not only by Diane’s clothes, her ‘corsets’ and things which he was treading on, but also by her possessions, little things bought to console her, stools, baskets, plants, a leather elephant, a yellow china umbrella-stand full of walking-sticks, a rack for shaggy magazines, objects which filled the interstices between the larger articles of furniture. Among the latter was an upright piano with an inlaid floral pattern and brass candle-holders. Diane, who could not play, had bought it cheap for the use of some hypothetical pianist client. She had pictured a tender scene, candle-lit. (There were occasional tender scenes.) But no piano player had come and the piano was, even to her ear when she idly strummed it, patently in need of tuning. The top of the piano was crowded with small objects, miniature dolls, bits of china, toy animals. ‘These are your children,’ one of her clients once told her, ‘you express your frustrated maternal feelings by taking pity on these bits of junk in shops!’ The speaker had a wife and four fine children, Diane saw them at the Baths. After he went away she cried for a long time.

  George brought a chair near to the sofa and sat and held her hand, facetiously at first, then seriously. George was wondering whether it mattered that the priest had (had he?) seen him pushing the car. Not that he imagined that the priest would tell the police or say anything which George could not safely deny. What troubled George was the bond which had now come into being between him and the priest. He had sometimes felt that the priest was ‘after him’, though in just what way was never clear. All sorts of baneful and inauspicious bonds joined George to the people who surrounded him; almost any incident could make a bond, create an enemy. These bonds were the cords with which people tried to tie him down, to net him as a quarry to be killed. He was the doomed maypole round which people danced to truss him as a victim. The priest, as witness, was but one more symptom of the mounting crisis in George’s life; of course George’s life had always been in crisis, in the sort of crisis where ordinary morality is felt to be abrogated, as it is in wartime. But now he felt at moments that it was the lutte finale.

  He looked down at Diane’s little nicotine-brown hand, like a child’s hand with tiny bitten finger-nails. He lifted it and smelt it, then kissed it and continued absently to hold it.

  ‘What is it?’ said Diane. ‘Is it Professor Rozanov?’

  George had briefly mentioned his teacher’s return, Diane was guessing.

  George did not answer this, but said, ‘You spend time gossiping at the Baths, you hear what people say. Who will he come to?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Who are his friends here?’

  ‘What about N?’

  ‘He quarrelled with N.’

  ‘William Eastcote?’ (This was Bill the Lizard, Brian’s godfather and the man who saw the flying saucer.)

  ‘He’s about that age, he’s the sort of person Rozanov might tolerate — ’

  ‘Is Rozanov as old as that?’ said Diane.

  ‘That’s not old.’ George let go of her hand. ‘What made you think of Eastcote?’

  ‘
Someone said he’d had a letter from Professor Rozanov.’

  ‘Well, keep your ears open, kid, watch and pray.’

  George’s face in repose had a calm benevolent expression. His ceaseless troubles had not yet made marks upon that bland surface. He had the darker brown hair of the McCaffreys (the Stillowens were blonds) which he wore cut short and sleek in an old-fashioned mode. (It was even rumoured that he used hair oil.) He was taller than Brian but not as tall as Tom. He had been slim but was now heavier. He had fine wide-apart brown eyes, which could suddenly narrow, but his ‘cat-look’, unlike Alex’s, was amused and quizzical. His face was rather round, his nose was rather short, and he had small square separated teeth set on a wide arc, giving his face a boyish frank look when he smiled. He wore light grey check suits with waistcoats, and was often to be seen (as he was now) wearing the shiny-backed waistcoat without the jacket. It was this habit which prompted people to say he looked like a snooker player. A remark made by Brian that ‘bar billiards’ was George’s game manifested more malice than insight and reinforced in Brian’s critics the view that Brian was something of a blunt instrument. George was not a frequenter of bars and there was something at least superficially stylish about him. He had been a graceful cricketer when young.

  George, more than most people, lived by an idea of himself which was in some ways significantly at odds with reality. To say he was a narcissist was to say little. We are mostly narcissists, and only in a few, not always with felicitous results, is narcissism overcome (broken, crushed, annihilated, nothing less will serve) by religious discipline or psycho-analysis. George was an accomplished narcissist, an expert and dedicated liver of the double life, and this in a way which was not always to his discredit. That is, he was in some respects, though not in others, not as bad as he pretended to be, or as he really believed himself to be. Herein perhaps he intuitively practised that sort of protective coloration which consists in sincerely (or ‘sincerely’, sincerity being an ambiguous concept) giving one’s faults pejorative names which conceal the yet more awful nature of what is named. All of which goes to show that it is difficult to analyse human frailty, and certainly difficult to analyse George’s.

  When George was younger he used to say, ‘Que faire? I love good food and good wine and pretty women.’ This, which George did not regard as a falsehood, was misleading, not only because George was not seriously interested in food and drink, but because he was not (in the crude accepted sense) seriously interested in women. He pictured himself as ‘highly sexed’, as no doubt a great many men like to do. (When does one ever hear a man announce that he is not highly sexed?) In fact he was a good deal less erotically interested in women than was his brother Brian. He was credited with some brief affairs both before and after marriage, but these were (in my view) probably nervous cravings rather than great passions. His relation with Diane was the only ‘illicit’ union which had lasted, and in this conventional lust played a minor role.

  Stella in some way stunned George, as if she had hit him very hard on the forehead. (They met at London University as fellow students.) Perhaps this initial coup was what he could never forgive. She was the cleverest strongest woman that he had ever met. Though later he said that he was never in love with Stella, only obsessed and hypnotized, there is no doubt that he was in love. She was in love too, though for some reason people always wanted to explain this away by saying things like, ‘She took him on as a challenge.’ George early gained the idea that Stella intended somehow to ‘break’ him; and there was perhaps such an element in her love. She had begun to feel that she was the stronger, and George could not bear this. Violence was his answer. It was a menage which lacked the language of tenderness. Yet George admired and, in a way, prized his wife, and Stella’s love was love, loyal absolute commitment, the love of an intelligent realistic person capable of unselfishness. She was one of the few women who were entirely unsentimental about George. People argued about whether Stella ‘knew what he was like’ when she married him. I think she did; but she overestimated the influence of her kind of love upon this kind of man. She was without feminine wiles, and could not conceal her strength as a more cunning or intuitively tactful woman might have done. She never soothed or accepted George’s manner of being himself. Strength and love were one for Stella, love redeeming strength, power corrupting love. ‘I’ve married a policewoman,’ George complained early on, before things became very bad, and before Rufus died. (About the death of the child and its effect opinions differed.) Stella’s father, a diplomat, detested George and a coolness arose between Stella and her parents. When Stella’s mother died, David Henriques retired and went to live in Japan, whence he sent presents and affectionate letters in which George was not mentioned. Henriques became an expert on netsuke.

  Many men are violent (the sealed doors of houses conceal how many). George conformed to a less usual type in that he made violence his trademark. He made a point of his aggressiveness and bad temper to define his esse; and this in some quarters actually made people more tolerant and forgiving. As Brian said, George ‘got away with things’. Some smilingly described his conduct as ‘rudeness à outrance’, others pointed out (and this had an element of truth) that he was prudentially violent; or else he was lucky. (That he was lucky was something that George believed too, a belief he managed to combine with seeing himself as a ‘doomed bull, full of rapiers’.) The causes of a habit of violence are mysterious and not often lucidly studied, since those who take an intelligent interest in violent cases usually have deep psychological reasons for preferring certain explanations. (This is almost always true in politics, and often in analysis.) Alex said (and half believed) that George simply drank too much. Others said it was because of Rufus, some blamed Stella, some Alex, some Alan. Yet other theories saw George as a repressed homosexual, or an Oedipus victim, or a one-man protest against the bourgeoisie. He figured indeed upon many flags which were flown. And although George never systematically took up the game of explaining himself, he dabbled in it to the extent of tinting his excesses here and there with ameliorating hints of a more interesting ethical background. He felt, or affected to feel, that his chaotic and unbridled personality was in some important sense more real than the decorous natures that surrounded him. George was supposed to be closer to awful aspects of the world which other people preferred to ignore, and was thereby somehow sympathetically joined to the afflicted and the oppressed. I once heard him say of his brother Brian, ‘He doesn’t realize how terrible and how serious life is.’ This use of the word ‘serious’ is idiosyncratic but highly significant. I may add that, on the occasion in question, George then laughed. In such contexts Brian was in turn perhaps quite right to hazard that George helped one to understand terrorists.

  Frustrated ambition, or as some more plainly put it George’s chagrin at discovering that he was no good, was also mentioned as a cause or an excuse. As a student, George had studied philosophy, then history and archaeology. Later, although he got a first-class degree, he failed to get the academic posts which he coveted. He wrote plays which no one would perform and (it was rumoured) poems which no one would publish. There is no doubt that he was consumed with envy of artists and thinkers. He did some historical research, inclining to call himself an archaeologist although he had done no field work beyond a fortnight’s junior grubbing at the Roman Wall. He entered the ‘museum and archive’ world and held one or two posts, then becoming deputy keeper at our Ennistone Museum, where he also drew a stipend as ‘research scholar’. He was said to be compiling some important work. However the fact remained that at the age of more than forty he had published nothing except A Short History of The Ennistone Museum. (This little work, which is still in print, is well written but necessarily of limited importance.) George was in fact a clever man, he was the lively gifted promising person whom Stella had loved and married. (She could not have loved a fool.) Only somehow he had never managed to do anything substantial with his talents. Instead he set about dest
roying himself. No one was very surprised when he ended his museum career by smashing all that Roman glass.

  I confess that I cannot offer any illuminating explanation. Every human being is different, more absolutely different and peculiar than we can goad ourselves into conceiving; and our persistent desire to depict human lives as dramas leads us to see ‘in the same light’ events which may have multiple interpretations and causes. Of course a man may be ‘cured’ (consoled, encouraged, improved, shaken, returned to effective activity, and so forth and so on) by a concocted story of his own life, but that is another matter. (And such stories may be on offer from doctors, priests, teachers, influential friends and relations, or may be self- Invented or derived from literature.) We are in fact far more randomly made, more full of rough contingent rubble, than art or vulgar psycho-analysis lead us to imagine. The language of sin may be more appropriate than that of science and as likely to ‘cure’. The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone’s life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge. There was some deep (so deep that one wants to call it ‘original’, whatever that means) wound in George’s soul into which every tiniest slight or setback poured its gall. Pride and vanity and venomous hurt feelings obscured his sun. He saw the world as a conspiracy against him, and himself as a victim of cosmic injustice.

  At the time of this story not much was known about George’s relations with John Robert Rozanov, so those relations did not figure in the ‘George theories’ or the ‘George legend’. George became John Robert’s pupil when he was studying philosophy in London. George was twenty, John Robert in his fifties. The Rozanovs were, as has been related, a poor family living in Burkestown. The grandfather, a Marxian socialist, had fled from Czarist Russia. (He was related, it was said, to the painter of the same name.) He came to England, freedom, poverty, obscurity and disappointment. His son, John Robert’s father, married a local girl, a Methodist, became a Christian and lost, indeed had never shown much, interest in politics. He was an electrician, sometimes unemployed. The grandfather lived long enough to be consoled by realizing that his grandson at least was some sort of remarkable creature. John Robert, an only child, proceeded to Ennistone Grammar School (now alas defunct) and then to Oxford. After graduating, he went to study in America, where he taught in California, then in New York. He returned to teach in London, then went back to America, thereafter making regular, sometimes prolonged, visits to the English philosophical scene. As he retained a tender relation with his parents, his face was occasionally, until his mother’s death, to be seen in Ennistone, and his fame was kept green among us. He had few friends here, however, and was generally said to be no maker of friends. He kept up with William Eastcote and with an eccentric old watchmaker with whom he had philosophical conversations.