The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  Belmont

  Victoria Park

  Ennistone

  Dear Professor Rozanov.

  Thank you for your letter. I could call on you about eleven a.m. on Wednesday (the day after tomorrow). I will assume that suits you unless I hear otherwise. With kind regards,

  Yours sincerely,

  Alexandra McCaffrey

  The tone of the letter presented no problem; her reply must be at least as cool as his request. She was only unsure about ‘kind regards’. Could it sound like a sarcastic parody? ‘Affectionate greetings’? Certainly not. ‘I look forward to seeing you’? No. She sealed up the letter and went out and posted it.

  Now it was Tuesday; and tomorrow she would see John Robert Rozanov. She wished now that she could delay the meeting which her ridiculous mind was making so fateful. She was alone. When Tom had telephoned to say that he was not coming to stay at Belmont, Alex had felt a stab of black distress, as if it were a nudge from her own personal private death. Now, with this new thing to think of, she realized that it was better so. She wanted, in whatever battle (as she envisaged it) she might engage in with John Robert, to be alone in the house: visitable, available, unwitnessed. For this action, decks must be cleared. As for the incidental information that Tom’s companion at Travancore Avenue was a male, Alex welcomed it. She affected to share the family anxiety about Tom’s tendencies, but secretly she hoped that he was homosexual. Alex did not care for daughters- In-law.

  As she stared once again out of the window at the wind-ravaged daffodils, a fox appeared. Alex saw at once that it was the vixen. The dog fox was larger and had a strong dark diabolical mark. The vixen was graceful, dainty, very feminine, with black stockings. She moved fastidiously, skipping a little sideways, then sat down among the daffodils. She lifted her head and gazed fixedly up at Alex with her pale blue eyes.

  John Robert Rozanov was tired of his mind. He was tired of his strong personality and his face and the effect he had upon people. He often thought about death. But something still remained which bound him to the world. It was not philosophy.

  He was sitting in the house in which he had been bom, in the room in which he had been born. He had a persistent illusion that as he emerged from his mother’s womb he had heard his father and grandfather talking Russian. John Robert did not know Russian. He wished now that he had learnt it, but it was too late. It was too late for other things he wished he had done.

  Now every morning as he assumed the burden of consciousness he reflected upon its strangeness: the mystery of mind, so general and so particular. Why do thoughts not lose their owners? How does the individual stay together and not stray away like racing water-drops? How does consciousness continue, how can it? Could the curse of memory not end, and why did it not end? Did not the instant, of its nature, annihilate the past? Was not remorse a fiction, an effect of a prime delusion? How could a feeling be evidence of anything? All those days and nights he had spent with the many and the one, how little wisdom they had brought him, now when thoughts were changing into living sensa, and appearance and reality contended inside his frame which seemed at times as huge as the universe, and racked with as large a pain. The point of solipsism, often missed, was that it abolished morality. So if the pain he felt seemed like a spiritual pain, must he not be the victim of a mistake? How little it all helped him now when he was pitchforked back into this mess of tormented being. The Other, whose hard fine edge he had aspired to trace, and in whose very absence he had sometimes gloried, was no more than an amoebic jelly, an unsavoury ectoplasm of wandering ideation. Truth was just a concept which had attracted him once.

  Who could fathom Plato’s mind? Unless one is a genius, philosophy is a mug’s game. There were not even any books any more. All the books were inside him now. Even the familiar act of reading had been taken from him. It had been his fate not to be interested in anything except everything. If he could live another hundred years, could time reverse its sense and lead him gently into a precious clarity? As it was, he saw through every notion that he had ever had, the ‘insights’ won by a sustained asceticism appeared to him now as so much vacuous rather nasty stuff which he had made up out of nothing. Artists have beauty and nature at their side, but a philosopher must contain his world inside his head until … it be unified, clarified … until he can become a god … or else perceive that his all is nothing. Once long ago John Robert had believed in that which lies beyond. He had felt himself confronted by a thin thin film, something paper thin, through which, if he would, he could pass his hand; and which, in his precious philosophical faith and his precious philosophical patience, he did not yet presume to touch. Now he could see through it all as through some substance which had rotted away into scraggy fibres; and beyond was chaos, the uncategorized manifold, the ultimate jumble of the world, before which the metaphysician covers his eyes. Even some last lingering belief that someone, somewhere, at some time had had a pure unlying thought was, in his mind, a festering sore.

  Speculation about Rozanov’s return had not limited itself to conjecture about his arthritis. John Robert did indeed retain an old childish faith in the efficacy of the waters. In America he had gained much benefit from the hot baths at Saratoga Springs. He had already reserved himself one of the Ennistone Rooms for a prolonged treatment. But many Ennistonians preferred the more touching view that the philosopher had ‘come home to write his great book’. (‘Returned like a priest-king to his people’, as Nesta Wiggins’s father, who belonged to the Writers’ Circle, was heard to say.) It was held to be deeply significant that Rozanov had never sold the family house in Burkestown which he had inherited from his parents. In fact, the ‘great book’ (containing the ‘secret doctrine’ if any) was already in existence. Of course no philosophy book is ever finished, it is only abandoned. John Robert could well have settled down in the little terrace house to rewrite his book. But to this he had not made up his mind. Looking at his early childish writings, he could see how much he had learnt in fifty years. Oh for another fifty! If human life were longer, art and science might be much the same, but philosophy would be an entirely different matter. Why had he not written this book when he was younger, and able to go on past it, into the light? But, younger, he could not have. He had formed no intention of publishing it; but there it was, and he knew that if he left it behind it would be published after his death. Half of him, the more authoritative half, hated it. It was extremely long, his final philosophy. Sometimes he told himself he would condense it all into a hundred exquisitely lucid pages. To write down nothing but the truth; had that ever seemed a simple, even an intelligible, project? The crystalline truth, not a turgid flood of mucky half-truths; not even half-truths, but desecrating obfuscations, harryings, muddyings, taunting vilifications of the truth. But here the book itself lay in his way as a major obstruction. He knew how bad it was. Unfortunately he also knew how good it was, how superior to what was being done by others, by lesser men. John Robert was sometimes, puzzled, almost childishly puzzled, by the extent to which his life was still ruled by vanity, even though he had recognized this fault long ago, and had passionately wanted and passionately attempted to overcome it. He had long since stopped resisting the obvious view, to which he was driven by experience, that he was superior to his contemporaries. But his vanity far outpaced such comparisons.

  When John Robert Rozanov surveyed his big flabby handsome-ugly face in the mirror and when, as he often did now, he considered his life retrospectively as if he were already dead, he concluded that what he had mainly lacked was courage. He left it to others to charge him with ‘solipsistic dottiness’ or ‘ruthless selfishness’. Courage was the name he chose for that virtue which should have cured his quite particular lack of nerve, his crucial compromises and shilly-shallyings, the imperfection of work which could have been far far better. He ought never to have got married. No philosopher ought to marry. He had loved Linda Brent, he still loved her and could quake for her. But that was just something personal
which he ought to have had the strength to toy with and then pass by, as he had done in later fleeting relations with women. The self- Inflicted pain of her loss then would have strengthened him. The pain of her loss later, inflicted by fate, weakened him, wasted his time, and impaired his work over a long period. He had not been a good father. He had resented the little burdensome girl who was left behind, and had never made terms with her. He was widely quoted as saying ‘I detest children,’ an observation which George McCaffrey used to quote with relish.

  John Robert had lived for so many years in the foggy space of his own thoughts, never pausing, never resting, the prey of incessant anxiety, carrying innumerable abstract interconnections inside his bursting head. He could feel the billion electric circuits of his frenzied brain, and how his mind strained and slipped like a poor overloaded horse. And was he now to work as he had never worked before? Sometimes he seemed to traverse vast heavens, sometimes to be enclosed in an iron ring, tied to one place, rooted in one spot. Sometimes it seemed to him that in all those strenuous metamorphoses he had hold of only one idea. He descended into primeval chaos and rose grasping some encrusted treasure which instantly crumbled. He pursued quarries into thickets, into corners, into nets, and at the end found nothing there. Such were his own images of his terrible addictive trade. If only he could get down deep enough, grasp the difficulties deep deep down and learn to think in an entirely new way. He perceived amazing similarities, startling light-bringing connections, problems which seemed utterly disparate merged into one, suddenly and with dream-like ease, then when the great synthesis seemed at last at hand, fell apart into strings of shallow aphorisms. He gazed and gazed with amazement at what was most ordinary, most close, until the light of wonder faded, leaving him unenlightened, without clue and without key. Philosophy may be called a sublime ability to say the obvious, to exhibit what is closest. But what is closest is what is farthest. He longed to live with ordinariness and see it simply with clear calm eyes. A simple lucidity seemed always close at hand, never achieved. He longed for thoughts which were quiet and at rest.

  He had lived for so long among the problems with which the greatest minds of the past had fumbled like children. He had contemplated, almost indeed become, the images of the great metaphysicians, spawning his own imagery with a foaming spontaneity worthy of any madhouse. He had fled from these warm shades to the clean company of non-sensible things, numbers, mathematical forms; and had returned refreshed and hungry. He had created a moral system based on the Timaeus, and wondered in the silent night why great Plotinus spoke at last of touching, and not seeing, the One. Long did he live with the Ontological Proof, and try to frame a language wherein to speak about the Form of the Good. He indulged, then denied, then indulged again his heady image-making power, and sometimes, holding his head, cursed the luck which had so authoritatively made of him a philosopher and not an artist. Sometimes his life seemed to him to have been, not a progression of pictures, but noise, continuous noise, not music yet containing ever-elusive hints of musical form. And now, when there might perhaps burst forth some great symphonic finale, the crown of his laborious trial, at the crucial point demanding the purest most refined thinking of all, he was old, losing the clarity of his mind, losing his words and mislaying his thoughts. Could he stop thinking? What could he do but think?

  Contrary to what many believed, John Robert’s metaphysical strivings had nothing to do with religion. That distinction had always been for him a clear one. His interest in the Ontological Proof was purely philosophical. What lay behind all that was certainly not God. John Robert was sometimes described as a metaphysical moralist, but if the tag was just, it did not imply that his morality was to turn out (perhaps in the alleged ‘secret doctrine’) to be religion after all. He was concerned with ‘the real’ and thus by his own confident implication with ‘the good’. He regarded religion, as he understood it, as a phenomenon of a different kind, something on which philosophy could not pronounce. Dogmatic belief he had none, nor was he troubled by its absence; and his own personal morality had a simplicity (some might say a naivety) which his philosophy certainly lacked. He had of course been indelibly marked by his Methodist childhood. As his would-be biographers, already hanging around like hyenas waiting for him to die, liked to remark in their ‘perceptive’ articles, Methodism had made of him a puritan with an obsessive guilt-ridden sense of truth which some saw as a motive for philosophy. If he had any convenient traditional label (he gave himself none) he was perhaps a stoic; and this too might be connected with the rigorous and bracing moral atmosphere in which he had lived as a child. His Eros was Amor Fati. He had been practising dying all his life, but had never, and certainly not now, been emotionally interested in death. He would have considered any quasi-religious collection of his soul as deluded sentimentality. He was aware of death as the imminent cessation of his labours. As a thinker, he was content to regard it as inconceivable.

  And now his purposes had brought him back to Burkestown, to the house and the room where he was born, where the old shabby graceless furniture was much as it had been when he had leapt into the world as his ancestors were conversing in Russian. He did not look at those old patient shabby things, nor did they touch his heart. He had never cared for the external world. He was sitting on the bed and thinking, but not about conceptual matters. He needed, like a drug, someone to talk to, preferably another philosopher. He wanted to talk philosophy even if he could not (at present) write it. All his life he had talked with pupils and colleagues. He felt ill now with the deprivation.

  He looked at his watch. It was still early, not yet ten. It was Wednesday morning. At eleven o’clock he was expecting Alexandra Stillowen.

  Suddenly the bell rang. He had not heard the bell with its old funny familiar voice (it was an electric bell which made a conspiratorial hissing sound) since his return to 16 Hare Lane, and he shuddered. It was too early for his expected visitor. He rose and peered down through the lace curtains. The person at the door was George McCaffrey. John Robert moved abruptly back.

  He never swore, his Methodist upbringing had made such vulgarity impossible. He frowned slightly and shook his head to and fro. It did not occur to him not to answer the bell. That would have been a lie or subterfuge. He thought, I shall have to see George sooner or later. I had better see him now. He went down and opened the door.

  George McCaffrey had, like his mother, meditated carefully upon exactly how soon and how he was to present himself to John Robert Rozanov. He had fled promptly from his teacher’s apparition at the Institute: a meeting then would have been a miserable botched affair. Though, on the other hand, George felt later, it would have been, now, a relief to his mind if he could simply have got over the ‘first sighting’, for instance by passing by and giving and receiving a friendly nod. He observed, with calculating detachment, his mounting frenzy. He could not absent himself too long. He had to be in Rozanov’s presence, with all the danger which that represented.

  One thing encouraged him. He knew that, wherever he was in the world, Rozanov had to have someone with whom he could talk philosophy: a colleague, or failing that a pupil. George was the only person in Ennistone who fitted this role. (It was often said that Rozanov did not make or need friends: he only needed people to argue with.) At moments now George saw (or heartily attempted to see) the philosopher as lonely, abandoned, awaiting rescue. In the very early days George had aspired to be a favourite pupil, imagined himself the beloved disciple. He had even thought himself destined to be the prime interpreter of John Robert’s thought to the world. There was a kind of helplessness about the philosopher, some absolutely monumental lack of common sense, which seemed to demand the assistance of a more worldly chela. Now that George appeared to be without competitors, might he not be, without comment, simply ‘resumed’ into John Robert’s life? It was possible. Yet George also knew how terribly wrong, through no fault of his own as he so often agonizingly thought, his relations with Rozanov had gone. It was
not just that John Robert had ‘ruined George’s life’ by discouraging him from philosophy and thus somehow in effect from an academic career. John Robert had also mortally wounded George’s soul, setting at the same time therein the eternal need to be justified, to be healed, to be saved by the executioner himself. He and only he who had dealt the wound could heal it. What it was, and how and even when it had happened, was now unclear to George. He knew that his attempts to return to philosophy after he had, with such stupid obedience, left it, his pretentious letters (unanswered), his hauntings of John Robert’s classes, had annoyed the philosopher. He recalled (he tried deliberately to forget, stirred and muddied his memories in vain) one or two awful occasions when John Robert had been positively angry with him. No, it was not anger, it was cold as if the philosopher, while crumpling George up and casting him aside, had been thinking about something else. There had been psychological analysis, moral summary, spiritual devastation, inward wreck. He was not accused or savaged, simply annihilated. Nonetheless at a later time he had had to, had to, follow Rozanov to America and once more haunt him, waiting around under palm trees on hot dusty roads in California. It was almost as if anything, a gesture of the hand which recognized his existence, could cure him, so great was his need, so humble his expectation. Rozanov had been casual, but somehow awful. He had made it clear that he did not want to see anything more of George. George had become more persistent, then crazy, furious. Was he not ruining his life to spite a charlatan? He had been suddenly possessed by wild destructive hatred; only it was not really hatred, he could not hate John Robert, it was madness. Rozanov had responded with a ferocity suited to the occasion. George tried to see him again, tried to apologize. He returned to England and from there wrote a number of extremely long letters, some indignant, some abject, which received no answer. Of course he told nobody about this nightmarish pilgrimage. However, the idea somehow got around in Ennistone that George McCaffrey had pursued Professor Rozanov to America and been rebuffed. George felt he could murder the people who sent these rumours about, no doubt repeating them with satisfaction.