by Iris Murdoch
‘What nonsense! You mean he ran after women.’
‘He was my truth once. And if one’s truth proves untrue …’
‘I think you’re just fed up with him because he’s sick, and sick people are a nuisance!’
‘He has betrayed us by becoming our child.’
‘How can you talk like that, of course you love him, I love him — Or are you jealous because he loves me?’
‘Does he? You are the blameless outsider, not tainted as we are by having known him as he once was. For that knowledge he cannot forgive us. You are fresh and unspoilt, you were never his gaoler, you never forced him screaming up those stairs. But be careful. He could maim you for life with his little finger.’
‘I am maimed for life.’
‘What you call suffering is nothing. You have never really suffered yet.’
‘I can understand your resenting his having had other women. But I’m sure he never intended to hurt anyone.’
‘If you are aware of nothing but your own desires you don’t have to intend to kill, you just kill. Don’t you even care that your mother was driven mad with grief? Of course he ran after women, and after men too. You’re the only bastard we know of. But there may be dozens of others.’
Edward did not like this thought. ‘If I am the longed-for boy — why didn’t you summon me sooner?’
‘You are not very bright, Edward. Of course at the start Chloe guarded you like a tigress, she never let us near you, and Cuno would have kept us off too, but it wasn’t just that. Can’t you realise how complicated, how dangerous it all was? Jesse didn’t want you to exist, he wanted Chloe to have an abortion.’
Edward was dazed by the idea of how very nearly he had not existed. ‘Do you mean he chucked her out because of me, or she gave him up because of me?’
‘You were a minor point then. When you did exist he pretended you didn’t. He was tired of Chloe and you were thrown away with her. Later on if he mentioned you it was just to annoy us. And frighten us.’
‘How frighten you? So you — the three of you — must have been against me?’
‘Of course.’
‘But you wrote to me, you did. It must have been to please him.’
‘No. Just to make a change.’
‘To make a change?’
‘We were — becalmed — it wasn’t good — it isn’t good. We needed a disturbance, a catalyst, we came to feel that any change would be better.’
‘And have I been a catalyst?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Ilona said I’d stirred things up.’
‘Ilona does not understand the situation.’
‘But what change do you want?’
‘You don’t seem to understand it either.’
Edward thought, is it that they want him to die? But that’s not anything I ever could or would bring about. They are crazy, not him. Groping for intelligence, Edward wondered if the wine were affecting his wits. He said, ‘I’m sure you don’t mean what you say about Jesse. Of course I was brought up by my poor mother to regard him as the devil — ’
‘Your poor mother was a bitch and a whore,’ said Mother May calmly. ‘She slept with everyone. Jesse wasn’t even certain about you till he saw you.’
‘My God,’ said Edward. ‘You mean you’ve discussed that with him?’
‘Do you imagine you’re the only person he talks to?’
‘Did you ask me here because you wanted to look at me?’
‘I’ve told you why. Just think.’
‘Well, what am I to think? You say such odd contradictory things. I believe I have a real relation with the real Jesse. And you’re wrong about my mother. And anyway my mother is my business.’
‘She was my business when she tried to break up my marriage. She thought she could take Jesse away. Of course she failed. He went over her like a juggernaut, as he did over all the other poor waifs, I heard their bones crunch. She had a terrible life. No wonder she committed suicide.’
‘She didn’t commit suicide.’
‘I hated your mother. I prayed for her death. Hatred kills. I probably brought about her death.’
‘She died of a sort of virus.’
‘A mysterious virus. The virus of hate.’
‘You mustn’t hate people.’
‘I have a Gorgon face,’ Mother May continued to look at him with her calm lucid unwrinkled gaze.
‘You conceal it well,’ said Edward. But for a second he thought he saw something far back in her eyes like a little black thing peering out, and he was afraid. He went on, ‘You said in your letter that you were sorry for me because of — what had happened — because of my misfortune — which you’d read about. But since I’ve been here no one has asked me anything about it. The only person I’ve talked to about it is Jesse.’
‘You didn’t bring up the subject. So we didn’t.’
‘Perhaps you’re not interested.’
‘We wanted you to tell us in your own time.’
‘I think you didn’t give the matter a thought!’
‘We all have horrors in our lives which have to be lived with. We must all harden our hearts about the harm we have done to others, forgive ourselves and forget our deeds as the victims of them would do if they were righteous.’
‘Oughtn’t we to be righteous?’
‘That belongs always to the future.’
‘Is that all you have to say about it?’
‘We have our troubles, you have yours. Men have to kill their fathers. Life has to go on.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Only that you have to grow up, Edward. We are all in the hands of fate. That brother of yours, Cuno’s son — ’
‘Stuart — ’
‘He knows what to do. Hasn’t he given up sex?’
‘He’s mad.’
‘Or good. Anyway he’s extreme. That’s what’s needed now, extremes.’
‘You’re disappointed in me.’
‘No — ’
‘Perhaps you wanted me to fail, you wanted Jesse to be disillusioned about me, that’s why you asked me.’
‘No — you just don’t astonish me. You are a suitable companion for Ilona.’
Edward felt tempted to astonish her by speaking of Brownie and Elspeth Macran; but it was too dangerous a move. In any case he was beginning to feel rather drowsy and strange. Mother May’s face, smooth and calm, now smiling a little, was wavering and becoming larger and moving gently as in a wind. There was a ring of white moths circling rhythmically about the lamp. ‘You’re drugging me, aren’t you, the wine is drugged, you’re making me see things — ’
‘You have drugged yourself, Edward. Before you came here you drugged yourself for life. I know about these things. The effect of what you were taking never stops, it never leaves you. Do you know that? That’s how you killed your friend, remember?’
‘Don’t — speak so — ’
‘Oh you and your troubles. You know nothing, see nothing. The question is, how much can you do for me? What can you do for me at this moment in my life — or am I to destroy myself before your eyes? How much can you love me — can you help me, can you love me, can you love me enough?’
Bettina came in through the outer door, shutting it after her. She had undone her hair. She said to Edward, ‘Flirting with Mother May?’ She said to Mother May, ‘Come now, come to bed and to sleep.’
Edward got up and walked unsteadily out of the hall. Looking back he could see nothing but the lamp shining through a cloud of moths.
Stanford
My dear Stuart,
Dad, who is here, tells me you are proposing to chuck up thought. This has got me worried. You mustn’t do it. Of course Dad may be exaggerating. Because of his old (you know) troubles he likes to think that everyone has extraordinary obsessions and is secretly in extremis. Maybe he has misunderstood. Maybe you are just momentarily fed up, as we all are sometimes. Thinking is hell. But just in case it’s serious, let me beg you not to. It’s a bad idea, it�
��s an abstract idea. I don’t want to enter into the moral good versus bad business. Not that I think it isn’t the thing — I think it is the thing, for all of us I mean, but it’s impossible to talk about, anyway in a letter, there isn’t time, or rather it’s that face to face one can keep on swiping out the bad formulations. (And you are seven thousand miles away, worse luck.) I suspect that goodness is too hard even to name and ‘comes about’ infinitely‘slowly if at all, as a scarcely visible result of watching a million steps. It can’t be a ’programme‘, can it? Even if one enters a monastery it can’t. Plato said it came by divine gift. Of course that doesn’t mean it’s a matter of luck. But you just have to work at something or other and be around. I wonder if even wanting it matters? (It would be too clever to say it was a positive obstacle!) My point is (I’m coming to it) that you’ll be wretched, you’ll be miserable, you’ll feel useless, you’re an intellectual, you’ll miss thinking, you’ll be sick: and if you drop out now, it’s not all that easy (just look at the job situation) to get in again. So don’t do it. If you want to be a ’social worker‘ why not try university teaching? It’s just the thing. You have to nursemaid the kids all the time these days. Besides, reflect on this, the world is going most awfully astray (I see a lot of that here), and in ten years time we’ll need all the decent men we can muster in positions of influence. (For your benefit I am avoiding the word ’power‘.) I don’t mean this in a narrow political sense. Perhaps the time for narrow politics is already over.
Meanwhile I live like a king here, anyway like a (which I’m not) hedonist. It’s easy to do in America. (All right, if one’s not poor, black, etc.) To be honest, I’m rather happy. Or would be if it weren’t for certain, soluble I hope, love and sex problems. (These can’t be avoided, you know, even by you!) New ones, not those old ones. (Of things displeasing to you I will of course not speak.) Everyone here is beautiful, the men, the women, tall, strong, clean, healthy, lucid-eyed. Why don’t you come and visit me? We could talk of everything. Come and see the earthly gods before you give up the human race. Come and see me.
This is just a message. I’ll write a letter later.
Yours,
Giles.
Stuart Cuno, sitting in the Parthenon frieze room of the British Museum, smiled over this letter from his friend Giles Brightwalton and stuffed it into his pocket. He was waiting for Meredith McCaskerville. They used to run. Today perhaps they would walk. There were things to be said. Nevertheless, the greatest part of Stuart’s communication with the boy was wordless.
Stuart and Meredith met in various significant places, sometimes in an art gallery, sometimes in a park, often in the British Museum. It was like a secret assignation (though of course it was not secret). Across London they came, from points far apart, traversing time and space, coming closer, until suddenly at last they were in each other’s presence. These, always somehow surprising and strange, meetings were of quite long standing, since the days Stuart was ‘uncle’ and Meredith used to frisk like a puppy in his presence and paw and punch him playfully. All that had altered, painlessly and felicitously in the substance of their understanding of each other changed. Now Stuart looked forward to the self-contained dignified straight-backed separate taller boy, his laconic reticence, his mystery.
At this moment, however, although aware of Meredith’s imminent arrival, Stuart was reflecting that the questions raised in Giles Brightwalton’s letter simply did not affect him at all. He would not miss the pleasures of being an ‘intellectual’ or an ‘academic’. It was indeed with an intense relief, and without any sense of its being a cowardly action, that he laid down that burden. (Giles had not accused him of cowardice, but Harry had.) And as for being, in time to come, an influence, a power for good, Stuart thought (touching the thought with caution) that he was likely to have, by his path, more of such power. Was that then his aim? No. Harry had said that a religious man must have an aim. (There was no point in disputing the word ‘religious’ with Harry.) Stuart could only formulate his ’aim‘ in negative and exceedingly general terms. He wanted to avoid being bad. He wanted to be good. Was this unusual? Did he think he was exceptional? He had to be fundamentally and permanently alone, now at the beginning of his life, not only as celibate priests are alone, but as everyone is in the end alone. What had happened to make him live his life backwards in this way? That was another person’s question. Nothing had happened, it was just so. He was surrendering his talents as monks do under obedience. He was not a monk, yet he was under obedience. Was it wrong to think about the matter in this way — or at all? He could not help thinking. But often he let his thoughts rise like smoke and blow away. Giles had said it couldn’t be a programme. Harry had said it was all a sexual fantasy. Somebody had said there is no way, only the end, what we call the way is messing about.
Of course, he thought, this of mine is a matter of love and passion, which somehow denies time and yet also creates it, creates its own necessity and pace. It’s a matter of looking elsewhere. Then I orient myself as I move. This, which he did not want to name, not with the abhorrent name of God, not either with the awkward dry old name of religion. He did not reject religion as he rejected God, but his private language excluded the word. It was a necessary passion, a necessary love, which was cunning so to station itself as to be attracted by what was holy. What an apparatus; and how difficult and yet how easy it all was. God had been convenient, a permanent non-degradable love-object, to use Thomas’s phrase, automatically purifying desire. But it must all be able to happen without God. Could one not surely love everything so? Somewhere, in his weakness, there lurked the desire for a sign, for an indubitable light to shine so upon something. Yet did it not shine so upon everything? Upon evil too? Can one be a spectator of evil? To be a spectator of suffering was difficult enough: the mysterious awful untouchable suffering of others. Edward’s suffering. The suffering of animals. The suffering of the whole planet burdened with hardship and injustice and unquenchable grief. The whole of creation groaning and travailing together in misery and sin. There was no solution to that, even at the end of the world no holy man in a cave, or working in a field or office, who knew the answer. Here were the negative things, the deprivation of understanding. To prise open a door of holiness and knowledge with a narrow but very pure instrument: had that once seemed to be his aim? Where on earth do such ideas come from, and such images, surgical, sexual? Is it a form of madness, or an ecstasy? The negation of such ambitions, such formulations, came as a kind of pleasure, like opening one’s eyes into total darkness. Kneel and let the darkness flow over you, kneel and ask pardon for the sin of existing. Someone had described God as boiling over in the dark, a vast dark boiling of perpetually self-creating being. Something that Keats saw too. The mystical Christ walking upon the boiling sea. Christ in Limbo. Angels embracing repentant sinners in a picture by Botticelli.
Stuart was conscious of a feeling which he often now experienced of almost falling asleep yet of being intensely alert at the same time. What odd fragments of images came then, so vivid and charged with sense. These were the sort of things (but indeed they were all sorts of things) he had, he now remembered, told Edward to hang on to, talismans, sacraments, holy objects, existing in corners of the mind as they might in corners of a church or shrine. Surely Edward too had such things? Stuart had a mental picture of a small image of a god, or perhaps it was just a stone, upon a wet shelf of rock beside a fountain or waterfall. He could not recall ever having seen anything like this, perhaps he had dreamt it. What was it, this ‘holiness’ idea which he seemed to recognise as so ubiquitous and important? Was it perhaps dangerous, an ambiguous face of good, a blank face of sex? Where was Edward anyway and was it not time that he reappeared from whatever safe retreat Thomas, that magician, had despatched him to? Stuart felt a strong desire to see Edward, to help him, to find out how to. He had been no use to Edward at the start. Could he help him now? Could he help anybody? Sometimes he felt so alone with this that it seemed to c
ut him off from other people, and that couldn’t be right. Would all that change when he found a job? Job: odd blunt word for it. He loved Edward, he loved Harry. He loved Meredith. Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy. He had, or had had, more or less vague sexual feelings about all sorts of things and people, school-masters, girls seen in trains, mathematical problems, holy objects, the idea of being good. Sex seemed to be mixed into everything. Was this unusual? Was he perhaps ’over-sexed‘, whatever that meant? The mechanical superficial aspects of the desires characteristic of his youthful age he dealt with himself, privately and without guilt, easily blanking out any tendency to erotic fantasy.
His gaze began to articulate his surroundings of which he had not been unaware. Stuart, not blessed with a classical education beyond the stage of elementary Latin, had rather unclear ideas about the Greeks with whom however he ardently identified. In an ignorantly attentive way, he knew the Parthenon frieze very well. He liked the young horsemen. He had always seen himself as a horseman, although he had never been on a horse in his life. By an odd quirk of association, the kind of association of floating fragments which interested him in himself, he connected the idea of riding a horse with the image of his grandfather’s death which Harry, without intending it to haunt the boy, had early imparted to him: the helpless swimmer, the white sail of the ghosting vanishing yacht slowly drawing away. Perhaps the connection came somehow through the Greeks, something dangerous and heroic and awfully lonely and sad, clearly delineated in a pure light. In Stuart’s picture of his grandfather’s death it was always early morning, with a cool clear sky and a calm sea.
The Parthenon procession was, in its stillness, so purposive, moving or waiting to move, prancing horses, swaying riders, all immobile, pressing forward, pressing onward, a procession to a mystery. No, it was not innocent; those careless young men were too beautiful. The gods, so relaxed, so calmly seated in repose, were not innocent either. The only blameless ones were the animals, the horses, and the sacrificial beasts lifting their fine heads, lifting up their touching unsuspecting heads to heaven; and one little boy, a page or groom, younger even than Meredith. Not innocent, but not evil either. These images belonged to fate. And rising up by an association of contrast Stuart saw a girl’s plaited hair, plaits of hair severed at the nape lying in huge mounds. Did she plait it on the day she died, upon a day when she knew that she would die? One might plait one’s hair on any terrible day, like shaving before the scaffold. Oh it was the details, the details that were so unendurable.
