The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  How little he had helped himself by meddling with his mind this test told him. For years he had tried to control his dreams, to remain conscious while dreaming, to connect sleeping and waking. He had partly succeeded, making thereby the waking world less real, not the sleeping world more so. That was right in a way. But as so often, he had got hold of the wrong form of the right answer. Horrors swept freely in on him from the land of dreams, and what should have been wisdom turned into nightmare. All his spiritual efforts had been mere adventures ending in fright and muddle. After it all he was but an apprentice and his master was a sorcerer. Not even a very important sorcerer. Of course the little figure under the acacia tree could not possibly have resembled Sophie, though she was so small and had often seemed to him like a boy. Yet for a moment, in exquisite pure fear, he expected her to turn, expected to see her spectacles glinting at him like an animal’s eyes in the half dark. But of course it was just a boy. The fear remained however. Supposing the strange boy were to hear him and to turn round and look at him? Monty hurried silently back to Locketts, touching the reptilian trunks of the twisted orchard trees for comfort. Inside the house Milo Fane, cool, ironical, slit-eyed, mocked his pusillanimous scurry.

  As he now looked down into the relentless morning garden he recalled his mother’s promised visit. Underneath an unfailing lady-like politeness his mother had detested Sophie. His mother had doubtless willed Sophie’s death, who knows how ineffectually. The feeling had been mutual, of course, and Sophie had scarcely even attempted to be kind. She had a sort of foreign awkwardness with her mother-in-law which seemed designed to exasperate. Monty’s mother, who thought of herself as impoverished gentry, had been delighted by her son’s literary success but disappointed by his marriage. Sophie, though gratifyingly well off, came of a nebulous alien ‘flashy’ background of Swiss business people, which Mrs Small could not and would not attempt to understand. She regarded Sophie as vulgar, and she and Sophie’s mother were instant enemies. ‘The creator of Milo Fane can marry anybody.’ Monty had been earlier informed by his mother. She had imagined for him a frail elegant delicately nurtured English girl (possibly with a tide) whom she would have dominated and made into a junior ally. In fact, she would probably have found means to hate any woman Monty married.

  Monty’s father, a poor curate, had died when Monty was eight. A week after the death, his mother had instructed him henceforth to call her by her given name: Leonie. Something unintelligible and dark entered with this portentous name into the relationship. Leonie, who had always wanted to be an actress (doubtless another reason for Sophie’s unpopularity) gallantly supported her son and only child by teaching elocution and singing at a girls’ school. She was delighted when Monty went to Oxford, dashed when he did less than brilliantly, yet more dashed when he became a schoolmaster, delighted when he ceased to be a schoolmaster, and became a successful writer, dashed again when he married a shrill-voiced unreticent foreigner. Now the time for delight had come round once more. Sophie was dead and tidied away. Leonie could not, and indeed scarcely tried to, conceal her satisfaction, but at least she kept away. She had been discreetly ‘ill’ on the day of the funeral. Perhaps she might have been unable to restrain herself from dancing. Now she had retired quietly once more to the little house which Monty had bought for her in a Kentish village, where she played at grande dame country life. She had not yet, but soon would, inflict her triumphant presence: eater-up, taker-over. The first wild period of rejoicing (mourning) must shortly be deemed to be done with. Her sugary letters arrived now almost daily. She wanted the house, she wanted the things in it, of course she wanted him. She had hungered for a grandson, but there had been only the one miscarriage.

  The thought of his mother caused Monty little emotion. That did not matter. He was fond of his mother. He understood her attitudes. He even sympathized. Her glee simply did not concern him. He was so scoured by death, so scalded and sterilized, he could not feel the petty irritations of which ordinary life is composed. His mother could not touch him, he had become untouchable. He felt indestructible because destroyed. An awful separateness had come upon him in the later days of Sophie’s illness. He could not bring himself to take his wife in his arms, not (as she thought) because her illness had made her hideous: it was that death had already taken hold of her and he could not bear the sense of utter loss which her still-breathing body inspired. He had heard of people embracing and kissing their dead. He could not have done so. The absence of the loved person is so absolute. And as she lay dying he felt even more the tormenting impossibility of touching that body where, every day, she so dreadfully still was.

  What a tumultuous history their married life had been. There had not been very many years of it. Monty had married late. Sophie had always been stupidly flirtatious, a muddler. He had been chronically jealous, a harsh judge. He lectured. She wept. She reviled him. They went to bed. It was too often like that. The great sphere, as he pictured it, of their love had often been strained and made to shudder, but had never actually broken. There had just been endless trouble, endless rows, endless new starts. Locketts had been a new start. Before that they had lived in a series of flats in Kensington and Chelsea. Sophie then professed to want to live ‘in the country’, and Monty, although he did not particularly care for the country, had been pleased by the idea of at last ‘carrying her away’. He would have liked to lock her up, to chain her. They compromised upon this umbrageous pretty almost-suburb. Sophie had liked the house, but started complaining at once of being lonely. In fact they had rarely managed to make joint friends, to compose, as most married couples do, a new world which they inhabited together. They had no people to gossip about. They never somehow quite managed to set up the ordinary married state between them at all. Sophie continued to flirt with her old friends and to make new friends who did not want to meet her husband, and Monty, increasingly isolated, watched her.

  Perhaps, he thought now and had sometimes thought then, his love for Sophie had been in his life something too intense, too magical. He had fallen in love with her instantly when, after he was already a well-known writer, an old college friend had introduced him to her at a party. She did not even then look like an actress. (She was in fact a very bad one.) She looked like a poor little rich girl. He recalled still with great clarity and purity, that first vision of her, leaning eagerly a trifle forward, her elegantly shod feet neatly together, her dark eyes glowing with self-satisfaction, her shiny little handbag held up childishly in front of her, her powdery turned-up nose, her clever provocative elaborate make-up, her very smart very plain dress. Her laughter. Her pert little vanity, her absolute rich girl’s confidence, tempered by a certain touching simplicity and waifishness. All this penetrated straight into his heart. She was not the sort of woman he liked or approved of. He loved her crazily and at once, not for ‘reasons’ but just because the totality of her particular charm made her suddenly entirely indispensable to him. He entered into an immediate frenzy and proposed two days later. She refused him. He kept on proposing. At last she said yes. Of course there had been other women, but they were unimportant.

  Naturally he had loved her more than she had loved him. That had been written into the contract. They had spoken of it and laughed over it. She had married him, partly at least, for reasons, which she frankly acknowledged. She was old enough (her thirtieth year was in sight) to feel that she had been a waif for long enough. She thought (as he put it to her later) that she wanted to stop racing around. She admired Monty and she trusted him absolutely and she was impressed by the way he loved her. She proposed to rest upon him. It all added up. For him, there had been no addition sum. He had lived throughout upon magic, upon romantic love in its fullest sense, and this magic, now that she was gone, seemed sometimes likely to kill him. He had never been able, as most husbands are, to make the transition from frenzy to deep quiet communion. Sophie had not let him. Later she had grown fatter and had put on the thick round glasses which soon seemed so much a p
art of her. Only as she became less dazzling she seemed to collect even more admirers. There was no rest. She never settled down.

  Sophie had isolated him. So had Milo Fane. Milo had even cut him off from the world of literature. Obsessively writing, he scarcely now read at all. At times he felt that Sophie and Milo between them had done for him properly. Novel-writing is at the best of times a lonely occupation. Monty wrote fluently and fast, hoping somehow that each novel would excuse and rescue its predecessor. He had intended at first to write a few best-sellers and then to settle down to serious composition. Perhaps he had even just intended to impress his mother. But he had reckoned without Milo. Milo turned out to have tremendous vitality and staying-power. Of course the sedentary man enjoys pretending to be the man of action: that is banal. There were deeper and stranger links between Milo and his creator. Some men, perhaps most men, are the lifelong dupes (or beneficiaries) of self-ideals or self-pictures developed in adolescence. Monty adolescent, fatherless, insecure, saw himself as a sort of ‘terror’. He even at Oxford, among his radical friends, affected to hold extreme right-wing views. He lived by and in a professed contempt for others, for the stupid sheep of the world, which suffered a rude blow when he obtained only a second-class degree. Milo was also of course created in order, with his right-angle grip Mauser and his ruthless courage and his invariable success, to expunge that second.

  As a young man Monty had rather crudely mimed the ‘demonism’ which it pleased him to feel within him. Later he began, when it was almost too late, perhaps altogether too late, to feel himself to be an intellectual. If only, he thought, he had become a scholar, a collector, a scrutinizer, one whose life progressed. He had hated school-mastering and had never attempted to fructify it by real study. He was ‘rescued’ by a seemingly felicitous personification of his ‘demonism’ combined with his intellectualism in the person of Milo Fane, the ironical disillusioned diminished man of power. Milo was, at first, almost therapy. With the help of this scornful sceptical homunculus, Monty could criticize his earlier yearnings while at the same time quietly gratifying them. An author’s irony often conceals his glee. This concealment is possibly the chief function of irony.

  Years went by and Monty at intervals decided to say farewell to his sardonic alter ego. It was, after all, such a mean stupid inglorious aspect of the masterful spirit within him which he had externalized in his detective. Monty felt the need to transform himself, to discipline himself, but Milo drained him of energy and made him sometimes feel that if he abjured this mean exercise of power he would have no power at all. The serious novels which he occasionally attempted did not engage his feelings and soon collapsed, and he would then decide that he might as well give himself a quick rest by writing another Milo. It was now so easy. Monty and Milo watched each other. Long before the critics noticed it, Monty began to see the attenuation of his hero. Milo had developed a weight problem in reverse. He was a skinny man who constantly wanted to fill himself out. Milo lived on cream and Guinness and chocolate biscuits, all in vain. Monty had at first invented this idea for fun, but later it began to seem symbolic. Milo got thinner and more shrivelled and was more sarcastic and more contemptuous of the women who fell at his feet. Milo with his chocolate and his glass of milk became almost malevolent; and as he did so the therapeutic intellectual ferocity of his creator began to lose its way. Monty made at last a wild attempt to ‘save’ his cute unwanted familiar, to humanize him, to ‘relate’ him. Milo developed a sudden passion for justice, a pity for victims, a concern for young people. But the result was an unsavoury unconvincing priggishness which the original unregenerate Milo, now become as thin as a piece of wire, seemed to be wearing as a scarcely serious mask.

  Monty had wanted to rid himself of Milo. Later he felt he wanted to rid himself of himself, so huge had this growth become which had seemed at first so liberating. ‘You just are Milo Fane,’ Sophie had cried in moments of anger, perhaps of resistance after his hectoring and lecturing had reduced her to such touching tears. When he contemplated the impoverished world, the cold smart ultimately passionless mind, of his now so famous and somehow so powerful hero, Monty knew that he was not Milo Fane. But he felt frightened all the same. Something of all this he had once wanted to explain to Blaise Gavender, just in order to be able to explain it to some intelligent person. But Blaise, without listening properly, had been in such a hurry to connect everything with everything, to connect Milo with Sophie, and Sophie with Monty’s mother, with great over-simplifying leaps. Monty, annoyed with himself for having even for a moment seemed to be Blaise’s ‘patient’, soon set to work to mystify his doctor. Then he exerted his power against Blaise, trying almost frivolously to subdue him. Blaise quickly terminated the discussions.

  Even when he had been happiest with Sophie (and they had been happy) Monty had sometimes wondered why all his life he had so wantonly deviated from an image of calmness (he was loath to give it any grander name) which he had (it now seemed to him) from his earliest years had plain before his face. Even as a silly exhibitionist undergraduate he had known about that. Even what he was pleased to think of as his demons themselves suggested the only form which his salvation from them could take, assuming that he wanted to be saved. Of course this had nothing to do with God, who had passed out of Monty’s life very early on. He spoke to no one about this matter, least of all Sophie, with whom he never talked about deep things. He meditated on it secretly; and as he sat, frenzied with pain, watching Sophie suffer (she was not good at it) he had thought almost with longing of the time after her death when he could, as never before, take refuge with that. (As if Sophie’s death could enlighten him in a sort of spiritual orgasm.) But how unlike his expectation of it this later time had turned out to be. He had thought to live in suffering like a salamander in the flames. He had not expected or conceived of the sheer horror of her absence, he had not expected mourning to be a sort of fruitless searching, he had not foreseen the remorse. Why had he, quite apart from anything else, not made Sophie happier? It would not have been difficult. If he could not even see that, what could he see? How could he have behaved so stupidly badly? And now in the stead of the blank quietness he had hoped for, he felt like a hunted informer seeking a new identity. He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgement. His old friends kept changing their masks, but he and they had not moved an inch.

  He had lost all sense of direction. His life seemed at an end, yet he felt no urge to kill himself, the hours and the days had to be got through somehow. And thought continued, cold thought, in the midst of it all. He even coldly asked himself, can I not turn all this misery into art, into real art, not the pseudo-art of Milo Fane? Can art for me ever be more than vile self-indulgence? This involved the question, can I now get rid of Milo? And this sent him back again to the question of the calmness, the question of getting rid of himself. Was he too old a leopard to change his spots? Could he undo himself completely at the age of forty-five? Could he get rid of them and achieve that? What anyway, in the most mundane sense, was he to do with himself? Richard Nailsworth, the actor who played Milo, had invited him to stay at his villa in southern Italy. But that would be the last place to seek consolation. I must simply stop writing, thought Monty. If he wrote now or in the foreseeable future he would write muck. If he wrote another Milo Fane novel he was done for. What could he do? Why not become a schoolmaster again? he thought to himself at some point in his reflections, and then the thought kept recurring. After all, this was the only work, besides writing detective stories, for which he was trained. He had done it once, why not again? It was decent ordinary work, and he must somehow find his way back-to ordinary life or lose what was left of his soul. Much much later he might try to write again. Or perhaps never. Meanwhile, why should he not simply put himself in a position where he had to attend to the needs of others? This was no spiritual orgasm, but it looked a good deal more like the way. Thi
s still vague notion, passing him at intervals in the maelstrom of his distress, alone carried some hint of a possible future.

  Monty moved back from the window where the pale cold light was increasing, the sky not yet declared as blue. In the dimness of the room he peered at himself in a mirror. How well he knew that disingenuous face which seemed to try to conceal itself even from its owner. Small head, dark eyes which the tired wrinkles were already hooding, dark straight hair a bit stringy at the end, now unobtrusively balding a little. Soon he would have a tonsure and would even more resemble what he sometimes felt himself to be. A suspicious Jesuitical face. A cold thinker’s face. A clever face. A narcissistic face. The face of a man who had wasted his talents and ruined his marriage and who still thought himself wonderful and exceptional. A stupid posing false face.

  How insanely obsessed he was even Harriet, who cared so much to find out his thoughts, had not the faintest idea of. Of course bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved, and later forgotten when the bereaved one recovers. Was this misery simply bereavement or was it some more final mental ruin from which there was no recovery? I must be a man, he said to his image, and turned from it. The banal phrase struck him. Could it carry to him any sense of possible ordinary living? After all, the day returns and brings back a few at least of the small concerns and duties he had once prayed about at school. He had to see Harriet. He had to pretend to Harriet. That was a sort of duty. He had to talk to Blaise about that foul slug Magnus Bowles. He had to write to Sophie’s mother in Berne. He had to write to his own mother. He could do all these things. Why should he not become a schoolmaster and live a simple decent lucid life at last? He looked at his watch. Oh God, it was only half past four.