The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  I shall describe myself a little more. My parents kept a shop. This is important, though not as important as Francis Marloe thinks, and certainly not in the way that he thinks. I mention Francis first of any of my ‘players’ not because he is the most important: Francis is not important at all and has no deep connection with the course of these events. He is a subsidiary, a sidesman, in the story as I fear he is generally in life. Poor Francis will never be the hero of anything. He would make an excellent fifth wheel to any coach. But I make him as it were the mascot of the tale, partly because in a purely mechanical sense he opens it, and if on a certain day he had not, and so on, I might never, and so on. There is another paradox. One must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance, a subject even more edifying than the subject of death. Partly too I give a special place to Francis because he is, of the main actors in this drama, probably the only one who believes that I am not a liar. My gratitude to you, Francis Marloe, if you are still among the living and should chance to see these words. That another, later, believed me has proved of infinitely greater value. But you were then the only one who saw and understood. Across the aeons of time which have passed since that tragedy, I salute you, Francis.

  My parents kept a shop, a sort of paper shop, down in Croydon. The shop sold daily papers and magazines, writing paper and so on, and horrible ‘gifts’. My sister Priscilla and I lived in this shop. We did in fact often have our tea there, and I have a ‘memory’ of sleeping under the counter. But the shop was the house and the mythical domain of our childhood. Some fortunate children have a garden, a landscape, as the ‘local habitation’ of their early years. We had the shop: its drawers, its shelves, its smells, its endless empty cardboard boxes, its particular dirt. It was a shabby unsuccessful shop. Our parents were shabby unsuccessful people. They both died when I was in my twenties, my father first, my mother not long after. My mother lived to see my first book published. She was proud of me. My mother filled me with exasperation and shame but I loved her. (Be quiet Francis Marloe.) My father I simply disliked. Or perhaps I have forgotten my affection for him. One can forget love, as you will perceive that I shortly find out.

  I will not go on about the shop. I still dream about it at least once a week. Francis Marloe thought this very significant when I told him once. But Francis belongs to that sad crew of semi-educated theorizers who prefer any general blunted ‘symbolic’ explanation to the horror of confronting a unique human history. Francis wanted to ‘explain’ me. In my moment of fame, a number of other and much cleverer people attempted this also. But any human person is infinitely more complex than this type of explanation. By ‘infinitely’ (or should I say ‘almost infinitely’? Alas I am no philosopher) I mean that there are not only more details, but more kinds of details with more kinds of relations than these diminishers can dream of. You might as well try to ‘explain’ a Michelangelo on a piece of graph paper. Only art explains, and that cannot itself be explained. We and art are made for each other, and where that bond fails human life fails. Only this analogy holds, only this mirror shows a just image. Of course we have an ‘unconscious mind’ and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a ‘scientific’ one.

  My life, until the drama which brought it so significantly to a climax, had been an uneventful one. Some people might call it dull. In fact, if one can use that rather beautiful and pungent word in an almost non-emotive sense, my life had been sublimely dull, a great dull life. I was married, then ceased to be married, as [ shall tell. I am childless. I suffer from intermittent stomach troubles and insomnia. I have usually lived alone. After my wife, and also before her, there were women about whom I shall not speak since they are irrelevant and unimportant. Sometimes I saw myself as an ageing Don Juan, but the majority of my conquests belonged to the world of fantasy. I wished in after years when it seemed too late to start that 1 had kept a diary. One’s capacity to forget absolutely is immense. And this would have been some sort of monument with an aimost guaranteeable value. A sort of Seducer’s Diary with metaphysical reflections might have been an ideal literary form for me, I have often thought. But the years are spent and gone to oblivion that might have filled it. So much for women. On the whole I have been cheerful, a solitary but not unsociable, sometimes unhappy, often melancholy. (Cheerfulness and melancholy are not incompatible.) I have had few intimate friends. (I could not I think be ‘friends’ with a woman.) This book is in fact the story of an ‘intimate friendship’. I found good friends, though not intimate ones (‘pals’ you might call them) through my office work. I do not speak of those years ‘at the office’; nor do I speak of those friends, not out of ingratitude, but partly for aesthetic reasons, since they do not figure in the tale, and also out of delicacy since they may no longer wish to be associated with me. Alone of these old ‘pals’ I mention Hartbourne, because he seems such a typical denizen of my great years of dullness, and so can conveniently represent the others; and also because he did at last misguidedly, but with sincere and friendly intent, involve himself in my fate. I should say that ‘the office’ was the office of the Inland Revenue, and that I have been for most of my official working life an Inspector of Taxes.

  I am not, then, proposing to describe my life as a ‘taxman’. For some reason which I cannot fully understand the profession of ‘taxman’, like the profession of ‘dentist’, seems to excite laughter. But this laughter is, I suspect, uneasy. Both taxman and dentist only too readily image forth the deeper horrors of human life: that we must pay, perhaps ruinously, for our pleasures, that our resources are lent, not given, and that our most irreplaceable faculties decay even as they grow. And in an immediate sense, what makes a man more obsessively miserable than income tax or the toothache? No doubt this accounts for the defensive covertly hostile mockery with which one is greeted when confessing to either of these trades. I used to think however that no one but fools like Francis Marloe actually believed that tax inspectors chose their profession out of secret sadism. I cannot think of anyone less sadistic than myself. I am gentle to timidity. Yet latterly even my quiet and respectable calling has been used as evidence against me.

  When this story starts – and I will not much longer delay its inception-I had already retired, at an earlier age than is usual, from the tax office. I worked as an Inspector of Taxes because I had to earn a living which I knew I should never earn as a writer. I retired when I had at last saved enough money to assure myself a modest annuity. I have lived, as I say, until latterly, without drama, but with unfailing purpose. I looked forward to and I toiled for my freedom to devote all my time to writing. Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time. I have been on the whole a lucky man. And I would say that even now. Perhaps especially I would say it now.

  The shock of leaving the office was greater than I had anticipated. Hartbourne warned me that it would be so. I did not believe him. Perhaps I am, more than I realized, a creature of routine. Perhaps too, with scarcely pardonable stupidity, I imagined that inspiration would come with freedom. I did not expect the complete withdrawal of my gift. In the years before, I worked steadily. That is, I wrote steadily and I destroyed steadily. I will not say how many pages I have destroyed, the number is immense. There was pride in this as well as sorrow. Sometimes I felt at a (terrible phrase) dead end. But I never despaired of excellence. Hope and faith and absolute devotion kept me plodding onward, ageing, living alone with my emotions. And at least I found that I could always write something.

  But when I had given up the tax office and could sit at my desk at home every morning and think any thoughts I pleased, I found I had no thoughts at all. This too I suffered with my bitterest patience. I waited. I tried to develop a new routine: monotony, out of which value springs. I waited, I listened. I live, as I shall explain soon at more
length, in a noisy part of London, a seedy region that was once genteel. I suppose I have myself, together with my neighbourhood, made my pilgrimage away from gentility. Noise, which had never distressed me before, began to do so. For the first time in my life I urgently wanted silence.

  Of course, as might be pointed out with barbed humour, I had always in a sense been a devotee of silence. Arnold Baffin once said something like this to me, laughing, and hurt me. Three short books in forty years of sustained literary effort is not exactly garrulity. And indeed if I understand anything that is precious, I did understand how important it was to keep one’s mouth shut until the right moment even if this meant a totally voiceless life. Writing is like getting married. One shpuld never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck. I hate, in any context, an intemperate flux of words. Contrary to what is modishly thought, the negative is stronger than the positive and its master. What I needed now however was literal silence.

  So I decided for a time to leave London, and at once began to feel closer to my hidden treasure. My decision taken, my confidence returned, and I felt that latent biding power which is the artist’s true grace. I decided to rent a cottage for the summer beside the sea. I had never in all my life had enough of the sea. I had never lived with it, never lived in a lonely place with only the sound of waves, which is no sound but the murmur of silence itself. In this connection I must mention too a not altogether rational idea which I had nourished more or less vaguely for a long time: the notion that before I could achieve greatness as a writer I would have to pass through some ordeal. For this ordeal I had waited in vain. Even total war (I was never in uniform) failed to ruffle my life. I seemed doomed to quietness. And it could be a measure of this quietness, and of the gentle timidity of which I have spoken, that a summer spent out of London could even for a second present itself to me as a trial! Of course for a man like myself, conventional, nervous, puritanical, the slave of habit, such a departure could reasonably be thought of as an adventure, a daring and unpredictable move. Or did I know by intuition that wonderful and terrible things were really imminent at last, trembling into being just behind the curtain of the future? My searching eye was caught by the advertisement: a seaside cottage at a modest rent. Its name was Patara. I had made the necessary arrangements and was just about to depart when Francis Marloe as the messenger of fate knocked upon my door. I did eventually get to Patara, but what happened there did not include anything that I had expected.

  As I now read this Foreword through I see how meagrely it conveys me. How little perhaps can words convey except in the hands of a genius. Though I am a creative person, I am a puritan rather than an aesthete. I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie. For myself, I have no theories. True politics is simply the drying of tears and the endless fight for freedom. Without freedom there is no art and no truth. I revere great artists and the men who say no to tyrants.

  It remains to record a dedication. There is of course one for whom this book was written whom I cannot name here. With a full heart, to witness duty, not to show my wit, I dedicate the work which you inspired and made possible to you, my dearest friend, my comrade and my teacher, with a gratitude which only you can measure. I know you will forgive its many faults, as you have always with a percipient mercy condoned the equally numerous shortcomings of its author.

  Bradley Pearson

  Now follows BRADLEY PEARSON’S STORY which is entitled:

  The Black Prince

  A Celebration of Love

  Part One

  It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, ‘Bradley, could you come round here please, I think that I have just killed my wife.’ A deeper pattern however suggests Francis Marloe as the first speaker, the page or house-maid (these images would appeal to him) who, some half an hour before Arnold’s momentous telephone call, initiates the action. For the news which Francis brought me forms the frame, or counterpoint, or outward packaging of what happened then and later in the drama of Arnold Baffin. There are indeed many places where I could start. I might start with Rachel’s tears, or Priscilla’s. There is much shedding of tears in this story. In a complex explanation any order may seem arbitrary. Where after all does anything begin? That three of the four starting points I have mentioned were causally independent of each other suggests speculations, doubtless of the most irrational kind, upon the mystery of human fate.

  As I have explained, I was about to leave London. It was a raw damp cold afternoon in May. The wind carried no flowery smells, but rather laid a moist healthless humour upon the flesh which it then attempted to flay. I had my suitcases ready and was about to telephone for a taxi, had in fact already lifted the phone, when I experienced that nervous urge to delay departure, to sit down and reflect, which I am told the Russians have elevated into a ritual. I replaced the instrument and went back into my crowded little Victorian sitting-room and sat down. The result of this manoeuvre was that I was immediately aching with anxiety about a number of arrangements which I had already checked ten times over. Had I got enough sleeping pills? Had I packed the belladonna mixture? Had I packed my notebooks? I can only write in a certain kind of notebook with the lines a certain distance apart. I ran back into the hall. I found the notebooks and the pills and the belladonna of course, but by now the suitcases were half unpacked again and my heart was beating violently.

  I lived then and had long lived in a ground-floor flat in a small shabby pretty court of terrace houses in North Soho, not far from the Post Office Tower, an area of perpetual seedy brouhaha. I preferred this genteel metropolitan poverty to the styleless surburban affluence favoured by the Baffins. My ‘rooms’ were all at the back. My bedroom looked on to dustbins and a fire escape. My sitting-room on to a plain brick wall caked with muck. The sitting-room, half a room really (the other half, stripped and degraded, was the bedroom) had wooden panels of that powdery dignified shade of green which can only be achieved by about fifty years of fading. This place I had crammed with too much furniture, with Victorian and oriental bric-à-brac, with tiny heterogeneous objets d’art, little cushions, inlaid trays, velvet cloths, antimacassars even, lace even. I amass rather than collect. I am also meticulously tidy though resigned to dust. A sunless and cosy womb my flat was, with a highly wrought interior and no outside. Only from the front door of the house, which was not my front door, could one squint up at sky over tall buildings and see above the serene austere erection of the Post Office Tower.

  So it was that I deliberately delayed my departure. What if I had not done so? I was proposing to disappear for the whole summer, to a place incidentally which I had never seen but had adopted blind. I had not told Arnold where I was going. I had mystified him. Why I wonder? Out of some sort of obscure spite? Mystery always bulks larger. I had told him with a firm vagueness that I should be travelling abroad, no address. Why these lies? I suppose I did it partly to surprise him. I was a man who never went anywhere. Perhaps I felt it was time I gave Arnold a surprise. Neither had I informed my sister Priscilla that I was leaving London. There was nothing odd in that. She lived in Bristol with a husband whom I found distasteful. Suppose I had left the house before Francis Marloe knocked on the door? Suppose the tram had arrived at the tram stop and taken Prinzip away before the Archduke’s car came round the corner?

  I repacked the suitcases and transferred to my pocket, for re-reading in the train, the third version of my review of Arnold’s latest novel. As a one-book-a-year man Arnold Baffin, the prolific popular novelist, is never long out of the public eye. I have had differences of opinion with Arnold about his writing. Sometimes in a close friendship, where important matters are concerned, people agree to differ and,
in that area, fall silent. So, for a time, it had been with us. Artists are touchy folk. I had, however, after a superficial glance at his latest book, found things in it which I liked, and I had agreed to review it for a Sunday paper. I rarely wrote reviews, being in fact rarely asked to. I felt that this tribute would be some amends to Arnold for former criticisms which he had perhaps resented. Then on reading the novel with more care I decided regretfully that I detested it just as much as I detested its numerous confrères, and I found myself writing a review which was in effect a general attack upon Arnold’s whole œuvre. What to do? I did not want to offend the editor: one does sometimes want to see oneself in print. And should not a critic simply speak out fearlessly? On the other hand Arnold was an old friend.