The Black Prince

by Iris Murdoch

  Julian said, ‘Bradley, if I asked you, would you come to Covent Garden with me?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I would go to hell with her, and even to Covent Garden.

  ‘It’s Rosenkavalier. Next Wednesday. Meet in the foyer about half past six. I’ve got quite good tickets. Septimus Leech got us two, only now he can’t come.’

  ‘Who is Septimus Leech?’

  ‘Oh he’s my new boy – friend. Good night, Bradley.’

  She was gone. I stood there dazed in the lamplight among the hurrying ghosts. And I felt as a man might feel who, with a whole skin on him and a square meal inside him, sits in a cell having just been captured by the secret police.

  The next morning, of course, I awoke in torment. The reader may think it was unconscionably stupid of me not to have foreseen that I could not continue simply to derive happiness from this situation. But the reader, unless he is at this moment of reading himself madly in love, has probably mercifully forgotten, if indeed he ever knew, what this state of mind is like. It is, as I have remarked, a form of insanity. Is it not insane to concentrate one’s attention exclusively on one person, to drain the rest of the world of meaning, to have no thoughts, no feelings, no being except in relation to the beloved? What the beloved ‘is like’ or ‘is really like’ matters not a fig. Of course some people go crazy about people whom other people think worthless. ‘Why did she fall for the leader of the band?’ is an eternal question. We are stunned when we see those whom we esteem enslaved by the vulgar, the frivolous, or the base. But even if a man or a woman were so fine and so wise that their claim to be such could be denied by no one, it would still be a form of madness to direct upon him or upon her the kind of exclusive worshipping attention in which being in love consists.

  A common though not invariable early phase of this madness, the one in fact through which I had just been passing, is a false loss of self, which can be so extreme that all fear of pain, all sense of time (time is anxiety, is fear) is utterly blotted out. The sensation itself of loving, the contemplation of the existence of the beloved, is an end in itself. A mystic’s heaven on earth must be just such an endless contemplation of God. Only God has (or would have if He existed) characteristics at least not totally inimical to the continuance of the pleasures of adoration. As the so – called ‘ground of being’ He may be considered to have come a good deal farther than half – way. Also He is changeless. To remain thus poised in the worship of a human being is, from both sides of the relationship, a much more precarious matter, even when the beloved is not nearly forty years younger and, to say the least of it, detached.

  I had in fact lived through almost the whole history of ‘being in love’ in just over two days. (I say ‘almost the whole history’ because there is yet more to come.) The condensed phenomenology of the business had been enacted within me. On the first day I was simply a saint. I was so warmed and vitalized by sheer gratitude that I overflowed with charity. I felt so privileged and glorified that resentment, even memory of any wrong done to me, seemed inconceivable. I wanted to go around touching people, blessing them, communicating my great happiness, the good news, the secret of how the whole universe was a place of joy and freedom filled and running over with selfless rapture. I did not even want to see Julian on that day. I did not even need her. It was enough to know that she existed. I could almost have forgotten her, as perhaps the mystic forgets God, when he becomes God.

  On the second day I began to need her, though even ‘anxiety’ would be too gross a word for that delicate silken magnetic tug, as it manifested itself at any rate initially. Self was reviving. On the first day Julian had been everywhere. On the second day she was, yes, somewhere, located vaguely, not yet dreadfully required, but needed. She was, on the second day, absent. This inspired the small craving for strategy, a little questing desire to make plans. The future, formerly blotted out by an excess of light, reappeared. There were once more vistas, hypotheses, possibilities. But joy and gratitutde still lightened the world and made possible a gentle concern with other people, other things. I wonder how long a man could remain in that first phase of love? Much longer than I did, no doubt, but surely not indefinitely. The second phase, I am sure, given favourable conditions, could continue much longer. (But again, not indefinitely. Love is history, is dialectic, it must move.) As it is, I lived in hours what another man might have lived in years.

  The transformation of my beatitude could, as that second day wore on, be measured by a literally physical sense of strain, as if magnetic rays or even ropes or chains were delicately plucking, then tugging, then dragging. Physical desire had of course been with me from the first, but earlier it had been, though perceptually localized, metaphysically diffused into a general glory. Sex is our great connection with the world, and at its most felicitous and spiritual it is no servitude since it informs everything and enables us to inhabit and enjoy all that we touch and look upon. At other times it settles in the body like a toad. It becomes a drag, a weight: not necessarily for this reason unwelcome. We may love our chains and our stripes too. By the time Julian telephoned I was in deep anxiety and yearning but not in hell. I could not then willingly have put off seeing her, the craving was too acute. But I was able, when I was with her, to be perfectly happy. I did not expect the inferno.

  Even then, when I got back to my flat after leaving her, I was confused and frightened and wounded, but not writhing, not screaming. My spiritual liberation from alcohol appeared to be over. I got out the secret bottle of whisky which I keep for emergencies and drank a lot of it neat. After that I drank some sherry. I also ate, spooning it out of the tin, some chicken curry which Francis had evidently introduced into the house. I felt then, as I remember having felt in childhood, very unhappy, somehow humiliated, but determined not to think, determined to seek refuge in sleep. I knew that I would sleep well and I did. I rushed towards unconsciousness as a ship that flies towards a black storm cloud which covers the whole of the horizon.

  I woke with a clear head, a slight headache, and the knowledge that I was completely done for. Reason which had been – where had it been, during the last days? – somehow absent or dazed or altered or in abeyance, was once more at its post. (At least it was audible.) But in a rather specialized role and certainly not in that of a consoling friend. Reason was not, needless to say, uttering any coarse observations, such as that Julian was after all a very ordinary young woman and not worth all this fuss. Nor was it even pointing out that I had put myself in a situation where the torments of jealousy were simply endemic. I had not yet got as far as jealousy. That too was still to come. What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.

  There were no tears now. I lay in bed in an electric storm of physical desire. I tossed and panted and groaned as if I were wrestling with a palpable demon. The fact that I had actually touched her, kissed her, grew (I am sorry about these metaphors) into a sort of mountain which kept falling on top of me. I felt her flesh upon my lips. Phantoms were bred from this touch. I felt like a grotesque condemned excluded monster. How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?

  I got up but was suffering such extreme local discomfort that I could hardly get dressed. I started making tea, but its smell sickened me. I drank a little whisky in a glass of water and began to feel very ill. I could not stand still but wandered distractedly and rapidly about the flat rubbing against the furniture as a tiger in a cage endlessly brushes its bars. I had ceased groaning and was now hissing. I tried to compose a few thoughts about the future. Should I kill myself? Should I go at once to Patara and barricade myself in and blow my mind with alcohol? Run, run, run. But I could not compose thoughts. All that concerned me was find
ing some way of getting through these present minutes of pain.

  I have said that I did not yet feel jealousy. Jealousy after all is a sort of exercise or play of the reason. And my state of love was still too monumentally complete in itself to let reason get inside. Reason stood, as it were, beside it, playing its torch over the monument. It was not yet worming about within. It was not really until the following day, day four that is (but I will describe it now), that I began to think that Julian was twenty and as free as a bird. Did I dare question with my jealous thought where she might be, and her affairs suppose? Yes, I did, it was ultimately unavoidable. At that very moment she could be anywhere in anybody’s arms. Of course I must have ‘known’ that at the start, since it was so obvious. But it had not then seemed to concern me or to touch the saint that I was. She had dwelt with me then in a kind of unlocalized communion of consciousness. Now it began suddenly to concern me so much that it felt like a red – hot knitting needle thrust into the liver. (Where had I picked up that appalling simile?)

  Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins. It is at once one of the ugliest and one of the most pardonable. In fact, in relation to its badness it is probably the most pardonable. Zeus, who smiles at lovers’ oaths, must also condone their pangs and the venom which these pangs engender. Some Frenchman said that jealousy was born with love, but did not always die with love. I am not sure whether this is true. I would think that where there is jealousy there is love, and its appearance when love has apparently ceased is always a proof that the cessation is apparent. (I believe this is not just a verbal point.) Jealousy is certainly a measure of love in some, though as my own case illustrates not in all, of its phases. It also (and this may have prompted the Frenchman’s idea) seems like an alien growth – and growth is indeed the word. Jealousy is a cancer, it can kill that which it feeds on, though it is usually a horribly slow killer. (And thereby dies itself.) Also of course, to change the metaphor, jealousy is love, it is loving consciousness, loving vision, darkened by pain and in its most awful forms distorted by hate.

  What is so terrible about it is the sense that a part of oneself has been irrecoverably alienated and stolen. I realized this now, first vaguely and then with increasing precision, in the case of Julian. It was not simply that I frenziedly desired what I could not have. That was but a blunt and unrefined kind of suffering. I was condemned to be with her even in her very rejection of me. And how long and how slow and how long – drawn – out that rejection would be. Still temptation would follow where she was. Endlessly she would give herself to others taking me with her. Like an obscene puny familiar I would sit in the corners of bedrooms where she kissed and loved. She would make consort with my foes, she would adore those that mocked me, she would drink contempt for me from alien lips. And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain. I had acquired a dimension of suffering which would poison and devour my whole being, as far as I could see, for ever.

  The idea that one recovers from being in love is, of course, by definition (by my definition anyway) excluded from the state of love. Besides, one does not always recover. And certainly no such banal would – be comfort could have existed for a second in the scorching atmosphere of my mind at that time. As I said earlier, I knew that I was completely done for. There was no ray of light, no comfort at all. Though I will now also mention something which dawned upon me later. There was of course no question now of writing, of ‘sublimating’ it all (ridiculous expression). But the sense remained that this was my destiny, that this was ... the work of ... the same power. And to be pinned down by that power, even though one was writhing upon a spear which passed through the liver, was to be in some terrible sense in one’s own place.

  To speak of matters which are less obscure, I soon of course decided that I could not ‘run’. I could not go away to the country. I had to see Julian again, I had to wait through those awful days until the appointment at Covent Garden. Of course I wanted to ring her up at once and ask her to see me. But I somehow kept blindly thrusting this temptation away. I would not let my life degenerate into madness. Better to be alone with him and to suffer than to pull it all down into some sort of yelling chaos. Silence, though now with a different and utterly unconsoling sense, was my only task.

  Somewhere in the middle of that morning, which I will not attempt to describe further (except to say that Hartbourne rang up: I replaced the receiver at once), Francis Marloe came.

  I went back into the sitting – room and he followed me, already staring at me with surprise. I sat down and started rubbing my eyes and my brow, breathing heavily.

  ‘What’s the matter, Brad?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I say, there’s some whisky. I didn’t know you had any. You must have hidden it jolly well. May I have some?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Francis was putting a glass into my hand. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  I drank some whisky and choked a bit. I felt extremely sick and also unable to distinguish physical from mental pain.

  ‘Brad, we waited all evening for you.’

  ‘Why? Where?’

  ‘You said you’d come to see Priscilla.’

  ‘Oh. Priscilla. Yes.’ I had totally and absolutely forgotten Priscilla’s existence.

  ‘We rang up here.’

  ‘I was out to dinner.’

  ‘Had you just forgotten?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Arnold was there till after eleven. He wanted to see you about something. He was in. a bit of a state.’

  ‘How is Priscilla?’

  ‘Much the same. Chris wants to know if you’d mind if she had electric shock treatment.’

  ‘Yes. Fine.’

  ‘You mean you don’t mind? You know it destroys cells in the brain?’

  ‘Then she’d better not have it.’

  ‘On the other hand – ’

  ‘I ought. to see Priscilla,’ I said, I think, aloud. But I knew that I just couldn’t. I had not got a grain of spirit to offer to any other person. I could not expose myself in my present condition to that poor rapacious craving consciousness.

  ‘Priscilla said she’d do anything you wanted.’

  Electric shocks. They batter the brain cage. Like hitting the wireless, they say, to make it go. I must pull myself together. Priscilla.

  ‘We must go – into it – ’ I said.

  ‘Brad, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. Destruction of cells in the brain.’

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m in love.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Francis. ‘Who with?’

  ‘Julian Baffin.’

  I had not intended to tell him. It was something to do with Priscilla that I did. The pity of it. And then a sense of being battered beyond caring.

  Francis took it coolly. I suppose that was the way to take it. ‘Oh. Is it very bad, I mean your sickness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you told her?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. ‘I’m fifty – eight. She’s twenty.’

  ‘I don’t see that that decides anything much,’ said Francis.

  ‘Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that. Can I have some more whisky?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘I can’t – before that – young girl — make a display of feelings such as I – feel. It would appal her. And as I can envisage – no possible relationship with her of that kind – ’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Francis, ‘though whether it would be a good idea is another matter.’

  ‘Don’t talk such utter — It’s a question of morals and of – everything. She cannot possibly feel — for me – almost an old man – It would just disgust her – she simply wouldn’t want to see me again
.’

  ‘There’s a lot of assumptions there. As for morals well maybe, though I don’t know. Everything is another matter, especially these days. But will you enjoy going on and on meeting her and keeping your mouth shut?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, then. Sorry to be so simple – minded. Hadn’t you better start pulling out?’

  ‘You’ve obviously never been in love.’

  ‘I have actually. And awfully. And – always – without hope—I’ve never had my love reciprocated ever. You can’t tell me—’

  ‘I can’t pull out. I’m only just in. I don’t know what to do. I feel I’m going mad, I’m trapped.’

  ‘Cut and run. Go to Spain or something.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m seeing her on Wednesday. We’re going to the opera. Oh Christ.’

  ‘If you want to suffer I suppose it’s your affair,’ said Francis, helping himself again to the whisky, ‘but if you want to get out, I think I should tell her if I were you. Reduce the tension and let the thing get more ordinary. That’ll help the cure. Secret brooding always makes it worse. Tell her in a letter. You’re a writer chap, you’d enjoy writing it all down.’

  ‘It would sicken her.’

  ‘You could do it with a sort of light touch – ’

  ‘There’s a dignity and a power in silence.’

  ‘Silence?’ said Francis. ‘You’ve broken that already.’

  O my prophetic soul. It was true.

  ‘Of course I won’t tell anybody,’ said Francis. ‘But why after all did you tell me? You didn’t intend to and you’ll regret it. You’ll probably hate me for it. But please, please don’t if you can. You told me because you were frantic, because you felt an irresistible nervous urge. You’ll tell her, sooner or later, for the same reason.’