The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  Of the three persons involved in this little arrival scene or ceremony. John Robert Rozanov was not the one least moved. His heart beat as fiercely as Hattie’s as they faced each other.

  John Robert had never managed to get on with his daughter Amy. He loved his wife who had died so soon after the child’s birth. He mourned Linda, he resented Amy, he did not like children, he had wanted a son anyway. Amy was an awkward suspicious hostile child, he had made her so. She showed no spark of any intelligence which might have interested him. He engaged nurses and housekeepers, then dispatched Amy to a boarding school. Just when he was arranging for her to go to college she ran off with that fool Whit Meynell. Then there was another little girl.

  John Robert was never sure later on exactly when he had begun to notice Hattie; perhaps not until she was about eight or nine, and her mother, whom she had been so drearily ‘part of, was already dead. She was a solemn child, aloof and shy, but, unlike Amy, not patently intimidated. She had Whit’s Icelandic mother’s stone-blue eyes and silver-gilt hair. But in the totality of her face and tenure she resembled Linda. John Robert’s heart had long ago been walled up and frozen; or rather his heart had become an intellectual organ and it was as such that it could beat strongly and warmly. He was at the height of his philosophical powers and in the grip of intense and continual mental turmoil. He had never deeply desired any woman except Linda. As a young widower he had been pursued, especially by powerful American women intellectuals, but any brief involvements had been much regretted by him, and even more by them. This period was short. His relations with his pupils were sometimes intense, but for John Robert these relations were strictly a function of intellectual excitement. When they ceased to be able to interest him philosophically he forgot them. He enjoyed talking with his colleagues on intellectual academic topics, where his interests and his knowledge ranged beyond the field of philosophy (he could have been a historian). But his pleasure in these encounters was concerned with ideas not with people, although there were not a few clever men and women who would dearly have liked to become his intimates. The last thing in the world that he expected was that he should suddenly find himself moved by a child.

  John Robert was indeed surprised to find himself, confronted with the young person, experiencing a new emotion. What was it? Interest, tenderness, affection? Whatever it was, he kept it strictly to himself. He had long ago decided upon his ‘way of life’, and his experience, especially his dismal relation with his daughter, had amply confirmed the decision, also of course confirmed by the world-consuming satisfaction which he found in philosophy. There was no room for anything else now. Yet there was something else, Hattie. She appeared to him like an awkward unnerving extra, a kind of contingent excrescence upon the perfect circle of his life, something outside. John Robert reflected deeply upon this, and found that the phenomenon persisted. He began to think about his grand-daughter with certain obscure flutters of the heart. But, to her, he exhibited no emotion whatsoever. Later on, much later on, he had times of the most bitter remorse, that biting ‘Oh if only — ’ which can gnaw its way into the very centre of the soul and there set up a pain which mixes itself with every experience. Remorse, at times, even distracted Rozanov from philosophy. If only he had, earlier on, established some direct affectionate relation, some ordinary modus vivendi with Hattie. Other grandfathers, as he could see from looking at his colleagues, were friends with their granddaughters, held their hands, hugged them, set them on their knees, kissed them. Except for occasions when he sat next to her in the car or on an aeroplane, he never touched Hattie. He did not pat her head or shake her hand. And, as he sometimes reflected, when he did (rarely) happen to sit next to her, not only did he discreetly shrink from her, she also shrank from him. How could he, he wondered as the years went by, go on and on so thoroughly doing what he did not feel? If only he had been braver and more intelligent, he could have had an ordinary affectionate relationship with Hattie ever since she was a small child. This might not have been anything wonderful but it would have been a door to open wider at need. Had he at the beginning so hardened his heart that change could not any more happen? But it was exactly his heart which was no longer hard. If only he had, years ago, seized the child in his arms. Would she have shrunk from him? Was it simply the fear of that which had made this long misunderstanding between them? There remained this thing which other people found so simple which he had never in all the years learnt how to do. And now it was too late.

  When had it become too late? Had it always seemed too late? As time went on John Robert, in the restless painful working out of his remorse, kept moving the moment at which it became too late further and further onward in time toward the present, with which it never caught up. But if ‘too late’ kept moving on in this way, was it not still in his power, looking at the present from the future, to assert that, after all, now was not yet too late? The idea of just this freedom was perhaps what tormented the philosopher most. He could still ‘do something about Hattie’. Or could he? What could he, after all these years, do? What move could he make now which would not mystify, even appal her? Such speculations were being endlessly examined, metamorphosed and refined in his secret thought, while at the same time he struggled with the most crucial problems of his philosophy, his ability thus to brood and suffer matching but not diminishing his giant ability to work.

  He thought often of writing Hattie a letter, explaining that he hoped that she realized how much he loved her. But, as in imagination he perused it, this letter seemed to be so stiffly conventional as to be insignificant or even embarrassing, or else to be something extremely melodramatic and startling. Other people solved such problems without even noticing them, or else lived thoughtlessly without their ever arising; he could not. Was it that he loved her? Was this love? Did he after all know so little of the world as not to have thoroughly understood this concept? Was it the same thing now as what he had felt when she was eight (or was it nine)? Perhaps the thing he felt, and thought he could identify, was always changing. Had it, in especial, changed lately, as Hattie grew - older? To say that John Robert was ‘in love’ with his grand-daughter was to employ too vague and dubious a concept. What was certain was that he was obsessed by her.

  During years when John Robert thought continually about Hattie he saw her only at rare intervals. He deliberately rationed his visits to her, which had the effect of intensifying her mystery. Of course this was unwise, he later saw; he should have kept the child close to him. But would familiarity have dispelled her charm? He could not see the whole situation or see the situation whole. Certain necessary hypotheses excluded certain other necessary hypotheses, it was like some situations in philosophy. She would have interrupted his work. Would she have made him ‘happy’? Another problematic concept. Inevitably, and in spite of the changes in her life, she seemed complete without him. When he had first ‘noticed’ her, her father had been still alive; but the philosopher’s contempt for Whit Meynell effectively obliterated this figure from the picture in a way in which it had not been possible to obliterate Amy. Amy had been a blot, a thorn, a dismal even sinister growth. Whit Meynell was nothing. In the picture of Hattie which had begun to glow there was not even a shadow. Yet this nothingness, though it made Hattie more visible, did not make her more accessible. She always seemed to be ‘getting on’ in a sort of life of her own in which John Robert must figure as an otiose outsider, one whose arrival was a bit of a trial. Poor Whit, of course, could make no secret of his ardent desire for his father- In-law’s absence, and in this Hattie seemed naturally to share. Later, with Margot, it was much the same. Of course John Robert was aware how scrappy and unsatisfactory, how problematic and provisional, how very unhappy Hattie’s mode of life must be. But this awareness could not help him to any sensible decision. Sometimes vaguely he dreamed of taking Hattie right away with him, capturing her, keeping her with him in some Spanish-style palazzo in some isolated part of southern California and overwhelming her with luxurie
s and treats. But what would that really be like? Might she not be embarrassed, annoyed, irritated, bored, frustrated, longing to get away? The mere idea of finding her so caused him such anguish as to make the experiment impossible. Was it not better simply to stand by and take such satisfaction as he could in simply watching her grow? His present aloof relation to her at least precluded problems, situations, consequences. Had he not his work to do and must he not protect himself? But … watching her grow … As Hattie became fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, John Robert began to feel his ‘too late’ with an added intensity. If the disclosure of his ‘love’, or whatever it was, was likely to ‘appal’ Hattie, was this not because the ‘love’ was, or was becoming, something ‘appalling’? John Robert, who was not accustomed to stop himself from thinking, here endeavoured to stop.

  It is in the context of this secret life of Rozanov that his extraordinary proposal to Tom McCaffrey may become intelligible. But before Tom there was Pearl. John Robert had never liked or trusted Margot Meynell, but for a time he could think of no alternative policy. Pearl was a sudden inspiration, and with amazing luck when he reached out his hand blindly he immediately took hold of exactly the right person. He needed an absolutely reliable watchdog, someone (when she was not imprisoned in her school) who would be with Hattie all the time; for control of Hattie’s time had gradually become a part of John Robert’s obsession. He needed positively to seclude her innocence, he wanted to be able to know where she was and what she was doing, to have, in fact, an effective spy in her life; and this role Pearl, without fully realizing it, performed very adequately. John Robert was aware of Pearl as a strong and able person; he respected strong and able people. (His awareness of her, however, had not revealed her much more intense awareness of him.) Lately, however, he had found himself beginning to feel jealous of Pearl, and resenting her existence as a barrier between him and Hattie; that was how the thing, poisonously, was growing and how mad it had all become.

  The notion of Tom was in a sense a notion of the same sort, though also of course completely different. John Robert had for some time been well aware that the period of her life during which he could keep Hattie in a cage was coming to an end. Hitherto, even if he could not imprison her in a Californian palazzo with himself as a gaoler, he had been able to supervise the limitations of her life elsewhere. Pearl was good, the strict old-fashioned boarding school was good, the ‘families’ were very carefully chosen. John Robert did not want Hattie to live free with bands of disorderly young people; this idea sickened him. He was beginning to realize, with another turn of the screw, how crazy his secret possessiveness was destined to become now that Hattie was seventeen.

  Was he now to be the helpless spectator of Hattie becoming a woman? Only yesterday she had been a little slim thing with pigtails and a doll and pale solemn eyes, the child who lived in his mind, as she might have lived in his house. He had established his picture of her as an innocent child. He had prepared no picture of her as a young woman. There would be lovers, affairs, scrapes, pregnancies, abortions, all the coarse horror of the world of indiscriminate sex, the degraded sex-mad modern world from which John Robert shrank away with profound moral revulsion. Then there would be no Pearl any more, Hattie would escape from her watchdog and dance about free. Could he bear it, and if not what could he do? Sometimes, walking at night in half-nightmares, it seemed to him that the only solution was to kill her.

  John Robert could recall, in permanently available cinematograph, many of the occasions, not immensely large in total number, when he had been with Hattie. He saw her in the senseless baked garden of Whit Meynell’s bungalow in Texas, a little child, not as tall as the flowers. Could he not have made friends with her then, when she reached up her hand and expected him to take it (which he did not), when she had not yet fenced him away with her nervous thoughts? How he perceived it later, that fence: not that he imagined she thought immensely about him, but she had a view of him, a view which paralysed them both at terrible little tea parties at terrible motels. Later in Denver they had gone on some short expeditions to see lakes and waterfalls, to look at a ghost town (Hattie liked ghost towns), to drive to a high place from which, surrounded by scores of other motor cars, they could look at immense empty flanks of snow mountains behind snow mountains into white distances where the eyes failed. (John Robert hated cars but, being a Californian by adoption, had to drive one.) Margot, later Pearl, had come on these jaunts. Occasionally he was alone with Hattie. Of course, it was possible that he felt as he did about the pure child because she was only available as a set of pictures and not as a continuous active imperfect person. But what difference did such speculations make now? He recalled her too, faintly, perceptibly adolescent, in California beside the ocean, walking on the lawns of campuses in the east, in the west, in a desert somewhere standing with Pearl beside his car and drawing cats in the dust upon it with her finger. Had they not, on those occasions, had ‘ordinary talk’, ‘got to know each other’? No. The occasions had been too rare, and they had both, too early, set up their formal self-protective attitudes. These ‘impressions’, these ‘stills’ from her childhood came to him with a piercing sense of her particular odd dim whitish charm and her secluded innocence, her blessed loneliness and awkwardness in anything which showed any danger of being a ‘sophisticated’ or ‘merry’ scene. Of course John Robert had always endeavoured to steer her clear of ‘merry scenes’. He had done his best to preserve her from any touch or even knowledge of the abysses which surrounded her. He could not, short of total captivity, keep her out of the world. Often it seemed that it could not touch her, she was not only too well-protected, she was too naturally fastidious and, perhaps, profoundly naive. At least it could not touch her yet. Still, still, she was preserved from the abominable vulgarity of growing up.

  The idea of Hattie simply walking away into a secret world of sexual adventure increasingly tortured the philosopher. It was as if he felt, with a crazed passion: she must not sin. This torment, visiting earlier with premonitory pains, now, as if by destiny, raged in full possession exactly at the time when John Robert began to feel, or imagine, that his philosophical powers were waning. That was one way to put it. It was, too, like a loss of religious faith. He began to mistrust not only what he was doing now, and everything he had ever done, but everything they had ever done, his philosophers, the great immortal ones, in fact to doubt the whole goddamned enterprise. His pen weakened in his hand, his hand which would soon in any case be stiff and monstrous with arthritis. (He had never learnt to use a typewriter, a machine which he found totally inimical to thought.) He felt world-weary, as if the journey was done, his era was over, John Robert Rozanov was finished. There only and so terribly remained alive the future, which was Hattie.

  In this desolation the characteristically dotty idea of marrying Hattie off quickly came to him as a salve. Why should he not at least attempt to arrange her marriage, to meddle thus far in her life and her future? It had been one of his most secret and peculiar miseries, one which he continually revived for his discomfort, that he would never be able to know when and with whom Hattie lost her virginity, and moved definitely out of the magic circle in which he had installed her. He would have to wait and guess and never be certain, and could he bear that? Hence there arose the idea of hastening the event and controlling it himself. It remained to find a bridegroom. Again, as in the case of Pearl and, as he hoped, with equal luck, he had at once hit upon a candidate. It might have been expected that the world of possibilities would at once have seemed so giddily large as to defeat reflection. Tom McCaffrey’s amazement at the choice lighting upon him is easily understood. But in fact the area of selection, once essential requirements were met, turned out to be reasonably small; and here Rozanov’s calculations were a strange mixture of extreme self-protective worldly wisdom, and a naivety as great as Hattie’s.

  John Robert did not want an American. Americans knew too much. He considered, not seriously but as a clear instance of an
impossibility, one of his cleverest younger pupils, Steve Glatz. Steve was a noble youth, but he was already hand- In-glove with life; he lacked that certain awkwardness which characterizes English boys and which, somehow or other, was upon John Robert’s list of requirements. Besides, Steve was too old, being now at least twenty-five. Men of other races were out of the question. (Jews were, of course, not excluded, but the only Jews known to John Robert were American ones.) The chosen one must be English and must not be a philosopher, that too was clear. Philosophical chat with his grandson- In-law was not part of John Robert’s picture of the future. Indeed any chat with this person was rather hard to imagine. The boy must be educated, a university student or graduate. Hattie herself, he supposed, would be proceeding to the university. She would need an educated person, able to earn his living (perhaps as a school teacher) but not too brilliantly clever (nothing like Glatz). Very clever people tended to be, in John Robert’s experience, neurotic, unstable and obsessively ambitious. The chosen one must be English, and must, in practical terms, be an Ennistonian. John Robert still, in that large part of himself which remained untouched by sophistication, regarded Ennistone as the centre of the world. Besides, there was nowhere else in England where he knew so many people. He had quickly passed his academic London friends in review, scrutinizing their families in vain. As soon as it was Ennistone, the light shone upon Tom McCaffrey.

  In the wilds of California and Massachusetts and Illinois John Robert had regularly received and studied the Ennistone Gazette. This gossipy sheet mentioned Tom on a few occasions as having acted in a review, been a runner-up in the tennis tournament, played well in the cricket team, obtained a university place: modest achievements, but McCaffreys were news. (The Gazette had also featured Tom’s only publication so far, an extremely bad poem, but this fortunately John Robert had not seen.) McCaffreys were news, and not only to ordinary home-keeping Ennistone, but also to John Robert himself in exile. In an odd way John Robert, bereft of home ties and relations, felt himself connected with the McCaffreys and the Stillowens, the old Victoria Park people, as if they were his family. This connectedness, which did not need to include any real friendship or even acquaintance, passed of course through Linda who had been, at the crucial time, so much at home with these folk. Perhaps indeed something even more primitive had been touched within the philosopher’s soul. George had, without for a second believing it, hazarded, to insult his teacher, the idea that John Robert, when he was young, had resented not being invited to ‘the grand houses’. In fact this was true. John Robert, at a time when he was already well known and admired, was annoyed to find himself ignored, or patronized, by people like Geoffrey Stillowen and Gerald McCaffrey. From this too he retained a deep and mixed feeling about these self-appointed ‘grandees’. From this source came his whim to establish Hattie in the Slipper House, an edifice which amid much social fuss and éclat, he could remember being built, and which had figured in his youth as a symbol of affluence and social power. Perhaps even the very idea of ‘choosing’ Tom arose from some scarcely formulated desire to see his grandchild stoop to marry a McCaffrey. John Robert did not purposefully intend to dominate and trap Tom, yet this he instinctively did and with a perceptible satisfaction.