THE LOOK OF LOVE
Iris Murdoch’s novel The Black Prince revisited
CATHERINE TAYLOR
“My mind seems absolutely seized up – the novel – awful – utter inability to think – and generally demon-ridden”, Iris Murdoch wrote to her lifelong friend, the philosopher Philippa Foot, in a undated letter from the summer of 1971. The “awful” novel-in-progress to which she referred was The Black Prince, which would be published two summers later in 1973. Murdoch’s most “difficult, intimate novel”, “written in pain” according to her authorised biographer Peter J. Conradi, it was described on publication as a “domestic frenzy” by the New York Times critic Lawrence Graver. “Feydeau mixed with Strindberg and a touch of Muriel Spark”, said the same reviewer, “a kind of epistemological detective story.” It belongs to a clutch of seriously good novels which Murdoch published between 1973 and 1978, three of which, if not directly inspired by Shakespeare’s plays, at least recall them: Much Ado About Nothing in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); The Tempest in The Sea, The Sea (1978); and The Black Prince, which is itself famously semi-concerned with Hamlet, in content if not in authorial intent.
“The great artist sees his objects (and this is true whether they are sad, absurd, repulsive or even evil) in a light of justice and mercy”, Murdoch had written a few years earlier in what is probably her best-known work of philosophy, The Sovereignty of Good (1970). “Anything which is to count as a definite reality must be open to several observers.” The Black Prince features “several observers”, in the form of its secondary characters, who are satellites of a self-proclaimed “great artist”: in fact, a struggling writer, Bradley Pearson, who may or may not be a realization of the “Black Prince” (certainly his initials hint at it). These characters act, too, as prologue and postscript to what is presented as a novel within a novel written by Pearson (just as Hamlet contains a play within a play).
Considering that Murdoch’s published output was so prolific throughout the 1970s (seven novels, two philosophical treatises), it is agreeable to observe that here she rather cruelly gives her protagonist a severe case of writer’s block, coupled with a disabling (and, of course, Hamlet-like) tendency towards procrastination. Bradley Pearson has been identified (in part) as Murdoch’s alter ego, although she claimed that she preferred to keep herself out of her books, even if her much pored-over and complicated emotional life provided more than enough material for them. If so, it is a boldly unflattering self-portrait. Pearson is egotistical, cold, repressed and dismissive. At the age of fifty-eight, he has just retired from his job as a tax inspector with plans to write a great work of Platonic perfection, to close the gap left by his few previously published books, the number of which is later disputed. Thwarted and distracted by continuous interruptions and embroilments from the novel’s beginning, he moves, in a series of seemingly convoluted developments, towards its apotheosis, when he unexpectedly and catastrophically falls in love with the androgynous Julian Baffin. Julian is the twenty-year-old daughter of his former protégé, supposed best friend and younger literary rival Arnold, a highly successful novelist of formulaic bestsellers with titles such as A Skull on Fire and Inside a Snow Crystal. Bradley is seethingly jealous of Arnold’s fame even as he despises his dubious talent. The ultimate consequences of this envy, and of his love for Julian – obsessive, humiliating and, in what is Murdoch’s great achievement, convincingly transformative and truly pitiful – will be suicide, murder and life imprisonment.
Ruinous, melodramatic, tragic: Bradley Pearson’s attempts to separate life from art and from his personal artistic vision lead to his downfall but also to a state of pure mystical revelation. Yet Murdoch tempers this seriousness with caustic dialogue and a robust sense of the improbable, as well as parody, the whole being wrapped up in a surfeit of unreliable narrators and metafictional aspects. There is even an overall master of ceremonies, Bradley’s “editor”, the mysterious P. Loxias, whose true credentials are worth a little literary detective work. Yet the primary objective of the novel remains to adequately convey how it feels to fall completely and irredeemably in love.
Murdoch was to experience this multiple times in her own life, and experience or endure the profound attachment of others to herself many more times over. The romantic entanglements and naked confessions at which the characters in her books excel are both a product of Murdoch’s personal relationships and of her imagination, as testified by Peter J. Conradi’s comprehensive biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life, which came out in 2002, three years after Murdoch’s death from Alzheimer’s, and Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (2015). Both publications go some way towards restoring the Murdoch of dazzling intellect and capricious ideas who had been lost to her readership as much by her husband John Bayley’s controversial memoirs of Murdoch’s living with dementia, written without her knowledge, as by the progress of the dementia itself.
Living on Paper, despite the careful curating of its editors, which features only Murdoch’s side of her voluminous correspondence, was gleefully seized on in some quarters for its more salacious elements – particularly her bisexuality, which became more overtly expressed during the 1960s, and included an involvement with her fellow writer Brigid Brophy. (In a letter to Brophy, dashed off with typical unself-conscious grandeur during the creation of The Black Prince, Murdoch wrote that “I have felt the demise of our friendship is a cosmic pity”). This scrutiny of the love affairs and close friendships conducted long before and after her marriage to Bayley, in 1956, sometimes threaten to obscure the extraordinary literary and philosophical output which led her to be acclaimed as one of the great writers of the late twentieth century.
“I find myself quite astonishingly interested in the opposite sex”, a twenty-year-old Murdoch had written to a friend in April 1939, “and capable of being in love with about six men all at once – which gives rise to complications and distresses. And too many people are in love with me just at present – which though pleasing to my vanity, is also liable to be annoying and difficult.” It is a letter which might find its natural embodiment in The Black Prince, as Bradley Pearson, by choice solitary and celibate, finds himself set upon by a variety of at first benign pursuers: Arnold Baffin; Arnold’s wife Rachel, with whom he begins a tentative, chaste affair before falling for their daughter; his depressive sister Priscilla, in flight from her miserable marriage; Christian, his hated former wife who has returned to London after years in America; and Francis, Christian’s pathetic, wily brother, who becomes Bradley’s helper and accidental betrayer. Bradley is a prodigious letter-writer himself, commenting in one of his persistent soliloquies: “What dangerous machines letters are: perhaps it is as well that they are going out of fashion. A letter can be endlessly reread and reinterpreted, it stirs imagination and fantasy, it persists, it is red-hot evidence”, and letter-writing and other instruments of mostly non-verbal communication – a ringing telephone, a door-bell, a telegram – are central to the plot of The Black Prince. When Bradley first re-encounters Julian, whom he has known since her birth, as a grown-up woman, she is tearing up a letter from her departed boyfriend (crucially, Bradley at first mistakes her for a young man); any number of declarations and confidences are made and denied by post or hand-delivery, and the well-intentioned destruction of a letter as the sole piece of evidence which might change the outcome of the novel is one of Murdoch’s many ingenious twists.
It is also an intensely physical book. Not so much in the erotic sense, although eroticism fleetingly (and destructively) touches its central Platonic ideal. Murdoch was a writer who was compelled to describe physiognomy much as Dickens was and in a manner with is almost entirely absent from much contemporary fiction; one is reminded in this novel of concealment (by Shakespeare again) that “there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face”. Bradley fancies he drops decades in age when his love for Julian is returned (and just as swiftly regains them when he fears she is lost to him); his sister Priscilla’s mental deterioration is outwardly marked by her frenzied application of increasingly grotesque make-up; and Julian’s own ambiguity as a love object is emphasized in Murdoch’s depicting her through Bradley’s eyes as, variously, a golden innocent not long out of childhood, or a predatory manipulator whose face can quickly assume the non-human mask of a bird, or a fox. In addition, the body’s involuntary functions or malfunctions are all part of Murdoch’s forensic examination of the manifestations of love: from Bradley’s copious vomiting during a performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier immediately before he declares himself to Julian, to sleeplessness, lack of appetite, symbolic dreams and sudden acts of violence, two of which frame the novel, as its opening and denouement.
This is also a book in which feet and footwear are omnipresent and almost fetishized. The (independently and much-mentioned) sweat of Rachel’s and Pricilla’s stockinged feet; Julian, barefoot when Bradley first runs into her, and later the triumphant recipient of a pair of purple boots which he impulsively buys her; his weeping over the paleness of her wet feet in the fleeting time they have together as lovers in a remote place by the sea; and finally the cold feet of a corpse and the accusatory, bloody footprints which surround it as the novel reaches its climax.
Love in its purest, selfless sense and love as possession, rendered through acts of consummation, vie with each other throughout The Black Prince, and through its language. Bradley seeks to create a “gorgeous metaphor” as a reaction to Arnold’s relentless “scented bathwater” of literary outpouring, while simultaneously falling into his own trap of overwrought, urgent prose – here Murdoch is having a dig at her tendencies in this area, and also echoing Malcolm Bradbury’s excitable send-up of her writing in his parody “A Jaundiced View”.
It is the emotional carousel on which Murdoch places her eccentric figures, their chronic suffering and overblown pronouncements, which have perhaps given her the tag of “unfashionable writer” as her centenary approaches in 2019. Yet her unashamed quest both as a novelist and a philosopher for moral truth and “goodness”, her own acknowledged gender fluidity and embrace of polyamorous relationships make her very modern indeed. A diary entry from December 1966, when Murdoch was forty-seven, has her asking herself: “Q. What am I?” The answer: “A male homosexual sadomasochist”. Of The Black Prince, in which Murdoch is writing in the persona of a man who is only able to make love to his much younger lover when he sees her in the guise of another man (in a scene where Julian surprises Bradley by dressing up as Prince Hamlet in a black doublet), she remarked: “A lot of nightmares have got inside this novel”. Nightmares but also pleasure, fantasy, redemption through love – however transient – and what Bradley Pearson defines – for the last word must go to him – as “something resonant and huge, of histories and ecstasies and tears”.
Catherine Taylor is a former deputy director of English PEN and the editor of The Book of Sheffield: A city in short fiction (Comma, 2019).
“The Look of Love” was first published in BRB2 (summer 2018).