The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (2 page)

When Murdoch began her career shortly after World War II, philosophy and the novel had close connections in France, as Sartre and Camus wrote in both genres. In Britain, however, the two genres had virtually no contact. To some extent, the reason for this estrangement was cultural. British academic society had, and perhaps still has, a strong distaste for the public display of strong passions on the part of its members. To the typical Oxbridge don, novelists were a little like actors: amusing at a distance, embarrassing if they came too close.

To some extent, too, the estrangement was stylistic. Anglo-American philosophy was being written in a very austere and impersonal way, so that any incursion of narrative and emotion into the text would be an embarrassing anomaly. But how could a novelist not want to record the texture of concrete particulars—for example, as Murdoch once memorably and shockingly said in the hallowed precincts of the Aristotelian Society, “the smell of the Paris metro or what it is
like
to hold a mouse in one’s hand”? She shocked because she insisted that such details of experience were the stuff of philosophy as well as the stuff of life. People were not yet ready to listen.

Above all, however, the estrangement was produced by issues of philosophical substance. Moral philosophy in the post-war period had become preoccupied—not surprisingly, given the times—with the moment of ethical choice. R. M. Hare, who had spent time both in a prisoner-of-war camp and on the Burmese railway, had no interest at all in the inner life. He wanted a philosophy that would produce good in the world and help us understand the nature of good action. His analysis of moral language famously held that all moral statements were in essence commands to act; this soldierly conception of morality became popular in a world intent on seeing the good act defeat the bad. (A similar emphasis prevailed on the continent: Sartre depicted the moral agent as a free isolated will, capable of choosing courageously for the sake of humanity only if it could first come to grips with the agony of being free.) To this muscular conception of philosophy, the preoccupations of the novelist—the vagaries of emotion and desire, the variety of human character, the predatoriness of love—looked simply irrelevant, as if one had suggested that a bright crisp salon painting of “The Choice of Hercules” could be improved by the addition of a floating indeterminate sky in the style of Turner.

But the choice-of-Hercules conception of the ethical life left a good deal out, and these omissions were damaging to the post-war philosophers’ own project of understanding how good can be done and evil avoided. For evil is very likely to begin in the inner world, with the struggle of love against infantile egoism and ambivalence, the laborious effort to form patterns of thought and action that defeat narcissism and acknowledge the reality of other people. Oddly enough, these British philosophers were all teaching the Greeks, and they must have encountered there a richer view of the moral life. Teaching Aristotle, they would have insisted that a person’s goodness does not consist in isolated moments of willing, but, rather, in a lifelong effort to cultivate patterns of motivation, attention, reaction, and, related to all these, choice. The effort was a virtuous one only if these patterns became reliably rooted, suffusing the moral life. Aristotle certainly had too simple and sunny a conception of the obstacles to good in the personality, in part because he took no interest in children. But his conception is promising in its general shape, and can be deepened by the addition of a more nuanced psychology. Nonetheless, as often happens, teaching Aristotle did not affect the substance of what Oxford philosophers wrote—until much later, and under Iris Murdoch’s influence.

Murdoch was for many years, then, an anomaly: a celebrated and also popular novelist, and at the same time a respected Oxford philosophy tutor at St. Anne’s College, who throughout her career (even after she quit teaching) continued to publish serious philosophical essays and books. For most of this time, Murdoch opposed any effort to connect her two careers. In a 1978 BBC interview with Bryan Magee on “Philosophy and the Novel,” she offered a caricature of Oxbridge philosophy at its driest as a definition of what philosophy was, a similarly extreme view of the novel as uncommitted play as a definition of what the novel was, as if to say to the baffled Magee, “See? You thought you’d do a program about how my two careers are connected. But there’s no such connection, except in your well-intentioned head.” Murdoch had a constant desire to mystify and to prevent people from finding her where she was, and this interview is a fine case in point.

But of course there are profound connections, and they are more apparent all the time. For Anglo-American moral philosophy has by now achieved a broader conception of its subject matter, which would today be agreed to include the virtues and vices, the nature of imagination and attention, the vicissitudes of passion. And Murdoch’s novels can now be seen as a major part of her philosophical contribution, because one cannot fully make Murdoch’s case for the moral significance of the strivings of the inner world without narratives that show at length and in detail what Henry James (one of Murdoch’s favorite novelists) called “the effort really to see and really to represent,” as it contends with “the constant force that makes for muddlement.”

As her journals record, Murdoch struggled throughout her life against her own egoistic tendencies, and especially with erotic desires that included a need to cause mystification and achieve control. For someone with such a tumultuous inner world, the muscular choice-is-all school of philosophy could not possibly be satisfactory. Murdoch felt that we would only get to the right choices if we understood better the inner forces militating against goodness. And in her view, the main such force was our inability to see other people correctly. We are always representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, she believed, ways that gratify our egos and serve our own ends. To see truly is not the entirety of virtue, but it is a very crucial part. And even where a person makes good choices, if the inner vision is lacking, then an important part of virtue itself is lacking. (Here she agrees with Aristotle: there is a morally large difference between self-control and real virtue, even though the overt acts may look exactly the same, because the self-controlled person has not yet achieved the motives, reactions, and patterns of seeing characteristic of the good person.)

To make this point clear for philosophers, Murdoch invented an example that has by now become famous. In her lecture “The Sovereignty of Good,” she asks us to imagine a mother-in-law, M, who has contempt for her daughter-in-law, D. She sees D as common, cheap, low. Because M is a very self-controlled Englishwoman, she behaves, let us stipulate, with perfect graciousness all the while, and no hint of her real view surfaces in her acts. But she realizes, too, that the very feelings and thoughts she has are unworthy, very likely to be generated by jealousy and a too-keen desire to hang on to her son. So she sets herself a moral task: she will change her view of D, making it more accurate, less marred by selfishness. So she sets herself exercises in vision. Where she is inclined to say “coarse,” she will say, and see, “spontaneous.” Where she is inclined to say “common,” she will say, and see, “fresh and naïve.” As time goes on, the new images supplant the old, and she now does not have to make such an effort to control her overt actions: they flow naturally from the way she has come to see D.

Murdoch claims simply that this change is of some moral significance. Getting the behavior right is one good thing; but getting the thoughts and emotions right is another, and in some ways a deeper, more fundamental, good thing. She challenges moral philosophy to attend more to these long-term tasks in vision and self-cultivation, to focus on patterns of character that extend over a life rather than simply on isolated moments of choice.

There are gaps in Murdoch’s philosophical vision. Surprisingly in someone with a past of political commitment, she seems almost entirely to lack interest in the political and social determinants of a moral vision, or of an aspect of social critique that ought, one feels, to be a major element in the struggle against one’s own defective tendencies.

 

Another problem is the tension between Murdoch’s Platonism and her vision of particulars. Murdoch keeps on suggesting that “The Good” is a unitary abstraction of some kind, even while all her writerly instincts work in the direction of showing its irreducible many-sidedness and kaleidoscopic variety. This tension is never fully resolved, either in the essays, where it simply sits there generating difficulty, or in the novels, where the novelist’s rich vision of the particular sets the agenda, and yet characters whom the author appears to admire keep on talking what sounds like nonsense about The Good.

Finally, there is an acute problem about action. Hare’s vision of life is incomplete; but it contains much that matters greatly. As the post-war generation knew, action does matter, and at the end of the day, if one resists tyranny and saves the lives of the innocent, who cares if one was saying all the while “coarse,” “common,” or, more virtuously, “spontaneous,” “fresh”? Murdoch is so preoccupied with goings-on in the inner world that she seems almost to have forgotten about the difference that action can make. The obsession with one’s own psychology that results can look strangely like egoism in a world where a forthright commitment to action can make the difference to countless people who are suffering, no matter whether the intentions of the agent are pure.

In
The Black Prince
, however, these problems do less damage than they do elsewhere. The inner drama of erotic love is realized with such moving completeness that the problem of underdescribed social context does not loom large. The problem of social action is actually transcended to some degree: for the novel is a murder story as well as a love story. Narrated by Bradley from prison, it is framed by his choice to accept responsibility for a crime he did not commit, but perhaps caused. And the deeply sad reappearance of an adult Julian at the novel’s end makes questions of choice and action central, as we see what Bradley’s erotic decisions have meant for another person’s life. Finally, the problem of Platonism versus many-sided reality is transcended as well as Murdoch ever transcends it. As befits a love story, the reader is continually confronted with the sensuous textures of things and the surprising unexpectedness of individuals, even while those individuals also raise large general questions. Nor is The Good very much on display. Fortunately for the novel’s coherence, characters are far more worried about particular vices and virtues.

Let us now return to Bradley and Julian. There are, as I have said, many indications in the novel that Bradley has the Murdochian vice of blinding egoism, that his love is a fantasy. Although love initially makes him overflow with feelings of love and generosity toward everyone else in his surroundings, these generous feelings are quickly supplanted by the pain of anxiety, by jealousy and possessiveness, and especially, after the two arrive at the country retreat, by overwhelming and obsessive concern about sexual performance. The novel lets us see clearly that this last concern does indeed blind Bradley to important truths about his world. In the grip of the idea that he must finally make love successfully to Julian, he allows himself to conceal from Julian, and to distance from his own thoughts, the news of his sister Priscilla’s suicide, a death for which he is in part responsible because of the neglect induced by his passion. He does not think seriously enough of Julian’s real emotions to recognize that she will be devastated and profoundly shocked when she realizes that she has been making love to a man who has just received the news of his sister’s death, but who has concealed it in order to go to bed with her. Anxiety and vanity do, here, defeat the real vision of the beloved. Nor does Bradley recognize the importance to Julian of his other lie, about his age. (He says he is in his forties, rather than fifty-eight; when her father reveals the truth, her romantic attraction to Bradley is seriously undercut, though whether more by the lying or by the truth it is hard to say.)

Furthermore, the four narratives at the novel’s end all convict Bradley of various forms of egoistic illusion. For Christian, Bradley is a humorless Puritan whose infatuation with Julian was a crude attempt to conceal from himself the fact that he was really in love with Christian. As for the love between them, “it was obviously mostly in his mind” (387). For Francis Marloe, the psychoanalyst, Bradley’s story is just one more confirmation of the truth of Freudian theory. Bradley is in the grip of a childhood ambivalence toward his mother, passionately desiring her but also hating her for her infidelity to him; therefore he fears women and is homosexual. The fact that he is physically most aroused by Julian when she is dressed up as Hamlet is just one detail that confirms, for Francis, the essential truth that Bradley is pursuing a childhood fantasy. For Rachel, Bradley is plainly in love with her all along. His story about Julian is just a silly fiction, “His great ‘passion’ for her is a typical dream-up” (397), resulting from a sadomasochistic fantasy of doom and separation. For Julian, now married to the teenage boyfriend with whom she had just broken up before the affair with Bradley, there was something like love between them, but it is a great mistake on Bradley’s part to think that eros can reveal the truth. “Love is concerned with possession and vindication of self,” Art with “truth in its least pleasant and useful and therefore most truthful form” (402). Eros is thus a corrupter of art, incapable of telling truth. His words therefore cannot truthfully describe the love between them.

These are the doubts. Now we must consider the other side of the ledger. We should notice, first, that Bradley’s claims for the truth and value of erotic vision are claims that Murdoch makes in her own voice, with similar allusion to Plato, in
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: