“If a man is not a socialist in his twenties he has no heart; if he is not a conservative in his forties, he has no brain. (Often mistakenly attributed to Churchill though taken from Bratbie)
“Dear Anne! Stop trying to change people; if you cannot accept them as they are, just give them up as a lost cause.” F. Sagan Bonjour, Tristesse
A noted social critic and author once put forward his solution to reversing the dumbing down of the victims of Globalism. “What if the movie houses featured only the classic films from,say, the ‘30s to the early ‘90s? Imagine audiences exposed to the great films of auteur directors such as Lean, Hitchcock, WS Van Dyke, Huston, Fellini, Bergman, Renoir, Truffaut, Satyajit Raye, Eisenstein, Cocteau, Bresson, Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Wertmuller, Kubrick, and Polanski, to name but a few, who worked before Hollywood closed ranks with doctrinaires and chose to make films reflecting the new Marxist anti-theology and sociopathic morality? Imagine global audiences flocking to see classic films that drew billions of viewers resulting in profits, before Hollywood wiped out the American, British and French movie industries to indoctrinate audiences with the latest cause celebre in their political agenda? Cinematic art instead of Marxist cliches from worn out leftist dialectic? Luckily, audiences in India were never subjected to such banal propaganda once Bollywood directors--most likely inspired by the Merchant-Ivory Ramayanaesque parody in Shakespeare Wallah--started singing and dancing all the way to the bank.
The critic was presenting his views at an open forum at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, a venue catering to an ultra-radical leftist crowd most likely to reject his thesis. During the break, a group of wild-eyed attendees, perhaps recently subjected to Noam Chomsky’s lecture on “Euripides’ Bacchae as the earliest justification to exterminate counterrevolutionaries,” approached the dais and began ripping the critic limb from limb before reluctant guards pretended to come to his rescue him. He paid for his solution to free mankind in much the same way as Marsyas, who once dared challenge Apollo to determine who was the better poet. The earthly poet, displayed in Iris Murdoch’s favorite Titian masterpiece The Flaying of Marsyas, was skinned alive by a blood thirsty band of Apollo’s devotees for his hubris in challenging the god.
Iris Murdoch seems to have inspired such thinking as that of the doomed social critic among a small coterie of intellectuals as soon as her first bestseller, UNDER THE NET, was published in 1954. And she maintained her place throughout the rest of her publishing career without paying quite the same price for her intellectual audacity as Marsyas, that is until she was stricken with Alzheimer's eventually leading to her death in old age. The salacious and uproariously funny adventures of Jake Donaghue, self-exiled Irish émigré’ to London, were captured between the covers of her bestselling picaresque novel as satiric as that of Cervantes Don Quijote and as
serious as that of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
Murdoch, an Oxford don in philosophy up to and including that time, had shamefacedly managed to expound the importance of such abstruse concepts at the heart of Logical Positivism while illustrating the perils of Existentialism without ever resorting to labyrinthine didactic theories or abstruse technical vocabulary. Throughout her novels she adhered to the art of showing rather than telling. She understood the dialectic of life at the heart of classic drama and fiction; she knew how to present a believable protagonist determined to confront a logical antagonist. She created the kind of characters who are as absent currently from the screen as they are from contemporary fiction.
In short, Jake will do anything to avoid writing his own books and paying his own rent. He lives, along with his own Sancho Panza, Finn, by exploiting his sexual gifts from one mistress to another who has the patience to suffer him and his factotum free lodging. The action of the novel is set in motion when Jake meets Finn looking crestfallen with his only piece of luggage on a busy London street. Jake has just returned from Paris to obtain translation rights to a popular author’s bestseller from which he hopes to earn enough to feed himself and Finn while covering their bar tabs. Finn reveals how they have been dispossessed from their last bed at Madge’s spacious digs upon her deciding to marry a bookmaker named Sammy Starfield. Her fiance’ is a violently jealous mob boss; so the two homeless Peripatetics have no stomach to challenge him.
After depositing his manuscripts and luggage at Mrs. Tinckham’s cat filled newspaper shop, the homeless pair throw themselves at the mercy of Dave Gellman, Jake’s former mentor. Gellman teaches philosophy by encouraging most of his former students to come to tea in his apartment while standing back and allowing them to “do philosophy” in the Socratic method. All these ambitious young men need to do is think and their philosophizing helps them confront the positivist challenge to turn an is into an ought head-on with the least possible damage to their crania.
Jake admires Gellman, who has no need of history, because his Jewish identity assures his being a part of history. No small thanks to Dave’s living philosophy, he avoids the trap of allowing Jake and Finn to park themselves in his apartment lest he assume responsibility for them, while pursuing their next adventure. He offers them a place to sleep for as long as it takes them to find another sympathetic landlady who can guarantee their parasitical raison d’etre.
The two set off tilting at real life windmills for the next 200 pages involving another ex-mistress and her thuggish boyfriend with whom she managed to kidnap Mr. Mars, a canine movie-star. She offers them food and a place to live; helps Jake reconnect with her chanteuse sister, Anna, the love of his life. When Jake learns Anna gave up singing for acting at what appears to be a Hindu inspired mime theatre, he learns she is now in love with Jake’s former friend, and unwitting book collaborator, Hugo Bellfounder. Bellfounder, the rightful owner of Mr. Mars, is a movie studio executive who wants to chuck it all and live a quieter life as a watch maker. He is still unaware that Jake turned their Socratic conversations on the nature of life into a pseudo-philosophical flop published as The Silencer. Even worse, each thinks that the other is in love with the wrong sister. The underhanded exploit only managed to silence Jake’s relationship with Hugo as he is too ashamed for having published the book without Hugo’s permission.
Hugo is now heavily under the influence of Lefty Todd, an up-and-coming leader of Britain’s Socialists. When Jake tries to approach Hugo during the filming of his last great epic on yet another Fall of Rome, Hugo and an unruly group are listening to Lefty lecture the studio crowd on the virtues of Socialism. When a riot breaks out. Jake and Mr. Mars escape, while Hugo gets a head concussion during the ensuing fracas. They get to catch up on old times later at the hospital, while Hugo is recovering, where Jake is employed as an attendant.
These adventures are preceded by yet more madcap adventures such as a nude swim in the Thames after a drunken evening which culminates with the disappearance of Finn, and more abstruse references to Wittgenstein’s life and theories via Hugo’s real life experience. Hugo’s last epic on Rome presents us with yet another thought provoking allusion: Hugo is somehow a representation of Alexander Korda in his failed attempt to film Robert Graves’ I CLAUDIUS. Lefty’s barroom and movie studio rhetoric contain enough of Murdoch’s former romance with the Communist Party until, around 1946, she was forced to confront the barbaric reality of mass murder that accompanies grass roots movements initially sponsored by revolutionary members of the ruling classes. Stalin’s purges and gulags luckily brought Murdoch, unlike Lefty and Hugo, to her senses.
With Jake’s connection to French literary hacks comes a lot of veiled references to Sartre’s theories and novels, aka Existentialism. Under the guise of Jake’s latest honeypot for translation rights, such lowbrow novels by Jean-Pierre Breteuil, namely Le Rossignol de Bois/The Wooden Nightingale brings Jake back to Paris hoping to acquire the rights to the latest bestseller, Nous les Vainqueurs. During Jake’s Parisian visit, he reconnects with Sadie just as she is set to leave for Hollywood. Instead of dealing with her demand for Mars’ ransom and his long-lost copy of The Silencer, which he hopes Sadie will use to land him a movie contract, they have a final shag. When he leaves Sadie, he stumbles upon a street scene in which the hue and cry accompany the news of the latest winner of the Goncourt Prize for fiction. It turns out that his long milked hack, de Breteuil’s has managed to win the Prix Goncourt for his latest bestseller, Nous les Vainqueurs! This shocking discovery arouses such envy in Jake’s breast to inspire him to return home and begin working on his own masterpiece as soon as he can afford to pay for the necessary paper and ink. Jake will now publish the comedic tale which we have almost finished reading. Wink wink.
Before leaving Paris, he gets caught up in a Quattorze de Juilliet celebration and thinks that he spots Anna among the crowd of revellers, while she sunbathes on the opposite bank of the Seine. By the time he crosses and gets to the spot he thought he sighted her, Anna is gone and the only thing left of her presence is one discarded slipper.
Does such an entertaining narrative merit comparison with Dante’s final volume describing Paradise in La Divina Commedia? I think so. Perhaps you will not. Yet on some uncanny metaphysical level, each rung of Murdoch’s heaven in Under the Net manages to reveal how these sinners all end up as occupants or unintentional saints in Jake’s hagiographic adventures. London is described in the novel as filled with the only vestige of real saints available to modern Londoners and tourists, tare buthe mostly abandoned churches that dot the city. With every bar crawl and adventure, Jake always manages to identify the various parish churches among London’s architectural hallmarks: St. Bride’s, St. Marin in the Fields, St. Clement the Martyr, St. Pancras, St. Leonard’s are but a few, and Westminster Abbey lurks in the background as his drunken comrades go for the nude baptism in the Thames. A counter catalogue of pubs rears up as Jake and friends visit divers drinking places in search for Hugo, after their last visit to his apartment atop the Holborn Viaduct competes with Dante’s description of the rings of Saturn: instead of boasting the protection of the imperial Eagle escorting Dante on his final ascent, Hugo’s apartment is flooded with pigeons who cannot be bothered finding other people’s roofs to relieve themselves. My only regret is Murdoch’s failure to include the name of my favorite parish in her catalogue of churches, that of St. Andrew Undershaft, where Samuel Pepys was a longtime parishioner.
All in all, the category of heavenly residents gives the reader enough pause to remember what was and what is or, to put it in more philosophically foreboding terms, drag themselves back to what was while confronting the hopelessly inevitable is of their current ought-filled reality. Murdoch can juxtapose the idle luxury of speculative philosophy with the ineluctable ought of Logical Negativism. In a word, Murdoch’s title. Any clear-thinking reader will be forced to admit that we all find ourselves, like Jake and Anna during their last romantic interlude--under a net of self-contrived props wrought by an Olympian devil-like god to frustrate their illicit pleasures. In Murdoch’s Olympian view, we all live under the net of reality and its relentless clockwork of heavenly bodies determining our destiny with painstaking, ego crushing exacting exactitude.
By the last chapter, the only friends in whom Jake can confide, Mr. Mars, a St. Bernard who has retired from the screen, and Mrs. Tinckham. She is perhaps the only woman who will ever play Beatrice to his mock Dante. Her shop and cattery become Jake’s final refuge as he strides the celestial brink of finally accepting responsibility for his own future. After learning that Finn has returned to Dublin, where a letter to his local pub, the Pearl, will always find him, we are left with a final indication of Jake’s acceptance of what is instead of chasing down another of his, hopelessly unattainable oughts.
When Mrs. Tinckham’s impregnable Maggie finally produces a litter of four kittens, she expresses her bewilderment at their appearance: two pure Siamese, and the other ones quite different, instead of their all being half-tabby and half Siamese. Jake is just about to bloviate in one of his fact free expostulations to concoct a theory off the top of his head. He catches himself in midsentence and decides to let all concerned come to the end of his and our journey in a final acceptance of reality:
“Well,” I said, “it’s just a matter of ---“I stopped. I had no idea what it was a matter of. I laughed, and Mrs. Tinckham laughed.
“I don’t know why it is,” I said. “it’s just one of the wonders of the world.”
Dante, who knew the answer so elegantly put in the final line of the Paradiso as L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle, would have agreed with Murdoch’s blessedly illogical conclusion.
***
The topography of London in Murdoch’s early comedy appears to mimic the cosmology of Dante’s Paradiso for symbolic as well as bathetic purposes. In The Sea, the Sea, the inescapable geography of what many consider to be her greatest novel, reveals a steep and arduously imagined mountainside. One that cautions the reader to beware of pitfalls with every step just as was demanded of Dante in his climb up to the top in the Purgatorio. Murdoch’s unwavering references to Bardo, the Buddhist vision of purgatory, is perhaps the strongest detail for discussing the book in terms of the Dantesque analogy. Most of all, the narrative contains a confessional autobiography of the hero, Charles Arrowby, that recalls such literary ancestors and ideological antecedents. Arrowby appears to be expiating for his past through an endless series of confessions involving his romantic and professional victims up until the last paragraph of the novel.
While enough analysis has been put forth regarding the title’s reference to a passage in Xenophon’s Anabasis, where Greek soldiers finally reach the Black Sea and realize they are safe from being slaughtered by Cyrus’s army, and they cry out, Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! — "The Sea! The Sea!") or Thálassa! Thálassa! According to Murdoch’s biographer Conradi, the reference is identified alongside the equally valid relevance of Murdoch’s oft quoted use of Paul Valery’s Le Cimetiere Marin (The Graveyard by the Sea), in which Valery quotes Xenophon in the first stanza: La mer, la mer, toujours la mer recommence’; these critical insights take none of the description of Arrowby’s seaside home and surrounding village into account for their symbolic dimensions. Ever engaged in a playful yarn of cat and mouse, Murdoch, describes her little mountain of karmic suffering and penance equally in terms of the rivers that flow through Dante’s Purgatorio: the Lethe which after one draught causes the soul to forget its mortal sins and the Eunone where souls are cleansed and purified with restorative memories to assure their eventual entry into Paradise.
Ever the tireless student of Baroque tracery for the sake of tracery and elaboration for the sake of elucidation, Murdoch wastes no time in introducing Charles Arrowby’s cousin and only living relative, James Arrowby. James is a retired MI6 agent and a convert to Buddhism. Cousin James and Charle’s reuniting with his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Mary Hartley Fitch, become the two currents which connect the hero to his past as the narrative resembles ever greater aspects of the Buddhist purgatory knowns as Bardo. The unactualized Arrowby, user of other people for his own pleasures, realizes as each turns up unexpectedly and has come back to haunt him.
In the creation of these characters, we meet Murdoch’s use of the traditional watery elements of Buddhist purgatory or Bardo. There, bodies of water are not necessarily literal but rather symbolic of the soul’s mental and emotional states experienced during the transitional periods between lives. Murdoch' s narrative here is one long and arduous metaphorical ascent taking place atop a hilly landscape, as the hero recounts his various romantic and professional exploits during a number of “lives.” In each of which, he assumed such various dramatis personae as the awkward yet pious and still virginal adolescent in love, the grief stricken rejected suitor, the mercenary gigolo who gratifies an older actress’ vanity to exploit her professional connections, the breaker of happy homes, and a narcissistic abuser of his leading ladies.
After the tragic climax, the book reveals a real trek in the Himalayas as cousin James recounts how he attempted to save his guide, and perhaps male lover, Milarepa, after they were lost in an avalanche. Thus, discounting the novel’s purgatorial dimensions, Christian and Buddhist alike, in favor only of the allusive references serves little purpose in coming to our understanding of the hero’s motives for revealing himself on these multiple levels.
Charles Arrowby goes to live at Shruff End, his new home on the sea, complete with distinctly quaint touches of living without electricity, filled with objects acquired at jumble sales, left by the former owner, Mrs. Chorney. Arrowby’s stated purpose for withdrawing from society to this last outpost of what he regards as primitive civilization is to write a biography of his first and last real love, Clement Malkin, whom he betrayed and used for his professional advancement even up to the time of caring for her while she was dying. This literary reason for his presence there will soon give way to yet a more haunting reason for turning his strange experience into a book: the story of his loss and recovery of yet another first great love of his life, Hartley.
The home, built atop a high promontory overlooking the sea, appears to be somewhere off the coast of Cornwall or Devonshire. His immediate neighbors, occupying homes a few miles walk from Shruff End, are mostly outright hostile or unapproachable residents. They speak an almost Cornish sounding dialect and openly display their guarded attitude toward any London intruders. The fact of its remaining deliberately unidentifiable despite all the topographic details which Murdoch lavishes on Arrowby’s elaborate insistence on simple dishes composed of inedible ingredients and a garden whose descent to the sea along sleek rocky cliffs, supports even greater evidence for viewing the setting as mainly as a symbolic place of ghoulish recollection and encounters leading more to atonement than character development.
The property from which he chooses to dive for his daily bathe might itself prove fatal, knowing full well the difficulty with which he will have to scale the rocky edges to climb back up to his home. Yet he manages to navigate the rocks as skilfully as the traditional explorers must in Bardo if they are to survive their nightmarish odyssey through a sea of souls they formerly victimized. It even comes complete with a symbolic bridge over a stirring whirlpool named Minn’s Cauldron. That bridge-like formation also reverberates with the usual description of the passage places over which souls must cross in order to complete their torment in Bardo. Arrowby enters his personal Bardo through the dim lit foyer of Shruff End and his relaxed nightmare continues for almost the entirety of the narrative.
He no sooner moves in than eerie visions and happenings begin to torment his sense of privacy. At first it’s just a matter of seeing strange figures outside his windows at night, the ruffling of a bead curtain at the top of the stairs, the shattering of a mirror. Yet all these phenomena are sent crashing beneath Arrowby’s feet, we later learn, by the real ghosts of those he victimized in his chequered past; they have now come back to haunt him in reality.
The most startling figure at the onset of this nightmarish procession is the least unattractive. Lizzy Scherer was one of Arrowby’s starlets whom he insists would never have gotten anywhere were it not for his developing her as a stage performer. Curiously, she is a Welsh-Jewish mutt, and the most striking feature of her beauty for Arrowby centers upon the voluptuous shape of her breasts. Lizzie’s arrival and forced departure is followed by the arrival of her new platonic interest, Gilbert Opian, also a former Arrowby drama company alumni who is ostentatiously gay. He claims he has come to beg Arrowby not to destroy his new relationship with Lizzie; instead, Opian decides that he really wants to be Arrowby’s slave and will serve him if he allows him to stay on at Shruff End. These two visitors alone could make for an interesting digression on Murdoch’s debt to Shakespeare’s The Tempest; however, their presence will in no way deter the rest of the living phantoms from Arrowby’s past as they come forward to interrupt his new project, his supposed biography of his dead “lover.”. A book about his former beloved mentor, Clement Malkin, might also be viewed as a sort of atonement for having betrayed her long ago.
The theme of betrayal is next cut from his memories of Clement Malkin only to be pasted upon that of the living reality of an older and less attractive woman whom he knew as an adolescent. Hartley. Arrowby’s unexpected neighbor, who has become Mrs. Fitch, suddenly turns up to haunt him with yet another digression into the labyrinth of his guilt complex.
Shopping one sunny day, Arrowby notices a strange resemblance to his childhood sweetheart in the face of an obese elderly woman walking ahead, Once she assures him that she has known of his presence all along but did not want to intrude. She feared the gulf that separated her from his world of celebrities would cause him to reject her. Hartley and her husband, Fitch saw him on the telly years before and she knew instantly when she spotted him in town that he had strangely taken up residence in an ugly house in the same town in which they came to retire. She even spied on him late at night but hesitated to knock.
Arrowby will not be deterred and he forces her to withdraw into the quiet sanctuary of a local church where he learns about her unhappy past and present marriage. Since she could have only made such a fatal misalliance, he convinces himself, after she rejected, he begins to wonder how to come between her and her husband. Arrowby slowly begins to brood while plotting his new life with Hartley. He must now rescue Hartley from her unhappy marriage.
The rest of the ghouls from Arrowby’s past arrive shortly after his fateful meeting with Hartley. These involve his past relationship with a celebrated film star, Rosina Vanbrugh, whose marriage to Peregrine Arbelow Arrowby destroyed. Soon as he took up with Rosina he no sooner cast her off. Most important of all for Arrowby’s past is his reconnecting with his cousin, James Arrowby, the retired MI6 agent.
Over a day trip to London shortly after meeting up with Hartley, he reluctantly confesses his new preoccupation out at Shruff End, saving his given up for lost childhood sweetheart. James immediately dismisses his distorted memory of a childhood fling, only to enflame Arrowby’s new mission. The encounter takes place at the Wallace Collection where another important artwork in the Murdoch canon comes into focus. Arrowby first spots James admiring Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier which is perhaps the singularly most Bodhisattva-like painting in Western art. A feverish Arrowby next mentions the Fitchs’ unsuccessful attempt to locate their adopted son,
Titus, an elec al engineering student who's gone missing almost two years. When Arrowby passes out, James revives him and he reluctantly agrees to take tea at James’ flat. There they recall their childhood relationship, only to stir up Arrowby’s bitter memories of his mother’s insane jealousy of James’ successful father and mother, a Jewish American heiress who died young in an automobile fatality. Before leaving, he manages to steal a photo of uncle Abel and aunt Estelle showering their love for one another while dancing intimately. In a final rush of insouciance, Arrowby dismissively agrees to James’ inviting himself to spend Whitsun weekend at Shruff End toward the end of June.
Unknown to Arrowby and thanks to James’ spy connections, Titus Fitch soon turns up at his door to request Arrowby’s informing him with regard to a nagging question which led to the breakup with his parents. Titus wants to know whether Arrowby is his real father. Fitch long tormented mother and child with his suspicions that Titus was fathered by Arrowby just before Mary agreed to the marriage. Arrowby assures Titus that he is not his biological father, but he would like him to hang around long enough to see whether he can do something to shape Titus’ future. Titus agrees and seals his fate as Arrowby’s next victim.
This idyllic encounter between Arrowby and his newly discovered link to luring Hartley out to Shruff End concludes with his kidnapping of Hartley; she only wants to come visit with Titus because he refuses to see Fitch at her house. Once there, Hartley lingers in an at times hypnotic and at other times rebellious state while the rest of the ghouls appear to bicker over who Arrowby really loves and mingle with Peregrine Arbelow who also takes Arrowby up on his invitation.
After they run out of sleeping room, Lizzie returns to London and Rosina stays on at the local hotel. In another while, James shows up to remind Arrowby that he invited him for Whitsun weekend. Again, we can watch Murdochian comedic genius play out against the symbolic backdrop of a Pentecostal gathering in which everyone appears to be speaking in his own tongue while haunting Arrowby with Bardo logic and guilt. This almost bacchic frenzy occurs all the while that Hartley remains locked in the main bedroom above.
When James and Titus succeed in getting Arrowby to return Hartley to her rightful husband, they are distracted by a rock being thrown through Peregrine’s windshield—actually by Rosina, Peregrine’s ex-wife now enraged at the very thought of Arrowby finding love with a bearded old lady. They do manage to get Hartley safely back to Nibletts Cottage. Yet it is only due to James’ quick management of Fitch’s violent reaction as the betrayed husband. James recalls Fitch’s heroic behavior in a prisoner of war camp which somehow manages to quell his rage and the peace party withdraw back to Shruff End.
When this climactic showdown somehow leads to a more festive weekend in which Gilbert cooks and Titus adores his new found friend, the celebrated Rosina Vanbrugh, the group alternate demonically between a capella renditions of “Cherry bright,” and some obscure Italian aria, Eravamo tredici, while Arrowby sulks alone to plot a new way in which to revenge himself against Fitch. First, Peregrine almost succeeds in murdering Arrowby on the bridge above Minn’s Cauldron; James almost drowns saving him and administers his own Buddhist version of the kiss of life. After both heal, James believes that he has succeeded in getting his cousin to abandon his distorted notions of conjuring up the past. The peace is once more disrupted when Arrowby returns from town to see the gathering distressfully standing around Titus’ drowned body.
James returns to London and then appears for one final interview before Arrowby learns from James’ executor of his cousin’s death that he left him the entirety of his estate of Buddhist treasures and his library, long sought after by the British Museum. Arrowby comes face to face with his having misjudged his only living relation. After he goes into town to propose some sort of détente with Rosina, he finds her and Peregrine celebrating their decision to remarry. One last luncheon at Nibbletts gives him renewed hope of regaining Hartley, until he learns that within less than a fortnight, she and Fitch have emigrated to Australia with their newly adopted dog, Chuffey behind his back so as to assure their peaceful escape from his insane meddling.Thus, Arrowby’s Bardo ghouls need to separate themselves from Arrowby by real oceans and eternal seas if they will ever manage to save themselves.
Arrowby’s return to London after selling Shruff End is haunted by his latest speculation that James is not really dead and he has gone to Tibet on an undercover mission. He does relent in giving James’ oriental library to the British Museum, but he refuses to turn over the manuscript of James’ poems to his executor. His former secretary’s mother is consigned to a nursing home, and he agrees to pay her expenses. He has, as another of his theater friends once predicted, become everybody’s protective uncle.
He manages to accept that perhaps Hartley was “not his Beatrice.” He manages to retain one of the few objects in Titus’ possession, an Italian edition of Dante’s sonnets, still unopened. Then he consider if perhaps James’ sherpa lover Milarepa, who died in James’ arms under an avalanche in the Himalyas, was possibly an Italian poet after all! Whether or not he will survive another Fall in London, acquire a sufficient supply of his favorite food source, Cox’s Green Gage Pippins, and come to accept his amazement at a new production of Hamlet—"perhaps the greatest thing since sliced bread”—servie to remind us how he has learned absolutely nothing
from the ordeal and tragedy he last managed to inflict upon others. At least his haunted existence gets put on hold. One of James’ Tibetan treasures is sent hurtling to the floor just as Mrs. Chorney’s mirror’s shattering spooked him earlier. This final disaster concludes his purgatorial journey with yet another observation on his endless pursuit of self-proclaimed causes while holding fast to an empty life of self-absorption:
--My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?”
So much, in Murdoch’s assessment, for anyone who defies the gods as a bathetic parody of Marsyas, and chooses to meddle in the lives of others under a perverted notion of altruism. Murdoch’s later anti-heroes would do anything rather than brave living for honestly for themselves.
***
Admittedly, Murdoch published The Black Prince almost six years before the ordeal of Charles Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea. The Dantean parallel universe becomes apparent, however, as Bradley Pearson enters the gates of hell at the threshold of an ordinary home in Ealing, a rather well-to-do suburb of London. His sometime Virgil, Dr. Francis Marloe, is Bradley’s ex-brother-in-law and, though a physician whose name was stricken from the licensing list, his only poetic pretension in the opening of the novel could be the variant spelling that alludes to Shakespeare’s greatest contemporary and mentor, Christoper Marlowe. Francis begins to guide Bradley through the circles of hell which Bradley constructs for himself by allowing Arnold Baffin to believe that he is a doctor, accompanying Bradley to answer his plea for help. Arnold called Bradley a short time before claiming he murdered his wife, Rachel. While preparing to rescue Arnold, Francis shows up at Bradley’s flat, somewhere in the shadow of the Postal Tower, and agrees to accompany him since he used to be a doctor.
Bradley’s agreeing to the lie, however minor a detail, casts him in the traditional pose of the Murdochian anti-hero, a man of literary pretensions who seeks the approval of those with whom he should never associate himself. The pattern, established in Under the Net and continued here, gives us the strongest link in the chain of Murdoch’s somehow assembling her Earthy Comedy in an original order yet one that will reflect her genius not just as a classical satirist but a universal moralist.
This novel, perhaps her greatest, is permeated with Shakespearean allusions particularly relevant to the tragedy of Hamlet. The eponymous title can be associated both with Hamlet, the Black Prince, as well as Bradley Pearson’s initials. The overall structure of the novel hinges upon critical scenes that, to quote Polonius’ words to his servant Reynaldo in Hamlet, “by indirections find directions out.” Unfortunately, the destination for Bradley Pearson, so determined to meddle in the lives of others while posing as their personal savior, having to quote Hamlet once more, “is a prison,” and death. Pearson dies in prison after having been condemned for the murder of Arnold Baffin. The novel plays out and the final climax poses Rachel as the murderer this time and her husband as the victim. Rachel lies to the police and, in typical Dogsberry fashion, arrest the wrong person, Pearson.
The superficial structure consists of a series of flashbacks narrated by the hero, framed with an introduction by his so-called editor, Loxias, and concluded with a series of metatexts composed of four personal rebuttals to Pearson’s “version” of the truth. Murdoch develops the hero’s tragedy more in terms of the classical Dantean progression of circles set in motion by Pearson’s literal circle of friends and relations in a more organic progression whereupon each wider narrative circle will flow outwards while maintaining Pearson at their epicenter--alone, unjustly condemned and hopelessly self-deluded. For it is within each circle that he could have chosen
either a realistic lover with whom he could have embraced the responsibility of aging with grace or acting in a responsible way to prevent the destruction of yet another human being. This is particularly emphasized in the destruction of his sister Priscilla during her neediest time for comfort. He always manages to distract himself with a new love object, Julian, breaks one of Priscilla’s favorite pieces of Chinese bric-a-brac, a lady on a water buffalo, which belonged to Priscilla. Pearson soothes Julian's worries by giving her the broken statue. Every movement only serves to advance Pearson’s inevitable self-destruction.
When we step away from the Baffin’s domestic tragedy, we then enter the largest infernal circle where Pearson chooses to meddle in the life of their eighteen-year-old daughter, Julian. While he first mistakes her for an attractive youth from the Hare Krishna cult inundating London in the ‘70s, Pearson uses Julian’s need for a mentor to prepare her for her exams before entering university. At first their rambling discourse focuses upon world literature; within a second meeting, they are determined to study Hamlet with the most iconoclastic anti-academic approach imaginable while focussing mainly on Hamlet's sexuality. The age difference to any normal adult male would have provided Pearson with the necessary ego boundaries for avoiding his becoming sexually obsessed with Julian, Instead, he is determined to present himself as a reasonably fit suitor who can save her from her pretentious father and her nymphomaniacal mother who he chooses to abandon in order to pursue her flighty daughter.
The classic Nabokovian stereotype, “nymphet,” is everywhere avoided by Murdoch; and upon this lexical absence her critics refuse so much as to compare The Black Prince to Lolita. Yes, Julian is technically speaking a young woman, where no hint of paedophilia can enter into the discussion. Humbert's sole interest in Lolita is set in motion by her being virginal and underage. Yet the Nabokovian parallels, Pearson’s love affair with the mother preceding his involvement with the daughter, are there and always serve to illustrate the level of Pearson’s madness by his ability to justify his foolishness with the kind of arcane rationalization that would defy a Medieval Schoolman.
It is only when we consider Murdoch’s former S/M relationship with her onetime literary mentor, Elias Cannetti, that the rest of the narrative bears its full semblance to the Dantesque dimensions of a world turned into a living hell for all who enter there. The future Nobel laureate carried on an intense sexual relationship with the younger Oxford don while she had just begun to establish herself as a novelist. The cliched question of who was using whom may serve to distract the literary critic. Yet it is this masochistic sexual relationship that becomes revelatory in The Black Prince because both older and younger lovers are authors as well as philosophers prone to using susceptible young women. In Murdoch’s case her lesbian affairs as a bi-sexual provide the basis of her creating male heroes adept at using female victims.
Murdoch seems to have disposed of her chief Existentialist model, Sartre, and her former logical mentor, Wittgenstein as well, in Under the Net. There she creates a world in ucontradictionof Sartre’s primary defense for his justification of self-centered sadistic love: “L’enfer c’est les autres,” in the novel’s earthly paradise where such a thesis becomes tenable only for as long as Jake chooses to act like an immature brat. There the only real growth available to her hero is his ability to survive a fantasy world by becoming his own man. The characterization of Gellman, the noble Socratic teacher, and Lefty Todd, the persuasive Platonist, as a mercenary Socialist also reflect her rejection of Wittgenstein’s attempts, self-denounced ultimately, to find the rules of logic in a manipulative use of language. And the leading literary existentialist thinker of her age, Camus, advanced a nihilist absurdist principle which she could not accept as a substitute for the pursuit of artistic truth. Not Sissyphus, but Marsyas is Murdoch’s symbolic model for sacrificing oneself at the expense of one’s deluded self.
All these sources of philosophical theories relevant to the author’s critical meaning should ultimately be held for comparison beside the Dantean model. For Dante, once a student at the Sorbonne returned to a war-torn Florence only to be exiled under penalty of death. Dante, above all, was a scholastic philosopher, who used his philosophical training to perfect his use of the vernacular before applying it to his new theory of poetry. Dante literally gave his life toward creating his own vita nuova by using the vulgate as a modern alternative to classical Latin.
The Black Prince makes no pretense in its rejection of Cannetti’s theories about language and society. Here language is just another tool to be perverted by society’s worst players. In Canetti’s case his habit of using younger women, and sometimes more than one at a time, often occurred in the presence of his victim wife, who herself happened to be an aspiring author. The subtext such biographical details provide for The Black Prince therefore becomes an essential springboard for the reader. In this particular Murdoch novel, with fictional authors at the center.
In The Black Prince Murdoch creates an anti-hero who fancies himself as a literary genius instead of a self-deluded manipulator of language and people. Baffin, on the other hand, is a self-loathing Jew who detests his being regarded as a literary genius for his bestsellers which he regards as spiritually inferior. Their twisted relationship, only reported through the eyes of Pearson, provides a mock Virgil to Pearson’s Dante as he explores the various circles of Hell in his ever-shifting quest for literary truth. Each episode widens yet another circle leading toward Pearson’s ultimate descent. Pearson’s journey through a psychological hell resulting in the accidental death of one of his victims, his sister Priscilla, and the murder of his intended victim, Arnold Baffin, proceeds with the same dynamic geography of his Dantean model. Yet Pearson’s last circle is one of his own making, his prison cell in which he presumably composed the narrative which details his self-destruction.
It is only through the lens of this circular structure that the novel becomes comprehensible as opposed to just readable. Upon returning from his meddlesome solution to the Baffins’ marital problems, Pearson’s sister arrives at his door. Priscilla is seeking shelter after leaving her husband and abandoning their ill-kept home in Bristol. Pearson attempts to humor her while determined that she must return to Roger and not muddle his affairs. Pearson soon abandons Priscilla to Francis’ babysitting while he journeys to Bristol to collect Priscilla’s treasures. He stumbles upon his brother-in-law and Roger’s new mistress Marigold long enough to sympathize with their need to be rid of the self-pitying Priscilla.
When he returns to London he decides to convince Priscilla to divorce Roger and leave him free to marry his younger paramour. He sees Roger as a role for emulation. He soon encounters Christian, his ex-wife who is now and very wealthy and very happy widow. She is a liberated business woman who is determined to live according to her own desires. She also wants to pick up with Pearson where they left off. Pearson rejects her sound business and romantic offer. When he next discovers that Priscilla moved to Christian’s Mayfair flat under Francis’ watchful eye. He barges in on the new trilogy to drag Priscilla back to his flat.
The next circle moves back to Pearson’s flat where the Baffins drop by and meet Christian. Julian accompanies them long enough to drop Priscilla’s beloved water buffalo statue, while Christian and Arnold go off for a drink. By the time this circle closes, Bradley agrees to tutor Julian for her A levels and school her on everything she should know about Shakespeare but never learned. Rachel continues to imagine her romantic fantasy regarding Pearson as a fit replacement for Arnold, whom she now suspects is enamored with Christian. Christian and Arnold return to announce their joint venture in manufacturing seductive ladies’ under apparel. And, by the way, they immediately knew that they were both of Jewish heritage. Pearson is enraged to learn that Francis and Christian’s dad was raised as an Orthodox Jew.
The circle involving Julian’s re-education widens long enough for Pearson to break off with Rachel while seducing her daughter. Pearson soon decides to cast Julian as Francesca to his Paolo and run off to the seaside villa, Patara, that he was originally going off to live in seclusion while writing his masterwork. Murdoch, good film buff that she was, manages to pay homage to the film version of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and Clayton’s film of Paterson’s screenplay, Room at the Top, while describing the lovers’ idyll at the shore. When he receives a wire from Francis informing him of Priscilla’s suicide; he decides to put off mentioning this to Julian for fear that she will insist upon returning to London and interrupt his holiday.
The circle at Patara lasts just long enough for Pearson and Julian to play house until she dresses up like Hamlet in a last ditch effort to solve Pearson’s erectile dysfunction. They soon consummate their affair. While resting from their long night of pleasure, Arnold arrives. He tracks them down and manages to ferret his daughter back to London after she learns to her horror that Pearson made love to her knowing of his sister’s suicide and, what’s worse, deceiving her about his real age.
The last circle revolves around Pearson’s futile attempt to reunite with Julian until Rachel convinces him that Arnold has taken the girl on a European tour. Somehow Pearson and Francis are convinced that they are hiding in Venice, and his energies are spent tracking them down for as long as he can afford. By the time he returns to London, the fatal call comes from Rachel asking him to come to Ealing as she fears that she has murdered Arnold. Somehow, Pearson cannot resist entering the final circle to close the narrative with an analogous predicament which first set him off meddling in the lives of others.
Does he deserve his self-destruction? The ominous structure of the Postal Tower, where they dined before their first date at Covent Garden to attend a performance of Strauss’ Rosenkavalier--whose plot concerning an old fool determined to marry a young baroness escapes Pearson’s attention, are more than literary symbols and allusions. The architectural and musical symbolism which frame Pearson’s personal tragedy become key Dantesque elements in the hero’s descent into hell from great physical and emotional heights.
The appended journals consist of Dr. Francis Marlowe, Clinical Psychologist, explaining Pearson’s latent homosexuality as the ultimate cause of his having murdered Arnold Baffin, followed by Christian’s argument that Pearson murdered Baffin in a jealous rage, followed by Rachel’s explanation that Pearson murdered Arnold to remove her beloved husband, and concluded with the journal of Mrs. Oscar Belling, aka Julian Baffin, now hazy in her recollection of all the details leading up to her father’s murder. The labyrinth of analysis only reminds the reader of Murdoch’s debt to Nabokov as she plunges us into the final vortex questioning the observer’s ability to distinguish between truth and deliberately imagine falsehoods based on some partial detail in the hero’s past.
When we arrive at the last literary document framing Pearson’s story, we hear once more from P.A. Loxias whose Editor’s Foreword set up the narrative. Loxias’ Editor’s Postscript closes the narrative detailing the fall of Bradley Pearson with an ironic implication that Pearson may have even managed to create the contradictory journals before his death which mimics that of the homicidal Humbert Humbert, from cardiac arrest in a prison cell. By his self-destructive sacrifice for art’s sake Pearson exchanges places with the mythic Marsyas in the final analysis:
“Art is not cosy, and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art, there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
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