Iris Murdoch - The Black Prince

What it was that had happened the percipient reader will not need to be told. (Doubtless he saw it coming a mile off. I did not. This is art, but I was out there in life.) I had fallen in love with Julian. At what point during our conversation I realized this fact is hard to determine. The consciousness darts back and forth in time like a weaver and can occupy, when busy with its mysterious self-formings and self-gatherings, a very large specious present. Perhaps I realized it when she said, in that beautiful resonant tone of hers, «Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice.» Perhaps it was when she said, «Black tights and black velvet shoes with silvery buckles.» Or perhaps it was when she took her boots off. No, not as early as that. And when I had had that mystical experience, looking at her legs in the shoe shop, had that been a veiled realization of being in love? It had not seemed so. Yet that too was part of it. Everything was part of it. After all, I had known this child since her birth. I had seen her in her cradle, I had held her in my arms when she was twenty inches long. Oh Christ.

«I had fallen in love with Julian.» The words are easily written down. But how to describe the thing itself? It is odd that falling in love, though frequently mentioned in literature, is rarely adequately described. It is after all an astounding phenomenon and for most people it is the most astonishing event that ever happens to them: more astonishing, because more counter-natural, than life's horrors. (I do not of course refer to mere «sex.») It is sad that, like the experience of bereavement, the experience of love is usually, like a dream, forgotten. Furthermore, those who have never fallen desperately in love with someone whom they have known for a long time may doubt whether this can occur. Let me assure them that it can.

It happened to me. Was it always there cooking, incubating, in the warm inwards of time, as the girl grew and filled out into bloom? Of course I had always liked her, especially when she was a little child. But nothing really had prepared me for this blow. And it was a blow, I was felled by it physically. I felt as if my stomach had been shot away, leaving a gaping hole. My knees dissolved, I could not stand up, I shuddered and trembled all over, my teeth chattered. My face felt as if it had become waxen and some huge strange weirdly smiling mask had been imprinted upon it, I had become some sort of God. I lay there with my nose stuck into the black wool of the rug and the toes of my shoes making little ellipses on the carpet as I shook with possession. Of course I was sexually excited, but what I felt transcended mere lust to such a degree that although I could vividly sense my afflicted body I also felt totally alienated and changed and practically discarnate.

Of course the mind of the lover abhors accident. «I wonder by my troth what thou and I did till we loved» is a question intimate to his amazement. My love for Julian must have been figured before the world began. Surely it was lovers who discovered astrology. Nothing less than the great chamber of the stars could be large and steady enough to be context, origin and guarantee of something so eternal. I realized now that my whole life had been determinedly travelling towards this moment. Her whole life had been travelling towards it, as she played and read her school books and grew and looked in the mirror at her breasts. This was a predestined collision. But it had not only just happened, it had happened aeons ago, it was of the stuff of the original formation of earth and sky. When God said, «Let there be light,» this love was made. It had no history. Yet too my awakening consciousness of it had a history of bottomless fascination. When, how, did I begin to realize the charm of this girl? Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise. And in fact lying there absolutely limp and yet absolutely taut with my brow on the ground and my eyes closed I was actually not just glimpsing but in paradise. The act of falling in love, of really falling in love (I do not mean what sometimes passes by this name), floods the being with immediate ecstasy.

The rather flowery ideas which I have set out above were not of course as such at all clear in my mind while I was sitting on the floor hugging the chair which she had sat in. (I did this too for some considerable time: perhaps until the evening.-) I was, for that period, largely dazed with happiness: joy in my marvellous achievement of absolute love. In this blaze of light of course a few more mundane thoughts flitted to and fro like little birds, scarcely descried by one who was dazzled by emergence from the cave. I will mention here two of these thoughts since they are germane to events which happened later. They were, I should say, not posterior to my discovery of being in love: they were innate in it and born with it.

I spoke earlier in this rigmarole of my whole life as travelling towards what had now occurred. Perhaps my friend the percipient reader may be excused for having interpreted this conception in the following terms: that all this dream of being a great artist was simply a search for a great human love. Such things have been known, indeed such discoveries are common, especially among women. Love can soon dim the dream of art and make it seem secondary, even a delusion. I should say at once that this was not my case. Of course since everything was now connected with Julian, my ambitions as a writer were connected with Julian. But they were not cancelled thereby. Rather something more like the opposite seemed to be happening. She had filled me with a previously unimaginable power which I knew that I would and could use in my art. The deep causes of the universe, the stars, the distant galaxies, the ultimate particles of matter, had fashioned these two things, my love and my art, as aspects of what was ultimately one and the same. They were, I knew, from the same source. It was under the same orders and recognizing the same authority that I now stood, a man renewed. Of this conviction I will speak more and explain more later.

Nor did I envisage suffering. «I will run the gauntlet of a thousand blows but I will keep my mouth shut.» No. To the pure lover in his moments of purity the idea of suffering is vulgar, it portends the return of self. What I rather felt was a dazzled gratitude. Yet I understood at once in a clear intellectual way that I could not ever tell Julian that I loved her. The details of this certainty (what it involved) became clearer to me later, but it stood flaming in my way at the very start. I was fifty-eight, she was twenty. I could not puzzle, burden and bedevil her young life with the faintest hint or glimpse of this huge terrible love. How fearful that dark shadow is when we catch sight of it in the life of another. No wonder those at whom that black arrow is aimed so often turn and flee. How unendurable it can be, the love another bears us. I would never persecute my darling with that dread knowledge. From now onward until the world ended everything must remain, although utterly changed, exactly as it was before.

The reader, especially if he has not had the experience I have been describing, may feel impatient with the foregoing lyricism. «Pshaw!» he will say, «the fellow protests too much and intoxicates himself with words. He admits to being a thoroughly repressed man, no longer young. All he means is that he suddenly felt intense sexual desire for a girl of twenty. We all know about that.» I will not pause to answer this reader back, but will go on as faithfully as I can to recount what happened next.