Iris Murdoch: Bruno’s Dream

Of course they all caused him pain, all the time, they just could not help it. He could spy their assumptions, their thoughts which no longer ended in him but sped away past him into that unimaginable time when he would no longer be. He had become a monster to them. “A fine old man” he had overheard someone calling him more years ago than he liked to think of. What was he now? In his own consciousness he was scarcely old at all. He could see that his hands had aged. He noticed that with puzzlement as he promenaded the two twisted dried-up heavily spotted things upon the counterpane. He no longer looked into the mirror though he could feel sometimes like a mask the ghost of his much younger face. He glimpsed himself only in the averted eyes of Danby and Adelaide, in the fastidious reluctances which they could not conceal. It was not just the smell, it was the look. He knew that he had become a monster, animal-headed, bull-headed, a captive Minotaur. He had a face now like one of his spiders, Xysticus perhaps, or Oxyptila , that have faces like toads. Below the huge emergent head the narrow body stretched away, the contingent improbably human form, strengthless, emaciated, elon gated, smelly. He lived in a tube now, like Atypus , he had become a tube. Soma sema . His body was indeed a tomb, a grotesque tomb without beauty. How different death appeared to him now from how it had seemed even three years ago when he still had his white hair. Real death was nothing to do with obelisks and angels. No wonder they all averted their eyes.

The printing works ought to be a kind of monument only he still thought of the works as his father’s creation. Gater and Greensleave. Greensleave and Odell it ought to be now with Danby in charge, only Danby had refused to change the name although old Gater had been dead these forty years. There had been a bad patch after the war when it was so hard to get spare parts for the American presses, but things had picked up somehow. Was that due to Danby? Variety was the secret, and nothing too humble: programmes, catalogues, leaflets, posters, Bingo cards, students’ magazines, writing paper. Bruno had done his best for the place. He had been born to it, for it, practically in it with the clack of monotype machines in his infant ears. But he had never felt at home with printers, and their strange private language had always been for him a foreign tongue. He had been always a little afraid of the works, just as he had been afraid of the horses which his father had forced him to ride when he was a child. It was different for Danby, who had no natural bent and no creative gifts and was not even an intellectual, and who had taken to printing when he married Gwen as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Bruno, who never got over thinking Danby a fool, had resented that calmness. Yet it was Danby who had turned out to be the businessman.

Bruno had wanted to study zoology and not to go into the printing works. His father had made him study classics and go into the printing works. How had he made him? Bruno could not remember. Only through business, only through money, had he ever really communicated with his father. Because of certain punishments he had forgotten almost everything about his father, who remained nevertheless in his life as a source of negative energy, a spring of irritation and resentment, a hole through which things drained away. He could flush with anger even now when thinking of his father, and even now the old hatred came to him fresh and dark, without images. Yet he could see his mother so clearly and see that particular strained smile on her face as she tried to persuade her husband, and the tones of her voice came to him clearly over an interval of eighty years. “George, you must be more gentle with the boy.”

I ought to have been a recluse, Bruno thought, lived in the country like an eighteenth-century clergyman with my books of theology and my spiders. The proper happiness of his life, the thing which he had so completely mislaid, came to him always associated with his mother, and with memories of summer nights when he was sixteen, seeing in the light of his electric torch the delicate egg-laying ritual of the big handsome Dolomedes spider. O spiders, spiders, spiders, those aristocrats of the creepy-crawly world, he had never ceased to love them, but he had somehow betrayed them from the start. He had never found an Eresus niger , though as a boy his certainty of finding one had seemed to come direct from God. His projected book on The Mechanics of the Orb Web had turned into an article. His more ambitious book, The Spiders of Battersea Park , had shrunk to a pair of articles. His monograph on the life and work of C. A. Clerck was never published. His book on The Great Hunting Spiders did not get beyond the planning stage. He corresponded for several years with Vladimir Pook, the eminent Russian entomologist, and Pook’s great two-volume work Soviet Spiders , inscribed to B. Greensleave, an English friend and a true lover of spiders , was among his most treasured possessions. But he had never accepted Pook’s invitation to visit Russia; and it was Pook who had written the last letter.

What had happened to him and what was it all about and did it matter now that it was practically all over, he wondered. It’s all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it’s all too hard . Death refutes induction. There is no “it” for it to be all about. There is just the dream, its texture, its essence, and in our last things we subsist only in the dream of another, a shade within a shade, fading, fading, fading. It was odd to think that Janie and Gwen and his mother and for all he knew Maureen now existed more intensely, more really, here in his mind than they existed anywhere else in the world. They are a part of my life-dream, he thought, they are immersed in my consciousness like specimens in formalin. The women all eternally young while I age like Tithonus. Soon they will have that much less reality. This dream stuff, this so intensely his dream stuff, would terminate at some moment and be gone, and no one would ever know what it had really been like. All the effort which he had put into making himself seemed vanity now that there were no more purposes. He had worked so hard, learning German, learning Italian. It seemed to him now that it had all been vanity, a desire at some moment which never came, to impress somebody, to succeed, to be admired. Janie had spoken such beautiful Italian.

As one grows older, thought Bruno, one becomes less moral, there is less time, one bothers less, one gets careless. Does it matter now at the end, is there really nothing outside the dream? He had never bothered with religion, he had left that to the women, and his vision of goodness was connected not with God but with his mother. His grandmother had had evening prayers every night with the servants present. His mother had gone to church every Sunday. Janie had gone to church at Christmas and Easter. Gwen was a rationalist. He had gone along with them and lived in casual consciousness through the life and death of God. Was there any point in starting to think about it all now, in setting up the idea of being good now, of repenting or something? Sometimes he would have liked to pray, but what is prayer if there is nobody there? If only he could believe in death-bed repentance and instant salvation. Even the idea of purgatory was infinitely consoling: to survive and suffer in the eternal embrace of a totally just love. Even the idea of a judgement, a judgement on his cruelty to his wife, his cruelty to his son. Even if Janie’s dying curses were to drag him to hell.

It must be ten years since he had seen Miles, and that had been about the deeds of the house in Kensington, which had been let and which Miles wanted to sell. The house was in Janie’s name, bought with Janie’s money, and of course she had left everything to the children. Before that he had met Miles at Janie’s funeral, at Gwen’s funeral, and there had been one or two other encounters about money. Miles, so cold, so unforgiving, writing those regular patronizing letters for Christmas and birthday: I always think of you with affection and respect . It could not be true. He had thought his son distinguished. He had admired him for refusing to go into the works, envied him perhaps. Yet Miles had not done all that much with his life. How hard it was to believe that Miles must be over fifty. He was an able civil servant, they told Bruno, but nowhere near the top. And then there had been all that poetry nonsense, getting him nowhere.