Iris Murdoch - Under the Net

I was puzzled by this myself. I felt that there was something wrong in what Hugo said, and yet I couldn't see what it was. We discussed the matter a bit further, and then I told him, 'But at this rate almost everything one says, except things like "Pass the marmalade" or "There's a cat on the roof", turns out to be a sort of lie.'

Hugo pondered this. 'I think it is so,' he said with seriousness. 'In that case one oughtn't to talk,' I said.

'I think perhaps one oughtn't to,' said Hugo, and he was deadly serious. Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking of how we had been doing nothing else for days on end.

'That's colossal!' said Hugo. 'Of course one does talk. But,' and he was grave again, 'one does make far too many concessions to the need to communicate.'

'What do you mean?'

'All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us--and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.'

What would happen if one were to speak the truth?' I asked. 'Would it be possible?'

'I know myself,' said Hugo, that when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth absolutely dead, and I see complete blankness in the face of the other person.'

So we never really communicate?'

'Well,' he said, 'I suppose actions don't lie.'

It took us about half a dozen cold-cure sessions to reach this point. We had arranged by now to have the cold alternately, so that whatever intellectual diminution was entailed by it should be shared equally between us. Hugo had insisted on this; though I would willingly have had all the colds myself, partly because of a protective feeling I was developing towards Hugo, and partly because Hugo made such an infernal noise when he had the cold. I don't know why it didn't dawn on us earlier that we didn't have to stay in the cold-cure establishment in order to continue our talks. Perhaps we were afraid of breaking the continuity. I don't know when it would have occurred to us to leave of our own volition; but eventually we were turned out by the authorities, who feared that if we went on having colds much longer we might do some permanent injury to our health.

By this time I was completely under Hugo's spell. He himself never appeared to notice the extent of the impression he made on me. In conversation he was completely without any sort of desire to score points, and although he often silenced me, he seemed unaware of having done so. It was not that I always agreed with him. His failure to grasp certain kinds of ideas often filled me with annoyance. But it was as if his very mode of being revealed to me how hopelessly my own vision of the world was blurred by generality. I felt like a man who, having vaguely thought that flowers are all much the same, goes for a walk with a botanist. Only this simile doesn't fit Hugo either, for a botanist not only notices details but classifies. Hugo only noticed details. He never classified. It was as if his vision were sharpened to the point where even classification was impossible, for each thing was seen as absolutely unique. I had the feeling that I was meeting for the first time an almost completely truthful man; and the experience was turning out to be appropriately upsetting. I was but the more inclined to attribute a spiritual worth to Hugo in proportion as it would never have crossed his mind to think of himself in such a light.

When we were turned out of the cold-cure establishment I had nowhere to live. Hugo suggested that I should come and live with him, but some instinct of independence forbade this. I felt that Hugo's personality could very easily swallow mine up completely and much as I admired him I didn't want this to happen. So I declined his offer. I had in any case to go to France about this time to see Jean Pierre, who was making a fuss about one of the translations, so our conversation was interrupted for a while. During this interval Hugo returned to work at the Rocket Factory, and began to develop his great ingenuity with set pieces, and generally resumed the pattern of his London life. His attempts to break out of this pattern always took some eccentric form or other; his inability to take a normal comfortable expensive holiday was the nearest thing to a neurotic trait that I ever discovered in him.

When I got back from Paris I took a cheap room in Battersea, and Hugo and I resumed our talks. We would meet on Chelsea Bridge after Hugo's day's work, and wander along the Chelsea embankment, or make the round of the pubs in the King's Road, talking ourselves to exhaustion.

Some time previous to this, however, I had made a move which turned out to be fatal. The conversation of which I have given a small extract above had interested me so much that I had made a few notes of it just to remind myself. When I glanced at these notes again after a little while they looked very scrappy and inadequate, so I added to them a bit, just to make them a better reminder. Then later still when I looked them up it struck me that the argument as it stood on paper didn't make sense. So I added some more, to make it look intelligible, still drawing on my memory. Then when I read the thing through it began to occur to me that it was rather good. I'd never seen anything quite like it. I ran through it again and made it look a bit more elegant. After all, I am a natural writer; and since the thing was now on paper it might as well look decent. So I polished it up quite a lot and then began to fill in the preliminary conversation as well. This conversation I found wasn't so clear in my memory, and in reconstructing it I drew on a number of different occasions.

Of course, I didn't tell Hugo about this. I intended the thing as a private and personal record for myself, so there was no point in telling him. In fact, I knew in my heart that the creation of this record was a sort of betrayal of everything which I imagined myself to have learnt from Hugo. But this didn't stop me. Indeed, the thing began to have for me the fascination of a secret sin. I worked on it constantly. I now expanded it to cover a large number of our conversations, which I presented not necessarily as I remembered them to have occurred, but in a way which fitted in with the plan of the whole. A quite considerable book began to take shape. I kept it in the form of a dialogue between two characters called Tamarus and Annandine. The curious thing was that I could see quite clearly that this work was from start to finish an objective justification of Hugo's attitude. That is, it was a travesty and falsification of our conversations. Compared with them it was a pretentious falsehood. Even though I wrote it only for myself, it was clearly written for effect, written to impress. Some of the most illuminating moments of our talk had been those which, if recorded, would have sounded the flattest. But these I could never bring myself to record with the starkness which they had had in reality. I was constantly supplying just that bit of shape, that hint of relation, which the original had lacked. Yet though I saw the thing quite plainly as a travesty I didn't like it any the less for that.

Then one day I couldn't resist showing it to Dave Gellman. I thought it might impress him. It did. He immediately wanted to discuss it with me. Not much came of this, however, as I found myself quite incapable of discussing Hugo's ideas with Dave. Greatly as I was moved by these ideas, I was totally unable to reproduce them in talk with anyone else. When I tried to explain some notion of Hugo's it sounded flat and puerile, or else quite mad, and I soon gave up the attempt. After that Dave rather lost interest in the book; nothing is true or important for Dave which can't be maintained in an oral discussion. However, he had during this time, and contrary to my instructions, showed the book, which he had taken home to finish, to one or two other people who were also very impressed by it.