“Bradley, I want you to go with me to the lawyer, and I want you to go with me to the hairdresser, I must get my hair rinsed. I think I can do just that, it won’t be too much for me. Then I think I’ll rest.” (299)
In the first part of The Black Prince, Bradley Pearson wants to get away from London to start writing the great work of art he believes he has in himself. He sees himself as a puritan; art is not something produced lightly and easily, but is the fruit of discipline and ascetic preparation. This high-minded view of art and the artist stands in contrast to that of his friend and rival Arnold, a successful writer whose success Pearson resents and with whom he often clashes. “‘Art isn’t chat plus phantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silence.’ / ‘If the silence is endless there isn’t any art!’” (50)
But Pearson will not in fact leave London to write his book; a flurry of people pulling on him makes sure of that. Pearson’s ex-wife Christian comes back to the city and Pearson has to witness how she starts a relation with Arnold, whose lonely and unhappy wife Rachel is drawn in turn to Pearson. This is all disturbing to Pearson, but the only person who provides him with what he knows is an obligation to stay is his sister Priscilla, who has been pushed away by her husband. Priscilla is perpetually sick with sadness and simultaneously crying for death and clinging on to the hope that she will at least get her stuff back from her husband.
Pearson learns from her husband that he has fallen in love with a much younger woman, and by the way isn’t going to give Priscilla her stuff back. Pearson is morally outraged at the injustice of it all, as he relates:
“I saw, for this time, with perfect clarity how unjust and how unkind life had been to my sister. […] I felt so unhappy and ashamed because I had not brought away even the few little pieces of consolation which she had, really with such humility, wanted […] Poor Priscilla, I thought, poor poor Priscila, with a pity for which I deserved no credit since I was simply feeling sorry for myself. Of course I ‘put myself out’ for Priscilla, and did it without any hesitation, because one has to do what one has to do. That human beings can acquire a small area of unquestioned obligations may be one of the few things that saves them” (109)
The relevant section goes on for a bit longer and foreshadows a lot of what is going to happen later in the book, but for now I want to focus on the clarity with which Pearson, “for this time”, sees his moral obligations to his sister. “A simple hard obligation to [tend to Priscilla] remained with me, a palpable thorn in the flesh of my versatile egoism. […] Until these things were clarified Priscilla would have to remain in London and so would I.” (125-126)
Now, the definiteness and absoluteness with which characters in this novel make pronunciations concerning their feelings and decisions carry little predictive value in general; they will declare their undying love, hate, or loyalty to anything and anyone if it serves them, and be made a fool of by the other characters and by their own acts a minute later. And surely Pearson is not the exception but rather the foremost example of this. But when Pearson is talking about Priscilla, he is not talking about feelings primarily; he is talking about his moral obligation to this person for whom he is responsible, who has nothing left except him.
Circumstances and chance are the first reason why Pearson cannot leave London – “one must constantly meditate upon the absurdities of chance” (14) – and his own inertia and lack of courage are certainly another. But a sense of duty towards his sister is part of what motivates his actions in the first part of the book, and according to the puritanical measure by which he measures himself and others, there is no excuse for forgetting such responsibility even for a minute:
“There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave ‘anyhow’ and then expect to resume life where we left off. The wicked regard time as discontinuous, the wicked dull their sense of natural causality. The good feel being as a total dense mesh of tiny interconnections. My lightest whim can affect he whole future. Because I smoke a cigarette and smile over an unworthy thought another man may die in torment. I kissed Rachel and hid from Arnold and got drunk with Francis. I also put myself into a totally different ‘life-mood’ which had extensive and surprising results. Of course, my dear, I cannot, how could I, altogether regret what has happened. But the past must be justly judged, whatever marvels may have sprung out of one’s faults through the incomprehensible operation of grace.” (125)
The “totally different ‘life-mood’” that Pearson alludes to here is his falling in love with Julian, Arnold’s and Rachels’ daughter. One major question, of course, is whether we should contextualize this love in the romantic, or Shakespearian, divine quasi-mystical language in which Pearson tries to sing it, or in the more shallow, creepy, deceptive (and perhaps no less Shakespearian) terms in which Arnold understands it.
On the one hand, the question is a simple one: Murdoch makes no attempt to arouse sympathy for Pearson’s pathetic, adolescent obsession. On the other hand, Pearson himself is well aware how things will look to any audience; he knows that from now on he is completely alone in this story. Even to Julian, he says “There is nobody here but me […] You’re just something in my dream.” (264) This, and Francis’ (not-completely-implausible-within-the-story) suggestion that Pearson is a closet homosexual, suggests that when Pearson calls his story “a celebration of love” (21), he does not mean it to be an account of his bond with Julian – Julian is not important to him except as a muse, a very abstract and reduced object of obsession (an obsession that will be acted out and consummated if possible, but that can perfectly well survive on its own, when Julian has gone into the dark). His celebration is ‘the thing itself’: his story is about what being possessed by romantic or erotic obsession does to your mind.
The upshot is that love liberates you from all other worldly ties. What the drive to write a great work of art could not achieve, a chance to be with Julian accomplishes without a moment’s thought: Pearson finally leaves London.
This means leaving Priscilla. Oblivious to her pain now and uninterested in the fact that she shows some signs of improvement, he cruelly rejects her pleas to help her get to her feet again, and leaves her in the hands of Francis, where she will predictably die. Her last words to him are: “Oh don’t go away and leave me, please, please, please –”. (302)
That it could have been otherwise, that it perhaps ought to have been otherwise, we can see confirmed in a conversation where Pearson tells Francis about his love for Julian, and Francis suggests a remedy: “‘Brad, why don’t you make a thing of Priscilla?’ / ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Make her your life-line. Go all out to help her. Really make a job of it. Take your mind off this.’” Pearson refuses to take it. “Later on I sat down and began to think over what Francis had said to me. At least I thought over some of it. About Priscilla I did not think at all.” (252)
The courage Pearson has gained has not, for the people around him, been for the better. The results of Pearson’s “different ‘life-mood’” are indeed extensive. Their precise unfolding is, indeed, surprising. Priscilla’s death drives a wedge between him and Julian at a crucial moment, again illustrating that there are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave ‘anyhow’ and then expect to resume life where we left off.
A moralist should draw from this story the conclusion that obsessive love is egocentric, selfish, dangerous and immoral. She should believe that the misanthropic and cynical person that Bradley Pearson was before his conversion, however unlikable and deceived about his artistic talents, was a better person than the one he became after. She should believe that Priscilla ought to have lived. Murdoch has made it hard to avoid this moralistic conclusion, but she does not go all the way; after all, there is Pearson himself, who still believes that being struck by Cupid’s arrow has been good for him (and has, indirectly, brought him in a position where he could write a book). He is aware of his faults, but still celebrates the marvels that have sprung out from them “through the incomprehensible operation of grace”. With as much benefit of hindsight as us readers, he still does not regret what has happened.
This is what makes the novel disturbing: that it paints a dark, destructive, one-sided, reductive, esoteric picture of erotic or romantic love, while still having its hero-and-victim insist that loving and fearing this “black Eros” is the most sublimely transformative experience he has ever had. “Human love is the gateway to all knowledge, as Plato understood. And through the door that Julian opened my being passed into another world.” (390)
The last two people Pearson mentions at the very end of his book are Priscilla – “her death was not a necessity”, he admits (392) – and of course, Julian. The book is in a profound way about the sacrifice of the one for the other. But whether that sacrifice itself is profound; whether Eros is deserving of it; whether we have lost something if we refuse to consider the possibility that he is? That, I believe, is the question the book is daring us to ask. Do love and art mean something if they are subject to reason, judgment, responsibility and morality? Or do they require the pathetic and fanciful absoluteness of a converted puritan such as Bradley Pearson? Can we even judge him?
(edition used: Vintage Classics, 2013)