The Black Prince

"It’s the most complex and complicated of Murdoch’s novels. It plays around with form; it’s a quasi-postmodern novel. It’s got a range of voices. It’s the story of an eccentric failed artist/ author called Bradley Pearson, who’s trying to write a great work of artistry. His great friend and rival is Arnold Baffin, a popular author who writes works that sell. And Bradley is intensely jealous of this. The relationship between Bradley and Arnold fuels the novel. It’s Murdoch’s reflection on the question of what great art is, and what it means to be obsessed with other people. Bradley is obsessed with Arnold, and later on he’s obsessed with Arnold’s daughter, Julian, who perceives Bradley as this very strange man. She calls him a ‘funny uncle’ who she’s known all her life, and yet the two of them fall in love and have this great—though quite short-lived—relationship that’s intensely erotic and sexual, especially for Bradley, who hasn’t experienced this for a long time. There’s a wonderful scene in Covent Garden where he can’t stand even his own emotions and he’s sick in the flower market. There are moments of great humor in Murdoch’s novels and that’s one of them. “ The Black Prince is Murdoch’s reflection on the question of what great art is” What else would I say about The Black Prince ? Very like The Sea, The Sea , people from his past come back to haunt Bradley—friends, his ex-wife, his sister—and he fails to pay attention to them. This is one of the great themes of Murdoch’s novels: that we have to perceive people, and see them as they really are, and not as want them to be. It’s the same as in Word Child with Hilary Burde: Bradley just doesn’t perceive other people as they are. There are scenes of him discussing his love, or how he looks at his ex-wife, or Arnold’s wife, Rachel—with both of whom he has had relationships—where you see this. He’s quite a damaged character himself, but he’s also quite damaging to women. There’s what some people perceive as a rape scene with Arnold’s daughter Julian, while she’s dressed as a boy, so gender fluidity comes into it. The interesting thing that makes the novel postmodern is that it has a foreword by an editor called P. Loxias, whom we later find out is the god Apollo. And then there are postscripts by other characters, including Julian, Rachel and Loxias. They frame the narrative, but we don’t have a clear idea who killed Arnold at the end. Arnold dies and he’s clearly been murdered, but is it Bradley? Is it Rachel? It could be Julian. And they all have their say at the end. It’s a novel that plays with form. I think Murdoch saw the beginnings of the postmodern movement. She’s read Nabokov and thought, “I can do this just as well.” That was her one major experiment with the postmodern form and it comes off very well indeed."

"This is really idiosyncratic: The Black Prince (1973) by Iris Murdoch. Iris Murdoch means a great deal to me because, though I never meant to be a novelist, I always loved her novels very much, even back when I didn’t tell any of my colleagues that I read novels on the sly. Again, the feeling, when you read the book, of someone who is philosophically talented and ferociously knowledgeable, and who creates her art out of the tensions that this philosophical talent and knowledge produces. It was encouraging when I fell into writing a novel—and then wrote more of them—that Iris Murdoch had done so, too. She entertained a career as a philosophy academic as well. Her first book was on Sartre. She is a deep, Christian Platonist. To be a Platonist and a novelist is to feel a tension and that really comes to the fore in The Black Prince. It is a deeply Platonic novel so it’s one that I respond to strongly. It’s also a really good novel, and I don’t think it gets enough credit. I don’t think Murdoch gets enough credit, actually. The main character is Bradley Pearson. He’s a writer. He’s written very little because he’s the type who thinks of art as sacred and cultivates all this paralyzing solemnity around it. In some sense, if you’re a Platonist you’re a little torn about this attitude of solemnity toward art because yes, there’s great and inspiring art , but there is philosophy , and philosophy is more important. One of the things that I think she’s playing with in The Black Prince is desacralizing art. The Black Prince partly utilizes farce to dramatize its tensions. It can turn on a dime between profound philosophical insights into the nature of art, followed by sheer farce – just people behaving crazily. There’s a phrase that she uses, the ‘foul contingency,’ and that is all that life consists of. The narrative of our lives is not written out by logic, but by all of this ‘foul contingency.’ It’s kind of an insult to our intellect, how unpredictable and chaotic life can be and the novel is very interested in that. It also takes up this great question of when you’re in the midst of a madness—in this case, again, it’s a romantic madness—can you tell whether it’s the good kind of madness or the bad kind of madness? Mann writes a tragedy out of this conundrum, and Murdoch writes a farce, and Murdoch’s is the riskier choice. So Bradley Pearson has finally got some time to write his magnum opus , and he’s very good friends with this other guy, Arnold Baffin, who is a popular writer. Bradley looks down on him—perhaps it’s envy, perhaps it isn’t—and he tells the story of what happens when this popular writer calls him up because he’s beaten his wife and he’s afraid he’s killed her. “It’s also a really good novel, and I don’t think it gets enough credit. I don’t think Murdoch gets enough credit, actually.” Then Bradley falls in love with the Baffin’s young daughter whose name is Julian and is 18. Then you don’t know, through the whole thing, whether this is the good kind of madness or he’s a creepy old man, a pervert who falls in love and has a brief affair with Julian. There’s also a lot of play with Shakespeare . There are so many things going on and so many literary tricks at the end – there are postscripts by all the characters giving their versions. Everybody writes their own version of the story in which now they are the star and it’s all about them and how do we know what’s really the truth? This includes the editor of the book who signs his name A. Loxias. Loxias is, of course, the last name of the god Apollo. So there’s that playing in the background, lots of things to try to interpret and figure out and a basic preoccupation with the tension between art and philosophy that somebody trained in philosophy, who is also a novelist, feels very keenly. The thing you have to be aware of when you’re writing fiction out of your own philosophical preoccupations is that you’re writing on several levels, and it has to be enjoyable on every level. Writing a novel, you have to make it enjoyable; you have to use the literary devices to their utmost: character, plot, scenery, language-play, all that stuff. You have to make it a feast on a literary level. What you’re trying to do, as a novelist, is to prepare the ground for a big experience, the exact nature of which you can’t really control, because your readers are going to bring their own lives and their own characters into it to make it their experience. That was very hard for me, I have to say, when I first wrote a novel. I would hear people discussing my novel and I would think, ‘What? I didn’t have that in my mind at all, how could they think that?’ And then I realised I had to let it go. You create the groundwork, and it has to be porous enough so that people can infiltrate it with their own inner beings and create something meaningful. That’s what you’re hoping, at least, or you wouldn’t risk your philosophical career by writing novels. So if there is laid, in the groundwork, this philosophical cogitation as well as everything else, it makes it potentially a bigger and more meaningful experience. Not everybody is going to get it, but you have to prepare the ground so that people can move in with whatever they have and try to get something big out of it. For me, for all of the novels I’ve chosen, the payoff is big. It’s big on many levels, but the philosophical is very important to me, obviously. And it’s there in these novels, whether people get it or not."