Bookclub: "The Black Prince"
Presented by Chris Lehmann
Book World Editor
Thursday, Jan. 31., 2002; Noon EST

Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World. Book World Editor Chris Lehmann will be leading the discussion on this month's selection, Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince."

Below is the transcript.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

washingtonpost.com: Can you tell us about the BBC and Miramax Film "Iris," directed by Richard Eyre, based on the life of Iris Murdoch?

Chris Lehmann: Actually, I can't say anything informed about the BBC?miramax film version of Murdoch's life. By the looks of things, though, it seems to focus mainly on IM's heady personal life and her battle with Alzheimers near the end of her life. I suppose that's to be expected--to focus on a writer's imaginative work and the throes of literary creation would make for awfully dull cinema--but I do fear that the movie will wind up portraying Murdoch as alternately a louche character and a victim. And as I think you can see in her work that she would have detested either portrayal.

Washington, D.C.: Unfortunately I will not be able to join the discussion at the posted time so I am wondering if it will be archived in order that I may read it later.

In the meantime, I am wondering why you (Lehmann) see Murdoch as giving Bradley "the last word in the heady, colliding significations..." The editor is actually the last person to "speak" which is generally the case in any piece of published writing, so I am wondering if in fact he isn't given the last word. But, also, I am not so sure that Murdoch meant readers to conclude anything about any of the questions she raises. It might be that she just wants to raise the questions, as I am sure these are the kinds of questions that must have been raised often in (some of) the circles of people with whom she associated and obviously the kinds of things she thought about. It may be that she created characters likely to assert each of a number of positions she either heard or contemplated herself. It may be that these questions don't have just one answer...or that the "answers" are like the blind men and the elephant answers. She certainly didn't appear to like or feel sympathetic to any of her characters, so one can't infer from whomever was "good" what her preferred answers might be. Was she as much of a misanthrope as it appears to me from this book that she was? Not having read any of her work before, I will find it interesting to see the movie "Iris" this Spring and move on to other books to see what other questions interested her and if she was more compassionate towards other characters than she was in this one.

Chris Lehmann: Well, I meant that Bradley gets the last word in that his version of events is the heart of the book--and indeed, he himself cautions us that the other players in the tale will offer self-serving accounts of things, which they predictably do. Loxias, his literary executor, clearly endorses Bradley's own narrative, so even though he technically gets the last word, he uses it to second Bradley.
I think you're right that Murdoch herself doesn't mean for us to take away a singl message from the novel--though I don't necessarily agree that she's unsympathetic to any of her characters, or a misanthrope. I think, as other critics of the book have suggested, that you see much of her sensibilty embedded in a number of the book's characters and situations. arnold, for instance, composes novels filled with what Bradley scornfully describes as "garrulous spirituality," which is what unsympathetic critics said about Murdoch's own work. Indeed, the ongoing debate between Bradley and Arnold about art and perfection is one that Murdoch herself is conducting--and one that, charcteristically, she doesn't neatly resolve for her readers.
To return briefly to the question of Murdoch's sympathetic characterizations, I think it can be easy to mistake the probing description of acute human misery (which is abundant in The Black Prince) with scorn for those who suffer from it. I think one of the great strengths of Murdoch as a novelist is that she's able to plumb this sort of despair without bandying glib judgments of its sufferers. to take just one quick example: Francis. He is in every worldly and personal sense a failure--and Bradley begins affecting the greatest sort of scorn and dismissal of him (except, of course, when he comes in handy, which the plot often contrives him to be . . .) But by the book's end, Bradley is responding to francis's woes in a full, direct and (for him,a t least) compassionate manner. This, no doubt, is due to the acute sufferings Bradley has endured--and to his annealing, self-extinguishing love affair. To the extent that Murdoch is assyaing a "message" in TBP, it would seem to be figured in this expansion of Bradley's sympathy and moral imagination. (Bradley does, after all, subtitle his memoir "A Celebration 0f Love.")

Alexandria, Va.: For me Bradley's correlating of higher truths to his own condition (eg. his spiritual/physical love for Julian) shows a common human state where we rationalize our immoral tendencies by elevating them to a spiritual cause. If we feel the spirit intervened to bring about a change, then we are blameless. I haven't read the entire book yet, so I can't comment on Bradley's ongoing awareness, deceits, or decisions as he plays out his love for Julian; but what I'm perceiving so far is that Bradley has set the stage to fall in love, and Eros has struck rather surprisingly. He believes Eros has made him helpless to resist and since he believes that, he succumbs. Puritans, rigidly controlled persons, even when generally perceptive, go easily out of control with a divine mandate. It gives them permission, and they unknowingly want out of their conventional prison. But, having implied these puritan-based artists are unreliable in their morality (or any artist regardless of his cultural persuasion), I sense that much of the higher truths they reveal is valid. The observer of the artwork must sift through the presentation and find what resonates within them. Within us all is the flawed and the sublime. Am I on the right tack? Or am I out on a limb no one else perceives?

Chris Lehmann: I agree that much of Bradley's ordeal has to do with the gradual opening of the terms that he's used to formulate his morality. In some ways, I think it's tricky to characterize that morality as "puritan," even though Bradley himself of course does so many times over. (But certainly one of the recurring themes of TBP is that it's very dicey to take someone's word for anything, let alone their preferred moral self-characterization . . . .) I think that Bradley is, or rather comes to be, a sort of Neoplatonist: still greatly obsessed with the purity of form and expression, but also reconciled to the messy contingency of things. (As AS Byatt remarked of the novel, one of its signal ironies is that, for all of Bradley's soliliquizing over the purity of art and its mandates, his actual memoir is very much the sort of book that Arnold Baffin would write.)
And think you've also correctly intuited that the sublime, and the quest to render it in art, is back of much of Bradley's distress. But as I've mentioned above, I think the great crisis of his love for Julian dramatically shifts his metaphysic around. Certainly moral probity seems to count for less than it ever had for Bradley--he is, after all, serenely resigned to being tried and imprisoned for a murder he didn't commit. Not to get garrulously spiritual myself, but I think what Bradley has come to realize as his ordeals draw to a close is that the sublime resides not so much in the self's striving for pure aesthetic assertion but in the self's reconcilaition to its own extinction--in art and love alike. Still an ascetic morailty, one could argue, but one that's more tolerant of fallen human desire and various other frailties than Bradley had been at the outset of TBP.

Bethesda, Md.: We thoroughly enjoyed this book but we have several observations or questions:

1. There were several hints by the author or commenters as to possible interpretations of the meaning of the title, "The Black Prince." What do you judge to be the most likely meaning?

2. It seems to have been a perfectly crafted, but nonetheless frustrating, novel. It raised the questions as to how the author constructed it: Does it appear to you to have been deliberately set up in its existing form -- with the contradictory postscripts -- or did it just evolve more naturally into its present form?

3. What is the overarching meaning or message of this particular story? Is it saying that all of life is a dream, that searching for truth is a hopeless endeavor, that people cannot be counted upon to be there when you need them,and that trying to change your basic nature is both vain and futile?

Chris Lehmann: Thanks for your questions. The most common cognate that gets assigned to "The Black Prince" is Hamlet, though Murdoch herself dismissed that association. As Peter Conradi observes in his just-published (in the US) study of Murdoch's work, The Saint and the Artist, the more likely source of the title is from another Shakespeare play, All's Well That Ends Well: "the black prince, sir, alias the prince of darkness, alias the devil," which would seem more in line with Bradley's own experience of Eros. All's Well is also a more likely touchstone since it concerns a whole series of unlikely couplings and reversals in amorous affairs, as does Murdoch's novel.

In re. the novel's construction, some critic somewhere referred to it as an "anti-anti-novel," ie., a novel that deliberately resists its own reduction to voguish critical categorization. I do think the form of it is very deliberate--I think Murdoch intends for us to begin approaching Bradley's narration with a certain fastidious suspicion, and then for us to get swept along, as Bradley does, by the intensity and passion of events (So much action is packed into TBP that it's easy to forget that the bulk of Bradley's tale unfolds only over a two-week period.) In re. the postcripts, I think there is something deliberate about giving Loxias the opening and closing segments. Not to get carried away with the sort of classical philosophical obsessions that inform the novel, but I think the structure is intended to be something of a ritual incantation, on the order of some Neoplatonic rite.
And re. an overarching message, as I mentioned above I think Murdoch is constitutoinally averse to drafting any such thing. But as I also mentioned above, I think it is possible for readers to see in the arc of Bradley's tale an invocation of how the raw experience of Eros (at leats one face of The Black Prince) lays low the conceits of self and the fastidious, artificial orders imposed by art and morality.

Lenexa (Iced-in), Kans.: Mr. Lehmann,

Been wanting to get to Murdock. As shown in your write-up, there is so much to the novel.... I like skilled philosopher-novelists for the witty insights of the human condition that accompany. Also, I like skilled playwright-novelists for the sparkling dialogue and the crescendoing build of scenes--always a doorbell ringing with a new interloper at the worst (best) time.

Julian was a perfect blend of a 20-year-old Lolita and a promising Galatea (we'll write great novels together). I especially liked Bradley's encounter with her showering autos with the diced love letters and releasing the balloon of former boyfriend (and future husband)--Bradley madly chasing the balloon across London. Your thoughts? Thanks.

Chris Lehmann: Yes, most of Murdoch's work gives the lie to the notion that novels of ideas have to be ponderous and sober undertakings. I, too, admire the many surprising scenes of inadvertent self-disclosure that Murdoch erects for her characters. In addition to Julian's memorable, androgynous entrance on the scene, I found the opening Arnold-Rachel melodrama that precedes it gothic, wrenching and obliquely heartbreaking all at once. I also think that Bradley's break-up scene with Rachel is extremely moving in its very quiet touches of scene and characterization--eg., the legions of neglected middle-aged London women that Bradley suddenly notices all around. And of course, Badley's experience, and confession, of love for Julian, which quite literally lays him and ravages his physical being. How many love scenes, after all, can make vomiting all over a box of peaches seem an entirely natural response to one's own acute state of longing? Thanks for writing, and stay warm. . . .

Hyattsville, Md.: Did anyone else find the dialogue (I mean the language in which the characters speak) to be as implausible as I did? If so, do you think Murdoch thus intends to underline the artificiality of the characters and/or the unreliability of Bradley's perceptions? Or does she always write terrible dialogue?

(This is my first Murdoch novel, though I have read some of her philosophical writings. I found it fascinating and enjoyed it; thanks for making it a Book Club selection.)

Chris Lehmann: It's true that there's so much dialogue in the novel, and so much of it is taken up with heady philosophical speculations, that you are occasionally drawn back to remind yourself that people don't usually talk like this (particularly as they're undergoing great ravages of romantic separation, sexual frustration and near-suicidal despair). But for better or worse, Murdoch does commonly give her characters such high-flown obsessions to mull over. Apart from those occasional double-takes, though, I tend to find it no more obtrusive than in, say, George Eliot. It may just be that, as readers, we've grown accustomed not to having philosophical specualtion fly out of characters' mouth. (It occurs to me that much the same complaint was levied against Terence Malik's movie The Thin Red Line, which had all sorts of military grunts philosophizing over the nature of life; perhaps I just ave a weakness for such things, but I sort of appreciated it as a welcome departure from other war movie characterizations. Plus, I thought that if anything would send the mind racing toward the thought of last things and their meaning, it would be combat in the Pacific Theater. But I digress; thanks for writing.)

Hyattsville, Md.: "Loxias was one of the titles of the god Apollo, especially as god in charge of the Oracle at Delphi." I found this tidbit via a web search and thought I'd share it. Does this imply that we are to accept Loxias as a more authoritative source than the others? Or does it confirm that Bradley is the oracle, i.e. that Bradley's is an oracular voice, which it would be fatal to take at face value?

Chris Lehmann: Very good--I wondered whether someone would raise this connection. By at least one interpretation of The Black Prince, Bradley's tribulations can all be read as a prolonged act of worship before the Greek God of beauty--and indeed his alleged murder of Alfred a version of a flaying ritual featured in the Apollo myth. But I think it's possible to get too carried away in this direction--Loxias is, after all, the literary executor's own chosen pseudonym. I think it a bit more likely that Murdoch was allowing herself to play with these elements of Greek mythology, much as she did with Shakespeare's plays. I do think, however, that Loxias' vocation as a musician reflects a new phase in Bradley's own aesthetic-cum-spiritual evolution; Bradley professes that, after hiw ordeal, he is inured to silence and the more disciplined expression of music as never before. (Indeed, early in the book I think he refers to his own tecthy intolerance of music as "a kind of gabble," and a gabble that he suspects is always about him. To put things mildly, eh thinks of it as something very different by the end of the book. . . .)

Crofton, Md.: Chris, you hit the jackpot with "The Black Prince." A great diabolical novel. Was there ever a more infuriatingly smug maddening character than Bradley Pearson? Somehow though I can't quite accept the fact that he allowed himself to be the fall guy for Arnold's murder. The same man who could flout convention and have an affair with Julian be the same whimpering coward that would go to jail for a crime he did not commit. Strange. Anyway. I wanted to have translation of that Dante passage late in the novel. What does it mean?

Chris Lehmann: I'm emnbarrassed to say that I can't supply any translation for the Dante passage. Any Italian scholars out there? In re. Bradley's irritating character: I certainly don;t argue the point, but I guess your response to the novel depends on whether you buy that Bradley's changed in any deep way by his ordeals. Then his taking the fall makes more sense. Obviously, I do buy the notion that he's changed, but he certainly supplies an abundance of material early on in the novel to let the reader suspect that he's beyond all changing. . . .

Arlington, Va.: "Prince" was my third Murdoch novel, and although I've heard it's one of her best, I can't say that it made nearly the same impression as did "The Green Knight," the first of her books I'd read. The other is "A Fairly Honourable Defeat," which I enjoyed just as much as "Prince," which is to say, not nearly as much as "The Green Knight."

Why is this? Do Murdoch's readers become infatuated with her work the first time they're exposed to it, only to wilt later? Given my tastes, which of her other novels might reignite my interest in her work?

Chris Lehmann: I think if you cottoned to The Green Knight, you'd probably also like The Philospher's Pupil or The Book and the Brotherhood (one of my own favorites). I also very much like Nuns and Soldiers and The Sea the Sea, but those (the latter one in particular) could prive a little too close to The Black Prince for your liking.
As for the different response to the various Murdoch novels, I think it's not all that surprising--especially given how open-ended they can be in supplying their own materials for interpretation.

McLean, Va.: "The Black Prince" was the first Iris Murdoch book I have read. I remember John Updike saying at his book signing that he admired her. I understand why after reading this novel and look forward to reading other works written by her.
I couldn't understand what made Bradley Pearson attractive to his friends, especially women. He was self absorbed, snobbish, impatient, and neurotic. He didn't have the depth of character to write a work of art or a maintain a meaningful friendship. What do you think?

Chris Lehmann: Well, as I've noted above, I think Bradley _acquires_ depth of character by the shock of falling so irremediably in love with Julian. As for the source of Bradley's attraction to other women in the novel, well, for one thing the men they've taken up with aren't exactly (you'll pardon the expression) princes themselves. But more than thought, I suspect they may be drawn to the very image of his own crabbed austerity of character. In part, he might present a challenge to the women in his life--to draw him out into an actualentanglement with the world. In part, though, I think the women in the novel themselves represent Bradley's own arch suspicion of engagement with the world itself, even though this reading does buy a bit into Bradley's own narcissistic suspicion in the book's outset that everything in the world really is about him . . . .

Alexandria, Va.: The main theme of the book seems to be Bradley's suppressed homosexuality. So I suppose it is intentional that Christian (Chris) and Julian have names that could be male or female.

Chris Lehmann: Well, I do think Murdoch--who was, as we're about to be reminded by Mirimax, herself bisexual--was making a point by giving Julian and Christian androgynous names. But I don't think that the point was that Bradley is himself a repressed homosexual--the interpretation that she pointedly parodies in Francis's postscript to Bradley's manuscript. Rather, I think her point in lending these androgynous touches to her characters is two-fold: First, to play with the identities of Hamlet within the novel (this being part of the point of Bradley mistaking Julian for a boy when he first encounters her); and second (and more broadly) to hint that the destructive power of Eros resides in a rather unqualified way in everybody, regardless of their identification along either pole of gender roles. Or so it seems to me.

Lenexa, Kans.: Thanks for nice response--at least our home has power (much of the city doesn't). Martin Amis in his novel The Information also features two writers conflicted due to the one being much more popular than the other. I'm sure the young Martin read Murdock and was inspired. Of course, I'm not suggesting that he used TBP--Martin obviously doesn't need help with imaginating his fiction--but I was wondering how close was Murdock to the Amis family. Do you happen to know? Thanks.

Chris Lehmann: I hadn't thought of that connection re. The Information and Martin Amis. I don't know whether Amis has tried to model any of his work on Murdoch's-- haven't even had a chance to look over his new essay collection to see if he's reviewed any of her work. My suspicion, however, is that it may be a thematic coincidence: Amis is such a withering devotee of style, and Murdoch very much favors novels that are rambling and Dosteivskian in their profusion of voices. But again that's just speculation--I don't know the answer to your question.

Casa de Oro, Calif.: Did you feel that the falling of Bradley for Julian was a little hard to buy? That is to say, he didn't sell me that it was deep, true and enduring.

Chris Lehmann: On the contrary--as I've mentioned in a few other responses--I thought Bradley's falling for Julian was very convincing. (These May-September [or, more accurately, perhaps, late November] romantic attachments occur in a number of Murdoch's other books, but I think this is her most persuasive portrayal of them in her fiction.)
To say that it's convincing doesn't also mean, however, that it's not doomed. Or that it's more complicated than it seems, particularly on Julian's side. As Peter Conradi points out, even if Bradley isn't acting out an Oedipal trauma, Julian sure as heck seems to be. And with Arnold's active connivance: Arnold makes a melodramatic show of forbiding connubial relations between Bradley and Julian--even as he gives them permission to stay the night together. He refers to their union as "a crime" and "a defilement" even though Julian is 20, and has already had consensual relations with other adult men. And his first response when Julian confesses her love of Bradley to him is to lock her in her room. (In her postscript, moreover, Julian reports that her father had always been the love of her life, and with a definite overtone of titillation, she recounts that many hoteliers on her continental tour with her dad mistake the two for lovers . . . .)
All of which is, in a way, to reinforce Murdoch's own point in putting The Black Prince on such a shaky narrative footing: that even the most profound experiences and moemnts of self-revelationare not always what they seem to be. . .

Arlington, Va.: When did Murdoch's Alzheimer's overcome her ability to write? I've read that her husband either wrote whole books under his wife's name or finished partial manuscripts.

Is that true, and if so, which Murdoch books aren't true Murdoch books?

Chris Lehmann: I'm not up on all the biographical details of Murdoch's career, especially in her later life. I gather, however, that she had a terrible time of writing The Green Knight, and had some assistance from her husband and (presumably) her editors. I imagine this is covered in John Bayley's memoir, but I frankly find the subject too depressing to take on in detail. . . .

Hyattsville, Md.: Do you suppose we are meant to endorse Bradley's virtuoso analysis of the play Hamlet? pp 164-67. Could he possibly be speaking for Murdoch? (I hope not! Though he contends that Hamlet was speaking for Shakespeare unlike any other of the playwright's characters.) Or are we just to appreciate the analysis for its effervescence, which evidently impressed Julian.

Chris Lehmann: A good question. I guess my anwer would be, at some formal level, that Murdoch _is_ asking us to endorse Bradley's interpretation: that the sort of intimate genius Shakespeare displayed in the play won't admit to pat, unicausal intepretations. The postcripts are there largely to warn us off such responses to The Black Prince. At the more close-grained level, though, I don't think that Murdoch is offering Bradley's seat-of-the-pants solilquy on Hamlet as a definitive interpretation of the play itself. I doubt she thought any such thing was possible. And I also wouldn't underestimate the way she's playing here with the figure of Hamlet, as she does throughout the book. As Bradley says, Hamlet is words and words are Hamlet. (Or words to that effect.)

Hyattsville, Md.: PATARA: "On his third missionary journey St. Paul embarked from here for Tyre." -Catholic Encylopedia] So much about saints and saintliness in TBP. Is Bradley a saint?

Chris Lehmann: Bradly is many things, but I certainly don't think of him as a saint. To the extent he's martyred, it's to a very private (and rather highly ironized) conviction of his own spiritual calling. As I've suggested in some of my other replies, I think he's a Neoplatonic adept, who's had his austere former morality greatly chastened by the experience of falling in love.

Chris Lehmann: Well, I think that does it for questions (and replies) on The Black Prince. Thanks one and all for taking the time to read the book and write in. It's always a pleasure.

washingtonpost.com:

That wraps up today's show. Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion.