Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, the narrative of a man imprisoned for murder who has previously had a sexual relationship with a much younger female character, owes something to an earlier novel. It repays the debt with interest.

Iris Murdoch wrote more than 25 novels of which I’ve read only one. In this post, I’m going to try to write about that one without any reference to the context of her work as a whole, of which I know virtually nothing. My mother seems to have been a bit of a fan and I remember as a teenager seeing both The Nice and the Good and A Fairly Honourable Defeat — orange-spined Penguins — on her bookshelves. I think I probably read the first page or two of the latter, decided it wasn’t my kind of book and from then on avoided Murdoch’s writing.

Around 1996 or 1997, I heard somebody on BBC Radio 4 enthusing about The Black Prince (1973). Soon afterwards I happened to see a copy in a secondhand bookshop. I bought and read it and wasn’t particularly impressed, certainly not enough to read any more Murdoch. Still, I kept that copy through several house moves, each marked by visits to a convenient charity shop carrying a load of books I was unlikely to want to read again. I unexpectedly came across the book earlier this year and decided to give it another shot.

The main body of the book is the first-person narrative of a man who died shortly after writing it while serving a prison sentence for murder. The book is prefaced by an “Editor’s forword” by someone who does not feature in the narrative itself, but who claims to be responsible for its posthumous publication. The main narrative ends with the murder and is mainly concerned with the narrator’s love for or infatuation with a much younger female character, with whom he (eventually) has sex. The story is his apologia, or explanation of what happened.

Does this remind you of anything?

I cheated a bit with the phrase “a much younger female character”. It’s not an expression I’d usually use. When Julian Baffin (named after Julian of Norwich) becomes involved with Bradley Pearson (the narrator) she is 20 years old, a young woman. In 1973, when the novel was published, women of Julian’s age and considerably older were routinely referred to as “girls”, and Julian is indeed described as a girl by several characters, including Bradley, her father and her mother. The age of majority was reduced from 21 to 18 in England and Wales in 1970. The novel was published in 1973, and Julian in her postscript says “Not so many years have passed since these events” (p. 408): it’s not clear whether she is, in law, an adult at the relevant time. At any rate, she is perceived by Bradley and her parents as being in an ambiguous position. Early in the story, the Baffin family arrives at Bradley’s flat during a crisis:

The door bell rang again. I opened it. Arnold, Rachel and Julian were standing outside the door. They were neat and smartly dressed, Julian in a sort of flowered smock looking about twelve. (p. 76)

An exaggeration, presumably, but a significant one. Dolores (“Dolly”) Haze is 12 years old when Humbert Humbert first sees her in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955–59). Humbert, at 36, is three times her age. In terms of the number of years, the age-gap between Bradley Pearson and Julian Baffin is much wider, but the 58-year-old Bradley is a little less than three times Julian’s age.

There seems little doubt that Murdoch’s novel is in some respects a commentary on, or a response to Nabokov’s, the UK edition of which was published amid controversy fourteen years earlier. For example, Bradley Pearson and Humbert Humbert both vomit at significant moments in their respective stories. They are both repelled and disgusted by mature women, including the women they have married. Humbert is sexually attracted to barely pubescent children whom he calls “nymphets”, while it would seem that Julian’s immaturity, both in appearance (some of the time) and in attitudes, is part of what draws Bradley to her.

(It might seem that I’m being inconsistent in calling Murdoch’s protagonist by his forename, while referring to Nabokov’s primarily by his surname, but I believe the difference in treatment is defensible. Bradley Pearson is not a sympathetic character and some of his behaviour is open to severe criticism. Julian certainly suffers as a result of her relationship with him. She loses her father, is estranged from her mother, marries an ex-boyfriend whom she had previously dismissed as having “no real feelings, no strength” and for whom she had felt “just a nervous craving” (p. 275). But what happens to her is nowhere near as bad as what becomes of Dolly. Ironically, Humbert, for whose behaviour no excuses can be made, is a more interesting, entertaining character than Bradley is.)

But if The Black Prince is in part a response to Lolita it is certainly not only that. It’s not a pastiche or a skit or, I think, a satire but rather what it claims to be: a novel. There are obvious differences between the two books. Much of Lolita shows Dolly and Humbert traversing and retraversing the United States.

In contrast, Bradley crosses a small part of London, between his own flat in Charlotte Street — is there a reference there to Dolly’s mother? — the flat in Notting Hill that he used to share with Christian before their divorce 30 years earlier, and the Baffins’ house in Ealing: a steadily westward progression from Central London. He and Julian spend some time in a remote cottage he has rented by the sea, but this is a world much more narrowly circumscribed than Humbert’s. Not that the wider horizons have necessarily done Humbert much good. Dr Ray, the “editor” of Humbert’s manuscript, comments that “Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous” (Lolita, p. 7).

I mentioned that each book ends with a murder. In each case, the victim is the man who has taken away the narrator’s beloved, depriving the narrator of her company forever: Clare Quilty has driven away with Dolly in his car, while Bradley believes that Arnold Baffin has done the same thing with his daughter, though the truth turns out to be slightly more complicated. Humbert finally tracks down Quilty and shoot him several times, while Arnold Baffin, a commercially successful novelist whom Bradley “discovered”, has his skull smashed with a heavy poker.

Quilty is just as responsible as Humbert for the misery of Dolly’s short, sad life, though to say so is not to let Humbert off the hook. Dolly’s tragedy is overdetermined. Having “rescued” her from Humbert’s clutches, Quilty soon throws her out, leaving the fourteen-year-old to make her own living, when she refuses to take part in an orgy.

It’s not clear whether it is actually Bradley who has killed Arnold. Bradley, who of course is telling the story, denies it, saying that Arnold was already dead when Bradley arrived at his house, cleaned the blood and Rachel’s fingerprints off the poker and left his own, before making an ineffectual attempt to hide the weapon. On my first two readings of the novel, I thought the question — whether Arnold’s killer was Bradley or Rachel — was indeterminable, that Murdoch had deliberately left it open. This time, I’m not so sure.

The police theory, enthusiastically taken up by the popular press, is that Bradley is a failed writer, driven by jealousy of the success enjoyed by his former protegé. Bradley is surely right to label this a ridiculous cliché — which is not to say that it might not be true. On the other hand, there is no shortage of indications almost from the beginning of the novel, that Rachel’s rage and resentment have been underestimated or ignored by the other characters, and particuarly Arnold.

The story opens with Arnold’s phone call to Bradley, saying that he may have killed his wife. He has apparently hit her with the poker that again features at the novel’s end. Bradley worries that neither of the Baffins will forgive him for having witnessed their domestic crisis. As the story progresses, he gives Rachel several other reasons to hate him, something he notices from time to time before promptly forgetting it again, as if he can’t quite take Rachel seriously.

Against my suggestion that The Black Prince is in part a commentary on Lolita, it has to be admitted that the two novels feel very different. I wonder if that’s because Murdoch is demonstrating that a story like Humbert Humbert’s and Dolly Haze’s should ideally be written rather differently from the way Nabokov approaches it. Until Quilty takes Dolly away, Humbert doesn’t have to cope with much interference from people outside their “bubble”. He easily soothes the qualms of Charlotte’s neighbours in by hinting that he is Dolly’s biological father, for example.

In contrast, Bradley has no choice but to interact with a cast of characters with their own sometimes unpredictable desires, wishes, idiosyncrasies, habits and interests. There’s his younger sister, Priscilla, who has left her husband; the husband himself, Roger, who is delighted that she has gone, leaving him free to move his “mistress” into the house; Bradley’s ex-wife, Christian, just returned, widowed and rich, from the US; Christian’s younger brother, Francis, a struck-off doctor, who is poverty-stricken and pathetically in love with Bradley; and Bradley’s former colleagues. (Bradley had taken early retirement from his job as a Tax Inspector in order to write.) And there’s the fact that both of Julian’s parents are still alive until the last chapter (and one of them beyond it). The actions of all these characters impinge in various ways on Bradley’s plans.

The relative degrees of isolation of Humbert and Bradley are reflected in the number of prefaces and afterwords that each novel includes. Lolita has a single, short foreword by “John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.” and a final note by the author in propria persona. Notwithstanding the brevity of Dr Ray’s preface, it contains significant information, notably the fact that Mrs Richard F. Schiller “died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest” (p. 6). We later learn from the body of the text that she was seventeen.

Bradley Pearson’s story, in contrast, has an author’s foreword after the editor’s, and a longish postscript by Bradley himself, followed by further postscripts by Christian, Francis, Rachel and Julian, with the editor awarding himself the last word.

Shortly after learning about it, Julian suggests that Bradley’s love (for her) is “‘solipsistic if you don’t even imagine or speculate about what I might feel’” (p. 267). He agrees that it is. When Arnold says it’s all very well to disapprove of some behaviours, but he mustn’t cut himself off from people, Bradley replies that he wants to be cut off from people like Francis:

“… Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don’t want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people’s lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody.” (pp. 48–9)

So Bradley doesn’t see Francis as “a real person”; one suspects that the same is true of Priscilla and other characters. But the wish not to be “a nebulous bit of ectoplasm” suggests that Bradley is afraid that he himself is not “real”.

“Solipsistic” applies even more appropriately to Humbert’s behaviour. He doesn’t act as if he recognizes that other human beings — including Dolly — have an existence equally worthwhile with his own. He knows that Dolly cries every night when she thinks he’s asleep, but that doesn’t stop him from continuing to abuse her. Bradley too might be happy to forget that the people around him have lives, that they feel things, but he keeps being forcibly reminded!

The second most significant thing about The Black Prince — the first being the fact that it’s about a love affair between a man approaching 60 and a much younger woman — is that it’s the story of two authors with conflicting approaches to publication. Bradley writes a certain amount but keeps none of it. His last published book came out when he was still married to Christian, over 30 years previously. He says in his Foreword:

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck. (p. 18)

Arnold, on the other hand, has produced a book a year for something like two decades. When Bradley decides that he may have been unfair to his friend and resolves to read the whole oeuvre afresh (some of it for the first time), a huge, heavy carton is delivered to his flat. Arnold admits to knowing that he’s “a second-rater”:

“I believe that the stuff has some merits or I wouldn’t publish it. But I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better. And an aspect of this is that any artist has to decide how fast to work. I do not believe that I would improve if I wrote less. The only result of that would be that there would be less of whatever there is. And less of me …” (p. 172)

When he says this to Bradley, Arnold is being (somewhat) conciliatory: he might not be willing to concede as much at other times.

This is a novel, then, in large part about two authors with opposed ideas about what constitutes art, specifically the art of the novel. It’s also a novel that, if I’m right, is in dialogue with an earlier controversial work. I’d like to explore the notion that Bradley Pearson can be seen as a caricature of Nabokov’s novelistic practice, with Arnold Baffin representing a simplified version of Murdoch’s own approach to novel-writing. There’s a case that I think could be made, but I’d need to read both novels at least once more before attempting to make it.

Instead, I’d like to close by drawing attention to another similarity or resemblance between the two books. On the first page of Part One of Bradley’s story, under the title “The Black Prince”, there’s a subtitle: ”A Celebration of Love”. This purports to be a love story, and it clearly is that in some sense.

The author J K Rowling came in for some criticism on Twitter earlier this year for describing Lolita as “a great and tragic love story”. But she’s right, the bien pensants of Twitter notwithstanding: it is finally a love story. Humbert expected to lose interest in Dolly, no longer to be attracted to her, when she reached the age of 14 or 15, when she started to mature into an adult woman. But when at last he briefly finds her again, aged 17, married and pregnant, a nymphet no longer, he is astonished to discover that he loves her. Of course, his love is no excuse for his previous monstrous, predatory behaviour. It doesn’t retrospectively justify the years of abuse. It certainly doesn’t save either of them. But it is love, for what it’s worth.

Editions: The Black Prince, Penguin paperback, 1975, reprinted 1985; emphasis original, ellipses added;
Lolita, Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, 1980.