The Good Apprentice (23 page)

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Authors: Iris Murdoch

BOOK: The Good Apprentice
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‘Kafka said there is no way, there is only the end, what we call the way is messing about.’
‘Could you say that again?’
‘There is no way, there is only the end, what we call the way is messing about.’
‘I’ll think about that. I just mean I, I privately, am trying to do, at least I’m starting to try to do, something which I’m
certain
about, which is
obvious
, and I see
everywhere
.’
‘Everywhere outside you and inside you too. It’s dark inside, Stuart.’
‘You mean original sin. I’m not concerned with those guilt stories. Oh, of course, you mean the unconscious mind!’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t believe in it.’
‘Nothing so positive. I don’t fancy the idea. It doesn’t interest me.’
‘Perhaps you interest it. Don’t despise the concept. It’s not just an abode of monsters, it’s a reservoir of spiritual power.’
‘Spirits. Magic. No, I don’t like what you’ve just said. It’s a misleading bad idea.’
‘You say you’re not concerned with guilt. Do you imagine you’ll never feel any?’
‘I mean the feeling isn’t important, it may even be bad. One must just try to mend things, do better. Why cripple yourself when there’s work to do?’
‘So you don’t envy Edward his extreme situation?’
‘No, why should I?’ said Stuart, surprised.
‘It’s one method of breaking up illusions of self-satisfaction.’
‘You think I’m self-satisfied?’
Thomas considered this. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Your case confuses the concept. I’m waiting to see.’
Stuart laughed. ‘My father says I’m a hedonist, I’ve chosen the higher selfishness!’
‘To sleep with a clear conscience every night is indeed en-viable.’
‘He meant being ostentatiously poor and looked after by rich friends!’
‘You imagine that you want to lead an orderly monotonous altruistic life — ’
‘Say it, a dull life!’
‘You object to the idea of it being dull. Part of your energy is that you think well of yourself. So you will want some recognition, even drama, the pleasures of self-assertion, to conquer and be seen to conquer.’
‘You’re provoking me!’
‘You think you’re an exceptional person.’
‘There’s something exceptional but it isn’t me. You think I lack humility.’
‘You lack the gift of ordinariness, perhaps essential for your programme. To put it crudely, you have a strong ego. Now isn’t that horrible? You don’t want to be ordinary. You
think
too much to be ordinary.’
‘I want to be invisible. In a way I’m not there — ’
‘Already?’
‘I’ve never had any sense of identity.’
‘That’s not the same as being unselfish, dear boy!’
‘All right — in a way it is selfish.’
‘It’s choosing a kind of safety. Being alone is safe. Stoicism is safe. Never to be surprised, never to have anything to lose. A source of pride.’
‘I don’t think I’m a stoic. Really it’s worse than that. For I on honeydew have fed and drunk the milk of paradise.’
‘Stuart, could you sit down please. I don’t like your leaning against that window, I feel you might fall out, come into the middle of things,
there
.’
Stuart sat down in the armchair opposite to Thomas and gazed at him with an exasperating air of good humour. Thomas, who had known his face for a long time, through boyhood and adolescence, wondered at how unchanged it seemed, how clean and smooth and glowing, as if Stuart had kept all his faces, even his baby face, as satiny masks superimposed through which this lively intelligence and maddeningly confident self-being was now looking out. Thomas had to tell himself that this was after all a vulnerable inexperienced perhaps entirely deluded young man. He examined the golden points of Stuart’s well-shaved beard.
‘What’s this stuff about honeydew?’
‘Oh just that it’s so wonderful, it makes me so happy, just to think about it all. It’s as if one had manna to eat and didn’t want to spoil one’s palate.’
Thomas laughed, then roared with laughter, while Stuart continued to smile at him, observing his laughter with benign interest. ‘Stuart, you’re priceless! You’ve simply elected yourself out of the human condition of indelible selfishness. To remove a mountain is easy, to change any man’s temperament for the better is considerably more difficult. But you seem to assume you’ve done it already just by thinking!’
‘Well, what’s wrong with thinking,’ said Stuart, ‘that’s a sort of action too. And why should I bother about my temperament, a jolly unclear concept anyway. One soon comes to the end of psychology, and there’s no point in detailed theories about morals.’
‘That’s what your father said the other night!’
‘He meant it’s all nonsense. I mean talk about the “spiritual life” and all that is too abstract. It’s not a matter of “explaining”. All sorts of important things have no explanations.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. And mental activity is action too. But this thinking of yours isn’t theorising, it’s not systematic reflection — ’
‘Innocence is a strong idea, purity, holiness — Ideas are signals, or pointers, or refuges, or resting places — it’s hard to describe.’
‘Of course. You are fertile in metaphors. So you pray? Or sort of. You meditate?’
‘Yes.’
‘You invoke help, you invite grace — sort of?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you kneel down?’
‘Well — yes — sometimes.’
‘Am I being impertinent?’
‘Not yet!’
‘No one taught you?’
‘Of course not! Look, Thomas, these are ordinary natural things, nothing odd!’
‘And all this came naturally and painlessly out of your vague Anglican childhood. You weren’t religious at school.’
‘There’s such a thing as growing up.’
‘What about Jesus?’
‘Well, what about him?’
‘You said you didn’t want a master, but isn’t he one you can’t avoid?’
Stuart frowned. ‘Not a master. Of course he’s
there
. But he’s not God.’
‘All right. Am I tormenting you? Or are you loving it?’
‘You keep getting it wrong. I just want to grip onto the world directly, like — like a painter — ’
‘Like a spider?’
‘Like a
painter
. I don’t imagine I’m a sort of sage, I don’t believe in sages. And there’s no programme of action except that one has to earn one’s living and I do want to help people. It’s rather a state of being.’
‘A prolonged adolescence some would call it. Yes, just that blessed sense of growing up, that happy sense that some adolescents have, a conscious superior innocence. To keep that innocence and that vision of glory and that feeling of possibility and power still with you, to establish that light forever, simply not to let it dim — yes, that might seem easy. But oh you’ll be misunderstood!’
‘I already am!’
‘Yes, but it doesn’t hurt yet. And you’ll be hated. Perhaps you already are. You’ll be called timid and impotent and repressed and retarded and childish — never mind. But do you really think you can live by innocence alone?’
‘No — there’s more — ’
‘What?’
Stuart hesitated.
‘Come on, tell me.’
‘“Sink me the ship, master gunner, sink her and split her in twain, let us fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain.”’
‘What on earth are you talking about, Stuart?’
Stuart said in a low voice as if confessing a secret, ‘Courage, just sheer courage — being willing to die. It sounds awfully silly, but those lines of poetry somehow express it.’
‘Every adolescent’s favourite poem, or used to be. I’m sure your father loved it, certainly your grandfather did! Forgive me!’
‘I’m talking too much.’
‘You’re talking beautifully, please don’t stop. Since we seem to be listing the necessary things, what about love?’
‘What?’
‘Love.’
‘Oh — love.’
‘I don’t want to be what you might call abstract or literary or sentimental, but isn’t love supposed to be fundamental in the matters that concern you, your state of being, your honeydew?’
‘I’m not certain about that,’ said Stuart. ‘I think it has to look after itself, I mean it has to sort of cancel itself.’
‘Cancel?’
‘It has to un-be itself to be itself, so it can’t exactly be aimed at — ’
‘The subject embarrasses you.’
‘No, I just can’t think about it. I want to go in at the deep end as it were.’
‘Fall in love?’
‘No, not fall in love. That’s the shallow end.’
‘But can you get to the deep end without starting at the shallow end?’
‘Yes, why not. But I’m probably talking nonsense. I just mean I don’t want ordinary attachments, intimate friendships or relationships, what’s usually called love. Perhaps just the word bothers me, the name, like “God”, it’s got so — ’
‘Degraded?’
‘Messy. Messed up.’
‘If it can’t be aimed at you can’t decide where you’ll “go in”. It’s dangerous, Stuart. I liked your image of falling into the hands of God — oh, I know you didn’t mean
him
— but it’s a deep place, an ocean heaving and giving birth to itself, melting and seething in itself and into itself, interpenetrating itself, light in light and light into light, swelling inwardly, flooding itself, every part interpenetrating the rest until it spills and boils over.’
‘What’s that, sex, the unconscious?’
‘A description of God by a Christian mystic.’
‘He must have been a heretic.’
‘He was. All the best are. There are principalities and powers, fallen angels, animal gods, spirits cut loose and wandering in the void, they have to be reckoned with, St Paul knew that, he was the first heretic.’
‘Thomas, do stop making jokes. I’m against fallen angels like I’m against dramas and mysteries and looking for masters and fathers and — ’
‘Fathers?’
‘I mean, I’ve got a perfectly good ordinary one and I don’t regard it as an important symbol.’
‘Since we’re on fathers, what about mothers? What about yours?’
Stuart flushed a little, looking almost annoyed. ‘You want to explain me through my mother.’
‘Nothing so simple. I just want to know what you’ll say.’
‘I don’t see why I should say anything. I’m not your patient. I’m sorry I didn’t know my mother.’
‘Do you think about her, dream about her?’
‘Sometimes. But it’s not your sort of thing
at all
and I’d rather you didn’t touch it.’
‘All right, I won’t.’
There was a silence. Thomas thought, he’ll go now. Can I stop him, do I want to? He looked down, arranged pens and blotting paper upon his desk, his face assuming a cat-like mask of benign detached self-absorption. Stuart looked at Thomas and smiled in a secretive way, began to rise, then sat back. He said, ‘It would be ungrateful of me, after this conversation, during which you’ve been making me talk so, not to ask if you have anything special to say to me.’
‘Advice? I thought I’d been giving some — ’
‘You’ve just been provoking me, as you admitted, to see what I’d say! Come on, Thomas, you’re
thinking!
’
‘Of course 1 think a lot of things, but I don’t see any point in uttering them at this stage. Later on perhaps. I’m still puzzled. You are extraordinarily full of yourself.’
‘You mean conceited?’
‘No, solid, articulated, full of being. I just wonder — you seem to have two aims, one to be innocent and self-subsistent, the other to help people. I wonder whether these will not seriously conflict.’
‘Oh maybe,’ said Stuart. He got up and resumed his post by the window. He looked at his watch.
‘Also, there is more in you than you know of. You are not lord of yourself. Put it this way, your enemy is stronger and more ingenious than you seem to imagine.’
‘You and your mythology, how you love these pictures! You think I ought to go to hell and back, you want me to fall and learn by sin and suffering!’
Thomas laughed. ‘You want to be like the Prodigal Son’s elder brother, the chap who never went away!’
‘Exactly — except that he was cross when his brother was forgiven!’
‘Which you wouldn’t be.’ It’s time to stop this, thought Thomas. We’re tired, and we’ve both done well, considering what a mess we might have made of it. And here’s another dangerous topic. Better leave it at that for now. We’ve certainly made a start. He rose to his feet.

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