The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch Page A

get into a situation where this would be something simple and automatic, something expected and every day. He knew how awkward and conspicuous he was, how he embarrassed people, exasperated them, unnerved them, frightened them. He lacked charm. He was often aware when he entered a room how much he disturbed the atmosphere and broke the tempo. This made it important to find a place where he need have no persona, and awkwardness would become something unimportant, taken for granted. Perhaps it would pass off, he was young and could learn. Besides all men are mocked, Christ was mocked.
    Stuart’s dislike of modern society was made much of by those who wished to explain or interpret his behaviour, especially his attitude to sex. Stuart certainly detested sexual promiscuity, vulgar public sex, the lack of privacy and reticence, the lack of restraint and respect, the lack of reverence, the lack of inwardness. He was afraid of the future, of a world without religion, of crazed spirit without absolute. He was afraid of technology, and of the decay of human language and the loss of the soul. But these reactions were not the prime movers of his asceticism. He was perhaps nearer, though he laughed at it and gave it no force, to Harry’s charge of a ‘higher hedonism’. How high can it go? He wanted to love the world and not to be caught in traps, to have a calm lucid consciousness and an untroubled conscience. In Stuart’s conception of his ‘task’ celibacy held a central place, not just because of the mucky sex life of people he knew and heard of, but because of some more positive conception of innocence. Why start? Stuart said to himself. To love without entanglement, that, for him at any rate, meant celibacy. Many others in the past had seen it so, and in this at least he was not alone. He was sorry now that he had, through answering a direct question put to him by Giles Brightwalton, let his resolve become public, a matter for speculation and jokes. His ‘innocence’ was to be something private and simple, to be like a lonely animal in its lair at night, or as he had sometimes felt at happy times in his childhood, secure in bed, hearing Harry moving about downstairs. That such a picture might seem dull, or suggest a retarded or childish personality, did not dismay him. Perhaps he just was a little childish, and perhaps this was no great matter, even a good thing. The effect upon him of his mother, ‘the girl from far away’, was something more complex. She had indeed figured in his child mind, and even still, more dimly, as an angel. He could scarcely remember her, his images of her hovered between memory and dream. Her mystic form had been a refuge from a thoughtless stepmother and a neglectful father and a brother preferred by both. She knew about love, about how he lacked it. Her name was Teresa Maxton O‘Neill, a Catholic, born in Dunedin of Irish immigrant parents. She had seen the great ocean seals basking on golden seaweed at the end of the world. She had seen the albatross.
    A disinterested observer might have wondered why Stuart so ardently rejected God, since he did not simply sit and meditate, he also knelt down, sometimes even prostrated himself. Once again, Stuart, recognising no problem, instinctively resolved apparent contradictions. Meditation was refuge, quietness, purification, replenishing, return to whiteness. Prayer was struggle, reflection, self-examination, it was more particular, involving concern about other people and naming of names. Harry had said that Stuart wanted to be like Job, always guilty before God, an exalted form of sadomasochism. Stuart’s rejection of God was, in effect, his rejection of that ‘old story’, to use Ursula’s words, as alien to his being. His mind refused it, spewed it out, not as a dangerous temptation, but as alien tissue. Of course he wanted to be ‘good’; and so he wanted to avoid guilt and remorse, but those states did not interest him. Towards his sins