Wild Minuet

By Melvin Maddocks

THE BLACK PRINCE

by IRIS MURDOCH 366 pages. Viking. $7.95.

At mid-whirl in Iris Murdoch's latest witch dance, one of her characters stammers: "I didn't know ordinary educated middle-class English people could behave the way we behaved."

This cry from the well-mannered heart carries across 15 novels and almost 20 years--in fact from Under the Net, which the author wrote in 1954.

With a perversity hardly matched since Shakespeare put an ass's head on Bottom, Miss Murdoch has made a career out of bewitching into beastliness the discreetly charming British bourgeoisie. In her neo-Gothic tales, subtle spells fill the air until respectable Londoners seem to sprout horns under their bowlers, rolled umbrellas (one would swear) resemble snakes, and good gray Anglican church towers turn primitive, not to say phallic.

Never has Oxford Philosopher Murdoch staged more perfervid rituals, or composed more coolly brilliant commentaries upon them, than in The Black Prince. As usual, the master spell is love. The book's narrator is a 58-year-old failed writer named Bradley Pearson. Grinding his teeth in silence, Bradley has been waiting for the moment of absolute inspiration. Nothing less will do. His cursed Doppelgdnger, his best friend, is Arnold Baffin, a fluent hack who turns out popular novels with religious overtones while Bradley grubs away in a tax inspector's office. Freedom is the cruel lure of Murdoch novels. Opting for early retirement, Brad ley believes his time of freedom, his time of inspiration, has come: "I can be a great writer now." But instead of solitude and virgin-white pages covered with copperplate writing, what awaits this cold, private, very fussy man is the sublime messiness of love.

Murdoch love stories are like wild minuets: all decorum on the surface, barbaric ecstasies underneath. The magical music starts, and partners, to their own amazement, find themselves in one another's entranced arms. Just as suddenly the music stops, the trance is over. Then, just as suddenly, there are second partners all round. Before Bradley's pen can reach paper, he falls in love with Arnold's wife and, immediately after, with Arnold's 19-year-old daughter Julian.

But here is no command perform ance by author's fiat. The Black Prince is that rarest of novels, one which conveys the texture, the immediacy, the superb improbability of love as it hap pens. The metamorphosis of Bradley from a self-concerned prig into a dancer of the rites of spring does such full justice to the mysteries of the heart, imagination and the groin, as to seem predestined.

Poor old Bradley's brief, intense affair with Julian brings this novel -- and perhaps Miss Murdoch's whole body of writing -- to a high point. All the passionate Murdoch questions get passionately asked. What is the connection between love and death? Is "black Eros," as a transfigured Bradley comes to think, the artist's name for truth -- the name for all the knowledge he seeks?

Can the artist be defined, after all, as a lover who remembers?

The dark gods do not come cheap in Murdoch novels. A suicide and a murder occur. Most of what passes for love is "like a dream, for gotten" and this is the worst spell of all. Doomed by the very powers he has released, Bradley never does become his kind of artist, but he does become Miss Murdoch's kind of lover -- a man with "a sort of certainty, perhaps the only sort."

Lover or artist? Neither or both? In the end, Bradley Pearson's designation scarcely matters, for The Black Prince is really the story of all souls who traffic with their demons in order to transcend, sometimes at a terrible risk, the meanness, the dull ness, the lower depths of being human. Blessed are those who live to tell about it, pre-eminently Iris Murdoch.

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