The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch Read Free Book Online Page A

in a professed contempt for others, for the stupid sheep of the world, which suffered a rude blow when he obtained only a second-class degree. Milo was also of course created in order, with his right-angle grip Mauser and his ruthless courage and his invariable success, to expunge that second.
    As a young man Monty had rather crudely mimed the ‘demonism’ which it pleased him to feel within him. Later he began, when it was almost too late, perhaps altogether too late, to feel himself to be an intellectual. If only, he thought, he had become a scholar, a collector, a scrutinizer, one whose life progressed. He had hated school-mastering and had never attempted to fructify it by real study. He was ‘rescued’ by a seemingly felicitous personification of his ‘demonism’ combined with his intellectualism in the person of Milo Fane, the ironical disillusioned diminished man of power. Milo was, at first, almost therapy. With the help of this scornful sceptical homunculus, Monty could criticize his earlier yearnings while at the same time quietly gratifying them. An author’s irony often conceals his glee. This concealment is possibly the chief function of irony.
    Years went by and Monty at intervals decided to say farewell to his sardonic alter ego. It was, after all, such a mean stupid inglorious aspect of the masterful spirit within him which he had externalized in his detective. Monty felt the need to transform himself, to discipline himself, but Milo drained him of energy and made him sometimes feel that if he abjured this mean exercise of power he would have no power at all. The serious novels which he occasionally attempted did not engage his feelings and soon collapsed, and he would then decide that he might as well give himself a quick rest by writing another Milo. It was now so easy. Monty and Milo watched each other. Long before the critics noticed it, Monty began to see the attenuation of his hero. Milo had developed a weight problem in reverse. He was a skinny man who constantly wanted to fill himself out. Milo lived on cream and Guinness and chocolate biscuits, all in vain. Monty had at first invented this idea for fun, but later it began to seem symbolic. Milo got thinner and more shrivelled and was more sarcastic and more contemptuous of the women who fell at his feet. Milo with his chocolate and his glass of milk became almost malevolent; and as he did so the therapeutic intellectual ferocity of his creator began to lose its way. Monty made at last a wild attempt to ‘save’ his cute unwanted familiar, to humanize him, to ‘relate’ him. Milo developed a sudden passion for justice, a pity for victims, a concern for young people. But the result was an unsavoury unconvincing priggishness which the original unregenerate Milo, now become as thin as a piece of wire, seemed to be wearing as a scarcely serious mask.
    Monty had wanted to rid himself of Milo. Later he felt he wanted to rid himself of himself, so huge had this growth become which had seemed at first so liberating. ‘You just are Milo Fane,’ Sophie had cried in moments of anger, perhaps of resistance after his hectoring and lecturing had reduced her to such touching tears. When he contemplated the impoverished world, the cold smart ultimately passionless mind, of his now so famous and somehow so powerful hero, Monty knew that he was not Milo Fane. But he felt frightened all the same. Something of all this he had once wanted to explain to Blaise Gavender, just in order to be able to explain it to some intelligent person. But Blaise, without listening properly, had been in such a hurry to connect everything with everything, to connect Milo with Sophie, and Sophie with Monty’s mother, with great over-simplifying leaps. Monty, annoyed with himself for having even for a moment seemed to be Blaise’s ‘patient’, soon set to work to mystify his doctor. Then he exerted his power against Blaise, trying almost frivolously to subdue him. Blaise