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The exact moment at which her disaffection with existentialism began may now be hard to determine. The spiritual claim that quarrels with it is present as early as Under the Net; and in a sense this argument has continued.
In the 1950s Murdoch began to read the great French mystic Simone Weil, whose influence on the novels A.S. Byatt has discussed in Degrees of Freedom. It is Weil’s strength that she does not, unlike Sartre, sentimentalise the position of being radically denuded and outside society. Murdoch has called Simone Weil’s Need for Roots ‘one of the very few profound and original political treatises of our time’(kv). It argues that the most terrible deprivation possible is the destruction of one’s past and one’s culture. Weil’s argument is that the affliction and degradation caused by the destruction of roots are such that they deprive all but the saintly person of the capacity to change or ‘unself’ from inside. The uprooted hurt and uproot others. Only for the saintly can virtue have no fixed address, in Weil’s philosophy and in Murdoch’s fiction. Morality depends, for Weil, on the slow attenuation or destruction of the ego, which itself requires a quiet environment. Sudden or violent deracination can mean complete or demonic demoralisation.
It is not that existentialism (or formalism) are wrong to attack the substantial self. It is rather that their attack is for Murdoch in bad faith. In pretending that the essential self does not exist the existentialist may behave like an ‘egotist-without-an-I’. The Buddhist attack on the fictionality of the ego is more profound, for both Weil and Murdoch, because it is based on a realistic assessment of the limited capacity of the ego to decentre itself, and because it is nonetheless designed to alter perception and behaviour. The originality of Murdoch’s novels is that they are full of a sense of what it means to come from one of the luckier, stabler societies or sections within that society, in an unlucky century, but avoid false piety about either that luck or that misfortune. The make-believe of ordinary life and the painful destruction of ordinary human illusion can be carried out anywhere, in a refugee camp or at a tea-table. Nowhere is privileged.
Just as her recoil from existentialism begins early, so does her attraction to a countervailing soul-picture which is, though absorbing much from Freud, religious yet (like Buddhism) atheist (and hence scandalous both to some Christians and to many humanists). Apart from a polemical letter to the New Statesman in 1941 defending the fellowtravelling Oxford Labour Group against J.W. Joad’s ‘liberal ethics of the nineteenth century’ and his facile invocation of ‘truth, beauty, goodness and love’,12 Murdoch’s earliest prose publications are three reviews of books with Christian topics, written during the war for the Adelphi magazine. They already prefigure her developed ‘philosophy’ of the 1960s, which she pertinently called not so much a philosophy as a moral psychology (Caen, 1978) in its interest in the differences between people, and in ‘how conduct is changed and how consciousness is changed’ (Bellamy, 1977). These reviews, while making clear that she was non-Christian, also show that she was prepared calmly and sympathetically to consider the claim that ‘science and philosophy may come to rest afresh upon a specifically religious exposition of the nature of reality’. Two other passages seem relevant to later preoccupations. The first concerns her interest in the dualism of worldliness and unworldliness, and the problem of the contemplative’s ‘return to the Cave’: ‘One may sympathize with this horror that turns its face utterly from this world as a place of unrelieved filth and corruption – but the problem of the return to the Cave remains a very real one for Christianity.’ In the second she compares the detachment of the artist with that of the saint. The artist, she argues, is not ‘apart’ as the saint is: ‘He sees the earth freshly and strangely but he is ultimately part of it, he is inside the things he sees and speaks of as well as outside them. He is of their substance, he suffers with them. Of saints I know nothing…’13 That collocation of ‘fresh’ with ‘strange’ prefigures many of the effects of her novels. The ‘odd’ for her is often close to being or to revealing the beautiful.
From 1948 to 1963, when she gave up full-time teaching, she was Tutor in Philosophy and Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 1956 she married the writer, critic and Oxford don John Bayley. John Fletcher has called theirs ‘one of the most fruitful literary and critical partnerships of our time, and remarkable in any time’.14 While Murdoch showed her novels to nobody until they were absolutely finished, she and Bayley shared a common humanism and an admiration for Shakespeare and Tolstoy as the writers who best succeed in creating the illusion that their characters are free.
It is rare to find someone who excelled, as did Murdoch, both as a novelist and as a moral philosopher. The precedent at which she glances at various points is the founder of European philosophy, Plato. In 1968 she called herself a Platonist (Rose, 1968). As well as philosophy, Plato is rumoured to have written poetry which he later tore up, and I think that in Murdoch we may intuit what she saw in Plato in The Sovereignty of Good – some version of ‘the peculiarly distressing struggle between artist and saint’ (88). She spoke of this as a theme in her work in numerous interviews. She described the division between would-be saints – Belfounder, Tayper-Pace, Ann Peronett – who have the certainty and power which come as gifts of faith, and possess a mysterious radiance beneath their ordinariness, and the would-be artists – Donaghue, Meade, Randall Peronett – who are imposing form on to essentially uncontrollable nature. The saint is unconsciously good, silent, and for him it is action that counts. The artist is consciously, aesthetically creating his life. In an interview she suggested that the importance of this conflict had to do with the ways in which the temptation to impose form existed in life as much as in art: the value of truth must pull at both.15
Thus the ‘ancient quarrel’ vivifies the novels themselves at the level of the moral psychology of the characters. Her depiction of artists – Miles in Bruno’s Dream, Bradley in The Black Prince – is always suspicious; not, as Dipple has too simply argued, that they are necessarily bad artists – in The Fire and the Sun Murdoch makes perfectly clear her view that ‘Good artists can be bad men’ (84) – but because ‘art’ itself is an analogue of the process by which we create in life a self-serving world view in which other people figure merely as subsidiary characters. This can be the only sense in which she refers, for example, to Michael Meade in The Bell as an artist – a man who has no strictly artistic ambitions.
Meeting Iris Murdoch in 1960 Ved Mehta wrote, ‘Among her friends and students Miss Murdoch has the reputation of being a saint, and she has no enemies’ (Mehta, 1961).
A received view of the post-war British novel treats it as in slow retreat from a simple-minded and ‘reactionary’ social realism, and moving towards an embrace of the purportedly ‘radical’ virtues of fantasy, Gothic, and romance. A new generation of writers, beneficiaries of the 1944 Butler Education Act which enabled children from poorer homes to enjoy higher education, reacted in the 1950s against the canons of Modernism. They perceived it as a metropolitan and rentier mode, the writing of a privileged group typified often by Virginia Woolf. The new realism, championed by Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow, was resolutely provincial – anxious to celebrate the regions and to return, against the stylistic narcissism and self-consciousness of London and international Modernism, to the liberal conscience of Trollope, Wells, or George Eliot. The new realism, however, showed signs of strain. According to both Marxist and some liberal commentators this was because realism was underpinned by ‘liberal humanism’, an outmoded or inadequate ‘ideology’ whose superannuation cleared the way for more self-conscious, speculative and ironic forms. Social realism came to be seen as a naive or inauthentic mode, relying on a false view of the unified self, of perception and the innocent eye, and a falsely optimistic estimate of human history. And just as ‘realism’ came to be seen as a form of whiggish romancing, so ‘romance’ was to be the new realism. The novel thus acts out a Miltonic fall myth, first innocent and unselfknowing, later fallen, recessive, and wickedly self-conscious.
Murdoch’s career strikingly belies this consoling map. She did criticise Modernism – or its symbolist legacy – in her early and influential essays, whose hostilities were very much of their time, and which have been plundered by critics for too few ideas. She did not start as a liberal and a social realist and move towards more ‘apocalyptic’ and Gothic forms. Instead she started her work with a devastating critique of liberalism which resembles a systematic purgation, and began her career as a novelist in Under the Net where others of her generation look like ending theirs, with a work which is witty and anxious about art-as-lies, but which also scorns the banal play which might have called its own illusionism into doubt. Such self-conscious play with the form, even in the later perplexing The Black Prince, is peripheral.
It might unkindly be said that liberal humanists in Britain have sometimes seemed to resemble Murdoch’s character Eric in Australia where, ever since he arrived, ‘people have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down’ (NG 42) – either worrying away at the code like a game of Patience that seems unlikely to come out, or, in the case of the more prophetically inclined, as if it were just about to give way to some novel and more modish system of obligations whose name they were anxious to be the first to learn. For Murdoch the faults of liberalism were to a large extent the faults of existentialism. Both oppose, too simply, an innocent self to a guilty society, an inheritance they share from Romanticism. For her the question was posed not in terms of the mischievous default of history to make us secure and happy, but in terms of our own deep unacknowledged unfreedom and irrationality, our complicity in ‘lifemyths’ we unknowingly construct and live by, and our deep defencelessness, which we wrap up in various ways, to history, chance and contingency. She had of course political concerns. She campaigned among many other things against American involvement in Vietnam, and for homosexual law reform, and the novels obliquely discuss many public themes.16 But, for her, man is not innately rational, good or free. ‘Reason’ has to be earned, unendingly struggled for, and her world is not inertly comprehensible, as in ‘naive’ realism, but inexhaustibly mysterious and energetic beyond our easy grasp. An intense lyricism about this mystery marked her out from the first. To put her critique another way: there is in her work only ever the limited, very messy, imperfect and unperfectible task of love, and its failure. Society is not merely there outside us as a system of vulgar privations. Its nastinesses begin in our heads.
In both French and English novels of the mid-twentieth century the hero can appear as a potentially absolute individual unfairly circumscribed by a world of mere types. Although Kingsley Amis’s is a comic existentialism, both Lucky Jim and Roquentin seem similarly to dramatise their predicaments as those of ‘freedoms caught in a trap’ (SRR 36). It is the others who are irrational or falsely rational. The hero may, like Meurseult, be the only person who knows that he is powered by unreason and may thereby be ‘authentic’ in a way denied the less self-conscious; or like Bernard Sands in Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After may have his one moment of cruelty, an aberrance that must be neutralised before it destroys him.
Murdoch attacked both ‘self-knowledge’ and ‘sincerity’ as second-rate and often delusive virtues. She argued that both French existentialism and English linguistic philosophy are heirs of Romanticism and share a common voluntarism, a romantic overemphasis on the will. Both separate the moral agent from all that surrounds him and, in speaking of the will as if it were or could easily be free, wholly ignore the personality and the huge and daunting power of its secret, fragmentary, opaque and obsessive inner life. The unenlightened self is mechanical, and escape from it is hard. ‘Self-examination’ strengthens its power. Willed acts of imaginative attention to what lies outside it can help erode it. In the important essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ (1970) she attacked the hero of much contemporary fiction as
the lonely brave man, defiant without optimism, proud without pretension, always an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of society. He is an adventurer. He is godless. He does not suffer from guilt. He thinks of himself as free. He may have faults, he may be self-assertive or even violent, but he has sincerity and courage, and for this we forgive him…He might do anything.
She called this hero ‘existentialist’ and noted that he already looked a little out of date. He is the hero of novels by Hemingway, Lawrence, Sartre, Camus, Amis…It is typical of existentialism that it ‘either makes his responsibility absolute or abolishes it’ (Bigsby, 1982). Existentialism’s promise of total human freedom is a bogus one. Much of Murdoch’s moral psychology boils down to a criticism of the idea of fast moral change as romantic and false, and a defence of slow moral change as something difficult, piecemeal, and always incomplete.
‘Existentialists and Mystics’ is a meditation on various themes – on the existentialist novel, on the novel which contains an alternative ‘mystical’ hero, and on the place of literature in the new moral and political scene. The question of whether the present age is so wholly different from the past as to be deemed discontinuous with it is debated from various points of view. The existentialist novel tries to be cheerfully godless but abounds in a gloom which is secretly self-satisfied because, from its point of view, man is God himself. It is this which makes that novel look already old-fashioned. The mystical attitude is a ‘second thought about the matter and reflects the uneasy suspicion that perhaps after all man is not God’. ‘The existentialist novel shows us freedom and virtue as the assertion of the will. The mystical novel shows us freedom and virtue as understanding, or obedience to the Good.’ And the mystical novel (Greene, White, Bellow, Spark, Golding and by implication Murdoch herself) is the more recent development. The existentialist’s is a ‘natural mode of being of the capitalist era’. It is the mystic therefore who offers the deeper critique.
As we readily recognise and sympathise with the hero of will-power, so we can also recognise and sympathise with the mystical hero. He too is a man in tension, but here the tension is not between will and nature, but between nature and good. This is the man who has given up traditional religion but is still haunted by a sense of the reality and unity of some sort of spiritual world. The imagery here is the imagery of height and distance. Much is required of us and we are far from our goal. The virtue of the mystical hero is humility. Whereas the existentialist hero is the anxious man trying to impose or assert or find himself, the mystical hero is an anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself. The chief temptation of the former is egoism, of the latter masochism. The philosophical background or protective symbolism is fairly clear in each case. The first hero is the new version of the romantic man, the man of power, abandoned by God, struggling on bravely, sincerely and alone. This image consoles by showing us man as strong, self-reliant and uncrushable. The second hero is the new version of the man of faith, believing in goodness without religious guarantees, guilty, muddled, yet not without hope. This image consoles us by showing us man as frail, godless, and yet possessed of genuine intuitions of an authoritative good. (em)
Murdoch notes that of course no pure example of either novel, or of either hero, exists. Both existentialist and mystical heroes are marked by their apparent isolation from moral norms; both are ‘outsiders’. All novels must therefore be mixed. She also argues here for a new empirical and utilitarian political morality which starts at the level of food and shelter. It is worth noting that the essay argues for both empiricism and mysticism, which are not seen as in conflict. Unlike Bertrand Russell, who presented the classic, inadequate Western view in his significantly named ‘Mysticism and Logic’, Murdoch sees no opposition here. The mystical hero, like Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, can be fully engaged morally and politically: Tallis is engaged to the point of exhaustion. The mystic is, rather, one who has begun to grasp the absolute ‘for-nothing-ness’ and absolute lack of consolation involved in the Good. ‘Goodness is needful, one has to be good, for nothing, for immediate and obvious reasons, because somebody is hungry or somebody is crying.’ From this point of view the current demythologisation of religion is ‘a great moral tonic, because it asks the ordinary believer to do what only the exceptional one could do in the past, that is live a religious life without illusions’: that is, without any belief in the afterlife, in rewards, or in God. In one sense a truly religious life is uniquely possible without belief in God.
The novel is seen in this essay as taking on an ambiguous role in purveying moral symbolism. ‘The mystical novelist may or may not be a good man or a good novelist, but what he is attempting to do, perhaps unsuccessfully, is to invent new religious imagery (or twist old religious imagery) in an empty situation.’ He will run the danger that he may merely ‘reintroduce the old fatherly figure of God behind a facade of fantastical imagery or sentimental adventures in cosy masochism…It is easy to say there is no God. It is not so easy to believe it and to draw the consequences.’
‘Existentialists and Mystics’ is an important essay, which necessitates some re-reading of Murdoch’s work from the beginning, for Under the Net already has two heroes, not one – a voluntarist and a mystic, or alternatively a would-be artist and a would-be saint, one living by the will and by a hunger for aesthetic form, the other living by a constant sacrifice of the will. The essay also suggests that moral terms are a species of universal, that ‘we recognize good or decent people in times and literatures remote from our own…Patroclus’ invariable kindness. Cordelia’s truthfulness. Alyosha telling his father not to be afraid of hell.’ This, too, invites us to ask new questions about Murdoch’s own fiction, and about what kind of man it is in it that we are being asked to admire.
Murdoch argued for the centrality of the old naturalistic idea of character for the business of writing novels, and also wrote about the ways in which too great an attention to the form of the book can damage the illusion that the characters are free. In ‘Against Dryness’ and ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ she argued that the task for the novelist was to recreate ‘realism’, which often meant avoiding the bad habits – overt design, patterning, symbol and myth – which damage it. Her fiction, however, appeared to be written by the kind of novelist she least approved of, since it was much preoccupied with pattern, utilised fantasy and myth, and had generally the character implied by the term already used – ‘romance’. This gave criticism its main opportunity. She had written of the novel as if it were a vehicle of human differentiation and belonged to a vast campaign for the preservation of human plurality, and of the novelist as a tender detective of human souls, but herself seemed to write the novel of human resemblances and exciting symbolic conflations. The more open novels were used in England to punish the more closed and Gothic ones, and critics scrutinised the books for delinquent symmetries and wicked coincidences. Alternatively the critic, mindful that Murdoch had urged a distinction between fantasy and imagination, searched the work for ‘fantasy-apprehensions’ like a metaphysical park attendant, as if what was left once these were speared were some pure undiluted essence of the real. We have been given the choice between unmasking the works and denouncing their personnel.
I think criticism has been too absolutist and pious about the early theory. A writer theorises in a particular spirit. She may be trying out a variety of different positions in the effort to understand the shape and nature of her gift, rather than announcing a single unchanging campaign manifesto. The kinship between work and theory is likely to be complex in any writer worth reading. We no longer praise either Wordsworth or Ben Jonson for what, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads or in Timber, they thought they had put into their work. A relaxed account of Murdoch’s work which does not quarantine off certain works because they are generically diverse is needed. The writer has the right to as much ‘organis’d innocence’ as will enable her work; the critic is not obliged to follow.
I am not suggesting that those early and influential essays should be disregarded. There are arguments within them that now belong to the epoch in which they were written, and which have less relevance, and others which still stand. There is a degree of openness in them which deserves underlining. I hope for the remainder of this chapter to suggest how they can help illuminate her career.
Murdoch’s theory has been too often cited as though it involved an opposition between two discrete terms, rather than a mediation between extremes. In ‘Against Dryness’ and ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ she does not argue for a choice between ‘realism’ on the one hand, and ‘myth’ on the other, but for a dialectic or mediation between them. She is proposing a middle way. She describes how the realism of the great nineteenth-century novelists has split into two antagonistic and equally incomplete tendencies. On the one hand the ‘conventional’ social realism of ‘journalistic’ novelists produced a world of dead, predictable public facts divorced from psychological inwardness. On the other hand the ‘neurotic’ psychological realism of ‘crystalline’ novelists produced a wholly spiritualised, private world of unified values divorced from facts. The split – in which she declared herself uninterested much more quickly than the critics (Bradbury, 1976) – seemed to owe something to Socrates’ advice in the Philebus that it is bad if we arrive at the One or at the Many too quickly. It notably fits the literary politics of the 1920s – Woolf’s differences from Arnold Bennett, say – and the division of novelists in that period into Moderns and Contemporaries. The writer Murdoch cites as an example of how to marry these two sets of warring virtue – naturalism and symbolism – is Shakespeare. ‘Perhaps only Shakespeare managed to create at the highest level both images and people; and even Hamlet looks second rate compared with Lear’ (ad). In ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ she argued that the greatness of Dostoevsky, Melville, Emily Brontë and Hawthorne was not of the same order as that of Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and especially Tolstoy. This was scarcely her last word on the matter, however. When I interviewed her in 1983 she no longer recalled this distinction but said that, if obliged to ‘place’ these respective geniuses then, would undoubtedly consider Dostoevsky a greater writer than George Eliot. She also paid tribute to such diverse forebears as Proust, Homer, Wuthering Heights, Dickens and James; and to such very diverse romances as Treasure Island, Peter Pan and The Tempest; and to Shakespeare generally.
A task for critics today would seem to be to understand the indebtedness of her demonic, tormented sinners and saints and of the curious co-existence in her work of malevolence and goodness, to the dark tragi-comedies of Dostoevsky, and to romance; and also to focus her recoil from the rational, optimistic importunacies of George Eliot. Murdoch’s assertion of the primary value of ‘character’ has meant that she has sometimes been placed, much too simply, in one camp. It was always her point that ‘character’ and ‘form’ must be reconcilable. Great literature would provide two satisfactions rather than one. It was never merely that ‘there is a temptation for any novelist…to imagine that the problem of a novel is solved…as soon as a form in the sense of a satisfactory myth has been evolved’ (sbr). The problem was also that myth is inescapable. ‘The mythical is not something “extra”: we live in myth and symbol all the time’ (mmm). The novelist must use myth and magic to help liberate us from myth and magic, an enterprise which, since both writer and client are frail and human, can never be more than minutely successful; and the artist, in her view, had better not give himself too many airs. We are all symbol-makers, mythmakers, story-tellers, she repeatedly asserted. Art is, as it were, the ordinary human condition, and not (or not merely) the peculiar task and property of a vain crew of specialists.
