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John Bayley has acutely observed that ‘the modern reflective consciousness cannot in some sense but see itself as taking part in a novel, the novel being the standard literary reflection in our age.’5 Against this might be set Simone Weil’s dictum that ‘Just as God, being outside the universe, is at the same time the centre, so each man imagines he is situated in the centre of the world. The illusion of perspective places him at the centre of space.’6 The artists Jake and, differently, Mischa, see themselves or are perceived as being at the centre. The saintly figures are struggling in some sense ‘to give up [the] imaginary position as the centre not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of [the] soul’.7 Decentring is the book’s theme. Peter, with the strength to survive at the edge of the world, contrasts with Nina whose dispossession demoralises her and, when no one sufficiently imagines her needs, leads to her suicide. Only for the saintly can virtue have no fixed address.
Calvin tells Rosa at the end of the book that ‘ [You] will never know the truth and you will read the signs in accordance with your deepest wishes. That is what we humans always have to do. Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones…The truth lies deeper, deeper’ (278). His is a point of view Murdoch has explicitly rebutted,8 and which within the book is echoed and answered by Peter’s avowal to Rosa, when his research into the script he was working on turns out to have been worthless: ‘One reads the signs as best one can, and one may be totally misled. But it’s never certain that the evidence will turn up that makes everything plain. It was worth trying’ (287). Peter possesses that ‘superior honesty required to tear up one’s theory’ (SG 96) when it is disproved. His ideal of a realism of approximations and towardnesses which depends on a certain unselfish directedness is Murdoch’s too. Both Peter’s and Calvin’s look like styles of relativism, but Calvin’s depends on the notion of an absolute we are being darkly cheated and deprived of. Peter’s is a more relaxed, disciplined and cheerful agnosticism.
The Sandcastle (1957) is a romance about the love of Mor, a prep-school master interested in politics, for the young half-French artist Rain Carter. Mor is divided between his sour and controlling wife Nan and the innocent, fey painter. Rain comes to the school to paint the retired headmaster Demoyte, a charming old despot. She loves Mor both as a man and as a substitute for her own, now dead, jealous father. The novel treats painting as A Severed Head was to treat sculpture – as a paradigm case of the problems of representing the human subject in art, and an implicit analogy of the mysterious creation of the novelist. The Sandcastle is consistently interesting, sensitive and moving, yet there is a slightness about its final effect which contrasts with our clear sense of the author’s gravity. Nan’s disappointment is never focused for us, and because it is hard to imagine the Mors’ marriage when it was successful, it is also hard to imagine the book’s aftermath. On the other hand Nan’s rebirth of desire for Bill once she feels rejected by him is perceptively done, and the novel is full of acute touches. There is also a characteristic division in the author’s sympathy which she has not yet managed fully to put to work. We experience her sympathy for Rain and the duller Mor, and therefore hope for the success of the affair. The idea-play, however, which comes from Bledyard, is on the side of respect for the proprieties of marriage. The Sandcastle is a less successful novel than the later study of adultery The Sacred and Profane Love Machine because the division in our sympathies between wife and mistress is so unequal. We begin to understand Nan’s disappointment but insufficiently to want Mor to return to her. The later book is more painful and distressing because we come to know both wife and mistress.
There is also a recurrent paradox in that the central characters, who have had so much loving attention devoted to them, can be, while fully animated, less alive or less ‘typical’ than some of the people only half-attended to at the edge of the book. Here Murdoch’s successes are the silly, gauche yet innocent and unselfish headmaster Everard, who preaches unheard that ‘Love knows! There is always, if we ponder deeply enough and are ready in the end to crucify our selfish desires, some thing which we can do which is truly for the best and truly for the good of all concerned’ (206); and the tender-hearted roguish tyrant Demoyte, who wishes Mor to have Rain in spite of, and because of, his being in love with her himself. Lastly there is the eccentric Old Etonian art master Bledyard. Demoyte and Bledyard represent two opposite types who often compel our sympathy in the early books, one with the charm of a complete worldliness, the other intensely other-worldly. Bledyard plays the role occupied by Hugo in Under the Net. He is the would-be saint who represents an intolerable, charmless ‘best’, the puritan an-aesthetic world of silence and truth. Just as Hugo argued for the purifying effect of silence, showing Jake how to renounce and be ordinary, so Bledyard is an artist who will not or cannot paint any longer and who constantly intervenes and acts as an unsolicited voice of conscience: ‘I have to bear witness…I think you are acting wrongly’ (211). Bledyard’s uninvited sermon to Mor in the squash courts, whence he has sent Rain away from a rendezvous, argues for what Mor finds an intolerable austerity. He denounces ‘happiness’ as a poor and a selfish guide, and pleads in effect for Mor to crucify his desires and open himself to any hurt in concern for others. Freedom, for Bledyard, is total absence of self-concern.
Two other features of Bledyard’s case deserve note. One is that he is, with his speech impediment and his eccentricity, a ludicrous figure, mocked by all, including Mor and Rain. The scene where he gives a school lecture, at which the boys have substituted a slide of the digestive tract of a frog for the enormous Socratic head of the aged Rembrandt, is a triumph of controlled tone. The reader, like the audience, is convulsed with happy laughter, yet what Bledyard is saying has always about it a disturbing impractical truthfulness. We are made to feel that Bledyard is mocked rather as Christ was mocked. The mockery is partly Murdoch’s own irony and disguise, as with Socrates, for whom the ironies always were thickest when the approach to truth came nearest.
The second interesting feature of Bledyard’s case is his Platonic hostility to representational art. Just as Hugo approved of Leonardo’s deliberately having made The Last Supper perishable, and favoured the instantaneous obsolescence of fireworks, so Bledyard is interested in the debates about iconoclasm in the early Eastern Church and favours Byzantine art. He feels that a loss of proper reverence occurred in the Renaissance: ‘It is a fact…that we cannot really observe really observe our betters.’ (The repetition is a result of his speech impediment.) ‘Vices and peculiarities are easy to portray. But who can look reverently enough upon another human face? The true portrait painter should be a saint – and saints have other things to do than paint portraits’ (77).
Bledyard stands in relation to the rest of the book as do Hugo and Peter. Like anti-matter to matter, they are out of focus with ordinary human appetite. You can focus on either the saints or their artist antitypes – which is to say, on everyone else – separately, but not together. Their function in the books is to point to an (unrealisable) ideal which even they cannot wholly embody, though they are directed with a certain hope, faith and openness towards it.
Bledyard speaks two related kinds of wisdom. One is related to moral immediacy in personal relations, the other to the interplay of truthfulness and skill necessary to the artist. In this second area his effect is most palpable. He has a way of appearing in the book at crucial moments not just in Rain’s love affair with Mor but also in her attempts to picture and ‘see’ Demoyte. Each time he appears Rain recognises his authority and realises that a change in her painting is necessary. Her painting comes to seem, as I think art does to Murdoch, a provisional affair, never wholly finished. Art, like morality, must be pulled at by the value of a truth or perfection which is unreachable. Rain is desolate when Bledyard criticises her painting at an early stage, yet is helped by this criticism and rethinks her task. Finally, when she renounces Mor, she sees her representation of Demoyte once more anew and remakes what she has done again. At the same time Mor is held in his marriage, not by his own sudden conversion to Bledyard’s austerities, but by his wife’s brave and worldly cunning in staging a public scene. This compromises him and leaves him little choice but to pursue the political career she had formerly opposed.
As its title implies, The Sandcastle is much concerned with notions of form and permanence. Rain had been brought up on the tideless Mediterranean, where the sand was too dry to make a sandcastle. She finally tells Mor that, since he would have had to give up his political ambitions and his children for her, their affair would have been ‘all dry sand running through the fingers’ (300). Characters are throughout realised by their aesthetic preferences. Nan likes matching colour-schemes and moves everything in the house around as an expression of her need for control and territory. Demoyte lives in the magnificence of superimposed Persian rugs, drowning in splendour. Evvy’s apartments are drably unimaginative, and Bledyard characteristically lives in a stripped room, void of colour or comfort: ‘The floor was scrubbed and the walls whitewashed. No picture, no coloured object adorned it. The furniture was of pale wood and even the bed had a white cover’ (51). This recalls Hugo’s bedroom in Under the Net. Goodness, for Murdoch, depends on stripping away the consolations of a private world. Most art, like most morality, is a necessary realm of compromise and second-best.
The theme of the artist and the saint lies at the heart of An Unofficial Rose (1962) in the marriage of Ann and Randall Peronett, and is early dramatised in the row Randall stages to provide himself with a pretext for cutting loose and joining his mistress. A.S. Byatt has rightly drawn our attention to the book’s Jamesian qualities.9 James continues to haunt Murdoch at least until Nuns and Soldiers (1980), which partly reworks the plot of The Wings of the Dove. Here there is ‘beautiful’ speech, periphrasis on the part of the narrator, and the creation of a decorous golden world. Jane Austen is another presence, and Hugh presents Miranda with her works.
An Unofficial Rose is set in a Tatler world of two neighbouring Kentish houses and concerns the manoeuvrings which follow the death of Fanny Peronett. The title refers to the dog-rose of Rupert Brooke’s 1913 poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which, unlike the orderly flowers of Berlin, where Brooke is composing his poem, he perceives as sweetly undisciplined and ‘unkempt’. The poem, itself an improvisation, hinges on the conceit that nature in Germany is punctual and formally ordered, while in England it is gloriously free.
Thus Randall, a would-be artist too rapacious to succeed, is offended by his wife’s formlessness and feels stifled by her capacity for self-sacrifice. He lives for and inhabits a stylish world, farming cultivated roses, and objects to Ann in that she is as ‘messy and flabby and open as a dogrose’ (37). Ann is busy and unselfish and, while not odd as Bledyard is odd, has a shy awkwardness and stubborn self-withholding that offends Randall. In The Red and the Green (1965) the artist Barnie is similarly hurt by his good wife Kathleen’s unyielding, passive stoicism. Such virtuous characters have a special negativity which refuses the imagination of those they live with, perhaps a consequence of how hard they work at not imagining wrong. Such deliberate gracelessness offers the onlooker no imaginative foothold. This seems a just perception, and I know of no other novelist capable of making the point, or of relating it to the virtues of the artwork itself, since art depends on style and stylishness, and requires and feeds off form. ‘Goodness accepts the contingent. Love accepts the contingent. Nothing is more fatal to love than to want it to have form,’ the sententious vicar Douglas Swann says (UR 130). Art, in making its pact with contingency, must however embrace enough to test its own form without yielding to banality.
Freedom, too, is a subject of the book. Characters are frequently surprised when actions they had planned and claimed for themselves turn out to have been partly engineered by others. Randall discovers that his action in stealing Lindsay Rimmer from the aged detective-story writer Emma Sands, to whom she had been companion, was at least partly connived at by Emma: ‘His action was stolen from him’ (202). In direct contrast Ann finds that her inability to claim Felix Meecham for herself, despite their mutual love and despite her desertion by Randall, was worked at by her daughter Miranda, who was in love with Felix herself: ‘She had been part of someone else’s scheme’ (325). Randall, typically, resents this threat to his supremacy. Ann, as typically, does not.
This is not to say that even the most powerful and worldly characters can ever fully ‘own’ their actions. All have to suffer their own unfreedom, but do so with a difference. Even the ‘witch-like’ Emma, despite the tough and very quick-witted front she puts on, is after all abandoned first by Hugh, then by Lindsay, and is about to die. The prissily unappealing Miranda, who ensures her mother’s disappointment, is thwarted herself; and it is not impossible that Ann will get Randall, whom she still loves, back in the end.
If there is a pecking order in the book it has at the top not the ‘freest’ characters but simply those who most acutely and earthily see how things are. Lacking a taste for the fantasy of an unconditioned world, they thereby possess a power denied to those deluded by the notion of freedom. The theme recurs in Nuns and Soldiers. The whole complicated imbroglio of love and passion is held in being as the unstable product of a variety of different wills.
In relation to this pecking order Ann is the most passive and acquiescent, and Emma the most cunning and authoritative of the moral agents. Murdoch’s different sympathy for both seems clear. There is energy if not approval behind Emma, and like her near-homophones Honor in A Severed Head and Hannah in The Unicorn – and, though rather differently, Millie in The Red and the Green – she is a psychopomp, one who leads the others towards some ambiguous wisdom. That her detective stories hilariously champion a hero of the will (‘Marcus Boode’) suggests that we are not to take her without irony. She is, however, earthy, witty, wise, and speaks always with a humorously forthright dryness, for a practical politics of the emotions. Compared with the men who surround her, she represents the toughness of commonsense itself. On her single visit to Grayhallock it takes her only a matter of minutes to intuit the various relationships.
The men in this book, as so often in Iris Murdoch, are weak and poor things who seem to be chasing phantoms. The women often provide ‘all the warmth and sense of the world’ (AM 324). The soft and romantic ‘ninny’ Hugh Peronett wishes to pick up with Emma after having dropped her twenty-five years earlier. His equally romantic if more caddish son Randall wants to ditch his wife for the sexy Lindsay. In wanting to reverse time (Hugh), or negate it (Randall), or simply escape (Felix’s brother-in-law Humphrey) , the men compare ill with the tougher-willed and more realistic women. Since the attempt to behave well can sometimes be accompanied by a new self-regard, Murdoch’s respect can sometimes go to the character who, while not behaving most ‘beautifully’, is at least not stupefied by self-importance. Mildred, who is guileful too, reflects some of her rival Emma’s practical horse-sense.
There is much in An Unofficial Rose to hold the interest, both in the intricate story and also in the touching respect which the author never loses for the love affairs of what are sometimes elderly people – Hugh is sixty-seven. Here as in Bruno’s Dream she paints the love affairs of the middle-aged without a trace of condescension. Few other ‘liberal’ novelists could have given us the sympathetic portrait of Felix Meecham the soldier, if only because his profession would at once have earned their mistrust.
If An Unofficial Rose finally is less successful than some of the other books it may be because its very tautness of design, with its closely interwoven destinies, is, for all its admirable economy, somewhat chill. In this it differs from the equally condensed A Severed Head (1961). The rhetorical point of the plot, which is to marry the idea of unfreedom to the idea of mystery, is made better there and elsewhere. The ‘love’ which the characters conspire to enjoy seems, perhaps, too clearly empty.
To put these points differently: the early novels often urge on us a patience with the world’s multiplicity which they cannot yet adequately enact. And this seems partly a result of the author’s unrelaxed investment in mystifying us. To appreciate a mystery you renounce the patient desire to see further and understand better. The early novels sometimes buy off our curiosity with bribes to our love of surprise; and surprise can itself become a ‘manner’, a convention, and can exhibit the human unfreedom it ironises. The later books, which are more relaxed and assured, more often get the balance right.
The individual worlds of these early books are nonetheless always beautifully imagined, fully and in detail ‘there’. There is in them a division of sympathy between two kinds of character: on the one hand the good characters who are in two senses eccentric, both decentred and also dotty or absurd – Hugo, Bledyard, Ann; and on the other hand the worldly charmers who talk a dry Realpolitik of the emotions – Mrs Wingfield, Demoyte, Emma. In some sense Murdoch narrates, as John Bayley said of Tolstoy, by two positives10 – Ann Peronett’s positive, and Emma Sands’s.
Elizabeth Dipple in her book Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit argues that An Accidental Man represents an indictment of the ‘ease of the frenetic, bitchy but comfortable bourgeois world’ to which its characters are too attached. Dipple suggests that ‘Only by jettisoning all the imagery of the culture and facing the ensuing blackness do characters begin to perceive reality, which is their religious duty.’ It is certainly true that Murdoch has written of movement towards ‘an impersonal pictureless void’ as part of a complete religion (FS 88). Dipple apologises for Murdoch’s rogues’ gallery of ‘hateful characters’ and argues of Austin in An Accidental Man that he is ‘an absolute triumph for Murdoch; the reader experiences a wonderfully pure hatred of him’. Twice addressing herself to Bradley Pearson’s question in The Black Prince – ‘And shall the artist have no cakes and ale?’ (349) – Dipple says, ‘the darkness of man’s squalid limitations must give a resounding “no”’.11 Though Dipple mentions in passing that Murdoch is not unequivocally hostile to pleasure, and appears to give us a double frame of reference, her own refreshingly enthusiastic account of Murdoch is, I think, intensely censorious about the characters, and gives out a missionary and humourless moral stridency. I shall leave aside the curious assumption that Murdoch is specially hostile to ‘the bourgeois world’. Dipple’s account is remote from how the books feel as you read them; and remote too, from that ‘calm merciful vision…breath of tolerance and generosity and intelligent kindness’ as well as the capacity to ‘leave the reader a space to play in’ (Magee, 1978) that Murdoch admired in great writers of the past.
Against such severities, Lorna Sage, in the most perceptive article on Murdoch’s work that I know, also addresses herself at one moment to An Accidental Man with its court of bourgeois grandees. Sage writes compassionately of the fate of the spinster Charlotte who ‘unselfishly’ looks after her mother only to find herself disinherited when Alison dies. Sage quotes:
She owned her toothbrush but not the mug in which it stood…Everything was entirely as usual, and yet entirely alienated, as if what one had taken to be someone’s house had turned out to be an antique shop. Just for a moment all these things were proclaiming a secret truth…Ownership was an illusion. (94)
Ownership, Sage comments, is ‘an illusion one can hardly live without, however’. Dipple, who argued that morality consisted of ‘jettisoning all the imagery of the culture and facing the ensuing blackness’, fails to notice that Charlotte’s disinheritance leads to her attempted suicide, or that Austin’s destruction of his brother’s priceless china is an act of spiteful and vindictive vandalism. Dipple finds in Murdoch that radical contemptus mundi et vitae that has always characterised a heretical Christian dualism. Sage, on the other hand, finds a series of cautionary tales against any such ‘jettisoning’ of the imagery, and aptly quotes from Bradley Pearson’s description of his deserted sister Priscilla’s abandoned Bristol flat, in The Black Prince:
There was a kind of fairly solid ordinariness about that ‘maisonette’ in Bristol, with its expensive kitchen equipment and its horrible modern cutlery, and the imitation ‘bar’ in the corner of the drawing-room. Even the stupider vanities of the modern world can have a kind of innocence, a sort of anchoring quality.
Priscilla dies when her marriage breaks up and she is deprived of even a few of these ‘anchoring’, ‘steadying’ possessions. Sage comments that
In Iris Murdoch’s world it is spiritual arrogance of the most dangerous kind to imagine you can become cultureless; she is not much troubled by the snobbish imperative of placing the quality of one kind of life over another, but she refuses to imagine a life that is ‘free’ of cultural patterns.12
The author that Dipple intuits behind the books is in some respects a vindictive moralist. Sage, on the other hand, finds her cheerful, complaisant and worldly. Each of these critics seems to have understood one half of Murdoch’s genius, which is (roughly) to be an idealist without illusions. Dipple sees only the moral passion and idealism, Sage chiefly the absence of illusion and the moral scepticism. It is the combination of the two that gives Murdoch her brilliant and essentially tolerant double focus. Becoming good may very well involve a slow ‘jettisoning of imagery’ and a breaking of patterns. When others perform these acts of iconoclasm for us, or when we perform them ourselves too fast, the breakage can be malign. It depends on who you are; and how situated.
An Accidental Man (1971) is a marvellous book in its relaxed mediation between these stances. It resembles Henry James’s The Awkward Age in the dryness of its irony about its strange and ‘awful’ crew. The only character in the book incapable of spite is the dog Pyrrhus, often-abandoned and renamed by new owners. The little scene in which Pyrrhus watches the lovers Charlotte and Mitzi row, and ponders anger as a disease of the human race, is a small triumph, moving, funny and true. Dryness of course need not exclude compassion. The dreadful Austin, the accidental man of the title, is, as one of the choric party voices puts it at the end, ‘like all of us, only more so’. Yet in case this makes us feel too comfortable, a second voice adds, with a double-edged complacency that cheerfully mocks our own, ‘Everybody is justified somehow.’ The narrator can be urbane, like her characters. Austin and his brother Matthew are dimly echoed by Charlotte and her sister Clara. Both sets of siblings are deeply dependent on life-myths which feed and require obsessive reciprocal feelings of guilt, hostility, pity and jealous rivalry, including sexual rivalry. Austin, associated like so many men in Murdoch’s novels of the 1970s with Peter Pan, the ‘sinister boy’, on account of his immature spirituality, is a person who positively invites his own bad luck. Failure has become so much his secret consolation that he resembles a vampire. Austin is a clown, a comic awful figure, and a fool. He is surrounded by a succession of demonic ‘accidental’ figures – Norman Monkley the incompetent blackmailer, the horrible child Henrietta Sayce who finally falls off some scaffolding and breaks her skull. There is a pervasive Schadenfreude in the book, a malicious delight as typical of Murdoch’s world as it was of Dostoevsky’s. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky defined this special joy in the misfortunes of others or in their deaths when he wrote after Marmeladov’s accident of ‘that strange inner feeling of satisfaction that may always be observed in the course of a sudden accident even in those who are closest to the victim and from which no loving man is exempt, however sincere his sympathy and compassion’.
