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The Saint and Artist
A study of the fiction of Iris Murdoch
Peter J. Conradi
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
I ‘A Kind of Moral Psychology’
1 ‘Existentialist and Mystic’
2 Under the Net and the Redemption of Particulars
3 ‘Against Gravity’: The Early Novels and An Accidental Man
4 Eros in A Severed Head and Bruno’s Dream
II ‘Open and Closed’
5 The Sublime in The Bell and The Unicorn
6 Self-Sufficiency in The Time of the Angels and The Nice and the Good
III
7 A Fairly Honourable Defeat
8 The Black Prince
9 The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and Henry and Cato
10 The Sea, The Sea
11 Nuns and Soldiers, The Philosopher’s Pupil and The Good Apprentice
12 The Book and the Brotherhood, The Message to the Planet, The Green Knight and Jackson’s Dilemma
Conclusion
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright
About the Publisher
I ‘A Kind of Moral Psychology’
The novel itself, of course, the whole world of the novel, is the expression of a world outlook. And one can’t avoid doing this. Any novelist produces a moral world and there’s a kind of world outlook which can be deduced from each of the novels. And of course I have my own philosophy in a very general sense, a kind of moral psychology one might call it rather than philosophy.
Iris Murdoch speaking at the University of Caen, 1978
1 ‘Existentialist and Mystic’
Iris Murdoch was the author of some twenty-six novels, a handful of plays and poems, a number of influential articles, a book on Sartre, two books of her own moral philosophy, and a book on Plato’s theory of art. She is a writer of international reputation. Apart from monographs there has been no full-length study of her work by a British critic since A.S. Byatt’s valuable, pioneering study Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965). Despite the honours that the later work won – The Black Prince won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1973, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine won the Whitbread Prize in 1974, The Sea, The Sea the Booker Prize in 1978 – it has not been properly celebrated. I believe that the early theory, and also the real but limited success of the early apprentice fiction, have obscured the enormous, disorderly merits of the later work, which in its turn must alter the way we view the earlier.
Few writers divide their audiences as radically. Between Murdoch’s advocates and her detractors there is a gulf fixed. Elizabeth Dipple’s useful missionary Work for the Spirit (1982) sought to bridge this gap and to convert the latter into the former. This study is not, by contrast, a proselytising one. It seeks to persuade no one who does not already enjoy her work, but to describe some of the pleasures which an excessively narrow critical focus has neglected. This is a celebratory study whose aim is to try to illuminate her best work and to give some account of why she is found both entertaining, and also serious and important.
‘Most artists understand their own weaknesses far better than the critics do,’ says Arnold Baffin in The Black Prince, a writer unflatteringly parodied, as his creator has been, for emptying himself in his books over the world ‘like scented bath-water’, and as living ‘in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea’ (BP 137). Iris Murdoch is her own best critic and best defendant. She gives the prolific Baffin an eloquent self-defence too – ‘The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on trying to do it better. And one aspect of this is that any artist has to decide how fast to work. I do not believe that I would improve if I wrote less. The only result of that would be that there would be less of whatever there is’ (172).
Murdoch’s frailties are by now well chronicled. Borrowing her own lofty criteria and sometimes drawing on her Peccavis, reviewers have sometimes been content to issue bulletins of high-minded reproof and adopt a tone of puritanical strictness. In what follows I do not seek to whisk her away into academic irreproachability. It is in some sense her human quality that seems to me engaging – her quality of, in the best sense, ‘stubborn imperfection’.1 She can be uneven, over-intellectual or romantic. There is some unfinished and repetitive writing. The books can seem contrived or over-plotted, the characters sometimes insufficiently imagined. Her social range is not huge; she says little about work and often appears to take money for granted. She can seem to be playing a complex game with the reader. There is, as early reviewers noted, ‘too much’ in the books.
The objections are by now well canvassed. Her virtues need cataloguing too. She writes spellbinding stories in beautiful prose. She knows how to master paragraphs and sentences and at her best achieves an extraordinary, luminous, lyrical accuracy. She has an intensely visual imagination and can use it to evoke things, people, the activity of thinking, feeling, places, cars and dogs too. In each novel are things that no other British writer has the power to describe. Her empirical curiosity and moral energy seem endless. Few other writers are as full of the naked pleasures of looking and describing. She can tackle happiness, ‘that deep, confiding slow relationship to time’ (SPLM 16), the subject-matter for great writers. (Every fool can write about misery.) London is a real presence in the books, indeed seems to figure sometimes as an extra character, and even when her people are having a hellish time there, which is often, the author’s loving and patient apprehension of the city comes through. This is the more noticeable in that, Dickens and Woolf apart, London has lacked distinguished celebrants. There is no touch of neurotic agrarianism in Murdoch, and if London had its Samuel Palmer it might well be her. But she can of course evoke the inner world, the world of fantasies, projections, demonic illusions too. No one writes better about the urgencies and illusions of the moral life. She is our most intelligent novelist since George Eliot, and like George Eliot she was a mature thinker before she wrote her first novel. Her technique altered significantly as the novels progressed. Many of her leading ideas are already there in her first work.
Does our sense that the novels feel ‘contrived’ damage the illusion that the characters are free? Decreasingly, I think. The point has too often been argued in a simple-minded manner. Even in the most Gothic of her novels the characters seem alive. What she writes owes much to ‘romance’,2 and romance is both the most conventional and yet the least ‘literary’, most immediate of forms.3 It is a form which demands a certain latitude in the matter of probabilities. All art is contrived, and in great art truth can be purchased at the expense of improbability; yet the absurdities vanish under the force of the art. This is clear in the case of Restoration comedy, or opera, both of which her work can resemble,4 or indeed in the case of Shakespearian drama, which her work increasingly contemplated and was nourished by. The plots of King Lear or Much Ado About Nothing are not ‘realistic’, and at the end of Twelfth Night we share in a ‘triumph of the improbable’. These are plots which can grip you in the theatre and mock your attempts to recount them outside. You put up with the contrivance and conscious stylisation for the sake of the illumination they offer, and the degree of trust you show depends on the good will you bear the author, and the reward her illusions purchase. As Murdoch put this in the 1982 Gifford lectures – ‘in good art we do not ask for realism; we ask for truth.’
Truth, of course, has had a bad press recently, and thus the question of stylisation has a way of returning. One reviewer recorded how his feeling on opening a Murdoch novel – ‘But surely human beings are not like this’ – can be swiftly followed by the feeling – ‘Perhaps this is just what human beings are in fact like, and it is precisely our delusion to imagine that we are not.’5 One source of positive pleasure in the bizarrerie offered by her plots comes from our sense that, as Murdoch has often averred, people are secretly much odder, less rational, more often powered by obsession and passion than they outwardly pretend or know, and that the novelist is revealing such secrets in creating her (imaginary) people. Some accounts of Bloomsbury – for example Angelica Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness – make most Murdoch plots look models of understatement. ‘Murdochian’ has justly joined ‘Dickensian’ and ‘Swiftian’ as a way of pointing to certain aspects of the world. I think her characters are recognisable. These vain bookish civil servants, morally squeamish men whose sheer egoism is driving them mad, emotionally greedy women, precocious adolescents, isolated and awkward good characters, all involved in the great, lonely hunt for love and consolation and power: it is not a bad image of the world. It has universality too.
There are related points to be made about contrivance. Her best work is quiveringly real/unreal in its texture. What can be perplexing is not that she fails to convince, but that she can describe with an extraordinary hallucinatory validating detail and power the most ‘unlikely’ situations, so that, before you have time to decide whether or not you believe in them, you find yourself forced to imagine them. Her ingenious style of realism, in combining fantasy with a meticulous naturalistic rendering of detail, shares something with surrealism. It can drive a wedge between reason and imagination, so that we concur imaginatively, against reason’s good advice; reason is dulled in something like awe at her sheer aesthetic nerve and inventiveness. In Chapter 5 I discuss how the limits to rationalism become for her a great theme. Her use of contrivance seems to relate to this, a deliberate and shameless affront, ‘unbelievable’ in a way that mimics and parodies the frequently unbelievable quality of life too. Unreality, in other words, can be a potent aesthetic device. The task of classifying, as her work often asserts, can perhaps never be more than a (serious) game; but visionary or ‘magical’ realism seems to get closer than most descriptive terms to the special and disturbing pleasure her work can afford. The question of artifice has too often been divorced from the question of pleasure.
She can create mystery and magic. In the least of her work there is something alive and interesting, an atmosphere which haunts and stays with you. The Dorset seascape of The Nice and the Good, the fogbound rectory in The Time of the Angels, the various different Londons of A Severed Head, or A Fairly Honourable Defeat – these are real imaginative creations. The creation of a strong ‘atmosphere’ can be at odds with the creation of character, and I think critics can be too puritan here. Even Shakespeare and Tolstoy do not always create ‘memorable’ characters. Like any other writer’s, Murdoch’s characters can sometimes be memorable, sometimes merely believable, sometimes interesting without being persuasive, sometimes ‘far too individual to remember’.6 In the most idea-bound of her romances we have persons and not merely personifications. A disservice is done by critics awed by the cold prestige of ‘philosophy’, and mindful that Iris Murdoch is a philosopher as well as a novelist, who treat the novels as though their inhabitants must therefore be no more than symposiasts at a disputation. The books are full of ideas, of course, but are also about life, feed off life, feed back into life.
Murdoch clearly understood a great deal about people, with a quality of understanding I can best describe as ‘animal intelligence’, a Keatsian ability to encounter the sensuousness of the activity of thinking, in all its immediacy. She was interested in power, a subject largely ignored by critics. ‘No question can be more important than “Who is the boss?”’, says Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The question ‘Who is the boss?’ links in her books, as in life, with sex and with spirit. There is a large other range of mixed emotion she is adept at evoking, especially, of course, love, her subject par excellence. If she is the Gilbert White of the sensations and the emotions, she is also love’s natural historian.
She can appear to be playing a sophisticated game with the reader, and the critic should beware of complaining that she is simply more intelligent than he is. If you enjoy her, her intelligence is part of what you are enjoying. I try to explain in Chapter 5 how the frustration of the reader’s natural desire to make the world of the book transparent is a task Murdoch takes seriously. She is, I think, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous dichotomy, much more of a fox than a hedgehog – one who knows many things before she knows one. Knowing many things is in a sense her premise for knowing one. Despite the fact that she declared that she inclined, temperamentally, to monism (SG 50), she sees the world’s variousness and multiplicity as art’s opportunity, as well as its foe.
Her social range deserves comment. Often the novels will concern a central ‘court’ of relatives and friends, some of whom will have met at university, and whose older womenfolk have sacrificed careers for those of their husbands. Such inbred courts feed off Shakespeare, as she often acknowledged, as well as off life. The British professional classes often lead such inbred coterie lives, and she will be remembered, I am sure, partly as a chronicler of her age’s chattering classes. ‘One can only write well about what one thoroughly understands,’ she has noted (Bradbury, 1976), pointing out that any account of ‘intelligent people who are interested in their society’ will carry some general interest. One might gloss this by saying that a close account of those assumed by society to be ‘the Great and the Good’ is likely – as in the toughly satirical A Severed Head – to tell us something important about society itself, even though satire as such in the other novels is muted into a more general irony. Moreover, contrary to the superficial view that her social range merely shrank, a close look shows that it polarised. There were always in her work deracinated intellectuals of various backgrounds, ambitious girls on the make (Madge in Under the Net, Miss Casement in The Flight from the Enchanter), working-class recruits to the intelligentsia, delinquents, bohemians and refugees. Latterly there was a polarisation of the cast into the possessing and the dispossessed, so that in Henry and Cato the two ends of Ladbroke Grove, one wealthy, the other derelict, act as an image of social contrast and inequality. In A Word Child the orphan and bastard Hilary Burde’s seedy life contrasts with that of his rival Gunnar Jopling’s ‘casually gorgeous’ milieu. And in Nuns and Soldiers Tim Reede moves from the class that raids other people’s fridges to the class that owns the wellsupplied fridge. It is certainly true that she animated well those characters who have had some sort of higher education. This is not quite the same as claiming she could deal only with the bourgeoisie. To put the matter another way, she accurately reflects one of the ways in which, under the Welfare State, Britain’s class structure tended to alter. Before the Second World War the inheritance of privilege did not necessarily involve attending university, though it did depend on attending public school. Since the war, whether or not you received higher education became, for some decades, important in a novel way. As Murdoch noted in 1959:
Equality of opportunity produces, not a society of equals, but a society in which the class division is made more sinister by the removal of intelligent persons into the bureaucracy and the destruction of their roots and characteristics as members of the mass. (ht)
This middle-class intelligentsia broadly provided her material. ‘Barkers people not Harrods people,’ as one of her characters notes (AM 27), though the spread moves upward on occasion. Murdoch’s father was a civil servant, and during the war years so was she. As in so many Russian novels, bureaucrats abound, though tempered with members of genteel and other professions – schoolteachers, wine-merchants, printers, rose-growers. Just as Britain has recently become more socially divided, so the world she addressed has appeared more beleaguered and isolated. The loftiest apology for this social range is made by Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince when he points out that a truly enlightened person might perhaps be known by his sympathy’s extending even as far as the rich (BP 348). Pearson himself, like Burde in A Word Child and Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, is the child of a poor family.
Perhaps in the end – and this will be truer of contemporary writers than of any others – ‘a philosopher’s thought either suits you or it doesn’t. It’s only deep in that sense. Like a novel,’ as the dying Guy puts it in Nuns and Soldiers (2). Qualities such as facility, the capacity to rework a few themes, and conscious stylisation, can be as characteristic of great as of small writers – it is as proper to speak of the facility of a Shakespeare as of a Wodehouse.
It has not been enough repeated that Iris Murdoch was, as well as a very witty writer, also a consistently funny one, and that this humour was linked to her moral passion. Taine remarked of Dickens that his whole work might be reduced to the phrase ‘Be good, and love.’7 So might Murdoch’s oeuvre. Both attack human self-centredness. That human beings are powered by egoism is not by itself, however, exciting news. The problem for the critic is in describing not just this message, but how it gets ‘dissolved in the purr of beatitude’8 the work promotes in us, and in describing the comic tension between that message, and everything in the work which resists and complicates it. She admired in Shakespeare’s plays not merely their ‘tremendous moral charge’ but also that ‘it is morality at its most refined, and at the same time it is not dogmatic, it has got an element of extraordinary openness in it’ (Bigsby, 1982). The author of these twenty-six novels seems to have seen life with one eye warm if not wet, one dry and distant, and perhaps narrated by two positives. There is in her mediation between these a sanity, a cheerful common sense, a gift for openness and for comedy, that need emphasising at the outset.
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919, of Anglo-Irish parents.*; Her mother’s family were from Dublin, her father’s were County Down sheep-farming stock. Her mother gave up a career as a singer to marry at eighteen. Her gentle bookish father had survived the war partly through the good luck of being a cavalry officer – the cavalry missed the holocaust of the trenches. Further back her ancestors were mainly Irish farmers and soldiers. She had a very happy childhood, and was brought up in London, to which her parents moved when she was a baby, but with holidays in Ireland, and seeing Ireland as ‘a very romantic land, a land I wanted to get to and discover’ (Caen, 1978). Her father’s family were ‘admirable people, but Protestants of a very strict kind, and I think he wanted to get away’ (Haffenden, 1983). The Anglo-Irish are a peculiar people, from whose stock some most gifted writers have come, but also a people with a dual identity, seeing themselves in some sense as both the true Irish and the true English, while being regarded by everyone else as neither, and as outsiders. About growing up in London Murdoch commented, ‘I feel as I grow older that we were wanderers, and I’veonly recently realised that I’m a kind of exile, a displaced person. I identify with exiles’ (Haffenden, 1983). Perhaps Ireland provided her in her imagination with an absent, alternative identity. She spoke often of her distress at the continuing violence there, and Ireland figured significantly in only two novels – The Unicorn, which is a Gothic romance set on the west coast, and The Red and the Green, an account of the 1916 Easter Rising which combines detailed research into the period with an intricate plot, and where the sexual imbroglio within an extended Anglo-Irish family partly mirrors the political tensions. The political viewpoint of the book, in so far as it commits itself to one, is that of the liberal Irish patriotism of the Anglo-Irish, who have of course often been zealots in that cause.
Murdoch was an only child, and has related her writing drive to the search for imaginary brothers and sisters, as she also saw in this a reason for her (and Sartre’s) fascination with twins – ‘the lost, the other person one is looking for’ (Caen, 1978). She was educated at the Froebel Educational Institute in London, at Badminton School, then at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read ‘Greats’ (ancient history, classics, philosophy). Her knowledge and love of the classics, and of classical mythology, are evident throughout the novels, where such myths are sometimes played with and made to help yield decoration for the plot. From 1942 to 1944 she worked as temporary wartime civil servant (Assistant Principal) in the Treasury, and then for the following two years with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, first in London, then in Belgium and Austria, where she worked in camps for displaced persons.
Her period with UNRRA seems to have been important for two reasons. In Brussels she encountered existentialism, which excited her about the possibilities, hitherto little considered, of philosophy. In 1947 she was to hold the Sarah Smithson Studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. She also saw a ‘total breakdown of human society’ which she has said it was instructive to witness (Haffenden, 1983). These two encounters now seem less far apart than might appear. This breakdown of society produced the refugees and homeless persons who figure in Murdoch’s novels, as in history, and Sartrian existentialism was a philosophy that privileged the cultureless outsider hero. The role of existentialism in her thinking has not been well focused. It has sometimes been said that she moved from existentialism towards a religious position. This makes for a difficulty in discerning her right relation to existentialism, by which I mean Sartrian existentialism throughout, since that was the form which most interested her. In interview with Bigsby (1982) she suggested that her objections went right back to her first encounter with it in 1945. Her scepticism as well as her interest is quite apparent before her first novel was published in 1954, and her book on Sartre the previous year, though respectful, is scarcely uncritical. What excited her about it was the primary place it gave to a consideration and depiction of experience, a subject then absent from Anglo-Saxon philosophy, and its comparative willingness to tackle problems of value and morality. It was the phenomenological and moral bias of the existentialists that excited her, and she was one of the few English philosophers to have read them. In Britain there had been a disastrous shrinking of the field of moral philosophy to, for example, discussions of the ontological status of moral assertions, and an abdication of the responsibility to guide and instruct.
Philosophy seems to have come to matter to her, for all its clear difference from literature, for comparable reasons, because ‘a dominant philosophy pictures the consciousness of the age’ (sbr), and because man is the creature who ‘makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the pictures’ (me). She came to distrust Sartrian existentialism and British philosophy equally, and to see them as sharing a common ground in offering no barrier to romantic selfassertion. In a radio talk in 1950 she criticised both Sartre and Camus for presenting worlds which were simultaneously too intelligible and transparent, and also too lacking (unlike the world of Gabriel Marcel) in mystery – in which category she included nightmarish mystery – and magic. ‘This fact alone, that there is no mystery, would falsify their claims to be true pictures of the situation of man…We are not yet resigned to absurdity and our only salvation lies in not becoming resigned’ (eh). The same year she asked, à propos Simone de Beauvoir’s championing of T.E. Lawrence as an existentialist hero, ‘Should he be taken as the model of the “good man” for this age?’9 In a sense this question resonates throughout her writing, and its very subversive simplicity rightly disturbs us. What man are we being asked to admire in this novel or in that philosophy? And are the reasons just? By 1957 in a Spectator review she noted that the appeal of existentialism was its dramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social exaltation of the individual.10 If the central question she was later to ask in The Sovereignty of Good – what is it that might ‘lead to unselfish behaviour in the concentration camp?’ (73) – has any answer, it is not the ‘instantaneous’ values of the existentialist hero or of his Anglo-Saxon voluntarist counterpart. It is no accident that the plots of her novels until 1970 often concern the disruption of a court of settled, rooted English grands bourgeois by displaced persons and refugees. The theme is of course as old as Jane Austen, but Murdoch makes her own special use of it. She has written both of the ‘phenomenal luck of our English-speaking societies’ and, in the same article (sbr), of how such luck may obscure deep truth. These outsiders – the Lusiewicz twins and Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter, the Levkins in The Italian Girl, Honor Klein and Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head, Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat – may sometimes appear as twentieth-century versions of the sentimental or demonic egoists whose irruption into the innocent provincial redoubt Austen chronicled.11 They as often, however, reveal the ‘deep truth’ hidden behind polite English manners.
