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We are nonetheless to understand that ‘wisdom’ is what Jake is in the process of acquiring. Hugo and Jake’s whispered colloquy in the darkened hospital at night, where Jake risks and indeed loses his job, is the first of a series between artist and saint, always carried out at a pitch of difficulty in Murdoch’s work. Hugo, who has already divested himself of much, ends the book wishing to ‘travel light. Otherwise one can never understand anything,’ and feels the urge to ‘strip himself’ (223). He advises Jake to ‘clear out’, as he is doing.
’some situations can’t be unravelled,’ said Hugo, ‘they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you, Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can’t be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on…The point is people must just do what they can do, and good luck to them.’
‘What can you do?’ I asked him.
Hugo was silent for a long time. ‘Make little intricate things with my hands,’ he said. (229)
What Hugo is going to do about this is become a watchmaker (‘A what?’ asks Jake) in Nottingham (‘In where?’), and when Jake asks ‘wildly’, ‘What about the truth? What about the search for God?’, Hugo replies, ‘What more do you want?…God is a task. God is a detail. It all lies close to your hand’ (229).
The scene is funny and touching and true. Hugo’s wisdom, we might say, is centrifugal and particular. His adoption of watchmaking – ‘an old craft, like baking bread’ – signals his calm absorption in the task of honouring the world’s details. He stands for a loving empirical curiosity about particulars, for reverential ‘attention’, that crucial Murdochian word (ad), and proposes to Jake that he renounce the grandiloquent – the search for God – in favour of the local – seeing life as task, as blundering on, and writing, by implication, as an unpretending craft which must also negotiate the detail and contingency of the world. His face ‘masked by a kind of innocence’, he calls Jake a sentimentalist who is always far too impressed by people. ‘Everyone must go his own way. Things don’t matter as much as you think.’
Jake, who famously classifies parts of London as necessary and parts as contingent, is understandably appalled by the notion of having to live outside London, which is to say of having to give up his position at the centre. Other artistfigures share this bias. Randall in An Unofficial Rose declares Australia, from which the innocent Penn comes, ‘a meaningless place’, and Hilary in A Word Child can bear only London near Hyde Park. Hugo, by contrast, is unable to conceive of himself at the centre to begin with, and, like all of Murdoch’s would-be saintly characters, and in this like Cordelia too, lacks the narrative skills which would dramatise his life as Jake consistently dramatises his (speaking throughout of ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’). Murdoch saints are always on the edge of the action, either leading happy lives or lives about whose unhappiness they have no talent for making a fuss, and which therefore lack any ‘story’. They exist, as Jake sees Hugo, as an unconscious ‘sign or portent’ for those less luckily situated.
Art for Murdoch presented the problems of true vision in a special form. She argued from first to last that particulars must be celebrated in a way that neither ties them up into some form of premature unity (symbolism) nor leaves them wholly outside the range of spirit (naturalism), condemned to banality.
In Bruno’s Dream Bruno thinks, ‘I am dying…but what is it like?’ (300). It is everywhere apparent in her work that Murdoch repeatedly asked herself ‘What is it like?’ of many disparate phenomena. In asking what the aged Bruno’s experience might be like she came up with, among other things, a man who, though he would not object to being loved by someone new, has settled for the moment to looking forward to a new kind of jam. That touching, and, surely, true ‘new kind of jam’ might stand for an emblem of how superbly and watchfully she can inhabit other experience than her own. It is a symptom of her tender-heartedness that Bruno is rewarded by the new person too. In that novel Bruno’s puritanical and self-enclosed son Miles keeps a ‘Notebook of Particulars’ in which he tries to overcome the problems of description. ‘How hard it was to see things,’ he thinks, and chronicles some marvels: ‘the ecstatic flight of a pigeon, the communion of two discarded shoes, the pattern on a piece of processed cheese’ (55). Some of the most brilliant passages in The Black Prince appear as answers to the question ‘What is it like?’, and as her work proceeds the answers she solicits are to increasingly ordinary questions.
In her early essay ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, which is ascribed as a book to the philosopher Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil thirty years later, Murdoch wrote of the ‘shyness’ of experience and the problems of ‘cornering’ it: ‘It is difficult to describe the smell of the Paris Metro or what it is like to hold a mouse in one’s hand.’ When the oafish Otto in The Italian Girl asks, ‘Has it ever struck you that we don’t eat anything blue?’ (39), the wholly unblue food we customarily, unthinkingly eat becomes invested with a kind of strange glamour, invoked as it is from so close, yet so happily alienated a perspective. A less successful example occurs in Crystal’s recounting of her seduction by the grief-stricken Gunnar in A Word Child, when, in the middle of a long and circumstantial narrative, she tells how Gunnar had spoken of Lapland, where the reindeer ‘like the smell of human water, urine’ (251). Here the improbable-but-true fact is used to authenticate the improbable and not quite plausible liaison. Finally in Nuns and Soldiers when the recently widowed and grief-stricken Gertrude, in trouble with young Tim with whom she finds herself falling in love, thinks of her dead husband, ‘I shall tell Guy about it, he will help me, he will know what to do’ (248), the moment is truthful as only high art can be.
Murdoch called, citing Simone Weil, for a ‘vocabulary of attention’ (ad), and while it is other persons who are the worthiest objects of such skill, the natural world is always well-attended. In Bruno’s Dream Miles draws attention to the tiny sound of the cracking of swallows’ beaks as they snap up flies; in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Luca hears the minute crepitation of woodworm. The oddness of what we take for granted is insisted on throughout. In The Sea, The Sea Charles hears ‘a most extraordinary rhythmical shrieking sound’ (404) which it takes him a minute to recognise as his newly installed telephone. Similarly in The Time of the Angels Marcus, who has unknowingly fallen down a coal-hole, experiences the smell of the coal before he is able reassuringly to name it. In a variety of ways Murdoch’s work constantly draws attention to the holiness, or threat, of those minute particulars which dullness and self-absorption prevent us from experiencing afresh, and which language can hide or reveal.
This is to take, in a particular way, a romantic view of the function of art. I would argue that Murdoch is, in the best and most positive sense of the word, a romantic writer – the sense in which John Bayley uses the word, in Romantic Survival, of Yeats and of Auden.12 Both colonise the modern urban world and in so doing give it back to us afresh. One might mention here the special poetry Murdoch gets out of London, the inclusion of the half-built motorway along which David wanders in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, the disused, abandoned railway line where Peter and Morgan embrace in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and Hilda’s disintegrating telephone in the same book. She has a special gift for finding, or rather ‘seeing’, such places and objects. In Under the Net the cold-cure centre in which Jake and Hugo meet, or the hairdresser’s in which Jake and Sadie meet, are further instances. Hers is the gift for making the strange seem familiar (the cold-cure centre) and the familiar seem strange (the hairdresser’s). Like Shakespeare, in Johnson’s view of him, she ‘approximates the remote, and familiarises the wonderful; the event [she] represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would be as [she] has assigned’. ‘Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form’ (SG 86). One might quip here that it is easy enough to understand complex things: it is what is most simple that is most unyielding and mysterious. Wittgenstein pointed out that ‘the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes)’ (Investigations 129).
In The Philosopher’s Pupil Rozanov describes philosophy as ‘the sublime ability to say the obvious, to exhibit what is closest’ (133). The same might be said, mutatis mutandis, about literature. The pleasure we get from Jake’s observation that if you try to direct a cat’s attention it will look at your finger or elsewhere, but not at what you are pointing to (19); the pleasure we get from his seeing Madge’s defence of Sammy as ‘an unhappy muddled sort of person’ as ‘a standard remark made by women about the men who have left them’ (173) – these seem to me high pleasures exactly because they are humbly true; and, while each belongs naturally within its context, it also works outside its context. If criticism finds no way of saying so, then so much the worse for criticism. Murdoch’s aficion about animals and persons, like the knowledge she incorporates about spiders in Bruno’s Dream, roses in An Unofficial Rose, or pubs and churches in Under the Net, are proper sources of readerly pleasure.
She described herself in different interviews as both a ‘poet manqué and an ‘engineer manqué’.13 These are not necessarily to be construed as opposed interests. It is the poetry of irreducible fact that most interested her, a poetry excellently ascribed by Gillian Beer to Dickens, Carlyle and Hopkins as ‘romantic materialism’ – a belief in the palpable and particular, not as insufficient substitutes in some Platonic scheme for their own idea, but as sufficient and even ideal, in all their incompleteness and irreducibility.14 Murdoch’s Platonism is a this-worldly commodity, and she is concerned throughout her books to redirect the reader’s attention to the sensory world in which he is immersed: ‘I had forgotten about rain,’ says Jake at one point. The books remind us, often through that ‘defamiliarisation’ of the way things are described by the Russian formalist critic Shklovski, who argued that a leading function of art was to de-automatise perception through descriptions which made the ordinary strange and therefore fresh.15
Lefty tells Jake in the Skinners’ Arms that ‘Nothing goes on for ever,’ and Jake, seeing his Jewish friend Dave at the bar, says, ‘Except the Jews.’ When Lefty concurs, Jake asks him, ‘So you do recognize certain mysteries?’ ‘Yes, I’m an empiricist,’ Lefty jokes (101). It is just such an empiricism, which finds miracle in what is most ordinary, that it is the book’s project, through its chief agent Hugo, to instil. For Hugo each thing is ‘astonishing, delightful, complicated and mysterious’ (58).
Shortly after this passage in the Skinners’ Arms Lefty and Jake wander through the bombed City as the twilight falls.
The evening was by now well advanced. The darkness hung in the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only made the vanishing colours more vivid. The zenith was a strong blue, the horizon a radiant amethyst. From the darkness and shade of St Paul’s Churchyard we came into Cheapside as into a bright arena and saw framed in the gap of a ruin the pale neat rectangles of St Nicholas Cole Abbey, standing alone away to the south of us on the other side of Cannon Street. In between the willow-herb waved over what remained of streets. In this desolation the coloured shells of houses still raised up filled and blank squares of wall and window. The declining sun struck on glowing bricks and warmed up the stone of an occasional fallen pillar. As we passed St Vedast the top of the sky was vibrating into a later blue…(95)
How superb that ‘later’ blue is! The description continues for some pages, and there is in it a freshness and an intense lyricism – a quality beautifully termed by one critic ‘lyrical accuracy’16 – that brings the John Piper bombed city-scape alive. The desolation and sweet melancholy of war-torn London – the fading of Empire, perhaps – is echoed by the elegiac processes of the fading daylight, seen with a new strangeness. The light is alive in its sensuousness, a Keatsian commodity with a behaviour entirely of its own.
The search for an ‘unmediated vision’ beyond duality, and the failure of such search – these are great themes in high Romanticism and in contemporary deconstructionism. For the critic Geoffrey Hartman, the poet is seen trying to break through social and other determinants to some ‘unmediated contact with the principle of things’. Hartman’s criticism suffers from a boastful privation in that it constantly shows off about how cheated we must be of any such final contact. To require to exhibit this is perhaps naive. In his Logic Hegel suggests that ‘nothing is absolutely immediate in the absolute sense that it is in no way mediated; and nothing is mediated in the absolute sense that it is no way immediate.’17 This commonsensical position is true for Murdoch too.
This is ignored by critics who insufficiently see the openendedness of even her most apparently ‘closed’ novels. Rabinowitz argues that Jake at the end has now learned ‘to accept contingency’. A.S. Byatt writes that Jake ‘is free of his own net of fantasy’ and describes his ‘final enlightenment’. Malcolm Bradbury speaks of his ‘learning a fresh truth’ and of ‘true vision’.18 This is at odds both with every theoretical pronouncement and also with what is there in the books. On one page of The Sovereignty of Good (23) Murdoch speaks of the effort toward reality as ‘infinitely perfectible’, an ‘endless task’, emphasises ‘inevitable imperfection’ and ‘necessary fallibility’. Again and again she attacked the liberal belief in fast change as false and magical, and opposed to it a truer picture of moral change as piecemeal, unending and in some sense goalless: ‘It would be hard to overestimate the amount of fantasy in any given soul’; ‘even the most piercing sense of revelation accompanying greater awareness of one’s moral position is likely to be partly an illusion.’19 The fact that the action of her novels rarely takes longer than a few weeks or months might be counted here as further evidence. ‘We cannot suddenly alter ourselves’ (SG 39). Indeed the books are at least as much comedies of inveteracy as they are the Advent calendars, packed with moral surprises, that critics have made of them. ‘Creative imagination and obsessive fantasy may be very close, almost indistinguishable forces in the mind of the writer’ (Magee, 1978), and what works for the writer is here true of her characters too. Her famous division between self-flattering fantasy and an imagination which links us to the world needs to be read not as expressing the total discontinuity between the two, but precisely their ambiguous continuity.
Thus Under the Net ends with Jake’s experiencing that thauma (wonder) that impels men to philosophise or create: ‘It was the first day of the world…it was the morning of the first day’ (251). But his sense of renewal carries with it, as it were, no guarantees. What we have is closer to the ending of Ulysses than of Hard Times. Molly Bloom’s decision to make her husband breakfast is a tiny token into which the reader puts as much hope as he feels the signal will bear. So with Jake’s forswearing of classification. Mrs Tinck’s cat, as if sharing the creativity which Jake experiences, has littered. Mrs Tinck is puzzled as to why the kittens should be half pure Siamese and half pure tabby. After some bluster Jake gives in. ‘It’s just one of the wonders of the world,’ he says, in the book’s closing words.
The ending asserts that the world is most apprehensible at those moments when we are calmest about submitting to its inexhaustibility. When we give up the claim wholly to ‘understand everything sympathetically’, we may be rewarded by a vision of the world’s oddness, which the urge to a completed act of comprehension will elude. Once you can admit you don’t fully know, you can begin, a little, to ‘see’.
3 ‘Against Gravity’: The Early Novels and An Accidental Man
Under the Net presented a hero of the will at its centre and a man attempting to sacrifice his will at the edge. The pattern is common to many of the early novels and is never wholly abandoned. Malcolm Bradbury has used the word ‘psychopomp’ for these decentred educators or leaders-of-souls.1 In this chapter I suggest that these psychopomps are of two kinds, one of them distinctly more worldly than the other, and look at the ambiguous idea of worldliness itself in Murdoch’s work. Since a common form of illusion is to imagine that you are more virtuous than you really are, the psychopomp, who acts, however unwittingly, as a tantric master reconnecting the novice with the real, can sometimes speak with an apparent worldliness.
The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) was begun before the publication of Under the Net, and an early draft held at the University of Iowa makes clear that originally all the major characters were to have been refugees – not merely Mischa Fox, Nina and the Luciewicz brothers, but also Rosa Keepe and Peter Saward who, under a different name, appeared to be a Central European writing a history of the Jews. The published book distances this theme of displacement and achieves a deliberate alienation of the treatment, which is lightly comic, Lewis Carroll-like and fantastic, from the matter, which is sombre. The English, too, are subject to various displacements. Agnes Casement is a recruit to the bureaucracy where Rainborough works, and one who seems likely to overtake him. Rosa has made the reverse movement, declassing herself to work in a factory. Annette Cockaigne is a ‘cosmopolitan ragamuffin’ speaking four languages. Even the sedate and unremarkable Rainborough suffers the uprooting of an old wistaria tree with all its associations. At the centre of the book is the enchanter and refugee Mischa Fox, with one eye blue and one brown, not famous for ‘anything in particular…just famous’ (81), a figure of bad power who enslaves many of those who surround him, partly through the devices of Calvin Blick. Blick represents Fox’s ‘sub-conscious’ dark half (Caen, 1978), and his photographic dark-room occupies the cellars of Fox’s Kensington palazzo. Mischa contrives to seem innocent because the enslaved Calvin carries the full burden of consciousness and guilt. Mischa, the artist-figure, is the creator of his own myth, with which the other characters actively collude.
The magnetic difference in Under the Net between Hugo and Jake is echoed in the implicit opposition between Mischa and Peter Saward. Neither Mischa nor Peter is focused with the skilful energy shown in their later incarnations Tallis and Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Both are nonetheless interesting. Like Tallis, Peter had a sister who died. He has advanced tuberculosis, lives an ascetic scholarly life trying to decipher an ancient script, and is decked out with an unclassifiable plant. Peter is otherworldly, does not read the papers, is associated – again, like Tallis – with an unconscious night wisdom, some of it nonsensical, lives with great simplicity, has long contemplative periods, and is recognised by the effete Hunter as ‘almost a saint’ (96). He has a personality without frontiers. ‘He did not defend himself by placing others. He did not defend himself’ (31), though he defends others, even the tormented and devilish Blick (‘I don’t know, he has a pleasant smile’). Like his anti-type Mischa he is a figure about whom the others are busy weaving fantasies. Rainborough finds himself instinctively making damaging admissions to Peter out of an instinctive if irritable trust; Rosa assumes that Peter always knows when she is lying, and he represents for her the ‘sweetness of sanity and work, the gentleness of those whose ambitions are innocent, and the vulnerability of those who are incapable of contempt’ (253). His virtue is necessary to the others as an object of contemplation and speculation, just as is Mischa’s power. While Mischa feeds off such speculation and is fattened by it there is a simplicity in Peter which resists it. It is an acute observation that Mischa’s power is invested in him by his ‘creatures’, and is a product of their masochistic needs quite as much as of his own hard work.
Even Mischa wants to reveal himself only to Peter, who, as A.S. Byatt pointed out in an excellent reading, is the only person shown to us in the role of neither victim nor predator.2 ‘Everyone has been going mad as usual,’ says Mischa. ‘You make them mad,’ Peter replies (205). Chapter 17, in which the two finally meet, resembles Jake and Hugo’s meeting in the hospital in that it represents something like a still centre, sandwiched between various arbitrary violences – Annette’s breaking of her leg, Miss Casement’s chopping down Rainborough’s wistaria. Its stillness also prefigures Julius and Tallis’s meetings in the kitchen in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, just as Mischa’s more fantastic deracination (‘Where was he born? What blood is in his veins? No one knows’ (35)) directly prefigures the more pointed discovery of Julius’s wartime internment in Belsen. In both meetings we sense a shared understanding between the two ‘spiritual’ characters. Peter is the only character whose pity for Mischa is shown uncorrupted by that longing to possess or destroy with which pity is here always associated. ‘If the gods kill us, it is not for their sport but because we fill them with such intolerable compassion, a sort of nausea’ (208), says Mischa, who is the chief repository of this nauseous compassion, a man reputed to cry when reading the newspapers, and who confesses to having killed a kitten when overwhelmed by it. ‘Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.’3 Pity as an active torment, symbolised through the animal world, is a great theme in Murdoch’s novels. There are weird communal ‘damaged animal’ dreams in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and Otto has a sequence of comic alarm dreams involving crushed or mutilated animals in The Italian Girl. In The Philosopher’s Pupil Gabriel is tormented by the desire to rescue a fish; in The Sandcastle Felicity cries childishly for a lost slug and for a butterfly flown out to sea. The Flight from the Enchanter reads in part as a meditation on the theme of pity and power; and Hitler, who, we are reminded, killed the pitiable and uprooted in the persons of gypsies and Jews, is, as Byatt has shown, a real presence.4 It is a tribute to the power of the later books that they make its treatment in The Flight from the Enchanter, for all its sharpness of outline and detail, seem abstract and whimsical in comparison. What you recall, as so often in the early books, is not so much the people as the wondrous set-pieces – Annette swinging on the chandelier, Mischa’s baroque party, the Dickensian Mrs Wingfield’s hilarious and uncomfortable persecution of the good Miss Foy.
Just as both Hugo and Jake are outsiders, so are Peter and Mischa. Peter’s mode of dispossession again silently opposes Mischa’s exoticism. Peter is caretaker of the symbols of Mischa’s own lost past, when Mischa was still rooted and still ‘belonged’: Peter collects photographs of Mischa’s now destroyed hometown and keeps them for him.
