Re-Reading Iris Murdoch' s Early Fiction
The other day someone asked me who was my favourite writer. I could, of course, have answered with a litany of writers who at some time in my reader’s life made a big impression, but people who ask you the question, really want one answer only, one name. And rightly so. Who has read a lot can talk about books and literature without end, expatiate on his preferences without making a definite choice, but most avid readers have an absolute favourite, a writer for all seasons. In any case my answer was: Iris Murdoch.
But why did I still consider her hors concours? She concentrates on a limited number of interesting characters, who in most of her novels are involved in an intellectual or artistic project. The plot of the novel(s) turns around this quest for knowledge and excellence. Mostly there is a competition going on between the characters and always there are erotic tensions that provide the changes and fluctuations in their mutual relations. The main reason why the novels of Iris Murdoch keep fascinating me is the contrast between the muddle human beings cause in everyday life – ‘muddle’ is a key word in the Murdoch vocabulary – on the one hand, and their pursuit of knowledge and their ambition to excel on the other. This friction and the compassionate way she describes it provide the typical Murdochian irony. It’s not the superior irony of someone who knows better, but the subtle irony of a writer who has studied human society with love and attention.
With this pattern in mind I started to reread the first five novels of Iris Murdoch, curious to find out whether this scheme – muddle in everyday life versus an abstract theory about life or society, very often represented by one of the characters writing a book on the subject – would shed a new light on the early development of her career.
In her first novel, Under the Net (1954), the main character Jake Donaghue doesn’t succeed in keeping a proper check on his life. He lives in London without a fixed address and earns some money with translations and journalistic hackwork. Actually he is a cadger, a literary relation of many similar characters in the novels and plays of the Angry Young Men – writers like J.P. Donleavy, John Braine or John Osborne. The plot of the novel consists of a series of picaresque adventures in which Jake gets involved through nonchalance and a frail sense of responsibility. All those little scenes and confrontations with a cast of colourful characters are rather arbitrary. The backbone of the novel is indeed a book, The Silencer, written by Jake but based on the multiple conversations he had with a mysterious chap, Hugo Belfounder. The message of this book within a book may be derived from a long quotation, a dialogue between the two main characters, who are based, of course, on Jake and Hugo. One of them is looking for a general theory that will permit him to cope with reality but the other one thinks that any theory about life is diminishing and falsifying. The conclusion of The Silencer is that the real world is so rich and overwhelming that it puts us to silence. We shouldn’t think too much but act. ‘God is a task. God is detail.’ (By the way, my younger brother, a philosopher, drew my attention to this quote: he thought it might be a reference to a rather famous dictum of the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers: ‘ Dieu n’est pas une existence, mais une exigence.’)
The irony in the scheme of Under the Net is reinforced by the consideration that the dialogue between Jake and Hugo may be read as a discussion in Murdoch’s own mind between Iris Murdoch, the professional philosopher, and Iris Murdoch, the budding novelist. And then, of course, the conclusion is clear: the novelist is superior to the philosopher. Murdoch’s plea is convincing because in this first novel she shows herself already a master in the relevant detail. The names of churches and pubs help the reader to follow Jake on his intricate rambles through London. And we have already a few set pieces, which are going to become a trademark in a Murdoch novel. So for example the hilarious scene in which Jake and an accomplice succeed in liberating a big expensive dog – famous as an actor in popular films – from a cage. The liberation and abduction are described in every minute and intricate technical detail. You read from one cliffhanger to the next, the ideas en route are a sweet bonus.
I was ready now to tackle her second novel, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). The main character is Mischa Fox, rich and powerful: a media tycoon, but Murdoch doesn’t elaborate on his precise professional activities. He has a foreign accent but we never learn where he comes from. This is how he is perceived by one of his many hangers-on: ‘the most striking characteristic of his face was noticeable immediately, making everything else about him for the moment invisible. He had one blue eye and one brown eye.’ Many of the other characters are also foreigners, who live in precarious circumstances in London, among them two Polish brothers who have an unlikely appeal to Rosa Keepe, the main antagonist to Mischa Fox. All the characters are in one way or another connected to Mischa Fox, but an explanation is not always given. Fox is the chess master who manipulates the other characters like pawns on a chessboard. The pattern of the novel is clear: on the one hand Mischa Fox, the charismatic conductor, and on the other the players, who once again create a cacophony.
Fox doesn’t represent a philosophical or ideological idea, a beacon for the other characters trying to find their way in the dark. He possesses power and money and uses it to dominate his surroundings. The weirdest character in the novel is Peter Saward, also an immigrant. He literally is a closet scholar; as a spider he sits in the middle of a large room amidst thousands of books. He is a specialist in pre-Babylonian civilisations and has been working for more than ten years on deciphering an ancient script. You can’t but see this scholar as someone who has turned his back upon the mess of everyday life and now loses himself in sterile intellectual games. He is a very amiable man but irrelevant, one of the pawns in the power game Mischa Fox is playing.(1)
Murdoch’s third novel, The Sandcastle (1957), is a love story. The main line of the plot is the mutual crush between the young painter Rain Carter and a teacher of Latin and Greek, Bill Mor. The story is situated in a minor public school, some twenty miles south of London. Bill is married to a dominating wife and for him this sudden unexpected love is a liberation from the oppression of a routine marriage. But because of his shilly-shallying, clumsiness and just tough luck – read: Iris Murdoch organising ingenious obstacles on his amorous course – he gets himself into a morass – sometimes very literally – of problems and complications. The words ‘mess’ and ‘muddle’ are again all over the story. And what sort of counterweight has Murdoch concocted for the disorder created by a simple amourette? No little theory this time or a wise man who is writing a book to solve once and forever the riddles of life. No, the counterweight for the confusion caused by the maverick lovers is brought about by some of the characters who are very close to Bill Mor, in the first place his wife Nan, who eventually succeeds to call him to order in a very cunning way. She represents the ‘reality principle’ that will bring him back to the fold. There is also a former headmaster who intimates that he is on Mor's side, that he would understand Mor if he eventually cuts the marital knot in favour of the attractive young painter. But this sympathy isn’t sufficient. A choir of secondary characters – colleagues, his two children, friends – guides him through his midlife crisis back to familiar ground. Order restored. The final sentences of the novel from the point of view of Nan: ‘Her eyes were filled with tears and soon they were streaming down her face. She gave a little sob into her handkerchief. Everything was all right now. It was all right. It was all right.’ Irony has the last word.
Most Murdoch aficionados will remember the legendary opening sentences of The Bell (1958): ‘Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason.’ To patch up their relation Dora and her husband Paul stay for a while in a religious lay community in the England profonde of Gloucestershire. It is an experimental commune, situated on a large estate next to a convent of a strictly enclosed Benedictine order. The eponymous bell, which is sunk in a lake on the grounds of the estate, is the device that drives the plot, as the climbing of a tower by the son of Bill Mor accelerated the outcome in her previous novel.
Dora plays an important part in recovering the bell from the lake. Murdoch is once more very convincing in describing the technical details of the operation, but the bell and its recovery draw the attention away from the spiritual quest of the novel. Will the members of the commune be able to solve their religious doubts and conflicts of conscience? The exemplary character here is Michael, who is not able to accept his homosexuality. The conflict between religion and the evil outside world is ultimately settled in favour of the latter. After the suicide of one of the ‘brothers’ the commune is dissolved. And this time Dora Greenfield decides not to return to her husband.(2)
A Severed Head (1961) is Murdoch’s fifth novel in seven years: we have the usual merry-go-round of a limited number of characters whose mutual love relations permute in unexpected ways. The frenzy – another key word – of the permutations reminds you sometimes of a French bedroom farce, in which the actors are continually caught trousers down. It’s not surprising that Murdoch, with the assistance of J.B. Priestley, adapted the novel for the stage. This became a great success in the London West End, with Robert Hardy and Paul Eddington playing the main roles and more than a thousand performances in a few years.
A Severed Head is steeped in existentialism, the philosophy that was made popular by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Murdoch wrote an introduction to the work of Sartre, which became her first published book in 1953: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist. There are no direct references to Sartre or existentialism in the novel, but it is the obvious ambition of the characters to liberate themselves from conventional morality and the pressure of society to conform. The novel is situated around Christmas in London. A thick fog is hanging in the streets: ‘I cannot see, I cannot see, I said to myself: it was as if some inner blindness were being here tormentingly exteriorized. I saw shadows and hints of things, nothing clearly at all.’ They feel free, yes, but often to achieve this freedom they have to lie to the people they love. And lies cause muddles. But stumbling in the dark and trying to find their way in foggy London they – the main characters in the novel anyway – keep their faith in discovering true love: ‘I watched, where a long golden streak had opened in the mist.’
The quest of Iris Murdoch to perceive some rays of light piercing through the mist of human confusion and folly will go on for 21 more novels. I’m looking forward to continue my exploration.
Notes
1. For some time after World War II, Iris Murdoch worked for UNRRA – United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She was stationed in Belgium and Austria and was mainly involved in repatriating refugees. Reading The Flight from the Enchanter, you can’t but consider the possibility that Murdoch found part of the cast in her old UNRRA files.
2. One of the most notable skills of Iris Murdoch is her talent to sketch the background of her novels in space. This is the more remarkable when the house where the action is situated exceeds the normal size as e.g. in The Sandcastle and The Bell. Her descriptions would enable an architect – or gifted reader - to draw an accurate and detailed plan. Also the grounds around the house with walks and ornamental waters, as in The Bell, are mapped with great precision. Those descriptions are functional because they allow the author to move her characters around – yes, as on a chessboard. Connected with this feature is the idiosyncratic practice seldom to lock front doors, which is the cause of many a scene in which a character is caught red-handed.
Author bio:
Wim D’Haveloose lives in Ghent and is a reviewer and translator into Dutch, mainly of plays, among them Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. His work has appeared in Slightly Foxed.