The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch. Peter Conradi J.

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СКАЧАТЬ 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’.

      The author cannot remain wholly outside such a system of feeling. Two characters die in circumstances that mock their and our childish desire for transcendence. The dying Alison is misheard when calling for her lawyer and has to endure a reading from the Psalms: ‘The words were at home in this scene. They had been here before’ (48). And the harassed Dorina on the point of death at last realises that what she had dimly recalled as spiritual advice – ‘Il faut toujours plier les genoux’ – was actually skiing instruction.

      Austin is the infectious centre of this cruel pleasure, this ghoulish pity and fear. He is the most deluded and unfree, but his story is circumscribed by many others, which radiate outwards and give the illusion of a marvellous depth of field. There are chains of lovers, whose voices are overheard only through a series of letters. The letters, like the anonymous party voices, wittily punctuate the narrative. Schoolboy Patrick loves and pursues Ralph Odmore, who imagines he loves Ann Colin dale, who is certain she loves Richard Pargeter, who currently dallies with Karen Arbuthnot, who loves and pursues Sebastian Odmore, who pines for Gracie Tisbourne. Gracie loves and is loved by Ludwig Leferrier, and this affair is close to the book’s centre. In every other case the more dedicated lover uses the same successful gambit to attract his or her beloved – he or she feigns interest in a third party. This comedy is Bergsonian – we laugh because the characters are exhibiting, in a form carefully exaggerated for artistic purposes, their recognisable unfreedom, and obeying Proust’s law that only the inaccessible love-object attracts.

      The comedy of the action is at odds with the idea-play, which meditates the theme of the Good Samaritan and of not passing by on the other side. Matthew as a diplomat in Moscow witnessed a passer-by coolly joining some protesters and thus condemning himself in an instant to certain state persecution. Garth in New York stood by and watched a street murder and later tries vainly, comically, to solace the dispossessed Charlotte. Ludwig (usually taken by American critics as the central character since he is American) is bypassing an issue of conscience in avoiding return to the United States to be tried for his refusal to fight in Vietnam. Later, in a mood of despair over the breaking of his engagement, he passes by and thus terrifies the tormented and needy Dorina, who is reading the world entirely in terms of her own guilt-feelings and on the way to her needless ‘accidental’ death, just as Ludwig sees entirely in terms of his own despair: ‘To walk by was the expression of his despair. His spirit was too tired, too troubled’ (347). This is compassionately done. Though there is a ‘tremendous moral charge’ it is also morality ‘at its most refined and least dogmatic’, as Murdoch noted of Shakespeare (Bigsby, 1982). The parable of the Good Samaritan enjoins kindness to the unlucky. But Austin СКАЧАТЬ