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

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СКАЧАТЬ his hand, as he blames his life, on his brother. And of course his brother, like everyone else, is not blameless. Each person has his own happiness, ‘however unglittering and inglorious’, a succeeding book proclaims (SPLM 16); each person also his own guilt. Austin’s bad luck, in seeming an infectious moral flaw, cheerfully shows the limitations to any Samaritan altruism, as well as its necessity.

      Speaking at the University of Caen in 1978 Iris Murdoch noted her father’s recoil from the world of Ulster ‘black Protestantism’ but also recorded her own puritanism, and her attraction to Sartre as a puritan thinker of sorts. The different anti-art scepticism and puritanism of such diverse thinkers as Plato, Kant and Freud long preoccupied her. Indeed any thinker who intelligently questions the role of art interested her. Her puritanism was not – in any obvious or simple sense – sexual. The saintliest of her characters, the Christ-like Tallis of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, is shown justly disappointed when Peter interrupts an ‘interesting’ sexual fantasy he is having; and Will’s full-blooded sexuality in Bruno’s Dream is a force making for happiness. The word ‘puritan’ will nonetheless echo throughout this study.

      It is clearly no accident that Murdoch named that character whom she has termed the ‘unconscious’ of the wicked Mischa Fox, Calvin Blick; and she remarked that ‘Puritanism and romanticism are natural partners and we are still living with their partnership’ (SG 81). Both puritans and romantics are marked by humourless impatience at the world’s ordinary amoral diversity, and wish to escape from or purge it in the direction of some simplified, purer ‘Original’, or some form of other-worldly release. Both puritans and romantics are other-worldly. The temptation to ‘sum up a character, to round off a situation’ (sbr), or to assume that ‘one has got individuals and situations “taped”’ (vc), which Murdoch stigmatised as formal temptations in art, are obviously moral temptations too. The temptations to moralise and to coerce the world are uncomfortably close, if not identical.

      This may be why the villains of Murdoch’s work, in so far as it admits of such, are frequently puritans or falseascetics who, however much they be loved by the author, often take the greatest punishment from the plot, while the pagan hedonists get off most lightly. In the sheer delight it affords her work indeed asserts the pleasure principle again and again, and the novels seemed to her, in interview with Haffenden (1983), to be ‘shining with happiness…works of art make you happy…Even King Lear makes you happy.’ To Haffenden she concurred with a definition of art as ‘pure pleasure’.

      If critics have not always responded as enthusiastically to Murdoch’s work as did Elizabeth Dipple, this may be quite as much because they are puritanically embarrassed at the feast of pleasure she affords as that they are, as Dipple supposed, selfishly frightened at Murdoch’s unremitting righteousness. What a gallery of happy and innocent sensualists there are in her novels! Danby in Bruno’s Dream might stand in for the breed in general, a man who, if the world were ending, would at once cheer up if offered a gin and French, and a man who even enjoyed every moment of the war. Danby comes out of the book better than his puritan foil and brother-in-law Miles, but it should also be said that Murdoch clearly shows us the difference between them without reaching for any crudely moralised distinctions. Each has his own happiness, however unglittering, and however inglorious. It is the fact of their difference that engages and imaginatively uses her, like the factual difference in moral temperament between the innocent, feckless worldling Dora in The Bell and her insensitive ascetic husband Paul; or between Simon in A Fairly Honourable Defeat and his lover Axel – another pagan innocent living with a less than fully responsive puritan.

      Each of these characters’ natures earns its proper reproach from the plot itself; each is cherished and chastised. In Murdoch’s own mediation between moral extremes hers might be said to be, like Buddhism, a dynamic and cheerful philosophy of the Middle Way. It is dynamic in that it insists on moral effort, but a mediation in that anything but a temperate self-denial turns out to reinforce what you already are. In her essay ‘T.S. Eliot as a Moralist’ she described Eliot as an ‘anti-puritan puritan’, a person who, while objecting to the vulgar Calvinism of the Reformation, none the less urged some fastidious discriminations of his own. The phrase ‘anti-puritan puritan’ admirably fits Murdoch too. It is a symptom of the difficulty of thinking about this area in her work that critics can be more royalist than the king. They have sometimes drawn a figure who, however apt the role of scourge of egoism might be in a zealot, is insufferable as an artist. The fact that art is a realm of moral compromise is a matter of regret to Murdoch, as The Fire and the Sun shows; but it is also a fact, as well as a theme in itself.

      Iris Murdoch is in some sense both the most other-worldly and the most worldly of our novelists. The war between the best and the second-best fills her characters, her idea-play, and provides her narrative locomotion. Speaking at Caen of women’s liberation she discussed the extent to which women have become ‘more liberated…more ordinary’. That apotheosis of ordinariness is itself typical of the emancipations her work is in quest of. And if she could be said to urge any position in the old quarrel between worldliness and other-worldliness it might be Arthur Fisch’s counsel to the outsider Hilary Burde in A Word Child: ‘the spiritual urge is mad unless it’s embodied in some ordinary way of life’ (88).

      In a splendid section of The Uses of Division John Bayley expounds the Russian critic Shestov. Shestov thought that great writers are, however much they protest the contrary, solipsists, and that the real virtues of their work are different from what they are usually taken to be. In the nineteenth-century novel this solipsism affects the way art faces its chief dilemma, that of serving the eschatological functions of which religion is no longer capable. It must ‘search for and reveal salvation while showing that no such thing existed’. ‘Tolstoi searched endlessly for the good and identified it with God,’ Bayley paraphrases Shestov, ‘but what his characters want and strive for is…contentment and assurance, even at the cost of hypocrisy.’¹³

      I shall pursue this further in discussing The Nice and the Good in Chapter 6. In that novel, Kate Gray has a patrician and socially useful assurance, a ‘golden life-giving egoism and rich self-satisfaction’ (22), which is an active force for good in the world. It might be said that in Iris Murdoch’s world, just as in Shestov’s, morality appears not merely as a vengeful Fury haunting the characters – though they are certainly sufficiently haunted – but as a potent ambiguity. Contentment too plays an equivocal role, since it can defend against profitless despair, but also feed a less than perfect self-delight. In The Sea, The Sea Charles Arrowby significantly ascribes such an ambiguous content to Shakespeare himself: ‘There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the world’ (482).

      The ambiguity could be examined further by comparing Murdoch’s fine work of moral philosophy The Sovereignty of Good with the novels. In that work she spoke eloquently for the unconsoled love of Good, and emerged as a puritan moralist in a tradition sanctioned by Plato, arguing for unselfing, and for the difficult task of ascesis. The austere project of the book is to rescue a religious picture of man from the collapse of dogma, to attack all forms of consolation, romanticism and self-consciousness, and to study the necessary degeneration of Good in morals.

      ‘All is vanity’ is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way is to be good ‘for nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every natural thing, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is to necessity.(71)

      She also, however, insisted on the pursuit of happiness. In one 1982 Gifford lecture she discussed happiness as a moral duty, and she spoke often of the ways that the desire for happiness ‘keeps people sane and freshens life’, and insisted that ‘one should plan one’s life in order to be happy, and this involves decisions about work; and marriage and where you live, and cultivating your talents and so on. I think our sort of world here provides innumerable opportunities for happiness which sometimes, СКАЧАТЬ