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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ