The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch

I

‘A Kind of Moral Psychology’

The novel itself, of course, the whole world of the novel, is the expression of a world outlook. And one can’t avoid doing this. Any novelist produces a moral world and there’s a kind of world outlook which can be deduced from each of the novels. And of course I have my own philosophy in a very general sense, a kind of moral psychology one might call it rather than philosophy.

Iris Murdoch speaking at the University of Caen, 1978

1

‘Existentialist and Mystic’

Iris Murdoch was the author of some twenty-six novels, a handful of plays and poems, a number of influential articles, a book on Sartre, two books of her own moral philosophy, and a book on Plato’s theory of art. She is a writer of international reputation. Apart from monographs there has been no full-length study of her work by a British critic since A.S. Byatt’s valuable, pioneering study Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965). Despite the honours that the later work won – The Black Prince won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1973, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine won the Whitbread Prize in 1974, The Sea, The Sea the Booker Prize in 1978 – it has not been properly celebrated. I believe that the early theory, and also the real but limited success of the early apprentice fiction, have obscured the enormous, disorderly merits of the later work, which in its turn must alter the way we view the earlier.

Few writers divide their audiences as radically. Between Murdoch’s advocates and her detractors there is a gulf fixed. Elizabeth Dipple’s useful missionary Work for the Spirit (1982) sought to bridge this gap and to convert the latter into the former. This study is not, by contrast, a proselytising one. It seeks to persuade no one who does not already enjoy her work, but to describe some of the pleasures which an excessively narrow critical focus has neglected. This is a celebratory study whose aim is to try to illuminate her best work and to give some account of why she is found both entertaining, and also serious and important.

‘Most artists understand their own weaknesses far better than the critics do,’ says Arnold Baffin in The Black Prince, a writer unflatteringly parodied, as his creator has been, for emptying himself in his books over the world ‘like scented bath-water’, and as living ‘in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea’ (BP 137). Iris Murdoch is her own best critic and best defendant. She gives the prolific Baffin an eloquent self-defence too – ‘The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on trying to do it better. And one aspect of this is that any artist has to decide how fast to work. I do not believe that I would improve if I wrote less. The only result of that would be that there would be less of whatever there is’ (172).

Murdoch’s frailties are by now well chronicled. Borrowing her own lofty criteria and sometimes drawing on her Peccavis, reviewers have sometimes been content to issue bulletins of high-minded reproof and adopt a tone of puritanical strictness. In what follows I do not seek to whisk her away into academic irreproachability. It is in some sense her human quality that seems to me engaging – her quality of, in the best sense, ‘stubborn imperfection’.¹ She can be uneven, over-intellectual or romantic. There is some unfinished and repetitive writing. The books can seem contrived or over-plotted, the characters sometimes insufficiently imagined. Her social range is not huge; she says little about work and often appears to take money for granted. She can seem to be playing a complex game with the reader. There is, as early reviewers noted, ‘too much’ in the books.

The objections are by now well canvassed. Her virtues need cataloguing too. She writes spellbinding stories in beautiful prose. She knows how to master paragraphs and sentences and at her best achieves an extraordinary, luminous, lyrical accuracy. She has an intensely visual imagination and can use it to evoke things, people, the activity of thinking, feeling, places, cars and dogs too. In each novel are things that no other British writer has the power to describe. Her empirical curiosity and moral energy seem endless. Few other writers are as full of the naked pleasures of looking and describing. She can tackle happiness, ‘that deep, confiding slow relationship to time’ (SPLM 16), the subject-matter for great writers. (Every fool can write about misery.) London is a real presence in the books, indeed seems to figure sometimes as an extra character, and even when her people are having a hellish time there, which is often, the author’s loving and patient apprehension of the city comes through. This is the more noticeable in that, Dickens and Woolf apart, London has lacked distinguished celebrants. There is no touch of neurotic agrarianism in Murdoch, and if London had its Samuel Palmer it might well be her. But she can of course evoke the inner world, the world of fantasies, projections, demonic illusions too. No one writes better about the urgencies and illusions of the moral life. She is our most intelligent novelist since George Eliot, and like George Eliot she was a mature thinker before she wrote her first novel. Her technique altered significantly as the novels progressed. Many of her leading ideas are already there in her first work.

Does our sense that the novels feel ‘contrived’ damage the illusion that the characters are free? Decreasingly, I think. The point has too often been argued in a simple-minded manner. Even in the most Gothic of her novels the characters seem alive. What she writes owes much to ‘romance’,² and romance is both the most conventional and yet the least ‘literary’, most immediate of forms.³ It is a form which demands a certain latitude in the matter of probabilities. All art is contrived, and in great art truth can be purchased at the expense of improbability; yet the absurdities vanish under the force of the art. This is clear in the case of Restoration comedy, or opera, both of which her work can resemble,⁴ or indeed in the case of Shakespearian drama, which her work increasingly contemplated and was nourished by. The plots of King Lear or Much Ado About Nothing are not ‘realistic’, and at the end of Twelfth Night we share in a ‘triumph of the improbable’. These are plots which can grip you in the theatre and mock your attempts to recount them outside. You put up with the contrivance and conscious stylisation for the sake of the illumination they offer, and the degree of trust you show depends on the good will you bear the author, and the reward her illusions purchase. As Murdoch put this in the 1982 Gifford lectures – ‘in good art we do not ask for realism; we ask for truth.’

Truth, of course, has had a bad press recently, and thus the question of stylisation has a way of returning. One reviewer recorded how his feeling on opening a Murdoch novel – ‘But surely human beings are not like this’ – can be swiftly followed by the feeling – ‘Perhaps this is just what human beings are in fact like, and it is precisely our delusion to imagine that we are not.’⁵ One source of positive pleasure in the bizarrerie offered by her plots comes from our sense that, as Murdoch has often averred, people are secretly much odder, less rational, more often powered by obsession and passion than they outwardly pretend or know, and that the novelist is revealing such secrets in creating her (imaginary) people. Some accounts of Bloomsbury – for example Angelica Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness – make most Murdoch plots look models of understatement. ‘Murdochian’ has justly joined ‘Dickensian’ and ‘Swiftian’ as a way of pointing to certain aspects of the world. I think her characters are recognisable. These vain bookish civil servants, morally squeamish men whose sheer egoism is driving them mad, emotionally greedy women, precocious adolescents, isolated and awkward good characters, all involved in the great, lonely hunt for love and consolation and power: it is not a bad image of the world. It has universality too.

There are related points to be made about contrivance. Her best work is quiveringly real/unreal in its texture. What can be perplexing is not that she fails to convince, but that she can describe with an extraordinary hallucinatory validating detail and power the most ‘unlikely’ situations, so that, before you have time to decide whether or not you believe in them, you find yourself forced to imagine them. Her ingenious style of realism, in combining fantasy with a meticulous naturalistic rendering of detail, shares something with surrealism. It can drive a wedge between reason and imagination, so that we concur imaginatively, against reason’s good advice; reason is dulled in something like awe at her sheer aesthetic nerve and inventiveness. In Chapter 5 I discuss how the limits to rationalism become for her a great theme. Her use of contrivance seems to relate to this, a deliberate and shameless affront, ‘unbelievable’ in a way that mimics and parodies the frequently unbelievable quality of life too. Unreality, in other words, can be a potent aesthetic device. The task of classifying, as her work often asserts, can perhaps never be more than a (serious) game; but visionary or ‘magical’ realism seems to get closer than most descriptive terms to the special and disturbing pleasure her work can afford. The question of artifice has too often been divorced from the question of pleasure.

She can create mystery and magic. In the least of her work there is something alive and interesting, an atmosphere which haunts and stays with you. The Dorset seascape of The Nice and the Good, the fogbound rectory in The Time of the Angels, the various different Londons of A Severed Head, or A Fairly Honourable Defeat – these are real imaginative creations. The creation of a strong ‘atmosphere’ can be at odds with the creation of character, and I think critics can be too puritan here. Even Shakespeare and Tolstoy do not always create ‘memorable’ characters. Like any other writer’s, Murdoch’s characters can sometimes be memorable, sometimes merely believable, sometimes interesting without being persuasive, sometimes ‘far too individual to remember’.⁶ In the most idea-bound of her romances we have persons and not merely personifications. A disservice is done by critics awed by the cold prestige of ‘philosophy’, and mindful that Iris Murdoch is a philosopher as well as a novelist, who treat the novels as though their inhabitants must therefore be no more than symposiasts at a disputation. The books are full of ideas, of course, but are also about life, feed off life, feed back into life.

Murdoch clearly understood a great deal about people, with a quality of understanding I can best describe as ‘animal intelligence’, a Keatsian ability to encounter the sensuousness of the activity of thinking, in all its immediacy. She was interested in power, a subject largely ignored by critics. ‘No question can be more important than Who is the boss?’, says Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The question ‘Who is the boss?’ links in her books, as in life, with sex and with spirit. There is a large other range of mixed emotion she is adept at evoking, especially, of course, love, her subject par excellence. If she is the Gilbert White of the sensations and the emotions, she is also love’s natural historian.

She can appear to be playing a sophisticated game with the reader, and the critic should beware of complaining that she is simply more intelligent than he is. If you enjoy her, her intelligence is part of what you are enjoying. I try to explain in Chapter 5 how the frustration of the reader’s natural desire to make the world of the book transparent is a task Murdoch takes seriously. She is, I think, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous dichotomy, much more of a fox than a hedgehog – one who knows many things before she knows one. Knowing many things is in a sense her premise for knowing one. Despite the fact that she declared that she inclined, temperamentally, to monism (SG 50), she sees the world’s variousness and multiplicity as art’s opportunity, as well as its foe.

Her social range deserves comment. Often the novels will concern a central ‘court’ of relatives and friends, some of whom will have met at university, and whose older womenfolk have sacrificed careers for those of their husbands. Such inbred courts feed off Shakespeare, as she often acknowledged, as well as off life. The British professional classes often lead such inbred 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 existentialism throughout, since that was the form which most interested her. In interview with Bigsby (1982) she suggested that her objections went right back to her first encounter with it in 1945. Her scepticism as well as her interest is quite apparent before her first novel was published in 1954, and her book on Sartre the previous year, though respectful, is scarcely uncritical. What excited her about it was the primary place it gave to a consideration and depiction of experience, a subject then absent from Anglo-Saxon philosophy, and its comparative willingness to tackle problems of value and morality. It was the phenomenological and moral bias of the existentialists that excited her, and she was one of the few English philosophers to have read them. In Britain there had been a disastrous shrinking of the field of moral philosophy to, for example, discussions of the ontological status of moral assertions, and an abdication of the responsibility to guide and instruct.

Philosophy seems to have come to matter to her, for all its clear difference from literature, for comparable reasons, because ‘a dominant philosophy pictures the consciousness of the age’ (sbr), and because man is the creature who ‘makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the pictures’ (me). She came to distrust Sartrian existentialism and British philosophy equally, and to see them as sharing a common ground in offering no barrier to romantic selfassertion. In a radio talk in 1950 she criticised both Sartre and Camus for presenting worlds which were simultaneously too intelligible and transparent, and also too lacking (unlike the world of Gabriel Marcel) in mystery – in which category she included nightmarish mystery – and magic. ‘This fact alone, that there is no mystery, would falsify their claims to be true pictures of the situation of man…We are not yet resigned to absurdity and our only salvation lies in not becoming resigned’ (eh). The same year she asked, à propos Simone de Beauvoir’s championing of T.E. Lawrence as an existentialist hero, ‘Should he be taken as the model of the good man for this age?’⁹ In a sense this question resonates throughout her writing, and its very subversive simplicity rightly disturbs us. What man are we being asked to admire in this novel or in that philosophy? And are the reasons just? By 1957 in a Spectator review she noted that the appeal of existentialism was its dramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social exaltation of the individual.¹⁰ If the central question she was later to ask in The Sovereignty of Good – what is it that might ‘lead to unselfish behaviour in the concentration camp?’ (73) – has any answer, it is not the ‘instantaneous’ values of the existentialist hero or of his Anglo-Saxon voluntarist counterpart. It is no accident that the plots of her novels until 1970 often concern the disruption of a court of settled, rooted English grands bourgeois by displaced persons and refugees. The theme is of course as old as Jane Austen, but Murdoch makes her own special use of it. She has written both of the ‘phenomenal luck of our English-speaking societies’ and, in the same article (sbr), of how such luck may obscure deep truth. These outsiders – the Lusiewicz twins and Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter, the Levkins in The Italian Girl, Honor Klein and Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head, Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat – may sometimes appear as twentieth-century versions of the sentimental or demonic egoists whose irruption into the innocent provincial redoubt Austen chronicled.¹¹ They as often, however, reveal the ‘deep truth’ hidden behind polite English manners.

The exact moment at which her disaffection with existentialism began may now be hard to determine. The spiritual claim that quarrels with it is present as early as Under the Net; and in a sense this argument has continued.

In the 1950s Murdoch began to read the great French mystic Simone Weil, whose influence on the novels A.S. Byatt has discussed in Degrees of Freedom. It is Weil’s strength that she does not, unlike Sartre, sentimentalise the position of being radically denuded and outside society. Murdoch has called Simone Weil’s Need for Roots ‘one of the very few profound and original political treatises of our time’(kv). It argues that the most terrible deprivation possible is the destruction of one’s past and one’s culture. Weil’s argument is that the affliction and degradation caused by the destruction of roots are such that they deprive all but the saintly person of the capacity to change or ‘unself’ from inside. The uprooted hurt and uproot others. Only for the saintly can virtue have no fixed address, in Weil’s philosophy and in Murdoch’s fiction. Morality depends, for Weil, on the slow attenuation or destruction of the ego, which itself requires a quiet environment. Sudden or violent deracination can mean complete or demonic demoralisation.

It is not that existentialism (or formalism) are wrong to attack the substantial self. It is rather that their attack is for Murdoch in bad faith. In pretending that the essential self does not exist the existentialist may behave like an ‘egotist-without-an-I’. The Buddhist attack on the fictionality of the ego is more profound, for both Weil and Murdoch, because it is based on a realistic assessment of the limited capacity of the ego to decentre itself, and because it is nonetheless designed to alter perception and behaviour. The originality of Murdoch’s novels is that they are full of a sense of what it means to come from one of the luckier, stabler societies or sections within that society, in an unlucky century, but avoid false piety about either that luck or that misfortune. The make-believe of ordinary life and the painful destruction of ordinary human illusion can be carried out anywhere, in a refugee camp or at a tea-table. Nowhere is privileged.

Just as her recoil from existentialism begins early, so does her attraction to a countervailing soul-picture which is, though absorbing much from Freud, religious yet (like Buddhism) atheist (and hence scandalous both to some Christians and to many humanists). Apart from a polemical letter to the New Statesman in 1941 defending the fellowtravelling Oxford Labour Group against J.W. Joad’s ‘liberal ethics of the nineteenth century’ and his facile invocation of ‘truth, beauty, goodness and love’,¹² Murdoch’s earliest prose publications are three reviews of books with Christian topics, written during the war for the Adelphi magazine. They already prefigure her developed ‘philosophy’ of the 1960s, which she pertinently called not so much a philosophy as a moral psychology (Caen, 1978) in its interest in the differences between people, and in ‘how conduct is changed and how consciousness is changed’ (Bellamy, 1977). These reviews, while making clear that she was non-Christian, also show that she was prepared calmly and sympathetically to consider the claim that ‘science and philosophy may come to rest afresh upon a specifically religious exposition of the nature of reality’. Two other passages seem relevant to later preoccupations. The first concerns her interest in the dualism of worldliness and unworldliness, and the problem of the contemplative’s ‘return to the Cave’: ‘One may sympathize with this horror that turns its face utterly from this world as a place of unrelieved filth and corruption – but the problem of the return to the Cave remains a very real one for Christianity.’ In the second she compares the detachment of the artist with that of the saint. The artist, she argues, is not ‘apart’ as the saint is: ‘He sees the earth freshly and strangely but he is ultimately part of it, he is inside the things he sees and speaks of as well as outside them. He is of their substance, he suffers with them. Of saints I know nothing…’¹³ That collocation of ‘fresh’ with ‘strange’ prefigures many of the effects of her novels. The ‘odd’ for her is often close to being or to revealing the beautiful.

From 1948 to 1963, when she gave up full-time teaching, she was Tutor in Philosophy and Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 1956 she married the writer, critic and Oxford don John Bayley. John Fletcher has called theirs ‘one of the most fruitful literary and critical partnerships of our time, and remarkable in any time’.¹⁴ While Murdoch showed her novels to nobody until they were absolutely finished, she and Bayley shared a common humanism and an admiration for Shakespeare and Tolstoy as the writers who best succeed in creating the illusion that their characters are free.

It is rare to find someone who excelled, as did Murdoch, both as a novelist and as a moral philosopher. The precedent at which she glances at various points is the founder of European philosophy, Plato. In 1968 she called herself a Platonist (Rose, 1968). As well as philosophy, Plato is rumoured to have written poetry which he later tore up, and I think that in Murdoch we may intuit what she saw in Plato in The Sovereignty of Good – some version of ‘the peculiarly distressing struggle between artist and saint’ (88). She spoke of this as a theme in her work in numerous interviews. She described the division between would-be saints – Belfounder, Tayper-Pace, Ann Peronett – who have the certainty and power which come as gifts of faith, and possess a mysterious radiance beneath their ordinariness, and the would-be artists – Donaghue, Meade, Randall Peronett – who are imposing form on to essentially uncontrollable nature. The saint is unconsciously good, silent, and for him it is action that counts. The artist is consciously, aesthetically creating his life. In an interview she suggested that the importance of this conflict had to do with the ways in which the temptation to impose form existed in life as much as in art: the value of truth must pull at both.¹⁵

Thus the ‘ancient quarrel’ vivifies the novels themselves at the level of the moral psychology of the characters. Her depiction of artists – Miles in Bruno’s Dream, Bradley in The Black Prince – is always suspicious; not, as Dipple has too simply argued, that they are necessarily bad artists – in The Fire and the Sun Murdoch makes perfectly clear her view that ‘Good artists can be bad men’ (84) – but because ‘art’ itself is an analogue of the process by which we create in life a self-serving world view in which other people figure merely as subsidiary characters. This can be the only sense in which she refers, for example, to Michael Meade in The Bell as an artist – a man who has no strictly artistic ambitions.

Meeting Iris Murdoch in 1960 Ved Mehta wrote, ‘Among her friends and students Miss Murdoch has the reputation of being a saint, and she has no enemies’ (Mehta, 1961).

A received view of the post-war British novel treats it as in slow retreat from a simple-minded and ‘reactionary’ social realism, and moving towards an embrace of the purportedly ‘radical’ virtues of fantasy, Gothic, and romance. A new generation of writers, beneficiaries of the 1944 Butler Education Act which enabled children from poorer homes to enjoy higher education, reacted in the 1950s against the canons of Modernism. They perceived it as a metropolitan and rentier mode, the writing of a privileged group typified often by Virginia Woolf. The new realism, championed by Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow, was resolutely provincial – anxious to celebrate the regions and to return, against the stylistic narcissism and self-consciousness of London and international Modernism, to the liberal conscience of Trollope, Wells, or George Eliot. The new realism, however, showed signs of strain. According to both Marxist and some liberal commentators this was because realism was underpinned by ‘liberal humanism’, an outmoded or inadequate ‘ideology’ whose superannuation cleared the way for more self-conscious, speculative and ironic forms. Social realism came to be seen as a naive or inauthentic mode, relying on a false view of the unified self, of perception and the innocent eye, and a falsely optimistic estimate of human history. And just as ‘realism’ came to be seen as a form of whiggish romancing, so ‘romance’ was to be the new realism. The novel thus acts out a Miltonic fall myth, first innocent and unselfknowing, later fallen, recessive, and wickedly self-conscious.

Murdoch’s career strikingly belies this consoling map. She did criticise Modernism – or its symbolist legacy – in her early and influential essays, whose hostilities were very much of their time, and which have been plundered by critics for too few ideas. She did not start as a liberal and a social realist and move towards more ‘apocalyptic’ and Gothic forms. Instead she started her work with a devastating critique of liberalism which resembles a systematic purgation, and began her career as a novelist in Under the Net where others of her generation look like ending theirs, with a work which is witty and anxious about art-as-lies, but which also scorns the banal play which might have called its own illusionism into doubt. Such self-conscious play with the form, even in the later perplexing The Black Prince, is peripheral.

It might unkindly be said that liberal humanists in Britain have sometimes seemed to resemble Murdoch’s character Eric in Australia where, ever since he arrived, ‘people have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down’ (NG 42) – either worrying away at the code like a game of Patience that seems unlikely to come out, or, in the case of the more prophetically inclined, as if it were just about to give way to some novel and more modish system of obligations whose name they were anxious to be the first to learn. For Murdoch the faults of liberalism were to a large extent the faults of existentialism. Both oppose, too simply, an innocent self to a guilty society, an inheritance they share from Romanticism. For her the question was posed not in terms of the mischievous default of history to make us secure and happy, but in terms of our own deep unacknowledged unfreedom and irrationality, our complicity in ‘lifemyths’ we unknowingly construct and live by, and our deep defencelessness, which we wrap up in various ways, to history, chance and contingency. She had of course political concerns. She campaigned among many other things against American involvement in Vietnam, and for homosexual law reform, and the novels obliquely discuss many public themes.¹⁶ But, for her, man is not innately rational, good or free. ‘Reason’ has to be earned, unendingly struggled for, and her world is not inertly comprehensible, as in ‘naive’ realism, but inexhaustibly mysterious and energetic beyond our easy grasp. An intense lyricism about this mystery marked her out from the first. To put her critique another way: there is in her work only ever the limited, very messy, imperfect and unperfectible task of love, and its failure. Society is not merely there outside us as a system of vulgar privations. Its nastinesses begin in our heads.

In both French and English novels of the mid-twentieth century the hero can appear as a potentially absolute individual unfairly circumscribed by a world of mere types. Although Kingsley Amis’s is a comic existentialism, both Lucky Jim and Roquentin seem similarly to dramatise their predicaments as those of ‘freedoms caught in a trap’ (SRR 36). It is the others who are irrational or falsely rational. The hero may, like Meurseult, be the only person who knows that he is powered by unreason and may thereby be ‘authentic’ in a way denied the less self-conscious; or like Bernard Sands in Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After may have his one moment of cruelty, an aberrance that must be neutralised before it destroys him.

Murdoch attacked both ‘self-knowledge’ and ‘sincerity’ as second-rate and often delusive virtues. She argued that both French existentialism and English linguistic philosophy are heirs of Romanticism and share a common voluntarism, a romantic overemphasis on the will. Both separate the moral agent from all that surrounds him and, in speaking of the will as if it were or could easily be free, wholly ignore the personality and the huge and daunting power of its secret, fragmentary, opaque and obsessive inner life. The unenlightened self is mechanical, and escape from it is hard. ‘Self-examination’ strengthens its power. Willed acts of imaginative attention to what lies outside it can help erode it. In the important essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ (1970) she attacked the hero of much contemporary fiction as

the lonely brave man, defiant without optimism, proud without pretension, always an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of society. He is an adventurer. He is godless. He does not suffer from guilt. He thinks of himself as free. He may have faults, he may be self-assertive or even violent, but he has sincerity and courage, and for this we forgive him…He might do anything.

She called this hero ‘existentialist’ and noted that he already looked a little out of date. He is the hero of novels by Hemingway, Lawrence, Sartre, Camus, Amis…It is typical of existentialism that it ‘either makes his responsibility absolute or abolishes it’ (Bigsby, 1982). Existentialism’s promise of total human freedom is a bogus one. Much of Murdoch’s moral psychology boils down to a criticism of the idea of fast moral change as romantic and false, and a defence of slow moral change as something difficult, piecemeal, and always incomplete.

‘Existentialists and Mystics’ is a meditation on various themes – on the existentialist novel, on the novel which contains an alternative ‘mystical’ hero, and on the place of literature in the new moral and political scene. The question of whether the present age is so wholly different from the past as to be deemed discontinuous with it is debated from various points of view. The existentialist novel tries to be cheerfully godless but abounds in a gloom which is secretly self-satisfied because, from its point of view, man is