Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination 3031272161, 9783031272165

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: ‘Of Science and of Light’: Learning with Iris Murdoch
References
Chapter 3: ‘In My Beginning Is My End’: Threads and Themes from Under the Net to Jackson’s Dilemma
Overview of the Terrain
In my Beginning: Under the Net (1954)
Brigid Brophy and The Black Prince
From Philosophical Novelist to Feminist Politics
Is My End: Jackson’s Dilemma (1995)
Murdoch’s Agenda
Threads and Themes: Bridges and Rooms
Comic and Tragic Masks
Jackson’s Dilemma Today
Raids on the Inarticulate
Murdoch’s Standing Today
References
Chapter 4: ‘A Man Shut in a Glass’: Textual Blindness and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954)
Interrogating the Text
Iris Murdoch, Rachel Cusk and Female Autobiography
Joining the Patriarchy
Male Protagonists and Misogynist Complicity
Moral Ambiguity and the Male First-Person Narrator
Jake’s Trinity
Unconditional Love
‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, How I Love You’14
The Wicked Witch and ‘the Prince in a Fairy Tale’ 17
Reading Simone de Beauvoir
Maidens in the Margins
Jake’s Legacy
Murdoch’s Feminism
References
Chapter 5: ‘Now the Illumination’: Iris Murdoch as Zen Philosopher-Poet
Zen
Haiku
Murdoch’s Poetry
Goodness
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Iris Murdoch and The Tale of Genji
References
Chapter 7: Iris Murdoch, Australia and Me
References
Chapter 8: ‘The Scrambled Script’: Contingency and Necessity in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight
References
Chapter 9: ‘Adolescent Girls Attract Ghosts’: Iris Murdoch and the Supernatural
Toxic Masculinity and the Supernatural
‘Adolescent Girls Attract Ghosts’
Coda
References
Chapter 10: Friendship, Sex, and the Moral Life in Iris Murdoch’s Novels
References
Chapter 11: Iris Murdoch and Goodness: How Good?
References
Index

Citation preview

IRIS MURDOCH TODAY

Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination Edited by Miles Leeson · Frances White

Iris Murdoch Today Series Editors

Miles Leeson Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK Frances White Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK

The aim of this series is to publish the best scholarly work in Murdoch studies by bringing together those working at the forefront of the field. Authors and editors of volumes in the series are internationally-recognised scholars in philosophy, literature, theology, and related humanities and interdisciplinary subjects. Including both monographs and contributed volumes, the series is scholarly rigorous and opens up new ways of reading Murdoch, and new ways to read the work of others with Murdoch in mind. The series is designed to appeal not only to Murdoch experts, but also to scholars with a more general interest in the subjects under discussion.

Miles Leeson  •  Frances White Editors

Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination

Editors Miles Leeson Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK

Frances White Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK

ISSN 2731-331X     ISSN 2731-3328 (electronic) Iris Murdoch Today ISBN 978-3-031-27215-8    ISBN 978-3-031-27216-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Edited collections are never just the work of the editors and contributors, many share in the production of the finished work and it is to them that this work is dedicated. We are blessed with an international support network in Iris Murdoch studies that enables individuals to flourish, and for works such as this to be published. The conception of the ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ series, of which this is the first edited collection, first came about at the Centenary Conference in Oxford in July 2019 where it became clear that work in the field had shifted so significantly, and the critical mass of academics and readers involved had increased so significantly, for a new era of publishing in this area to begin. In 2019 we looked back to those who were involved from the beginning—and we are delighted to be able to posthumously publish the work of Stephen Medcalf, one of Murdoch’s students at Oxford as well as one of the keynote lectures given at the conference by her friend, Valentine Cunningham. However, the main thrust of this collection brings together the very best recent work by recognised experts in the field working across her literary output, and we are delighted to present such a wide-­ ranging collection bringing together work on Murdoch’s fiction, critical reception, unpublished poetry and interdisciplinary links with other connected subjects that she worked on. We are in no doubt that the future of Murdoch studies is in safe hands and the wealth of material on display in this collection not only showcases what we believe to be the range of excellence currently produced, but points towards new avenues of thought and investigation for later monographs and collections in this series. v

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Our thanks go firstly to our families who have lived with Iris as a constant presence for longer than they may care to remember. We also need to extend our gratitude to Dayna Miller, Kington University’s Archivist who has been a constant source of support and inspiration, and Heather Robbins, Research Centre Administrator and technical support, upon whom we rely not only for day-to-day practicalities but for organisational and promotional support for this and many other ongoing projects. We also want to thank Anne Rowe, for her timely guidance and advice, and the good humour and support of the other members of the Research Centre Team. We are also grateful to our publishing team at Palgrave Macmillan; Brendan George, Amy Invernizzi and Eliana Rangel for their support and guidance in bringing this (and other works in the series) to completion. Chichester, UK Chichester, UK 

Miles Leeson Frances White

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Miles Leeson and Frances White 2 ‘Of  Science and of Light’: Learning with Iris Murdoch 11 Stephen Medcalf 3 ‘In  My Beginning Is My End’: Threads and Themes from Under the Net to Jackson’s Dilemma 25 Frances White 4 ‘A  Man Shut in a Glass’: Textual Blindness and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954) 47 Anne Rowe 5 ‘Now  the Illumination’: Iris Murdoch as Zen Philosopher-Poet 67 Paul Hullah 6 Iris Murdoch and The Tale of Genji 93 Fiona Tomkinson 7 Iris  Murdoch, Australia and Me113 Gillian Dooley

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Contents

8 ‘The  Scrambled Script’: Contingency and Necessity in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight131 Peter D. Mathews 9 ‘Adolescent  Girls Attract Ghosts’: Iris Murdoch and the Supernatural147 Miles Leeson 10 Friendship,  Sex, and the Moral Life in Iris Murdoch’s Novels163 J. Robert Baker 11 Iris  Murdoch and Goodness: How Good?181 Valentine Cunningham Index193

Notes on Contributors

J. Robert Baker  is Professor of English, senior level, at Fairmont State University in West Virginia. He has served as secretary of the Iris Murdoch Society and briefly as president. He has published essays on Murdoch, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor. Valentine Cunningham  is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and Tutor and Senior Fellow in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has lectured widely around the world and has been a visiting professor in the USA, Australia and Germany (where he was a permanent visiting professor at the University of Konstanz for ten years). He reviews widely for various British and American journals and newspapers and broadcasts regularly for BBC Radio on literary and musicological topics. He has twice been a judge for the Booker Prize (1992 and 1998) and was a Regional Chair for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region) in 1999 and 2000. His most recent books are Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems and Poetics (2011) and The Connell Guide to Shakespeare’s King Lear (2012). Gillian Dooley  is honorary senior research fellow at Flinders University in South Australia. She has published widely on Iris Murdoch, as well as other authors such as Jane Austen, V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee. She is the editor of From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003) and other Murdoch-related books and the author of Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music, Sounds, and Silences (2022), the first work in the ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ series. ix

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Paul  Hullah  is an award-winning poet, Associate Professor of British Poetry at Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, and the current President of the Iris Murdoch Society of Japan. With Yozo Muroya he edited Iris Murdoch’s Poems (1997) and Occasional Essays (1998). He is the author of Rock UK: A Sociocultural History of British Rock Music (2013), We Found Her Hidden: The Remarkable Poetry of Christina Rossetti (2016) and Climbable: Poems by Paul Hullah (2016). Miles  Leeson  is the Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester. He is the author of Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist (2010), the editor of Incest in Contemporary Literature (2018) and Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019), and the co-editor of this volume. He is the lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, the host of the Iris Murdoch Podcast and the series co-editor of ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ with Palgrave Macmillan. Peter  D.  Mathews is Professor of English Literature at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea. He is the author of Lacan the Charlatan (2020), English Magic and Imperial Madness (2021) and From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey of John A. Scott (2022). Stephen Medcalf  (1936–2007) was, until his death, Emeritus Reader in English Literature at the University of Sussex. He was a widely published essayist, and his collected works were published in The Spirit of England: Selected Essays of Stephen Medcalf (2010), edited by his friends, and colleagues, Brian Cummings and Gabriel Josipovici. Anne Rowe  is a visiting professor at the University of Chichester and an emeritus research fellow with the Iris Murdoch Archive Project at Kingston University. She has published widely on Iris Murdoch, including Iris Murdoch and the Visual Arts (2002) and, most recently, Iris Murdoch: Writers and Their Work (2019). She is researching the relationship between Iris Murdoch and Dame Julian of Norwich. Fiona  Tomkinson  is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University (since 2017). She has numerous publications in the fields of philosophy and literature, including a variety of articles and essays on Murdoch. She is researching Murdoch’s use of Japanese literature and myth and the influence of Buddhism, Shintoism and shamanism on the work of Murdoch, Lawrence Durrell and Ted Hughes.

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Frances White  is a visiting research fellow and Deputy Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, editor of the Iris Murdoch Review and writer in residence at Kingston University Writing School. She has published widely on Iris Murdoch and other writers. Her prize-winning biography Becoming Iris Murdoch was published in 2014. She is writing the sequel, Unbecoming Iris Murdoch, and is series co-editor of ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ with Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Miles Leeson and Frances White

The ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ series, which began in 2022 with the publication of Gillian Dooley’s Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music, Sounds, and Silences, aims to produce a range of monographs and edited collections to bring together the best and most insightful work in the growing field of Murdoch studies. The series builds on a number of previously produced edited collections by Palgrave going back over the past fifteen years, and is under the editorship of the Directors of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. As Murdoch cements her place in the British literary canon as one of the foremost writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century, it is fitting that a major series such as this should provide an ongoing space to showcase the most recent scholarship currently in production. This first collection of essays in the ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ series, Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, highlights the expanding range of approaches being taken to Murdoch’s work and new readings of her work which are emerging in the light of contemporary culture and events; for example, the changing social attitude to sexual predation. Iris Murdoch

M. Leeson (*) • F. White Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester, Chichester, West Sussex, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_1

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focused on the open messiness and contingency of life, suspicious of tidy closed structures of thinking and creating. Because of this suspicion we have the ‘huge hall of reflection’ that is Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Murdoch 1992, 422) and the late great baggy monster novels. As Peter Mathews says in Chap. 8 of this collection: ‘The demon of disorder always returns to disrupt and undo the neat endings that humans devise’ (142). So it is fitting that this anthology should also be a kind of hall of reflection on Murdoch’s life, work and legacy, including not only formal academic essays by Robert Baker, Paul Hullah, Miles Leeson, Peter Mathews, Anne Rowe, Fiona Tomkinson and Frances White, but also hybrid pieces which are part literary criticism and part personal memoir and reflection by Valentine Cunningham, Gillian Dooley and Stephen Medcalf. The second chapter of this anthology opens with a memoir, ‘“Of Science and Light”: Learning with Iris Murdoch’, written in 1998 by the late Stephen Medcalf, who, with Anthony Nuttall, had tutorials with Murdoch at St Anne’s College, Oxford, in 1959. (We are grateful for the kind permission of his literary executor, Brian Cummings, to edit and publish this essay which was originally written for a proposed festschrift in 1999 which did not come to pass.) Medcalf paints a vivid picture of Murdoch as a teacher and a thinker, as he recalls engaging in discussion with her about imagery and consciousness. He posits a possible link between her work—specifically The Sandcastle (1957)—and the novels of Charles Williams, although Murdoch was not aware of any such connection, and he gives a critical account of the early novels written around the period in which he knew her and John Bayley. Particularly moving is Medcalf’s recollection of noticing at a Merton College dinner that ‘whenever either thought of something that would interest the other and turned to him or her, their faces were so radiant that they looked like beings not of earth but of light’ (20). This portrait adds another layer of richness to the picture of Iris Murdoch’s life and personality being formed not only by biographies but also by the memoir-writing created by those who knew her. We are glad to include Medcalf’s contribution posthumously in this collage of memories. In Chap. 3, ‘“In my beginning is my end”: Threads and Themes from Under the Net to Jackson’s Dilemma’, Frances White offers an overarching perspective on Murdoch’s fictional oeuvre, appraising reviews of both the first novel of 1954 and the last novel of 1995, before tracing a consistency of themes and tropes as well as a notable discordance of tone between the jouissance of the early work and the lachrymosity of the late work. This is

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partially accounted for by the affliction of Alzheimer’s disease but also by the cumulation of loss, grief, anxiety and remorse that comes with ageing and bitter experience. Murdoch’s journals, held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at the Kingston University Archives, reveal her increasing distress and struggle. White focuses on an image—two men meeting (or not meeting) on a bridge—in Under the Net and Jackson’s Dilemma, and on close textual analysis of the vocabulary used in two parallel passages— word pictures of a cluttered interior—in each novel. She finds these passages ‘synecdochal of the novels in which they are embedded’ and sadly acknowledges that ‘the tight plot and fast pace and coherent dynamic of Under the Net has given way to the rambling, repetitive and inchoate format of Jackson’s Dilemma’ (37) before espousing the cause of defending that final novel as Murdoch’s crowning achievement. Anne Rowe, one of Iris Murdoch’s foremost literary critics, has not only published widely on Murdoch’s work—editing three previous Palgrave collections, and Murdoch’s letters with Avril Horner—but also taught Murdoch at undergraduate and postgraduate level for over twenty-­ five years. Rooted in this teaching experience she returns in Chap. 4, ‘“A Man Shut in A Glass”: Textual Blindness and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net’, to Murdoch’s first novel to grapple with the knotty issue of how this novel is being read by twenty-first century readers in the light of contemporary feminism and the #metoo movement. At the time of publication, Jake Donaghue was viewed as a Kingsley Amis-style ‘lad’, but after the Harvey Weinstein furore his behaviour appears far less innocent. As does Hugo Belfounder’s: once seen as an early figure of good in Murdoch’s oeuvre, he can now be read as a dangerous sexual predator (even uncannily like Weinstein in appearance). Rowe persuasively demonstrates the protean nature of Murdoch’s novels which are read very differently in the twenty-first century but remain relevant and presciently insightful, engaging a new generation of readers. Taking into account the development of Intersectional Feminism, Rowe argues that Murdoch’s fiction holds up a mirror to its times, indirectly—and humorously— disclosing attitudes of men towards women in ways that subtly identify and critique behaviours which are now being directly challenged. This essay thus enacts within itself Rowe’s opening contention that ‘critical interrogation of literary texts is necessarily influenced by both political and cultural movements in society and fresh developments in literary theory’ (47), as it offers a new reading of Under the Net, appropriate for today’s feminist agenda.

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The Iris Murdoch Society of Japan, established in 1998, sprang from, and has since fostered, the popularity of Murdoch’s work among Japanese readers. Two British Murdoch scholars, currently teaching in Japanese universities, use the knowledge gained from personal immersion in Japanese culture and literature to offer new insights into the influence of Japan—a country Murdoch loved and visited three times—on her writing. In Chap. 5 Paul Hullah focuses on Murdoch’s lesser-known poetical work in ‘“Now the Illumination’: Iris Murdoch as Zen Philosopher-Poet’, whilst in Chap. 6 Fiona Tomkinson analyses the influence of the eleventh century female novelist Murasaki Shikibu on Murdoch’s imagination in ‘Iris Murdoch and The Tale of Genji’. Hullah—himself a poet—was, with Yozo Muroya, instrumental in persuading Murdoch to allow some of her poetry to be collected in the 1997 Poems, for which he wrote a fine Critical Introduction. In this chapter Hullah takes his study of Murdoch’s poetry, which he believes is currently undervalued, to a yet more detailed level. Giving an informative introduction for Western readers to Zen and haiku—both of which Murdoch studied and revered—he contends that this ‘is a place where a proper appreciation of her poetic output can begin’ (68). He sets out the evident appeal of Zen Buddhism for Murdoch with ‘its focused championing of the […] insight and enlightenment that will be arrived at through sustained attentive meditation’ (69) in parallel with her ‘own notoriously godless notion of good’ (68) and, in as much as ‘the focus of the Zen meditative act can be the actual, the ordinariness and contingency, the nuts and bolts of the natural object-world outside us’ (69), it shares a very Murdochian perspective. As also does the fact that ‘Zen is a realistic faith, infused by a Taoist elevation of actual human experience, conveyed in anecdote and attention to what Murdoch calls the thinginess of things, meaningfully filtered through the purposeful lens of art’ (69). With this as background to close readings from diverse Japanese and English poets as well as Murdoch, Hullah analyses her poetry from the early—‘I Will Not Wander’, ‘The Message of the Bumble Bee’ and ‘After the 2nd of April’— in which he finds ‘a counterpoint, contrary and violent post-Romantic Modernist challenging of Nature not only red in tooth and claw, but now conveyed in splintered, fragmented imagism’ (76), to the later—‘The Brown Horse’, ‘Poem and Egg’ and ‘No Smell’—in which he perceives ‘the dialogue between Romantic and Zen-haiku strategies that co-exist in her poems of the later 1970s and 1980s’ (80). The culmination of this essay is ‘John Sees a Stork at Zamora’, ‘one of her best poems’ (85) written

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in 1975 which, Hullah contends, ‘is a Zen koan-like portrayal of the act of unselfing’ (86) and he concludes that ‘the technically impressive and knowingly intertextual, eclectic poetry produced by Murdoch is good poetry as well as meaningful philosophy’ (82). The jury may still be out, but in Paul Hullah, Murdoch has an expert champion of her poetry. In the next few years we anticipate that an edited selection of Murdoch’s poetry will be published showcasing the best of her work in this little-known area of her writing. The Murdoch Collections in Kingston University Archives stretches to thirteen substantial notebooks and consideration of these in relation to her other work will form a new dialogue in the years to come. Tomkinson analyses the relationship—which has received little previous critical attention—between Murdoch and The Tale of Genji, an eleventh century Japanese novel. She extends her previous work on traces of Japanese fox mythology in Murdoch’s fiction by focusing chiefly on the image of stealing a cat taken from Genji which recurs in various novels, particularly The Nice and the Good (1968) and Jackson’s Dilemma. Rooting her discussion in Murdoch’s feeling of affinity with Murasaki’s masterpiece and a sense of parallels between the concerns of these two women writers— who, albeit separated by culture and nine centuries, have much in common—Tomkinson identifies their shared interest in the ‘exploration of the complexities of multiple erotic entanglements, an intense focus on the nature of bereavement and the need to find substitutes for lost love objects, and the recurring motif of characters seeking a life of religious renunciation and retreat from the world’ (94). These themes are familiar to Murdoch readers, whether or not they are aware of The Tale of Genji, and Tomkinson teases out diverse intertextual allusions between that text and a wide range of Murdoch’s novels; as well as those mentioned above, she discusses The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), The Unicorn (1963), A Fairly Honourable Defeat(1970), An Accidental Man (1971), The Black Prince (1973), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), and The Green Knight (1993)—Murasaki’s influence on Murdoch is found to be wide-­ ranging. Of particular resonance is Tomkinson’s account of following in Murdoch’s footsteps to the sacred tree and sacred stone at the Shingon Buddhist Temple of Ishiyama-dera, a place closely associated with Murasaki which Murdoch and Bayley visited in 1975. Through close readings of the text of Genji and passages from Murdoch’s novels, Tomkinson makes a

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convincing argument for the importance of this ancient Japanese author to Murdoch’s literary imagination. From Japan to Australia—in Chap.  7 Gillian Dooley surveys ‘Iris Murdoch, Australia and Me’. (Dooley’s monograph, Listening to Iris Murdoch: Music, Sounds and Silences (2022) is the first work to be published in the ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ series.) Here, in a vivacious piece of life-­writing she recounts her journey which began as an isolated Murdoch reader in the 1970s when Murdoch was not much studied in literature courses at schools or universities in Australia. Drawing on research she undertook, Dooley analyses the situation, but what she modestly does not emphasise is that she herself almost singlehandedly transformed the Australian response to Murdoch by her enthusiasm, hard work and publications, beginning with her doctoral thesis and continuing with the interview collection, A Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction (2003), which instantly became, and still remains, a vital tool in the kit of every Murdoch scholar. Learning how this developed is a fascinating detail of literary history, as is the story retold here—drawing on letters and journal entries—of Murdoch’s interaction with Australia. Extending her earlier essay, ‘“You are my Australia”: Brian Medlin’s contribution to Iris Murdoch’s concept of Australia in The Green Knight’, Dooley analyses how Murdoch, rather clumsily—‘the Australia of her imagination is a distant and rather fantastic world’ (128)—used this experience in her fiction. Murdoch’s correspondence with Medlin—the Australian philosopher with whom she had ‘a warm friendship’ (122)—which Dooley edited with Graham Nerlich, is unique in being the only symmetrical set of letters in the Murdoch letters collection. Dooley’s essay begins by saying that when she was a young student, ‘Murdoch had somehow caught the atmosphere and tone of the society I was living in—the danger and the excitement and the pain. One was always in love with the wrong person, or consoling someone else who was in love with the wrong person’ (114). Decades later she concludes that ‘Murdoch’s books somehow help one be happy with—even perhaps to glory in—one’s own oddness and the strangeness and sadness of one’s life’ (128). Dooley’s personal story confirms not only the impact Murdoch’s novels make on individual lives, but also the importance of the Iris Murdoch Society as a network of scholars and students across the world. Her connection with this academic group encouraged and enabled the scholarship which Dooley has richly contributed to Murdoch studies. In Chap. 8, ‘‘The Scrambled Script’: Contingency and Necessity in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight’, Peter Mathews focuses on Murdoch’s

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penultimate novel through the lens of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal retour. Augmenting previous readings foregrounding Levinas and Schopenhauer by Kanan Savkay and Miles Leeson respectively and drawing together multiple critical interpretations of Murdoch’s ‘dizzying multiplication of references’ (136) in this heavily intertextual late work, Mathews persuasively argues the case for the centrality of Nietzsche to its interpretation. The trajectory of this essay is from the stone on the shore of Lake Silvaplana which Nietzsche called ‘Zarathustra’s Rock’ to the rock to which Moy at the end of The Green Knight returns the stone she had taken. Contra previous interpretations of this scene offered by Carla Arnell and Rob Hardy which see this ‘as a movement of resolution and closure’ (142), Mathews contends that such readings go ‘against every lesson that the novel teaches about the contingency of the world in which Murdoch shows how the mythical scripts humanity once used to make sense of the world’s patterns are really seductive traps’ (142). Working his way through a labyrinth of allusions towards this trailblazing conclusion, Mathews has to beware of over-imposing his Nietzschean insights to the imbalance of his interpretation. To this end he acknowledges that ‘Nietzsche cannot be allowed to function as a focal point’ because the novel ‘actively rejects the possibility of being solved by a single thinker or idea’ (137). His essay thus aptly mirrors and enacts the claim Mathews makes that Murdoch ‘executes a carefully calculated double movement in this novel’ by giving ‘a prominent place to the ideas of Nietzsche, whilst taking care to remove him from a position in her text where he might be taken for an idol or saviour’ (137). Murdoch herself was likewise resisting such over-­ expectations by this stage in her career, and this is a compelling reading of a highly complex and much debated late text. Miles Leeson explores ‘Adolescent Girls attract ghosts: Iris Murdoch and the Supernatural’ in Chap. 9, contending that although substantial work has been written on Murdoch’s early Gothic fiction, little attention has hitherto been given to her use of the supernatural as a motif throughout her fictional career. Leeson draws not only on her novels, but also on her philosophy and unpublished journals to suggest that this material is not primarily there to give a ‘chill’ or fictional frisson, but to illuminate her underlying motives with regard to deconstructing toxic masculinity, arguing that the adolescent woman has the strongest connection of all with the embedded supernatural. Above the narrative patterning, however, he also posits that Murdoch’s understanding of linguistic philosophy, emanating from the early work of Wittgenstein, allows for no conception

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of magic (or magical thinking) but that her perception of the social world she inhabits necessitates an engagement with, and use of, supernatural events, powers, and visions. As Murdoch herself says, the ‘world can suddenly show itself as magic. This is a permanent existential quality of the world. Nb social world is magical’ (151) and as careful readers, we should both recognise this tension, and celebrate its ficvtional appearance. Chapter 10, ‘Friendship and the Moral Life in Iris Murdoch’s Novels’ revisits the subject of sexual relationships, not from the problematic perspective brought to them in Anne Rowe’s earlier chapter, but in a positive light. In his analysis of the educational potential of friendship and sexuality Robert Baker contends that sexual intimacy teaches Murdoch’s characters not only about themselves and their own identity but also about the reality of the other person. It thus acts as a force for learning to attend to the world outside the self which is the desideratum of Murdoch’s moral pilgrimage. He surveys the apparent acceptance by Murdoch scholars that such moral development is necessarily a solitary and lonely endeavour before juxtaposing that impression—given prominence in the M and D scenario Murdoch creates in The Sovereignty of Good (1970)—with the relationships she portrays in her novels. Close readings of the friendship of Tom MacCaffrey and Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) and of Harvey Blackett’s relationship with Sefton Anderson in The Green Knight support Baker’s contention that physical affection can be a guide to the good. Borrowing an image from the latter novel he claims that in her fiction ‘Murdoch represents the moral life not as a lonely pilgrimage toward reality, but as a passeggiata with others in which one gives way to a movement larger than and beyond oneself’ (177), a viable interpretation which reads the passeggiata with an interestingly different slant from other current critics such as Rebecca Moden, who regards it as Murdoch’s ‘metaphor for the nature of human existence’ (Moden, 2023, 232) and ‘a troubling image of the impoverished quality of human consciousness in the late twentieth century’(Moden, 2023, 235). The collection concludes in Chap. 11 with a developed version of the Plenary Lecture given by Valentine Cunningham at the Iris Murdoch Centenary Conference, held at St Anne’s College in July 2019. The international audience of delegates found Cunningham’s provocative approach to his topic of Iris Murdoch, Eduard Fraenkel, and questions about goodness, hands, and touching, distinctly controversial. Like Rowe, Cunningham takes up the ‘hot potato’ of changing sexual mores, revisiting

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Murdoch’s (and others’) experience of being taught by Fraenkel. At the time it was seen by some as a privilege to be pawed by the great Greek scholar, even an important aspect of what Cunningham terms ‘Fraenkelism’ (187) but in this century exception is taken. Fraenkel’s having been called out as ‘one more case of post-Harvey Weinstein male sexual predator’ (187) in 2017, The Fraenkel Room at Corpus Christi College was renamed The Refugee Scholars’ Room. This was against Cunningham’s judgement as he finds the goodness in Fraenkel’s teaching and scholarship outweighs his deplorable behaviour. The contextual background to this contentious opinion lies in Cunningham’s extensive and perceptive reflection on goodness in Murdoch’s fiction and how this is ‘imagined, aestheticised, defined, argued for, shown operating’ in her novels (182). Questions arising from this issue concern ‘matters of touch’ and ‘matters of what hands do’ (182) which Cunningham shrewdly delineates as the convergence of ‘the discourse of goodness and the discourse of touch’ (182). However readers may feel about these difficult moral issues, this essay will make them think very precisely about how their judgements on such matters are formed. And—as with Stephen Medcalf’s essay above—it is illuminating to capture Valentine Cunningham’s personal memories of his encounters with his Oxford colleagues, Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. Taken altogether, this collection of essays forms a prism through which light on Murdoch’s art is refracted in new and different hues. We hope it will set readers thinking afresh about these novels which are as pertinent to human experience and as challenging to our moral vision in the twenty-­ first century as in her own era, as well as continuing to give enduring readerly pleasure—something Murdoch valued highly, for as she says, ‘A readable novel is a gift to humanity’ (Dooley 2003, 166). Furthermore, this volume showcases the global breadth of contemporary Murdoch scholarship, and the role played in the work of this international community both by the Iris Murdoch Society which unites readers across the world, and by the Iris Murdoch Research Centre which produces the Iris Murdoch Review and organises the International Conferences, Summer Schools, Postgraduate Study Days and podcasts that create a forum for the expansion of Murdoch scholarship and the dissemination of knowledge and enthusiasm to the wider world. The ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ series extends and bolsters this work and offers a new arena in which Murdoch criticism can evolve and flourish in the twenty-first century.

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References Dooley, Gillian. 2003. From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Moden, Rebecca. 2023. Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger: Imaginations and Images. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto and Windus.

CHAPTER 2

‘Of Science and of Light’: Learning with Iris Murdoch Stephen Medcalf

At Oxford in 1959, Tony Nuttall and I, having read for the undergraduate school of English Language and Literature, wanted to look in philosophical terms at the relation between thinking in images and thinking in literal or abstract concepts; but when we asked for a philosopher to supervise us in postgraduate work, we gathered that there was only one philosopher willing to do so, a Mrs. Bayley, whom we knew to be the novelist, Iris Murdoch.1 And as she was on sabbatical leave for the first term of the academic year, it would fall to someone in the English faculty to tide us over, among whom, so we heard, no one was very willing until the formidable Helen Gardner said ‘Well, I’ll take them on.’2

Stephen Medcalf was deceased at the time of publication.

S. Medcalf (Deceased) (*) University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_2

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The fences between disciplines were very tall in those days, and perhaps it made only for increased mutual suspicion that Oxford philosophers claimed for their technique the analysis of ordinary language, as ordinary language seemed to exclude any wisps of poetry, of whose extensions of meaning they seemed to disapprove, and all prose whether philosophical or literary before John Locke at the earliest. The theologians were more promising, seeming to have an eye on both enclosures; and I think both Nuttall and I, certainly myself, felt that what interested us, in particular allegory and symbol, must have something to do with the truth of religion, with the relation between God and ‘good’; with incarnation and, as C.S. Lewis had suggested in The Allegory of Love (1936), with sacraments.3 Miss Gardner’s first acts, indeed, were to try to arrange a meeting with the Thomist theologian Eric Mascall—who proved to be sympathetic but too busy to see us that term—and to recommend us to read Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief (1938), which she thought might clear up our difficulties and let us get down to something useful.4,5 We read it, and it proved to have much of interest to say about why particular images, as of light or depth, were useful in religion, but not to reach the philosophical issues about why and in what circumstances symbols and literal concepts occupy our thinking. Meanwhile we read Iris Murdoch’s novels, partly at least and in scorn of all the theory and argument against doing so, to find out what she was like. There were four of them then—Under the Net (1954), The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) (but I never got much out of that), The Sandcastle (1957) and The Bell (1958). They built up a pattern of someone disconcerting but likely to be sympathetic both in general and in relation to the questions which concerned us. Of course it is difficult to recover exactly what one thought of books first read forty years ago and read and reread since, but the pattern so far as I remember it from the conversations of that time was as follows. The thing that first engrossed me, I think, was a puzzlement which was resolved when I said to Nuttall, ‘She uses “make love” to mean “have sexual intercourse”’. I do not remember when this crystallised, but it may have been when Mor in The Sandcastle tells his wife that he has not made love to the portrait painter Rain Carter—which in the then familiar meaning, covering all kinds of amorous advance, he certainly had. ‘That’s a girl’s use,’ Nuttall said, ‘Girls say that.’ Iris’s husband John Bayley says in The Characters of Love (1960), which he must have been writing about that time, that it is an upper class use.6 As the only use of the phrase in the

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new sense quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary from before the sixties is by Fuchsia, Titus Groan’s sister in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series, they may both have been right. I supposed then that Nuttall was right, and that perhaps the motive behind Iris’s use of the phrase was a girl’s wish to stress the emotional side of sexuality. And yet the spread of the phrase since into general acceptance has perhaps tilted the balance the other way, rather to associate love more indissolubly with its tactile, muscular and mechanical side than to exalt the tactile and mechanical into the emotional. I think now that Iris was aware of that uneasy tilt, and that her use of the phrase was part of that novelist’s ear for things to come which she exhibited more largely in the novel she wrote while she was supervising us, A Severed Head (1961). At any rate the tilt seems to link with something that Nuttall pointed out, how fascinated she was with elaborate mechanical operations which hang between delight in the power and intricacy and dismay at their possible ending in disaster, like Rain Carter’s Riley and its calamitous slide into the river. Into that pattern of precarious balance between the humane and the mechanical I can now see fitting other things which I noted then, such as the removal in Under the Net of the search for God into the factual, the actual, the going on of events—‘God is a task. God is detail. It all lies close to your hand’ (Murdoch 2002a, 252)—or, in The Sandcastle again, Bledyard’s austere defence of marriage against immediate emotion when Mor has fallen in love with Rain Carter and intends to leave his wife: ‘You look only at yourself and find there violent emotion. And of that you make a virtue. But look rather on the others, and make yourself nothing in your apprehension of them’ (Murdoch 2003, 216). In questing about for treatments of symbol, I had read of a West African tribe whose religion, centring on the recognition of a particular object— they called it a tro—by a particular person as overwhelmingly significant, seemed to find echoes in those first four novels. Objects and people loom out suddenly with raw unexplained power to affect events. This seemed true even on the largest historical scale, when Lefty Todd in Under the Net admits that there is one thing that goes on for ever, the Jews—‘“You do admit some mysteries then,” says Jake. “Naturally,” says Lefty. “I’m an empiricist.”’ (Murdoch 2002b, 113). On the smallest scale, the religion of the tro seemed to have been independently invented in The Sandcastle by Mor’s adolescent daughter Felicity, who expects a divine being called Angus to manifest himself in any sufficiently strange person she meets and thus to determine her course of action. But Felicity’s world is mirrored in

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the whole world of the novel, where a deaf and wayward gypsy has the same power and manifestation: as I recall Nuttall saying, the gypsy is to Murdoch as Angus to Felicity. At times the two worlds coincide: once when Felicity and her brother Donald are on their way to steal something from Rain Carter and Angus appears to Felicity as the gypsy, and again when Felicity uses the stocking they have stolen to do private magic on the Dorset coast to protect her parents’ marriage. During the magic she consults the Tarot pack as Rain Carter has noticed the gypsy doing when she drove past with Mor shortly before the disaster to her car. When Felicity uses the Tarot, the cards she draws, ‘The Empress, the King of Swords, the Broken Tower, the Hanged Man and the Moon’ (Murdoch 2003, 224)—in her interpretation representing her mother beside her father, who is separated by the Tower and the Hanged Man from Rain Carter—are echoed by subsequent events, as the attempt by Donald and his friend Jimmy Carde to climb the school tower and their hanging from it in danger of death bring about the separation of Mor from Rain, and his consequent adherence to his wife. Whether this sequence of events shows that Felicity has either determined or foreseen what is to happen is left entirely open, however. I thought then that Iris had lately read one of Charles William’s ‘supernatural thrillers’, The Greater Trumps (1932), in which the Tarot pack emerges as really imaging and controlling the process of the world, and had determined to produce something of the same effect in a more conventionally realistic novel. And this was supported by her use of the world ‘coinherence’ in what one might call a thoroughly digested way when Bledyard tells Rain Carter that the head in her portrait of Demoyte should have been seen as a ‘coinherence of masses’ (Murdoch 2003, 172). For coinherence is a word highly characteristic of the sense of the world which is expressed in Williams’s novels, and very rare indeed outside his work or the work of writers influenced by him. But if it was Iris’s intention to retain something of Williams’s atmosphere while improving on his credibility, I think that she made a mistake. For Williams within his novel, for many readers including myself, achieves a perfect persuasion of reality, and even leaves one feeling that although this particular mechanism of the supernatural is only true within the book, it represents something possible within the actual world. But despite an eerie power in the description of Felicity’s private rites under the setting sun by the rising tide, Iris’s attempt to suggest occult powers at work without conceding their reality seems to me weak.

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But the most perfect, the most assuredly great of those early novels seemed to me the most recent, The Bell. The tro was perfectly instantiated in the contrast of the two bells, the modern bell with its feeble accompanying rituals and merely constructed symbolism, and the medieval bell raised almost horrifyingly from the lake to ring out and impose its presence on the people of the book. And at the end the Mass looms out, detached from any clear context in religion or life, a tro ‘not consoling, not uplifting, but in some way factual. It contained for [Michael] no assurance that all would be made well that was not well. It simply existed as a kind of pure reality separate from the weaving of his own thoughts’ (Murdoch 2004, 322). The weaving of the whole book seemed to me, as it still does, perfect, far superior to that of The Sandcastle. The two sermons (Nuttall remarked) fitted more seamlessly with the development of character and story than Bledyard’s attack on Mor. James Tayper Pace preaches against having an image of oneself, or of considering oneself at all, and in favour of attending either to a perfection ‘“so external and so remote that we can get only now and then a distant hint of it” for “where perfection is, reality is”’ (Murdoch 2004, 133), or to the rules God has given us to express perfection in everyday life. Michael Meade preaches in favour of self-­ knowledge, of not doing what abstractly ‘“seems to be a good act if in fact it is so contrary to our instinctive apprehensions of spiritual reality that we cannot carry it through”’, and believes that he is saying the exact opposite of what James had said the previous week. That there is a contrast is true, and much that happens in the book manifests an interplay of these two methods of living, but Michael approaches James when he says that ‘“one finds God, as it were, in certain places; one has, where God is concerned, a sense of direction, a sense that here is what is most real, most good, most true”’ (Murdoch 2004, 210). In the week between James’s sermon and Michael’s, the wayward wife Dora Greenfield experiences what is actually in common between the two, seeing in Gainsborough’s picture of his two daughters in the National Gallery: something real and something perfect. Who had said that, about perfection and reality being in the same place? Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it part of her fantasy make it worthless [….] When the world had seemed to be subject, it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all [….] She looked at the radiant, sombre, tender, powerful

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canvas of Gainsborough and felt a sudden desire to go down on her knees before it, embracing it, shedding tears. (Murdoch 2004, 196)

That too is a description of a tro, but a tro that manifests some further vision of the world. At that time I frequented the Anglo-Catholic institution of Pusey House, and as was the custom maintained contact with one of the clergy there, Donald Allchin. I was having lunch with him on a day when he was about to lecture on the Eastern Orthodox ikon, and when I quoted the description of Gainsborough’s picture, he said excitedly that it exactly expressed the feeling at the heart of the theology of the ikon, and quoted it both in that lecture and in others later. This pattern, I think, represents fairly what I had in my head about Iris Murdoch when I went for my first supervision with her in Hilary Term 1960, and though I only discussed its elements with her obliquely and scantily, she did not disappoint. She had a teaching room in the basement of one of the 1870ish houses in Bevington Road on the north side of St Anne’s College. One entered it from the college past a bicycle shed and an overgrown garden: the light slanted in, so far as I remember, brightly but as if on an underground world. And Miss Murdoch herself had the look of a being that one might expect to find underground at the end of a deserted garden, at once faintly unearthly and of the earth, earthy, like a kobold.7 Her voice, kindly but a little withheld in the shy Oxford way, is lodged in my memory with one phrase from (I think) that first supervision—‘Old Puss’, the ‘u’ very full—greeting a comfortable cat that came in at the window to be gathered up in her arms. It was a gesture paradoxically, perhaps, linked for me with an instance she used about that time of a sensation too particular to be reproduced in words, holding a mouse in the palm of one’s hand. These gestures seem to me good, if odd, examples of that recall to the particular textures of human experience, physical, mental or spiritual, which has been Iris’s gift to us and perhaps to philosophy. Nuttall remarked at the end of our time with her that she had had the most powerful effect on him with one remark scribbled against an airy reference of his to ‘the Thomistic doctrine of analogy’—‘Dons philosophise by allusion’, and that, I suppose, is the obverse of the same recall. By the time we met Iris, while we were with Helen Gardner, we had determined what would be our specific studies. Nuttall had in mind the variety of ways in which Shakespeare’s Tempest might be overdetermined by meanings beyond the literal—hence his mention of the doctrine of analogy. I had found a book, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, which the author,

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Joseph Glanvill, having written it in 1661  in a language emulating Sir Thomas Browne rich in poetic imagery, recast twice, as Scepsis Scientifica in 1665, and An Essay against Confidence in Philosophy in 1676. This attempted to achieve what the Royal Society asked of its members, namely ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a natural easiness; bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can’ (Sprat 1667, 113). I doubt if Iris was ever very interested in the notion of translating imagery. Her first response, I think, to my tentative explorations was to suggest that imagery was a kind of homage to the object about which it was used. And when I asked her what she thought of Charles Williams’s imagery, she said so far as I remember that it was too rigid and objective. If she had in mind the imagery of The Greater Trumps, I think this opinion would be partly at least based on a misunderstanding. For although in that novel, as in others, Williams uses a traditional set of images, this, as I remarked before, implies no belief in them as images outside the world of the novel. But he uses fixed images as a foundation to transcend the common view that glory (something in which he most certainly does believe as a manifestation of the supernatural in our world) is ‘a mazy bright blur’. Glory, he remarks, is exact and accurate: it is our business to ‘examine the pattern of the glory’ and a traditional set of images, entertained rather than believed in, is an aid to such an examination (Williams 1984, 39). I have to admit that when some years later, I raised the question of Charles Williams’s writings again with Iris, she denied ever having read them. I still think, though, that the juxtaposition of Tarot and coinherence, together with her apparent knowledge of what I was talking about in connection with him when I first broached the question, suggests that she had read something of him, but forgotten. However, it may be, as I think indeed she tentatively suggested, that someone had described his work to her vividly enough for quite a lot to sink deeply in to her. At any rate, the tension between bright blur and accurate pattern, between what Williams also calls romantic states and the hard exploration of romantic states, seems at the heart of Iris’s own writing and thought, both as I understood it before I met her, and as I grew acquainted with it in our supervisions. Glory for her is connected with value, and specifically with one thing she instructed me in, G.E. Moore’s understanding of ‘good’ as a non-natural quality, with which she sympathised, detaching it firmly from his belief that friendship and the contemplation of beautiful objects were the ‘good-est’ things (that was her word, accompanied in a

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marginal note on something I had written by an exclamatory mark). ‘Good’ for her was contrastingly associated with otherness: I remember reading in an interview with her about that time her answer to the question why she wrote novels, ‘God, if He exists, is good because He creates things other than Himself.’ And she was pleased by a project which I developed, but never fulfilled, of writing a book to be called ‘Poetry and Ellingness’, ellingness being a word I had found in Shane Leslie’s The Cantab: ‘I admire the Lucretian mind that pushes into the utter ellingness of things’ (Leslie 1926, 196).8 I read about that time Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances and found enormously tempting his notion of an evolution of consciousness by the elimination of ‘original participation’ (Barfield 1988, 40) in which mankind sensed an inner within the external world like and continuous with one’s own inner self. Absence of participation coincided with the scientific revolution. He remarks that in painting, conventions like the nimbus or the halo were as appropriate before the scientific revolution as others, like perspective, seeing objects related in a mathematically defined space, were after it. But Iris, I think, was not attracted by the notion of an evolution of consciousness. I tried the idea out on her in a paper on Thomas Traherne’s philosophy of objectivity. Traherne, I wanted to say, felt objects in the categories of scholastic philosophy: he felt, he did not merely state, that we hold in our minds an aspect of the objects we are conscious of, their intelligible species. We participate, then, in their beings. Traherne was thus able, in a way that seems at least odd to later generations, to feel that we own what we are conscious of. Hence the language in which he describes his childhood vision: The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and the stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world [….] Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared: which talked with my expectation and moved my desire [….] The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine […] and all the World was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. (Traherne 2007, 152)

And when he comes to speak of natural science he understands it as part of a personal relationship with the universe:

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Natural Philosophy teaches us the Causes and Effects of all Bodies simply and in them selves. But if you extend it a little further, to that indeed which its Name imports, signifying the Love of Nature, it leads us into a Diligent inquisition into all Natures, their Qualities, Affections, Relations, Causes and Ends so far forth as by Nature and Reason they may be known it includes all Humanity and Divinity together, GOD, Angels, Man, Affections, Habits, Actions, Virtues; Every Thing as it is a Solid entire Object singly proposed being a subject of it, as well as Material and visible Things. But taking it as it is usually Bounded in its Terms, it treateth only of Corporeal Things [.…] And as thus is it taken it is Nobly Subservient to the Highest Ends: for it Openeth the Riches of God’s Kingdom and the Natures of his Territories Works and Creations in a Wonderful Manor, Clearing and preparing the Eye of the Enjoyer. (Traherne 2007, 153)

For Iris this was a question of two modes of consciousness equally available to us now. My notes of what she said run: Note that there is no evidence (? or likelihood) of Traherne performing scientific experiments. Traherne seems to think in terms of single objects rather than classes as the object of study of science. Traherne on language. Does language and classification blur the childhood vision? This would connect with Locke. Locke on real essence:—animating the real substance—contemplation not penetrating but yearning to know objects—connected with uniqueness. The double vision of scientific study and mystical contemplation.

I wanted to say that before the concept of objectivity in the modern sense developed, the sense that we ought to treat of the universe in mathematical terms only, as if otherwise we were not aware of it, then ordinary consciousness was perhaps closer to what we would now count mystical consciousness. When, so to speak, Chaucer addressed Apollo as ‘God of science and of light’ (Chaucer 1987, 1091–92), if one thinks of science as meaning knowledge and light ordinary consciousness the two run together: when Auden, filching the phrase, addresses God as Dove of science and of light Upon the branches of the night

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he is thinking of God as uniting in Himself two quite different modes of knowledge (Auden 1991, 240). And in between Chaucer and Auden there has been a loss of participation, an evolution of consciousness. For Iris, it seems light was something that streams from particular objects, science a subjection of objects to classification and experiment. And although it may not be at our choice, both modes of experience happen to us as they happened to Chaucer or to Plato. It may be that, for herself, she was simply stating a fact. After Nuttall and I had gone on to other supervisors, in the early spring of 1962 I invited Iris and her husband John Bayley to dinner in Merton. There is something of the kobold in him too, but I still have a picture in my memory of how that evening whenever either thought of something that would interest the other and turned to him or her, their faces were so radiant that they looked like beings not of earth but of light. I do not suppose that that sort of radiance is all that the halo or the nimbus expresses: but it was enough to make one understand at least one need for such a convention. I had in my room, hanging against dull oak over the fireplace, a copy of the greatest of all pictures using the convention of the halo, arguably the greatest picture ever painted, St Andrew Rublyev’s Old Testament Trinity as it was then known. Now it is so widely known and reproduced that perhaps I hardly need to say that it depicts the three angels who appeared to Abraham at his tent by the tree at Mamre, and whom he fed with a calf out of his herd: or that it is the only form under which it is permissible for a Russian Orthodox ikon painter to represent the Trinity. It was not widely known in England in 1961. I had bought a colour photograph which quite well reproduced the brightness of the original and it sent Iris into a rapture. She climbed on an armchair to see it more closely, went later to see the original, as she wrote to tell me, in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and described it in two of her novels, The Unicorn (1963) and The Time of the Angels (1966). Her descriptions of it, I think, carry on the development which began with Rain Carter’s portrait of Demoyte in The Sandcastle. In her first version, Demoyte’s head depends, says Bledyard, on the power of a series of definitions ‘to appeal to a conception of character in the observer.’ He criticises it as too beautiful and as not sufficiently manifesting its nature as a picture: ‘The head should be seen as a coinherence of masses’ (Murdoch 2004, 172). And this is how it is seen when Rain repaints it, when she resolves to send Mor back to his marriage, so that there is a double movement in the book away from the immediate attractiveness of human

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character to the necessities which underlie character: ‘The head stood out now solider, uglier, the expression no longer conveyed by the fine details, but seeming to emerge from the deep structure of the face’ (Murdoch 2003, 314). In aesthetics as in ethics, The Bell is more neo-Platonic than The Sandcastle. It is not the techniques of Gainsborough’s portrait of his daughters that are praised, neither coinherence of masses nor deep structure (though those virtues are not denied, and perhaps should be presumed). It is the fact that in it perfection and reality are in the same place. This is what makes it like an ikon and almost brings Dora to her knees, temporarily displacing her powerful ego by its presence. In The Unicorn the Neo-Platonic theory of an authoritative epiphany of perfection is developed and articulated by means of Rublyev’s picture. The reader is enabled, as Charles Williams desired, to examine the pattern of the glory. The hospitality of Abraham is actually recreated in the three-­ dimensional, this-worldly reality of the narration of the story. Effingham having come near to death by drowning in the bog has achieved a mystical vision of self-transcendence, but survives to be looked after by Hannah, Marion and Alice. The description matches the ikon: Their handsome faces, lit with tenderness and love, hovered over him, angel-like. ‘In the eastern church,’ said Effingham, ‘the Holy Trinity is sometimes represented as three angels’ [….] The three angels were a radiant globe out of which light streamed forth. He had seen this before. The globe was the world, the universe. He said, ‘I think it is love which happens automatically when love is death [….] You see, death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. It’s very simple. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that’s how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of. (Murdoch 2000, 171)

In The Time of the Angels, Rublyev’s ikon is in a way even more deeply and pervasively present, but at the level of the this-worldly narration of the story imperfectly and under two forms. The first is a closely similar painting of the same theme. It is described three times; in the first two descriptions there is nothing to show that it is different from Rublyev’s ikon, except that the mood of the description is different, no longer responsive either to the tenderness or the authority of the original. In the first chapter, ‘It is painted on wood and partly with golden paint, real gold Pattie thinks it

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must be since it glows as if it were on fire. It shows three angels confabulating around a table. The angels have rather small hands and very large pale halos and anxious thoughtful expression’ (Murdoch 2002a, 5). In chapter five, as the story becomes more threatening, the beauty of the picture becomes less able to impress: With gentle inclined faces the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost conferred around their table with the white cloth. Their gold wings overlapped, entwined. They were melancholy. They knew that all was not well with their creation. Perhaps they felt that they themselves were drifting quietly away from it. (Murdoch 2002b, 52)

In chapter seventeen, the same tendency increases to an extent which shows that in some ways the ikon is sharply different from Rublyev’s: Under the direct light of the lamp […] the solid wooden rectangle glowed golden and blue. The three bronzed angels, weary with humility and failure, sat in their conclave holding their slender rods of office, graceful and remote, bowing their small heads to each other under their huge creamy halos, floating upon their thrones in an empyrean of milky brightness. (Murdoch 2002a, 173)

Rublyev anchors his angels firmly in time and space. Their thrones are set on the green earth, and behind them is not the empyrean but a mountain symbolising (as in other ikons) Palestine, a tree which is the oak of Mamre under which Abraham dwelt, and Abraham’s stone-built house. Although it is possible to understand these as hyper-characterised, meaning also the mountain of the Law, the tree of life and the temple, they are thereby if anything further from the empyrean, in a world where God manifests Himself through such symbols. And although the angels are gold in their wings and creamy in their haloes, they are dressed in other colours than blue. The central figure wears an underrobe of imperial purple with a gold stripe, and only an overrobe of blue. As I read it (there are other interpretations) this figure is the all-ruling Father and the blue overrobe, which is echoed in the underrobes of the other two, symbolises the divinity which He communicates to them. The figure to the viewer’s left has a pink overrobe, suggesting the incarnation, the figure to the right a green one, in Orthodox convention the colour of the Holy Spirit as giver of life, connecting therefore with the green earth beneath. The viewer stands on

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the remaining side of the table, making like Effingham in The Unicorn a fourth who is invited to join the love of the Three. Carel Fisher, the demonic priest who is at the heart of The Time of the Angels, recalls Rublyev’s ikon in quite another way immediately after this description: Carel slowly laid it down. He murmured something. “What?” said Marcus. “I said ‘tall’.” “Tall?” “They would be so tall.’ Marcus looked at Carel. He was still intent on the icon, smiling again, a relaxed happy smile. Marcus coughed. “It represents the Trinity of course,” he said. “How can those three be one? As I told you.” (Murdoch 2002b, 173)

In Carel’s anti-Platonic anti-theology, God is dead and His angels, being set free, are terrible: pictorially they would retain the strength, the tallness of Rublyev’s angels which the ikon in the book has lost. There is no Platonic one, no single perfection, only conflicting and now demonic powers. One ought then to retain by way of contrast, in reading The Time of the Angels, the full name of Rublyev’s ikon. The cataclysmic ending of the novel in no way persuades one that Carel is right, though it may suggest as James Tayper Pace thought, that the good is unimaginably more remote than any image we can form of it, so that in this world Carel may seem right. In fact, it is some such pattern that I retain of Iris’s teaching on images, the beautiful and the good when she supervised me. There has been a continuity with that pattern in all that I have known of her. Tom Phillips’ portrait of Iris seems to me to go back to the beginning of her thought about portraiture. In it, the strength of the head emerges from the deep structure of the face. I recognise in it what our tutor at Merton, Hugo Dyson, briefly said when we first told him of what it was like meeting Iris: ‘She’s suffered.’9 And though it is not exactly a realistic portrait, being very aware, as Bledyard wanted, of its nature as a picture, it certainly belongs to the world of mass and emphatic space, not to the world of the nimbus and the halo. Iris’s face in it is bright, but with a corporeal light falling on it. I wish someone would paint her with the radiance that repeatedly shines from her face.

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Notes 1. Stephen Ellis Medcalf (1936–2007) was a literary scholar and critic. Soon after leaving Oxford University, he was one of the founding members of the English department at the University of Sussex. He wrote the introduction to the Penguin Vintage edition (2001) of The Unicorn. https://www. theguardian.com/news/2007/oct/18/guardianobituaries.obituaries2. Anthony David Nuttall (1937–2007) was an English Literary Critic and academic. After leaving Oxford he, alongside Stephen Medcalf, were founding members of the English department at the University of Sussex. He wrote the introduction to the Penguin Vintage edition (2001) of An Unofficial Rose. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/mar/27/ guardianobituaries.booksobituaries. 2. Merton Professor of English Literature from 1966 to 1975. 3. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 4. Eric Lionel Mascall was an Oxford academic and theologian. He knew Murdoch during her time as a visiting member of the theological group, ‘The Metaphysicals’, of which Mascall was a leading figure. 5. Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief (London: George Allena and Unwin, 1938). 6. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (London: Constable, 1960). 7. A sprite (Germanic origin). 8. ‘Ellingness’ is an archaic version of ‘loneliness’. 9. Hugo Dyson (1896–1975) was a literary scholar and member of The Inklings.

References Auden, W.S. 1991. Collected Poems. London: Vintage. Barfield, O. 1988. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press. Chaucer, G. 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. Boston: Hugo Mifflin. Leslie, S. 1926. The Cantab. London: Chatto and Windus. Murdoch, I. 2000. The Unicorn. London: Vintage Classics. ———. 2002a. Under the Net. London: Vintage Classics. ———. 2002b. The Time of the Angels. London: Vintage Classics. ———. 2003. The Sandcastle. London: Vintage Classics. ———. 2004. The Bell. London: Vintage Classics. Sprat, T. 1667. History of the Royal Society. London: J. Martyn. Traherne, T. 2007. Centuries of Meditations. New York: Cosimo Classics. Williams, C. 1984. He Came Down from Heaven. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

CHAPTER 3

‘In My Beginning Is My End’: Threads and Themes from Under the Net to Jackson’s Dilemma Frances White

Overview of the Terrain This essay discusses Iris Murdoch’s first and last novels, surveying their reception at the original time of publication and comparing that with how they are currently viewed in order to reveal shifts that may occur in readerly response and critical thinking as cultural norms and aesthetic preferences change. It considers constant factors across the range of Murdoch’s oeuvre as displayed in these two texts before analysing differences between them—differences that disclose the progression of Murdoch’s art and thought as well as sadly displaying the effects of the Alzheimer’s from which she died in 1999. A secondary area of interest—but equally pertinent to fresh assessments of Iris Murdoch today, as this series is intentionally called—is Murdoch’s view of herself as novelist and her response to views of her work expressed by others. A sense of progression is also found with F. White (*) Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester, Chichester, West Sussex, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_3

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regard not only to this aspect of her role as an influential artist but also to the role of ‘saint’ latterly projected onto Murdoch, to her evident discomfort and disavowal. Evoking the closing lines of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’, one could say that Murdoch’s career as a novelist began in 1954 with a bang and ended over forty years later with a whimper. The trajectory of her astonishing fictional oeuvre of 26 novels thus describes an arc. She rapidly gained acclaim from The Bell (1958), onwards, winning the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) and the James Tait Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973), which, along with The Good Apprentice (1985) and The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), was also nominated for the Booker Prize, won by Murdoch with The Sea, The Sea (1978). There has never been unanimous agreement amongst either critics or general readers about which, if any, is the ‘best’ of her novels, but the ‘baggy monsters’ of the 1980s and 90s— Henry James’s phrase is often applied to Murdoch’s late novels—may for a while have seemed to lose her the popularity her midlife works had established. Nonetheless, as late as 1994 ‘the Sunday Times voted her the greatest living author writing in English’ (Rowe 2019, 36), but by the time she died in 1999 Murdoch’s reputation was a low ebb and her readership was small by comparison with the 1960s to 1980s. Small but loyal. Despite the damage inadvertently done to his wife’s memory by the memoirs John Bayley controversially published between 1998 and 2001—on which the director Richard Eyre based the film Iris (2002) which further marred her public image—Murdoch’s work continued to be studied by both literary scholars and philosophers throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century. By the occasion of her centenary in 2019, a resurgence of interest was clearly evident, with Penguin Random House publishing a new Vintage Classics set of six of her most popular novels with fresh appraisals by contemporary writers, and a special international Iris Murdoch Conference (the ninth since 2002) held in the Oxford Colleges with which she was associated— Somerville and St Anne’s—to celebrate not only her life and work but also all the new scholarship which she is inspiring world-wide.1 As a young woman Murdoch had aspired to making her mark: when six new publications about her work were launched in the Mary Somerville Room at her Alma Mater, it seemed that the spirit of her undergraduate self might have been present seeing her life’s ambition resoundingly fulfilled.

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In my Beginning: Under the Net (1954) Murdoch had written and destroyed at some earlier novels—and had one rejected by no less a personage than T.S. Eliot himself at Faber & Faber— before she sprang to public attention gaining instant critical acclaim.2 Under the Net is thus a sophisticated and finely-honed début novel, by a mature though still young woman, the fruit of years of patient apprenticeship. Remarkably, it has not dated. In his 2002 Introduction to the Vintage Classics edition of Under the Net, Kiernan Ryan says, ‘it was immediately apparent that a remarkable new writer had arrived on the scene, a writer already in full command of the art to which she was to devote the rest of her creative life’. He describes the novel as ‘a flawless fusion of the mundane and the marvellous, laughter and lyricism, farce and philosophy’. And in his opinion, which I share, ‘she never wrote a better novel than the one that made her name’ (Murdoch 2002, ix). Murdoch disliked people thinking it one of her finest works, believing herself that her later novels are better, but it remains a favourite with many readers (including her life-long friend, the philosopher, Philippa Foot) and is still a good springboard for introducing new readers to her work. Charlotte Mendelson, reading Under the Net for the first time when invited to write an Introduction for the new Vintage Classics edition of 2019 asks, ‘What possible relevance could such a book have now?’ to which her decided response is, ‘It has all the relevance in the world’ (Murdoch 2019, x). Looking back at the critical reception of Under the Net in 1954, as recorded in the bibliography painstakingly compiled by John Fletcher and Cheryl Bove which was published in 1994, reveals the impact this young novelist made on the contemporary literary scene. Kingsley Amis, who made his own debut the same year with Lucky Jim, called her book ‘a winner, a thoroughly accomplished first novel’ and praised Murdoch’s humour, philosophical bent and male first-person narrator, while Elizabeth Berridge praised her ‘invention and wit’. Elizabeth Bowen, by contrast, was ‘not taken with the narrator, Jake Donaghue’, and a reviewer in the Brentford and Chiswick Times also found him ‘weary’ while praising Murdoch’s ‘crisp dialogue’; a review for Cape Argus (it is fascinating to see how far and wide this novel was reviewed) found it to have ‘excitement, wit, and sympathy’. The reviewer for the Irish Independent was less positive, titling the review ‘Disappointing’ and concluding that ‘the reader is saddened and puzzled, rather than amused and entertained’ by Under the Net. Derek Hudson likewise ‘complains of lack of coherence in the novel’.

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John Macaulay’s review, ‘Fashionable Novel,’ started a hare by placing Murdoch ‘in a new school of novelists (including Kingsley Amis and John Wain) who take their impetus from Sartre rather than Joyce’—this led to Murdoch’s briefly being linked with the ‘angry young men’: the National and English Review resisted such unhelpful comparisons calling Under the Net ‘a novel of notable promise’ while Nigel Nicolson wrote of it as ‘clever, observant, funny and very real’. The Sphere praised its ‘comic gusto’. Julian Symons, reviewing the novel for Punch, gave an ambiguous response ‘calling it “amusing” and “intelligent” but claiming Murdoch’s “pleasing flippancy” about her hero turns to “soggy seriousness when she come to consider his emotions”’: Angus Wilson likewise offers both negatives and positives when he ‘faults the lack of integration of comedy and philosophy in the novel but notes the poetry in the novel’s scenes’ (Fletcher and Bove 1994, 465–71). A mixed bag of reviews but on balance encouraging for an emerging novelist.

Brigid Brophy and The Black Prince However, it seems that Murdoch wisely took little notice of reviews throughout her life, using them as ammunition for her art rather than taking criticism personally. The preeminent instance of this is her self-­ parody in The Black Prince when the novelist Arnold Baffin is described 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’ (Murdoch 1999, 137). No critic could ever poke more fun at Iris Murdoch than she did herself, having a realistic and humble view of her own artistic ability, and accepting that ‘every book is the wreck of a perfect idea’ as she makes Arnold’s rival, Bradley Pearson, say (Murdoch 1999, 172). Reviewers aside, Under the Net made such an impression at the Cheltenham Literary Festival that, although First Prize had been awarded to Brigid Brophy’s Hackenfeller’s Ape (1954), a second Prize was created that year for Murdoch’s novel—this chance encounter between the two novelists was to have far-reaching future implications for their personal lives and work. The story of that intense sexualized friendship and literary rivalry tells itself in Murdoch’s letters to Brophy, published in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, and in an article for the Times Literary Supplement, ‘Love, in lines unmusical: the literary and romantic relationship between Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy’ (2020), Miles Leeson analyses ‘one of the

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most important relationships in Murdoch’s life’.3 Elements of this tortuous relationship may be glimpsed in The Black Prince, a tale of two novelists, in which Arnold, the prolific writer, tells Bradley, the blocked writer, When one is attacked through one’s work it goes straight to the heart. I don’t mean that one bothers about journalists. I mean people one knows. They sometimes imagine that you can despise a man’s book and remain his friend. You can’t. The offence is unforgiveable.

But when Bradley asks if this means their friendship is over, Arnold answers. No. Because in rare cases one can overcome the offence by moving much closer to the other person. I think this is possible here. (Murdoch 1999, 171–2)

Murdoch was adamant that she did not draw from life in terms of basing her characters on people she knew, and John Bayley is right to say, as Anne Rowe also comments in her essay (50), that his wife’s imagination utterly transforms any such connections with real people. But her experience was the crucible of her art, and it was the pain Brophy caused Murdoch which renders this exchange poignantly believable. On 19 November 1960 Murdoch sent a letter to her ‘dearest creature’ in which she admits her hurt feelings and explores how she feels about criticism: Until now I have taken the view that your odd attitude to my work was unimportant. Lots of my friends don’t like what I write […] but mostly they keep quiet about it and it doesn’t matter. I don’t, by the way, dislike, or don’t think I do, interesting criticism if devoid of spite. Interesting criticism one practically never gets of course. My own debate about the merits of my work and how to improve it is one that I think no one else can contribute to. I believe I have a reasonably just estimate of my faults and virtues as a writer […] I confess I am surprised that you altogether dislike my work, as I should have thought it was complex enough to have some things in it which would touch your heart and mind […] It is not a matter of love me love my books […] It is partly that I am, I think, rather like my books. So that it is a little odd (and a little unnerving) to find you detesting them. (Horner and Rowe 2015, 215)

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This is a very rare—indeed unique?—instance of Murdoch’s being openly self-appraising, and despite her efforts to move much closer to Brophy (whose work she generously praised) their relationship was to founder in the end, although they never lost touch.4 Through the letters one gets a sense of a love-hate dynamic similar to that of Bradley and Arnold, which is not seen in others of Murdoch’s friendships. It may be that Brophy’s somewhat spiteful attitude to Murdoch’s novels played as big a part in their disunion as did their incompatible sexual requirements. Be that as it may, this letter indicates that Murdoch did identify with her books to some extent and could be wounded by criticism of them from those she cared about. But all of this was to happen much later when she was a firmly established novelist, not at the outset of her budding career.

From Philosophical Novelist to Feminist Politics By the time she wrote Under the Net Murdoch had already acquired a First in Greats at Oxford, fallen briefly under Jean-Paul Sartre’s spell after hearing him speak in Brussels, read widely in both British and Continental philosophy, wrestled with logical positivism during her year in Cambridge and set out her own philosophical agenda with quiet assurance. Her interest lies ‘in the direction of ethics’: she lacks sympathy with ‘passionless formalistic theories’ which fail to relate to ‘the real moral problems’ that distress her and her contemporaries. Murdoch describes these problems as ‘all mixed up with emotion and psychology and religion and politics and all sorts of things that were not discussed’: for the rest of her life she stuck with this mixed agenda and worked to get a multi-disciplinary approach to moral philosophy acceptable for discussion. She wants to keep in the picture ‘man with blood in his veins, and a complicated psychology (and partly conscious of it) and with definite social and emotional problems to face—the man who goes to the cinema, makes love, and fights for or against Hitler.’5 Her first novel reflects her early philosophical concerns and is haunted by Wittgenstein as well as Sartre. It was this aspect of her fictional debut that inevitably set in motion the still ongoing debate as to whether Murdoch falls into the category of philosophical novelist, a pigeon-holing which she herself forcibly though inconsistently rejected but which literary critics have continued to worry at like terriers with a bone. The gauntlet thrown down by Murdoch was accepted as a challenge by Miles Leeson who provocatively entitled his 2010 study of the topic, Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist, and the

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debate rumbles on over a decade later. It is not this point at issue that chiefly concerns the current generation of new Murdoch readers, however, but the sexual politics displayed in Under the Net, not only by the narrator Jake but also by the author herself in her choices of how she represents women and sexual violence. Young students may now view Jake Donaghue and his friend Hugo Belfounder as reprehensible potentially dangerous sexual predators—not something that was raised as a matter of concern 70 years ago. This shift in focus is fully analysed by Anne Rowe in chapter four of this collection of essays, ‘A Man Shut in A Glass’. Textual Blindness and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (47–66).

Is My End: Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) Jackson’s Dilemma is a rough-edged, flawed text, written with the last failing powers of an old and sick woman. An article in the Daily Telegraph on 4 February 1997, revealed that Murdoch was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The first symptoms became apparent as early as 1993–1994 and she was clearly struggling to write this novel in a state of increasing mental difficulty and distress. Scientists investigating Alzheimer’s disease have analysed Jackson’s Dilemma in comparison with Murdoch’s early and mature novels—Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea—as it manifests the type of vocabulary reduction and sentence-structure breakdown which is caused by Alzheimer’s disease and which is here uniquely available for investigation.6 Completing Jackson’s Dilemma was a remarkable achievement and a tribute to the perseverance of a dedicated and professional novelist. Sadly, by the time copies of her new book were delivered to Charlbury Road, Murdoch’s condition had deteriorated so much that she was not aware of her accomplishment. Fletcher and Bove had completed their mighty bibliography before Murdoch’s final novel was published so we have to look elsewhere to see how it was received. John Bayley records that Jackson’s Dilemma ‘got exceptionally good reviews’ and says ‘I read these reviews to Iris, a thing I had never done before because she had never wanted to listen. Now she listened politely but without understanding’ (Bayley 1998, 151). A different picture is painted by Anne Rowe who wrote ‘A Review of Critical Reception of Jackson’s Dilemma’ for the Iris Murdoch News Letter 9, which came out in the Autumn of 1995. This excellent summary deserves reading in full. Rowe originally intended to group the reviews under the headings of ‘commendatory’, ‘dismissive’ and ‘ambivalent’ but soon had to extend

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these categories to include ‘ecstatic’ and ‘downright rude’, and gave up on the endeavour when she found that ‘the whole range of responses was frequently to be found in one review’, and concluded that such ‘ambivalence typifies reaction to Jackson’s Dilemma: reviewers are simultaneously charmed, affronted and bewildered’. She picks out some striking comments: A.S.  Byatt (author of the first critical work on Murdoch in 1965, Degrees of Freedom) called it an ‘Indian rope trick’—an image taken from the novel itself (Murdoch 1995, 232)—saying that ‘there is no story and no novel’, and D.J. Taylor thought that it showed ‘an original and dangerously self-engrossed mind merely uncoiling itself’. I find the serpentine allusions in these two comments intriguing: were they suggested by Murdoch’s image in the novel itself of Jackson’s being found ‘in a basket […] curled up like a snake’ (Murdoch 1995, 64), or do they indicate a sense of unease caused by an apparent loss of authorial control which allows this novel to be more directly reflective of Murdoch’s subconscious than any previous work? In tune with this idea, Kate Kellaway intuits that the ‘strained syntax’ evident in this last novel reveals ‘what the heart would say if the heart could speak’, and Caroline Moor who found Jackson’s Dilemma ‘irresistible’, thinks it is ‘the distilled quintessence of her art’ (Rowe 1995, 9–9). As a life-long Murdoch reader, I acquired Jackson’s Dilemma on the day of publication and devoured it. Like the reviewers Rowe analysed, I was charmed (though never affronted) but bewilderment was uppermost. What had happened? Was Murdoch being innovatively experimental in this strange work? Or was she—literally—losing the plot? When, shortly afterwards, John Bayley announced her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, the question was tragically answered. But in the uneven text I found so much that was enchanting and illuminating that I endlessly re-read it and found much to inspire critical study: this final flawed novel informed my essays on ‘Jackson’s Dilemma and “The Responsible Life of the Imagination”’ (2010) and on ‘Murdoch’s Dilemma: Philosophy, Literature and the Holocaust’ (2011).7 Jackson’s Dilemma is far from being a curiosity or afterthought, rather it is essential to our understanding of Murdoch’s art and thought, as I will shortly argue. For this novel, like her first, mirrors Murdoch’s prevalent philosophical struggles. Just as Under the Net engages with Sartre and Wittgenstein, in Jackson’s Dilemma a central character, Benet Barnell, has long been trying to write a book about Heidegger; through him Murdoch voices her thoughts about that ambiguous philosopher and the great difficulty thinking about him caused

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her. Is Heidegger one of the greatest philosophers of all time, or an evil paltry charlatan? A dilemma experienced by many Heidegger scholars and readers, and one of the dilemmas in the novel which may lie behind its cryptic title. But there are parallels to be found between the two texts in many other ways, and after setting out parameters for framing discussion of Murdoch’s central message—to use an image she found evocative—I will turn to them in detail.

Murdoch’s Agenda Murdoch preferred to describe her philosophy as ‘moral psychology’ (Dooley 2003, 92) and I want now to look at the way in which her views on what is of ultimate importance are explored and revealed through her literary writings. As we consider threads and themes in her first and last novels, we should keep in mind some aspects of Murdoch’s thinking which remained crucial to her throughout. First, she is very aware of the significance of the reader. This is clear from her first monograph, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), published the year before Under the Net, in which she says: The reader too must be the creator of the novel; his continuing to read it ‘properly’, that is to enter into it seriously, to “lend” it his emotions and so on, involves him in a sustained act of faith in the work itself. (Murdoch 1989, 97)

In ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’ (1978) she speaks of, ‘the writer and the reader, that wicked co-operating pair’ (Murdoch 1997, 251), and in her magnum opus, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) she observes that ‘the creation and appreciation of a novel is a complex highly diversified operation’ (Murdoch 1992, 146) and says that ‘the consumption of literature involves continual (usually instinctive) evaluation’ (Murdoch 1992, 190). Murdoch further sees a reflexivity between the experience of reading novels and the experience of living: ‘In the traditional novel the people, the story, the innumerable kinds of value judgements both illuminate and celebrate life, and are judged and placed by life, in a reciprocal process’ (Murdoch 1992, 97). Poetry may, as Auden said, make ‘nothing happen’ (Auden 1966, 142), but the novel, in Murdoch’s view, may act as a catalyst for moral change in the reader. She thus has a very clear view of the nature

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and purpose of art. For Murdoch, art is anti-aestheticist. She states clearly in ‘The Sublime and the Good’ (1959): ‘The work of great artists shows up “art-for-art’s sake” as a flimsy frivolous doctrine. Art is for life’s sake […] or else it is worthless’ (Murdoch 1997, 218). And in ‘On “God” and “Good”’ (1969), she links art firmly with ethics: ‘Art is an excellent analogy of morals, […] indeed in this respect a case of morals. We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else’ (Murdoch 1997, 348). She thus links art with morality as in the statement of her central credo, most succinctly articulated in ‘The Sublime and the Good’, which is consistent across the four decades of her novel-writing: Art and morals are, with certain provisos […] one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. (Murdoch 1997, 215)

All these quotations are from the essays which formed The Sovereignty of Good published in 1970, a seminal text in Murdoch’s philosophical works which forms the kernel of her moral vision. That vision found expression in her novels which act simultaneously as a ‘jolly good yarn’ of which Murdoch spoke to Jeffrey Myers with enthusiastic approbation (Dooley 2003: 230).

Threads and Themes: Bridges and Rooms With this background in mind, I want now to consider ways in which Jackson’s Dilemma uncannily echoes and mirrors Under the Net, before looking into the enigma of Murdoch’s extraordinary last novel. There are the obvious details which recur in all her fiction: details of food and of the night sky, of singing and swimming, of walking in London and of the Thames. There are significant animals and spiders, siblings and rivers, philosophers and writers, masters and servants, misunderstandings and broken relationships, past wounds and new beginnings. But re-reading these novels, two striking passages from each stand out in the way they parallel each other in their close textual detail. The first is a visual image of two men on a bridge. Each novel has at its epicentre a precious, fragile and troubled relationship between two men: Jake Donaghue and Hugo Belfounder in Under the Net, Benet Barnell

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and Jackson in Jackson’s Dilemma. Jake is accustomed to meet Hugo on Chelsea Bridge and this is the scene of his severance of their friendship. On the day that Jake’s book, The Silencer, which he feels he guiltily plagiarised from conversations with Hugo, is published, he describes his non-meeting with Hugo, thus: I had an appointment to meet Hugo that evening, on [Chelsea] bridge as usual [.…] A tragic fascination drew me to the riverside, from which I could see the bridge. Hugo appeared punctually and waited. I sat on a seat and smoked two cigarettes. Hugo walked up and down. After a while longer I saw him cross the bridge to the south bank and I knew he was going to my lodgings [.…] Half an hour later, I saw him walk slowly back across the bridge and disappear. (Murdoch 2002, 75)

Benet believes he has forfeited Jackson’s friendship through his own unkindness and grieves over his loss. This is the scene in which he re-discovers Jackson and the turning point for the renewal of their relationship: [Benet] found himself standing at the foot of the steps leading up to the railway bridge; automatically he began to mount [.…] The Thames below was full and quiet. It was dark on the bridge [….] Benet turned to go down, then changed his mind and set off slowly towards the other side. Near the centre of the bridge a man was leaning upon the rail, looking down the river in the direction of Waterloo Bridge. Benet stopped, then moved on. The man turned to him. (Murdoch 1995, 215)

There seems perhaps to be some esoteric significance in the scene of estrangement in her first novel being complemented by this scene of reunion in her last, a making whole again of connections that had been severed. Chelsea Bridge and Hungerford Bridge are two and a half miles apart and are very different from each other, but bridges are a potent symbol of separation and connection throughout Murdoch’s oeuvre.8 What is clear is that the immediacy of Murdoch’s sense of London, her ‘beloved city’ never failed her (Murdoch 2002, 269). As Peter Conradi has remarked: ‘London is a real presence in the books, indeed seems to feature as an extra character’ (Conradi 2001a, 5), and this is as true of Jackson’s Dilemma with its vivid sense of people by the river, as it is of Under the Net. The difference lies in that the detail is not present in the same crisp way as in the earlier novel, where Jake’s path—as he meanders round the city in search of people or drink—can be traced in full.

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A similar loss of detail can be descried by analysis of a second pair of passages in which Murdoch gives a verbal description of a chaotic room, Anna Quentin’s props room in Under the Net and Owen Silbury’s attic in Jackson’s Dilemma. In the lexical change between these passages, not only Murdoch’s reduced mental grasp but also a darkening of her apprehension of the world can be glimpsed. In Anna’s room An astonishing medley of objects lay about in piles which in places reached up to the ceiling. The contents of the room had a strange cohesion and homogeneity and they seemed to adhere to the walls like the contents of a half-empty jam jar. Yet here was every kind of thing. It was like a vast toy shop that had been hit by a bomb. In my first glance I noticed a French Horn, a rocking-horse, a set of red-striped tin trumpets, some Chinese silk robes, a couple of rifles, Paisley shawls, teddy bears, glass balls, tangles of necklaces and other jewellery, a convex mirror, a stuffed snake, countless toy animals, and a number of tin trunks out of which multi-coloured costumes trailed. Exquisite and expensive playthings lay enlaced with the gimcrack contents of Christmas crackers. (Murdoch 2002, 42)

The passage is full of specific concrete nouns: toy shop, French Horn, rocking-horse, tin trumpets, silk robes, rifles, shawls, teddy bears, glass balls, tangles of necklaces and other jewellery, mirror, snake, toy animals, tin trunks and costumes. Juxtapose this passage with that describing Owen Silbury’s attic, in which there is …a mass of heterogeneous things which thickly covered the invisible floor: old moth-eaten clothes, broken articles of furniture, dusty filthy broken-­ backed books, stones of various sizes, ancient trunks and suitcases, broken glass, old photograph albums falling to pieces, useless lampshades, smashed up china of every description, boxes crammed with innumerable small objects, ancient newspapers in faded yellow piles, broken toys. (Murdoch 1995, 175)

Although there are still concrete nouns, they are far less specific: things, clothes, articles of furniture, books, stones, trunks and suitcases, glass, photograph albums, lampshades, china, boxes, objects, newspapers and toys. The nouns here are quite different in type. They move from the specific and particular to the general and vague. The result is a loss of visual impact: it is easier to form a mind’s eye picture of Anna’s room than

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of Owen’s. From the first passage a vivid painting could be created to illustrate it: the second reads like a list for a house clearance. This notable reduction of radiance is also due to a change in the adjectives employed in each passage. Thus, Anna’s props are clearly distinguished and heightened by Murdoch’s vivacious youthful vocabulary—astonishing, red-striped, tin, Chinese silk, Paisley, Glass, Tangles, Convex, stuffed, countless, multi-coloured—whereas Owen’s objects are described in repetitive and forlorn terms. The words which came to the aged Murdoch when writing this passage speak for themselves. A sense of dissolution and sadness pervades the text—thickly, old, moth-­ eaten, broken, dusty, filthy, broken-backed, ancient, broken, old, falling to pieces, useless, smashed up, ancient, faded, broken. The diminished lexicon is starkly redolent of ageing, brokenness and disease and if the adjectives in each passage are contrasted, the shift of register is shocking. Colour too has leached away, from bright red and multi-coloured, to faded yellow. Key to the similarities and differences of these descriptions of Anna’s props and Owen’s items are the concepts of homogeneity and heterogeneity. Jake says that ‘the contents of the room had a sort of a strange cohesion and homogeneity’ (Murdoch 2002, 42), whereas in Owen’s attic there is just ‘a mass of heterogeneous things’ (Murdoch 1995, 175). This loss of cohesion in Murdoch’s descriptions embodies the loss of cohesion she was experiencing in her mind. These passages are synecdochal of the novels in which they are embedded. That the tight plot and fast pace and coherent dynamic of Under the Net has given way to the rambling, repetitive and inchoate format of Jackson’s Dilemma is evident in the lexicon as much as in the structure of these texts.

Comic and Tragic Masks The change is also manifest in the emotional register of each novel. Murdoch was always fascinated by masks, which recur throughout her fiction both as mysterious artefacts and as symbols of the gap between appearance and reality.9 Masks appear at Anna’s little Riverside Theatre in Under the Net and Jake is made uneasy by their presence. The comedy/ tragedy masks of traditional Greek drama are glimpsed in behind his statement that, ‘My happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away’ (Murdoch 2002, 188). These first and last novels are each dominated primarily by one of these masks: Under

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the Net is poised for life, full of laughter, upbeat. It is the most purely comic of Murdoch’s novels, fast, witty, full of memorable scenes which still make one laugh on the umpteenth reading. The pub crawl across London in vain search of Hugo which involves Jake’s leading a drunken round of singing in the General Post Office and a midnight swim in the Thames; the kidnapping of Mister Mars and the escape from the film studios—readers can all think of further examples. The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals is Murdoch’s chosen artwork for her first novel. There are over thirty references to people laughing during the story, sometimes hysterically as when his friends find Jake locked by in Sadie into her flat: ‘Finn and Dave looked at each other, and then they collapsed helplessly. Dave sat on the kerb choking with laughter and Finn leaned weakly against the lamp-post. They rocked’ (Murdoch 2002, 99). Jake and Hugo laugh so much in the Cold Cure centre where they first meet, that they are ‘rebuked by the authorities’ and ‘threatened with separation’ (Murdoch 2002, 64). After betting with Sammy Starfield, Jake bursts in on Finn and Dave ‘laughing like a lunatic’ (Murdoch 2002, 87) and the group enter the Post Office ‘hilariously’ (Murdoch 2002, 113). There is a touch of slapstick to Murdoch’s comic effect: trying to get the dog cage out of Sammy’s flat, Jake and Finn ‘both lay on the floor and laughed like maniacs until [they] could do nothing but groan’ (Murdoch 2002, 145–6) and when he and Mister Mars outwit the police and run ‘off down the road at full pelt’, ‘there arose an immense roar of laughter’ (Murdoch 2002, 172). In Paris on Bastille night Jake hears ‘voices and laughter […] blowing like a gale’ (Murdoch 2002, 215), and he almost sabotages Hugo’s escape from the hospital by nearly laughing out loud at the sight of his friend with ‘his two boots gripped by their tongues between his teeth […] negotiating the passage on hands and feet, his posterior rising mountainously into the air’ (Murdoch 2002, 263). Laughter provides the energy which fuels this explosive debut novel, which indeed closes with Jake and Mrs Tinckham’s laughing together at Maggie’s mixed-up kittens who are ‘one of the wonders of the world’ (Murdoch 2002, 286). Jackson’s Dilemma, by contrast, is poised for death, fearful, elegiac. This novel wears the sad mask. Tears abound in Murdoch’s fiction, becoming more frequent as the novels go on. Pamela Osborn has analysed the theme of grief and mourning in Murdoch’s novels and noted her increasing sense of Virgil’s ‘tears of things’ in the Aeneid.10 There are over a hundred uses of such words as weeping, crying, sobbing, grief, sorrow in Jackson’s Dilemma: the text is awash with tears. Darkness and dimness

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are also prevalent, as is misery, fear, loneliness, chaos, distress, and anxiety. Words of high frequency include terrible, awful, madness, shock and wound. Reading it is a distressing experience.

Jackson’s Dilemma Today It is undeniable that Jackson’s Dilemma is a very strange book, not easily accessible for readers unfamiliar with Murdoch’s earlier work. After the ‘huge baggy monster’ novels of her late period—The Sea, the Sea (1978) to The Green Knight (1993)—this short last novel is only half the length of preceding works and has an uncharacteristically simple plot. Byatt, as we have noted, queries whether, indeed, it has a story at all. The small cast of tightly knit characters appear intermittently and the novel lacks any central viewpoint: Dipple writes of ‘the indirect crooked routes through which it is narratorially presented’ (Dipple 1995, 4). Murdoch was often parodied by others and revelled in conscious self-parody as we have seen, but her last offering appears to be almost an unconscious self–parody. Among the dramatis personae are emotionally damaged scholars, a painter, a holy lady, a mysterious and haunted Jew and adolescent girls, all of whom have their counterparts in many previous novels. Here too are the dead, remembrance of whom haunts the living with guilt and grief. Here is the muddle of past and present events, and of secrets, familiar to Murdoch readers, and also the emotional scenes, tears, and moral scruples which are keynotes in her oeuvre. Yet something about the mixture is not quite as before: the unique tone of anxiety and of authorial confusion in Jackson’s Dilemma is imparted by the labour of composing coherent narrative when the mind’s structures are disintegrating through disease. Once Murdoch’s condition was known, the puzzling change in her writing became sadly comprehensible. This ultimate novel exhibits the obsessional focus of Murdoch’s last coherent thoughts. Jackson’s Dilemma has a pared-down skeletal quality, and this skeleton, stripped of the excess flesh of the ‘baggy monsters’, reveals the central elements of her imaginative life with unwonted clarity. The religious traditions which exercised her spirit, Christianity, Quakerism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, are present. The people who influenced her make a final appearance: T.  E. Lawrence, Simone Weil, Plato. Murdoch’s seminal texts are listed with evident love, Lord Jim, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, Kim, and The Tale of Gengi.11 Her favourite paintings and artists are present, including Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas

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as well as her literary mentors, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Kipling, Tolstoy. The presence of Shakespeare, the artist she revered supremely, pervades the text, both overtly, in the discussions of him by the characters, and covertly in the essence of this novel in itself. Dipple sees Jackson’s Dilemma as ‘Murdoch [….] writing a Shakespearean comedy for us, as a novel’ (Dipple 1995, 6); both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest are central to the conception of its unrealistic plot as well as to the dreamlike, romantic mood of the novel. Murdoch was aware that this would be her last novel (she had told Bayley that she would never write another), just as The Tempest was Shakespeare’s last play. Coupled with her parallel semi-awareness of her intellectual and creative debilitation, this gives sad power to the dark and anxious thoughts and feelings of her characters, particularly Jackson himself. As the book closes, he experiences momentary losses or shifts of memory and thinks, ‘My powers have left me, will they ever return?’ (Murdoch 1995, 248). Prospero-like, Iris Murdoch, the greatest fictional magician of the twentieth-century English novel, bids farewell to her own creative powers. Alzheimer’s killed them before it killed her, but effortfully and in great anxiety of mind, ‘that endless omnipresent anxiety of Alzheimer’s’, as Bayley describes it, she wrote this last lyrically beautiful and haunting novel (Bayley 1998, 35). As much as any of her earlier works Jackson’s Dilemma is a unique and rich book which is generating lively debate today as Murdoch’s oeuvre is re-assessed and critically evaluated.

Raids on the Inarticulate Murdoch’s efforts are encapsulated in more words from T. S. Eliot: That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory […] the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings […] every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate… (Eliot 1969, 181–2)

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Murdoch kept trying to pin down her thoughts, to express them in the art form of the novel, ‘that great sensitive mirror, or screen, or field of forces’ which she called ‘still one of the most articulate expressions of the dilemmas of its age’ (Murdoch 1997, 221). (That word, dilemma, again.) But art, like the set-piece fireworks Hugo excels in creating in Under the Net, is impermanent, provisional, disposable. Each time, she was dissatisfied, never quite capturing her vision.

Murdoch’s Standing Today Charles Péguy said, ‘Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics’ (Roe 2014, 217): Murdoch reversed that trend. Her life’s journey voyaged from the political to the mystical, the political interests of her first novel with Lefty Todd and the New Independent Socialist Party, giving way by the close of her career to increasing mysticism. She foresaw this is a letter to Raymond Queneau written on 26 September 1946, when she said, ‘I started life as a political animal thinking my soul didn’t matter—now I am almost a religious animal, thinking it matters vitally. In the swing between those two attitudes lie all the philosophical problems that interest me’ (Horner and Rowe 2015, 23). In her last novel, as well as in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch focuses on mysticism. Tuan asks, ‘What is mysticism, can it relate to philosophy?’ (Murdoch 1995, 163) and Mildred thinks: ‘But what is real, the mystical truth of Christianity, as the great mystics saw it […] that is what must be preached now, where it is needed’ (Murdoch 1995, 186). Like Eliot, Murdoch reached out to the transcendent, to that which is beyond words. She came full circle, back to Wittgenstein, whose words give her the title for her first novel. His first work, Tractatus, concludes: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (Wittgenstein 1974, 89). Murdoch’s novels and philosophy are a bravely persevering raid on the inarticulate, but in the end, she fell into silence. English literature is the poorer for the loss of her unique, aesthetic, imaginative, ethical, mystical voice. But that voice echoes on as new readers come to Murdoch’s books, and as scholars reassess them. Her reputation as a philosopher is steadily growing through the twenty-first century with the shifts in emphasis which have occurred in that discipline: she is now studied in Oxford which during her lifetime thought little of her philosophical work.12 Her popularity as a novelist is reviving as a new generation of readers discovers her, and as contemporary social media provides new forums for discussion

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of her novels.13 And, after a stormy period following her death, Bayley’s memoirs, Eyre’s film, Conradi’s biography and the publication of her letters, the water is now settling so that a clearer reflection of her life and work can be seen. Murdoch said unequivocally, ‘it is the fundamental task of each person to make himself good (Murdoch 1992, 362). She was also, however, down-to-earth about human nature, saying wryly, ‘What of the command “Be ye therefore perfect?” Would it not be more sensible to say “Be ye therefore slightly improved?”’ (Murdoch 1997, 350). She attempted to become good herself and gained an unlooked-for reputation as a secular saint. When the pedestal on which she had been placed by others came tumbling down in the light of unexpected revelations about her relationships and sexuality, reaction was initially extreme.14 But Murdoch had as realistic and humble a view of her own behaviour as she did of her art. She knew her own moral as well as aesthetic failings and suffered bitter remorse over actions of which she was ashamed. But, contemplating Shakespeare and Titian, Owen Silbury says of remorse, ‘Artists know all about it’ (Murdoch 1995, 64), and Murdoch was no exception to this. She resisted the tendency of her readers to sanctify her and did not want to influence them in the role of a sage or guru—figures she reveals as being a danger to others in many of her novels. Rowe identified this authorial anxiety over a decade ago, saying that ‘Murdoch provides a moving, self-­ deprecating deconstructing of herself, her moral philosophy and her neo-­ theology, as any ideal model’, and that ‘the sheer complexity of Murdoch’s novels resists any attempt at deifying her position’ (Rowe and Horner 2010, 153). This model of calm interpretation and clear-eyed appraisal is being built on by Murdoch scholars around the world, such that a more balanced view and better understanding of the enduring value of her work, philosophical and literary, is being reached in the twenty-first century.15 This reappraisal is being aided by the publication of Murdoch’s letters— which will be followed in due course by her journals—and through fresh biographical and critical studies, including those which this series is designed to promote and publish. Jake and Jackson along with their creator are assured of a place in the canon of English Literature.

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Notes 1. The first one-day conference in 2002 was held in St Anne’s College, Oxford, but subsequent conferences have been held in Kingston University, London, 2004–2014, and in the University of Chichester, 2017–the present. 2. ‘Iris wrote several fictions before publishing Under the Net in 1954— sometimes she gave the figure as four, on occasion six’ (Conradi 2001b, 170). 3. https://www.the-­tls.co.uk/articles/iris-­murdoch-­brigid-­brophy-­love-­in-­ lines-­unmusical-­miles-­leeson/ [accessed 25-5-22] 4. See Iris Murdoch, ‘A Jewelled Occasion’. Sunday Times, 19 January 1964, 37, for a review of The Snowball by Brigid Brophy. 5. Newnham College Archive, file AC/5/2: letter from UNRRA, Vienna, 9 April 1946, from Murdoch to Myra Curtis, Principal of Newnham College, concerning the Sarah Smithson Studentship. 6. See Peter Garrard et al., ‘The effects of very early Alzheimer’s disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author’, Brain, 128:2 (February 2005), 250–60; Peter Garrard, ‘The Iris Murdoch Text Analysis Project and its Importance to the Study of Authorship and Alzheimer’s Disease’, the Iris Murdoch Review, 1 (2008), 14–17. 7. Frances White, ‘Jackson’s Dilemma and “The Responsible Life of the Imagination”’, in Iris Murdoch and Morality, Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 126–38; Frances White, ‘Murdoch’s Dilemma: Philosophy, Literature and the Holocaust’, in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher Meets Novelist, Sofia de Melo Araújo and Fátima Vieira, eds. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 89–102. 8. See ‘Chapter Six: The Thames’ of Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 129–44. 9. For detailed analysis of Murdoch’s use of masks see Rebecca Moden, ‘Breaching the Barrier of the Mask: Iris Murdoch, Someone Weil and the Construction of Visual Metaphor’, the Iris Murdoch Review, 8 (2017), 38–44, and Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger: Imaginations and Images (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), chapter five. 10. See Pamela Osborn, ‘Another Country: Mourning and Survival in the Novels of Iris Murdoch’, unpublished thesis, Kingston University, London, 2014. 11. For a discussion of the importance of The Tale of Genji to Murdoch, see Fiona Tomkinson, ‘Iris Murdoch and The Tale of Genji’, Chapter Six of this collection.

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12. For accounts of the new recognition being accorded not only to Murdoch, but also to her philosopher friends, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley, see Benjamin J.B.  Lipscomb, The Women are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoc Revolutionized Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), and Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2022). 13. At the time of writing there are 7796 people on the Iris Murdoch twitter feed, 526 on Instagram, and 2036 members of the Iris Murdoch facebook page. 14. For a discussion of this reaction see Anne Rowe, ‘The best novelists are the most satanic’: Iris Murdoch—On Art and Life, in Murdoch on Truth and Love, Gary Browning ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 21–42. 15. The finest example of this fresh look at Murdoch is found in Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch, Writers and Their Work Series (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019).

References Auden, W.H. 1966. Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957. London: Faber & Faber. Bayley, John. 1998. Iris. London: Duckworth. Conradi, Peter J. 2001a. Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist. 2nd ed. London: HarperCollins. ———. 2001b. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins. Dipple, Elizabeth. 1995. Fragments of Iris Murdoch’s Vision: Jackson’s Dilemma as Interlude. Iris Murdoch News Letter 9: 4–8. Dooley, Gillian. 2003. From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Eliot, T.S. 1969. The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber & Faber. Fletcher, John, and Cheryl Bove. 1994. Iris Murdoch: A Descriptive Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York & London: Garland. Horner, Avril, and Anne Rowe, eds. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. (1954) 2019. Under the Net. London: Vintage. ———. (1974) 2003. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. London: Vintage. ———. 1987. The Book and the Brotherhood. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. (1953) 1989. Sartre Romantic Rationalist. London: Penguin. ———. 1992. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 1995. Jackson’s Dilemma. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 1997. In Existentialists and Mystics; Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi. London: Chatto & Windus.

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———. (1973) 1999 The Black Prince. London: Vintage. ———. (1954) 2002. Under the Net. London: Vintage. Roe, Glenn H. 2014. The Passion of Charles Peguy: Literature, Modernity, and the Crisis of Historicism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rowe, Anne. 1995. Review of Critical Reception of Jackson’s Dilemma. Iris Murdoch News Letter 9: 8–9. ———. 2010. ‘The Dream That Does Not Cease to Haunt Us’: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness. In Iris Murdoch and Morality, ed. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, 141–155. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. Iris Murdoch. Writers and Their Work. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds. 2010. Iris Murdoch and Morality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1922) 1974. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

CHAPTER 4

‘A Man Shut in a Glass’: Textual Blindness and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954) Anne Rowe

Interrogating the Text The critical interrogation of literary texts is necessarily influenced by both political and cultural movements in society as well as fresh developments in literary theory. The early decades of the twenty-first century ushered in a surge of high-profile media exposées of endemic male harassment and insidious violence towards women: the #MeToo movement, which spread virally on Twitter in 2017 exposed the ubiquity of manipulation, harassment and sexual assault against women in the film industry, and in 2021, the incensed public reaction to the abduction from a public street and subsequent murder of Sarah Everard, which led to a mass demonstration demanding freedom for women from all walks of life to walk in public places without fear of harm from men.1 These movements aimed to empower all women in society, not only those who had suffered or felt in

A. Rowe (*) University of Chichester, Chichester, UK University of Kingston, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_4

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danger of violent abuse. In vociferously articulating their anger and solidarity, women (and men) of all generations came together to demand an end to unacceptable aspects of male behaviour that had been tolerated in society for generations.2 Such widespread movements gained academic and intellectual legitimacy in the context of ‘Intersectional Feminism’ which demands a nuanced and expansive approach to female experience that acknowledges this insidious structural victimisation of women, not only in terms of gender but also race, ethnicity, class and sexuality.3 ‘Intersectionality’ points to a moral and societal blindness to multiple forces that both perpetrate and propagate the psychological and physical suffering of women, and centres the voices of those suffering from overlapping, concurrent forms of oppression. Iris Murdoch’s twenty-six novels, which span almost the entire second half of the twentieth century (1954–1995), will inevitably be reappraised in the light of these upheavals which illuminate unacceptable behaviour and attitudes towards women that were previously ignored or tolerated. It should have come as no surprise then that the #MeToo movement would incite groups of culturally informed twenty-first-century female undergraduate students to bring more searching and sometimes critical perspectives on gender relations to Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954).4 These revisionary interrogations of her characters’ behaviour resulted in very different interpretations of the text from previous generations of students. Jake Donaghue, the novel’s first-person male narrator, once perceived as a lovable rogue and ‘Jack the lad’ was now recast as a dangerous potential rapist. The critical revisiting of the text that followed, comprising a detailed and, as far as possible, unbiased close reading, suggested that although Murdoch’s representations of gender relations are very much of their time and can seem old-fashioned, they also indicate a prescient awareness of the insidious ‘blindness’ to the harmful cultural and gendered attitudes to women being called to account in the twenty-­ first century. It seems that even in 1954, Murdoch too was calling into question artificially constructed labels of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ and even the term ‘feminism’ itself.

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Iris Murdoch, Rachel Cusk and Female Autobiography Feminist theorists have often raised concerns about Murdoch’s representation of female experience in her novels.5 As background reading to Under the Net students were given a short essay entitled ‘Is Iris Murdoch A Woman’s Writer?’ by the novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk, whose critique of Murdoch as a women’s writer challenges readers to consider what contemporary feminist female writers, and their readers, expect from other women writers, past and present. Cusk’s foremost demand is that to be a ‘woman’s writer’ a female author must include her own authentic experience of being a woman into her art, and claims that, in this respect, Murdoch falls short. Cusk herself, sometimes controversially, writes openly about her own experiences as a woman, sustaining one of the mainstays of second-wave feminism that ‘the personal is the political’. Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, is a frank account of her own experience of motherhood, and Aftermath: On Divorce and Separation catalogues her painful divorce from her first husband. Both works draw viscerally on the author’s private life and such willingness to confuse the border between autobiography and fiction distances Cusk from Murdoch, who holds the antithetical view that a writer’s life should not, by any clear identification, be used as fodder for her art. Such personal input, Murdoch claimed, distorts the attempt at truth-telling to which great art should aspire (the autobiographical writer will tell the truth only as she sees it, not the truth as it is); and will limit the parameters of art and stifle the creative imagination (there will only be one story to tell from only one perspective). Murdoch also thought the practice unethical, because it may hurt, insult or harm those who would inevitably be identifiable in the text. This refusal of the female autobiographical, Cusk argues, means that Murdoch, although a woman, is not a woman’s writer. For her, the cultural positioning of authentic female concerns in novels written by women is a moral requirement and Murdoch’s sidestepping of women’s issues in this way not only harms her work but also its chances of survival. The motive for Murdoch’s removal of her own ‘lived’ experience, Cusk suggests, is because she ‘fears the female ordinary as a place of entrapment and mediocrity’ and thus ‘loses her connection with womanhood’ (Cusk 2022). This absence of exclusively female experience destroys the integrity of the work of art. As illustration Cusk cites the intelligence of Murdoch’s narrator, Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea (1978), and invites readers

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to imagine Arrowby’s words, instead, as the words of an ordinary housewife. Here, Cusk argues, one sees both Murdoch’s brilliance and her limitations, because ‘knowledge being knowledge of the truth belongs to everyone’. (Tolstoy, she suggests, would have given Charles’s words to an everyman or everywoman). ‘Reading Murdoch’, she says, ‘one wishes her life had encompassed more, that her tremendous gifts had been fed by more personal sources of knowledge’, and she suggests that Murdoch’s remoteness from these questions creates a sense of lost parentage in the woman writer looking for literary forebears (Cusk 2022, pp. 29–32). Fresh detail about Murdoch’s private life indicates that the gulf between Cusk and Murdoch as ‘woman’s writers’ is more concerned with a difference in practice than a theoretical standpoint. After the publication of Peter J. Conradi’s authorised biography, a cluster of personal memoirs, and the availability of more than 4500 of Murdoch’s private letters, it has become increasingly evident that Murdoch’s novels are in fact saturated with her own life experiences and peopled with echoes of many friends and lovers: ‘I want to write a long and exceedingly obscure novel objectifying the queer conflicts I find within myself and observe in the characters of others’ she wrote to her Oxford friend Frank Thompson when she began to write seriously in the 1940s (Horner and Rowe 2015, 31). And this is exactly what she went on to do. Conradi acknowledges a number of characters who bear similarities to their creator, identifying Anna Quentin in Under the Net as one such veiled self-portrait. Several of Murdoch’s obsessional female characters are disempowered by just such self-­ deprecating longing that can be found in Murdoch’s own impassioned letters to lovers such as Elias Canetti and Raymond Queneau (see Horner and Rowe 2015), while characteristics that echo a number of her male friends also appear in certain types of male characters. The difference, though, is that only exceptionally rarely have Murdoch’s acquaintances discerned themselves in these characters because her fictional portraits both borrow from life and transform it.6 Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, has suggested that her characters could never be traced back to their real-­ life blueprints because ‘the raising of the imaginative temperature is intense and transformative’ (Conradi 2001, 442). Murdoch, it seems, never did set out to dislocate her creations from the authentic self who created them, only to put her considerable creative skills into making those links invisible.7

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Joining the Patriarchy Murdoch’s concomitant roles as novelist and moral philosopher are also problematic for Cusk because philosophical practice aligns her with the (patriarchal) world of intellect which, for Cusk, constitutes an attempt to transcend female experience. Thus Murdoch’s use of ‘placed’ philosophical discourse in her novels is not an act of enlargement but of aggression against herself and ‘a defence against the “shame” of womanhood’, a ‘dissociating the creation from the self who created it. A lost source of strength; a lost and gifted mother, cloistered in philosophy and academe’ (Cusk 2022, pp. 29–32). The role of Murdoch’s moral philosophy within her fiction has been well rehearsed, and while Murdoch’s title of ‘philosopher-novelist’ is ubiquitous, she repeatedly shunned the label, rejecting the idea that her novels might be read as didactic enactments of her moral philosophy. Yet she also admitted that ‘philosophical ideas must somehow find expression in my novels’ (Dooley 2003, 36), and her philosophy clearly hides in plain sight. When Under the Net was published in 1954, she was teaching philosophy to students at St Anne’s College Oxford, participating in BBC radio discussions and making her name as a distinguished female moral philosopher, a rare female public profile indeed in those years.8 It is unsurprising then that Under the Net is one of Murdoch’s most overtly, and unashamedly, philosophical novels, containing unusually sustained chunks of philosophical debate in the form of ‘set-piece’ Platonic Dialogues between her narrator, Jake Donaghue, and his friend, Hugo Belfounder. Her philosophical credentials are also showcased in the image of the ‘net’ in the novel’s title which, she admitted, engages with Wittgenstein’s ideas on language expressed in his Tractatus.9 While the unusually heavy-handed philosophy in this novel is artfully subsumed into the narrative so that uninformed readings need not be impaired by it, it also unashamedly points towards mainstream philosophical dialogues from which women were, in 1954, largely excluded. Murdoch offers a glimpse of an intellectual world outside the day-to-day experience of the majority of her female readers which raises a significant question in relation to Cusk’s criticism: should women readers be consciously excluded from philosophical discourse by a woman writer herself well skilled in it? On this issue, some students felt strongly that to exclude philosophy is to perpetuate patriarchal oppression of women; to include what was the staple diet of Murdoch’s intellectual life is a tribute to female potential and an invitation to enlarge knowledge. Indeed, conferring equal intellectual

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rights to female readers is in itself an act of ‘parentage’, asserting herself in the role of the ‘gifted mother’ that Cusk accuses Murdoch of shunning.

Male Protagonists and Misogynist Complicity The inherent ‘silent’ misogyny in men’s perception of women being called to account in society today is precisely that which informs the psychological realism of the two central male characters in Under the Net, and their complicity in such distorted vision can indeed lead to some uncomfortable questions. The vicarious exploitation of women in the film industry that the novel explores uncannily mirrors the debate on sexual abuse that dominated the national media when the #MeToo campaign exposed the violent criminality of the film producer, Harvey Weinstein, who was convicted of sexually assaulting, raping and abusing women in the industry over decades.10 Hugo Belfounder, who owns the film Company, Bounty Belfounder, obsessively pursues one of his movie stars for sexual favours. (Murdoch’s description of Hugo as ‘extremely large, both stout and tall with very wide shoulders, enormous hands and a huge head [that] was usually sunk low between his shoulders while his brooding gaze traced around the room’ [Murdoch 1982, 6] uncannily echoes images of Weinstein). Hugo’s obsessive pursuit of the celebrity actress, Sadie Quentin, so unnerves her that she feels the need to ‘employ a bodyguard’ and feels ‘persecuted’: ‘he keeps calling and trying to get in at all hours, and when he doesn’t call he rings up, and I’m just a nervous wreck’ (Murdoch 1982, 58). Sadie’s business partner, Sammy Starfield, suggests that ‘with Belfounder on the rampage you’ll need an armed guard’ (Murdoch 1982, 134). Hugo’s admission to Jake that he ‘behaved like a mad thing. I broke in once in the night and another time I came during the day and looked for letters and took away some of her things. I was absolutely insane about her’ (Murdoch 1982, 255) creates an uneasy ambivalence for informed readers of Murdoch’s moral philosophy, because Hugo’s process of understanding his own moral blindness and his ultimate call for gentle and loving attention to detail echoes her own philosophy of ‘attention’ to the particular as a moral positive. Murdoch critics have identified this character as the first among Murdoch’s band of ‘good’ men who are presented as moral exemplars. Despite the fact that for a large part of the novel Hugo is unable to practise what he preaches, it is from him that Jake learns, at the end of the novel, to ‘see’ others more clearly: ‘God is a task. God is

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detail’ Hugo famously tells Jake, ‘It all lies close to your hand’ (Murdoch 1982, 258). This knowledge may have been painfully learned but, nonetheless students felt that Hugo’s profound philosophical views should not mitigate the fact that a female writer depicts sexual harassment, or ‘stalking’, without direct censure, and that Hugo’s status as a ‘good man’ is thus compromised. However humble and kind a character may become, the task of his creator is surely not to merely illustrate that his lust blinds him to his unacceptable behaviour, but to condemn it. Students felt uneasy about gaps in the narrative that leave such condemnation entirely to her readers’ discretion. However, Murdoch was never one to preach or turn her fiction into polemic and this ‘gestalt’ mode of writing, where she, as truth-teller, leaves readers to formulate meaning, was to become the staple of her narrative style thereafter.

Moral Ambiguity and the Male First-Person Narrator Jake Donaghue is the first of Murdoch’s six exclusively male first-person narrators and her failure to construct any in the female voice has caused puzzlement and disappointment. Murdoch intimated that the transition she makes from female to male in her narrative voices enables a perceptivity less likely to be infected by the personal obsessions of the author. For Murdoch, such deep attentive looking at difference, in art as in life, becomes a moral act. Murdoch’s male first-person narrators, as Cusk points out, tend to be highly intelligent thinkers and Jake is indeed a case in point. But they are, however, also among her most morally dubious and deluded characters. Jake, who is for all his ‘laddishness’, highly literate, well-educated and talented is, nonetheless, guilty of cruel misogyny, which Murdoch is at pains to point out. Her use of the first-person male narrator, in fact, ensures that she does not sidestep Jake’s misogyny. The novel provides a penetrating and enlightening study, not only of how men perceive women through ingrained cultural perspectives that blind them to women’s reality, but also how that warped perception leads them to reinterpret women’s actions and invent motives to justify misogynistic, and even violent, behaviour. However, if Murdoch’s goal is to illustrate the veiled misogyny and distorted logic that fuels disrespectful behaviour so that women are more equipped to defuse the violence that may emanate from it, the comic irony

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through which she describes that behaviour can appear to diminish culpability. The novel demands an almost cynical awareness of the sharp humour and underlying irony that informs Jake’s view of women, or else the narrative becomes a double-edged sword. Illustrating such jaundiced perception in this way is indeed a gamble. Under the Net catalogues Jake’s development from a bigoted young man with an unhealthy and disrespectful attitude towards women, to a more mature and respectful individual (and thus a more sophisticated and promising young writer). However, appreciating this change demands not only a sensitive close reading of some problematic individual encounters between male and female characters that explore the psychological complexity of both genders, but also an appreciation of the moral trajectory of the text.

Jake’s Trinity Unconditional Love Murdoch explores the tendency for men to dangerously stereotype women by the way they look in a trinity of female ‘types’ who are at the centre of Jake’s love-life: Magdalen, or ‘Madge’ and Anna are each his former lovers, while Anna’s sister, Sadie, the famous actress, is a beguiling yet threatening possibility. Each woman is perceived through Jake’s distorted perception, and victimised in different ways. Madge, with whom Jake has been living, rent-free, for over a year, is a beautiful typist dedicated to conforming to the popular voluptuous female stereotype of the day. She constructs her appearance in ways ‘suggested to her by women’s magazines and the cinema’,11 but her slavish attempt at conformity does not attract but irritates Jake who interprets this ‘harmonious norm’ as designed to enslave and dominate men. Yet Murdoch allows this particular female stereotype to be capable of playing men at their own game: Madge evicts Jake and goes into business with a shipping magnate who is funding the creation of an Anglo-French film company. Clearly cunning enough to understand that this relationship offers a position of power she becomes a partner in the new company then lures Jake to Paris to offer him a lucrative financial deal as a script writer. Jake, however, declines. In a morally complex scene (in relation to the characters and their creator) at the Hôtel Prince de Clèves in Paris, the dialogue, both darkly comic and disturbing, runs to nine pages (Murdoch 1982, 192–201). Students were aggrieved that Murdoch refuses to reward Madge’s

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self-empowerment with dignity when Jake disparages her new-found sophistication and dissolves her evident pride with one dismissive ironical look. Mutually agreed recreational sex is implied, after which Jake declines the job Madge offers. Stung at the failure of her grand plan, she strikes him hard across the mouth but then crumbles emotionally, even offering to turn a blind eye to his infidelity if he will take her back. Jake’s motives for rejecting the sinecure are unclear, even to himself, but they certainly involve the sustaining of his own self-respect: ‘I must live my own life. And it simply doesn’t lie in this direction’ (Murdoch 1982, 220–201). This scene, generally regarded in terms of a moment of moral growth for Jake is humbling and humiliating for Madge, and students unanimously read it as Murdoch’s wasting of an opportunity to allow a female character a moment of self-assurance and dignity. Whether Murdoch refuses to shy away from enacting moments when women are complicit in their own humiliation or ironically incites a just fury in readers, is left for them to decide. Such discomfiting moments between dominant men and submissive women recur in several later novels, and this vignette marks the beginning of a sustained exploration into how far unconditional love can be squared with self-respect and moral justice.12 Now, however, more expansive information about Murdoch’s theological and philosophical frames of reference are available through which these scenes may be interpreted. We know that even in 1954 Murdoch was already intrigued by the writings of the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich who, in her Revelations of Divine Love,13 describes sixteen visions in which God’s promise of ‘unconditional love’ for all sinners could be equated with the ultimate condition of the destruction of the ego that is the goal of Murdoch’s own moral philosophy. If the self is conceived as nothing, no sin can be laid against it. This dialogue between Jake and Madge is germinal to Murdoch’s later investigations into the possibility that such renunciation can too easily tainted with sado-masochism, a danger that she acknowledges in her moral philosophy. The legitimacy of bestowing unconditional love in terms of how it equates with dignity, self-respect and moral justice can be as troublesome to readers and Murdoch scholars as indeed it was to Julian herself. While more obvious networks of imagery in later novels link passive female characters to the writings of Julian, this scene in Under the Net is the first in which it seems unclear whether Murdoch is providing a role model for her own brand of moral righteousness which hints at a troublesome passivity (that, it should be

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said, also defines her ‘good’ male characters), or if she is bravely upholding a woman’s right to self-determination and individual choice, however unpalatable those decisions may be to some feminist principles. Sabina Lovibond notes that much of the critical force of feminism has been directed against the excessive compliance demanded of women and that women have done rather too much unselfing (Lovibond 2011, 32). Murdoch herself feared that a too radical feminism would replace one set of or burdens on women with another. Either way, deciphering how to ‘read’ such female characters is difficult and readers can be left to flounder with no direct authorial position available. The subsequent availability of Murdoch’s letters n.d., which occasionally include impassioned pleas to be taken on by lovers who had rejected her, illustrates her own tendency towards self-abnegation in the face of longing for a lost, or unavailable lover. Readers have to disentangle all these positions from one that simply allows a female the right to choose. ‘Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, How I Love You’14 The second of Murdoch’s trinity is an old flame, Anna Quentin, a once famous husky-voiced Jazz singer whose affection Jake needs to rekindle to secure rent-free accommodation after Madge’s defection. By means of his warped reminiscences of their affair, Murdoch indicates the gap between the actuality of the woman herself, and the culturally ingrained perceptions of ideal femininity as docile and submissive through which Jake perceives her. Anna exists as a chimera of images of femininity not only ubiquitous in the mid 1950s but influentially prevalent in generations of Western art. Both feminine ideals insidiously fuel Jake’s misogynistic behaviour. A web of sophisticated imagery is woven into Jake’s descriptions of Anna which recalls the mermaids of Botticelli, ‘rising out of a motley coloured sea’ (Murdoch 1982, 42), or ‘with voluptuous silks at hip and breast’ (Murdoch 1982, 47), evoking Renoir’s opulent portraits of women as objects of yearning.15 Jake’s perception of Anna as ‘deep’ ‘mysterious’ and ‘unfathomable’, with a face ‘tenderly moulded’ and ‘lit by a warm intent glow from within […] full of yearning, yet poised upon itself without any trace of discontent’ (Murdoch 1982, 31) echoes Walter Pater’s famous description of Leonardo’s La Gioconda, the Mona Lisa herself, who has ‘a beauty wrought from within upon the flesh […] expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire’ (Pater, 1986, 79–80). This feminine ideal has the serenity of one who is dead and is raised to a symbolic expression of what man has ever desired

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in a woman.16 Murdoch universalises such insidious assumptions about the submissiveness of beautiful women and the power of their enchantment that had legitimated predatory male behaviour for centuries. She sustains the idea with reference to the quintessential saintliness inherent in nineteenth-century binary perceptions of woman as either angel or whore when Jake searches for Anna on the banks of the Seine. He could ‘see her quite clearly, her face, radiant like a saint’s face in a picture’ (Murdoch 1982, 213). The woman he doggedly pursues initially appears not to have been Anna at all, yet a brief textual hint at the end of the novel suggests that Anna was indeed in Paris on the fourteenth of July. So Murdoch makes obvious not only the dramatic difference between the actuality of a woman and her existence in the mind of a male observer, but also how difficult is the task of extracting real women from such powerful culturally ingrained stereotypes. Whether such damaging influences are sufficient to justify the sexual intimidation of Anna that follows is questionable. However, they certainly contribute to the danger in which Anna is placed during a problematic scene at the mime theatre in Hammersmith where Jake has finally tracked her down. Again, her characters’ complex psychological acuity can only be accessed through a careful analysis of textual detail that covertly illustrates the way Anna’s distaste for, and fear of, Jake is interpreted by him as a coy reticence contrived to coquettishly camouflage her desire. Their eyes meet in what Jake is convinced is a ‘mutual understanding’ (Murdoch 1982, 41), while Murdoch constructs a complicated textual double entendre to indicate that Anna’s feelings are far from reciprocal. However, the comic irony through which Jake’s perceptions are rendered uneasily ameliorates his unacceptable behaviour. While for Jake, seeing her beauty as ‘mortal’ causes him to feel he had never loved her so dearly, it should be clear to readers that there is no real woman present here, only a simulacrum of Jake’s desires. And that disjunction spells danger for Anna. More detailed textual innuendo hints that Anna is practising a form of intelligent psychological warfare that diffuses a potentially dangerous sexual coercion. While her contrived delaying tactics slow down the action, they intensify Jake’s annoyance so that when she nervously looks at her watch Jake ‘took her wrist with the watch upon it and twisted it until I heard her gasp’ (Murdoch 1982: 47). When he interprets her defiance as a fond harking back to former such encounters and kisses her ‘stiffened neck and shoulder’ she cries, ‘Jake, you’re hurting me’ (Murdoch 1982: 47). The moment of high tension is defused by one of feigned submissive

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calm as Anna keeps her composure and strokes his hair: Jake releases her from this grip to ‘lay heavily upon her breast’ and ‘we lay so in silence for a long time. The universe came to rest like a great bird’ (Murdoch 1982: 47). Anna extricates herself from the situation with the promise of submission and a dangerous menace is defused. The couple never meet again in the course of the novel. Only a sustained close reading of this scene reveals the psychopathic gap between Jake’s perception of a coy but willing submissiveness and the reality of Anna’s physical dread. When combat could be dangerous, psychological acuity provides an exit route, though readers are not privy to Anna’s thoughts during this vignette other than through a textual innuendo that only hints at intelligent female empowerment. The Wicked Witch and ‘the Prince in a Fairy Tale’ 17 Anna’s sister, Sadie Quentin, whose ‘face is displayed all over London on posters twelve feet high’ (Murdoch 1982, 53) is both beautiful and incredibly wealthy. Jake’s braggadocio leads him to boast that Sadie likes him but, of course, she is ‘not his type’ (Murdoch 1982, 53), though it is more likely that Sadie’s wealth and status threatens his self-image. He expects to be ‘snubbed’, thus describes her as too ‘glossy and dazzling’ for his taste and, in his habitual derogatory way, assumes that any successful woman must have become so by ‘selling her talents’, in this instance to Bounty Belfounder (Murdoch 1954, 55). Here, by means of startling contrasting strands of imagery Murdoch evokes men’s tendency to demonise powerful females. When Jake, ‘like a prince in a fairy-tale’, spies Sadie through rose-tinted mirrors at the hairdresser’s he sees not a beautiful princess but a ‘a beautiful snake; and the curious fantasy came to me that if I were to look under the drier at the real face and not at the reflexion I should see there some terrible witch’ (Murdoch 1982, 59). This powerful woman morphs into a gorgon, appearing now as if ‘someone had started to shrink her head but had never got beyond the first stage’; her voice is ‘metallic’ and her hair like ‘rusty iron’ (Murdoch 1982, 33). But the joke here is not on Sadie but Jake himself. As the novel’s most self-sufficient female, Sadie’s inner life is even more elusive to the reader than that of the other two female protagonists. Her status and success, however, confirms her as intelligent, sharp and quite ruthlessly ambitious. She intends to use the stolen manuscript of Jake’s translation of Breteuil’s Rossignol de Bois as a film script and believes Jake’s consent can be easily bought or bribed; she is the dominant partner in her

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business relationship with Sammy Starfield with whom Jake, without any justification, assumes she has a sexual relationship to further her career. Sadie is a survivor and the hardest of the three women for Jake to absorb into his fantasy world because deep down he fears her power, independence and beauty. Thus three quite different types of femininity, presented to the reader as the fantastical constructs of indoctrinated male prejudices are, at the same time, independently concrete and convincing characters in their own right. The challenge to the reader is to decipher, through both the warped perception of the narrator and the ruthless comic irony of the author, where the fantasy ends and the reality begins. This task is the psychological driving force of the novel.

Reading Simone de Beauvoir The most authentic insight into to the inner reality of Anna and Sadie comes late in the novel when, in an intimate final meeting between Hugo and Jake in a hospital ward, Jake learns some home truths that force him to abandon general theories of womanhood. Female stereotypes metamorphose into women that he, and perhaps Murdoch’s readers, had never imagined existed: ‘every picture I ever had of Anna was contaminated, and I could feel my very memory images altering, like statues that sweat blood’. Her assumed reality ‘faded like a sorcerer’s apparition’ (Murdoch 1982, 268). Men, at least in this novel, can be educated; eyes can be opened. Murdoch resists stereotypically demonising men in the way her novel portrays men stereotyping women. Murdoch’s decision not to fall into this trap may be linked to her reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex when it was first published in 1949. Describing herself as the only person in Oxford to have heard of the work, she wrote to Queneau in November 1949, ‘I think it is splendid— tough and I like the fearless warlike manner. Here one connects feminism with the dear old suffragette types. This is a new voice’ (Horner and Rowe 2015, 121).18 Beauvoir’s argument that men oppress women by objectifying them as ‘Other’ and always exclusively in opposition to themselves is the psychological bedrock of Under the Net. The novel echoes both Beauvoir’s contention that mythical representations of women have been imprinted on male consciousness to the disservice of women for generations and debunks the idea of the ‘eternal feminine’. But Murdoch had read Le deuxième sexe with a critical eye; she had reservations about ‘the sweep of [Beauvoir’s] argument’ and noted that ‘although as her

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prejudices are clear, they are to that extent harmless’ (Horner and Rowe 2015, 121). The same might be said for Murdoch. For while Under the Net reflects Beauvoir’s views about the victimisation of women, the benignity that characterises Murdoch’s sharp comic irony implies that generations of men have also been victims of patriarchal ideology. Neither is Murdoch presenting the victimisation of womanhood as necessarily damaging: each of her central female trinity is successful in transforming her powerlessness into success. Madge, despite, or perhaps energised by, Jake’s dismissal in Paris pursues her bid to become a screen actress; Anna abandons her pursuit of Hugo and revitalises her singing career (still famous enough for news of her comeback to be released by the BBC and reported in the national press). The novel closes with the sound of her husky golden voice when ten of her live performances from the Club des Fous in Paris are being broadcast on BBC Radio. The last we hear of Sadie, still rich, still famous, is in a masterfully cunning letter to Jake that clearly illustrates who is the puppet and who the puppeteer: having always been attracted to Jake she knows better than to pander to his ego. She evokes her superior status, casually referring to her mounds of fan mail (in which a letter from Jake was lost), and to her ‘secretary’ who deals with it. She signs off with a contrived literary flourish that she knows will impress, along with a hint of sentiment and an indifference that delights Jake: ‘Let’s meet again shall we, when the hurly burly’s done. Tho’ heaven knows when that will be. Perhaps in a year or two. I have a long and tender memory’ (Murdoch 1982, 281). It works. Sadie, thinks Jake, is intelligent and will keep. Benedick may yet find his Beatrice, a woman more than clever enough to play him at his own game.

Maidens in the Margins More esoterically, and unremarked by critics, there emerges out of the shadows of this novel a band of tangential, but formidable, females thriving independently of men in their own right. The wise and mystical Mrs. Tinckham, an elderly chain-smoking shopkeeper who acts as a mother figure to Jake, is described as ‘an aged Circe’ whose kindness will endure eternally, indefatigable and inextinguishable, like her everlasting cigarettes (Murdoch 1982, 283). The imagistic link to Circe hints at the possibility of an interesting past: a minor goddess, Circe could transform her enemies from being reasoning entities into beasts. She is the archetype of the predatory female, notorious as a magician and a sexually free woman, so

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perhaps Mrs. Tinckham is a prophetic vision of Murdoch herself, who was well aware by the time she wrote Under the Net of how her own powerful sexuality could both enslave and be enslaved. Other minor ‘bit parts’ present powerful successful females: a young woman whom Jake bumps into at the mime theatre is ‘a cheerful-looking girl in blue jeans’ who asks him if he has ‘come for the retail trade figures.’ Jake is speechless at encountering the company’s accountant (Murdoch 1982, 124). A band of impressive nurses who staff the hospital where he finally finds a part time job, provides the opportunity for a relentless comic satire, as the banter Jake reports covertly pokes fun at his ludicrous over-estimation of his sexual attraction, his risible condescension and class-consciousness. Yet Jake also understands that the nurses treat his overt prejudices with ‘an affectionate teasing tyranny’ and that ‘none of them took me seriously as a male’ (Murdoch 1982, 124). And within his encounters with these independent skilled working women lies the potential for a fond and intelligent bonding: Sister Piddingham, known as ‘the Pid’, is around fifty with black-dyed grey hair and Jake intuits in her ‘the sad mystery of her mode of existence’ for which he feels ‘a respect which almost amounted to terror’ (Murdoch 1982, 231). He is still condescending, but learning. For both the central male characters this episode in their lives has been educative: Hugo concedes that he had ‘been a brute’ to both Anna and Sadie and leaves for a new life attending to practical mechanical detail as a watchmaker, while Jake, sitting on a number 88 bus, understands he is ‘a man shut in a glass’, but still ‘reluctant to get off’ (Murdoch 1982, 275). A figure of fun and fondness to the end.

Jake’s Legacy The requirement to read Murdoch’s first male narrator in Under the Net through a sharp comic irony provides a paradigm for understanding the psychology of the five who were to follow.19 Murdoch was never to present the twentieth-century world in which her novels are set from a first-person female perspective, and this disjunction between the first-person male voice and the gender of the author continues to vex critics. However, Murdoch’s propensity for male narrators needs reconsidering in the light of relatively recent revelations about her own experience of gender fluidity, unknown to contemporary readers of Under the Net in the 1950s and also to Cusk at the time of writing her essay. Murdoch had openly acknowledged that she identified ‘more with her male characters than her female

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characters’ (Dooley 2003, 82), but her own complex sexual identity was not widely understood until 2015, when a candid letter to her friend, Georg Kreisel, written in 1967, was published in Living on Paper: I am probably not at all normal sexually. I am not a lesbian, in spite of one or two unevents on that front; I am certainly strongly interested in men. But I don’t think I want normal heterosexual relations with them. (It’s taken me a long time to find this out). I think I am sexually rather odd, which is a male homosexual in female guise. (Horner and Rowe 2015, 347)

Murdoch’s own experience of gender confusion was covertly played out within her friendship with the novelist and political activist, Brigid Brophy, and provided a safe space for her to enact privately aspects of her experience of gender ambivalence which she was not willing to reveal publicly. Their crossdressing and role play shifted between male and female personae in fantasies that borrowed from areas of popular culture and contained transgressive gender stereotypes.20 While Brophy was open about her bisexuality, Murdoch preferred to keep her sexual preferences and gender ambiguity under wraps.21 Only now, can such complexities be absorbed into a comprehensive account of both Murdoch’s personality and the sexual proclivities of her characters which had always been hiding in plain sight.22 Murdoch’s own binary sexual identity allowed her to be comfortable in inhabiting a male personae, a position that both authenticates her work and contributes to her overriding desire to aid communication, not division, between the sexes.

Murdoch’s Feminism Murdoch’s male narrators do not possess any privileged access to truth and represent not only the moral blindness of men but of humanity itself. She is unflinching in practising her right to illustrate that women can be as complicit in pandering to unhealthy stereotypes as men can be in carving them out. The penetrating moral psychology that drives all her novels attempts to minimise rather than intensify gender difference which, Murdoch claimed, ‘at a higher level vanishes’, and her feminism embraces a diverse approach to non-binary gender: ‘the point of liberation is not’, she has said, ‘to say that we’re better, or we’re wonderful, but just to be equal, to be ordinary, to join the human race, to be people, just people like everybody else’ (Dooley 2003, 83). Being so much embedded in its time,

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Under the Net could not be described as either an intersectional or liberal feminist novel, but in its attempts at illuminating some of the covert structures of oppression in society, in its allowing its female characters to break free of the confines of domesticity and in its illustration of a psychological acuity that avoids confrontation, this novel points in the direction of these more recent brands of feminism and is presciently appropriate to the censorious times in which we now live. Margaret Atwood, speaking at the Hay Festival in 2021, talked about the future of feminism and suggested: ‘One cannot uphold women’s rights without upholding human rights [. . .] Progress often turns out to have negative side. There must always be a dialogue’.23 Murdoch, in her own role as an acclaimed writer and public intellectual, would also have felt an obligation to participate in this debate if she were alive today. But her measured wisdom, covertly woven into the fabric of her novels, can still make a kind and conciliatory contribution, with their clear denunciation of any kind of domination over, or cruelty towards, women as well as their just and honest exploration of what fuels and incites violence in men. In becoming liberated Murdoch suggested that ‘some [women] have produced a kind of cult consciousness which is damaging to us as novelists in that they think they have got to write as women in rather an aggressive manner [. . .]. The point is to join the great mainstream of thought and art from which [women] have been excluded’ (Dooley 2003, 83). Murdoch’s thinking presciently prefigures contemporary feminist positions and will surely find an intellectual home in this third decade of the twenty-first century which seeks to focus on gender relations in such a way as to promote equality and inclusivity, and support men as participants in the struggle for equality and constructive co-operation between the sexes.24’25

Notes 1. The subsequent calamitous vigil attended by the Duchess of Cambridge on 13 March 2021 ended in police assaults and widespread criticism of the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick. 2. At the time of writing, the murder of Sabina Nessa in 2021 is currently receiving media coverage. ‘The Sabina project’ is a campaign to class misogyny as a hate crime. 3. See the UN Women pages: https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/6/explainer-­intersectional-­feminism-­what-­it-­means-­and-­why-­ it-­matters.

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4. This essay was inspired by discussions with students on the ‘Women’s Writing in the Twentieth Century’ Course at Kingston University. Their thoughts have influenced the close readings of the novel discussed here. 5. See Marije Altorf, ‘Reassessing Iris Murdoch in the light of Feminist Philosophy: Michèle Le Doeuff and the Philosophical Imaginary’ in Anne Rowe (ed.) 2007. Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment. London: Palgrave, 175–186, and Sabina Lovibond, 2011, Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge. 6. The difference between Murdoch and Cusk lies in the belief in a deliberate and necessary transformative skill in the artist. When Cusk published a travel book, The Last Supper, in 2009 about a summer in Italy with her family a breach of privacy suit ensued; the book came out in February and was pulped in March. No criticism of Cusk is intended here, I am merely pointing to two antithetical styles of writing in two female writers. 7. I discuss this issue in more detail in ‘The Best Moralists are the most Satanic’ in Browning, 2018. 8. See Claire Mac  Cumhaill and Rachael Weisman, 2022 Metaphysical Animals, London: Chatto & Windus, and Benjamin Lipscomb. 2022. The Women are up to Something. Oxford. Oxford University Press. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus 1921. 10. Harvey Weinstein, an American film producer, is a sex offender whose entertainment company Miramax produced many highly successful independent films. See Lauren Aratani and Ed Pilkington. ‘Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 23 years in prison on rape conviction’, Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/harvey-­weinstein-­ sentencing-­rape-­conviction [accessed 5 June 2022]. 11. The film star Marilyn Monroe would have been a familiar role model for both for Madge and Murdoch’s readers in the mid 1950s. 12. Such as Jessica Bird in A Severed Head 1961, Lizzie Shearer in The Sea, The Sea 1978, Midge McCaskerville in The Good Apprentice 1985, and Franca Sheerwater in The Message to the Planet 1989. I discuss this issue more fully in Anne Rowe (2019). Iris Murdoch: Writers and Their Work. 13. Julian of Norwich, circa 1373. 1998. Revelations of Divine Love London: Penguin Books. 14. Lyrics from ‘Mona Lisa’ which was a popular song from the Paramount Pictures film Captain Cary U.S.A. released in 1950. 15. I discuss Murdoch’s dialogue with paintings in my earlier monograph Iris Murdoch and the Visual Arts Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. 16. Elizabeth Bronfen, 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester University Press, provides an influential study of this topic. 17. Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, 1982: 56.

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18. Murdoch was the first to include Beauvoir on the syllabus when she began teaching at St Anne’s College at Oxford in 1948, and may have explored with her own students Beauvoir’s argument that one was not born a woman but moulded into one by myths invented or written for women by men. 19. Murdoch’s six first person narrators appear in Under the Net (1954); A Severed Head (1961); The Italian Girl (1964); The Black Prince (1973); A Word Child (1975) and The Sea, The Sea (1978). 20. Examples are Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, the cartoon strip, Modesty Blaise in the Evening Standard and E.  W. Hornung’s popular crime fiction Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman. 21. I discuss this role play in more detail in ‘The Best Moralists are the most Satanic’ in Gary Browning ed., 2018. 21–42. 22. Emmanuel, ‘Emma’, Scarlett-Taylor in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) experiences both heterosexual and homosexual leanings and enjoys dressing in women’s clothes. 23. Margaret Atwood in Conversation with Peter Florence, Hay Literary Festival, May 2019. 24. Simone de Beauvoir also wrote about the pernicious effects for women of internalising masculine fantasies of the feminine ‘ideal’ and Angela Carter later made this a key theme in her fiction. 25. I am indebted to Lucy Bolton and Avril Horner for their judicious comments and for information that has been integrated into this discussion. Lucy Bolton’s essay on ‘Murdoch and Feminism’ in Caprioglio and Hopwood, 2022 has been hugely helpful and informative. Rhian Hughes was an efficient emergency transcriber.

References Bolton, Lucy. 2022. ‘Murdoch and Feminism’: The Murdochian Mind. In Routledge Philosophical Minds, ed. Silvia Caprioglio and Mark Hopwood, 438–450. Routledge. Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins. Cusk, Rachel 2022. Iris Murdoch Is Not a Woman’s Writer. Iris Murdoch Review, Vol. 13 (2022), 29-32. Dooley, Gillian, ed. 2003. From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Horner, Avril, and Anne Rowe, eds. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995. London: Chatto & Windus. Lovibond, Sabina 2011. Iris Murdoch Gender and Philosophy. London: Routledge. Murdoch, Iris. (1954) 1982. Under the Net. London: Chatto & Windus.

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———. n.d. Letters, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives https://adlib.kingston.ac.uk Pater, Walter. (1873) 1986. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. The Best Moralists Are the Most Satanic. In Murdoch on Truth and Love, ed. Gary Browning, 21–42. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. Iris Murdoch: Writers and Their Work. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

CHAPTER 5

‘Now the Illumination’: Iris Murdoch as Zen Philosopher-Poet Paul Hullah

Iris Murdoch’s poetry remains virtually unknown. In fact, it is really rather good: suggestive and surprising, rhetorically rich, and technically adept, it forms an illuminating companion text to all her prose. ‘I don’t publish much of my verse. I don’t think I’m really a poet, but I can occasionally write a poem,’ she may well have dissemblingly declared (Sutcliffe 1980), but many Murdochian researchers now accept that Murdoch was unquestionably a more than competent poet. This pleases me, for I have long argued for the inclusion of Murdoch’s poetry in any full and proper assessment of her importance as a writer and a thinker.1 Murdoch’s best poetic work is consistently underpinned by a distinct, systematic philosophical drive to effect fusion of the real physical and the spiritually unknowable, of life and art: a ‘matrix that we cannot fathom’, as she terms it in her poem ‘Music in Ireland’ (Murdoch 1997a, 93). In fact, this post-Romantic craving to relocate lost unity might usefully be termed her ‘muse’. Affirmed by Zen, and meaningfully influenced by Zen’s

P. Hullah (*) Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_5

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articulation in Japanese haiku, Murdoch’s own poetry thus interrogates western notions of circularity-as-emblem-of-unity, and the dominating omnipotent presence of the poet-subject. But her neo-Wordsworthian, very modern awareness of such matters, coupled to an inquisitive cognisance of oriental thought, triggers a fruitful meta-textual dialogue between Zen and western metaphysics. This signals a crucial point: the central presence/ absence of subjectivity, along with wider related implications of the Zen haiku philosophy to which it is cornerstone and cypher, becomes, for Murdoch, an issue directly akin to (and not opposed to) Romantic impulses. Murdoch’s ‘one-making’ verse foregrounds this vital revelation as dramatically as certain other writers, most notably Pound and the Imagists, have missed (or mis-read) this connection. Imagism tautologically satisfies itself with image, but therefore tells only half the story: we will note that Pound’s would-be haiku ultimately fail because they cannot admit or imagine the imaginable synthesis. Seizing upon this contradictive flaw as a catalyst to creation, Murdoch the poet is thereby liberated onto provocative metaphorical, philosophical, and spiritual planes unavailable to less adventurous, less eclectically formed, less authoritative writing. Referring specifically to Murdoch’s agile-minded attention to Zen-influenced modes of thought, and decoding some of her best poetry alongside Japanese haiku, I will argue that if poetry is, for Murdoch, a place ‘where words end’ (Murdoch 1975, 88), then a study of Zen and haiku is a place where a proper appreciation of her poetic output can begin.

Zen But of course long and austere disciplines are necessary before things can happen easily. I’m not sure how the analogy works. In fact the analogy is Zen. (Murdoch quoted in Conradi 2014, 25)

It will be best here to clarify just what Zen signified for Murdoch, and discuss the dynamics and implications of her relationship with it. Buddhism’s peculiarly Zen variant perfectly aligns with Murdoch’s own notoriously godless notion of good. She recognises the allure of Zen for the creative artist because it prioritises insight exclusively attainable through trained self-awareness, negating the authority of all deity-ordained theological knowledge in the process: ‘The imageless austerity of Zen is impressive and attractive. It represents to us “the real thing”, what it is like to be stripped of the Ego, and how difficult this is’ (Murdoch 1992, 247).

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The movement is from the mystical metaphysical to the humanity that remains, with the inevitable nagging sense that, though much abides, something nonetheless has been taken: Yet this [rejection of the idea of God] may still leave one with the familiar feeling of having lost something. One returns to the most obvious and most mysterious notion of all, that this present moment is the whole of one’s reality, and this at least is unavoidable. (The weirdness of being human.) Then one may start again reflecting upon the moment-to-moment reality of consciousness and how this is, after all, where we live. (Murdoch 1992, 257)

A further defining characteristic of Zen, equally attractive to Murdoch, distinguishing it from other versions of Buddhist belief, lies in its focused championing of the useful but inexpressible insight and enlightenment that will be arrived at through sustained attentive meditation: the Japanese word ‘Zen’ is itself derived from a Sanskrit term, via Chinese, meaning ‘meditation’. Murdoch absolutely believed that ‘we can all receive moral help by focusing our attention upon things which are valuable’ (Murdoch 1970, 56). Heather Widdows puts the Murdochian ‘objects of attention which are likely to inspire towards the good and which certainly draw one away from the self’ into ‘three sets’: beauty (including art), intellectual disciplines, and love (Widdows 2005, 111). But these are universals rather than objects: the destination rather than the point of departure. Crucially, the focus of the Zen meditative act can be the actual, the ordinariness and contingency, the nuts and bolts of the natural object-world outside us, and Murdoch, who was fascinated by and collected stones, of course finds great encouragement in this aspect: One may not be sure that those who observe stones and snails lovingly will also thus observe human beings, but such observation is a way, an act of respect for individuals, which is itself a virtue, and an image of virtue. The enlightened man returns to, that is discovers, the world. (Murdoch 1992, 244)

Otherwise agreeing with basic tenets of Mahayana Buddhism, Zen is a realistic faith. It is infused by a Taoist elevation of actual human experience, conveyed in anecdote and attention to what Murdoch calls the thinginess of things, and meaningfully filtered through the purposeful lens of art: ‘Zen Buddhism uses art as religious teaching, but therein also dispels its

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air of magisterial authority and grandeur,’ she perceptively notes (Murdoch 1992, 129). Accordingly, Zen is an active form of spiritual questing that rejects reliance upon signs and miracles and the imposition of commandments from above. It prefers research (researching the reality of one’s own self) and experience-driven relativism to passively absorbed didacticism and dogma, and more or less eschews formal rigid tract-based teachings and strict theoretical concepts. There is no magic and no manual, no a priori moral blueprint. We work it out as we go. Equally, and in addition to ascetic observation of the natural realm itself, the object of affective Zen attention can be narrativised vignettes and enigmatic riddles (known as koan) that frame chance and mundanity once-removed for posterity in art. These too were appealing to Murdoch— Angela Hague makes much of this (Hague 1983, 46–7)—and she refers directly to them as ‘educational paradoxes … designed to smash rational thought’ in Existentialists and Mystics (Murdoch 1997b, 448), and to their inferable modus operandi in a section on Zen ‘training’ in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Murdoch 1992, 242–5). A typical Zen koan begins in, and develops from, a paradoxical assertion. A startling and borderline-­ absurd surface contradiction-in-terms is introduced. Its purpose is to tease and provoke us to realisation, and rigorous examination, of the sets of assumptions behind it that we have been unconsciously holding in order that the ‘paradoxical’ phrase in question should strike us as such. So, for example, the Milindapañha opens with a monk telling us that his name is Nagasena, but ‘no person’ with that name exists (Mendis 1993, 28). This seeming semantic non sequitur is a catalyst to contemplation of the nature of identity: more than mere wordplay, such provocative paradoxes, when diligently extrapolated, are cypher to a useful philosophical wisdom. Murdoch understood this: Zen teachers say that Zen cannot be formulated as a philosophy. Enlightenment is achieved through a way of life which must include prolonged meditation. This process may involve the use of that characteristically Zen instrument, the koan, a paradox or contradiction which defeats imagination and conceptual thought, but which must be held in sustained attention. The, or one, purpose of this, I take it, is to break the networks not only of casual thinking and feeling, but also of accustomed intellectual thinking, to break ‘the natural standpoint’, and the natural ego: producing thereby a selfless (pure, good) consciousness. (Murdoch 1992, 244)

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Murdoch saw a sort of poetry in Zen thought and in Zen koan, a poetry somehow immediate and liberating, allowing the expression of instinctive truth incapable of paraphrase or dissection. ‘It’s better not to explain… Poetry is best of all. Who wouldn’t rather be a poet than anything else? Poetry is where words end…’, says Arthur Fisch in reply to another character’s reference to the novel’s capacity to ‘explain’ life in A Word Child (Murdoch 1975, 88). Murdoch was wont to repeat this provocative ‘where words end’ definition of poetry in her own conversations.2 It is a humanist perspective that sees poetry as extending a direct and spontaneous response to the natural world, as opposed to what are held to be the laboured, second-hand, narrativized pseudo-musings of the novel or the drier systemic clarifications of analytic philosophy. It is a conviction parallel to the earliest notions of Romanticism and that movement’s claims to have fused being and landscape in image and art as a way of explicating existence. The ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ which Wordsworth believed poetry appropriately to embody and to curate is an option less available to the creator of lengthily plotted novels or calculated philosophical tracts (Wordsworth 1802, xi). But in the hands of a modern writer such as Murdoch—a writer with the ‘gift of conveying the sheer poetry of objects’ (Conradi 2007, xviii)—it can also involve the urbane yet also gritty and urbanised post-new-apocalyptic philosophising of the ordinary that Philip Larkin, more than any other poet, (most effectively in poems such as ‘Home Is So Sad’ with its heartbreaking ‘piano stool’ and ‘[t]hat vase’) patented in his consistently world-weary visions of epiphanic truths beyond a surface of everyday items and episodes (Larkin 2003, 88). And so, to this end, and in this respect, Murdoch was understandably fascinated and intrigued by this inherent feature of Zen, and thereby in the form of Japanese poetry she saw as being Zen’s quintessential literary showcase: the haiku.

Haiku For Murdoch, haiku poetry could ably and profoundly embody a perfect platform (both conceptually and linguistically) for the poetic ventriloquizing of Zen elements she most revered. Its suggestive version of curated realism is the key. In a brilliant gem of a book, Zen Buddhism and its Influence on Japanese Culture, Daisetsu Suzuki3 notes that:

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Japanese artists more or less influenced by the way of Zen tend to use the fewest words or strokes of the brush to express their feelings. When they are too fully expressed, no room for suggestion is possible, and suggestibility is the secret of the Japanese arts. (Suzuki 1938, 148–9)

And the ‘senryu’ should not be overlooked here: a less-restrictive haiku subdivision dealing not specifically with nature (a nature reference is a prerequisite of a formal haiku), but, often bathetically and satirically, presenting (in true early Romantic fashion) what Wordsworth termed ‘incidents and situations from common life… ordinary things’, taking any subject, however ‘low’, as a theme (Wordsworth 1802, vii). While the traditional haiku proper is consciously elegant, elevated, solemnly spiritual in tone, Teruko Kumei rightly notes that senryu will tend to stay ‘down-­ to-­ earth, folksy, and humorous’ (2006, 29). At times, the potent conjunction of the poised and the prosaic is arresting: the essence of haiku poetry’s meaningfulness. A haiku proper of Takahama Kyoshi (1874–1959) demonstrates this impactful feature: On short summer nights. The dream and the real. Are one and the same. (Kyoshi)4

While a senryu of Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828) is more confrontational in its pointed blending of letter and spirit: Where there are people There are flies And there are Buddhas (Issa). (Addiss 2009, xvi)

Little wonder, then, that Zen and haiku so strongly appealed to a thinker such as Murdoch—someone respectful of, but ultimately rejecting the miraculous metatext of western Christianity. Instead, advocating activation of good from within by means of loving intellectual attention to the arena beyond the human physical self in order to relativize and comprehend the inner, Murdoch was naturally drawn to the minimalist and enigmatic yet down-to-earth modes of expression we meet in haiku and Zen koan. She was moreover inspired by the austere and seemingly paradoxical elements she found in traditional Japanese poetry, elements that confound many western readers when they first encounter it. Embedded in the

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non-Eurocentric aesthetic worldview underpinning Zen thought and haiku articulation of it, Murdoch recognised certain important similarities to and connections with both Romantic and Modernist ideals with which she herself identified and which, as we shall see, she consciously strives to address and incorporate into her own attempts at poetic expression. It should be admitted that I am, of course, presenting haiku and Zen here as I believe Murdoch conceived of them, in the hope of uncovering a worldview expressed in Murdoch’s writings that at once aligns with strategies I can specifically identify in her poetry. Of course, many have argued convincingly that religious experience mirrors aesthetic experience (Austin 1980; Knapp 2018), and this will be relevant here too. I hope this will unlock and illumine some important areas of meaning central and essential to full and proper understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of exactly what Murdoch consistently and consciously set out to do by writing poems in the singular way that she did. The more of her verses I read, the firmer my belief becomes that Murdoch’s best, enduring poetry articulates a doomed craving to locate, or relocate, a lost unity that has, I think, preoccupied and occupied poets since the end of the eighteenth century. The ethical turn is involved, of course, but more so involved in Murdoch’s oeuvre is a post-Saussurean, Barthesian interest in the way that semiotics had fractured confidence in authorial intentionality. The resultant concern with paradoxes and irreconcilable opposites that predominates in Murdoch’s novels and poems of the second half of the 1970s, presciently and shrewdly prefigures certain of the less irrational deconstructionist notions mystically set forth by Derrida and his disciples in the 1980s. At the start of her lengthy philosophical treatise of 1992, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch speaks of this concern: The idea of a self-contained unity or a limited whole is a fundamental instinctive concept. We see parts of things, we intuit whole things […] The urge to prove that where we intuit unity there really is unity is a deep emotional motive to philosophy, to art, to thinking itself. Intellect is naturally one-making … We fear plurality, diffusion, senseless accident, chaos, we want to transform what we cannot dominate or understand into something reassuring and familiar, into ordinary being, into history, art, religion, science. (Murdoch 1992, 1–2)

And into poetry? Yes, certainly. In creating poetry, it is what poets do. It is, in fact, what we all do. We do our best to impose patterns on the natural

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world in the hope of making coherent order out of contradictions and chaos (what Murdoch calls ‘contingency’), in order to make our lives liveable. The alternative is anarchy. Thus music, sport, religion and, of course, art. Thus, without doubt, haiku and, without doubt, Murdoch’s passion for that tantalizing form. But we cannot have any of these if we do not accept reality, in all its disappointing, soiled, and often dangerous ordinariness. This much, as Peter Conradi has observed, Murdoch most certainly knew: One of the enemies of goodness lies in our deep fear and puritan horror at the contingent—a key-term in Murdoch’s world-view—meaning random chance and mortality, all that the self cannot tame or make immediate sense of; and therefore, also, all that threatens our sense of our supremacy within the scheme of things, our desire to belong permanently at the centre of the universe and to control its workings. We see what we desire […] (Conradi 1994, 4)

In haiku, and in Murdoch’s best poems, life is translated, heightened into art in a process consciously recalling Yeats’s optimistic claim that poetry can re-reveal the natural world’s universal, beautiful ceremonies of innocence. Murdoch writes that: Art is informative and entertaining, it condenses and clarifies the world, directing attention upon particular things […] Art illuminates accident and contingency and the general muddle of life […] Art makes places and opens spaces for reflection, it is a defence against materialism and against pseudo-­ scientific attitudes to life. It calms and invigorates, it gives us energy by unifying, possibly by purifying our feelings. In enjoying great art we experience a clarification and concentration and perfection of our own consciousness. Emotion and intellect are unified into a limited whole. (Murdoch 1992, 8)

But for Murdoch and for the ancient Japanese writers of haiku (in particular the senryu model), the real world refuses to go away or be comfortably processed, tamed in art. Romanticism had already affirmed the notion that this contradiction—and, crucially, the greater concept of contradiction in general—may be a vital energy to any forging of unity, a principle central to understanding of much great Victorian and Modern English poetry, including, I believe, Murdoch’s best work.

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Murdoch’s Poetry So, what of Murdoch’s poems and how they manage the Zen and haiku inputs? As I have parsed it, Murdoch’s poetry appears to enact a career-­ long quest to examine the ontologically symbiotic relationship between the world outside and the world within. Her earliest poems centralise this vital nexus in a clear neo-Romantic fusion of self and nature. ‘I Will Not Wander’, written in early 1938 and as yet unpublished, with its echoes of Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Brontë, is an exquisite piece, and metrically sophisticated too: I will not wander any more Now. But I will stay, Watching from the desolate shore The white dawn of the day… I will sleep the sleep of death, Now, beside the wave, And three tall lilies, virgin-white, Shall grow from out my grave. (KUAS202/3/4)5

An imagistic frieze ends Murdoch’s poem here, as self and landscape work as one. In another poem of the same period, ‘The Message of the Bumble Bee’, again we detect a haiku-like reciprocal convergence between what Zen calls soto and uchi: the outer and the inner. As I sat at my window The world was spread below— The near green field, the far blue hill, Were neatly framed, remote and still, Spread out for me below. Only a lonely bumble bee, A brown and yellow bumble bee, Rose out of the world below, Rose out of the world remote and still The picture world of field and hill, And knocked upon my window, And brought the news to me. (KUAS202/3/4)

Other poems in the same handwritten notebook attest to a counterpoint, contrary and violent post-Romantic Modernist challenging of

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Nature not only red in tooth and claw, but now conveyed in splintered, fragmented imagism. The harmonious fusion becomes tumultuous traumatic struggle, conveyed best in a notably inverted sonnet, ‘After the 2nd of April’ (1938): I crumble the red soil, and cannot feel Its cruelty—I look, and cannot see The broken heart, the fire, the bloody steel That bud and blossom in the sighing tree. (KUAS202/3/4)

And the jagged unsettling dark metaphors of ‘To P. O’R’ (1940) provide a shockingly visceral and violated dramatisation of the sometime traumatic epiphany of imagined unselfing. It is the storm after the calm: And I am left alone with madman love— I see his staring eyes in the dark above. I loose my limbs and droop my head in dust And give my guilty flesh up to the knife. (KUAS202/3/4)

This is shocking, and reminds us that oneness is not always effortless or achieved without discomfort. But, mostly, Murdoch opts for a pleasant and painless dissolution of self into nature. Written in 1977, ‘The Brown Horse’, a Yeatsian modern(ist) lyric, is one of Murdoch’s best poems, offering a sophisticated, potentially healing conjunction of subject and object against a backdrop of contingency and fragmentation (Murdoch 1997a, 75–6). A calm returns: ‘The Brown Horse’ offers union (‘Your hair mingled with his mane as you embraced him…’), co-joining with nature conceived of as the key to harmonious existence and self-knowledge (‘Love comes again, again,/And thus identity…’). The wistful final section sets out Murdoch’s notion of the necessity of interaction with the outside world (‘we [a]re the parts of parts’) which the primarily (potentially) isolated and undeveloped human individual (‘an island and a child?’ with that telling, pregnant question mark) must accomplish in order to make some sense of life. The framed image of synthesis with nature is the keystone to deeper understanding of who and what we are. But contingency still haunts the existential reconstruction played out here: the union is, after all, positioned in the past. Also composed in 1977, ‘Poem and Egg’ further explores this issue. It is a properly philosophical poem in which Murdoch symbolically ruminates

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upon how best to tackle the issue of the broken-down language she inherits as a modern writer. It perfectly expresses the frustration of the poet immersed in western metaphysics of subjective presence but (or therefore?) drawn to the selfless liberation (offering a Barthesian explosion of meaning by way of the death of the author) seemingly represented by the ‘othered’ alien haiku form as read through western eyes. ‘I would like to write a poem like a picture’, Murdoch tellingly declares (Murdoch 1997b, 73). In the same way, ‘A Year of Birds’ (1978) once more denotes a poet negotiating positions between poles of subjectivity and self-elimination, as a comparison of its calendrical components reveals: in early sections the poet-subject—‘me’—is solidly stated and firmly established. But the mid-­ section of the sequence delivers a plateau of objectivity as subject and object are co-joined in synthesis and authorial presence absents itself. But by the sequence’s final poem, ‘December’, which achieves a manner of arresting epiphany and lends the work a masterly sense of peaceful closure, recalling William Blake’s dissembling reserve and Christina Rossetti’s sombre devotional poise (and even Eliot’s mellower moments), the poet-­ subject has re-entered the poem. Nature ‘follows me’, we are told: the poet cannot escape from the text. This resembles the now-you-see-menow-­you-don’t treatment of poet-subject (here ‘we’) in a stirring section of ‘Tintern Abbey’ that finds Wordsworth riffing on a similar theme to Murdoch. The western subject stubbornly refuses to vanish, despite the poet’s best efforts: Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (Wordsworth 1798, 204)

The ‘almost’ is crucial, and, like the Romantic visionary, Murdoch is painfully aware of this. The ‘A Year of Birds’ sequence relies on weighty western notions of circularity-as-emblem-of-unity and the dominating omnipotent presence of the poet. The meta-textual dialogue set up between Zen and western metaphysics in Murdoch’s verses lets us know that she perceives this central issue of subjectivity together with other implications of haiku poetics as being as much akin to as opposed to Romantic impulses. Murdoch understands this as clearly as the Imagists, led by Ezra Pound,

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missed or calculatingly mis-read the connection. Pound’s haiku ultimately fail because they do not see beyond the image as far as the synthesis. His ‘In a Station of the Metro’ is a good example: In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. (Pound 1913, 12)

This is (quite deliberately) all surface; nil beyond. Imagism is, as it repeatedly proclaimed, satisfied with image itself, but, as such, it must remain an incomplete version of Japanese haiku poetry proper. Kenneth Yasuda explains that the Japanese poem succeeds where Mr Pound’s fails, as Fletcher himself points out, Pound’s effort is not an unqualified success since ‘ the relation of certain beautiful faces seen in a Paris Metro station to petals on a wet tree branch is not absolutely clear’. That is to say, the poem is lacking in unity, in that forceful intensity of poetic vision and insight which alone can weld the objects named into a meaningful whole. In contrast, the relationship between objects named in the haiku is quite clear … [the Imagists] had forgotten that the naming of objects alone does not constitute an image … As the Japanese haiku poets have tried to remember, the totality of the poem is the image, within which there may be one or more objects. (Yasuda 1957, pp. xxi–ii, quoting Fletcher 1945)

Haiku may well be ‘singularly concerned with little living things’ (Suzuki 1938, p. 263) but, to reiterate: ‘the naming of objects alone does not constitute an image … the totality of the poem is the image, within which there may be one or more objects.’ Here is Murdoch’s perceptive, cautionary note on precisely this point: Emphasis is laid by Zen, partly in its instruction through art, upon the small contingent details of ordinary life and the natural world. Buddhism teaches respect and love for all things. This concerned attention implies or effects a removal from the usual egoistic fuzz of self-protective anxiety. (Murdoch 1992, 244)

The journey and process of emerging from the subject self to merge with and assimilate these ‘small contingent details’ is the ‘totality’ a proper Zen haiku will embody and emblematise. This totality (Murdoch’s

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one-­making) is crucial. It is where and how Murdoch’s ‘active moral agent’ (Murdoch 1970, 33) will be found (to borrow Annalisa Paese’s description): engaging in the effort of knowing individual realities by attending to their phenomenal features. Such an effort consists in reflection about and refinement of one’s own concepts as well as in criticism of one’s previous applications of those concepts. (Paese 2018, 113)

Likewise, in genuine haiku, the Zen Buddhist-like enlightenment comes not just from overcoming this or that paradox itself, but rather from grasping the whole nature of paradoxicality and embracing it. A haiku of Issa perfectly illustrates this: Even in Kyoto Hearing the cuckoo cry I long for Kyoto (Issa)

The object reality (Kyoto) itself is not enough. The connotative emotional resonance of the object is what elevates the descriptive impulse into true poetry: yearning (recollected into reality) for what we already have adds meaning to what we have, and that is the magical totality. Although, as Bossert proposes, this ‘ontological leap’ or shift may come to the Romantic or the contemplator of the koan as a flash of insight … one can work at it methodically by employing the principle of ontic non-commitment to make it into a useful continuum. (Bossert 1976, 271)

Edmund Husserl and others (in particular the Chinese philosopher Chung-ying Cheng) support this view of epiphany ratified and authenticated through composed ontological reduction (see Husserl 2012, 169; Cheng and Resnik 1965). To make sustainable order from chaos we simply need to train ourselves to remember to read the world differently. As Yoshinobu Hakutani puts it: ‘haiku is the creation of things that already exist in nature … To elicit significance from an image, the haiku poet must verify its existence’ (Hakutani 2009, 18. My italics). The route to harmony taken by the haiku poet involves the prescriptive (very Murdochian) elimination of the self, a deflation and ultimate

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negation of the very subjectivity without which the Romantic poet could not exist. I believe that this fundamental difference of approach is what fascinated Murdoch and underpins the dialogue between Romantic and Zen-haiku strategies that co-exist in her poems of the later 1970s and 1980s, a period when neo-Romantic disquiet with the inadequacy of language to express the world and construct a stable self was being revisited right before Murdoch’s inquisitive eyes by the semiotic, structuralist, and deconstructionist treatises of Saussure, Barthes, and Derrida. An important point to stress is that, unlike the Romantics, (yet, in fact like the trio of twentieth-century linguist-philosophers named above) haiku poets were often prepared to employ humour as a means to deflation of the subject-­ self: ‘Zen Buddhists are, as they point out, unusual in explicitly including a kind of jokiness in the region of spirituality,’ Murdoch observed (Murdoch 1992, 92). This, I know again from our conversations, is another aspect of the Zen-oriented haiku poetry that Murdoch found so appealing. Wry humour permeates Murdoch’s poems, rearing its head at the most seemingly inopportune moments: the coarse, earthy ending of the otherwise cleanly ethereal ‘No Smell’ (Murdoch 1997a, 87), a witty, deceptively light twelve-line neo-Romantic poem of 1979, posits images of the natural world in order that, by reflecting upon what these images mean, we may appreciate our own position in the broader scheme of things more clearly. A saint upon a mountain stair Concerned with other things attracted birds Who roosted there inside his cell.

No purportedly deep or lofty philosophical musings are openly attached to the pregnant scenarios in Murdoch’s most effective poetry; the image is, itself, held to be just about enough, and, certainly, here the attempted amalgam of haiku and Romantic principles is compelling. Adhering to self-decreed directives we noted in Murdoch’s earlier verses—that meaningful merging of outer and inner—the maturer poet shows herself consistently aware of the danger of relegating what is natural and immediate and raw to the level of mere device. To become immune to Nature’s essential appeal per se is to forget why we are here. Conceptually to separate oneself by differentiation from the real, outer world of nature and objects is to become irrelevant, impotent of thought, and thus Murdoch cannot eliminate the poet-self from the poem in the way that a haiku poet proper

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must. ‘No Smell’ succeeds on many levels, not least in offering an admonitory image of the danger of negating the ‘self’ within a wryly Zen-­ like register. In this alluring mixture of the mystic and the mundane, loosely held together by an almost ironically imposed, partial rhyme scheme, we are instructed of the fable of an ascetic would-be ‘saint’ who, though placing himself in the midst of the natural world ‘upon a mountain stair’ surrounded by wild birds, is pointedly ‘(c)oncerned with other things’. These ‘other things’ are the ‘abstract’ meditations of the seeker after philosophical enlightenment, the lofty ‘prayer’ of a man mentally questing after the secrets lying behind the natural world of surfaces. The birds are attracted to the saintly figure for good reason: It was the scent of goodness cast the spell Which simply ceased one day when he At last enlightened came to be A perfect man without a smell.

Attaining this ‘perfect’ state of enlightenment, the quester symbolically ceases to have a link with the real world, he loses his ‘presence’ in terms of the poem, that which formed his connection with the natural world around him, his smell. The poem’s bathetic conclusion mocks the failure to engage with that real world to which such achievement of superiority must allude: When the birds went he did miss them somewhat. Still, there were no more bird-droppings In his cooking pot.

This apparently flippant ending works on various levels, satirizing the protagonist’s lack of attention to the natural things around him—‘he did miss them somewhat’—as well as raising the ironic possibility that the birds were in fact attracted to the smell of the saint’s cooking pot and the natural goodness therein, rather than the scent of other-worldly perfection the quester himself sought to exude. In any case, the poem works well in illustrating the vitality of the natural, the healthiness of interaction with the real world and the retreat into absence that the achievement of a philosophical position which negates the importance of nature actually represents. Compare this with Basho’s or Issa’s arguably equally

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philosophical musings, and the similarity and difference in approach becomes vividly apparent: The tiny sparrow Craps on the New Year rice cake At the porchway’s end (Basho) After prayers The mosquitos of Kyoto Continue to bite (Issa)

Artless? Only seemingly so, says Suzuki: ‘How much art is concealed behind the apparent artlessness of Japanese art! Full of meaning and suggestibility’ (Suzuki 1938, 149). Bathetic crudity is in fact artfully applied, in both instances, to an image purportedly demanding reverence. In each case humour eases the transition from surface contrast into deeper synthesis, as a manner of heightened truth is liberated/achieved through initially ‘low’ contradiction. Another haiku of Hisajo constructs a dualistic spiritual allegory from the base (an old umbrella) and the holy eternal (sunshine) side by side, while Nozawa Boncho (1640–1714) contemplates sewage under moonlight: Beneath sunshine Colourless faded Old parasol (Hisajo) All over this town Above the stinking effluvium Floats a midsummer moon (Boncho)

Orthodox western interpretation might bridle and stop at the contrast, though a pantheistic progressive Romantic decoding would admit the possible synthesis-through-contradiction being offered. But a proper Zen perspective will look smoothly through and beyond the jarring juxtaposition, the necessary lens, to the clear transcendent unity beyond. Murdoch is in the privileged position of being aware of all three potential readings, and thus her own poetry is liberated into potential types of imagery and philosophical synthesis unavailable to lesser intellects or narrower minds. We can see that the technically impressive and knowingly intertextual, eclectic poetry produced by Murdoch is good poetry as well as meaningful

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philosophy. It constructs, treasures, and foregrounds abstract (Platonic/ Zen) notions formed from the harsh reality which Murdoch has every right to ‘place’ into art in the same way that Basho and other haiku poets, the Romantics, especially Keats and almost every good poet after him including Tennyson, Eliot, and Larkin, sought to ‘place’ real life into art in order to capture its magnetic sublimity and heighten its meaning. It is all that poets can do. It is everything and nothing. We are temporal and impermanent with only a ‘confused sense’ of elements (art, nature) outside our knowable physical world (Murdoch 1997b, 94). We cannot escape the fact that we are human, can never be free of the physical world, even in art. Nor should we want to. The nature of Enlightenment (whether Zen or Romantic or whatever) is simply the purposeful modification of our attention to the world, our expectations and interpretations of experience, for better or for worse. And Murdoch’s best poetry is fundamentally and consistently energised by a Zen-related contemplation of connections between the knowable and the unknowable in art. Perhaps, for her, this will-to-wisdom finds embodiment in the ‘great teacher’ of the haiku-like poem that Lucius Lamb scribbles on his deathbed in Henry and Cato: So many dawns I was blind to. Now the illumination of night Comes to me too late, O great teacher. (Murdoch 1976, 330)

Goodness Earlier I discussed Murdoch’s own notoriously godless notion of good, and it will be instructive here to delve a little deeper into it. Synthesising late Romantic and Zen thought, Murdoch intends something very specific when she seeks ‘objectivity’, with a direct connection to her neo-Platonic conception of ‘Good’. By ‘objective’ she does not mean empirical, scientific, detached, but rather enlightened, unselfed, spiritually awoken. The capacity for enlightenment, a Buddhist awakening, is innate in the successful seeker, and so to insist that one can gradually arrive at a liberating ‘objectivity’ is to miss the point: the awakening, de-subjectifying to at last become in harmony with all things (the ‘perfection’ of the ‘unself’, Murdoch calls it, then later, the awakening into ‘Good’) comes suddenly and it was always there. This notion (Murdoch’s westernised take on oriental Zen) is perfectly aligned with the Romantic notion of epiphany, evoking Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’:

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Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. ‘Good is a transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. (Murdoch 1970, 90–1)

This is useful: connected to all of us. How we see the world is important, and understanding that is a step towards happiness, with Murdoch’s careful caveat that it ‘is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt [at transcendence] cannot be entirely successful’ (Murdoch 1970, 91). At times, this quest appears to be doomed to failure: ‘Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-pre-occupied, often falsifying veil which artificially conceals the world’ (Murdoch 1970, 82). Although generally negative towards her work, John Carey correctly asserts that ‘Murdoch believes that natural, as well as artistic, beauty can release us from our selfish preoccupations’ (Carey 2005, 41). To illustrate, he cites perhaps the most oft-quoted paragraph of The Sovereignty of Good: I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but the kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care. (Murdoch 1970: 82)

The moment of unselfing is a transcendence and a betterment: a focused epiphanic awakening into the restorative, recuperative tranquillity and relative peace of newfound inner order effected through meaningful empathetic connection with that beyond the self. Murdoch, troubled and alone, finds succour and solace in careful, caring contemplation of nature. We find not dissimilar, but in important ways developed and extrapolated, revelatory instances of awed communion and symbiosis in poems Murdoch wrote both before and after she had mapped her manifesto in The Sovereignty of Good. Perhaps the earliest poem specifically to align with and foreshadow the kestrel incident is an unpublished notebook piece titled ‘Reverie in Winchester Cathedral’, dated March 1938 (‘The Bumble Bee’, mentioned above and dated 8 May 1938, is a contender). The consciously

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stage-managed, mannered, dramatic movement, and, especially, the second act here seem significant, prescient. I stood in awe and wonder for a while, In dread of such a silence and such sound— Till swift and sudden sped A swallow from the vaulted dark, and passed above my head. It seemed a spirit—like the Holy Ghost That beat its dove-wings in far Galilee. I knelt in peace. Tho’ yet the organ rings Above it still the darkening arches fill With a merciful murmuring of wings. (KUAS202/3/4)

But, to get to the point: in 1975, five years after the publication of The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch wrote what I think is one of her best poems, ‘John Sees a Stork at Zamora’ (Murdoch 1997a, 69).6 It would be remiss of me not to note that, when Yozo Muroya and I were evaluating pieces for our edition of her Poems, Iris more than once pointedly declared this piece to be one of her favourites. It is a fascinating and deceptively simple 13-line poem. Though written for its protagonist subject John Bayley, it was sent by Murdoch as part of a handwritten letter to another man, the Spanish poet-playwright, philosopher, and philologist Agustín García Calvo (1926–2012), who translated it into Spanish and published it in his 1982 collection Canciones y Soliloquios (García Calvo 1982). Zamora is a city with distinct and singular spiritual connotation: called a ‘museum of Romanesque art’, it is the city with the most Romanesque churches in all of Europe. The most important celebration in Zamora is Holy Week, and Murdoch’s poem is energized by such fecund collocation. Walking among quiet people out from mass He saw a sudden stork Fly, from its nest upon a house. So blue the sky, the bird so white, For all these people an unaccustomed sight. He took his hat off in sheer surprise And stood there and threw his arms out wide Letting the people pass Him by on either side Aware of nothing but the stork arise.

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Traditionally heralding a new birth in western literature, a stork symbolises enlightenment in a Zen Buddhist text—‘voicing Buddha’s teachings’—and is an archetypal Taoist symbol of spiritual growth (see Bukkyo Dendo Kyoukai 2019, 111; King 2021) ‘John Sees a Stork at Zamora’ dramatises assimilation of self into nature in a rounded, organic manner whilst, importantly, retaining an affirmative sense of elation and genuine awe. It presents an epiphanic, Wordsworthian spot of time in the image processed inevitably through the very present subjectivity of the poet, of John Bayley’s ecstatic reaction to the sudden sighting of a stork flying overhead, in consciously haiku-like manner: On a black tapestry now This gesture of joy So absolutely you.

Terminating in a paradoxically black joy, this vivid little poem manages economically, in just 13 lines, to amalgamate religious (‘mass’ has just occurred nearby), natural (the stork), human (John’s response to the bird), and artistic (the tapestry), versions of experience. The poem’s you/ John subject, observed by and rendered via the poet-subject in a Russian doll-like distancing, loses itself/himself in nature ‘[a]ware of nothing but the stork-arise’. What results is a neo-Romantic synthesis of subject (man) and object (natural landscape) translated into art in the form of the poem’s final reference (a Modernist touch) to a tapestry rendition of John’s joyful gesture (not forgetting that, in postmodernist mode on a meta-textual level, the poem itself stands as a further representation, in art, of the natural physical act). But more than all that, and germane to my specific purpose here, ‘John Sees a Stork at Zamora’ is a Zen koan-like portrayal of the act of unselfing (‘aware of nothing but the stork arise’: not the stork, but the moment and the movement). It presents transcendence and assimilation into nature in a rounded, organic manner. This is doubly so in Murdoch’s shrewd recounting: to quote her own words from The Sovereignty of Good: ‘In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self … has disappeared’ (Murdoch 1970, 82). Preoccupation with the self, and consequent lack of awareness of anything outside us, can likely lead us down a road to unkindness and poor unempathetic choices. Unselfing is a way to refrain from excessive selfconcern. Murdoch’s kestrel anecdote, and likewise her equally epiphanic

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observing of the stork at Zamora, are instances of what we might usefully call ‘momentary unselfing’. The great poets have long made much of this: clearly parallel to the ‘natural piety’ Wordsworth accesses when beholding a rainbow in ‘My Heart Leaps Up’, or the awe ‘stirred’ in Hopkins’s heart when glimpsing a windhover (notably, another name for a kestrel), this transportive momentary unselfing can be catalyst to enlightened consistent, even permanent attention to others—the portal to proper loving and truly meaningful (and of course there is huge irony here) self-knowledge (Wordsworth 1807, 44; Hopkins 1953, 30). As Itoh observes, Murdoch ‘proposes that we should, by opening our eyes, direct our attention outward, away from self which reduces all to a false unity, toward the great surprising variety of the world’ (Itoh 1982, 18). The revolutionary, radical aspect of Murdoch’s notion of moral, virtuous living is that it turns away from emphasis on a moment of choice as a chance for good. In her rejection of the ‘behaviourist, existentialist, and utilitarian’ conception of morality as willed ‘publicly observable’ activity (a ‘marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud’ is what she calls this tradition of ethical thinking) resides a clarion call for the ‘inner life’ to be reinvested as that ‘thought of as a moral sphere’ (Murdoch 1970, 8–9). Goodness and an abled moral vision are, Murdoch believes, holistic characterful functions contingent on a desirable state of being and self-awareness that is eminently more than momentary. A person who has achieved this state will instinctively make moral choices. The important moments in a life, then, are not isolated moments of choice (those can be seen as symptoms of goodness; not goodness itself). They are rather the unselfing moments (the momentary unselfings) that elevate us to transcend selfhood and emerge from the straitjacket of subjectivity into a true enlightened empathy with the needy world outside us. These unsolicited epiphanies come to us to confirm the ongoing presence of goodness already attained. Choice is not involved, but humility is. Murdoch confirms this in the very last sentence of The Sovereignty of Good, where she declares that it is only ‘the humble man’ who truly ‘perceives’: ‘And although he is not by definition the good man perhaps he is the kind of man who is most likely of all to become good’ (Murdoch 1970: 101). Goodness is not consciously enacted, but accessed and consolidated in such a moment. It is not result or consequence, it is a priori: ‘at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over … The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral

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choices’ (Murdoch 1970, 36). But access involves, and is in fact conditional upon, the ‘just and loving’ attentive, ‘active moral [agency]’ that Murdoch so crucially advocates: ‘I have used the word “attention,” which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent’ (Murdoch 1970, 33). Moments of being such as that rendered so vividly at the end of ‘John Sees a Stork at Zamora’, and ecstatically celebrated in ‘Poem’ and ‘Untitled II’, two more neo-­ pantheistic pieces (Murdoch 1997b, 60; 63–4), artistically dramatise Murdoch’s moral-philosophical position. We remember Wordsworth, again, gazing on Tintern Abbey:     become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power. Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. (Wordsworth 1798, 204)

There is that ‘just and loving gaze’ again. Murdoch’s own little poem of sudden revelatory joy in Zamora, ‘The Brown Horse’, and the earlier unpublished pieces examined above, each embody and echo that seminal Wordsworthian sentiment, albeit now with Murdoch’s added specification that the transportive gaze be one of ‘loving attention’: ‘Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature’ (Murdoch 1970, 40). Typically, Murdoch’s prose is pristine and minutely instructive: attention must be just and loving (and not just (only) loving). The letter and spirit comingle.

Conclusion What Murdoch learned from Zen and haiku is shrewdly, innovatively incorporated into her best poetry to become a vital aspect of her uniqueness as an artist. At the close of the dramatized instance of unselfing that forms the imagistic ‘narrative’ of ‘John Sees a Stork at Zamora’, there is ‘nothing but the stork arise’ … and … John. This is the crucial doubling up, the Murdochian revision and reinforcement in a frieze of loving selfless attention, denoting a progression and reinstatement of the inner as the origin and nexus of goodness and virtue. Murdochian moments of unselfing, glimpses of good, have all, like Wordsworth’s and Hopkins’s, hitherto been experienced in solitude. The Zamora incident occurs in a

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markedly public place: ‘among quiet people […] letting people pass’. The people may be unintrusive, but they are present. And the person most present is (not the speaker, but) John, who, by the end of the poem becomes ‘So absolutely you’. The poet-speaker, triggered by epiphanic communion with nature emblematized in the stork, has accessed and achieved a totality of unselfing here: the subject vanishes and the object-­ addressee ‘you’ becomes absolute, all. Murdoch pushes the envelope here, and daringly manages a degree of satori that Wordsworth and Hopkins both, arguably, could not. We see it very clearly in another wonderful later poem, ‘The Brown Horse’, too, with its prominent and telling real-life dedication, ‘For Emma Stone’, whose wedding Murdoch memorably attended ‘in red, white and blue stockings’, and of whom Iris was immensely fond (Carpenter 2018, 85). But it is not so easy. In the Zamora poem’s subtle closing, another masterstroke, we recall the cautious essential caveat: a poem may boldly embody aspiration to Zen satori, and yet remain ultimately anchored in the grip of a self-ish subjectivity. Whatever else it may achieve, Murdoch’s poetry unambiguously tells us what to feel. The self, and all its stubborn agencies cannot be left behind: for all its seeming aspirations to a manner of imagistic objectivity, the poem remains ultimately didactic and discursive in quintessentially western ways anathema to fundamental tenets of Zen-­ haiku expression. Far from this tacit admission of apparent failure (or at least a palpably partial triumph) being a weakness, its realism renders it a consolatory admonitory strength. The struggle is never finished. It is always with us. It is the ‘matrix we cannot fathom’. It is lifeblood to her finest writing. Murdoch’s belief that ‘true vision occasions right conduct’ is the chrysalis and lynchpin for her thesis in The Sovereignty of Good (Murdoch 1970, 64), and a prominent port of call for her poetry too. But this seemingly straightforward claim is not unquestionable and depends upon what degree of inevitability we place in that rather less-than-promising verb, ‘occasions’. Perhaps the visionary aspect can exist without (or in opposition) to actuality of expression: I can possess a notion of what goodness is without ever being good? Murdoch pre-empts this objection via an agile discussion of Plato whose aim is to set free the important concept of value from a purely empirical framework but nonetheless confirm it as a reality in our lives. And this, in turn, becomes a bold statement of intent: good is real. This, for Murdoch, is a ‘simple and obvious’ fact. We only need to look, and pay attention.

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I suggest [that] we introduce into the picture the idea of attention, or looking […] I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is the result of moral imagination and moral effort […] One is often compelled almost automatically by what one can see […] If I attend properly, I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at. (Murdoch 1970, 35–8)

Akin to the essence of haiku and Zen, the empathic unselfing that lets us know others, nurtures us towards a better notion of what living and loving and reality should properly and best entail. It sets us free from the stranglehold of unity. It de-necessitates enactment of perfection. Life is imperfect. Life is a form of denial too, or at least some parts of it necessarily are, and this requires a lot of acting (in both senses of that term), or otherwise we would all get into trouble even more often than we do. And, as Murdoch realised, it also requires a lot of love. It is the vital unselfing that makes love a sort of illuminated realism.

Notes 1. See: Hullah, Paul. (1997) ‘Critical Introduction’ in Poems by Iris Murdoch Okayama: University Education Press; Hullah, Paul. (2019) ‘The Matrix that We Cannot Fathom’: Desire and the Poetry of Iris Murdoch. Meiji Gakuin University Journal of English & American Literature and Linguistics 134 (45–60). Certain critical observations in this essay have also been aired, in embryonic form, in various papers delivered at conferences of the Iris Murdoch Society of Japan. I am grateful to society members for their helpful suggestions and continuing encouragement. 2. It should be noted that, in the novel, Arthur’s questioner, Hilary Burde, immediately responds with ‘Poetry is where words begin.’ I never once heard Murdoch quote that line, however. 3. Japanese names are given surname last, as is now the custom and norm. Haiku writers, traditionally known by their given name only, are, however, always written surname first—so Basho (family name, Matsuo) is always Matsuo Basho, and never Basho Matsuo. I respect this tradition here. 4. Unless specifically otherwise indicated, haiku (‘haiku’ is the formal family name of which ‘senryu’ are a singular branch) quoted in this essay are taken, in the original Japanese, from the Masterpieces of Japanese Culture website. 5. Unless otherwise stated, poems in this section of the essay have been transcribed from Iris Murdoch’s poetry notebook ‘Poems January 1938–July 1940’, held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives (KUAS202/3/4). 6. Originally published that year in Boston University Journal 23.2 (31).

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References Addiss, Stephen. 2009. Haiku: An Anthology of Japanese Poems. Berkeley: Shambhala. Austin, Michael R. 1980. Aesthetic Experience and the Nature of Religious Perception. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 14 (3): 19–35. Bossert, Philip J. 1976. Paradox and Enlightenment in Zen Dialogue and Phenomenological Description. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3: 269–280. Bukkyo Dendo Kyoukai. 2019. The Teaching of Buddha. Tokyo: Society for the Promotion of Buddhism. García Calvo, Agustín. 1982. Canciones y Soliloquios. Zamora: Lucina. Carey, John. 2005. What Good Are the Arts? London: Faber. Carpenter, Donna. 2018. ‘Through the Lens of Janet Stone’ A Book Launch and Talk by Ian Beck 22 March, 2018. The Iris Murdoch Review 9: 85. Cheng, Chung-Ying, and Michael D. Resnik. 1965. Ontic Commitment and the Empty Universe. Journal of Philosophy 62 (14): 359–364. Conradi, Peter J. 1994. Iris Murdoch and the Sea. In Études Britanniques Contemporaines, 4, 1–11. Montpellier: Montpellier University Press. ———. 2007. Preface. In Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe, xiv–xix. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2014. ‘The Guises of Love’: The Friendship of Professor Philippa Foot and Dame Iris Murdoch. The Iris Murdoch Review 5: 17–28. Fletcher, John Gould. 1945. The Orient and Contemporary Poetry. In The Asian Legacy and American Life, ed. Arthur E. Christy. New York: John Day. Hague, Angela. 1983. Iris Murdoch’s Comic Vision. London: Associated University Press. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. 2009. Haiku and Modernist Poetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hopkins, Gerard M. 1953. Poems and Prose. London: Penguin. Hullah, Paul. 2019. ‘The Matrix that We Cannot Fathom’: Desire and the Poetry of Iris Murdoch. Meiji Gakuin University Journal of English & American Literature and Linguistics 134: 45–60. Husserl, Edmund. 2012. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Itoh, Setsu. 1982. An Idea of the ‘Good’ in Iris Murdoch’s Novels. Tokyo Kasei University Research Bulletin 22 (2): 17–25. King, Bernadette. 2021. Stork Symbolism and Meaning. https://whatismyspirita n i m a l . c o m / s p i r i t -­t o t e m -­p o w e r -­a n i m a l -­m e a n i n g s / b i r d s / stork-­symbolism-­meaning/ Knapp, Lore. 2018. Religious Experience as Aesthetic Experience. In Religion and Aesthetic Experience, ed. Sabine Dorpmüller, Jan Scholz, Max Stille, and Ines Weinrich, 31–46. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press.

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Kumei, Teruko. 2006. ‘A Record of Life and a Poem of Sentiments’: Japanese Immigrant Senryu, 1929–1945. American Studies 51 (1): 29–49. Larkin, Philip. 2003. Collected Poems. NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mendis, N.G.K. 1993. The Questions of King Milinda: An Abridgement of the Milindapañha. Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society. Murdoch, Iris. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge. ———. 1975. A Word Child. London: Penguin. ———. 1976. Henry and Cato. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1992. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: Philosophical Reflections. London: Allen Lane. ———. 1997a. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1997b. Poems by Iris Murdoch. Okayama: University Education Press. Paese, Annalisa. 2018. The Human, Love, and the Inner Life: Ethics after Murdoch. University of Pittsburgh Doctoral Thesis. http://d-­scholarship.pitt. edu/35152/1/Annalisa%20Paese%20Dissertation%208_24.pdf Pound, Ezra. 1913. Contemporania. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 2: 1–12. Sutcliffe, Tom. Interview with Iris Murdoch. Guardian, 15 September 1980 Suzuki, Daisetsu T. 1938. Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture. Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Society. Widdows, Heather. 2005. The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch. Farnham: Ashgate. Wordsworth, William. 1798. Lyrical Ballads. London: John and Arthur Arch. ———. 1802. Lyrical Ballads. 3rd ed. London: Longman and Rees. ———. 1807. Poems, in Two Volumes, Volume 2. London: Longman. Yasuda, Kenneth. 1957. The Japanese Haiku. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle.

CHAPTER 6

Iris Murdoch and The Tale of Genji Fiona Tomkinson

It is well-known that Iris Murdoch was fascinated by the eleventh-century Japanese classic, the Genji Monogatori of the Lady Murasaki, known in English as The Tale of Genji, which she would have read in the 1933 translation of the renowned orientalist scholar, Arthur Waley. According to John Bayley (2012), Genji was one of the two books (the other was The Lord of the Rings) that he attempted to read aloud to Murdoch in her last years. Sadly, he tells us, ‘it made her so unhappy that I very soon gave it up’—perhaps because she was no longer able to follow the complexities of what she still vaguely remembered as a beloved text (Broackes 2012, 117). In this chapter I discuss Murdoch’s love for and sense of affinity with Genji and analyse a number of instances in which the work is alluded to in her novels through a subtle play of intertextuality. I also aim to demonstrate significant parallels between the tale and her own life, and to shed

This article is part of a study, ‘The influence of Eastern religion on selected British authors’, which has received grants from the JPS KAKENHI Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research (C) Grant number 19K00416.

F. Tomkinson (*) Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_6

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new light upon her fiction by tracing striking connections between its themes and preoccupations and those of the Japanese classic. These themes include an exploration of the complexities of multiple erotic entanglements, an intense focus on the nature of bereavement and on the need to find substitutes for lost love objects, and the recurring motif of characters seeking a life of religious renunciation and retreat from the world. The relationship of Genji to Murdoch’s oeuvre has not been discussed at any length in Murdoch scholarship, though as early as 1969, Howard German’s article ‘Allusions in the Early Novels of Iris Murdoch’ sees references to the tale in the episode of Georgie Hands’s attempted suicide in A Severed Head (1961), in which Georgie cuts off her hair, is compared to a drowned girl and is looked after in hospital by ‘sisters’ (German 1969, 376). He points out how this parallels the narrative in the later ‘Uji chapters’ of Genji, where a young woman called Ukifune, also involved in a love triangle, attempts suicide by drowning, is rescued by a priest and a nun and then decides to cut her hair and take her own religious vows. Peter Conradi’s biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life, also briefly references a borrowing of the ‘scene of cat-stealing’ from Genji in The Nice and the Good (1968) (Conradi 2001, 457). Following some introductory speculations on the reasons for Murdoch’s fascination with Genji, I analyse the significance of the best-known reference, the cat-stealing episode, in more detail, showing how it also appears in her Journals and in Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), where it is taken up in a much darker and more violent fashion. I then seek to demonstrate how Murdoch’s dialogue with Genji goes far beyond this episode, including numerous parallels of plot and theme and extended reference to other passages from the tale. These are especially noticeable in two of her novels of the 1970s, The Black Prince (1973) and The Sea, The Sea (1978), where, I argue, we find versions of Prince Genji in the narrator protagonists, Bradley Pearson and Charles Arrowby, as well as echoes of some of his amorous escapades and misadventures. Some of these echoes are reprised in Nuns and Soldiers (1980), where the mantle of Prince Genji is fleetingly donned by Tim Reede. I then return to the Ukifune episode, showing how its analogues recur elsewhere in the fiction, notably in The Green Knight (1993) and The Bell (1958), and discuss other subtle references to Genji in The Bell, witnessing to a persisting presence of the Japanese work in Murdoch’s fiction from the 1950s to the 1990s. What, then, first accounts for Murdoch’s attraction to The Tale of Genji? This is a question which can never be answered with full certainty. It may

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simply be that she came upon the text as an omnivorous reader with an interest in Japan and was seduced by its enduring brilliance. However, another plausible reason for her initial interest might have been its female authorship—the striking fact that the world’s first novel was written by a woman. Although Murdoch, in contradistinction to some of her contemporaries, did not place great emphasis upon women’s literature as a separate tradition, and has been seen by some critics, including Sabina Lovibond, as complicit in a patriarchal world-view, she continually engaged with individual examples of women’s writing, and it is noteworthy in this context that she frequently references, in both her novels and her philosophy, the earliest known female author in the English language, Julian of Norwich, author of the Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1373).1 When these allusions are intertwined with references to Murasaki’s work, as they are in The Black Prince when Julian Baffin re-enacts some of its scenes—as I discuss further below—they create, intentionally or not, a symbolic fusion of the Western and Eastern origins of women’s writing. The life of the Lady Murasaki herself may also have contributed to Murdoch’s fascination with her work. Murasaki Shikibu was a lady of the Heian court in Kyoto whose birth-name is uncertain, women of the period being usually referred to indirectly by sobriquets; ‘Murasaki’ means ‘purple’ and is also the name of one of the tale’s major protagonists. Although much about her life is obscure, some biographical details can be gleaned from court records of the time and from the Diary which she kept round about the years 1008–1010, which Waley’s introduction quotes at some length. Some of these details are likely to have resonated with Murdoch, as a female classical scholar and unconventional intellectual. Murasaki tells us that she excelled in Chinese studies, the Heian court’s equivalent to the Western study of Latin and ancient Greek, then thought unsuitable for women. She tells us how she was able to correct her brother in these studies, making her father wish that she had been a boy, but concealed her knowledge through fear of unpopularity; she later secretly instructed the Empress Akiko in Chinese. We are also given an account of her frustration at being attached to the court of the Empress Akiko after her widowhood, where she felt by turns disgusted by rowdy male behaviour and oppressed by the numerous prohibitions and atmosphere of stifling respectability enforced by the Empress: The Empress, as is well known to those about her, is strongly opposed to anything savouring of flirtation; indeed, when there are men about, it is as

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well for anyone who wants to keep on good terms with her not to show herself outside her own room… (Murasaki 2010, xix)

Waley’s introduction discusses Murasaki’s dissatisfactions through an analogy taken from his university days at Cambridge: There is a type of disappointed undergraduate, who believes that all his social and academic failures are due to his being, let us say, at Magdalene instead of at St John’s. Murasaki, in like manner, had persuaded herself that all would have been well if her father had placed her in the highly-cultivated and easy-mannered entourage of the Emperor’s aunt, Princess Senshi. (Murasaki 2010, xx)

It is possible that Murdoch found her own parallels between the elegant but stifling world of the Heian court described in Genji and the enclosed worlds of Oxbridge colleges where careers could still be terminated by indecorous behaviour, as her own may have been when she left St Anne’s in the wake of what Conradi calls her ‘mutually obsessional attachment to a woman colleague that threatened scandal’ which had caused her to be given a gentle but ill-received warning from the college Principal, Lady Mary Ogilvie (Conradi 2001, 457). Murdoch may also have identified with Murasaki as a fellow female writer who dared to deal with love not only as an ideal, but as a complex entanglement of lived erotic relationships, including liaisons or ongoing flirtations in which the feelings of one or both parties are not consistently or deeply engaged. The multiple love affairs of Prince Genji mirror Murdoch’s own, as well as those of some of the men in her life, notably Elias Canetti. She might even have felt a special affinity with Murasaki because of the shared first syllable of their names.2 Whatever the sources of the fascination, it was strong enough for Murdoch to make a literary pilgrimage, during her second trip to Japan in 1975, to the Shingon Buddhist temple of Ishiyama-dera, at Otsu near Kyoto, to see the place where the Lady Murasaki is said to have made a religious retreat and been inspired to compose Genji, which she is traditionally said to have begun on the night of the full moon in August 1004, after viewing the moon reflected in the waters of Lake Biwa.3 The temple is dedicated to Kannon, Goddess of Mercy. Murdoch had already shown an interest in this deity when she wrote a poem at Badminton School addressing the Chinese version of the goddess, Kuan-Yin, and German

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sees Honor Klein in A Severed Head as a representation of the Buddhist Goddess ‘Kwannon’ in her aspect as liberator from Hell (German 1969, 374–5). Conradi describes Murdoch’s visit, but does not dwell upon the physical features of the temple; during a visit I made in 2017, I tried to imagine how these might have struck her. She would almost certainly have seen a small wooden building called the Genji Pavilion dedicated to Murasaki and, near it, a tree surrounded by shide, the white paper streamers of Shintoism which demarcate a sacred space. Directly opposite the tree is another sacred natural object, the large Wollastonite outcrop from which the temple takes its name: the Japanese 石山寺 (Ishiyama-dera) translates as ‘Stone Mountain Temple’). The rock itself, Garan-yama, is associated with the eternal abode of the goddess Kannon and is nowadays often considered to be a ‘power spot’.4 This juxtaposition of sacred tree and sacred stone is likely to have resonated with Murdoch, given the presence in her writing of numinous and epiphanic encounters with natural objects such as trees and stones, of which Gracie’s tree-worship scene in An Accidental Man (1971) is one example. Although megaliths and obelisks also appear in early novels such as The Unicorn (1963), they appear more frequently in the later work, and it is possible that the sacred stone of Ishiyama-dera may have influenced scenes in the later fiction such as Tim Reede’s spiritual encounter with the Great Face rock in Nuns and Soldiers, the scenes of the New Age worshippers at the Stone in The Message to the Planet (1989), and Moy’s encounter with a rock in the closing scene of The Green Knight. Although many other locations could equally well have inspired these episodes, it is nevertheless intriguing that Ishiyamadera provides a locus in which the origin myth of Genji intersects not only with Buddhist spirituality, but also with the nature mysticism which continually resurfaces in Murdoch’s fiction. Murdoch’s second visit to Japan in 1975 inspired her to re-read Murasaki’s masterpiece. Just two days after returning to Oxford, she records in her journal on 3 May: ‘Reading Genji again’ (KUAS202/1/12, 15 n.d.). On 6 August, another citation of ‘Genji Vol 3. 292, Vol 3. 83 Discretion v. a good story. Akashi lady: appeal of mysterious’ follows the words ‘Hartley as girl’s name. Flames, an unlighted room’ (KUAS202/1/12, 28), suggesting that Murdoch was making imaginative connections with the work as she composed The Sea, The Sea. Most intriguingly, she compares a friend’s offer to look after a beloved’s pet to the cat-stealing scene:

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June 28. Kidnapping the beloved’s animal. Kashiwagi kidnaps Nyosan’s cat in Genji. David Luke’s cunning arrangement to look after M’s dog. (KUAS202/1/12, 25)

In this episode Prince Genji’s nephew, Kashiwagi, seduces, or perhaps even forces himself upon, his uncle’s somewhat neglected young wife, Nyosan. This episode was frequently depicted in Japanese art, often in a parodic way, as in eighteenth-century versions where the innocent and guileless Nyosan is transformed into a seductress or courtesan and the cat may play the role of a go-between, or the bearer of a love-letter. Murdoch adapts this episode into a story of obsessive adolescent love in The Nice and the Good, where Pierce Clothier kidnaps Barbara Gray’s cat, Montrose, as an act of revenge for her coldness to him after her return from finishing school in Switzerland, and her perceived flirtation with her father’s friend, John Ducane. Discovered and rebuked by Ducane, Pierce sets the cat free, but responds to the humiliation by embarking on a near-­ fatal swimming escapade into Gunnar’s Cave. The cat episode thus has serious ramifications: it comes very close to resulting in the deaths of Pierce and of Ducane, who follows him into the cave system, but the relief felt at their survival has a number of consequences which at least give the suggestion of traditional romantic happy endings: Pierce’s consummation of his relationship with Barbara, the engagement of Ducane and Mary Clothier, and Ducane’s decision to conceal Richard Biranne’s guilt as an accessory to murder and to facilitate Biranne’s reconciliation with his wife Paula. Three couples can thus be said to owe their union to the cat-­ kidnapping. Murdoch also entwines a Japanese element into the episode, perhaps as an intentional part of an intertextual game pointing the reader towards the Genji allusion. The change which Ducane undergoes after his near-death experience is associated with the Japanese word for sudden enlightenment, used in the tradition of Zen Buddhism, satori—a word which Biranne identifies in Joseph Radeechy’s secret code. Murdoch also used this word in her journal on 4 August 1975 shortly after the second trip to Japan: ‘Satori is proof of God’s existence by love’ (KUAS202/1/12, 27). The deep impression made on Murdoch by the cat episode in Genji is reinforced by the fact that this detail is also referenced in her final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), where the artist, Owen Silbery, repeatedly paints pictures of the scene:

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This subject it appeared was ‘Man Stealing a Cat’, a subject which he claimed to have collected from some ancient Japanese tale. The man, unable to obtain the favours of a certain lady, has stolen her cat. Owen’s version sometimes contained a Japanese flavour, and the proximity of the lady was hinted at though not seen. Interesting aspects of the pictures were the varying expressions upon the faces of the man and the cat. Sometimes the man looked frightened, the cat recalcitrant, sometimes both man and cat looked pleased as if joking, or else the man was wearing an evil grin and the cat was struggling, or the faces of both were demonic. (Murdoch 1997, 57)

This is not, in fact, a correct version of the events in Genji, where Kashiwagi does not actually take Nyosan’s cat by force, but—having fallen in love with her after catching sight of her through curtains pulled aside by the runaway cat—he adopts the ploy of asking for this particular cat to be sent to the Crown Prince, then borrows it from him and refuses to return it. He cossets and caresses it and even takes it to bed with him (Murasaki 2010, 652–53). We never find out what becomes of the cat later on, but it appears once more in Kashiwagi’s dream after his sexual encounter with Nyosan: At last, lying by her side, he did not exactly fall asleep, or certainly had no mind to do so; but must indeed have dozed a little. For suddenly, there appeared before him the cat which he had once contrived to steal from her. It advanced towards him purring loudly, and wondering in his dream how it might have got there, he supposed that he must have brought it with him. What had made him do that? […] So he was asking himself in his dream, when he awoke with a start. There was of course no cat anywhere to be seen and he wondered why he should have had so curious a dream. (Murasaki 2010, 664)

According to traditional Japanese belief, a dream of a cat presages the birth of a child. It turns out that Kashiwagi has indeed impregnated Nyosan and since Genji’s neglect of his young bride makes it painfully obvious that the child is not his, she feels obliged to retire to a nunnery. Although Genji regrets this and acknowledges that what has occurred may be a karmic result of his own sexual sins, he does not try to prevent it. Kashiwagi’s overwhelming guilt leads to his pining to death; his child, Kaoru, is brought up as Genji’s son, but deeply affected by his knowledge of the suspicion concerning his paternity. However, he also has the characteristic of being able to give fatherly advice from a young age, and this is

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perhaps why Murdoch uses his name for a character in An Accidental Man, the wise Kyoto monk with whom Matthew Gibson-Grey discusses Buddhism. Owen’s interpretation of the cat episode thus seems intent on bringing out the darker aspects latent in the fateful incident. We already know that his appreciation of things Japanese is entwined with sado-masochistic interests, epitomised by his possession of a photograph of Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian pierced with darts and his regret that there is no photograph of Mishima’s suicide by seppuku. The strength of these interests is also implied by Owen’s name, which he shares with Owen Evans, a character in John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance (1932), a novel much admired by Murdoch, whose nature is bifurcated between the noble and the sadistic.5 It is in keeping with the dark side of Owen Silbury’s nature that he provides a much more violent interpretation of the cat-­ abduction. When the object of his own frustrated affections, Mildred, asks him if we are never in his paintings to see the lady whose presence is implied by the ‘lacy white stuff’, he merely says: ‘She is already dead, strangled’ (Murdoch 1995, 57). In the context of the other Browning references in the novel (such as ‘The Last Ride Together’), we are probably intended to think of a situation such as that in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. This poem is also referenced in the strangulation of Sophie Artaud by her husband, Monty Small, in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), a murder which takes place on a purple sofa, the colour of which was perhaps chosen to make the Browning allusion clearer through referencing the colour of porphyry, but which could also through a chain of conscious or subconscious association have connected this scene with the Genji story through the Japanese word for the colour purple, or 紫 (murasaki). Owen seems to identify himself with the Kashiwagi figure in the paintings—and later seems to wish to take Jackson prisoner like the cat: I won’t let you outside the house, not yet anyway, like a dog or cat who might run away and get lost, I’ll show you my cat upstairs, cats, that is, in pictures of course […] these are the versions of the Japanese cat … (Murdoch 1995, 175–6)

Perhaps Murdoch also identified with the ageing and untidy artist Owen and his obsessive reworkings. Her own preoccupation with Genji indicates a re-working through a number of artistic re-imaginings which

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go beyond the single episode of the cat-stealing. Moreover, specific allusions to Genji within her novels take place against a background of numerous points of resemblance in terms of theme, plot and form. It is not my claim that these parallels should all be seen as imitations of Genji—it is just as probable that Murdoch was attracted to Murasaki’s text because it reminded her of her own work. A notable feature of Genji is that, like Murdoch’s own novels, it is extremely intertextual and allusive. The characters in the tale make continual use in conversation and in their love letters of furukoto (old words/ ancient matters), quoting or referring to fragments of poems, songs and tales, such as The Tales of Ise, in order to air their cultural knowledge and to convey their feelings—or pretended feelings—delicately and obliquely. As in J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings where the narrative of the Third Age is interspersed with glimpses of the legends from the First and Second Ages which are either told at length in the Silmarillion and elsewhere, or never completely explicated, so, in Genji, we are given glimpses of a mythical past recorded in other works of history and literature, some of them now lost. The presence of what one might define as ‘half-hidden dimensions’ in both Tolkien and Murasaki may go some way towards explaining why Murdoch gave their works a special place in her literary affections. It might also suggest that she was aiming for a comparable effect: the creation of a half-hidden dimension through allusions within a realistic modern narrative to literature and myth. This technique does not, of course, meet with universal acclaim. Murasaki’s high level of allusion to historical and literary texts was apparently noted at the time; her Diary records that the Emperor had taken the Tales of Genji as proof that she had been reading the Annals of Japan, and must be ‘terribly learned’. This casual remark caused a lady called Sayemon no Naishi, doubtless motivated by envy, to spread spiteful comments about Murusaki’s pride in her learning, causing her to be nicknamed Dame Annals (Murasaki 2010, xxiv–xxv). Murdoch’s display of learning in her novels is, of course, even greater, encompassing a wide range of literature, history and philosophy from the classical period onwards, and has sometimes also made her subject to malicious critique, perhaps not untinged with sexism—the unspoken assumption being that men wear their learning lightly but a bluestocking must parade it.6 A further common characteristic of the works of Murdoch and Murasaki is the extreme intricacy of their erotic plots and the complex psychology of their protagonists as they pursue, abandon and re-assume multiple love

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affairs. Prince Genji, like many of Murdoch’s protagonists, is involved in numerous relationships, often with people closely connected with one another, and sometimes with a quasi-incestuous element. Yet in this context, it is important to note that the Lady Murasaki goes out of her way to insist that Prince Genji is not the kind of man who is in search of sex at any and every opportunity. At the opening of the second chapter of the novel, ‘The Broom Tree’, we are told: Genji the Shining One … He knew that the bearer of such a name could not escape much scrutiny and jealous censure and that his lightest dallyings would be proclaimed to posterity. Fearing […] his most secret acts might come to light, he was obliged to act always with great prudence […] But in reality, the frivolous commonplace amours of his companions did not in the least interest him, and it was a curious trait in his character that when on rare occasions, despite all resistance, love did gain a hold on him, it was always in the most improbable and hopeless entanglement that he became involved. (Murasaki 2010, 18)

Likewise, Murdoch apparently did not consider herself or any of her main characters to be promiscuous, and would have defined this term as engaging in so-called casual sex, rather than having had multiple sexual partners over the course of a lifetime or sometimes engaging in concurrent relationships. Also, in both Murdoch and Murasaki we have the themes of incest or quasi-incest, homosexuality, the return of lost love objects from the distant past, the complications of love which hovers between passion and friendship, and above all, the tendency of characters to seek and find similar replacements for lost love objects. Yet Prince Genji’s unfailing ability to find such replacements does not prevent him from having a kind of constancy to each of the women in his life, and from being plunged into despair at the loss of many of them. Indeed, no work of fiction could be said to illustrate more thoroughly both Julius King’s cynical dictum in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) that ‘Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes’ (Murdoch (1970) 2001, 214) and the apparently contradictory assertion of Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince when he describes the experience of being in love as ‘The absolute yearning of one human body for another one and its indifference to substitutes’ (Murdoch (1973) 2006, 318). Centuries before Freud, Murasaki hows us how Genji’s adventures with eros begin as he seeks a substitute for his dead mother, the Lady Kiritsubo,

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in the person of Fujitsubo, whom his father, the Emperor, had himself married due to her resemblance to Kiritsubo: He could not remember his mother, but the Dame of the Household had told him how very like to her the girl was, and this interested his childish fancy, and he would have liked to have been her great friend and lived with her always […] And so, young as he was, fleeting beauty took its hold upon his thoughts: he felt his first clear predilection. (Murasaki 2010, 15)

Repeatedly thwarted in this forbidden passion, his love for Fujitsubo nevertheless remains his underlying obsession as he lives through an unhappy marriage with the Lady Aoi, whom he nevertheless mourns after her death, and a complex relationship with the proud and jealous Lady Roku-jo. He will later find a substitute for Fujitsubo in her ten-year old niece Murasaki, who strongly resembles her (and therefore also his own mother). Yet after this meeting, he seduces, or forces himself upon, Fujitsubo and makes her pregnant. He later adopts Murasaki and waits for her to grow up before taking her as his unofficial wife; history repeats itself when his own son Yugiri falls in love with her, after catching a glimpse of her during a typhoon which disturbs the screen concealing her. Genji himself continues to be involved in a string of loves, losses, abandonments and uncanny resurfacings—which have close parallels with the girouettes d’amour of Murdoch’s fiction. Throughout, the theme of substitutive satisfaction continues to emerge—a notable example being an early episode in which Genji consoles himself for the resistance of Utsusemi—a married lady—to his advances, by sleeping with her brother and also with another lady whom he accidentally finds in her bed-chamber. Later Genji is attracted to two young women whose deceased mothers were his past loves: Akikonomu, daughter of the Lady Roku-jo, and Tamakatsura, daughter of Yugao; he is also swayed in his decision to marry the thirteen-year old Nyosan by the knowledge that she is related to Fujitsubo. Finally, after Genji’s death, his grandson Niou and his supposed son Kaoru function as his substitutes, replaying versions of his previous entanglements and also the rivalry between himself and his friend and brother-in-law, To no Chujo. This play of substitutions is echoed in Murdoch’s novels, where we are often invited to consider the possibility that the major passions of the protagonists are substitutes for earlier affections, often of the Freudian family romance type. Is Charles Arrowby’s renewed passion for Hartley based on his early admiration for his Aunt Estelle, despite his dismissal of the

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possibility, or is it mainly a response to the death of Clement? What is the connection between the feelings Bradley Pearson has for Julian Baffin and his complex relationship with her parents, Rachel and Arnold Baffin? Is Rain Carter’s love for the much older Bill Mor a substitute for her possibly incestuous relationship with her recently deceased father? Is Hilary Burde’s passion for Gunnar Jopling’s second wife Lady Kitty (who may possibly be his sister) a compulsion to repeat, stemming from his ill-fated passion for Gunnar’s first wife, Anne, or is it a displacement of his feelings for his own sister, Crystal? What is the precise relation between Catherine Fawley’s love for Michael Meade and her feelings for Michael’s lost love object, her twin brother, Nick? Does Lucas Graffe run away with Aleph Anderson because he really wanted to marry her mother, Louise? A complete list of such questions concerning Murdoch’s characters would be long indeed. A final point of correspondence between Genji and Murdoch’s fiction is the recurring theme of renunciation of the world. Genji himself engages in periodic spiritual retreats and, finally, after his beloved Murasaki’s death, retires to a monastery at Saga. Genji’s love interests, the Lady Roku-jo, Utsusemi, the Empress Fujitsubo and Nyosan, all become nuns, and even his unofficial wife, Murasaki, had wished to do so before her death, despite his protests. The trope of monastic renunciation also runs through Murdoch’s novels from the depiction of the religious communities at Imber in The Bell, through the semi-enforced seclusion of Hannah Crean-­ Smith in The Unicorn (1963) to the abandoned vocations of Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers and of Bellamy James in The Green Knight. However, beyond these general resemblances, my contention is that at least three of Murdoch’s protagonists are at certain points in their drama re-playing the role of Prince Genji, and that Murdoch has deliberately left the reader with clues that this is the case. The characters in question are Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea and Tim Reede in Nuns and Soldiers. The parallels are clearest in the case of Bradley and Charles: both men, like Genji at the end of his life, or during his semi-voluntary exile from Kyoto, leave the capital in flight from the world; both of them have had multiple love affairs, though they do not consider themselves promiscuous; both are the victims of frustrated or unrequited love. Bradley falls into scandal through his relationship with a younger woman, while Charles shocks the theatre world by his relationship with Clement, a woman twenty years older than himself. In so doing they are dividing between themselves two significant parts of Genji’s story: his seduction of his stepmother and his subsequent relationship with the

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young Murasaki; however, Charles’s passion for Hartley combines a passion for a mature woman with a love rooted in his early life as was Genji’s for Fujitsubo. Specific passages in each of these novels make the connections even more apparent. Early in the The Black Prince, Julian ritualistically tears up the love-letters of Oscar Belling, scattering them to the winds—the irony being that this is the man that she will eventually marry (Murdoch 1973, 57–8). This echoes the passage in the Asagao chapter in Genji, in which the hero speaks of casting his offence of old days to the winds of Shinado, referencing a poem in which prayer-strips entitled ‘I will love no more’ are tied by the River of Cleansing, but the gods do not accept the vow (Murasaki 2010, 386). The description of Bradley and Julian’s idyll at Patara takes us further into the world of Genji. I have previously discussed this passage in ‘Murdoch’s Japanese Foxes: Kitsunē Myth, Shintoism and Zen Buddhism’, with regard to Murdoch’s use of Japanese fox mythology, with which both Julian and Bradley are associated, showing how the passage has similarities to Genji’s escape to a deserted mansion with his early love Yugao.7 Genji fears fox-spirits, but Yugao is killed by a fox-spirit emanating from the jealous Lady Roku-jo—whose name resembles that of Julian’s mother, Rachel, Bradley’s nemesis. It was probably this passage which Murdoch had in mind when she noted in her journal on 18 May 1975: ‘Hatred kills. (Genji)’ (KUAS202/1/12, 18). There is a striking resemblance between the passage in Genji describing Yugao’s death and the passage from The Black Prince describing Julian at Patara: He noticed that his mistress was trembling from head to foot […] suddenly she burst out into a cold sweat. She seemed to be losing consciousness. […] Her face was set in a dull, senseless stare. (Murasaki 2010, 66) Her flesh was cool, almost cold, and she shuddered, arching her neck. […] She was wearing the blue dress with the white willow-spray pattern […] She was staring at me with big eyes and every now and then a spasm passed across her face. (Murdoch (1973) 2006, 330)

The willow-spray pattern, characteristic of Oriental China and fabrics sold in Europe, is, a clue to the fact that Julian is, in a sense, reliving a Japanese story, the ordeal of Yugao. The willow in Japan, as in Britain, is associated with grief and unhappy love. Murdoch might been thinking of both the willows of Shakespearean tragedy—Ophelia’s willow aslant the brook, or

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the willow of Desdemona and Emilia’s death-bed songs—and the willows in stories of young love thwarted found in Japanese folklore, as in ‘Green Willow’, one of the ghostly tales re-told in Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan, where a samurai falls in love with a young woman who vanishes when the willow-tree, whose spirit she is, is cut down. It is also a Japanese belief that the ghosts of women who have died of love are found without their feet in willow-trees, and this piece of folklore is humorously referenced in Murdoch’s account of her 1975 trip to Japan when, on 1 April, she describes a party in which ‘We all get drunk (& become ghosts: no feet)’ (KUAS202/1/12, 2). It is also, I believe, significant that the willow-pattern and a kimono-like garment appear again in the context of another interrupted idyll in Murdoch’s fiction, that of Gertrude and Tim in Nuns and Soldiers during their first encounter in France: after they make love for the first time, Gertrude replaces her white dress with ‘a flimsy flowing yellow robe with a brown willow-leaf pattern’ (Murdoch (1980) 2001, 195). That this repetition is no coincidence is emphasised by the name of the house Les Grands Saules (The Great Willows) and also, I believe, by an additional allusion to Japanese literature in the closely preceding episode of the drowned dog in the canal which has parallels with a passage describing a dead dog found at the top of a waterfall at the opening of Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Just as Gertrude’s tears provoked by the sight of the dog, begin a chain of events leading to her intimacy with Tim, so the funeral of the dog conducted by the Buddhist Abbess in Spring Snow leads to the first recorded and emotionally-laden interaction between the star-­ crossed protagonists Kiyoaki and Satako. Tim’s near-drowning experience as he attempts to save a living dog in the same place symbolically cancels out this earlier episode, as both Tim and the dog escape. Likewise, Gertrude and Tim’s relationship can be understood as a version of the tragic Yugao episode: Murdoch’s lovers escape the malign forces which threaten them, but we are made to feel that it was a very close thing. Charles Arrowby of The Sea, The Sea is, even more than Bradley Pearson, a man with a large number of what Waley calls ‘attendants’. Like Prince Genji, he is from the beginning of the novel mourning the loss of a mother-figure in the person of his on-off lover, Clement. The haughty and jealous Rosina plays the role of the resentful and aristocratic Roku-jo, and their names probably do not share a first syllable by coincidence, while the much younger Angie offers herself as a future Murasaki. Likewise, the mixture of friendship and rivalry that characterises his relationships with

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Peregrine and Gilbert has parallels in the friendship between Genji and his brother-in-law, To no Chujo. Just as Genji does on many occasions, Charles finds an uncanny resurfacing of a lost love in the form of Hartley and he is also involved in a scandal in which Hartley’s adopted son Titus is wrongly thought to be his child, just as Tamakatsura, Yugao’s child by To no Chujo, was thought to be Genji’s. Murdoch’s interest in this minor character is also suggested by the possibility that the name ‘Tamakatsura’ influenced the choice of the name ‘Tamar’ in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987). Both characters have their lives thrown off track by giving in to an act of seduction by an inappropriate older man: Tamar Hernshaw undergoes an abortion followed by intense guilt and sorrow after being impregnated by Duncan Cambus, while Tamakatsura, who was about to join the Imperial court, gives in to the advances of Higekuro and becomes his wife. However, the strongest parallel with Genji in The Sea, The Sea lies in the way Charles’s self-imposed exile from London in his seaside house reflects Genji’s period of semi-voluntary exile from Kyoto at Suma and then at Akashi. Charles retires in order to write, but his cousin James imagines him painting the house; Genji turns to painting. Genji is persecuted by the god of the sea and by a dream vision of his wronged father; Charles is haunted by seemingly supernatural incidents including a vision of a sea-­ monster and a ghostly female face which he connects with the wronged Rosina. The use of Hokusai’s The Great Wave of Kanagawa as a cover illustration for the first edition of The Sea, The Sea emphasises the Japanese elements of the tale and invites readers to make a connection between Charles’s situation and the great storm which forces Genji to retreat to a back room of his house by the sea, where he will confront his past. The fact that this confrontation leads to his flight to Akashi, where he will father a future Empress with the Akashi Lady, suggests another parallel with the situation of Charles, whose erotic adventures may be far from over at the end of the book, as the likelihood of further entanglements with Jeanne, Angie and perhaps even Lizzie await him—not to mention all the possibilities latent in ‘a very tempting invitation to Japan’ (Murdoch 1978, 495), Although The Black Prince and The Sea, The Sea are the novels in which the connection of the main plot to Genji is the strongest, we also find hints of the tale incorporated in Murdoch’s fiction as early as The Bell. German’s aforementioned account of the parallels between elements in the Ukifune episode and the suicide attempt of Georgie Hands apply even more strongly to the attempted suicide of the postulant Catherine Fawley, which

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involves a near-drowning and the intervention of an ‘aquatic nun’ (Murdoch 1973, 283). The nun’s ‘short-haired’ appearance contrasts with the ‘long wet hair’ (Murdoch 1958, 280) of Catherine which would have been cut had she gone through with her entry to the nunnery.8 Ritualistic hair cutting, frustrated love, monasticism and near-drowning are also brought together, more than twenty years later, in the final scene of The Green Knight, in which Moy Anderson, broken-hearted by her sister Sefton’s betrothal to Harvey Blacket, sacrifices her plait to the sea and is almost drowned before being rescued by the failed monk Bellamy James. All these episodes also involve inter-familial/sibling rivalry— Ukifune is pursued by Genji’s grandson and his supposed son, whose ages make them almost like siblings; Georgie is abandoned by both Martin Lynch-Gibbon and his brother, Alexander; Catherine’s rival for the affections of Michael Meade is her own brother, Nick; Moy loses Harvey, who was initially involved with her other sister Aleph, to Sefton, while being suspected of being in love with her mother’s fiancé, Clement Graffe. The substitutive nature of love is also a major theme in The Bell, and a possible connection to this theme in Genji can also be made through a repeated trope in the text—the reference to sedge warblers. When Toby Gashe first takes the ferry to Nick Fawley’s quarters across the lake in the company of Michael Meade, still blissfully unaware that he will become Michael’s love object, but only as an inadequate substitute for Nick, we are told that ‘A bird sang harshly beside the lake. It was not a nightingale’ (Murdoch 1958, 52). We are not told what it is and this strange negative description seems to suggest that there is a certain symbolic significance intended. Later, as Dora Greenfield and Toby attempt to lift the bell from the lake, they hear the cry of ‘The sedge warbler […] The poor man’s nightingale’ Murdoch 1958, 216). In other words, a substitute nightingale in a novel of substitutive satisfactions sings at the moment before the substitution of the bell. Finally, when Dora prepares to bid farewell to Michael and the last substitute relationship of the novel, we are told that ‘The sedge warblers were gone’ (Murdoch 1958, 300). The clue to the repetition of the word ‘warbler’ may be found in Chapter 23 of Genji— the Hatsune Chapter, translated by Waley as “The First Song of the Year’ but later by Edward Seidensticker as ‘The First Warbler’. In this chapter, the Akashi Lady sends a toy nightingale to the daughter who has been taken from her to be brought up by Murasaki with the note: ‘“In my home the nightingale’s voice I never hear”’ (Murasaki 2010, 469). Genji is so moved by the Lady Akashi’s plight that he spends the New Year’s night

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with her rather than with his favourite, Murasaki. Here, too, we have a fake nightingale substituted for the true one and a tragic play of multiple substitutions, mirroring the emotional substitutions which resonate throughout Murdoch’s novels. Thus, Murdoch’s fascination with Genji demonstrably spans a period stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s and connects with her emotional and intellectual preoccupations on a number of different levels. Although in her last tragic years she was unable to connect with the world of the Heian court which she had made her own, for as long as she continued writing, her desire to engage with Murasaki’s masterpiece was never exhausted.

Notes 1. The Revelations of Julian of Norwich are read aloud by the lay religious community in The Bell (1958) and quoted blasphemously by Nick Fawley, while the enclosed order of nuns continue Julian’s anchoritic tradition; when Michael Meade leaves the Abbey for London at the end of the novel, he gives his next destination as Norwich. The work returns as an inspiration for the visions of Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and is referenced five times in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). Julian of Norwich is also referenced in The Black Prince (1973) through the name of Julian Baffin, who is not only the instrument of the revelation of the erotic and divine love which transforms Bradley Pearson, but is herself an aspiring writer, revealed at the end of the novel as having become a poet. In suggesting that Murdoch celebrated Julian of Norwich as a female writer, I do not mean to imply that she was not primarily interested in her work in relation to the question of mystical experience, or that she saw mysticism as quintessentially female; the male mystic St John of the Cross is also referenced five times in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. 2. It is notable that characters in Murdoch’s own novels whose names begin with an identical or similar first syllable tend to be among those who clearly share characteristics of the author. Examples are Mor in The Sandcastle (1957), whose extra-marital adventures conflict with his teaching and political career and whose writing ambitions have too long been submerged by other responsibilities; Muriel, the aspiring poet in The Time of the Angels (1966); Marcus, from the same novel, the author of an abandoned Platonist treatise foreshadowing Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992); and Morgan in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), a female academic who shared Murdoch’s predilection for erotic complications and her obsession with a Canetti-like enchanter figure in the person of Julius King.

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3. The temple is described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishiyama-­dera; and https://otsu.or.jp/en/thingstodo/spot47 4. Ishiyama-dera is listed as a ‘power spot’ at https://en.biwako-­visitors.jp/ spot/recommend/10 5. See Charles Lock, ‘The Sublime and the Giggly: On Iris Murdoch and John Cowper Powys’, in The Powys Journal, XI (2001), 45–62. 6. An example of this is George Stade’s extremely vitriolic review of Nuns and Soldiers, ‘A Romance for Highbrows’, New York Times, 4 January, 1981, which, witty as it is, seems to me symptomatic of a veiled misogyny; belittling comparisons with James Joyce and T.S.  Eliot imply that the use of intertextuality and symbolism, or the creation of texts super-saturated with Christian references (devices roundly condemned as pretentious in Murdoch’s fiction) are games for the boys. 7. Fiona Tomkinson, ‘Murdoch’s Japanese Foxes: Kitsunē Myth, Shintoism and Zen Buddhism’, in the Iris Murdoch Review, 10 (2019), 49–62. 8. It is somewhat surprising that Howard German does not make this connection in his 1969 article, despite including a discussion of The Bell.

References Bayley, John. 2012. Iris on Safari: A Personal Record. In Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays, ed. Justin Broackes. Oxford University Press. Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins. German, Howard. 1969. Allusions in the Early Novels of Iris Murdoch. Modern Fiction Studies 15 (3): 361–377. Jackson’s Dilemma. 1997. First published by Chatto & Windus Limited 1995. Published in Penguin Books 1997. Murasaki, Shikibu. (1008) 2010. The Tale of Genji. Trans by Arthur Waley. Tokyo: Tuttle. Murdoch, Iris. (1958) 1973. The Bell. London: Penguin ———. 1961. A Severed Head. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1963. The Unicorn. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1968. The Nice and the Good. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. (1970) 2001. A Fairly Honourable Defeat. London: Vintage. ———. 1971. An Accidental Man. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. (1973) 2006. The Black Prince. London: Vintage. ———. 1974. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1978. The Sea, The Sea. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. (1980) 2001. Nuns and Soldiers. London: Vintage. ———. 1987. The Book and the Brotherhood. London: Chatto and Windus.

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———. 1989. Message to the Planet. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1993. The Green Knight. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. 1995. Jackson’s Dilemma. London: Chatto and Windus. ———. n.d. Journals housed at the Iris Murdoch Special Collections. Kingston University, London. (KUAS202/1/12, 15) (KUAS202/1/12, 28) (KUAS202/1/12, 25) (KUAS202/1/12, 27) (KUAS202/1/12, 18) (KUAS202/1/12, 2)

CHAPTER 7

Iris Murdoch, Australia and Me Gillian Dooley

Iris Murdoch and I go back a long way, although we never met. In 1996, when I was challenged by my PhD supervisor to choose a third author for my English thesis, on some as yet vaguely conceived question of ethics and narrative technique in the novels of Doris Lessing and V.S.  Naipaul, it didn’t take me long to come up with Murdoch. I had been an avid reader of Murdoch’s novels since twenty years earlier when a sophisticated slightly older friend recommended her recent novel A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). I read it and was hooked. It was not just that I enjoyed the novel for all the usual reasons—absorbing plot, interesting characters, intellectual stimulation. At that time I had never left Australia and was a student at the Australian National University in Canberra, barely out of my teens. Although the novel was set very specifically in London and concerned professional people who were mostly much older than me, I immediately felt that she was describing my world. As A.N. Wilson wrote,

G. Dooley (*) Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_7

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In one sense, though taking in very little of the contemporary scene, and being quite exceptionally unobservant about it, in a more superficial way, Iris was on another level instinctively in tune with her times. (Wilson 2000, 57)

The emotional intensity, and the incisive wit, of this novel in particular was echoed in the circle of students, academics and young public servants I was a part of. Many of my friends were gay; a kind of febrile, edgy, risky behaviour seemed to be the norm amongst us, in those days before decriminalisation. It was not necessarily that I could identify any specific characters who corresponded to my circle of acquaintances: it was more that Murdoch had somehow caught the atmosphere and tone of the society I was living in—the danger and the excitement and the pain. One was always in love with the wrong person, or consoling someone else who was in love with the wrong person. Nobody drowned in the swimming pool but there was a feeling that anything could happen. Wilson also remarked that ‘in some strange way she explained a generation to itself. Reading her novels, they re-educated themselves morally, decided what their priorities were, both in law and in ethics’ (Wilson 2000, 65). This might explain much of her appeal: witnessing her characters faced with different but similarly bizarre problems helped us steer a course through a rapidly changing world utterly different to that of the previous generation. However, this education was entirely extra-curricular. There was, at this time, not much prospect of reading Murdoch as part of an English literature course in Australia, as far as I am aware. This may have changed elsewhere, but it is still true in Australia. The Open Syllabus Project (n.d.) lists forty-two texts by Iris Murdoch set for courses at institutions in the US and the UK (with The Sovereignty of Good at the top of the list), but only two for Australian university courses—both philosophical works, not novels. Of course, that is not the whole story by any means: this site, though astonishing in its scope, provides only raw quantitative data for the past few years. To get a better idea of whether my impression could be correct, without trawling through the university calendars of Australia’s thirty-­ seven universities for the past forty years, I turned to Facebook and asked my friends for help: Dear Hivemind, I want to test my general feeling that (a) Iris Murdoch’s novels have seldom appeared on curricula of Australian universities; (b) that not many Australian English lit academics have done much research on her

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novels (as opposed to her philosophy); and (c) her novels are nevertheless quite widely read and enjoyed. (3 July 2016)

I had thirteen responses, perhaps not enough for a rigorous study but sufficient, I think, for my purposes, especially given twelve of these people had taught or studied English literature at Australian universities over the past fifty years or so—there was quite a spread of ages and geographic locations. None of them had studied her novels at university, and none were aware of anyone (except me) doing research on them at an Australian university. Six of the thirteen had read her novels. One respondent, Ruth, wrote, ‘I think she has a reputation as a “difficult” novelist who is no longer very relevant,’ and continued, in a nice example of the Hawthorne Effect, ‘Which novel would you recommend I start with?’ Another, Susan, said, ‘I read her ‘cause you wrote about her.’ Laura, a former English academic at a Melbourne university, remarked, ‘I did almost put A Severed Head on one of my subjects once but I don’t think I could get an edition into the uni bookshop. I have however seen two different people reading her on the tram this year.’ This is interesting: Laura was teaching English literature during the first years of the twenty-­ first century, I believe. Would it really have been impossible to get it stocked in a Melbourne university bookshop at that time? We are not so far beyond the international book trade routes, and I was able to get copies of all her novels when I was writing on her in the mid-1990s. The Penguin edition of A Severed Head was reprinted in 1999, and there was one from Viking in 2001. Who knows what the story was?—perhaps there was not enough time to get stock in, or the cost would be too high. In any case, it is the only suggestion I have found that anyone was thinking of teaching her fiction at undergraduate level in an Australian university. Katherine, an experienced book reviewer for the South Australian daily newspaper, wrote, ‘Post uni I reviewed a number of her later works and enjoyed them very much but my impression was that she was considered “difficult” and intellectual by the reading public and “popular” by academia.’ This is very much the impression I had from my years frequenting Australian university English departments. My PhD supervisor, for example, had not read any of her novels and asked me for a recommendation. After he had read The Black Prince he reported back. ‘I enjoyed it immensely,’ he said, ‘but do you think she is a serious writer?’ Another of my former professors at Flinders, Joost, now retired, responded to my Facebook post at considerable length:

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I taught in the English Discipline at Flinders from 1976 to 2001 inclusive, and to the best of my knowledge (memory) no work by Murdoch was ever part of any of the courses—ertainly not a prescribed course. That also applies to others of her generation, the reason being—as I see it—that those writers ‘missed out’ by the fact that while they came to prominence ‘canonical’ works still tended to be favoured over anything modern/contemporary that students could read for themselves, in the case of British/Anglo-Irish authors. But when—as a Discipline—we turned more ‘modern/contemporary’, Murdoch’s time and that of her contemporaries had passed. I add to this that at Otago University (NZ), where I worked from 1966 to 1976, the few then recent/contemporary authors chosen excluded novelists like Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, etc, as ‘suitable for the students to read on their own’, while it was felt […] that from a purely literary/stylistic viewpoint Beckett and Pinter were far more innovative and intellectually and artistically challenging, so academically worth ‘getting to grips with’. I think, in sum, that all this has very little to do with Murdoch’s intrinsic merit, but everything with changes within English departments, and notably with the time(s) when they occurred!!

There were no surprises here, and confirmation, and a cogent explanation, of the impression that I had. What he wrote next was, however, something new to me: Actually I did read Under the Net […] when a student at Amsterdam University, as part of a course on ‘Modern Literature’. This was in the early 60s, and she was regarded as a ‘perfectly respectable choice’—because of the reputation of the book, per se, and possibly also because of her academic standing and connections. Dutch academics at that time were still hugely ‘high brow’ and snobbish, as well as extremely serious.

I would be interested to hear about other experiences of other students in other countries, and see whether Joost’s Netherlands university was unusual in this respect. Nevertheless, I think I have made my point: Murdoch has not appeared on the curriculum of many Australian university English departments. However, not entirely satisfied with my research so far, I searched the National Library of Australia’s union catalogue of theses, and came up with thirteen results for Iris Murdoch as a subject of higher degree theses written in Australia. They are spread over the period from 1977 to 2019. Five of them are in philosophy, seven are English literature, and one is

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indeterminate. It may not seem a lot but it somehow surprises me that I was one of seven or eight higher degree students to study Murdoch as a novelist in Australia during this period—although I was the only one in South Australia. Most of the Australian theses were Masters of Arts. Mine is one of three Australian English literature doctorates on Murdoch. And although the WorldCat searching facility for theses is not entirely reliable, as far as I can tell there have been at least 370 theses written on her world-­ wide, and that would include philosophy as well as English. So it seems I am not the only Murdochian in Australia—not quite, anyway. This realisation has been brought home to me all the more in recent years, as I have encountered Australian philosophers, including two at my own university, who take a deep interest in Murdoch. To my surprise, I met two Australians at the Iris Murdoch Conference in Kingston in 2012, although neither has, to my knowledge, gone on to do further work on her. In 2016, philosopher Cora Diamond was invited to a conference in her own honour at Flinders. The topic of her paper was ‘Murdoch off the map, or taking empiricism back from the Empiricists.’ Murdoch was very much in the air during the conference: most of the papers referred to her work at least in passing. The academic interest in Murdoch’s work at Flinders has encouraged higher degree students to work on her and Sean Haylock’s thesis in our School of Humanities, completed in 2019, applied Murdoch’s philosophy to the novels of other authors. In 2017 I supervised an Honours thesis on a similar topic. I think I can claim, however, to be the only person who has written in any detail on Murdoch’s relationship with Australia. My article about her and Brian Medlin, published in Antipodes in 2011 and based on my conference paper at the Iris Murdoch Conference at Kingston University in 2010, is the only item which comes up in an MLA Bibliography search on her name linked with Australia, apart from some articles comparing her work with Australian novelist Patrick White. I have to apologise, therefore, for a certain amount of self-citation in what follows. My colleague Joost had yet more to add, in his Facebook comment: She [Murdoch] did, with her husband, visit Dunedin (in New Zealand) when I lived there, and most members of the English Department of the University of Otago on that occasion attended when the two of them—both brilliantly intelligent, serious, and learned—answered questions on all sorts of issues from a well-educated audience assembled in a huge hall. They got very good ‘press’, in all respects.

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This would have been during her British Council tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1967, the only time she ever ventured to the Antipodes. During her travels she met Australian novelist Patrick White in Sydney. He wrote about it in a letter to his fellow writer Geoffrey Dutton in Adelaide: Yesterday evening Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were here briefly for a drink. I think you would like them. We did. She is rather plump, homely, and dowdy. He is a strange-looking little man, rather nervous in the beginning, and probably ill. I felt we were all on the same wavelength, and was sorry they are on this mad tear through Australia so that we can’t see more of them. (White 1994, 311–312)

These two major novelists, as Pamela Osborn points out, were of much the same generation—White was born seven years before Murdoch in 1912—and were very much ‘on the same wavelength’, ‘similarly concerned with retaining a focus on morality and a common moral framework in the context of a Western world increasingly unable to take moral guidance from religion’ (Osborn 2010, 156). White won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, having refused a knighthood in 1970. He is perhaps the most internationally famous Australian novelist of the twentieth century, and although Osborn writes that ‘the reason for the arranged meeting is unknown’ (Osborn 2010, 156), it makes sense for either Murdoch or Bayley to have wanted to meet White. The meeting may have been arranged by the Australian historian Manning Clark, who met them in Tasmania and wrote to White about them on 22 February 1967, according to Mark McKenna (McKenna 2015, 95). In her 1970 essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, Murdoch included White among novelists on the ‘mystic’ side of the equation, along with Muriel Spark, Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, William Golding ‘and—in one draft for this essay—herself’, according to Peter Conradi (Conradi 2001, 270). John Bayley, as a critic, knew his oeuvre well. He wrote in 1988 that ‘White was one of the very few writers down under who could be fanciful by nature, without giving any impression of self-consciousness.’ He and Murdoch would have been interested in meeting White, and it is interesting that this often caustic and difficult man liked and approved of Murdoch and Bayley. Murdoch’s visit to Australia was certainly a noteworthy event. There was a lot of press coverage: her appearances were announced months in advance and reported on afterwards. And this was not a fleeting interest: Australians have continued to follow her career. A search of her name in

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Australian newspapers over the past 50 years brings up thousands of articles: her books were routinely reviewed by the Australian dailies as they appeared. John Bayley’s memoirs received even more attention, and they were eclipsed by the Richard Eyre film Iris, which had the irritating effect of making people who had never read her books think they knew everything about her and earnestly telling me so. In any case, she was already well enough known in Australia as a prolific novelist, read by many people, and a recognisable name to those who had not read her, when I was writing on her in the late 1990s, well before the film came out in 2001. And in early 2019, in anticipation of the centenary celebrations, the Australian newspaper, the only print national daily, published a feature on her (Dooley 2019). * * * So much for what Australia knew about Iris. What did Iris know about Australia? What did she think of us? Her correspondence with Australian philosopher, the late Brian Medlin (1927–2004), who was almost aggressively Australian—a Marxist, an activist, a bushman and environmentalist—was published in a 2014 collection by his colleague Graham Nerlich and myself. I am not aware that she corresponded regularly with any other Australians, apart from Carmen Callil, her editor at Chatto and Windus, who in any case was based in London. In my article on the Medlin correspondence, I wrote about her views of Australia and how they were influenced by Medlin—not very much, I concluded: his influence on her fiction is slight, and despite all his attempts to complicate her idealised vision of Australia, it seems that she had found out as much about Australia by 1960 when she was writing An Unofficial Rose, before she knew Medlin and before visiting the country in 1967, as she knew thirty years later when writing The Green Knight and Jackson’s Dilemma. (Dooley 2011, 162)

Murdoch met Brian Medlin in 1961 when Medlin was Bayley’s student at New College. He and Bayley were roughly the same age and he and Murdoch became friends through that connection. They shared a love of singing: Bayley told me when I visited him in Oxford in 2010 that Medlin’s singing was ‘not tuneful but enthusiastic.’ In a letter of 9 September 1992, Medlin sent Murdoch the words of two Australian ballads, ‘Jones’s

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Selection’ and ‘Five Miles from Gundagai’, adding ‘Really you should hear me do these ballads. I can’t sing much anymore, but I can still do that sort of thing’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 168). She replied, ‘Thank you for the ballads! I like these offerings very much. I often think about the Man from Snowy River and Shift, Boys, Shift! You chaps are unique’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 170). Her interest in Australian ballads pre-dates her friendship with Medlin. There are some Australian songs among her music manuscripts held at the Iris Murdoch Archive at Kingston University Library. She often wrote out the words and sometimes the melody of a song and annotated the manuscript with the name of her source, or someone connected with the song in some way. A notebook titled ‘Miscellaneous Songs—Songs Bolshevik and Otherwise from the Party Summer School, July 4–12th 1939’ includes an Australian lyric, ‘The Great Australian Adjective’, a humorous poem by W.T.  Goodge, annotated ‘Comrade Weaver’s Song’ (Kingston, IML 1117). Another manuscript notebook, ‘Make a Joyful Noise’, volume 1, includes the words to the famous song ‘Waltzing Matilda’, which is regarded by many as Australia’s unofficial anthem, by A.B. (Banjo) Paterson. It is not annotated with a friend’s name but includes corrections in another hand (Kingston, IML 1118). Medlin’s name does appear connected to one notebook entry, in the second volume of ‘Make a Joyful Noise’ (Kingston, IML 1310). Murdoch copied out the words of six verses of ‘The Ballad of ‘91’ (‘The price of wool was falling / In 1891…’). The words of this ballad were written by Helen Palmer in 1950, and it concerns the historic shearer’s strike in Queensland in 1891. It is not surprising, given Medlin’s politics, that they are annotated at the end ‘From Brian Medlin, March 1962, chez M.’ (Kingston, IML 1310). Medlin’s politics stayed firmly on the Left, while Murdoch’s drifted more towards right of centre. In the early 1970s he was a leader in the Vietnam war protests, and was well known for radicalising his students, to the discomfiture of some of his colleagues. John Bayley told me when I met him in Oxford in 2010 that he remembered Brian singing this song, as well as ‘Waltzing Matilda’. ‘Chez M’ might refer to another Australian associate based in Oxford, Margaret Hubbard. Murdoch had a relationship with Hubbard which led to her resignation from St Anne’s College in 1962: Peter Conradi told me in 2010, when I was doing the research about Murdoch’s Australian links for the earlier article, that one of her ‘colleagues from St Anne’s College was from Australia and might have assisted these researches’—in

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particular, for the character of Penn in An Unofficial Rose (1962). As Penn comes from Adelaide, it seemed likely that Hubbard therefore also hailed from Adelaide. I found an obituary on the Adelaide University website which confirms that fact that she was a graduate of Adelaide University, born in Adelaide in 1924: Margaret was one of the 14 Founding Fellows of the college, a group that also included the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. Margaret is the dedicatee of Murdoch’s novel An Unofficial Rose and is said to have left her stamp on the character of the anthropologist Honor Klein in A Severed Head.1 (My emphasis: note the use of agentless passive to make an intriguing suggestion without claiming responsibility.)

Readers of Living on Paper will know the significance of Margaret Hubbard in Murdoch’s life, a turbulent story which is hardly traceable in the character of Penn Graham, the artless Adelaide boy, seemingly very young for his fifteen years, who appears in An Unofficial Rose, although he is as unimpressed by the English countryside as Hubbard was: ‘He disliked its smallness, its picturesqueness, its outrageous greenness, its beastly wetness’ (Murdoch 1964, 49). In August 1962, Murdoch wrote about Hubbard in her journal: ‘she was very hostile and bullying when we next met, spoke contemptuously about “English homes and gardens”. … Not unusual of course’ (Horner and Rowe 2015, 228). By this time, An Unofficial Rose was finished and, in Murdoch’s typical fashion, put behind her. * * * After Medlin left Oxford and returned to Australia he and Murdoch only met once again, on her trip to Australia with John Bayley in early 1967. She wrote letters to him later reminiscing about the trip, and giving details such as having ready Joseph Furphy’s novel Such is Life in preparation, but she doesn’t mention Brian in her published correspondence to others about the trip. She wrote to David Hicks about it before she left: I view the prospect rather gloomily at the moment I must confess! (The Australian philosophers are peculiarly ferocious.) I’ll look forward very much to seeing you in the summer, if I’m not eaten by a shark. (Horner and Rowe 2015, 330)

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I doubt if Medlin was one of the philosophers she thought of as ferocious. Based on their later correspondence, it seems they had a warm friendship, with some mild intellectual and political sparring, though his reputation at Flinders was as someone to be reckoned with. In 2010 I was lucky enough to receive a transcript of the diary Murdoch kept during her Australian trip, thanks to John and Audi Bayley, and I also met them at their home in Oxford in October that year. The diary entries give the impression of a crammed itinerary with very little time for reflection. The entry for the day she met Patrick White reads, for example, ‘March 5. Quadrant seminar. Drinks Patrick White. Dinner Griselda.’ Her correspondence at the time provides more detail. Her first letter from Australia to Brigid Brophy is worth quoting at length: My dear, sorry not to write sooner—we have scarcely had a moment to breathe since arriving in Australia. (Any unprogrammed moments are taken up by the press.) It’s all very mad and to some extent enjoyable.… Australia seems all right. There is an awful lot of it. Every city seems to despise every other city. We got rather fond of little Perth which lives all by itself over on the West Coast. [here she includes a roughly sketched map of Australia illustrating this fact.] But have heard nothing but anti-Perth jokes since coming east (‘In the midst of life we are in Perth’ etc.). And Canberrans despise Sydney, and vice versa. Sydney actually is super—the harbour is exciting and lovely and full of fine ships, and the bridge is the bridge, and the opera house is the most beautiful single object I’ve seen since getting here (with the possible exception of a West Australian novelist called Jerry Glaskin whom I had reluctantly to leave behind in Perth.) The trees actually are very beautiful too, especially the lemon-scented gums. (Eucalyptus to you.) We have been promised kangaroos, emus, possums, but have seen none yet. (The damn things are nocturnal.) Have seen a lot of splendid birds—wedge-­ tailed eagles, and sinister black cockatoos who go about in wailing groups and are said by the abos to be escorting the souls of the dead. We ran into a writer’s conference in Perth, which was interesting, there was a sort of doleful litany of South Australian writing going on. ‘Why have we got no literature?’ ‘Because we are suburban.’ ‘Because we are prosperous.’ ‘Because we have no guilt feelings’ etc. etc. All very nice chaps however, and it was enjoyable in rather a touching way. (Horner and Rowe 2015, 331–332)

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She also wrote to Elias Canetti from Queensland: ‘This place is anxious, nervy, raw, full of very sweet and unassuming people and of patches of magnificent scenery (trees especially) and lovely birds’ (Horner and Rowe 2015, 333). She was in South Australia from 17 to 20 March. She records in her diary that Brian Medlin met them and they visited the University—I believe it was Flinders University, although she does not specify. They had a free day on the 18th, went shopping, bought a green ring, went to the art gallery, and an evening party with the Medlins. They toured the beautiful Barossa Valley, a historic wine-growing district north of the city the next day. She wrote to Brophy: We are now in Adelaide. … Adelaide is a pretty sort of hick town among brown hills. … I’ve enjoyed Aussieland but I’ve had about enough of it now. The pubs in Adelaide shut at 6, as do all the pubs in NZ. I feel faintly crazy, as if I’d quietly become another person. (Horner and Rowe 2015, 334)

I must say, in defence of my home town, that Adelaide is now not a hick town at all, whatever it might have been in 1967. Premier Don Dunstan came along in the 1970s and brought South Australia into the twentieth century, with late night drinking al fresco and all sorts of exciting artistic and social initiatives, some of which have survived the depredations of the ensuing decades. And the hills are not brown all year round—Murdoch was visiting at the end of our long, hot, dry summer. But her feeling of craziness and unfamiliarity about the country seems to have persisted. When she flew out of Australia at the end of March 1967 after five crammed weeks of travelling all over the country, Australia retreated even further from reality. When it was mentioned in later novels it seemed a place quite out of the orbit of normal life. She felt as though she hardly ‘knew’ Australia well enough to write about it much. ‘I wouldn’t want to extend my scope by forcing myself outside the area where I feel I understand. … I’d like to write about India and Japan, and Australia—well Australia I do touch slightly too,’ she told Stephen Glover in 1976 (Dooley 2003, 40). Richard Todd, in a 1986 symposium, suggested that ‘Australia was often a way, a place for characters to just leave at the end of the novel, to exit or […] to start a new life. But it is also a way of getting them out of the world of the novel, isn’t it?’ In response, Murdoch quipped, ‘Yes, certainly. Yes, I mean you don’t want to kill them all, you know, you send them to Australia’ (Dooley 2003, 178). When Hartley emigrates to

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Australia with her husband at the end of The Sea, The Sea it is as final as death. Charles knows he will never see her again. In my Antipodes article my main focus, when discussing the novels, was Murdoch’s somewhat unconvincing attempt to convey the Australian vernacular, particularly in the character of the publican Kenneth Rathbone in her 1993 novel The Green Knight. However, there is also another aspect of this character which was discussed by Nicholas Spice in his London Review of Books article on The Green Knight. Rathbone is a guileless man who ‘has no trouble seeing Mir for what he is (“I say he’s the best chap I’ve ever met and also the wisest”)’ (Spice 1993). Rather like Penn Graham in An Unofficial Rose, Kenneth Rathbone seems to embody an Australianness like that envisaged by the seamstress Nina in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) in her fantasy of escape from her torment in London: ‘There a rough and generous people would take her to their hearts. She would live in their midst a life of openness and gaiety, respected as a worker and loved as a woman’ (Murdoch 1962, 144). Thus, from the second novel to the second-last, she seems to carry this notion of Australians as uncomplicated figures of good. Spice points out that ‘In contrast to the sophisticated doubts of the better-educated characters, Rathbone’s directness is exemplary’ (Spice 1993). When she was here, as she said to Brophy, she found that people were ‘all very nice chaps’, and to Canetti, ‘Very sweet and unassuming.’ I suspect that neither Patrick White, nor Margaret Hubbard, nor Brian Medlin could have been comprehended by the latter description. * * * A few Australian friends, a short visit to Australia, and a rather romantic picture of the country—’I think of your country as mainly untouched wildness’, she wrote to Medlin in 1991 (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 117): it hardly adds up to a major intellectual influence on her life and work. Her influence on mine is rather more substantial. She has been a presence in life for most of my adult life, as I mentioned at the start of this essay. There are some ways in which, despite our many differences of generation, nationality and so on, our backgrounds are shared. And one way to think about this is the phrase she often uses to describe her father, the Anglo-­ Irish, though New Zealand born, Hughes Murdoch: ‘a clever gentle bookish man’ (Dooley and Nerlich 2014, 67). He was a civil servant. Interesting, somehow, that my own Anglo-Irish father could also be

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described in those terms: he was a scientist in the Australian public service all his working life. He was born in the same year as Iris, just a few months earlier, but in Australia. So we are both from Anglo-Irish families but have lived outside Ireland all our lives. There is another somewhat tenuous link, but an interesting one. There is another ‘clever gentle man’ whom I knew very slightly at Flinders University, the founding Dean of our Medical School, named Gus Fraenkel. His father was a lecturer in Classics at Oxford University, a German Jewish refugee named Eduard Fraenkel. Gus was also born in 1919. I have no idea whether Iris knew that her beloved teacher Eduard Fraenkel’s son had emigrated to Australia and was working at the same university as Brian Medlin from 1970. He is not mentioned in their correspondence. He retired in 1984, and died in 1998. It is actually exaggerating to say I knew him. I doubt if I ever spoke to him, but I knew him by sight: he used to catch my bus occasionally. But there is a collection of his papers, including Fraenkel family history, in Flinders University Library’s Special Collection, where I was the librarian in charge for 15 years. Three post-World-War-One babies: Iris Murdoch, Jim Dooley and Gus Fraenkel, linked by once-removed family relationships and scholarship but never connecting, except in my memory and imagination. * * * In the middle of 1999, I was at the stage of my thesis where I had done most of the writing and I was revisiting my reading. I had somehow, in those days before social media, befriended an Iranian woman, via email, who at that time was the only other person I knew in the world who had a scholarly interest in Murdoch. As I wrote to her, at my university ‘There’s no-one particularly interested in any of my authors’. I didn’t know about the Iris Murdoch Society, which I see from the website was founded in 1986—but if it had a website by 1999 I hadn’t managed to find it—and I had been trying! I cannot find my thesis proposal from 1996, but I remember being almost apologetic about choosing Murdoch to study alongside Lessing and Naipaul, she was so out of favour academically at the time. In July 1999, I wrote to my Iranian friend as follows:

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As for Lessing—well, I’ve begun my programme of re-reading the novels I’ve written about, and it’s basically depressing. Her outlook is just so bleak. Naipaul’s outlook is quite bleak too, I suppose, but his writing has a lot of beauty in the linguistic sense, which Lessing doesn’t go in for. Lessing seems to be thought of as a kind of seer—that’s what I thought of her before I’d read any. It’s partly that reputation that interested me. Murdoch, on the other hand, I just love reading. Perhaps that says more about me than the authors involved, I don’t know!

I ran into difficulties a year later when it was time to submit my thesis. There was no-one in Australia to examine it and it was sent to someone who, although an English literature academic at an Asian university, was interested in Murdoch only as a philosopher and was thoroughly unsympathetic to my approach. He asked for a major rewrite—while the other examiner gave it a pass with flying colours—and it had to go to a third examiner. Eventually, in June 2001, after more than a year, I was notified that I had passed without the need for revisions, but it had been an anxious wait. Meanwhile, my thoughts turned to publication. I decided it might be a good idea to publish a collection of interviews. I knew somehow that Peter Conradi was writing the biography, so I sent him a letter and got an encouraging email back from him straight away. He put me in touch with John Bayley, who responded giving me his approval for the project. Then I started pitching my idea to publishers. I tried several English presses first, including Murdoch’s own publishers Chatto & Windus, and OUP, giving her connection with Oxford, but they completely underwhelmed me with interest. Then I tried Australia, and there was even less interest here. They seemed quite puzzled to be asked—why would an Australian publisher even think of publishing a book about a British writer? So in July 2000 I went through my Murdoch bibliography and picked out the publishers who had brought out books on Murdoch, and sent off an email barrage, mainly to US publishers. University of South Carolina Press was the first of several to send a favourable response, so I sent my proposal to them. The Acquisitions Editor there, Barry Blose, was lovely to work with and delightfully flattering—after a slight delay in replying to one of my emails, he wrote, ‘It’s been much too long since I last wrote, and I won’t be surprised if you’ve by now placed your set of interviews with another publisher […] Whether or not we still have a shot at the interviews, I’m sure that what you’ve done will capture the interest of

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many.’ There was still much to do before I could deliver a manuscript, and then there was the review process, but finally, on 17 August 2001, just a couple of months after my thesis finally passed (55 weeks after submission) he wrote, ‘Dear Gillian: It’s a great pleasure to report that late yesterday afternoon, our Press Committee unanimously authorized a contract for “Conversations with Iris Murdoch.”’ The book was published on 1 April 2003—but far from being an April Fool’s joke it turned out to be one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. The most laborious part of the process of publishing a set of 22 previously published interviews was tracking down the copyright owners and requesting their permission to reprint their work. But that was also a way of getting in touch with the Murdoch community. For example, I had to contact Barbara Stevens Heusel, who told me about a conference in Louisville, suggesting that I propose a panel on Iris Murdoch for the 2002 conference. At that stage I could not afford to travel and my university had not worked out what to do with uppity librarians with PhDs, so I replied saying that I did not think I’d be able to come: I hope that even if I don’t make it to the conference we’ll meet some day. Even in this age of electronic communication, I sometimes feel very isolated from the mainstream of the literary world. In Australia it is considered quite odd and perhaps politically incorrect to be interested in non-Australian literature, so I don’t often meet people face-to-face who are interested in IM.

I still have not made it to Louisville but I went one better: I finally made contact with the Iris Murdoch Society. Anne Rowe kindly agreed to publish an extract from my introduction to the book in the Iris Murdoch Newsletter for 2002. David Robjant was administering a website for the Society and he kindly posted an advance notice of the book there in January 2002. In 2006 my university found a way to give me some money for travel, and I actually made it to the Iris Murdoch Conference in Kingston-upon-­ Thames—and the thrill of being in a room of nearly 100 people who knew who Tallis and Morgan were, who were as interested as I was in whether or not Bradley actually murdered Arnold and, even more amazingly, knew my name—solely owing to the publication of From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003). People actually asked me if I was THE Gillian Dooley. Despite having published several hundreds of thousands of words, including 2 monographs and 8 other

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edited books, on writers including Lessing, Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, Jane Austen and Matthew Flinders, and many Australian authors as well, I am still only THE Gillian Dooley among the members of the Iris Murdoch Society. The Iris Murdoch community is truly international and is like an extended family. Perhaps we do not always get on perfectly, and we sometimes have to agree to disagree, but enduring friendships have resulted from my association with the Society and my participation in its activities. It is true that I have made friends through the other writers I have studied, but there is nothing quite like the Iris Murdoch group. The Facebook group is a constant source of pleasure and a wonderful way to keep in touch with distant friends with shared interests, as well as a useful way of canvasing the scholarly community for opinions or facts. Although we Australians must be wary of the ‘cultural cringe’, I am reluctant to believe that my appreciation of Murdoch is just Anglophilia on my part. After all there are many British writers but only one Iris Murdoch. Somehow those of us who are interested in her tend to be on the same wavelength in a way that is not always the case with other writers. It is a more cohesive group: we are still a small enough international community to know each other and to appreciate each other’s work. It is certainly partly because of the excellent work done over the years by the Iris Murdoch Society since it was founded in 1986, formerly at Kingston University and now at Chichester University. This sense of a world-wide community of friendly colleagues is surely something to do with Murdoch herself and the world she created in her novels. Like many of her characters, I often feel that I don’t quite belong in the world I live in. Murdoch’s books somehow help one be happy with—even perhaps to glory in—one’s own oddness and the strangeness and sadness of one’s life. Murdoch told Frank Kermode that she struggled with the narrative form, whose ‘satisfaction […] is such that it can stop one from going more deeply into the contradictions of paradoxes or more painful aspects of the subject matter’ (Dooley 2003, 63). The glory of Murdoch’s novels is that she never stopped struggling and in her best work she transcended the struggle, forging sublime works of art in the process, works in which the form and the subject matter fuse into searching examinations of the paradoxes and pains of life. And thus, despite the fact that the Australia of her imagination is a distant and rather fantastic world, her novels can be just as meaningful to an Australian born in the middle of the twentieth century as to anyone else on the planet.

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Note 1. This obituary, by Matthew Leigh, is no longer to be found on the Adelaide University website. I have the copy I downloaded in July 2016.

References Bayley, John. 1988. Up from Under. London Review of Books 10 (4): 18 February 1988. Online. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-­paper/v10/n04/john-­bayley/up-­ from-­under. Accessed 25 April 2021. Conradi, Peter. J 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. New York; London: W.W. Norton. Dooley, Gillian, ed. 2003. From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ———. 2011. “You Are My Australia”: Brian Medlin’s Contribution to Iris Murdoch’s Concept of Australia in The Green Knight. Antipodes December: 157–162. ———. 2019. Author Iris Murdoch in Australia. Australian, 23 March. Dooley, Gillian, and Graham Nerlich, eds. 2014. Never Mind about the Bourgeoisie: the correspondence between Iris Murdoch and Brian Medlin 1976–1995. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Haylock, Sean. 2019. Literature and Moral Sense (Flinders University PhD Thesis). Online. https://theses.flinders.edu.au/view/82f2354b-­4e4e-­48a3-­9806-­ d9f2268e9cb2/1. Accessed 25 April 2021. Horner, Avril, and Anne Rowe. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995. London: Chatto and Windus. Kingston University London. n.d. Archives and Special Collections. Iris Murdoch Collections. Leigh, Matthew. 2016. Margaret Hubbard. Adelaide University. Online. http:// arts.adelaide.edu.au/classics/whystudy/Hubbard_obituary.pdf. Accessed 31 July 2016. McKenna, Mark. 2015. Elective Affinities: Manning Clark, Patrick White and Sidney Nolan. In Patrick White Beyond the Grave, ed. Ian Henderson and Anouk Lang, 81–100. Anthem Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1962. The Flight from the Enchanter. London: Penguin. ———. 1964. An Unofficial Rose. London: Reprint Society. Open Syllabus. n.d.. http://explorer.opensyllabusproject.org/. Accessed 23 April 2021. Osborn, Pamela. 2010. “A Story about a Man”: The Demythologized Christ in the Novels of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White. In Iris Murdoch and Morality, ed. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, 156–167. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Spice, Nicholas. 1993. I Hear, I See, I Learn. London Review of Books 4 November. Online. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-­paper/v15/n21/nicholas-­spice/i-­hear-­i-­ see-­i-­learn. Accessed 25 April 2021. White, Patrick. 1994. Letter to Geoffrey Dutton, 6 March 1967. In Letters, ed. David Marr. Sydney: Random House. Wilson, A.N. 2000. Iris Murdoch and the Characters of Love. News from the Royal Society of Literature: 56–65.

CHAPTER 8

‘The Scrambled Script’: Contingency and Necessity in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight Peter D. Mathews

This essay on Iris Murdoch’s penultimate novel The Green Knight (1993) begins not in London, where much of the novel is set, but in a remote part of south-eastern Switzerland known as Sils-Maria. In that region there is a lake, Lake Silvaplana, which holds a special place in the history of modern thought. In August 1881, a solitary walker happened upon a large, uniquely shaped rock on its shores, where he had a revelation that would revolutionise his thought. ‘That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped’, he writes. ‘It was then that this idea came to me’ (Nietzsche 1989, 295). The solitary walker was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and, as this passage from his autobiography Ecce Homo (1888) recounts, the concept he had discovered there was ‘the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all

P. D. Mathews (*) Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_8

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attainable’ (295). Why this passage from Nietzsche is so central to an understanding of The Green Knight may not be immediately apparent but, in keeping with the spirit of Nietzsche’s discovery, it is a moment to which I shall return at the conclusion of this paper in order to explain its importance in more detail. This subversion of the usual rules of academic writing may seem unsettling, but let us not forget that the human inability to grasp the full significance of lived experiences when we first encounter them is a crucial part of what Murdoch is exploring in The Green Knight. In what Nick Turner calls ‘one of Murdoch’s longest and most puzzling novels’, the key to understanding the logic of this difficult text lies in realising the crucial role played by repetition in the process of understanding (Turner 2007, 118). At the centre of the novel’s plot, for instance, is Peter Mir’s insistence on a re-enactment of his first encounter with stepbrothers Lucas and Clement Graffe, a fateful night when Lucas, instead of murdering his brother as intended, appears to kill Peter with a blow to the head from a baseball bat. Clustered around this event is a typically Murdochian cast of characters connected to the stepbrothers: the ‘good girl’ Louise Anderson, the widowed mother of three young daughters, Aleph, Sefton, and Moira; the ‘bad girl’ Joan Blacket and her son Harvey, who has a close friendship with Aleph; Bellamy James, who has decided to take religious orders; Bellamy’s dog, Anax, who has been adopted by the Andersons; as well as a host of minor characters including the social worker Tessa Millen, Aleph’s friend Rosemary Adwarden, and the rich couple Clive and Emil, who are loaning their apartment to Harvey. The drama of their lives is overshadowed by the sudden intrusion of Peter Mir, who initially claims that Lucas’s strike has affected his ability to work as a psychoanalyst, leading him to demand the compensation of delivering his own blow. The crucial repetition of this scene makes possible the recovery of Peter’s memory and sense of self, driving Murdoch’s self-consciously theatrical plot into its next act, in which he unexpectedly metamorphoses into a beloved friend. Lucas’s initial attack was already, in a sense, a kind of repetition, a psychological replay of the sibling rivalry between Lucas and Clement. This connection is enhanced by Lucas’s employment of the same bat the boys once used in their sadistic childhood game of ‘Dogs’. At yet another level, the tension between the two brothers can be read as the latest permutation of a mythical trope that, as Lucas points out, goes back to ancient times: ‘Why did Cain kill Abel? Why did Romulus kill Remus?’ (Murdoch 1995, 88). This recurrent human fascination with dark and

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traumatic experiences is what compels Murdoch’s characters to repeat them. For instance, what does Harvey Blacket do when he returns to the bridge in Italy where he so disastrously injured his foot? He jumps right back up and walks along its precarious balustrade, an act he describes as a ‘kind of homeopathy’, a repetition that is required to ‘complete the cure’ (459). Such returns are the primary method offered in the novel for understanding the baffling events of life: Murdoch’s characters repeat in order to comprehend what happened to them. Yet this ‘homeopathic’ method is far from straightforward, for repetitions often spin off in unexpected directions, with consequences that obscure as much as they reveal. Peter’s sudden recollection of his Buddhist past, for instance, transforms his character in a positive way, but this metamorphosis also turns out to be something of a false revelation. He is not a psychoanalyst, as he initially claimed, but a rich butcher, and his dramatic departure in the middle of a dinner party at the instigation of his doctor, and subsequent unexpected death in hospital, leave his newfound friends with a host of unanswered questions. Such fragmentation is a phenomenon that has been much discussed by critics of the novel, particularly in relation to the fact that Murdoch’s novel, through its title, positions itself as a reprise of the medieval classic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Yet as Liliana Sikorska points out, the connection between these two texts is anything but simple: Iris Murdoch’s novel is not a historical novel, neither is it a translation of the medieval into the contemporary, a simple rewriting of a medieval story with contemporary characters replacing the medieval ones. Rather the medieval Green Knight glosses the contemporary one. The connection between the two texts is as much intertextual as it is philosophical. (Sikorska 2000, 262)

Sikorska is not alone in this opinion, with Milada Franková similarly pointing out that ‘Murdoch [only] retains the outer framework of the Beheading Game of retribution and mercy, the themes of virtue and truth and certainly the enigmatic mood. The rest is jumbled, reversed or hinted at by allusions’ (Franková 1995, 79). Murdoch fails to follow the pattern established by the earlier text in her novel in any meaningful way. Rather than a straightforward tracing, her repetition of the script provided by Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is deliberately modified, scrambled in such a way that the influence of the original is barely recognisable. Repetition may be the chosen method toward understanding, but this particular

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repetition, far from being faithful or mindless, turns out to be wild and unpredictable to the point of chaos. Such divergence is visible in all of Murdoch’s textual repetitions in the novel and may be seen, at one level, as an attempt by her characters to assert their freedom against the limitations imposed by pre-existing narratives. W.S. Hampl regards such upheavals as deriving from the ‘queering’ of social and familial configurations in Murdoch’s work, ‘a result of the destruction of traditional sexual categories, the point toward which Murdoch’s writings commonly strive’ (Hampl 2001, 658). This tendency stems from the same impetus toward a repetition that critically rearranges things in a newly ‘queer’ way. While this argument provides insight into some aspects of The Green Knight, especially the queer configurations that develop around the character of Bellamy James, it does not fully explain the larger question of Murdoch’s decision to scramble the various narrative ‘scripts’ that are referenced in the course of the novel. Certainly, there is an element of rebelling against convention in Murdoch’s ironic ‘queering’ and parodying of the reader’s expectations, but these twists on familiar stories are supplemented by a simultaneous proliferation and fragmentation of Murdoch’s points of reference: Familiar as Murdoch’s mythic materials are, as they surface in her novel, they appear uncommonly strange, too—akin to shipwrecked fragments in a much larger sea of stories. […] Murdoch leaves neither character nor plot entirely intact in her revision of the novel’s primary source, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Murdoch’s hands, the shape of this medieval romance is peculiarly borrowed, bent, and ultimately even ‘broken’. (Arnell 2004, 72)

This aesthetic recalls T.S. Eliot, a wasteland of narrative fragments in which storylines proliferate, intersect, and sometimes terminate abruptly, without explanation.1 For Carla Arnell, this fragmentation—or ‘mythic brokenness’—interrupts the imperative aspect of narrative repetition, ‘a narrative technique meant to allow Murdoch’s characters greater freedom’ (79). The metaphorical cracks that emerge in the process of retelling earlier narratives, in other words, are what allow her characters to subvert and change the stories to reflect their own configurations of desire. There is also a tension in this mode of presentation, a sense of theatre that the characters both adopt and implicitly strive against. Aleph, for instance, observes early in the novel that ‘Yes, we are players, actors’, and yet Murdoch follows this up by stating that ‘they could agree that there

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was nothing in the world more natural than their mutual mode of speech’: the unnaturalness of their dramatic dialogue is identified as uncanny and artificial, and yet it is nonetheless accepted as ‘natural’ (Murdoch 1995, 38). A similar twist occurs in Murdoch’s description of Bellamy, who has recently decided to quit his quotidian life to devote himself to God. ‘Bellamy removed his black jacket and undid his white shirt … since his ‘decision’ he had dressed always in black and white, a solemnity undermined by Clement who said he was just always playing Hamlet’ (44–45). Bellamy’s drastic decision to pursue a spiritual life thus leads him to dress as the character in English literature who represents the epitome of indecisiveness. No allusion in Murdoch’s novel is safe from this repeated twisting and reshaping, to the point where the system of references may be declared, in Arnell’s words, ‘broken’. The artificial is natural, the decisive is indecisive, and convention is subversion: in short, everything in the Murdochian universe is subject to a potentially infinite reversibility that makes it impossible to settle on a single point of meaning, a mind-bending mode of fiction familiar to readers of her previous novels. This fragmentation results not only from Murdoch’s playfully loose correspondences between her characters and the references to which she compares them, but also from the sheer proliferation of allusions with which she connects them. Peter Mir serves as a particularly useful example in this regard. Kanan Savkay, for instance, argues that Peter represents the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. ‘Not only is the novel’s protagonist, Peter Mir, of Russian-Jewish origin and living as an immigrant—just like Levinas’, writes Savkay, ‘but Peter’s ideas on justice and the other appear to coincide with those of the philosopher’ (Savkay 2012, 2). In Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life, Priscilla Martin and Anne Rowe point out the similarities between Peter Mir and Jesus Christ: ‘There are blows, magicians, temptations and justice in both, but no exact correspondences. […] Like Christ, Peter has in some sense died in place of another and has in some sense come back from the dead’ (Martin and Rowe 2010, 157). Martin and Rowe’s caveat that there are ‘no exact correspondences’ is an important one, because the number of possible precursors that Peter Mir might resemble does not end there: When Louise returned to the Aviary the others were playing the game of what character in fiction Peter Mir reminded them of.       ‘I think he’s Mr Pickwick’, said Louise.       ‘Oh no! Never!’ said Sefton. ‘I think he’s more like Prospero’.

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      ‘I think he’s the Green Knight’, said Aleph. ‘Come on, Moy, what do you think?’      ‘I think he’s the Minotaur’.       ‘The Minotaur isn’t a literary character, he’s a mythical character’, Sefton objected.      ‘Oh really – !’       ‘What does Clement think?’ said Aleph.       ‘I think he’s Mephistopheles’. said Clement. (Murdoch 1995, 195)

In addition to Levinas, Christ, Mr. Pickwick, Prospero, the Green Knight, the Minotaur, and Mephistopheles, Peter Mir is elsewhere compared in the novel to Lazarus (117), Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider (342), and ‘something out of Beowulf’ (215). This dizzying multiplication of references is not limited to Peter Mir, with many of the other characters subject to similarly manifold points of comparison—thus, Clement is Harlequin, Joan Blacket is Circe, Moy is Andromeda, Aleph is a Valkyrie, and Tessa Millan is the Cheshire Cat. Murdoch’s allusions appear and proliferate with dizzying speed, pieces of meaning that are taken up briefly, like masks, and then discarded for something else. Far from increasing meaning, this flood of signification creates a cacophony, a scrambled script pieced together from fragments that, in their heterogeneity, never come together to form a unified whole. In order to make sense of Murdoch’s orchestrated chaos, commentators on Murdoch’s work have frequently turned to philosophical interpretations. Miles Leeson, for instance, argues in Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist that Arthur Schopenhauer is the key figure for unlocking what is at stake in The Green Knight. ‘Although Lucas is undeniably Nietzschean in form, […] I would argue that it is the influence of Schopenhauer that is central to The Green Knight’, he contends. ‘Schopenhauer’s development of Kant’s thought is central to seeing The Green Knight correctly: what is the connection between the world as it is in itself and the world as it appears to us?’ (Leeson 2010, 126). Arnell makes a similar point, but replaces Schopenhauer with the more obvious choice of Plato: Murdoch’s implicit attitude towards myth here bears a clear resemblance to that of the philosopher Plato. Like Plato, Iris Murdoch is suspicious of human myth-making and encourages characters to leave behind false fictions (mythoi) in turning towards the light of truth. At the same time, though, it is through myth that Murdoch, like Plato, illuminates her characters’ quest for the good. (Arnell 2004, 82)

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Complicating this issue are what might be called the Nietzschean aspects of the novel. As Leeson points out, Lucas is the character who is most closely associated with this perspective, with his outlook referred to, in an allusion to Nietzsche’s 1886 work, as ‘[b]eyond good and evil’ (Murdoch 1995, 172) during a conversation between Bellamy and Peter Mir. A humourless scholar, Lucas is, however, closer to a caricature of Nietzsche who, in confronting reality, believes he has stripped life of all its illusions and myths. Lucas’s advice to Sefton not to marry for the sake of her intellectual integrity (274) is lifted straight from the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) and is succeeded by a denunciation of historicism that echoes Nietzsche’s essay on this topic in Untimely Meditations (1876). Despite the centrality of his ideas to The Green Knight, however, Nietzsche cannot be allowed to function as a focal point by Murdoch, precisely because the novel, with its aesthetic of scrambling and multiplication, actively rejects the possibility of being solved by a single thinker or idea. Anne Rowe perceptively traces the outlines of this refusal in a chapter on Murdoch’s secular theology: The Green Knight (1994) is much concerned with the nature and function of role models and is one of her most religious in the sense that it is a meditation on how human beings should justly respond to evil […] Here, it appears that she has lost any attempt at a governing vision, there is no incontestable argument for the sovereignty of any position and her compassion assuages any sense of evil. […] The Green Knight is an exercise in iconoclasm and here Murdoch provides a moving, self-deprecating deconstructing of herself, her moral philosophy and her neo-theology, as any ideal model. For her, idols are too easily drawn into subjective perceptions of truth, too easily manipulated to serve individual fantasies […] and the sheer complexity of Murdoch’s novels resists any attempts at deifying her position. (Rowe 2010, 153)

Murdoch thus executes a carefully calculated double movement in this novel, in which she gives a prominent place to the ideas of Nietzsche, while taking care to remove him from a position in her text where he might be taken for an idol or saviour. Nietzsche reveals the complex interplay between myth and reality in experience by arguing that the evaluation of the world, the human desire to find patterns and meanings in how it works, is an arbitrary delusion that only ever reflects our prejudices, never reality as it actually is. He makes his

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bluntest pronouncement on this situation in Section 109 of The Gay Science (1882), in which he reminds his readers that the godlessness of the universe results not in a vision of pure, random chaos, but rather a complex dance between contingency and necessity: The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. […] None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word ‘accident’ has meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type. (Nietzsche 1974, 168)

This censure of the apparent stupidity of mythical evaluations of the world, reflected in the novel by Lucas’s outlook of stoic bleakness, is counterbalanced in Nietzsche by a complementary joy that the iron hand of fate has thereby also been disrupted. In The Green Knight, Moy Anderson represents this journey to the other, joyful side of the Nietzschean coin, the birth of an amor fati that accepts with happiness the revelation of the eternal return. Murdoch’s novel only makes sense in the light of this interplay between contingency and necessity, with each random event in her narrative zig-­ zagging through the lives of her characters like a ball launched into a pinball machine. At the re-enactment of Lucas’s attack on Peter Mir, for instance, Clement refers to ‘the work of chance’ (Murdoch 1995, 279) that brought the three of them together. Speaking with the belief that he is somehow directing this piece of ‘theatre’, his feeling of control is overturned when he appears to see Peter Mir struck by lightning, a symbol of chance. The role of contingency is also highlighted by Murdoch when Anax the dog makes his escape, resulting in a panicked rescue effort. Although the most rational strategy for finding Anax would be to follow the paths where Bellamy, Anax’s former owner, used to take his dog on their walks together, that option is blocked when his rescuers realize that ‘in fact there were hundreds of possible ways and they must decide something at once’ (181). The search for Anax is only a minor incident in the

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novel, but Murdoch reminds the reader that it nonetheless was crucial to the outcome of the plot. ‘If at that moment Clement had caught sight of the dog and had managed to capture him, the fates of a number of people in this story would have been entirely different’, she observes. ‘Such is the vast play of chance in human lives’ (185). The different paths of chance may be random, but once taken, their potentiality immediately hardens into necessity. In much the same way, Lucas’s admonition to Sefton about the dangers of historicism are juxtaposed in the novel with her own habit of imagining how real historical events might have turned out differently, and the consequences such variations might have wrought. In one passage, for instance, Sefton ponders what might have happened if England had not fallen under Norman rule: Sefton, abandoning Fisher’s History of Europe, was now wondering: what would have happened if Harold had defeated the Normans? Or if Canute had lived longer? England would have become part of a Danish confederacy with its capital in Denmark. Europe would have been unified. Would that have been a good thing or a bad thing? (15)

A couple of pages later, Sefton has moved on from English history, instead expressing her admiration for Hannibal and wondering how world history might have been different if he had succeeded in conquering Rome. These musings set a pattern in the novel for Sefton, who contemplates a number of similar questions. If, like his father, Edward III had been murdered, would it have prevented the Hundred Years War? Or later in the novel: ‘Where did the Romans come from? If Augustine had not discovered Plato would things have been different? What things would have been different? The Renaissance for instance?’ (261). Both the public and private worlds that Murdoch presents in The Green Knight are subject to this interplay between contingency and necessity, with events gaining their sense of compulsion only from the fact that the characters just happen to be in a particular place at a particular time—walking at night in the park, for instance, at the precise moment when a baseball bat was poised to deliver its murderous blow. Despite its apparent chaos, there are nonetheless patterns of repetition that emerge in the world, proclivities that cut a path through existence in much the same way that a trickle of water can, over time, transform into a forceful, raging torrent. Murdoch has a long-standing fascination with the

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cultural and religious forms these patterns take, with Peter Mir, for instance, referring to the Hindu cycle of reincarnation described in ‘the discussion between Krishna and Arjuna’ (306) in The Bhagavad Gita. Lucas provides a further catalogue of these cyclical ideas, describing Peter’s experience of returning from the dead as ‘something like the Buddhist Bardo, or the Christian Limbo—and the Greeks pictured Hades as a twilit world’ (254). Yet these phases of repetition are experienced as temporal cages, as Harvey explains: ‘I feel so trapped. Eternel retour. I still don’t know what it means, but it’s what I feel’ (263). The eternal return is experienced here by Harvey as Nietzsche originally describes it in The Gay Science, as ‘the greatest weight’, a fateful burden that is initially perceived as soul-crushing. For Murdoch, these cycles of repetition, however imaginary, form the mythical prisons from which humanity must learn, if possible, to free itself. Recall the conclusion of The Sea, The Sea (1978), another text where Murdoch engages in a surreptitious dialogue with Nietzsche’s eternal return, in which James Arrowby uses his powers as a master Bodhisattva to end his own life, thus apparently stepping outside the cycle of the bardo. Yet that novel’s real conclusion comes when the imprisoned demon in James’s apartment (remembering that it is a demon who announces the eternal return in The Gay Science) is released when its container is tipped onto the floor by the hammering of construction workers ‘in the next flat’ (Murdoch 2001, 495). In a strict sense, therefore, there is no conclusion to the novel, only an opening onto the next iteration of ‘the demon-­ ridden pilgrimage of human life’ (495). In The Green Knight, Aleph similarly struggles to find a way to transform the eternal return into something open and positive, as she reveals in this conversation with Harvey: Aleph laughed and clinked the crutches together. ‘Well, one must work, what else is there, what other meaning is there in life?’ ‘You’ve got that ewige Wiederkehr feeling again’. ‘Nothing so interesting’. ‘So you’re not a romantic any more, youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm, not even the Magus Zoroaster?’ ‘Oh do not speak of him. So you contemplate an extreme act?’ ‘No, I wish I could. We have been so much loved, I can’t give life any other meaning, am I supposed now to create new meanings?’ (Murdoch 1995, 110–111)

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Although Murdoch expresses ambivalence about Nietzsche in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), her deeper engagement with his work shines through in a passage replete with Nietzschean allusions, from Harvey’s citation of the concept of the eternal return in the original German, to the invocation of Zoroaster, the Greek variation of the ancient sage that Nietzsche chooses as his protagonist in his masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). Aleph eventually finds the solution to her problem by dramatically breaking with her apparent fate, the long-held expectation that her intimacy with Harvey will develop into something more, and instead elopes to America with Lucas, thus opening up her life to the ‘new meanings’ (111) she intimated to Harvey earlier in the novel. This subversion of expected outcomes is the basic configuration for all the characters in The Green Knight, who find ways to overcome their seemingly fated roles in order to discover, like Aleph, a new and different life for themselves. In this respect, the most important character in the novel is Moy, whose real name is Moira, the Greek word for ‘fate’, a choice that signals her allegorical role in the story. While it may be tempting to designate Bellamy, with his yearning for spiritual purity, as the Sir Gawain to Peter Mir’s Green Knight, Moy is really the character who crucially links together the novel’s Nietzschean themes with its medieval namesake. Her status as Gawain is signalled, in particular, by her receipt, around the middle of the novel, of a green girdle from Peter Mir (213). This scene is accompanied by Peter’s birthday gift to Moy of a decorative box, a kind of mock Holy Grail that, symbolically, turns out to be empty. Much later in the novel, as Moy admires the figure of Rembrandt’s Polish Rider (recalling that in Ecce Homo Nietzsche fantasizes about being descended from Polish aristocracy), she compares her own lowly state to this figure’s imagined nobility: He is courage, he is love, he loves what is good, and will die for it, and his body will be trampled by horses’ hooves, and no one will know his grave. She thought, he is so beautiful, he has the beauty of goodness. I am a freak, a crippled animal, something which will be put down and out of its misery, I am a hump-backed dwarf. (386)

These last words are again a reference to the eternal return, this time to the section titled ‘Of the Vision and the Riddle’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which a dwarf, rather than a demon, is Zarathustra’s interlocutor when formulating this concept. The crucial subplot involving Moy’s stones is

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the culmination of these ideas: the stones symbolize the gravity of fate, while Moy’s telekinetic ability to move them with her mind is a secret power born of her teleological thinking. Each stone, she believes, has a rightful place and destiny, and she is overwhelmed by guilt when she thinks how she has wrongly disrupted these lines by collecting them. The importance of Moy to the overall interpretation of The Green Knight, in particular the scene toward the end of the book where she aims to return a stone she has taken from Bellamy’s seaside cottage to where she originally found it, has been highlighted by at least two other commentators on Murdoch’s novel. Arnell, for instance, argues that ‘Moy’s eventual quest to return the stone to its home is particularly significant to the meaning of The Green Knight because of the way it links Moy’s story to Peter Mir’s and reveals a larger mythic pattern that ultimately structures many of the other characters’ stories as well—a quest to remember what is right and fitting’ (Arnell 2004, 81). In his chapter ‘Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction’, Rob Hardy closes his analysis with an extended reflection on the meaning of Moy’s gesture: In giving to Moy her own storytelling rights and, in a life starved of external ritual, giving her access to a healing ritual of her own devising, Murdoch offers a view of the soul and its capacity to heal itself […] Moy, radiating her creator’s light, is an image of a person who has to find her own way without the help of psychotherapist or priest. But Murdoch also knew of those whom priests or psychotherapists can help—and one of her triumphs as a novelist is that she so intuitively and delicately distinguishes between the two kinds of person. And in controlling her disapproval of the ritual devised by a disbelieving priest to bring a young woman out of hell, in entering into the mind of a Jungian psychiatrist trying to rescue another of hell’s inhabitants, and in telling the story of a young man searching for a healing sign despite himself, Murdoch shows us that the psyche is, in the sense in which Jung meant those words, spiritual and divine. (Hardy 2010, 54)

Both Arnell and Hardy thus interpret the return of the stone as a movement of resolution and closure, in which the stone’s replacement by Moy signals an affirmation of the correct order of things. This shared conclusion, however, goes against every lesson that the novel teaches about the contingency of the world, in which Murdoch shows how the mythical scripts humanity once used to make sense of the world’s patterns are really seductive traps. The demon of disorder always returns to disrupt and undo the neat endings that humans devise.

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Moy’s return of the stone to its supposedly appropriate place is thus Murdoch’s implicit caricature of human mythologies of order, an ironic event that is forged from the ridiculous notion that stones have a teleological yearning, together with the fact that Moy cannot actually remember the stone’s exact location. When Moy proves unable to find where the stone is supposed to go, it is Anax who leads her to a random place where the stone miraculously fits, a fortuitous match that is almost certainly not the stone’s original place of retrieval. The location that Murdoch chooses for this scene is anything but arbitrary, however, marked as it is by a ‘rock, rising high, high out of the grass, a smooth grey pyramid, criss-crossed with hieroglyphics, quite unlike the rocks of the sea, unique, solitary, sacred’, an unmistakable echo of the rock Nietzsche describes in Ecce Homo as the place where the inspiration for the eternal return first came to him (Murdoch 1995, 470). This connection is given further weight by the site’s description in more recent texts, such as Mark Anderson’s fictional reconstruction Zarathustra Stone (2011), where he describes Nietzsche’s rock as a ‘hulking pyramidal stone, alien in its strangeness, mystic in its allure’ (Anderson 2016, 139). In I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche (2018), Sue Prideaux provides a lengthier depiction: Standing on the shore of Lake Silvaplana beside a monumental pyramid-­ shaped boulder that later he was to name ‘Zarathustra’s Rock’, he conceived the thought of eternal recurrence […] It can be no coincidence that he expressed the idea of the life of man as the ring of human existence. Wagner had not only composed his Ring but had meticulously structured it as a ring, an eternal recurrence, a circular tale whose hourglass turns and turns again and again. Nietzsche also wrote down the name Zarathustra for the first time in his Sils-Maria notebook, but only the name. Both ideas would take some more years to ripen. (Prideaux 2018, 191–192)

The scene in which Moy returns the stone is thus overladen with symbolism, in which the figure of fate (Moira) puts down the dead weight of teleological thinking (the stone) and discovers the contingent joy of the eternal return. Murdoch’s inevitable twist, of course, is that the site of the eternal return is transposed from the shores of Lake Silvaplana to Bellamy’s house by the sea, another symbol of endless recurrence, where an undecided future opens before Moy, Bellamy, Clive, and Anax that, like the conclusion of The Sea, The Sea, resembles not an ending or a resolution, but yet another beginning, another scrambled repetition.

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Note 1. The influence of Eliot on Murdoch is particularly visible in her essay “T.S. Eliot as a Moralist”.

References Anderson, Mark. 2016. Zarathustra Stone: Friedrich Nietzsche in Sils-Maria. Nashville: S. Ph. Anonymous. 1998. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Trans. Keith Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. The Bhagavad Gita. Trans. Juan Mascaró. London: Penguin. Arnell, Carla A. 2004. So Familiar, Yet So Strange: Mythic Shadows of the Medieval Gawain Romance in Iris Murdoch’s Green Knight. Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R.  Tolkien, C.S.  Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 24 (2): 72–86. Franková, Milada. 1995. The Green Knight and the Myth of the Green Man. Brno Studies in English 21 (1): 77–83. Hampl, W.S. 2001. Desires Deferred: Homosexual and Queer Representations in the Novels of Iris Murdoch. Modern Fiction Studies 47 (3): 657–673. Hardy, Rob. 2010. Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction. In Iris Murdoch and Morality, ed. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, 43–55. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Leeson, Miles. 2010. Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist. London and New York: Continuum. Martin, Priscilla, and Anne Rowe. 2010. Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Murdoch, Iris. 1995. The Green Knight. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1998. T.S. Eliot as a Moralist. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, 161–170. New York: Allen Lane. ———. 2001. The Sea, the Sea. London: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1974. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage ———. 1984. Untimely Meditations. Trans. R.J.  Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage. Prideaux, Sue. 2018. I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche. New  York: Tim Duggan Books.

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Rowe, Anne. 2010. 'The Dream That Does Not Cease to Haunt Us’: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness. In Iris Murdoch and Morality, ed. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, 141–155. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Savkay, Canan. 2012. Ethics and the Third Party in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight. Philosophy and Literature 36 (2): 347–362. Sikorska, Liliana. 2000. Constructing the Middle Ages in Contemporary Literature and Culture: The Reading of Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: International Review of English Studies 35: 259–271. Turner, Nick. 2007. Saint Iris? Murdoch’s Place in the Modern Canon. In Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe. Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 9

‘Adolescent Girls Attract Ghosts’: Iris Murdoch and the Supernatural Miles Leeson

A substantial amount of space has been given to thinking about, and critiquing, Murdoch’s Gothic novels. These are, arguably, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), The Bell (1958), The Unicorn (1963), The Italian Girl (1964) and The Time of the Angels (1966), with perhaps the most detailed critical work in this area having been written by Avril Horner a little over a decade ago. Horner’s work, from an earlier Palgrave collection, sets out to highlight two elements. The first, that Murdoch uses the gothic form to ‘explore the representation of evil’, is straightforward enough. The second, and of most interest with regard to this chapter, is that ‘whereas her essays advocate mature and dispassionate objectivity of thought, the Gothic novel relies on sensationalism, melodrama, the irrational and excess for its effects’ (Rowe and Horner 2010, 71). It is this I wish to explore more fully here in relation to Murdoch’s ongoing investment in the supernatural and the clear connections that she makes between the supernatural

M. Leeson (*) Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester, Chichester, West Sussex, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_9

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and the contingency, or messiness, of her fictional world. However true it may be to see these novels as experiments with the Gothic (although perhaps not The Flight from the Enchanter in its entirety), little attention has been given to her use of the supernatural. This strikes me as odd when we find themes, images and particular Gothic archetypes throughout her work; from Jake’s perception of Sadie as a witch in Under the Net (1954) through to the strange angelic character of Jackson in Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). Unlike her Gothic fiction which draws to a close with The Time of the Angels (although gothic images do break out in the later work), elements of the supernatural flow consistently. This chapter will contend that this constant flow of the supernatural occurs for three particular reasons. First, that Murdoch is using these in a subtle way, particularly in her first-person male narrator novels, to critique toxic masculinity; second, that the spiritual dimension of life is closer to us than we believe; and finally, that the young women on the cusp of adulthood in her novels have a particular connection to magic and the paranormal. This link is not merely rooted in earlier works of fantasy and fairy-tale but resonates with Murdoch’s conception of natural goodness and the connection of the supernatural to the rhythms of the natural world. This chimes with the recent work of Lucy Bolton in The Murdochian Mind (2022) on Murdoch and feminism where she states that: Murdoch is interested in particular human beings and individuals in their particular situations. This, I suggest, aligns her thinking far more with current feminism in its emphasis on intersectionality and phenomenological embodiment, than with second-wave feminism’s focus on specific women’s rights and sexual discrimination. (Bolton in Caprioglio Panizza and Hopwood 2022, 439)

This phenomenological element concerns not just the experience of the embodied individual but the contention that there is a connection between innocence and magic in a damaged world. As Lucy Oulton (2022) states, speaking of the former in her recent work in the same collection of essays, ‘Key for Murdoch is perception, felt through the body, that engenders an outward looking loving gaze on another reality’ (Caprioglio Panizza and Hopwood 2022, 464). Perhaps the latter should not surprise us given Murdoch’s love for classic children’s fiction, such as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan as well as Greek mythology; although I believe that particular uses of fantasy within her work are embedded to lead us out of our interiority to consider the world as a whole rather than to lead us inward

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to reinforce our own individuality and ego: naturally this chimes with her philosophical trajectory. Whilst it is possible to view Murdoch’s regular use of ‘fey’ (her term) for young women in her fiction as negative, regressive stereotyping, I contend that it instead supports a connection between the contingency of the fictional world and a radical empowerment in women’s agency. This will be discussed with regard to Felicity in The Sandcastle (1957) and Moy in The Green Knight (1993), but first it is crucial to consider the various forms the supernatural takes in her work. In order to conceptualise these three particular ways of reading the supernatural in Murdoch’s work, I think it worth turning to her non-­ fiction to give a conceptual framework. First, it is important to note that Murdoch does not want us to use fantasy (and this includes the supernatural) to support our own internalised fantasies. As she says in her essay ‘Against Dryness’ (1961), ‘Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling, and defeats our attempts, in W.H. Auden’s words, to use it as magic’ (Murdoch 1997, 295). Of course some works of Fantasy can take us out of ourselves, and Murdoch highlights the work of Tolkien in her essay ‘Art as the Imitation of Nature’ (1978) as a prime exemplar of this, but she warns against any fictional work, or indeed any artwork, that supports or inflates the ego. In The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977) she says that ‘magic in its own regenerative form as the fantastic doctoring of the real for consumption by the private ego is the bane of art as it is of philosophy’ (Murdoch 1997, 455). This essay, written approximately fifteen years after ‘Against Dryness’, and close in time to ‘Art as the Imitation of Nature’, gives the strong suggestion that the supernatural should not be used to undermine the real but to point towards something beyond our everyday existence. Of course there are some key examples of this in Murdoch’s fiction, particularly the recurrence of flying saucers in The Nice and the Good (1969)—worth noting that the young twins, Henrietta and Pierce, are given this vision and that this is dismissed as a fantasy by the older characters in the novel, and yet it appears in reality toward the end—and The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983)—a flying saucer seen once by (the adult) George McCaffrey. Perhaps we could even point to the sea monster in The Sea, The Sea (1978), although this may well be a manifestation of Charles Arrowby’s unconscious mind. These experiences are taken seriously by Murdoch, if not by the majority of her characters. For example, Henrietta subscribes to The Flying Saucer Review, and Murdoch does not use this for comedic purposes but to throw the adult characters, with their fantasy-ridden lives, into sharp relief. There is

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far more of the speculative supernatural in fictional ‘Murdochland’ than is dreamt of in her philosophy. Perhaps Murdoch’s most important contribution to this discussion in her philosophy is in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) where she says that: We need for purposes of discussion two words for two concepts: a distinction between egoistic fantasy and liberated truth-seeking imagination. Can there not be high evil fantasising forms of creative imaginative activity? A search for candidates will, I think, tend to reinforce at least the usefulness of a distinction between ‘fantasy’ as mechanical egoistic untruthful and ‘imagination’ as truthful and free. (Murdoch 1992, 321)

Although it could be tempting to take this as her final word on fantasy and imagination, and then consider them both in relationship to the supernatural, I think there is something more at play here. What interests me is this idea of unreflective vision and the links that this has to her egotistical, generally unrepentant, and certainly fantasy-driven male characters in her first-person narrated novels. Murdoch is using this particular model of narrative mode for her own devices to show possible routes out of this Gothic darkness. This, of course, has its roots in the Platonic allegory of The Cave, which is central to her thought, but in the earliest work she is still experimenting and finding the form that works best for her. That the Gothic genre, broadly defined, ceases to a large extent after the fiction of the mid-1960s is telling. Even though there are echoes of it in the suggestions of the satanic rites in The Nice and The Good and the darkness and spider-imagery of Bruno in Bruno’s Dream (1970), in both cases these are used to explore the representation of evil as Horner has suggested. It is also worth noting that Murdoch is fond of returning to the image of birds huddled in a dusty cupboard—found in several novels but most strongly in The Time of the Angels—that concerns the awfulness of the death of God and the spiritual malaise that follows; these returns to particular themes and character traits are closely linked to the supernatural. As she says later in Metaphysics, ‘Literature is a vast scene of confusion, that is of freedom’ (Murdoch 1992, 189). Perhaps, then, we need to see these concerns in relationship to her thoughts on the use of language. Murdoch makes the point that the world of linguistic philosophy— especially the work of the early Wittgenstein that she was invested in— makes no allowance for the supernatural or magic, and this is played out

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in the tension between one of her primary philosophical interlocutors and the world of her fiction. In part this need not concern this chapter for its primary driver is her fictional output; as she says to Bryan Magee ‘Philosophy aims to clarify and explain […] Literature entertains, it does many things, and philosophy does one thing.’ (Murdoch 1997, 4). Lesser known, however, are her thoughts from her journal from 1947 where she says that ‘emotion changes determined world for magic world. And nb world can suddenly shew itself as magic. This is a permanent existential quality of the world. Nb social world is magical’. She develops this by positing this question: there are she says ‘two main types for motion—acc. to whether consc. W. spontaneous finality changes the world—or where the world reveals its own existential magic quality [and that] pure phenomenological reflection can grasp emotion as constituting magic world’. (Murdoch 1947). This material, written in the decade prior to the beginning of her major published works, could be dismissed as a response to the fallout of the Second World War. But I see it as her nascent working through of her early interest in Sartre and Existentialism running up against her developing interest (at this point in her life via the influence of Donald MacKinnon) in both the spiritual and supernatural aspects of the world. Within five years or so this would be replaced by a return to Plato filtered through the work of Simone Weil. In her review of Simone Weil’s Notebooks, Murdoch suggests that: They show how the idea of the supernatural emerges necessarily from an intense mediation upon good and evil and death and chance. But, as Simone Weil points out, mysteries will yield truths only to a religious attention […] The Notebooks may also be recommended to those who imagine that current philosophical techniques can readily show theological statements to be empty. ‘To be able to study the supernatural, one must first be capable of discerning it.’ (Murdoch 1997, 160)

That the supernatural should be such a central theme of Murdoch’s entire oeuvre therefore come as no surprise because, as she says above, ‘social world is magical’ (Murdoch, 1948). It is through character interaction, then, that her most resonant supernatural material in the novels—all of which is not arbitrary but necessary for the fictional world—rubs up against the effervescent contingency of our everyday lives. She invites us into this ‘great hall of reflection’ to pay attention to our own relationship with the world and its inhabitants (Murdoch 1997, 28).

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The discovery that Murdoch herself had direct contact with the supernatural, given her repeated engagement with the subject, is unsurprising. Just a year prior to the notes in her journal highlighted above, Murdoch had a vivid lucid dream, a dream that is worth reflecting upon. Her journals occasionally relate her dreams, but this is a fascinating one as it appears to have haunted her for most of her life: A most strange & vivid dream last night: I am in a garden & see what I think are two allegorical figures of birds of prey holding a smaller bird in their claws, perched on low pillars. As I come nearer I see these are two angels, with wings & golden hair. They come down from the pillars & pass me by. I follow them, a little afraid, & call after them. ‘Can I ask you one question: Is there a God?’ They reply ‘Yes’, & disappear round a corner. I follow them & find myself alone in a gravel walk by the side of a building. Then I hear the footsteps approaching me from behind of someone whom I know to be the Christ. Filled with an indescribable terror & sense of abasement I fall on my face. The footsteps pass me & I hear a voice say: ‘Ite’—which I take in the dream to mean ‘Come’ in Greek. I dare not look up. Then I hear another person approaching, with a rustling dress. This I know to be the Virgin Mary. She stops beside me & puts her hand on my shoulder. The burden of terror is lifted a little & I say: ‘Forgive me.’ She replies (I don’t remember her exact words but the sense is) ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ She passes on. All this time I have kept my face hidden. Filled with an extraordinary lightness I am running through an extremely beautiful & vividly coloured landscape. I come at last to a high cliff over hill beside a sea. It is required of me that I should leap down from the hill, but I am afraid. At last a wooden bar or beam is thrust into my hand form above, & holding onto this I jump, & float down with a great sense of joy. (Murdoch 1947)

In Iris Murdoch: A Life, Peter J. Conradi tells us that ‘the dream had other sequences, some terrifying, two blissful’ and that ‘in these dreams, as in her school days, Iris is partly cast as a lonely child longing for approval’ (Conradi 2001, 555). This ‘dream of holiness’ is given to Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers, to Bellamy James in The Green Knight, and to ‘The Prisoner’ in her radio drama The One Alone (1995). Anne has a waking vision of Christ in her kitchen—perhaps the most discussed of all supernatural occurrences in Murdoch’s novels—where he informs her that ‘You must be the miracle worker, little one. You must be the proof. The work is yours’ (Murdoch 2001a, 299). As this scene has been widely discussed I think it is worth remembering that this is not the only example. Scenes

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of this nature were certainly close to Murdoch as a writer.1 Perhaps, to return to her essay ‘Against Dryness’, perhaps this is ‘the dream that does not cease to haunt us’ (Murdoch 1997, 254): it was certainly the dream that haunted her.

Toxic Masculinity and the Supernatural In Chapter Four of this collection Anne Rowe rightly points out that the ‘inherent ‘silent’ misogyny in men’s perception of women currently being called to account in society today is precisely that which informs the psychological realism of the two central male characters in Under the Net’, she suggests that, ‘their complicity in such distorted vision can indeed lead to some uncomfortable questions’ (52). What also needs addressing, though, is how thoroughly Murdoch uses the sorcery of language to throw her first-person male narrators into relief. Indeed, all bar one—A Word Child (1975)—have the word ‘witch’ used in a derogatory fashion in regards to women of all ages.2 Far from being an isolated event, then, Murdoch is being subtle here in her deconstruction not just of the male ego, but of the pervasive culture of the time, thereby bringing the novels into alignment with Bolton’s conception of Murdoch as an intersectional feminist writer. I will turn to look at each of the first-person male narrated novels chronologically. In Under the Net Jake Donoghue is looking for Sadie Quentin in an upmarket hairdresser in Mayfair. Once he has found her and the conversation shifts, he begins to lose power in their discourse; he tells us that ‘I began to dislike the conversation very much indeed’ and he debases her image in the mirror: I could see Sadie's face focused now into a look of intelligent venom. She looked like a beautiful snake; and the curious fantasy came to me that if I were to look under the drier at the real face and not at the reflexion I should see there some terrible old witch. (Murdoch 2001b, 61)

The image of the gorgon here is nothing new, indeed the monstrous woman has been a staple of fiction since at least Homer, but Murdoch’s use of it here for Jake as a quasi-Perseus crucially coincides with his recognition of Sadie’s agency to disregard him, even though we as readers will later discover that she is attracted to him. His wilful blindness to this, and his hopeless chasing after her sister Anna, heightens the comedic aspect of

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the novel as well as underscoring these dark undertones. Readers may forgive Jake this fantasy as he comes to a realisation of his own failings toward the end of the novel, but it strikes me as fascinating that, in her later first-person male-narrated novels, Murdoch comes back time and again to the image of the witch, and indeed the conflation of the witch with Medusa imagery. These images come through most strongly, perhaps, in her next first-­ person narrated novel, A Severed Head. Martin Lynch-Gibbon, the narrator and central character of the novel, repeats the witch imagery when discussing Honor Klein, the half-sister of his wife Antonia’s therapist-­ cum-­lover Palmer: But I could not see Palmer, even married to Antonia, as ever free from the clutches of that tawny-breasted witch the vision of whom, her jagged black hair in disorder, her face stern and angelic above her nakedness, never ceased now to be before me; and I felt equally that I was cursed for life, like men who have slept with temple prostitutes and, visited by a goddess, cannot touch a woman after. (Murdoch 2001c, 140–141)

The misogyny on display in this novel is the most virulent of any of Murdoch’s novels. Lynch-Gibbon, the central character, has become so introspective that his treatment of his wife Antonia, mistress Georgie, and the enchantress figure Honor, is repugnant to an informed readership today, reflecting not only Murdoch’s perspective on bourgeois London of the late 1950s, but also the lack of liberation and respect given to women at this point in time. Such conceited and self-satisfied men—with their lack of, or limited, imagination—revert to tropes that appear stale and lacking in vision, a critical point that Murdoch discusses at length in her philosophy, but that has greater potency when displayed in any Murdoch novel. Only after Honor literally (and figuratively) wields a sword and disrupts Martin’s ego, do his fantasies begin to fall apart. Many of Murdoch’s later novels will foreground such feminist topics, including the questioning of a woman’s ability and virtue. In The Italian Girl (1964) the same imagery arises: ‘“she is a witch, though […] a rusalka as they are called in Russia. She has a sort of death in her. And she is fallen, oh, fallen ever since she is very young. She has had many, many men”’ (Murdoch 2000, 68). Here David Levkin, like many of Murdoch’s unenlightened males—another that comes to mind is Rainborough in The Flight from the Enchanter—worries that the gaining of freedom and agency

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for women will result in the overturning of typical gendered roles. Levkin’s judgement of ‘fallenness’ is, again, a tired and overused concept, but one which Murdoch cleverly gives to her unreflective men. For Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince (1973), it is his former wife Christian who is the figure of hate: ‘I saw Christian as a witch in my life, and a low demon, though I did not in doing so excuse myself. There are people who occasion in one, as it seems automatically, obsessive egotistic anxiety and preoccupying resentment’ (Murdoch 2013, 125). Christian has left him for Evandale, ‘a rich unlettered American’ (25), and he partly blames his inability to write on this event. Her return is one of the numerous contingent events that lead to the death of Arnold Baffin, for which Bradley is convicted and imprisoned. Imprisoning is also a factor in Charles Arrowby’s pursuit of his former ‘love’, Hartley, in The Sea, The Sea. Arrowby refers to both his old love, Hartley, and a more recent love, Rosina, as witches: would I at last absolutely lose Hartley because of a treachery or desertion on her part which had turned my love into hate? Could I begin to see her as cold, heartless, uncanny, a witch, a sorceress? I felt this could never be, and I felt it as an achievement, almost as a mode of possession. (Murdoch 2008a, 462)

And about Rosina he says, ‘I looked up and outlined against the blue sky I saw Rosina […] she was black, a black witch, wearing something that looked like a peasant’s shawl’ (370). Charles will refer to Rosina again as a witch some fifty pages later. If we reflect on Murdoch’s thought in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, discussed earlier, it is clear that all these male characters are in some respects closely related; they have not made that distinction between fantasy and imagination that Murdoch holds as vital to understanding the right vision with regard to attention to the other. Whilst not a first-person male narrated novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) lends more weight to this concern with toxic masculinity as Harriet Gavender is gaslighted by both her duplicitous husband Blaise and her neighbour Montague Small: She stood in the darkness holding her head. Then suddenly from below there was a strange wailing cry. And as Harriet stood there motionless with fear, it was as if a wind blew through the house, as if an airy shape passed

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through, passed by, and Harriet felt cold, cold […] She thought, I must get out of the house, I must get away from Monty, I must get away from this awful, haunted place. (Murdoch 1974, 269)

Harriet is haunted by grief, but also by the stifling atmosphere that Monty’s recent attack has caused. That Murdoch returns to the ghostly is unsurprising then, given her predilection for linking toxic masculinity with oppression. However, when the women in her fiction reclaim the supernatural for themselves a far more efficacious outcome is generally perceived, and agency gained, as they are empowered to seek a new life away from their abusive partners, or at least negotiate new terms.

‘Adolescent Girls Attract Ghosts’ Aside from the negative use of the supernatural within Murdoch’s fiction, there is conversely a positive aspect that again runs through her entire oeuvre. The earliest example, and one that Stephen Medcalf discusses in his chapter in this volume, is Felicity Mor’s feyness; what she believes to be her magic ability, found in Murdoch’s third novel, The Sandcastle. At this point in the novel Felicity is convinced that she has some form of psychic power, and she is determined to remove the influence of Rain Carter from her father’s life: The Power Game was an invention of Felicity’s dating from long ago. It was a sort of eclectic witchcraft, which involved the purloining from the individuals who were to be bewitched of various intimate articles, such as socks, stockings, ties, and handkerchiefs, which were subsequently to figure in the various rituals and ceremonies. The main point of the Power Game, however, as it turned out, had not been the actual magic but rather the preliminary raids. In the course of these raids a number of highly cherished prizes had been taken, including some underpants of Mr Prewett, Mr Hensman’s braces, and an elegant sponge-bag belonging to Mr Everard, none of which had in fact been put to any magical use. (Murdoch (1992) 2003, 136)

Medcalf makes what I think is the correct point that this fictional device does not hang together with the main driver of the narrative. He believes that ‘despite an eerie power in the description of Felicity’s private rites under the setting sun by the rising tide, Iris’s attempt to suggest occult powers at work without conceding their reality seems to me weak’(14). And this is borne out later in the novel when Felicity, on the beach with

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her ‘paraphernalia’ around her, attempts to invoke the spirits to come to her aid and dabbles in tarot cards. This is rather darker than the earlier ‘Power Game’ and shows a willingness on Felicity’s part to move deeper into her connection with the occult. That these two sections, especially the latter, feel staged and rather melodramatic is only natural considering that the novel is at its best in the set-piece action sequences that Murdoch threads throughout the work. It may be that, self-aware as she was of her novels’ failings, she revisited these themes regularly in order to perfect them. While The Sandcastle has often been considered the weak link in Murdoch’s early novels, the work that followed it, The Bell—arguably her finest work from the 1950s—also lends something of the occult to Dora Greenfield. This is unsurprising, being one of her major Gothic novels; but in common with Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) it subverts our conception of the Gothic in its playfulness with form and convention. This is made manifest not only in the raising of the mythical bell from the bottom of the lake, but also in the sense that Dora will become the catalyst for change in Imber; ‘In this holy community she would play the witch’ (Murdoch 1958, 200). The suggestion that she will separate herself from the sacredness of the Abbey and divide herself from the original inhabitants of the court is an important one as it enables her to both develop her agency and ultimately leave her husband Paul. Dora creates a positive ending for herself, moving to Bath to be with her friend Sally in a sororal relationship, and returning to the world of art that she left behind when she married. Less positive is Hannah Crean-Smith’s fate in The Unicorn (1963). Entrapped in Gaze Castle she believes that ‘I have battened upon you like a secret vampire’ (Murdoch 2001d, 219) and her death at the climax of the novel, having shot and killed her gaoler, Gerald Scottow, is melodramatic and perhaps overwrought—although we can certainly see Murdoch drawing on Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla for both the location and the characterisation of Hannah.3 It is also uncertain if Elizabeth Fisher in The Time of the Angels—another fey character—will have a bright future under the care of her half-sister Muriel as they leave the ruins of the rectory in London’s East End. The death of her uncle-turned-father by his own hand has released the inhabitants of the rectory from their enclosure, and much like The Unicorn the breaking of the spell cast by the domineering male figure gives a form of release, although one not entirely liberating. In The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) Alex McCaffrey, the matriarch of the clan, reflects on her own fading power as she grows older. As her

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memories of youth turn sour, she experiences feelings of jealousy toward the younger females in the ‘court’ of characters around her; ‘She thought, it’s something to do with them, those wicked ill-omened girls. It’s some kind of vile ghost thing. Adolescent girls attract ghosts’ (Murdoch 2008b, 412). Alex’s statement echoes a belief that adolescents are more likely to connect to the paranormal phenomenon of the poltergeist. However, it is in The Green Knight that we read Murdoch’s most sustained engagement with the development of an adolescent girl’s telekinetic ability. Moy Anderson, the youngest of three sisters (and an introvert, not unlike Felicity Mor), discovers early on in the novel that she has the power to move stones with her mind. Bellamy James mocks her otherworldliness to her mother Louise: ‘she thinks it’s magic, she’s a leprechaun, perhaps she’ll be a witch when she’s grown up and earn a fortune making love potions’ (Murdoch 1993, 10). Bellamy, the ‘spiritual seeker’ in this novel (and there are a good many of these throughout her oeuvre), is at this point clearly unenlightened—indeed his enlightenment only comes toward the end of the novel, after Murdoch has given him her own dream of visiting angels like Anne Cavidge, highlighted earlier. As various forms of the supernatural break into the life of the characters—Clement and Bellamy see Peter Mir as both ‘an avatar’ and ‘an angel’ (Murdoch 1993, 363) for example—this apprehending of the contingency of the world highlights their smallness and reliance on the support of others to develop their own sense of self, enabling them to break free from the fantasies created by their egos. The disruption caused by Mir, much like that of Morgan Browne’s return in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), ultimately leads the enchanter figures of The Green Knight and A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Lucas Graffe and Julius King, respectively to be removed from the scene, and from England. The embodied evil in Graffe and King is not destroyed but removed to a distance, thereby allowing a resolution in the narrative. Moy’s embodied respect of the world’s contingent artefacts has much in common with the twins in The Nice and the Good. Like them she brings stones into the house, and she begins to realise she can control and direct them: She was gazing at one stone in particular, golden brown, shapeless as crushed brown paper. She moved, reaching out her hand towards it. After a moment the stone shifted slightly, it rocked, then slid evenly forward off the shelf and through the air into her open hand. Moy knew about poltergeists and why, or at any rate when, they were present. She had said nothing to the

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others, but had, by investigative hinting, satisfied herself that she was the only one to whom the ambiguous gift had been given. She accepted it as a strange not unfriendly presence or form of being which joined her life with the life of things. Only sometimes, for it had various manifestations, it frightened her. (21)

The ambiguity of the gift partially separates her from the life of her two sisters as the novel develops, especially as Aleph and Sefton become interested in more worldly matters and look outside the immediate family for a route into adulthood. Indeed, one of the central themes of the novel is this necessity to move from childhood to the adult world and, as the novel progresses, Moy’s powers begin to strengthen and she fears they may overtake her ability to control them: ‘she had become alarmed by her powers of telekinesis and by the occasional naughtiness of some stones which had apparently developed their own mobility and propelled themselves onto the floor’ (Murdoch 1993, 260). That she can also commune (in part) with the dog Anax, and toward the end of the novel attract seals at the seaside, not only signals her lineage with earlier young females in Murdoch’s novels, but also highlights this loving gaze upon all of the world’s inhabitants, animate or inanimate, that characterises Murdoch’s most successful figures of ‘the good’. Moy’s attention is drawn toward the natural world, and this enable her to discover her own agency in the coda section of the novel. What is unique to this novel, however, is that the adolescent is moving into adulthood and giving up her power over objects close to her. The relinquishing of power, or the inability to do so, had become a central (and often Shakespearean) facet of Murdoch’s fiction up to this point. One thinks of Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil, or Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet (1989a), but for a young woman to do so is distinctive: The stones in her bedroom no longer moved, there were no more rebellions, or things coming obediently to her hand. They lay now inert, her things, no longer related to her by mysterious ties. Moy connected the fading of her fey powers with something natural in her growing up. She was not surprised. But she was also distressed, even frightened, by the loss of contact with innumerable entities whose friendship with her she had taken for granted. (Murdoch 1993, 461)

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In her penultimate novel Murdoch is highlighting here the danger of not letting go of the past in order to sustain the ego. Moy is shown at the opposite end of the spectrum to the Nietzschean spectre Lucas Graffe who has spirited away her eldest sister to America. That they have escaped London is also to have escaped the social scene, one in which those left behind (much like in a Shakespearean comedy) find a renewed sense of life in new relationships. Moy will also leave, it is assumed, and may go to India. But it is her connection to the earth that remains; her fate and her agency is to be tied to the natural environment: ‘As soon as Moy had touched the stone she felt her body become warm and agile, she could run and keep running, the stone seemed weightless, she followed Anax’ (Murdoch 1993, 470). She then gives the stone back to the Earth and in so doing she moves into a new phase in her life, one in which she will no longer rely on any supernatural power to support her sense of self.

Coda This is a powerful ending to the novel, but one that those who know Murdoch’s philosophy well may have seen coming. To return to The Fire and the Sun, it is clear that her thoughts on this subject have remained consistent across the decades: Sophistry and magic break down at intervals, but they never go away and there is no end to their collusion with art and to the consolations which, perhaps fortunately for the human race, they can provide; and art, like writing and like Eros, goes on existing for better and for worse. (Murdoch 1997, 463)

The neater endings that we see in Murdoch’s earlier fiction have been replaced by messier and more contingent ones, aligned with her concern for a ‘truth-seeking imagination’ that prioritises a lived reality rather than a fictional fantasy that would merely console rather than invigorate. It is clear, then, why the Gothic mode of writing became a dead-end for Murdoch: it did not contain within the genre the expansive mode of narrative necessary for her to fully develop her worldview. In her use of a variety of supernatural devices Murdoch is highlighting the need to recognise the world and the small daily miracles we can perform within it for one another as well as the necessity for the magic of the natural world to impact on our lived experience.

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Notes 1. For a detailed discussion of this scene see Pamela Osborn’s “A Story about a Man’: The Demythologised Christ in the Novels of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White’ in Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (eds.) Iris Murdoch and Morality. 2. It is worth noting, however, that Hilary Burde is a destructive toxic figure, although the closest he gets to calling a woman a witch is in his dealings with ‘Biscuit’ when he sees her as an exotic object and kisses her against her will. ‘And now suddenly she looked so tired, almost old, a little old woman from the East. I put my arms round her and laid my lips against her cold mouth’ (Murdoch 2008c, 276). 3. For more on this see my article on Irish Literary Culture and the Vampire, here: https://booksirelandmagazine.com/irish-­literary-­culture-­and-­the-­ vampire/ [accessed 12 June, 2022]

References Bolton, Lucy. 2022. Murdoch and Feminism. In The Murdochian Mind, ed. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood. London: Routledge. Caprioglio Panizza, Silvia, and Mark Hopwood, eds. 2022. The Murdochian Mind. London: Routledge. Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: Harper Collins. Horner, Avril. 2010. ‘Refinements of Evil’: Iris Murdoch and the Gothic. In Iris Murdoch and Morality, ed. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Murdoch, Iris. 1947. Journal 3, June 1945 to May 1947, KUAS202/1/3, from the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives. ———. 1958. The Bell. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 1974. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. (1992) 2003. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Vintage ———. 1993. The Green Knight. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 1997. Existentialists and Mystics. London: Penguin. ———. (1964) 2000. The Italian Girl. London: Vintage ———. (1980) 2001a. Nuns and Soldiers. London: Vintage ———. (1954) 2001b. Under the Net. London: Vintage ———. (1961) 2001c. A Severed Head. London: Vintage ———. (1963) 2001d. The Unicorn. London: Vintage ———. (1957) 2003. The Sandcastle. London: Vintage

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———. (1978) 2008a. The Sea, The Sea. London: Vintage ———. (1983) 2008b. The Philosopher’s Pupil. London: Vintage ———. (1975) 2008c. A Word Child. London: Vintage ———. (1973) 2013. The Black Prince. London: Vintage Oulton, Lucy. 2022. Nature and the Environment. In The Murdochian Mind, ed. Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 10

Friendship, Sex, and the Moral Life in Iris Murdoch’s Novels J. Robert Baker

Iris Murdoch wrote about moral development as a slow, demanding movement toward the Good that comes about as one enlarges one’s vision and deepens one’s understanding of reality. Murdoch often describes this growth as a solitary enterprise. In one of her most famous examples, Murdoch portrays a mother-in-law, M, who changes her view of her daughter-in-law, D, in order to see the younger woman as more than flighty and irritating. The daughter-in-law plays no role in the mother-in-­ law’s evolving understanding of her. That change depends solely on the mother-in-law’s own effort and imagination to see the younger woman as she truly is (Murdoch 1970, 16ff). For Murdoch, this transformation comes from a just attention to a reality outside the self. She takes great art to be a catalyst for this sort of attention. Here, too, moral progress depends on an individual’s attention; the work of art remains itself, unchanged by and impassive to the moral agent’s effort. Gary Browning encapsulates Murdoch’s idea of moral change when he observes, ‘In her philosophical

J. R. Baker (*) Fairmont State University, Fairmont, WV, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_10

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writings, Murdoch suggests that what is required for moral development is a virtuous and loving attention to others and the reality of their circumstances’ (Browning 2018b, 12). This attention to others involves an ascesis in which one undergoes a process of unselfing, that is, a turning away from one’s assumptions, norms, and even needs to see reality as it is, rather than as one hopes it might be. Murdoch’s description of this self-­stripping obscures the role that friendship and even sex play in the expanded moral vision some of the characters in her novels experience. Unlike her novels, Murdoch’s philosophy takes unselfing to be austere, even lonely. For Murdoch, the myth of Marsyas and Apollo with its gruesome flaying of the musician by the god is a metaphor for unselfing; the myth indicates the grisliness of moral improvement, at least as far as the ego is concerned. She described the process of increasing perception of reality in less ghastly terms during a 1968 interview with W.K. Rose, saying, ‘The kind of opening out of love as a world where we really can see other people and are not simply dominated by our own slavish impulses and obsessions, this is something which I would want very much to explore and which I think is very difficult’ (Dooley 2003, 26). Even without the ghastliness of Marsyas’s flaying, Murdoch insists that becoming good makes hard demands on the ego. Scholars have tended to follow Murdoch, acknowledging the solitary and challenging nature of moral growth as a movement from self-­ absorption to a careful acceptance of the alterity of the world. David Gordon directly echoes the severity implicit in Murdoch’s view: ‘Her moral objective is not greater autonomy of the ego but its death or, better, its flaying’ (Gordon 1990, 120). This is developed by Maria Antonaccio who emphasizes the nearly infernal quality of this peeling away of the self; in her view, ‘Rather it burns and singes with the knowledge that “almost everything that consoles us is a fake”—including, sometimes, the idea of goodness itself’ (Antonaccio 2000, vi). In Antonaccio’s view there is no consolation to relieve the pain suffered by the ego in becoming good. The lack of solace makes the process, in Priscilla Martin’s and Anne Rowe’s words, ‘the strenuous attempt to surmount one’s natural egotism and to believe in the equal and different being of others’ (Martin and Rowe 2010, 35). This chorus is swelled by Heather Widdows who defines the solitary and ascetic nature of moral growth as ‘a slow and difficult journey’ (Widdows 2005, 110), whilst Browning similarly characterises moral progress as ‘arduous’ and ‘demanding’ (Browning 2018b, 34, 85). This range of critical voices over the years is true to Murdoch’s philosophical

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examination of goodness, but Murdoch’s life and fiction indicate that moral development does not exclude pleasures along the way and that pleasure may be a catalyst to that progress. As serious as she was about becoming good, Murdoch enjoyed friendships, sex, and travel, none of which would suggest the painful austerity she and scholars have seen in her vision of the moral life. She had many friends and a number of erotic relationships. She spent the two weeks just before the onset of World War II touring with the Magpie Players in light-­ hearted productions (Conradi 2001, 101–105). Pictures show her picnicking with family as a child and vacationing with friends as an adult. She relished riverine swimming with John Bayley across almost forty-five years (Bayley Elegy, 1999). She liked to meet scholars in pubs and talk with them over a pint or two. Speaking impishly about playing Scrabble with Stephen and Natasha Spender, she reported, ‘The Spenders play to win so we quietly give them leeway’ (Lewis 1989, 19). Her appreciation of pleasure can be seen at the end of her interview with Jo Brans when she said, ‘But I’m glad if people like those stories, it gives me pleasure, because stories are a very good way, you know, of getting away from one’s troubles. Now, let’s have a drink’ (Dooley 2003, 166). The convivial Murdoch knew much about the pleasures of company and drink, and she enjoyed them. Murdoch’s fiction also draws a portrait of the individual’s expansion of vision that is not so lonely or severe as Murdoch and her critics have proposed and that includes the pleasures of friendship and intimacy. From the start, her novels focus on coteries of friends and family rather than solitary characters. In Under the Net, Jake Donaghue’s development depends on his relations with other people, however damaged by his solipsism those relationships may be. Whether with Finn in their pub crawl through London and zany kidnapping of Mister Mars, the dog star of PhantasiFilms, or in his dealings with Hugo, Anna, Sadie, Madge, or Sammy, Jake needs people to see there is more to the world than he has imagined and to affirm the reality of the world symbolised by Mrs. Tinckham’s vari-­ coloured kittens. In all her subsequent novels, friends support each other as they grow in their understanding of the world, of other people, and of themselves, or fail to come to such recognition. Where her demonic figures and magicians bewitch, confuse, and manipulate others, friends enable, support, and confirm Murdoch’s characters as they slowly come to an expanded vision of reality. Friends catalyse her characters’ movement beyond themselves. In The Philosopher’s Pupil, Tom McCaffrey and

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Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor’s friendship allows them to deepen their discernment of themselves, each other, and of other people in their lives. Similarly, in The Green Knight, Harvey Blacket finds his perception of himself and of his circle of family and friends enlarged with the help of Sefton Anderson. In these two novels particularly, moral clarification comes through sex, an intimacy that at its best is neither lonely nor austere; in fact, for these young men sex is joyous and ultimately revelatory as it takes them beyond their initial and limiting fantasies into a deeper awareness of their partners.1 The youth of Tom McCaffrey and Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor is underscored by their lack of self-awareness. Tom starts as something of a cosseted child, doted on by his stepmother Alex. Father Bernard characterizes him as ‘innocent and happy, happy because innocent, innocent because happy’ (Murdoch 1983, 314). Even the taciturn John Robert Rozanov remarks on his ‘happy temperament’ (Murdoch 1983, 274). Tom’s happiness and innocence, like childhood itself, are untested. Tom acknowledges his inexperience; ‘As he had said to Emma, he felt unfallen and did not yet understand how wickedness began’ (Murdoch 1983, 214). In this Eden of ignorance, Tom wants to be loved, perhaps unconditionally, for ‘It was true that he wanted everyone to love him, everyone’ (Murdoch 1983, 178). Tom’s desire to be loved by all puts him at the centre of the world and, so, exposes his self-absorption. His solipsism makes it hard for him to see both his own limitations that may make him unlovable and of those of other people that may prevent their loving him. Though he shares Tom’s lack of perception, Emma is Tom’s opposite. Where Tom is gregarious, he tends to be reserved and solitary; in his reticence, ‘Emma looked a little critically upon Tom’s tendency to like everything and everybody’ (Murdoch 1983, 113). Emma does not yet know himself very well, and the thinness of his self-understanding leaves him edgy and apprehensive about the parts of himself, including his Irish ancestry, which make him different from others. He is so divided in himself that ‘he hated with all his heart and soul, Ireland, the Irish, and himself’ (Murdoch 1983, 125). He is also hesitant about his singing and troubled by his sexuality. His anxiety and uncertainty raise disconcerting questions that he must face because Murdoch sets him, as she does so many of her characters, the task of coming to terms with himself as he is. For Emma, this means understanding and accepting, even embracing his ethnicity, his gifts, and his sexuality as ‘wonders of the world’ (Murdoch 1954, 279).

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In the course of the narrative, Tom and Emma wrestle with their erotic attractions. Some people in Tom’s hometown think that his lack of interest in girls may be due to his being gay. His stepmother even hopes that he is. Under Rozanov’s scrutiny, Tom thinks, ‘It’s true I’m heterosexual. But suppose he asks if I’m homosexual too?’ (Murdoch 1983, 270). Tom assumes he is straight, but in this question, he intuits that there is more to his sexuality than can be neatly secured in an either-or construct. Though Tom ends up married to Rozanov’s granddaughter, Hattie Meynell, by the novel’s end, his experience of sexuality very much deconstructs the binary paradigm of gay or straight. He is an example of Browning’s point that ‘sexuality for Murdoch was not to be limited and trammelled by the prevailing conventional dichotomy between male and female. She imagined sex as fluid between individuals of the same and different sexes and between styles’ (Browning 1983b, 163). More pronouncedly than Tom, Emma grapples with this fluidity of sexuality. Early in the novel, he appears to have had no sexual experiences; however, he possesses a keen if inchoate awareness of other men and is especially bothered by his music teacher’s attraction to him, as if the older man’s interest signals that he knows Emma is gay. Despite sharing hesitations and, at times, anxiety about their sexualities, much divides these two young men. They have known each other ‘vaguely’ (Murdoch 1983, 112), but they are not immediate friends. Indeed, when Emma takes lodgings in the house where Tom lives, their hazy awareness of each other turns to irritation. Tom is envious of Emma’s singing even as it reveals a part of his friend to him: ‘There was a quick tiny fierce impulse of pure envy, a sense of passionate rivalry for the world’ (Murdoch 1983, 124). For his part, Emma is like the mother-in-law of Murdoch’s exemplum; ‘Emma’s first view of Tom was that he was a tactless nuisance’ (Murdoch 1983, 128). Emma is disturbed by Tom’s effortless confidence that they will be friends for he doubts Tom sees him as he truly is. When Tom cross-dresses and asks for Emma’s admiration, Emma feels threatened because ‘he himself suffered from secret transvestite fantasies; Tom’s caprice struck him as the idle profanation of a mystery’ (Murdoch 1983, 115). Emma’s insecurity prevents him from seeing that Tom’s wearing of women’s clothing is light-hearted, a frolicking that is part of the merriment animating much of his behaviour. In spite of his waggishness, Tom in some way needs Emma’s approbation and friendship, if only because he is used to having these easily from other people. If they had known and acted upon Murdoch’s famous example of M and D, they might have

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recognised that the envy and irritation these differences cause are clear signs of the need for seeing each other more clearly, for moral improvement. The differences that annoy and discomfit them are also the starting point of their coming to know each other accurately, even lovingly. As Tom and Emma become friends, their vexation gives way to the pleasure of being in each other’s company. After a pub crawl in central London, the two are in such high spirits that Tom has to usher Emma into a taxi because Emma’s singing begins to draw a crowd and a policeman. Almost magically, Emma falls asleep next to Tom, who ‘laughed quietly, profoundly with tears of pure pleasure in his eyes, all the way back to the digs’ (Murdoch 1983, 124). Their drunken carousing allows Tom to see that the power of Emma’s singing is a part of Emma he has not known. Even with such moments of enjoyment, Tom and Emma’s progress toward seeing each other clearly is painstaking. The narrator (N) directly attests to the partial nature of their understanding of each other: ‘Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor as he was “in himself” was not soon known to Tom, though they became friends, and doubtless never entirely known (but then who is ever entirely known?)’ (Murdoch 1983, 125). The young men, though, have an advantage in that ‘they often exchanged roles’ (Murdoch 1983, 125). Like their initial irritation, their willingness to trade roles may be Murdoch’s indication of the moral growth they enable in each other, for just as the older M must give up her own norms of propriety, judgement, and even common sense, and come to see the younger D as playful, whimsical, and delightful, Tom and Emma must give up the roles they are accustomed to play and each take the other’s perspective. Still, the unknowability of the other is dramatised when Emma finds himself temporarily caged and thoroughly soaked by Lud’s Rill (Murdoch 1983, 184). He has jumped the railing to approach the fountain, but on his own he can find no way to leap the fence from inside and exit the enclosure. Emma broods on the loss of his dog and the awkwardness of being trapped as a crowd gathers. When Tom instinctively moves to help his friend, Emma uses Tom’s knee as a step to vault over the fence. Emma needs his friend in order to escape the drenching spray of the water, melancholy memories of his dog, and a general uneasiness with his feelings. Tom’s high spirits and laughter, however, demonstrate that he does not see the depth of Emma’s sensitivity; worse, his exuberant gaiety contributes to the embarrassment and outrage that lead Emma to walk away ‘in grim silence’ (Murdoch 1983, 185).

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To grow beyond irritation and misunderstanding, Tom and Emma must take to heart the insight of William Eastcote, a leader of the Friends’ Meeting House, who devotes himself to good works and who counsels, ‘I want only to say something about simple good things which are as it were close to us, within our reach, part still of our world. Let us love the close things, the close clear good things, and hope that in their light other goods may be added’ (Murdoch 1983, 204). That love, Eastcote goes on to say, must be active: ‘At any time, there are many many small things we can do for other people which will refresh us and them with new hope’ (Murdoch 1983, 205). Tom may need to learn to do for others more than Emma does, for Tom mistakenly thinks he can help his half-brother George discover goodness simply by being in his presence or by uttering some inspired word. When George emerges thoroughly chilled from the sea after rescuing Adam McCaffery’s dog Zed, Tom finds that practical action is needed more than a quasi-mystical support or a heartfelt encouragement. As he strips off his shirt and offers it and his pants to George, Tom practises a more immediate and pragmatic love than presence and words could afford in the moment. Under the influence of Eastcote’s admonition to love the ‘close things,’ Tom is impelled to share his new sense of himself with Emma. He ends up loving Emma who is close by in the house and in the friendship they share. When Tom enters his room, Emma removes his reading glasses, signalling that he welcomes Tom into his bed as he is, without any corrective lens to remedy the limitations, defects, or deficiencies that Emma sees. ‘Emma said nothing, but he drew the bedclothes aside. Tom still in the swift impetus of his wafting, came to his friend, and for a moment, they lay breast to breast holding each other in a fierce bruising clasp, their hearts beating with a terrible violence; and so they lay in silence for a long time’ (Murdoch 1983, 218). In this embrace, the two young men become clearer, more real to the other; they are present to each other as they are without even the mediation of language. Murdoch’s steadfast discretion in describing sexual acts, her almost allergic aversion to doing so, avoids the details of their lovemaking. Still, they certainly enjoy the deep intimacy and vulnerability that sex can bring: That, the visit, had been something noumenal, as if they had slipped out of time, out of ordinary individual being. They had not made love in any of the rather mechanical senses in which Tom had hitherto understood a making of love. It was rather that, instantly, they had become love. For Tom it was

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like being embraced by an angel, being inescapably held between the wings of an angel who was and was not Emma. This enfolding was perfect happiness, perfect bliss, perfect unproblematic, undramatic sexual joy. Tom could not remember having, after Emma took him in his arms, moved at all. As he recalled it, they had both lain gripped together, absolutely motionless, in a spellbound ecstatic trance, perfectly relaxed yet also in extreme tension, in a holdingness of immense urgent power. (Murdoch 1983, 264)

Emma also feels an unmatched happiness in sleeping with Tom and knows it has transformed them both. For both friends, ‘it was rather as if they both moved more gracefully in an enlarged space’ (Murdoch 1983, 265). In that enlarged space they know each other more fully than they have and momentarily embody Murdoch’s understanding of ‘falling in love, although so often powered by fantasy and projection, as revelatory, one of life’s most intense experiences and granting the rare sense of another person’s existence and value’ (Martin and Rowe 2010, 41). Both their lovemaking and their widening knowledge of the other enact the two important senses of Murdoch’s understanding of love as Constance Squires configures them: ‘Sometimes Murdoch’s term “love” refers generally to the ability to care for anything outside oneself, but often it means sexual love’ (Squires 2005, 71). Browning points out the former sense can, at times, result from the latter, when he writes, ‘The dynamic Eros or love, which is manifested in sexual attraction, can lead to respect and love for others’ (Browning 2018b, 43). For Tom and Emma, making love leads them to a fuller understanding and appreciation of each other. For Emma, the enlarged space that sleeping with Tom brings proves initially problematic; he mistrusts his own feelings after the first elation of their night together. He still has such doubts about Tom’s ‘impulsive and affectionate character’ that his suspicions preclude his taking their intimacy seriously or meaningfully. Instead, he sends Tom away when they awaken, refuses to talk with him about their lovemaking, and declares it a one-off encounter. Despite his determination to refuse the joy he feels, he cannot completely deny the transformative power of sleeping with his friend: ‘He gloomily observed some utterly new happiness, something created ex nihilo, which had come to him and put its finger upon him’ (Murdoch 1983, 266). The sexual encounter changes the relationship between the two young men, at first making it more difficult but ultimately proving therapeutic as it ushers them into a deep sympathy and mutual regard. Its remedial action reflects the theme of healing Murdoch

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may have had in mind by setting the novel, which she called her ‘SPA book,’ in Ennistone with its hot springs (Horner and Rowe 2015, 497). The salutary effects of their lovemaking are most evident in Tom who affirms his love for Emma and pronounces that that love is ‘the most important aspect of the matter’ (Murdoch 1983, 266). Most significantly, Tom loves Emma without encumbering either one of them by his habitual expectation of being loved and admired in return. He has moved beyond the narcissism of his innocence. Emma struggles, but sex with Tom clarifies for him that Tom is mostly straight even as it illuminates his attraction to his friend. This knowledge is an occasion for unhappiness for ‘he thought how sad it was that he loved Tom, and yet that love could not go out and reach its object’ (Murdoch 1983, 334). Even in his misery, he cannot disavow he ‘had felt the joyful “whiff of eternity” which accompanies any real love’ (Murdoch 1983, 266). The ‘real love’ Emma feels for Tom takes root in his enhanced insight into Tom and into himself. Despite the difficulties Emma faces, the young men are drawn into a deeper friendship signalled by further scenes of physical closeness. In one, Emma again falls asleep in a car, this time ‘with his head on Tom’s shoulder’ (Murdoch 1983, 354). In a second, after quarrelling over Tom’s response to Rozanov’s proposal that he become Hattie’s protector, the two young men put their arms around each other and sing a romantic canon. Their touching and singing the round suggest their deepening attachment to, concern for, and acceptance of each other. In a doubling of this moment, Emma’s singing of Purcell’s ‘Music for a While’ helps disperse the slightly drunken, somewhat menacing revellers who have entered the garden of Alex McCaffery mistakenly thinking that a party is being held there. After the crowd leaves, ‘Tom and Emma stood alone in the garden. They put their arms round each other and silently laughed or perhaps cried’ (Murdoch 1983, 387). These moments of increased physical closeness to and ease with each other mark Tom’s and Emma’s love as moral progress. These charmed moments notwithstanding, their progress is slow. Even as they come to see each other more fully, they suffer ordinary human needs and the misunderstandings that attend those needs. They misconstrue the other’s actions and, initially, are not able to explain themselves to each other. Their suffering is clear as Tom comes to depend upon Emma’s attention and regard in a deep way:

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He admired Emma very much and regarded him as, in important respects, his superior, so that he was sad and irritated to think that Emma’s image of him might diminish. This unworthy anxiety prevented the communication which might have removed it. They were awkward with each other and Tom, failing to discover any way of expressing his affection, found himself playing the fool in front of an increasingly silent Emma. (Murdoch 1983, 402)

For his part, Emma is not immediately freed of his sexual longing for Tom, and he feels it most acutely when Tom does not meet him in London as they have planned. ‘And yet he could not help thinking about it and experiencing, in relation to Tom, that mysterious and terrible and well-known yearning of one human body for another, a condition which got worse as the week continued without sign or sight’ (Murdoch 1983, 468). Even as his appreciation of Tom grows, Emma’s sexual desire for his friend indicates a lingering resistance to fully accepting Tom as he is. Amid the alternations of pleasure and misunderstanding, the young men do come, like M, to see each other and the world more fully, more justly. Indeed, Tom’s growth requires Emma to see him as he is rather than as a foolish egotist; Emma’s regard is the catalyst of Tom’s development. For his part, Emma’s development comes as he recognises Tom’s essential straightness and his own gayness. The extension of their vision paves the way for Tom to marry Hattie and for Tom and Emma to ‘maintain a steady amitié amoureuse, although neither of them would dream of using that expression, or indeed of alluding to the matter in any way’ (Murdoch 1983, 557). Their love remains intimate, marked by mutual support, affection, and good humour. Emma’s clearer vision also allows him to come to peace about his music and to see his talent more reasonably and truthfully as a part of himself. In his reckoning, ‘with Mr Hanway gone … perhaps he could just go on singing without having to give it up because he could not dedicate his whole life to it’ (Murdoch 1983, 551). Like his love for Tom, which becomes deep-seated, faithful, and profound even if it does not require sexual consummation, his music can be satisfying and joyous; it can be enjoyed without a total commitment to it. Tom’s and Emma’s clarified understanding of themselves is moral development. Murdoch emphasises their growth with the counter example of George and Rozanov. These older men remain in the pupil-tutor relationship, locked in a hierarchy that prevents them from seeing each other fully and from working out a mutual relationship. In the end, rather

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than evolving into a more just way of seeing each other, George and Rozanov retain their diminished and reductive view of each other, making George ‘morally bankrupt’ and Rozanov ‘vindictive,’ as Avril Horner and Anne Rowe describe them in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 (Horner and Rowe 2015, 466–67). Murdoch returns to friendship as a catalyst of moral progress in her penultimate novel, The Green Knight. Here, characters attain moral clarity and deepen their apprehension of themselves and others not in isolation, as Bellamy James at first would do, but in relationship with others. In this novel, too, sex is a clarifying agent that edifies characters’ perception of reality. Harvey Blacket is part of a circle of friends, whose affection he attracts without conscious effort; he is loved by the Andersons and others in their orbit, all of whom generate an ‘atmosphere, thick with love and goodwill’ (Murdoch 1993, 32). As with Tom McCaffery, there is some speculation about Harvey’s sexual orientation. His mother Joan complains to Louise Anderson, ‘I wish he had a girlfriend. Somehow or other it always turns out he’s with men. He hangs around with Emil and Clive— what’s the use of a pair of dedicated gays—now who’s he with? Clement and Bellamy. All right, they’re not gay, at least Clement isn’t, but they’re men. Men flirt with him, he’s so pretty, they pet him’ (Murdoch 1993, 11). Though his mother can see this, Harvey is oblivious to the homosocial world he often inhabits; rather, he actually welcomes homoerotic pleasures. He ‘had often wrestled with Clement and on some occasions danced with him too’ (Murdoch 1993, 33). Like a small animal, he enjoys the attention and closeness without question about gender, orientation, or meaning. Like Tom, Harvey begins as an indulged, even spoiled, young man. Though he is about to enter university, he has yet to face reality as it is. He has something of the child’s refusal to consider the parts of reality that are harsh or distasteful: ‘He resented being made to think of himself in some serious sense likely to do wrong. Of course, he did not like to think about money! He disliked the, also more frequent, references to his father’ (Murdoch 1993, 50). Harvey prefers a reality that is pleasant and light-­ hearted, that is, a partial reality. Harvey’s proclivity for the enjoyable and blithe facets of reality is disrupted by his fall from a parapet in Italy. Symbolically, the fall tumbles him from the wall he has tried to erect to protect himself from unpleasant and uncomfortable aspects of reality. It breaks his foot and fractures his self-confidence, leaving him ‘exhausted and utterly alienated from himself’ (Murdoch 1993, 35). The accident

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forces Harvey to confront, tentatively and painfully, those parts of reality that do not coincide with ‘his well-known merry confident triumphant self’ (Murdoch 1993, 36). Harvey is brought up against his limitations, physical and emotional: ‘with his perfect health some magical authority was gone forever’ (Murdoch 1993, 36). In a sense, it is Harvey’s fall into a fuller awareness of who he is. For the first time, he experiences himself as imperfect and weak, and he feels embarrassed by his brokenness and his need for help. He fears the change of his friends’ admiration to sympathy because he cannot imagine himself as requiring compassion and evoking pity. Harvey finds his vulnerability and need so painful that he goes overboard, exaggerating his situation: Harvey who had been once so handsome, so long-legged and athletic, did not exist any more. He couldn’t even wash properly. He had lost, and lost forever, his youthful pride, his freedom, his nerve. All he could do now was attempt, but surely in vain, to conceal the extent of his loss. He watched television pictures of a war, of a football match, of worthy people in wheel-­ chairs. He thought about his father and wondered if his father ever thought about him. His leg was hurting alarmingly. They had spoken of taking the cast off again. What would they find underneath? Something decayed and rotting, suitable only for amputation. (Murdoch 1993, 60)

Harvey may need help washing himself, but his jump to amputation is surely a wild flight into puerile hyperbole. Harvey’s exaggerations extend to his fantasies about sexual relationships, the work and problems of which he is not ready for. He announces to Bellamy, ‘I wish I was a lesbian’ (Murdoch 1993, 76). This wish admits his attraction to women and simultaneously undercuts itself. Harvey has no genuine desire to be a lesbian; instead, he imagines, wholly improbably, that ‘female arrangements are so much simpler’ (Murdoch 1993, 76), but his picture of ‘female arrangements’ is unreal, grounded only in his desire to escape the complexities of relationships. Lesbianism is Harvey’s metaphor for bypassing the complexities of sexual desire that he fears. Harvey’s desire to evade the problems of sexual relationships intimates his unexamined self-absorption. It appears again when he asks Aleph for kisses (Murdoch 1993, 215). His attraction to Aleph is no more grounded in reality than his desire to be a lesbian; instead, both arise from an adolescent fantasy out of romances. He tells Aleph:

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Aleph, don’t you cry. I don’t want you ever to cry. I want you to be happy eternally. I want you to be your own perfect self forever. I feel so terrible before you, so wrecked, so broken, so vile. I’ve never felt like this before, I’m not worthy. I’m under a black cloud, I’m a faithless knight. I ought to be punished, I ought to be sent away for seven years to be some awful person’s servant. (Murdoch 1993, 263)

Harvey may be well-intentioned in hoping that Aleph will not experience misery and unhappiness, but his hopes are naïve, for no person, as he himself is finding out and coming to grips with, can be always happy. More, his representation of himself as a failed knight is utterly quixotic because he is not a character in a medieval romance, but a twentieth-­ century Londoner with a broken foot. Aleph’s effort to point out that Harvey will wake up from his romantic idealism at first reinforces his naiveté, for he protests, ‘I think we are really talking to each other, we are really being with each other, we are being each other. I shall always love you, Aleph, remember that’ (Murdoch 1993, 264). In fact, Harvey is talking at cross purposes with Aleph, unable to respond to her practical good sense because he is trapped in a daydream of becoming the beloved. He has no sense yet of the mutual love Emil wishes for him after he himself has been deserted by his partner Clive. That mutual love requires moral improvement as does Aleph’s counsel, ‘I mean something quite simple really, we should try to overcome our egoism and see the unreality and futility of so much of our instinctive thinking’ (304). Though Aleph does not quite say so, Harvey cannot see beyond his ego and instincts. Harvey is not yet capable of the altruistic seeing that Aleph recommends, though he does grow into a fuller grasp of reality with Aleph’s sister Sefton. Initially, he thinks of Sefton with alarm; his uneasiness is part of the egoism and unreality Aleph warns him against. When Harvey and Sefton kiss, they are propelled into a more dangerous selfishness, which the narrator describes, saying, ‘It was as if some blow had paralysed them’ (Murdoch 1993, 382). Sefton rightly sees this narcissism as ‘a form of madness’ (Murdoch 1993, 382) while Harvey pulls off his shirt and vest and tries to persuade her to make love with him. He does not understand that attraction and infatuation prevent him from seeing Sefton as she is. After she breaks off the kisses, she can persuade him to leave only by promising to come in two days’ time. Harvey leaves the house, but ‘he walked down the road smiling like a madman’ (Murdoch 1993, 384). Madman he is, for he has entered another dream state just as illusory as his

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unfounded fear of amputation or his improbable desire for Aleph. In his dream state, Harvey might seem a likely candidate to illustrate Horner and Rowe’s sense that ‘sexual encounters in [Murdoch’s] fiction are often part of a healing process that allows characters to move on from debilitating obsessions’ (Horner and Rowe 2015, xvi). Sex, though, does not initially free Harvey from his narcissism. After he and Sefton make love, he remains self-absorbed. He asks Sefton if he hurt her, but he is more concerned about being reassured of his ability as a lover and about Sefton’s love for him. Suspended in the afterglow of sex, he is also lost in fantasy and says, ‘Oh Sefton, we’re here, we’ve arrived, this is it—trip no further, pretty sweeting—I’m so happy, I’m crazy with happiness, the world is brilliant, it’s shining—’ (Murdoch 1993, 391). Rather than grasping that love is an ongoing project and that the moral life has no terminus, Harvey is utterly optimistic they will ‘leap over all the obstacles’ (Murdoch 1993, 390). He does not yet comprehend the complexity of human emotions and experience. He does not know anything, say, of Sefton’s love for Lucas. Nor does he consider her feelings in revealing he impotently attempted to make love with Tessa. Harvey’s illusions contrast with Sefton’s declaration that they must dress. Her insistence emphasizes the unreality of Harvey’s position. She understands, as he does not, that sex does not magic away difficulties. They still have to take up the ordinary demands of life. Similarly, her inspection of Harvey’s foot asserts the primacy of reality. As she touches it gently, she acknowledges the reality of his body, even if it is wounded and fragile. Her massaging of the damaged foot is therapeutic just as Peter Mir’s holding it is; in both instances, Sefton and Peter see, accept, and hold Harvey’s frailty and injuries. Their mirroring of him as he is helps him to see himself more fairly and to accept what he had found distasteful and foreign. With Sefton, Harvey begins to see his mistake in taking the pleasures of sex and the satisfactions of intimacy for having matured morally. He finds they may be catalysts for development, but for him they are not moral growth itself. That growth comes when Sefton objects to his walking a second time along the parapet in Italy from which he fell and injured his foot. Her protest brings him to understand that her view is different from his. In pledging never to repeat the stunt he accepts Sefton’s opinion and allows it to take precedence over his own. In this movement out of himself, Harvey shifts from his self-centred pleasures, sexual and otherwise, to respect Sefton’s wishes. He exemplifies Marilyn Fontane’s statement that ‘by learning to love people who are not part of us and

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accepting them for what they are by attending to them and seeing they are different, we can live in a real world and make realistically meaningful moral choices’ (Fontane 1983, 52). The passeggiata, in which Harvey and Sefton join, metaphorically enacts this loving acceptance, moral attention, and expanded vision, that Fontane sees at the heart of realism. The passeggiata symbolizes human life. While Rebecca Moden reads the ritual procession as showing that Murdoch is ‘deeply pessimistic about whether this [selfless] vision of reality can ever be attained’ (Moden 2017, 41), the movement of people around the square brings Harvey face to face with the reality of other people as they jostle him and he brushes up against them. Harvey is alert to the various faces he sees: ‘Beautiful faces appeared, joyful faces, inquisitive faces, friendly faces, dejected bitter faces, faces like masks with round empty mouths and eyes’ (Murdoch 1993, 460). Moden reads the circular motion of the passeggiata as ‘imply[ing] that no progress is made,’ but the motion is ritual rather than ‘mechanical repetition and substitution,’ as Moden has it (40). As ritual, it symbolizes the ongoing nature of the moral life which does not arrive at an end. In its turning, Harvey and Sefton confront the alterity of other people as they submit to the larger movement around the square. With Sefton at his side, in this submission Harvey is able to see more of the world than he did as the sheltered and petted young man he was as the novel began.2 With Harvey, Tom, and Emma, Murdoch represents the moral life not as a lonely pilgrimage toward reality, but a passeggiata with others in which one gives way to a movement larger and beyond oneself. Murdoch indicates that being with others socially, even sexually, is requisite for moral development. For these young men, the intimacy of sex and friendship sets them on the road to seeing others and themselves more fully. It is a moral awakening, not a final achievement of the Good, for as Browning observes, ‘The moral perfectionism that Murdoch imagines is not to be conceived as the pursuit of a supernatural end state that lies beyond imperfect critical endeavour but it involves a sense of goodness as being indefinable and embracing a vision of the world and the reality of others that supersedes a focus upon mere subjective choice’ (Browning 2018a, 18). While so much is currently being learned about Murdoch’s life and her sexuality, her letters and journals may well show that these young men’s development reflects her experience. Moreover, these papers, more private than her philosophical writings and novels, may provide insight into Murdoch’s experience of the moral life as she lived it. They may confirm, as Tom’s

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lovemaking with Emma and Harvey’s with Sefton indicate, that moral growth can occur even in moments when one is likely to be carried away by desire or pleasure, and that the intimacy and delight of sex can set a person on the path to Goodness. That path is arduous and painful; it has its austerities, but it also has the enjoyment of drinks with friends and the pleasure of sex to succor one along the way.

Notes 1. As Priscilla Martin and Anne Rowe observe, ‘Love is crucial to her philosophy because falling headlong into it can turn us into angels or demons. It can strip us of ourselves so that it can make us see others more clearly and thus make us better. Alternatively, it can titillate the fantasy life so that we become sexually obsessed, deluded and irresponsible’ (2010, 22). In The Philosopher’s Pupil and in The Green Knight, sex enables the shedding of fantasy and inspires clarity. 2. Audi Bayley has identified the source of Murdoch’s passeggiata and suggested the submission she and Murdoch made when they joined such a procession in Ascoli Piceno: ‘One of our experiences, which she put into The Green Knight about passeggiata in the square of a little town “somewhere in the Apennines,” actually took place in Ascoli Piceno, a lovely medieval town, little visited, near the Adriatic. Iris and I spent what seemed like an eternity walking arm-in-arm round and round the square among a dense crowd of good-natured Italians of all ages, surrendering ourselves and become one with the mass of people. Meanwhile we were being watched by John and Borys who, having found it all too claustrophobic, had retired to an open-­ air café’ (Bayley 2019, 94).

References Antonaccio, Maria. 2000. Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bayley, John. 1999. Elegy for Iris. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Bayley, Audi. 2019. Relaxing with Iris and John. In Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Miles Leeson, 93–97. Devizes, Wiltshire: Sabrestorm Fiction. Browning, Gary. 2018a. Iris Murdoch: History Woman. The Iris Murdoch Review 9: 17–22. ———. 2018b. Why Iris Murdoch Matters: Making Sense of Experience in Modern Times. Why Philosophy Matters. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

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Dooley, Gillian, ed. 2003. From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Fontane, Marilyn Stall. 1983. Under the Net of a Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 9 (1): 43–54. Gordon, David J. 1990. Iris Murdoch’s Comedies of Unselfing. Twentieth Century Literature 36: 115–136. Horner, Avril, and Anne Rowe, eds. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lewis, Roger. 1989. A Dangerous Dame: Iris Murdoch at Seventy. Telegraph Weekend Magazine 9: 16–19. Martin, Priscilla. 2010. The Preacher’s Tone: Murdoch’s Mentors and Moralists. In Iris Murdoch and Morality, ed. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, 31–42. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, Priscilla, and Anne Rowe. 2010. Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Moden, Rebecca. 2017. Breaching the Barrier of the Mask: Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil and the Construction of Visual Metaphor. The Iris Murdoch Review 8: 38–44. Murdoch, Iris. 1954. Under the Net. New York: Viking. ———. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Routledge. ———. 1983. The Philosopher’s Pupil. New York: Penguin. ———. 1993. The Green Knight. New York: Penguin. Squires, Constance. 2005. “A Just and Loving Gaze”: Iris Murdoch’s Theory of the Novel. The Philological Review 31: 59–84. Widdows, Heather. 2005. The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch, 2005. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

CHAPTER 11

Iris Murdoch and Goodness: How Good? Valentine Cunningham

The question of goodness, what it is, how to tell it, imagine it, fictionalise it, is for Iris Murdoch, our greatest moral-philosophical novelist, the question above all questions. ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, as her Leslie Stephen Lecture of 1967, climax of The Sovereignty of Good (1970), put it, is the sovereign question over all other questions. How to be good, and to think and write goodness in a post-God world is central. The Sovereignty of Good replacing the old Christian, Calvinist, Sovereignty of God. A matter of course then, of moral imperative and necessary personal submission—of being a subject of this sovereign. Yielding to the authority of this imperative as once you yielded to the authority of God. This chapter will discuss this concept in relation to physicality and touch, both fictional and realised in life. The question of the good life, doing good, being good without God, is especially potent for this one-time Protestant (Anglo-Irish) Christian, brought up among Christians and related to practising Christians—her Plymouth Brethren cousins. Murdoch was haunted by Anglican churchiness, and by great re-doers and revisers of Christianity, like Søren

V. Cunningham (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5_11

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Kierkegaard and Simone Weil, as well as by Greek moral philosophy which shaped Jewish Saul/Paul of Tarsus. All of this sponsors and animates the repeated moral struggle, perplexity, plight of her many fraught fictional believers, heretics, ex-nuns, spoiled priests, clergy manqués, and such. They are Murdoch’s proxies, engaged in the demonstrating and defining of goodness, its kinds and varieties, and its vivid opposite, the kinds and varieties of evil, which she insists is the main business of the Novel. ‘Good novels concern the fight between good and evil’, as she says in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Murdoch 1992, 97). What make the Novel good— good in the ordinary sense of being pleasing, readable, practically alright, and so forth, but even more vital: morally valuable. Greatly at stake for Murdoch is the goodness of the novelist as well as of the novel. The convergence registered, as it is achieved, in a certain sort of characterization— the making of characters, of fictional personae, out of Murdoch’s supreme narratorial imperative, the only moral way, namely ‘respect for the otherness of the other person’. This is the making of what John Bayley, her husband and close collaborator in these ethical-critical considerations, called the characters of love—in his impressively wide-ranging The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (1960). Her novels demand of us, as readers, that we reflect on goodness in Murdoch’s fictions—how it is imagined, aestheticised, defined, argued for, shown operating. These are questions about the moral philosophising in word and practice in Murdoch’s novels, which abut onto crucial yet ordinary, common or garden, critical questions. What are her fictions good for? How good are they? Are they any good? This is the questioning her people go in for a lot; as much as, if not more than, the intimately related question of how, and what, and who, is God. How good is this person, this event, this relationship? Is he, is she, any good at thinking, teaching, writing, making love? In bed? These are issues that are written, that is rhetoricised, metaphoricised, metonymicised, in many ways, but, I think, with especial pertinence as matters of touch—touching, being touched – both physically handled and emotionally moved. The matter of what hands do, what people do with their hands, what hands get up to. As, for instance, to take just one of the scores of moments when the discourse of goodness and the discourse of touch converge revealingly, when Mitzi Ricardo and the truly awful Austin Gibson Grey talk in An Accidental Man (1971). This novel is not untypically deluged in contradictory talk of what is good in an utter welter of good and bad touchings:

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(Mitzi) ‘Do tell me things. I bet you and Dorina were never any good in bed’. (Austin) ‘No, that was part of the trouble.’ ‘We’d be good, you and me. Can’t you feel that now?’ ‘Feel it? Yes. You can feel it too, if you like’. He took her hand and laid it where she could feel it. (Murdoch 1971, 240)

The feelings of and with hands, significant and signifying hands—hand work, handiwork—are simply everywhere in Murdoch’s fictions. Hands are key actors in her realism and are particularising of the human, of the contingent world. They are key exempla and illustrations in her ongoing story of goodness and its evil twin, of God and his antithesis, the Devil. The play of hands makes natural metonyms for her main plot of how characters handle and mishandle the demands of life and love, the possibility of living the good, and loving life: this is repeatedly a matter of touch. It is no accident, so to say, that contingency, coping with which is a main test of selfhood from Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954) on, should not only denote accidentalism, the dominant unforeseen and unpredictable (the ‘contingent rubble’ of the real, in that wonderful phrase from Metaphysics As A Guide to Morals (Murdoch 1992, 87)), but also bring in its root meaning: tangential acquaintance, mutual meeting and convergence: ‘touching together’. Just as attention, the mindful consideration of the other, that Murdoch took from Simone Weil as sustenance for her and Bayley’s espousal of the good of Novelist and Novel as respect for the otherness of the person, at root means tending towards, reaching out, a matter of touching the other. This is a central demand in her fiction. The good touch in her novels, the good touch of love and desire and attention which can, and commonly does, fail, succumbing to hostile, subjugating, even fatal touching. It is no accident that the matter of tact arises in The Black Prince (1973)—that self-reflexive late modernist novel, in which Murdoch potently confronts her own moral-critical theorizing and practice. Bradley Pearson, unreliable Murdochian fictionist, interrupts his story to address his reader (not unlike George Eliot addressing the reader in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede): My book is about art. It is also, in its humble way, a work of art: an ‘art object’, as the jargon has it; and may perhaps be permitted, now and then, to cast a look upon itself. Art (as I observed to young Julian) is the telling of truth, and is the only available method for the telling of certain truths. Yet

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how almost impossibly difficult it is not to let the marvels of the instrument itself interfere with the task to which it is dedicated. There are those who will only praise an absolute simplicity, and for whom the song-bird utterance of the so-called primitive is the measure of all, as if truth ceases to be when it is not stammered. And there are of course divinely cunning simplicities in the works of those who I hardly dare to name, since they are so near to gods. (Gods one does not name.) but thought it may always be well to attempt simplification, it is not always possible to avoid at least an elegant complexity. And then one asks, how can this also be ‘true’? Is the real like this, is it this? Of course, as you have so often pointed out, we may attempt to attain truth through irony. (An angel might make of this a concise definition of the limits of human understanding.) Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if he existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool. Irony is a form of ‘tact’ (witty word). It is our tactful sense of proportion in the selection of forms for the embodying of beauty. (Murdoch 1999b, 80–81)

Here Art is put as the only means of truth-telling, which, however, cannot help going in for complexity—‘elegant complexity’—i.e. excess, extravagance of the means. This undermines the claim to truth and realism and it is a matter of irony, of tact gone wrong: ‘our tactful sense of proportion in the selection of forms’ giving way to a tactless excess. This is, it would seem, Murdoch’s accepting the fact of overdoing in her fiction: all that repetition of persons and actions and ideas; the mess of personae, the huge casts, the enormous number of unhappy families, the twinning and doubling and mirroring within novels, the saying it again and again from novel to novel. In so doing she puts her finger on the irony, the paradox, the oxymoron, of tact, tactility, touch which is so necessary to being and to writing. This is so potentially and so actually good, but yet can also be a marker of the un-good, because it keeps going wrong, keeps being, at the same time as it is the essence of good, riddled with its opposite. This is a main Murdochian matter and one on which I want to reflect, and reflect on, through the two occasions when we, she and I, touched. First to consider, though not the first in time: I am driving down Oxford’s Woodstock Road, when I see her, a familiar figure. The aged Iris Murdoch.

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In her usual bag-lady togs—scruffy coat, bad-feet comfy shoes—sad old-­ lady outfit for the novelist whose eye is so taken by the attractive loveliness of her young women characters’ frocks and stockings and hair. She is scurrying along, looking hunted, haunted, lost, and I know she’s deeply Alzheimered. I had been dismayed to see her out with John Bayley, with her mind gone, contemplating the coats and coat-hangers at an Oxford Playhouse Gallery reception. I know from family experience that Alzheimered patients escape from home, get out of their house, whenever they can. I guess this is what is going on so I stop the car, and stop her. She is clearly in a panic, scared, afraid. I embrace her, arms around her, to console and protect; to show her she is safe. I remember her body heat, her sweat (she is overdressed for the weather). I drive her to my nearby house but cannot find the Bayleys’ phone number, so I drive her home (I know where she lives). Where I find she has been out for some time, to great alarm. Bayley distressed; the police alerted; all that. Th is incident gets into John Bayley’s Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories (1999), the second of his Iris memoirs, and a greatly fictionalised few paragraphs it is. He locates my meeting at the wrong part of the Woodstock Road and puts words into my mouth which were not uttered: ‘I’m late for a pupil—I must be going now’ and describes Iris as looking girlishly happy and pleased with herself, as at a successful escape. Which is not my recall. I am not complaining though I was, of course, disappointed with Iris the 2001 film having her discovered by a former lover. What impresses me is the fact of the rampant fictionalising. Although a small part, it appears of a great deal of fictionalising in Bayley’s autobiographical/biographical trio. The presence of the usual, and seemingly inevitable, submission of would-be truth-telling writing to the smoothing demands of narrative polish, the aesthetic massagings of form, the roundings-out for a ‘good story’. The grounds of old complaints about the narrativity of memoir and novel—that their clamant truth-claims are perennially undercut by their obvious allegorising, their fictionalising. Their making, a making-­up as much as a making-out. A mixing in Bayley’s Memoir that mirrors the mixed play of the great deal of autobiography and biography in Murdoch’s novels (the very presence of which she, of course, assiduously denied). Some years before, in 1978, I am shaking hands with her in my College, Corpus Christi. I was welcoming her to an undergraduate drinks evening I have organised for my Corpus and Somerville pupils as I was then a teaching member of both colleges. The event is in Corpus’s then largest

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reception space, the Fraenkel Room. My colleague Katharine Duncan-­ Jones is my co-host and she has brought along her newish husband, A.N.  Wilson, and Iris Murdoch. I knew of Duncan-Jones’s marriage to Wilson: the undergraduate pupil she became pregnant by and so ‘had’ to get married to. I am vaguely aware of Wilson’s connexion to John Bayley— the favourite pupil who did not do all that well in Finals but still got jobbed in by Bayley to teach undergraduates at New College, and by Bayley’s friend Rachel Trickett to do likewise at St Hugh’s. I am very unaware of his friendship with Iris Murdoch and did not know that she and Bayley had been eminent guests at his wedding. There was a closeness which resulted in his being chosen, in a kind of apostolic succession, as her official biographer. A closeness celebrated in his wonderfully witty but egregiously self-promoting record, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (2003), work of a then sacked biographer, which sports photos, incidentally (or not), of ‘IM and JB’ at the wedding, so I am rather surprised by her presence. Pleased, of course, and happy to give her a welcoming touch. But surprised, flummoxed even, when she says to me on the threshold of the Fraenkel Room, ‘It’s been a long time since I was in here’. I have no idea what she is talking about. Later I learn, from Peter Conradi’s superior biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), that this is where she attended the seminars of Oxford’s (and Europe’s) most distinguished Classicist, the Corpus Professor of Latin, eminent Jewish refugee from Hitlerite Germany, Eduard Fraenkel, Fraenkel being the prime inspirer of the Jewish exiles who people her fiction. He was in place in her imagination a long time before Elias Canetti entered her life and works as Fraenkel’s domineering successor. The Fraenkel Room is where, we are told by Conradi, she had met up with Fraenkel in 1964—reconciled after some sort of falling out. Fraenkel was then retired, an Honorary Fellow of the College, but so eminent he had been allowed—an uncommon privilege—to stay on in his old teaching room, and this room to be named in his honour after he died. This was the place where Iris had gone in June 1953 to console her old tutor after the suicide of his daughter. ‘It was marvellous’, she said in 1964, ‘to touch him again’ (Conradi 2001, 484). And she went on to dedicate The Time of the Angels (1966) to him. Was she just referring to her consoling touching of Fraenkel in 1953, or, as I cannot help thinking, was she also referring to her undergraduate meetings with Fraenkel, which involved a lot of touching? For he was a notorious hands-on tutor, as everyone in Oxford knew. Women’s Colleges tutors warned their girls against him as he was a

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persistent toucher of female students: the tutor with bad hands. Literally as well as morally bad hands—one of them actually withered, damaged by childhood osteomyelitis. Being touched by him physically, being ‘pawed’ (Murdoch’s word for such male physical importunity: for instance, Sam pawing at Yvonne in her 1957 Irish novella Something Special), a price, it was widely felt, worth paying for being in close touch with this so impressive a teacher, this wonderful reader and interpreter of Greek texts. The toucher who touched you by his touched readings. The good-bad, bad-­ good male teacher and intellectual father who so animates English Literature (he is featured in his one-time pupil Mary Warnock’s autobiography A Memoir: People and Places (2000), as well as in Murdoch’s fiction). He is the example, in the flesh, of Murdoch’s persistent awed, and aweing, notion of the oxymoronic marriage of good and evil. In 2017 Fraenkel was publicly outed as what The Times called a Sex Pest–in reference to the women graduate students of Corpus Christi who wanted his name erased from his Room, because he was one more case of a post-Harvey Weinstein male sexual predator. I argued against this demotion, this erasure, on the grounds that the good of Fraenkel, his great pedagogical efforts, his superior classical scholarship, as well as his contribution as subject and object to English Literature, outweighed the obvious badness. I argued that memorialising him should be thought analogous to the traditional practice of universities and other cultural institutions putting obviously bad money to obviously good ends: colleges, universities, scholarships, museums, galleries, and the like, all named for doers of truly bad deeds—imperialists, grinders of the faces of the poor, doers-­ down of the worker, purveyors of deadly pharmaceuticals and mortal tobacco—Rhodes, Frick, Guggenheim, Gulbenkian, Pierpoint Morgan, Wills, Sackler, and the rest (what a rogues’ gallery), as it were redeemed by the good of their benefactions (redemption not a condoning of original sin, certainly not a forgetting, but a large moral irony). My argument was in vain. The Corpus Governing Body caved in; and compromised, renaming The Fraenkel Room as The Refugee Scholars’ Room, on its wall a list of all such, the many in fact, associated with the College, including Fraenkel. De-individualized, alas, though a photograph of him standing by his books was allowed, despite some protests, to go on standing in the Senior Common Room. My colleagues should have read their Iris Murdoch. Where ‘Fraenkelism’, as we must call it, is the prototype of her necessary—deeply ironic, tragi-­ comic even—entanglement of good and its moral opposite in human life

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and art. Her repeated investment in the paradox of touching, indeed of contingency in the oldest sense of touching. We can see the morally mixed Fraenkelist handiwork in Max Lejour of The Unicorn (1963). Lejour, elderly scholar, expert on Plato, inspiring tutor of his prize classicist undergraduate Effingham Cooper. At home in his retirement office, where ‘he had stored up so much of his good’ (Murdoch 2000a, 79), Lejour sings ‘to a plain-song lilt of his own’ the ‘healing’ lines of Aeschylus about learning by suffering—translated by Murdoch (Murdoch 2000a, 80). Effingham, visiting, is blest to hear them again; to feel again their healing touch. But Lejour’s touch is also overwhelming, disempowering. Ever the masterful tutor, he goes on about the good and God, compelling Effingham’s agreement. He admits his take on goodness is only theoretical: ‘practically speaking I’ve never done a hand’s turn’ (Murdoch 2000a, 101). A mockery, perhaps, of his big hands. They inspire, but are, nonetheless, fearful paws: ‘His hands, which had inspired Effingham as an undergraduate with irrational fears, were big too [like his head and his nose], hairy with broad flat paw-like fingers’ (Murdoch 2000a, 95). It prevails in An Accidental Man (1971), a novel animated by what diplomat Matthew Gibson-Gray observed in Moscow’s Red Square: an ‘accidental’ passer-by proving his good human contingency by going over to some demonstrators, shaking their hands, and getting arrested for his pains. This man is a Good Samaritan, not an unheeding passer-by, as are the bad men of Jesus’s parable. The Gospel’s forerunners of Matthew, who simply returned to his Embassy, cocoon of English art, hung with ‘minor masterpieces by Gainsborough and Lawrence’ (Murdoch 1971, 103). The Red Square event gets discussed with regard to its moral significance with Ludwig Leferrier, who for his part failed to imitate the Russian hand-­ shaker, and ‘passed by’ mad Dorina on a Bloomsbury Street, on the day she died. Guilty about his failure, he quits Oxford and scholarship, returning to the USA in a massive redemptive act to protest the Vietnam war, and to go to prison for that. Ludwig is named for Ludwig Wittgenstein, inspirer of Murdoch, the philosopher who proposed that the world is all that is, and keeping quiet about what we should not speak of. Nothing ironic about this naming, in fact the contrary; unlike the dubbing of the seriously evil character of An Accidental Man as Austin. Austin is the name of the Oxford tutor J.L.  Austin, Fraenkel’s colleague at Corpus, philosopher of language deeply admired by Murdoch—and indeed by the whole philosophical world—for his How to Do things With Words (1955, revised 1962). Austin

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and Wittgenstein, were, Murdoch said, ‘the most extraordinary men among us’ (Mehta 1954, 52). Murdoch’s Austin aggressively paws women, and with his one ‘good’ hand—the other was injured in childhood (shades of Fraenkel) by a rock kicked at him by his brother. He is a thief and killer. He stole to pay a blackmailer, whom he brains with the man’s own metal box containing a bad novel, and he does it with his so-called good hand: the ostensibly good hand doing demonstrably bad work. Symptomatically he is the father of Garth—author of a commercially successful bad novel, which features his own passing by ‘on the other side’ in New York, refusing to heed the cries for help of a black man being knifed to death by thugs (Murdoch 1971, 88). Disturbed and disabled, we are told, by ‘the contingent details of choice’ (Murdoch 1971, 137). The moral paradoxes of touching are clamantly set out in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987). On a College Gaudy Night—in an updated Midsummer Night’s Dream—the former pupils of the great Jewish classicist Levquist, now retired (Fraenkel in fictional guise) visit him in his old college room (the Corpus Fraenkel Room to the life). Levquist was ‘not easy to approach … an awkward fact, given the strong attraction which he exerted upon many of those who had dealings with him’ (Murdoch 1987, 19). For Murdoch he is the symptomatically attractive overpowering refugee Jewish master. He lectures his former star-pupil Gerard about the lie of his Christianity, of redemption claiming it all a corrupted Platonism. He gets Gerard to read aloud from the Iliad, about the horses of Achilles weeping for the death of Patroclus—signals, he says, of unutterably miserable humanity, and both master and pupil are moved. Levquist talks of death, and the virtue of truth and endurance—of stoicism. The big man touches his pupil emotionally in the matter of literature, because he is himself touched by it. It is an emotional subjugation, thought of as utterly good by Gerard—so good he would like to touch the old man’s hands, embrace his knees like a classical suppliant. Levquist recalls a favourite poem of A.E. Housman; visibly touched by it: ‘Man is ever mortal, he thinks by fit and start, and when he thinks, he fastens his hand upon his heart’. As he spoke Levquist lifted his big wrinkled hand to the upper pocket of his shabby corduroy jacket. Living his life among the greatest poetry in the world, he retained a touching affection for A.E. Housman. (Murdoch 1987, 26)

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He is, of course, misrecalling Housman’s Last Poem, number X, about being touched. ‘Could man be drunk for ever/With liquor, love, or fights,/ Lief should I rouse at morning/And lief lie down of nights. / But men at whiles are sober/And think by fits and starts,/ And if they think, they fasten/Their hands upon their hearts’. He is so touched, he has touched the poem up, making it his own: devoted remembering as misremembering; loving owning as actual subjugating—it is what readers commonly do with their professed favourite parts. Somebody knocked at the door … Gerard stood up. He felt as on other occasions, a strong impulse to move round the desk and seize Levquist’s hands, perhaps kiss them, perhaps even kneel down. Would the classical suppliant rite of embracing the knees enable him to carry off such a gesture, make it something formal, not to be rejected as a ‘soft’ rush of graceless emotion? As on other occasions he hesitated, then inhibited the impulse. Did Levquist know of his feelings, of their tenderness and strength? He was a bit sure. He contented himself with a bow. (Murdoch 1987, 26)

We are in the presence of a complex chain of subjugating touchings— Housman and Levquist, Levquist and Housman; Homer and Levquist, Homer and Gerard; Levquist and Gerard: the overwhelming touch of literature, registered as good, real, and religious. This is analogous to Dora’s response in The Bell (1958) to Gainsborough’s painting of his two daughters hand-in-hand in the National Gallery: Dora stopped at last in front of Gainsborough’s picture of his two daughters. These children step through a wood hand in hand, their garments shimmering, their eyes serious and dark, their two heads, round full buds, like yet unlike. Dora was always moved by the pictures. Today she was moved, but in a new way. She marvelled with a kind of gratitude, that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvellous generosity, their splendour. It occurred to her that here at last was something real and something perfect. Who had said that about perfection and reality being in the same place? Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it part of her fantasy make it worthless … the pictures were something read outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all.

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These thoughts, not clearly articulated, flitted through Dora’s mind. She had never thought about the pictures I this way before; nor did she draw now any very explicit moral. Yet she felt she had had a revelation. She looked at the radiant, sombre, tender, powerful canvas of Gainsborough and felt a sudden desire to go down on her knees before it, embracing it, shedding tears. (Murdoch 1999a, 190–91)

Dora is overpowered, subordinated, as the Jewish masters’ pupils are, but the pictured hand-in-handedness (recalling fallen Adam and Eve taking their solitary way ‘hand in hand’ out of Eden in Paradise Lost; entering a Wittgensteinian world of all that is) is an ecstasy, a transport. She smiles ‘as one might smile in a temple’ (Murdoch 1999a, 191), feeling the utterly good of the ekphrastic handedness. This is the good touch of art: although never guaranteed of course. Certainly not guaranteed to Paula Biranne in The Nice and the Good (1968), also visiting the National Gallery. Pictures usually ‘brought to her an intense and completely pure and absorbing pleasure’ (Murdoch 2000b, 140); but not today, when all she can think of and picture to herself are big potter Eric’s ‘strange square hands’, uncannily hairy, and smelling of the clay he ‘miraculously’ manipulates. The hands of a ‘neurotic’, a possible killer (Murdoch 2000b, 140–41). It is an image of scary hands not alleviated by attending to her husband Richard’s favourite Bronzino painting, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. Richard thinks it is pornographic, but for Paula it represents the attraction-repulsion of erotic hands at work. Paula sat and looked at the picture. A slim elongated naked Venus turns languidly towards a slim elongated Cupid. Cupid stoops against her, his long-fingered left hand supporting her head, his long-fingered right hand curled about her left breast. His lips have just come to rest very lightly upon hers, or perhaps just beside hers. It is the long still moment of dreamy suspended passion before the spinning clutching descent. Against a background of smooth masks and desperate faces the curly-headed Folly advanced to deluge with rose petals the drugged and amorous pair, while the old lecher Time himself reaches out a long and powerful arm above the scene to bring all sweet things to an end. (Murdoch 2000b, 141–42)

The touch of the old lecher: destructive enemy of love’s sweetness. According to the ‘Editor’s Foreword’ of The Black Prince, ‘That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse’ (Murdoch 1999b, 9). This is a motto for Murdoch, who thought Titian’s

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Flaying of Marsyas the greatest painting in the western canon. In chapter two of A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970)—that astonishingly conversational novel, a set of as it were modern Symposia, pseudo-Platonic dialogues—Simon and Axel, an extremely knowing pair of gay men (Axel always claiming to quote Wittgenstein), camply and seriously, discuss the possible meanings of the Marsyas. It is ‘an image of love’, it shows ‘the inevitable agony of the human soul in its desire to achieve God’, it is just ‘blood and pain and no love’ (Murdoch 2001, 33). Love and hostility, good and evil: simultaneously present. Does it reveal ‘redeeming grace’ (Murdoch 2001, 33)? It does, and it does not. And no doubt what is fetchingly attractive, moving indeed, to Murdoch about this oxymoronic depiction of a human hand flaying a human body (painting featured, of course, in the background of Tom Phillips’ portrait of Murdoch in the National Gallery), this aesthetic revealing of the truth of morality’s daunting mixturing, is that its intrusive, satyr-like bearded figure carrying a bucket, presumably to catch the blood, sports a left hand, uncannily clawed. Not unlike the raised hand of Eduard Fraenkel in the photo of him taken in the Fraenkel Room, standing at his bookshelves: his good left hand, in the air—the one that did the pawing. The photograph that is in the Corpus Senior Common Room, which is reproduced in Conradi’s Life of Iris Murdoch, Fraenkel’s devoted pupil.

References Bayley, John. 1960. The Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality. London: Constable. ———. 1999. Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories. London: Duckworth. Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life London: Harper Collins Mehta, Ved. 1954. Fly and the Fly-Bottle. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1971. An Accidental Man. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 1987. The Book and the Brotherhood. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 1992. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. (1958) 1999a. The Bell. London: Vintage. ———. (1973) 1999b. The Black Prince. London: Vintage. ———. (1963) 2000a. The Unicorn. London: Vintage. ———. (1968) 2000b. The Nice and the Good. London: Vintage. ———. (1970) 2001. A Fairly Honourable Defeat. London: Vintage. Sandeman, George. 2017. Oxford Votes to Drop Name of ‘Sex Pest’ Eduard Fraenkel. Accessed 01-07-2019. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ oxford-­votes-­to-­drop-­name-­of-­sex-­pest-­eduard-­fraenkel-­gtjljk5k0 Warnock, Mary. 2000. A Memoir: People and Places. London: Duckworth.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 3, 47, 48, 52 A Aeschylus, 188 Alice in Wonderland, 39, 148 Alzheimer’s disease, 3, 31 Antonaccio, Maria, 164 Atwood, Margaret, 63 Auden, W.H., 33 Austen, Jane, 128, 157 Austin, J.L., 188 B Barfield, Owen, 18 Bayley, John, 2, 5, 9, 12, 20, 26, 29, 31, 32, 40, 42, 50, 85, 86, 93, 118–122, 126, 165, 182, 183, 185, 186

The Characters of Love, 12, 182 Beauvoir, Simone de, 59–60, 65n18, 65n24 Bevan, Edwyn, 12 Blake, William, 77 Botticelli, 56 Bowen, Elizabeth, 27 Bronzino, 191 Brophy, Brigid, 28–30, 62, 122–124 Browning, Gary, 44n14 Byatt, A.S., 32, 39 C Canetti, Elias, 50, 96, 123, 124, 186 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 19, 20 Conradi, Peter J., 35, 42, 50, 68, 71, 74, 94, 96, 97, 118, 120, 126, 152, 165, 186, 192 Cusk, Rachel, 49–53, 61, 64n6

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Leeson, F. White (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27216-5

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194 

INDEX

D Dooley, Gillian, 2, 6, 9, 33, 34, 51, 62, 63, 119, 120, 123, 124, 127, 128, 164, 165 A Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction, 6, 127 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 186 E Eliot, George, 183 Eliot, T.S., 26, 27, 40, 41, 77, 83, 134, 144n1 Everard, Sarah, 47 Eyre, Richard, 26, 42, 119 F Feminism, 3, 48, 49, 56, 59, 62–63, 148 Foot, Philippa, 27, 44n12 Fraenkel, Eduard, 8, 9, 125, 186–189, 192 G Gainsborough, Thomas, 16 Glanvill, Joseph, 17 H Hals, Frans, 38 Heidegger, Martin, 32, 33 Homer, 190 Horner, Avril, 62 Housman, A.E., 189, 190 Husserl, Edmund, 79 J Jesus Christ, 135 Julian of Norwich, 55, 95

K Kierkegaard, Søren, 181–182 Kingston University Archives, 3 Kreisel, Georg, 62 L Le Fanu, Sheridan, 157 Leeson, Miles, 2, 7, 28, 30, 136, 137, 178n2 Leslie, Shane, 18 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 135, 136 Lewis, C.S., 12 The Allegory of Love, 12 Locke, John, 12 M MacKinnon, Donald, 151 Mascall, Eric, 12 Medcalf, Stephen, 2 Medlin, Brian, 117 Moore, G.E., 17 Murasaki, Shikibu, 4, 5, 93, 95–97, 99–106, 108, 109 Murdoch, Iris, 1–9, 11–23, 25–42, 43n9, 43n11, 44n12, 44n13, 44n15, 47–63, 67–90, 93–109, 113–128, 131, 147–160, 163–178, 181–192 An Accidental Man, 5, 97, 100, 182, 188 The Bell, 5, 12, 15, 21, 26, 94, 104, 107, 108, 147, 157, 190 The Black Prince, 5, 26, 28–30, 65n19, 94, 95, 102, 104, 105, 107, 115, 155, 183, 191 The Book and the Brotherhood, 5, 26, 107, 189 Bruno’s Dream, 150 Existentialists and Mystics, 70, 118

 INDEX 

A Fairly Honourable Defeat, 5, 102, 113, 158, 192 The Flight from the Enchanter, 12, 124, 147, 148, 154 The Good Apprentice, 26, 64n12 The Green Knight, 5–8, 39, 94, 97, 104, 108, 119, 124, 131–143, 149, 152, 158, 166, 173, 178n1, 178n2 The Italian Girl, 65n19, 147, 154 Jackson's Dilemma, 2, 3, 5, 25–42, 94, 98, 119, 148 The Message to the Planet, 5, 64n12, 97, 159 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 33, 41, 70, 73, 141, 150, 155, 182, 183 The Nice and the Good, 5, 98, 149, 150, 158, 191 Nuns and Soldiers, 5, 94, 97, 104, 106, 152 The One Alone, 152 The Philosopher’s Pupil, 8, 65n22, 149, 157, 159, 165, 178n1 The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, 5, 26, 100, 155 The Sandcastle, 2, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 149, 156, 157 Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, 33 The Sea, The Sea, 5, 26, 31, 39, 49, 64n12, 65n19, 94, 97, 104, 106, 107, 124, 140, 143, 149, 155 A Severed Head, 5, 13, 64n12, 65n19, 94, 97, 115, 121, 154 Something Special, 187 The Sovereignty of Good, 8, 34, 84–87, 89, 114, 181 The Time of the Angels, 20, 21, 23, 147, 148, 150, 157, 186 An Unofficial Rose, 24n1, 119, 121, 124

195

A Word Child, 65n19, 71, 153 A Year of Birds, 77 Under the Net, 2, 3, 12, 13, 25–42, 47–63, 116, 148, 153, 165, 183 The Unicorn, 5, 20, 21, 23, 97, 104, 147, 157, 188 Muroya, Yozo, 4 N National Gallery, 15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 131, 132, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143 Ecce Homo, 141 On the Genealogy of Morals, 137 The Gay Science, 138 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 141 Nuttall, Anthony, 2, 11–16, 20 P Pater, Walter, 56 Peake, Mervyn, 13 Peter Pan, 148 Plato, 20, 39, 89, 136, 139, 151, 188 Powys, John Cowper, 100 Q Queneau, Raymond, 41, 50, 59 R Rembrandt, 136 Renoir, 56 Rossetti, Christina, 75, 77 Rowe, Anne, 2 Living on Paper, 121 Rublyev, Andrei, 20

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INDEX

S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 28, 30, 32, 151 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 7, 136 Shakespeare, William, 40 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 133, 134 T The Tale of Genji, 5, 43n11, 93–109 Thompson, Frank, 50 Titian, 191 Tolkien, J.R.R., 101, 149 Tolstoy, Leo, 50 Traherne, Thomas, 18, 19 Trickett, Rachel, 186

W Warnock, Mary, 187 Weil, Simone, 39, 88, 151, 182, 183 Weinstein, Harvey, 187 White, Frances, 2 White, Patrick, 117 Williams, Charles, 2, 14, 17, 21 The Greater Trumps, 14, 17 Wilson, A.N., 28, 113, 114, 186 Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her, 186 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7, 30, 32, 41, 51, 150, 188, 189, 192 Z Zen, 4