Virtue its own reward BOOKS

MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

Miss Iris Murdoch is a popular novelist, but one who has been wholeheartedly accepted by the literary establishment. She has been acclaimed as 'original,' brilliant' and possessed of 'absolute distinction.' With each book she moves forward in mastery, setting herself and encompassing larger goals,' rhapsodises one criticaster whose particular habit it is `to take off the hat to Fashion and hold it out for pennies.' These judgments, and others like them, have mostly been made by writers whose 'board and lodging,' as Gertrude Stein once ex- plained, 'is written on their hearts'; they are nevertheless symptomatic. For although Miss Murdoch is quite unusually intelligent, aware, clever and serious in intention, the special characteristic of her first eleven novels is their signal failure to achieve a satisfactory solution to the problem of how to write fiction in the post-Joycean era. That, one might fairly say, is what they are really about.

She began, as Mr Francis Hope has well re- marked, by refusing, in Under the Net, to write a novel at all, a clear indication of her pre- occupation with form; ever since, the problems of structure and method have haunted her to the virtual exclusion of everything else. In the sense that a novel is an imaginative response to an experience of life, Miss Murdoch is not a novelist. Her novels are not imaginative; they are ingenious attempts to solve a fascinating in- tellectual conundrum.

Many untalented writers cynically, or just stupidly, take refuge in their misunderstandings of responsible experimentation : misreading, as incoherent, the difficult surface of serious non- realistic _fiction (as witlessly as any reactionary), they imagine that incoherence is now allowed, and plunge into it. Miss Murdoch is not one of these. Her abundance of general talent is as obvious as her intelligence. But Miss Mur- doch the philosopher is a much more potent entity than Miss Murdoch the novelist. For although in her novels her cleverness has allowed her to write, at times, with humour and with grace, and to give an impression of brilliance in isolated passages, it seems to have escaped general notice that she lacks imagina- tion. Her fiction is disguised moral philosophy; it is not—in Lionel Trilling's phrase—an instru- ment of moral imagination. She deals in a series of fashionable cliches, and her main pre- occupation, about which she becomes increas- ingly desperate, is to discover a valid way of cobbling them together. But there is little a novelist can do with the snaffle and the curb without a bloody horse, as Roy Campbell observed many years ago in commenting 'On Some South African Novelists.'

Miss Murdoch's Leslie Stephen Lecture for 1967, The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts (cup 5s), is, of course, primarily directed at an audience of philosophers; but it does incidentally act as a useful guide to her artistic intentions. It tells us, in effect, that her reasons for writing novels spring from philo- sophical rather than imaginative, or, as site would perhaps say, artistic, concerns. It might be argued, especially by some philosophers, that her concerns are not philosophical at all, but merely frivolous; the answer here is simply that they are concerns which she considers to be philosophical. In those earlier novels, such as The Sand Castle, where her philosophical motivations are minimal, where she is experi- mentally trying to make 'art' that is independent of philosophy, she is at her weakest.

In common with other important concepts, the concept of good, she seems to argue, cannot be discussed 'without resort to metaphor': 'can- not be analysed into non-metaphorical com- ponents without a loss of substance.' Doubtless this acknowledgement of the limitations of traditional British philosophy early led Miss Murdoch to her interest in Sartre, of whom she has written a shrewd study, her best book. Com- pare her, here, to another British philosopher, A. J. Ayer, whose hostility exhibits little more than his inability to grasp what Sartre's exis- tentialism is about.

Like Sartre, Miss Murdoch is an atheist. Being the well-trained philosopher that she is, she does no more, however, than 'simply assert' that she sees 'no evidence to suggest that human life is not something self-contained' and 'pur- poseless.' Her own answer to the gratuitous absurdity of existence is, in a word, 'art': 'Art shows us the only sense in which the perma- nent and incorruptible is compatible with the transient. . . . Art pierces the veil and gives sense to the notion of a reality which lies beyond appearance: it exhibits virtue in its true guise in the context of death and chance.' She laments that Plato should finally have come to believe that all art 'is bad art, a . . . con- solation which distorts reality'; if we surrender to the authority of art, she implies, we may approach true humility and, seeing ourselves as nothing, 'see other things as they are.'

I am not qualified to judge the elegance of this performance in purely philosophical terms. It has certainly all been said before. But, whether we are atheists or not, our natural state of selfishness is certainly absurd: it will always bear saying again in a cogent manner. The trouble is that Miss Murdoch frequently sounds as though she were preaching a sermon or ghosting for Miss Patience Strong. That she seeks a valid way to free herself, as an atheist, from the spiritual impasse of modern philo- sophy without recourse to the kind of nonsense written by T. H. Green or Bernard Bosanquet at the end of the last century is an indication of her awareness of a fundamental problem; but she does not seem, here, to have found what she seeks.

Nor has she done so in her latest novel, The Nice and the Good (Chatto and Windus 30s), which is not merely a failure as fiction, but so trivial, vulgar, sentimental and (apparently),con- cocted to appeal to the inferior reader that it is no more than silly. The answers, which are instructive, are far less discreditable to Miss Murdoch than to her thoughtless adulators.

'The nice in this book is self-gratifying love: 'the good' is impersonal love. The chief pro- tagonist is John Ducane, intelligent lawyer and passionate puritan in search of Murdoch ia n virtue. There are two settings: a Whitehall office and a Dorset country house. In White- hall a violent death occurs, into which Ducane is appointed to hold an inquiry; this who- dunnit-cum-espionage theme, involving black- mail, black magic and a dash of sadism, is interwoven with a domestic theme, involving a cat, a dog, a lovesick adolescent, an eccentric 'happy marriage' and several sexually lost adults.

Miss Murdoch's treatment of 'delightful' (I quote the blurb) children and pets, together with her penchant for inserting information as to what clothes her women are wearing, can be described only as execrable, mawkish and cheap. Some of her dialogue, well exemplified in this exchange between two adolescents in bed for the first time, makes one glad that women's popular magazines are not allowed to be explicit : "Was that really it?"

"Are you sure you did it right?"

"My God, I'm sure!"

"Well, I don't like it."

"Girls never do the first time."

"Perhaps I'm a Lesbian.". . .

"0 Barb, you were so wonderful, I worship you."' Miss Murdoch's intentions, to describe reality and to demonstrate that selfless love is virtuous. are doubtless admirable. But if the welter of sentimentality in which this 'domestic comedy' ends is supposed to be ironic, then all traces of the intended irony have been lost. The effect, especially of the clothes-, 'scenery'- and pet- notes, is that of a serial in a woman's magazine; but worse, because more pretentious.

The excuse that this is not realistic fiction, but allegory, comedy, satire or fable (there are hints, in an episode in a cave, of Aeneas's visit to the underworld), will not do. There is no trace of parodic intent in the writing itself, as there clearly is even in a potboiler such as Wyndham Lewis's Red Priest. Only for a few lines at a time does the book come alive. Miss Murdoch has got herself into this mess—and it is a mess—because she has tried to use the novel to write a philosophical lecture. She can- not see her people as people, and so in her despair she has become increasingly reckless, using every cliche, from spying and whips to Virgilian allusions, to distract her and her reader's attention from her inability to create character or to imagine—as distinct from con- triving—situation.

When George Eliot came to write her first novel, Adam Bede, she certainly had, like Miss Murdoch, a strongly didactic intention. She was over-vindictive towards Hetty, and both Adam and Dinah are impossibly priggish. But we still read the novel because, when its author forgets herself, she sees her characters in their setting: the Poysers at their farm take possession of her—and of us. The most 'non-realistic' kind of modern novelist (one thinks of Nathalie Sar- raute) must possess this mysterious imaginative capacity, even if he does not make it as imme- ditttely apparent as earlier novelists did. It is the general failure of critics to demand this sort of robustness in fiction that leads to the com- position of such non-novels as The Nice and The Good.