Triangles, eternal, transitory and correctly tuned
Raymond Carr
EFFORTS AT THE TRUTH by Nicholas Mosley Secker, 120, pp. 345 It is generally accepted that one should not review the books of one's friends. Nicholas Mosley has been a great friend of mine for half a century, a friendship forged, as he writes, 'when we were lurch- ing through the undergrowth of Soho together'. In retrospect it seems a time of innocent pleasures. Lurching through Soho meant chatting up girls in the Gargoyle and taking them for mild flirtations in the semi- darkness of the 400 or the Stork Room. You would marry one of the girls — I met my wife at a party of Nick's — and hey presto! you would, given a minor aberra- tion or so, settle down to a 'normal' life of children and nannies.
Mosley has not led a normal life, a 'spoilt child' with a private income, he was spared the discipline of earning a living. Nor has he written normal novels. His novels are complex structures; he makes his readers work, unaccustomed as most are to experi- mental writing. In this autobiography he looks back on his novels and the experi- ences in his own life from which they arise; they are a search for what he sometimes calls 'reality', sometimes a pattern that will make some sense out of the paradoxes, the absurdities, the pain, the darkness and light of experience. In an article in Prism, the Anglican magazine he edited after his con- version by Father Raynes (a spiritual expe- rience that he describes in his biography of Raynes) he wrote that 'one should see one's life as a sort of trying out', a 'testing' With Christianity as a voyage of discovery, a way of seeing and bearing a situation that was essentially paradoxical'. His first marriage was an attempt to escape conventionality in a love 'with no graspingness, no power games, no jeal- ousy'. Clearly his wife came to think that he was playing power games.
I often feel [she wrote] that all you want is for everyone to be won round, and then for you to be able to continue your (in my opin- ion) fairly sad antics, while the spotlight always has to remain on you.
His essay in testing with 'Mary' broke, as must all such affairs, on the rock of the classic dilemma: if I leave the girl I hurt her; if I stay with the girl then I hurt my wife — the struggle made all the more difficult by an excess of 'the stuff about renunciation and self-immolation'.
His last affair with 'Natalia' broke the pattern of his marriage, and when patterns grow stale one must face up to the fact that there might be something 'round the cor- ner'. 'Natalia' was an occasional bolter, whose comings and goings would have driv- en most men round the bend and which condemned Mosley to a juggling act on a tight-rope. Nicholas Mosley is the funniest man I know. It comes out in his description of this juggling act. Each time Natalia stages one of her frequent disappearances, her piano is lowered by crane from a top storey; the crane driver remarks that it went up and down like a yo-yo. When his wife comes into residence, Natalia's pic- tures are taken down and his wife's put in their place, the process reversed when Natalia turns up again. By then the psy- chologist's couch has replaced the confes- sional of his Prism days; then he claimed that psychologists were 'religious' in that they see that through listening there might be 'some power of healing'. His present wife is a successful psychotherapist. His analyst had told him, 'You like tying your- self in knots'; but Mosley writes, 'we are all tied in knots; it is by looking at them that we hope to get out of them'. It is, as his wife writes, 'part of the burden of being a human being'. By contemplating their knots, both have found a way out of the maze. Good luck to them.
This autobiography is so blindingly sin- cere that it makes Rousseau's Confessions a non-starter in lacerating self-exposure. I have to confess that I found his use of let- ters from a dead wife and mistress disturb- ing. I can understand how Oswald Mosley's widow found painful the quotation of let- ters that revealed her husband as a philan- derer, although the overall portrait of his father is sympathetic. It caused some em- barrassment, if not pain. But then the busi- ness of writing, he says, is 'like a journey in a troika in which people are thrown to pur- suing wolves'. The discovery of healing truth is a painful business for all concerned.
His rejection of the narrative tradition of contemporary fiction is absolute. When none of his favoured authors made the Booker short-list he resigned from the jury. Here is his judgment of Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, which he confesses to have enjoyed reading — surely something: It rang a small bell with a sharp clear ping! but has no overtones nor undertones nor echoes at all, like a correctly tuned triangle being tuned by a triangle tuner in the Festival Hall.
For Mcisley, contemporary highbrow fiction presents a deterministic, and there- fore pessimistic, universe, where man 'has neither freedom nor responsibility'. His model was William Faulkner, an abiding influence. By a many-layered narrative style, Faulkner achieved
an extraordinary sense of the complexity and mystery of life as it is experienced, in contrast to a narrative style that remains outside.
We don't sense this mystery of life as it is experienced in reading Madame Bovary. It is all too straightforward.
`If we look', is Mosley's message, 'we can learn'. 'Either we trust and things may turn out, or we do not and they will not'. It reminds me of Father Raynes' unsuccessful attempt to convert me. 'If you want to believe,' he told me, 'that there's something out there, go to mass and pray as if you did believe, and you will find that you will.' Though no longer within the framework of Anglicanism, Mosley seems to me to remain a religious writer. His and my friend, the novelist Hugo Charteris, whose loss we feel almost daily, described Mosley's religious writings as the 'march past of an armoured division — immune to A. J. Ayer's jets, slick as farts overhead'. All writers who see in religion a way of explaining and dealing with the sometimes unbearable paradoxes of life, run up against the problem of describing what, to the irreligious mind, doesn't make sense the nature of religious experience itself. We are actors, he writes, but with luck we may sense what is going on off-stage. All his writings, and this autobiography, are an heroic and incessant striving after the truths that may be out there, off-stage and in ourselves.
Don't keep you tongue in son, it's rude.'
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