LITMIR.BIZ

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human race, is a small triumph, moving, funny and true. Dryness of course need not exclude compassion. The dreadful Austin, the accidental man of the title, is, as one of the choric party voices puts it at the end, ‘like all of us, only more so’. Yet in case this makes us feel too comfortable, a second voice adds, with a double-edged complacency that cheerfully mocks our own, ‘Everybody is justified somehow.’ The narrator can be urbane, like her characters. Austin and his brother Matthew are dimly echoed by Charlotte and her sister Clara. Both sets of siblings are deeply dependent on life-myths which feed and require obsessive reciprocal feelings of guilt, hostility, pity and jealous rivalry, including sexual rivalry. Austin, associated like so many men in Murdoch’s novels of the 1970s with Peter Pan, the ‘sinister boy’, on account of his immature spirituality, is a person who positively invites his own bad luck. Failure has become so much his secret consolation that he resembles a vampire. Austin is a clown, a comic awful figure, and a fool. He is surrounded by a succession of demonic ‘accidental’ figures – Norman Monkley the incompetent blackmailer, the horrible child Henrietta Sayce who finally falls off some scaffolding and breaks her skull. There is a pervasive Schadenfreude in the book, a malicious delight as typical of Murdoch’s world as it was of Dostoevsky’s. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky defined this special joy in the misfortunes of others or in their deaths when he wrote after Marmeladov’s accident of ‘that strange inner feeling of satisfaction that may always be observed in the course of a sudden accident even in those who are closest to the victim and from which no loving man is exempt, however sincere his sympathy and compassion’.

      The author cannot remain wholly outside such a system of feeling. Two characters die in circumstances that mock their and our childish desire for transcendence. The dying Alison is misheard when calling for her lawyer and has to endure a reading from the Psalms: ‘The words were at home in this scene. They had been here before’ (48). And the harassed Dorina on the point of death at last realises that what she had dimly recalled as spiritual advice – ‘Il faut toujours plier les genoux’ – was actually skiing instruction.

      Austin is the infectious centre of this cruel pleasure, this ghoulish pity and fear. He is the most deluded and unfree, but his story is circumscribed by many others, which radiate outwards and give the illusion of a marvellous depth of field. There are chains of lovers, whose voices are overheard only through a series of letters. The letters, like the anonymous party voices, wittily punctuate the narrative. Schoolboy Patrick loves and pursues Ralph Odmore, who imagines he loves Ann Colin dale, who is certain she loves Richard Pargeter, who currently dallies with Karen Arbuthnot, who loves and pursues Sebastian Odmore, who pines for Gracie Tisbourne. Gracie loves and is loved by Ludwig Leferrier, and this affair is close to the book’s centre. In every other case the more dedicated lover uses the same successful gambit to attract his or her beloved – he or she feigns interest in a third party. This comedy is Bergsonian – we laugh because the characters are exhibiting, in a form carefully exaggerated for artistic purposes, their recognisable unfreedom, and obeying Proust’s law that only the inaccessible love-object attracts.

      The comedy of the action is at odds with the idea-play, which meditates the theme of the Good Samaritan and of not passing by on the other side. Matthew as a diplomat in Moscow witnessed a passer-by coolly joining some protesters and thus condemning himself in an instant to certain state persecution. Garth in New York stood by and watched a street murder and later tries vainly, comically, to solace the dispossessed Charlotte. Ludwig (usually taken by American critics as the central character since he is American) is bypassing an issue of conscience in avoiding return to the United States to be tried for his refusal to fight in Vietnam. Later, in a mood of despair over the breaking of his engagement, he passes by and thus terrifies the tormented and needy Dorina, who is reading the world entirely in terms of her own guilt-feelings and on the way to her needless ‘accidental’ death, just as Ludwig sees entirely in terms of his own despair: ‘To walk by was the expression of his despair. His spirit was too tired, too troubled’ (347). This is compassionately done. Though there is a ‘tremendous moral charge’ it is also morality ‘at its most refined and least dogmatic’, as Murdoch noted of Shakespeare (Bigsby, 1982). The parable of the Good Samaritan enjoins kindness to the unlucky. But Austin is a character who positively wills his own bad luck, refusing help until the end when he is seen to move his (hysterically) paralysed hand. He blames his hand, as he blames his life, on his brother. And of course his brother, like everyone else, is not blameless. Each person has his own happiness, ‘however unglittering and inglorious’, a succeeding book proclaims (SPLM 16); each person also his own guilt. Austin’s bad luck, in seeming an infectious moral flaw, cheerfully shows the limitations to any Samaritan altruism, as well as its necessity.

      Speaking at the University of Caen in 1978 Iris Murdoch noted her father’s recoil from the world of Ulster ‘black Protestantism’ but also recorded her own puritanism, and her attraction to Sartre as a puritan thinker of sorts. The different anti-art scepticism and puritanism of such diverse thinkers as Plato, Kant and Freud long preoccupied her. Indeed any thinker who intelligently questions the role of art interested her. Her puritanism was not – in any obvious or simple sense – sexual. The saintliest of her characters, the Christ-like Tallis of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, is shown justly disappointed when Peter interrupts an ‘interesting’ sexual fantasy he is having; and Will’s full-blooded sexuality in Bruno’s Dream is a force making for happiness. The word ‘puritan’ will nonetheless echo throughout this study.

      It is clearly no accident that Murdoch named that character whom she has termed the ‘unconscious’ of the wicked Mischa Fox, Calvin Blick; and she remarked that ‘Puritanism and romanticism are natural partners and we are still living with their partnership’ (SG 81). Both puritans and romantics are marked by humourless impatience at the world’s ordinary amoral diversity, and wish to escape from or purge it in the direction of some simplified, purer ‘Original’, or some form of other-worldly release. Both puritans and romantics are other-worldly. The temptation to ‘sum up a character, to round off a situation’ (sbr), or to assume that ‘one has got individuals and situations “taped”’ (vc), which Murdoch stigmatised as formal temptations in art, are obviously moral temptations too. The temptations to moralise and to coerce the world are uncomfortably close, if not identical.

      This may be why the villains of Murdoch’s work, in so far as it admits of such, are frequently puritans or falseascetics who, however much they be loved by the author, often take the greatest punishment from the plot, while the pagan hedonists get off most lightly. In the sheer delight it affords her work indeed asserts the pleasure principle again and again, and the novels seemed to her, in interview with Haffenden (1983), to be ‘shining with happiness…works of art make you happy…Even King Lear makes you happy.’ To Haffenden she concurred with a definition of art as ‘pure pleasure’.

      If critics have not always responded as enthusiastically to Murdoch’s work as did Elizabeth Dipple, this may be quite as much because they are puritanically embarrassed at the feast of pleasure she affords as that they are, as Dipple supposed, selfishly frightened at Murdoch’s unremitting righteousness. What a gallery of happy and innocent sensualists there are in her novels! Danby in Bruno’s Dream might stand in for the breed in general, a man who, if the world were ending, would at once cheer up if offered a gin and French, and a man who even enjoyed every moment of the war. Danby comes out of the book better than his puritan foil and brother-in-law Miles, but it should also be said that Murdoch clearly shows us the difference between them without reaching for any crudely moralised distinctions. Each has his own happiness, however unglittering, and however inglorious. It is the fact of their difference that engages and imaginatively uses her, like the factual difference in moral temperament between the innocent, feckless worldling Dora in The Bell and her insensitive ascetic husband Paul; or between Simon in A Fairly Honourable Defeat and his lover Axel – another pagan innocent living with a less than fully responsive puritan.

      Each of these characters’ natures earns its proper reproach from the plot itself; each is cherished and chastised. In Murdoch’s own mediation between moral extremes hers might be said to be, like Buddhism, a dynamic and cheerful philosophy of the Middle Way. It is dynamic in that it insists on moral effort, but a mediation in that anything but a temperate self-denial

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