'A Severed Head' by Iris Murdoch

There are hours that you won’t get back.  ‘A Severed Head’ owes me several but her credit is good.  How interesting can utterly morally labile characters be is a question.  If there is no personal center there is no interest in their predicaments, their confusion, their attachments or passions.  Philosophically we are presented attributes without a substance.  It’s a farce with houses instead of doors and initially it seemed to promise mockery of psychoanalysis when a wife and her analyst lover engage in the emotional healing of the cuckold.  Then it fades away into musical beds in which all the dramatis personae permute polyamourously.

Don’t bother. 

Iris Murdoch: Muddles and The Mixture as Before

"I do love the way you talk, you're so precise, not like my father. He lives 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."

This is Julian the daughter of Baffin the popular novelist of the quasi deep Murdochian sort. The author in the mirror of her characters writes against herself. Bradley Pearson the ever so serious, not many words but true ones, in a review of Baffin’s latest, writes:

Arnold Baffin's new book will delight his many admirers. It is, what readers often and innocently want, "the mixture as before." It tells of a stockbroker who, at the age of fifty, decides to become a monk. His course is thwarted by the sister of his abbot-to-be, an intense lady returned from the East, who attempts to convert the hero to Buddhism. These two indulge in very long discussions of religion. The climax comes when the abbot (a Christ figure he) is killed by an immense bronze crucifix which accidentally (or is it accidentally?) falls upon him while he is celebrating mass.

This is all in The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch which I haven’t finished and mightn’t. It’s the insolence of being too successful, too prolific and not allowing the creative energy to gather itself that irritates. It’s Murdochshire on a warm summer’s day and the general sense of ‘muddle’ that confounds. A favourite word of Oxford philosophy which occurs 16 times in ‘Prince’ ,17 times in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, 42 times in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. I include muddles, muddler, muddling etc in this count – it’s the concept that counts, you know.

What does it mean? What could it mean? It ought to have an entry in a dictionary of philosophy. Let me attempt a prolegomena to a sense of it.

a mix up, taking something to be that which it is not, a categorical error, a state of affairs as a false framing (not really love), an unwitting masquerade, misapprehension, confusion, mistake, misprision, misplaced soul searching (solution: keep one in every room), stultification by intent ……..

Murdoch in many places is saying ‘Iris put down that pen, take the dogs for a walk, become more chaste and elegant, cut like a hated editor and for God’s sake don’t strain so much'.

‘I for one;, when did people stop saying that, have reverted to reading again Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Now that’s a novel, not a toy.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch (pub.1970)

Published in 1970 the same year as The Sovereignty of the Good there is a certain ghosting through of the philosophical work in the novel. Julius King refers to the philosophy book that Rupert Foster is writing as ‘High Church Platonism’. Arguably that is what ‘Sovereignty’ is, with Good being God. At two points in the novel the question is asked – why is stealing wrong? Rupert replies at length with the force and clarity which no doubt earned him his first at Oxford where he met Axel and Julius King. Julius also has a go at an elucidation of stealing and its wrongness. In both case it is Tallis Browne who is asking the question.

Are you confused yet? Time to introduce the Dramatis Personae:
Rupert and Hilda Foster, he a senior civil servant, economics department, she a housewife with a multitude of committees to attend to.
Peter their only child, dropping out of Cambridge and gone to live with Tallis Browne a community worker and evening class lecturer.
Tallis Browne is the husband of Morgan, Hilda’s sister, back from America where she has been for the last two years. While there she was the mistress of Julius King. They have parted now.
Simon Foster is the brother of Rupert and the partner of Axel. The latter is a colleague of Rupert’s and an old friend from college days.

Well then, are we sitting comfortably? As the novel opens it is the 20th. Wedding anniversary of Rupert and Hilda. The time seems to be in the early 60’s, Rupert had a good war. I have never been able to quite get the insinuation of that expression. They are drinking champagne in the afternoon and getting a trifle squiffy. The Evening Standard has reported that Julius King is in England after a stint in Dibbins College heading up a military funded lab working on biological warfare. Nerve gas and anthrax resistant to antibiotics. He has given that up because he got bored with it. We are told that he is Jewish and independently wealthy. Julius is the arch manipulator, Mephistophelian meddler and the kingpin of this novel. He makes things happen with an malicious ingenuity which is quite credible given that all the characters other than Tallis Browne are self absorbed and not capable of noticing the damage done or if they have, doing anything about it. In contrast to the ghostly ‘Sovereignty of the Good’ we might subtitle this book ‘The Ebullience of Evil’.

Morgan Browne is an emotional wreck sustaining herself with lots of whiskey and gin. Morgan le Fay is a suggestion from her name, sexually predatory and the disciple of Merlin/Julius. She is a disturber and a creator of variance. Tallis Browne who will not divorce her lives in Notting Hill in utter filth which Murdoch has great fun describing. Have you ever been in a house where you step backwards onto a plastic bag which yields like dead puppies? Morgan visiting Tallis remembers that their previous house in Putney had a similar smell.

Axel and Simon live near to Rupert and Hilda in the posh Barons Court area. The minutiae of this relationship seems a parody of heterosexual marriage with fluttery airheaded Simon and stern sensible strict Axel. The closet is firmly closed to Axel’s colleagues in Whitehall. Even Simon when he first met met Axel did not know that he was ‘queer’. They met in the kouros annex of the National Museum in Athens quite by chance. That was some 3 years previously and the photo of the kouros resides on the left of the mantelpiece. Simon’s fear of the loss of the love of Axel is the lever that Julius uses to make him collude unknowingly with his plan to disturb the cosy relationships in his vicinity. How that is worked is a masterpiece of creative ingenuity of Murdoch’s.

It’s an excellent novel very well sustained with a good serving of evil that is in its way a demonstration of its privative quality. Confidence, faith, trust and love is taken away in a spirit of wilful caprice and when ruin ensues rationalisation follows. Probably one of her best books.

In case you are wondering why stealing is wrong:

Rupert, who had not had a philosophical training for nothing, was never startled by any question, however bizarre, and was ready at once to give it his undivided attention. He reflected now for a while, staring at Tallis. Then he said ‘Of course the concept of stealing is linked to the concept of property. Where there are no property rights there is no wrongful appropriation of the goods of another. In completely primitive situations where there is no society—if any such situations exist or existed—it could be argued that there are no property rights and so no stealing. Also in certain kinds of community, such as a monastery or conceivably a family, there could be mutual voluntary renunciations of property rights, so that within the community stealing would not exist by definition. Though even in these two cases what a man customarily uses such as his clothes or his tools might be thought of as natural property and ergo as deserving of respect. Indeed one might argue that it could never be right under any circumstances, to remove a man’s toothbrush against his will. However, in state and society as we know it, there is no prospect of any universal voluntary surrender of the concept of property, and extremely complicated property rights, extending far beyond the area of clothes and tools, appear to exist and are upheld by law. Doubtless many of these complex arrangements can be argued to be economically and politically necessary to the well-being and continuance of the state, and in a healthy open society the details of these arrangements are properly a matter for continual discussion and adjustment in the light of both expediency and morality. Acceptance of any society, and even a bad society gives its members many benefits, does seem to suggest a certain duty to respect property. In a bad undemocratic society there might of course exist specialized duties to disregard particular alleged property rights, or even to break the law as a matter of protest, though it should be kept in mind that there are always prima facie utilitarian arguments against stealing, in so far as people may be distressed by the removal of their goods. But in a democratic society stealing is surely wrong not only for utilitarian reasons but because property is an important part of a structure generally agreed to be good and whose alteration in detail can be freely sought.’
When Rupert had finished speaking Tallis waited as if there might be something more to come. He looked puzzled. Then he said, ‘Thank you very much, Rupert.’ And to Hilda, ‘Please forgive me, I must go. Don’t bother to see me to the door. Oh how kind of you. Thank you, good-bye, good-bye.’ He went away smiling and waving.
Hilda and Rupert walked back into the drawing room. They picked up their drinks. They stared at each other in complete bafflement.

If they knew that their son Peter was shoplifting with abandon they would be less puzzled.

Julius is asked the same question:

Why is stealing wrong?’
‘It’s just a matter of definition,’ said Julius.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s a tautology. “Steal” is a concept with a built-in pejorative significance. So to say that stealing is wrong is simply to say that what is wrong is wrong. It isn’t a meaningful statement. It’s empty.’
‘Oh. But does that mean that stealing isn’t wrong?’
‘You haven’t understood me,’ said Julius. ‘Remarks of that sort aren’t statements at all and can’t be true or false. They are more like cries or pleading. You can say “Please don’t steal” if you want to, so long as you realize that there’s nothing behind it. It’s all just conventions and feelings.’

The Time of the Angels by Iris Murdoch (1966)

So I went on from The Bell by Iris Murdoch (1954) to The Time of the Angels (1966). A grim, bleak descent and I think an artistic and moral failure. Don’t do evil says Google. Murdoch likewise should have stayed away from the depiction of the serious evil in this novel. London fog carries too much symbolic weight and moreover robs her of landscape at which she is very good. You might want to read it as a completist chore but best left out. There are plenty more where that came from. If I say anything about it spoilers will emerge. So there is the Anglican priest, and two girls a Russian caretaker, his son and a maid of all work living in a large house. An ogre, captive maidens, the good servant in a Castle Perilous. Initially there is a feeling that a Charles Williams diaphane will drop on the scene. That might have been better. Restriction is not her forte.

Non placet.

The Bell by Iris Murdoch (1958)

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

(The Circus Animals Desertion by W.B.Yeats)

Was he wrong? Can character become fixed by a significant incident at a sensitive moment? Iris Murdoch proposes in her novel that the tentative grooming by Michael of Nick, a teacher and his pupil, had a disastrous effect on both their lives. He the priest manqué, and the other a ‘beautiful boy’ of 15. Of course Michael does not see that, it was all so aesthetic, so pure, almost holy. Now 15 years later He is running a Brotherhood attached to a convent of Anglican Benedictines. Nick’s sister Catherine is due to join the nuns and Nick is lurking at the lodge but not a serious member of the group quartered at the big house of Imber. Yes it’s that familiar one pot stew of Murdoch’s that you must stir, stir, stir and don’t let it stick to the bottom. She is a great fabulist and the story continues to hubble bubble.


James the second in command at Imber (it’s Michael’’s house and lodge) has a view which is a rough sketch of the course of the novel:

In so far as Michael had had serious hopes that any individual other than Catherine might be of any genuine help to Nick at Imber he had thought that James Tayper Pace was the man. He was disappointed in James's reaction. James showed himself, where Nick was concerned, stiffly conventional. 'He looks to me like a pansy,' he said to Michael, soon after Nick's arrival. 'I didn't like to say so before, but I had heard it about him in London. They're always troublemakers, believe me. I've seen plenty of that type. There's something destructive in them, a sort of grudge against society. Give a dog a bad name, and all that, but we may as well be prepared! Who'd believe that thing was twin to dear Catherine?'

James has no inkling of course of how Nick was ‘turned out’ by his interlocutor and how something of the same sort is to to be visited on the innocent Toby who is helping out at Imber before going up to Oxford in the Autumn. As I wrote in my previous post Toby is quartered with Nick at the Lodge to keep an eye on him. Is he being traded? Well you decide, Iris does not tell you everything.

Another interesting character is Dora, the errant wife of a resident at Imber Paul, who is studying the historical documents of the nunnery. She is a true Dora (Copperfield nee Spenlow) scatterbrained with a good heart but a ninny. Iris reduces many pc mansions to rubble in this novel. That was the 50’s for you, an era of great repression. On a day flight from Imber and her overbearing husband Dora visits the National Gallery and has a Murdoch moment:

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. Even Paul, she thought, only existed now as someone she dreamt about; or else as a vague external menace never really encountered and understood. But the pictures were something real 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.

The chief characters are developed through their own voice and consciousness which change as the novel develops. The craft is to make that credible and she does along with very fine nature word painting as well. A classic.

Trivia: Glenn Ford stars in a made for tv movie The Brotherhood of the Bell which is quite good and out there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ICl0KMm5yw

Hallfway through The Bell by Iris Murdoch

I’m not sure if I read Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell (‘58) before and I still haven’t read it being at the half way stage. I can project forward and feel my way towards possibilities only to have them confounded by the author. She will herself have been surprised by the lurch of the Jungian active imagination.. The recurring dream of Michael’s, the leader of the Anglican Community at Imber, is it clairvoyant? High, high, high, verily unto plain chant and incense Anglican. Smells and The Bell, quite. Will the period of very dry weather reveal the old bell in the lake? Will mythic history cast its doom on a suitable victim, the postulant Catherine. Why is homasegsshuall (Oxbridge) Michael putting Toby in the way of Nick his old love? Vicarious seduction or does he even see it? One’s own motives being opaque to one is the novel’s strength. Spontaneous goodness and overwrought goodness, which is the better would in a philosophical treatise run close to mere quibbling and deontic dancing on the head of a principal. We notice these things because that is what we do, yet they doesn’t impose and force acquaintance.

Tension is abuilding and the fine weather will be, should be, must be broken by a thunderstorm. Could I be wrong about this?

'Somewhere a dog barked' trope on languagehat.com

‘The somewhere a dog barked’ trope was indulged in by Iris Murdoch in The Sea, The Sea. I am not sure but that she was being mischievous. The owl makes me feel a slight tug. It’s the salad cream on the sausage.

“Shadows were strong , and the brooding identity of everything I passed so powerful that I kept nervously looking back. The silence was vast, different in quality from the foggy silence of the morning, punctured now and then by an owl’s cry or the barking of a distant dog.”

Following this trope has been going on since 2010 on languagehat.com
somewhere a dog barked
It’s now running at 148 anfractuose scholarly comments taking in Mongolian yurt approach ettiquette, Turkic saws, botch and bungle, usw.

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (pub. 1978)

Did he really eat boiled onions for breakfast? One of the endearing if dysphagic elements of this book is the careful recipes nay concoctions the like children might assemble when their parents were away. The bizarre thing is that this was standard grub in the Bayley/Murdoch household. If you wish to follow through on that the Paris Review has an article:
cooking with Iris

Who he? Charles Arrowby renowned theatre director, now retired to Shruff End a house on a promontory right at the edge of the sea, the sea. Alone with his memories mainly of the women that he has subjugated by alternately wooing and leaving until their emotional life is imprinted with his personality. In the Platonic world of philosopher Murdoch the incarnation is preceded by the idea. They do turn up, all of them and for a section of the novel all at the same time. That’s the classic Murdoch stew. Don’t let it go off the boil and keep adding: stir, stir, stir.

Now I won’t even attempt to offer a summary of the novel but instead focus on a central moral theme that of the correlative sins of jealousy and envy which oppress Arrowby. He has to own and absolutely own the past and present of his women. He breaks them by clever direction and the creation of crisis, resolution and abandonment. One woman has escaped him, his first girl friend Hartley, a secret love that left him when they were both eighteen. They were chaste and therefore perfect lovers, the yolk and shell of the one egg. But why, why, why did she go off untraceably? In a karmic reversal he is owned by her: a lump remains like a Jungian serpent in the cave of his past.

I mentioned karma and that brings in the Tibetan theme. His cousin and only relative James Arrowby, retired general, scholar of Tibetan occult lore, spy, adept, and siddha has come back into his life. Charles has envied him all his life and measured his achievements by comparison with the soldier’s. In the completion of a cycle of incarnations all manner of coincidences abound. A siddha induces acceleration of prarabdha (unresolved) karma. Things happen around him. The director finds that the play is getting out of hand though he tries to force his interpretation on it. The past remains owned by Hartley and that is unacceptable.

The novel is a coup of narrative surge. There is no let up. (would cardomom pods go with this ?– crushed or whole?) But how is it finishable? Wonderfully. Read this, save it for the summer, get lots of sand in it. Great writing, good ideas, vile recipes.

Iris Murdoch - Silly like us.

Did her gift survive it all? Her personal claim that she was Irish was a twee excursion into the Celtic Twilight. An Post want to claim her with its philosophy on a post card campaign. That should be ample space. Daily Nous has the details:
charming project

I read a lot of her novels many years ago but if you put a gun to my head and said tell us in your own words, in broad outlines, the plot of any of them; I would have to say, ‘Is it about Oxbridge people crossed in love ruminating?
- Sorry I can’t accept that, boom.

One of her books with ‘philosophy’ in the title - The Philosopher’s Pupil has been lying around for years now so I took down it because of the year that’s in it. I read several pages, obviously readable because I read them but it was not a pleasant experience. Cadence was entirely lame, broken, dragging, abrupt with uncouth metaphors and inapt similes. It was published in 1983. Was this a manifestation of the beginning of the loss of her wits? Her previous book published in 1978 The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize and I remember reading it before but no – shoot, dam your eyes.

I’m only a little way in and I can tell tell her style has a dwelling quality that creates a body under the surface of description. Yes, yes I know I’m moving close to the rocks of Heideggerian pseudology. I’ll get my coat. More on the book and the topic of cadence later.