What Iris Murdoch doesn't know
Cunneen, Sally
II INGMAR BERGMAN CROSSED WITH CHARLIE CHAPLIN? What Iris Murdoch doesn't know ! SALLY CUNNEEN R ECEN'I~ ADS for Viking Press feature grafitti of a heart pierced by an arrow; above it is the...
...What her characters do not know about their own most intimate attachments is the very stuff of this late fiction--and is often revealed in their emotional response to real neighborhoods and landmarks which, in their imagination, echo Greek, Christian and Eastern myths...
...Oddly enough, just the comic inventions to which her creative talent drew her from the first...
...Even the narrators seem unlikely, not necessarily because they are so often men...
...In A Word ChiM the central figure is Hilary Burde, a lower-class scholar with a chip on his shoulder that leads him through repeated acts of envy and violence until his demons are exorcised...
...Canada) | 1119/79 ' *| iS i all I i l l 4i i 411 i l i I I i I t i l i alm I 11g i mlt i l i l I I I i l i I i I I I I i I i i i I I I ~ m 9 November 1979:625...
...His real state of arrested interpersonal development is aptly conveyed through his cozy womb-like flat and the excitement with which he continually views the upward thrust of the metallic Post Office Tower...
...He casts doubt in our eyes like the specks of paper, flakes of paint a~d ghostly images Murdoch scatters throughout The Black Prince to hint what he is up to...
...This is the kind of movie that Other People's Money is, the kind that can't stand to leave life a bit ambiguous, the way it really is...
...Already deeply afflicted by his sister's rape, his wife's desertion and his father's terminal illness, he refuses to judge anybody...
...This ~lf-styled Prospero cannot put aside his wand and begins to stage a "real-life" drama in which he manipulates friends, ex-mistresses, hangers-on, Hartley and even her son Titus, who ri~ight have offered him a more realistic opportunity to exercise his good intentions...
...Yet she can inhabit his imagination so convincingly that his view of events dominates the book...
...Except in The Bell, however, a remarkable probe into the failure of an idealistic lay religious commune, she seemed unable to place her characters and symbols into a plot and setting sufficiently naturalistic to suit her own idea of the novel as a form that should suggest the shapelessness of life...
...The last achievement is the absolute surrender of magic itself, the end of what you call superstition...
...Yet shortly after, back in the dead James's flat in London and surrounded by statues of Budddhas and a box said to contain a demon, Charles proves the truth of his cousin's words...
...Real pain and wild humor coexist in The Black Prince...
...It defies the laws of gravity, tossing three or four possibilities into the air and just leaving them there...
...10016 | i Please send Commonweal for one year at $20 for the first subscrip- | I : tions, $15 for each additional, to: | i * Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ! i Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | ' I | City, State, Zip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | a If a Send gift card to me [] for me [] Renewal [] ! ' I I NAme .~176176176176176176176176176176176176176 . . . . ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 | il Address...
...1 . i | a I 9 ($2 per sub...
...Her contemporary London becomes a realistic world through which her painter's eye and playwright's ear depict the collision of characters who are both believable individuals and a cross-section of human society in their differing personalities, age groups and degrees of moral insight...
...His compulsive behavior is brilliantly symbolized by the Inner Circle Line of theUnderground he loves to ride...
...Well written, yes...
...The man has something in his eye, and his wife is trying to get it out...
...Tallis is the other figure unaffected by Julius's machinations...
...He is the only character Julius respects but is also unable to help...
...He mocks his friend Arnold's one-novel-a-year production in much the way critics have chastised her...
...he can "honestly say that I have nothing else to do but learn to be good...
...The worshipper endows the worshipped object with power, real power not imaginary power, that is the sense of the ontological proof, one of the most ambiguous ideas clever men ever thought of...
...Compensating for the pleasures his mother had denied him as a child, Charles has developed not only a gourmet taste but an eye for the changing colors of the rocks and the moody sea that lie just outside his door...
...Can we tolerate the vision of an Ingmar Bergman crossed with that of Charlie Chaplin...
...But the homosexual couple Simon and Axel are strengthened in their love and made alert to the sources of evil in themselves...
...So is the dialogue between Hilda and her son Peter, two individuals who cannot communicate honestly despite their intense love and suffering...
...And the sophistiCommonweal: 624cated mode she adopts in these late novels exploits this mimetic accuracy in order to prod the reader to her ironic attitude towards the human failings captured in them...
...But this power is dreadful stuff . . . . Demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards...
...She herself finds little difference tmtween them and we can see this in the androgynous names and traits assigned to many of her characters...
...Other People's Money often lacks generosity in this way...
...Screen I I I FESTIVAL FOIBLES GENEROSITY IN FILMS T HERE ARE THREE kinds of movies--good, bad, or indifferent--and one way to tell them apart is to look for the sort of scene that occurs about half way through Christian de Chalonge's Other People's Money...
...I have never seen this happening...
...Or does he see in them some image of himself...
...Shots of Rainier sitting in a bright, modern waiting room are intercut with a dim scene where the bank's board fires him by candlelight, as if in a fraternity ritual...
...The hurry de Chalonge is in to eliminate all the possibilities except one is almost insulting...
...Uncertain, he hesitates...
...The central character, the famous London theater director Charles Arrowby, now in his sixties, has impulsively retired to a house by the northern sea to "abjure magic" and to meditate...
...Worth Supporting ? John Jay Hughes on The Leadership We Need Robert Phillips on Flannery O'Connor Such articles plus the many others, editorials, personal columns and reviews provide an abundance of good reading all year long in this widely quoted biweekly...
...Uncomfortable with the variousness and uncertainly in life, he wants to deprive us of them too...
...Possibly...
...Religion is power, it has to be," James observes, "the power for instance to change oneself, even to destroy oneself...
...And if it has this scene followed shortly by another in which the hero explains what the first scene meant, it's a bad movie...
...The bitter, believable complaints of older wives about the misery of their marriages make an exceedingly comic chorus throughout...
...Although James does not stand for Murdoch, his last talk with Charles does suggest the poles of her thought...
...Misled by his cleverness, we ignore his neurosis and miss the trap of the plot until it has snapped shut...
...What Iris Murdoch knows she transmutes into comic art so that we should not exaggerate our own importance either for good or evil...
...She pecks him on the cheek to calm him...
...If a movie has a scene like this, it's good...
...for postage outside U.S...
...That's what they think," replies James...
...The scene has a little magic to it...
...but what is it to love God...
...Her constant concern in the early novels, in which she tried on genres like borrowed clothes, 9 November 1979:623was to trip up her self-centered heroes so that they might take a fresh and humbled look at the variety of things and people around them...
...Murdoch has said she uses male narrators because she is dealing with the human condition which "still seems to belong more to a man than a woman...
...There is, my dear friend and mentor, some hard-won calm when we see the world very detailed and very close: as close and vivid as the newly painted funnels of ships on a sunny evening...
...Left alone,;'the scene is pleasing because it is indefinite...
...Yet comic vision is precisely what enables Murdoch to be so accurate about her characters' condition...
...For it can't be denied that Tallis's aged father's bitter diatribes against life, the Welfare State and his longsuffering son are wickedly funny...
...A mild thriller about a bank executive named Rainier (JeanLouis Trintignant) who is being made the fall guy in a financial scandal, the film begins with some surreal touches...
...The limitations of their private loves and imaginations have clear social consequences quite unrelated to their good intentions...
...The Sea, the Sea (Viking, $10.95,512 pp...
...His ecstatic state in love provides one of the funniest courtships on record, yet the consummation of this strange affair at a secluded seaside cottage involves the death...
...As he says to the "dear friend" he meets in prison: "All things work together for good for those who love God," said St...
...A serious initiate in Tibetan asceticism, James knows he is soon to die, and tries to tell Charles indirectly--through a discussion about religion--that he has been deluding himself in trying to force Hartley to freedom, that the real-life, bedraggled housewife, struggling to preserve her marriage despite its pain and imperfection, has nothing to do with Charles's fantasy of ideal love...
...He is proved only partly right...
...I A crucial dialogue with his cousin James provides a necessary clue to the fantastic distortions in Charles's observations, which are responsible for many of the surprising complications and much of the astringent humor of this intricate pseudomemoir...
...Even in his enlightened state, the comic hero Pearson suffers...
...As she argued brilliantly in The Sovereignty of Good (1971), good exists, yet we cannot trust our intellects to perceive it, so deluded are we by our desires...
...This comic Dante falls madly for young Julian, the daughter of his best friend Arnold (whom he envies) and Rachel (whose advances he rejects...
...Charles becomes obsessed with rescuing her from this obviously miserable marriage...
...Morgan, leaving her husband Tallis to seek "freedom," "identity" and Julius, is severely shaken...
...He doesn't trust us with them...
...Charles protests: "I thought religious people felt weak and worshipped something strong...
...Most of these late novels deal primarily with the middle-aged: old enough to have past relations that need reclaiming, not so old that they cannot repeat their mistakes again and again, each time purging their affections a little more...
...They don't notice the hero, but he notices them and approaches anxiously as if he's going to speak to them...
...an editor of Cross Currents and author of Contemporary Meditation on the Everyday God, teaches at Rockland Community College, SUNY...
...But the fussy, unloving personality of a Bradley Pearson and his views on art axe the very opposite of hers...
...Does he want to help them with theirs...
...Beginning with The Nice and the Good (1968) Murdoch showed a true mastery of her medium...
...Falsely accused of the murder of Arhold by the vengeful Rachel, Bradley accepts the situation without contest, and through his sacrifice is at last enabled to write his book...
...Paul...
...After the violence and the death of Titus, for which he is partly responsible, Charles is momentarily cleansed and renewed in this reconciliation with his wealthy cousin whom he has always resented...
...His plans are overwhelmed, however, by a chance meeting with Hartley, the ideal love-of-his-life, who had disappeared in late adolescence and married another man...
...But de Chalonge is afraid someone might take this whimsical treatment for a loose end, so he soon has Rainier explain it away like the incident on COMMONWEAL: A Christmas gift that thinks, talks, listens and entertains Friends whom you might have given Commonweal last Christmas would have enjoyed such features as: John Garvey on Celibacy Mary Jo Weaver on Singleness Jonathan Yardley, Martin Green & George W. Hunt on The State of American Fiction The Special Issue on John Paul II Richard J. Krickus on The Limits of the Superpowers Anna Maria Murdoch on Mythology and Motherhood Thomas J. Gumbleton and J. Bryan Hehir: Is SALT II...
...If it doesn't, it's indifferent...
...The demon-casket falls on the floor and opens...
...Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively...
...Does he want to tell them his troubles...
...Fair enough for a moralist and a mystic, but what kind of novels could faithfulness to such seemingly contradictory and negative beliefs produce...
...As the scene ends, he has drifted off down the platform, but still can't take his eyes off them...
...Rupert, writing a book on the good but unable to love his own son, succumbs and is destroyed...
...Julius is successful at the end, but he is alone and always will be...
...of Bradley's pathetic sister Pri sciila and leads to his permanent separation from Julian...
...Why is the hero drawn to these people...
...above it is the hand-scrawled Ilegend, "Iris Murdoch thinks...
...Tallis is a failure...
...But isn't there something unseemly in filling with so much humor a book that depicts the triumph of evil...
...Nearby is an old couple...
...It is comforting to know that her publisher accepts this truth, which is not always helpful to a writer's popular appeal...
...i I Send gift card to me [] for me [] Reneq# [] ! | t I MY NAME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | t ! 0 : e Address i Jl ~176176176176 . . . . ~ . . . . * ' ' ' ~ . . . . . ~ a | m | a City, State, Zip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . t I | e t I $ . . . . . . . . . . enclosed [] Bill me after Jan...
...Worse, he doesn't trust human experience...
...Yet how does it happen...
...published last year and her nineteenth novel, is representative of these late works in its fusion of moral vision and literary form...
...Just as Charles enacted a manipulative drama in The Sea, The Sea, here the charismatic scientist Julius King creates an experiment to prove that he can "divide anybody from anybody," that no human relationship is permanent and no serious harm is done in breaking people apart...
...M URDOCH'S greatest achievements, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) and The Black Prince (1973), are also the most outrageous in mingling usually opposed elements: comedy and tragedy, good and evil...
...COMMONWEAL 212-MU3-2042 "| 232 Madistm Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...His continuous (and delightful) absorption in food reveals the' true state of his development...
...But the dark and the ugly is not washed away, this too is seen, and the horror of the world is part of the world...
...Although almost all of this long novel is mediated through Charles's consciousness, his vaguely sinister house with its windowless inner rooms reflects his lack of selfunderstanding...
...At the novel's wry conclusion, he is about to resume the pursuit of pleasure with an obnoxious adolescent...
...but he is the only one to understand and suffer from the depths of evil in the world and still love the others in it without sentimentality or illusion...
...In The Black Prince the narrator is the aging bureaucrat and would-be artist Bradley Pearson, ready to write his great work if people, especially women, would stop pursuing him...
...Ironically, he is so seized by the intensity of his belief in his perfect love that even Hartley's dowdy appearance and the flowered carpets, the dogs, the sheer tastelessness of her house--called Nibletts!--do not shake him...
...What she doesn't know her novels point to indirectly: the rich human possibilities of our world seen in the light of the good that shines in the most pessimistic of her novels...
...Nonetheless, what gives the recent novels of this English philosopher-novelist their special flavor is Murdoch's use of her intellect to emphasize its limits, to suggest that what is most important is beyond the intellect's grasp...
...The good is unimaginable...
...She was able to evolve her own kind of novel while turning to a new emphasis on love as her central subject...
...A Fairly Honourable Defeat is just as dark but different in method, using multiple viewpoints and dramatic techniques to reveal the sources of good and evil in the relations among its nine characters...
...In this scene the hero, who is in the midst of a grave personal crisis, is waiting on a train platform...
Vol. 106 • November 1979 • No. 20
