The water is deep

...The source of the vitality in Murdoch's work is beyond explanation...

...It seems to me that whether one sees God as a symbol on which to focus, integral to human understanding, but limited to ending with our individual earthly consciousness, or believes God is a separate entity to be better known in the future, Murdoch is supplying us with enlightening and enlarging ways of understanding and acting...

...He calls out to Pierce and hears a faint cry (it turns out to be the echo of his own voice) and proceeds further...

...Her universe is filled with possibility and joy, much of which her characters realize...

...Jumbled and immoral," he describes himself to the woman with whom Books Dis_9 in this Essay The Philosopher's P u p i l Penguin, $7...

...She considers it a means of dilly-dallying with one's mind that is the opposite of imagination...

...Meanwhile, Pierce's mother, Mary, waits in a rowboat in a condition of fearful, desperate hope...

...For the reader the result is happiness at a glimpse--one that may grow into a vision--of a greater plan...

...Murdoch's extensive and pervasive use of symbols extends and amplifies our grasp of reality...

...Imagination, however, is a highly valuable human attribute that can and should be used to focus on great and worthy 14 June 1991:399 objects and people...

...Murdoch the philosopher and Murdoch the artist are wonderfully consistent...

...Death happens, love happens, and all human life is compact of accident and chance...

...Reading Iris Murdoch's novels is an experience akin to what I imagine total immersion baptism to be: one goes under with optimism and a sense of purpose, and emerges in a state of wonderment, feeling more acutely bewildered than before, and, simultaneously, enlightened...

...The rain is unremitting and the gardens are sodden...

...Her portrayal of the force and beauty of the natural world, of human character in its variety, and her story-telling ability--her dexterity at building and resolving plots--together create an "utterly demanding present...

...We look at them and think about them, rather than sink into them...

...She's a warm writer...

...Ultimately, to rid himself of torment, George kills the philosopher...

...This is an achievement Murdoch repeats over and over again, variously showing us disaster and death, the natural world and symbolism, modem-day quirks and quandaries, all smashed together into a whole that has the surprise of the complicated inevitable...

...Despite the schematic nature of this long passage, it is not at all contrived...

...God's world, for sure...

...Along the way, Ducane thinks and promises himself that if he survives he'll concentrate on goodness and love...

...Water is as vital a reality as air...

...95 The Nice and the Good...

...Whether or not it qualifies as religion seems to me less a question of theology than semantics...

...The pouring rain and the flooding are an extreme yet absolutely believable circumstance...

...George's marriage, albeit imperfect, becomes a loving one...

...The three I'll discuss are representative of her mature work...

...Murdoch has a high regard for happy marriages, and she's opposed to a pessimistic, determinist view of human nature...

...Murdoch's argument in favor of goodness and love doesn't--can't--preclude God...

...The child, who is channing and emotionally and ethically precocious, is the object of George's brooding, self-indulgent hate because his own child is dead...

...Addressing his fleshly shadow is everybody's business, conscious and purposeful or not...

...I think she succeeds in meeting her own impeccable standard...

...Leafless trees finger its tissues, as if to pulse their sap into its cells and rooftops slice it like razors of indigestible ideas...

...it's John Ducane's experience we're shown...

...Spumed by love, he allows personal disappointment to overwhelm him, and decides to stay in the cave through the duration of a ride, regardless of the consequences: A great black dart pointed him into this magnetic darkness...

...Frequently, though, the plot's--fife's--contingencies push them in the right direction...

...In The Philosopher's Pupil, such people are related through family ties and professional ones, through common history and the self-delusion of romantic yearning...

...In The Sovereignty of Good (1970), a collection of three essays, two of which were published before the novels discussed here, Murdoeh wrote: Goodness is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance, which is psychologically so difficult, can we understand the full extent of what virtue is like...

...The water washes away Bruno's most prized material possession, leaving him with his spirituality...

...Fantasy, to Murdoch, is the enemy...

...This is Murdoch's stance, articulated in The Sovereignty of Good, and shown to us in the novels...

...He is mysteriously propelled by an image of Alice in Through the Looking Glass that summons up, for him, femininity in general...

...Social ambiguity is not only tolerated but celebrated: sexual orientation and generational and ethnic identifications aren't absolute in Murdoch's novels...

...George McCaffery, the pupil of the rifle, has a pile of psychological and spiritual trouble...

...It takes us out of ourselves, yet we don't completely enter the worlds Murdoch creates...

...The book starts with a marital battle in the rain, and ends with an aborted suicide but successful murder performed in a bathtub...

...Yet the hypothesis of this factual death was almost incidental...

...The passage demonstrates Murdoch's formidable command of structure...

...At first, there seems no other choice...

...The acceptance of death is an acceptance of our own nothingness which is an automatic spur to our concern with what is not ourselves...

...one sees the shape of its bridges and the green of its lawns...

...While denying the certainty of God's existence, she demonstrates his presence...

...Cumulatively, the literary and psychological connotations of water, for example, join in our minds with the worlds Murdoch creates in The Philosopher Pupil, The Nice and the Good, and Bruno's Dream to enlarge our understanding exponentially...

...One isn't anything, and yet one loves people...

...It's important to note that a lot of the solutions to characters' problems happen by accident...

...In The Nice and the Good, the adolescent boy, Pierce, swims into an ocean cave...

...Sometimes, as with John Ducane, or with Lisa in Bruno's Dream, men and women can decide to love someone free and able to love them, and they can strive to be good...

...Murdoch packs her wallop not with this scene alone, of course, but through the understanding she's built in the three hundred pages that precede it...

...Bruno himself meditates on estrangements--that which existed between him and his wife, and the one that continues between him and his son...

...the everyday lives of the people Murdoch creates are never simply mundane, because the world in which they live incorporates the intangible...

...I walk within a thought...

...Humiliation and rejection and despair had blended into a thrust of desire which no longer had Barbara for its object...

...There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great, and utterly demanding present...

...In the downpour and the deluge, scars of old sins fester and heal, current ones reveal themselves and are quelled, and a fortune in the shape of a stamp collection floats away...

...Murdoch the artist encompasses and absorbs Murdoch the philosopher...

...People put the always messy, sometimes wicked, past to rest, and settle down with each other...

...But she doesn't want us to fall into the vanity of thinking life is altogether manageable...

...Here is a priest, at the end of The Philosopher's Pupil (1983), writing to the novel's omniscient narrator (known only as "N") about the philosopher, Rosanov, of the rifle: Metaphysics and the human sciences are made possible by the penetration of morality into the moment to moment conduct of ordinary life: The understanding of this fact is religion...

...Her characters have opportunity, Carl L. B(mkston In A Phonomonolog3j, of Fog A mind settles on the neighborhood...

...The first time I read the scene I found it so frightening my own breathing got strained, and my heart pounded...

...Only the spondees of the clock knock against walls white "and bare as concentration...

...it shudders light and the light probes from the window like a ~alpei...

...The generosity with which she uses these attributes is wholly admirable, and the result is prodigiously productive...

...Murdoch offers her philosophy and advice partly, at least, to fill a void in a godless world, but I don't see anything contradictory in a believer's living them out...

...The quality that most gives her novels their beauty and importance, however, isn't the result of her virtuous will alone, and it certainly isn't purely intellectual achievement...

...They're ethically befuddled, at least at first, but her clear moral convictions and ebullient artistic talent result in novels that are entertaining yet never superficially diverting...

...Even for a Murdoch novel, Bruno's Dream is extraordinarily wet...

...In water, John Ducane's soul is reborn and George McCaffery's is liberated, all in ways we feel as well as observe...

...It is the liveliness in Iris Murdoch's novels--their bounce, and the convincing reality they convey--that shows the existence of form, meaning, and mystery in the universe...

...her stories don't offer either the romanticism or "the consolation of despair" she deplores...

...For example, George saves his nephew Adam's dog Zed from drowning...

...When Ducane appears (following the safe return of the dog and then Pierce), flopping naked onto the bottom of her boat, Mary covers him with her overcoat, hugs him, and is in love...

...Its symbolic component intensifies its realism...

...Instead, they demonstrate the words of an acquaintance of mine, a young woman troubled and grieving at the possibility ofber beloved mother's premature death, who said that, in any case, "God's breath is everywhere...

...All along, he's wanted to be good, but he's a faithless, plodding, intelligent, likable rationalizer...

...So it is with the title character of Bruno's Dream, a dying old man--Mecaying but, it turns out, somehow desirable--who is filled with regret and remorse over others who have died: his wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law, people whose memory connects and separates all the book's characters...

...God's reflection in human life after all is the most accessible, as well as constant and concrete, manifestation of his presence...

...Murdoch is an absolute believer in the importance of literature...

...Critical as she is, Murdoch is never mean...

...Pierce will surely drown before the Coast Guard can arrive...

...The good man is humble...

...Nevertheless, The Nice and the Good (1968), Bruno's Dream (1969), and The Philosopher's Pupil, like much of the rest of her work, present dramatic, even heroic action, the constant use of a particularly powerful symbol (water), and the distinctively Murdochian structure and resolution in which the strands of all the stories are tied together--not necessarily happily, but acceptably...

...After many years of guiltridden widowhood, she's able to think peacefully of her husband as dead...

...Consequently, his action somehow defies godlessness...

...Where it cuts away the evening fog I .see a square of uncut grass...

...It is concrete...

...She tried to think about herself but there seemed nothing there...

...Murdoch's rendition of the baths and river and ocean, and just plain damp is sensuous...

...In Bruno's Dream the young succeed at love and Bruno becomes reconciled to the living and the dead...

...similar action, performed intentionally to save another human being, occurs in Murdoch's pivotal 1968 novel The Nice and the Good, and is central to it and to Murdoch's work as a whole...

...Nevertheless, fate sweeps Adam's pet into the part of the rough, cold ocean George is swimming in alone, and an act of heroism is granted him...

...Though after Rosanov's death George suffers hysterical blindness, he is cured, largely through the intervention of Father Bernard (whose letter I quoted above...

...In nearly forty years of writing, Murdoch has produced close to thirty plays, philosophical and literary treatises, and books, most of them novels...

...400: Commonweal The near-drowning of foolish young Pierce carries tremendous pathos, and the revelation of Ducane as a great man makes one long for his victory and fear his loss...

...work as a whole, is, in my opinion, impossible to categorize: This is the highest compliment I can pay...

...Diana is perplexed at the very end of the novel, when she knows Bruno is about to die...

...Bruno's earthly existence is almost over...

...Murdoch is brilliantly acute and deeply reflective...

...A series of impulses and contingencies, rather than a decision, make Dueane go after Pierce...

...John Ducane, the novel's protagonist--I would go so far as to call him its hero, a type that may not exist in Murdoch's work before this book---has been, until his epiphany, a thoughtful but pedestrian man...

...A convincingly rendered dialectic, organic to the plot, succinctly carded out by a triumvirate of a religious, an all-knowing mysterious being, and an analytical intellectual is no mean trick...

...Shaped by Murdoch's overriding, purposeful intelligence, all this, and a great deal more, is both wacky and realistic...

...Bruno's son Miles resentfully mourns his long-dead In'st wife, thus neglecting his second one, whose sister Lisa is in love with him...

...One feels the sensuous charm of the spa where, every day, the residents soak and swim and steam and meet...

...In the 1961 essay "Against Dryness" (available in Modern Critical Views: Iris Murdoch, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1986), she argues that art--good art, not the slick and sentimental, the overly formed or the lazily formulated--can give us the fullest possible truth, one without self-delusion...

...Murdoch constantly emphasizes the coexistence of apparently mutually exclusive circumstances and human qualities, so that when she describes a gorgeous, ludicrous, amoral woman's naked body, she tells us it reveals "the pathetic ugliness of real flesh and also its attractiveness...

...But the shapes of churches, homes, and fences are as vague as childhood lessons in geometry...

...When a duel is fought, people slip on the mud and then swim through the Thames...

...An obvious moment of grace...

...Each of the books, however, like Murdoch's MADELINE MARGET, a frequent contributor to Commonweal, has a book forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on medical progress and patient care...

...Her artifice is so persuasive that the mysterious becomes immediate, though by its nature it's not fully intelligble...

...Problems work out, or fall away, or are I 14 June 1991:401 buried, and the cumulative experience of them--for characters and readers alike---does not defeat us...

...But when Pierce finds himself lost in the cave, he gets frightened...

...Typically, they all get together in the water...

...Individual lives contribute to the whole, but don't control it, and Murdoch does not allow her characters what, in The Sovereignty of Good, she refers to as the "consolation of...

...Words, however, are important...

...The motion of the novels, though sometimes frenetic, is toward the internal peace and freedom love brings, not toward obsession or fixation or any other psychological distortions...

...The writer gives us distance along with immediacy and pleasure...

...Everyone swims in Ennistone, and encounters at the pools both further the action and lead to its resolution...

...How could that be...

...Its London becomes both a jungle and a biblical flood...

...She counsels "loving attention"--concentration on goodness, especially in other worthy human beings--as the way to achieve and enact virtue...

...and she lends them, too, open-heartedness...

...This is an enactment of Murdoch's own central belief, but there's nothing authorial about its presentation here...

...Ennistone, presumably modeled on Bath, is nevertheless fully imagined...

...Her compact, after all, is, at least chiefly, with readers, and by the time John Ducane takes this ultimate step in his transformation we know the world he inhabits as absurd yet desirable, valuable, not beyond description, but because of it...

...A nice man...

...But it is also difficult to forgo the attempt, because so much of her genius lies in her ability to create the very texture of reality...

...He clutches his dog, Mingo, and cries...

...He and Pierce meet and--in fifteen pages that are a tour de force of intertwined philosophical inquiry and human tenderness--struggle to swim and climb and pull themselves to safety...

...The Philosopher's Pupil takes place in Ennistone, an English town inhabited by the haute bourgeoisie and gypsies--two manifestations of humanity recurrent in Murdoch's novels---and dominated by public baths...

...His body is decrepit, but it inspires love...

...George McCaffrey doesn't fall into hell, even one of his own making...

...Penguin, $6.95 B z . u n o ' s Dream, Penguin, $4.95 The Sovereignty of Good, Ark, $9.95 he's about to fall in love, right before he finds himself rescuing her son...

...Rosanov is a man of torturously convoluted, and often obscure affections, moral priorities, and loyalties...

...This is what Rozanov distantly glimpsed when he was picking away at questions of good and evil, and he knew that it made nonsense of all his sophisms...

...402: Commonweal...

...Good," she says,"is the magnetic center towards which love naturally moves...

...Murdoch rights the world around McCaffrey both by tying up more strings than most of us can hang out or keep track of, let alone manipulate, and by giving all the characters either peace and contentment, or at least the possibility of a path to it...

...Claustrophobic, terrified, he tries to turn back but is carried forward, to a fate that imposes bravery...

...In this writer, there's nothing provincial or pious...

...his daughter-in-law Diana, focused on him, detaches herself from her problems...

...Surprises pop up in a joyous manner...

...The filament strung in the bulb hung from the ceiling vibrates with cerebral tension...

...The juxtapositions are critically Murdochian...

...She is in favor of"the techniques of religion," specifically prayer, and opposed to self-absorption in any form...

...t is impossible to sum up any, let alone all, of Murdoch's plots...

...Then, as Ducane swims on, the incident seems to him to be isolated from reality, and his effort sure and safe...

...A middle-aged father and husband, unloved by his emotionally maimed and twisted mother, brutal to his wife, dishonorable to his mistress, he's obsessed with his failure to get the respect--the attention and love----of his world-famous, but miserable, mentor, John Robert Rosanov...

...The concept of death had been growing in Pierce's mind, an expanding, curiously dazzling object which was not a physical possibility or even a consolation, but a supreme object of love...

...despair...

...That the ordeal might end in death was an essentiai part of its authority...

...Either in, or when critically observing Murdoch's world, one doesn't, ultimately, resent fate...

...Much is given to us to do...

...Its social stratifications are delineated, its geography is outlined and painted...