A Satire of Civilized Psychotics:
ADAMS, ROBERT M.
WRITERS and WRITING A Satire of Civilized Psychotics A Severed Head. By Iris Murdoch. Viking. 248 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Robert M. Adams Professor of English, Cornell University To GET THE...
...In various forms, it is an old and familiar fable, and in itself might provide a perfectly satisfactory theme for Miss Murdoch's immoral little morality...
...For the one exception to the vapid nonentities who fumble and clutch through Miss Murdoch's novel is supposed to be a Jewish lady-anthropologist of the Cambridge persuasion, named Honor Klein...
...They are understanding, affectionate, oily and persistent-—they are perfectly terrifying, in fact, and when the chapter closes on the analyst's broad white American smile, the reader has had something like a vision of ultimate depravity...
...The point of the severed head seems to be that for civilization to flourish, the dark deities must somehow be propitiated...
...Reviewed by Robert M. Adams Professor of English, Cornell University To GET THE base mechanics of Miss Murdoch's plot out of the way first, she introduces us to three males (let them be A, B and C) and three females (?, ? and Z...
...So the book falls, as it were, between two stools...
...Miss Murdoch bears watching...
...In the course of it, the analyst and his mistress confront her husband with the fact of his previous infidelity (this basket of interwoven snakes requires some getting used to, but it can be done...
...is a model of a well-built, wellplaced episode...
...Miss Murdoch's sense of social comedy is cruel, her pace is fast, her dialogue mostly crisp, and her command of the precise, telling detail altogether admirable...
...The victim of this sort of assault is usually an innocent booby...
...Miss Murdoch's narrator-victim is a good deal of a booby but not much of an innocent, and thereby hangs a measure of the confusion which beclouds her ending...
...A Severed Head seems to me a flawed novel, but it has scenes of great power, and a wry, uncivilized wit which gives promise of better things to come...
...Martin does succeed in biffing the psychiatrist in the eye...
...Honor, I want you savagely and I shall fight for you savagely.' " Yea...
...On a less athletic level, Miss Murdoch's story involves a fearfullyfunny representation of some "civilized" psychotics coupling and uncoupling with the rapidity of rabbits behind the most suffocating smokescreen of paralyzing polysyllables ever spread by an unctuous analyst...
...This deficiency of control is curiously accented in spots by a prose which, while generally trim, has a way of spiralling into something not far short of burlesque: "Georgie still kept my gaze...
...But the only person who might help us form a satiric perspective on him is Miss Klein, and she, for reasons which are utterly indecipherable, is by the end of the book infatuated with him...
...In a 250-page novel, this is par for the course...
...But her narrator is too badly compromised by the first part of the book to arouse much sympathy for his fate in the second part...
...I do not know if Miss Murdoch had in mind the ancient myth that the architects who laid out the Roman capitol, when they first broke ground for the building, uncovered a bleeding head, a grotesque rawbones which yet proved a hopeful augury for the welfare of the state...
...she is apparently a powerful, repulsive person, but Martin has already had pretty women...
...that is, out of nine possible sexual permutations involving male and female, Miss Murdoch's characters have accomplished eight...
...Wild Honor, because of her cruelty, her barbaric destructiveness, her incest, will be a kind of propitiation for civilized Martin...
...Honor Klein apparently lashes to fury the dormant tiger of Martin's nature...
...Alexander and Honor, so far as we can tell, have not bedded down together, but everyone else has...
...Briefly, then, Miss Murdoch has written a slashing social satire, rooted in a sense of total humiliation...
...Her eleventh chapter, for instance...
...At such moments her intelligence and lucidity made her beauty ring like a silver coin" Or " 'It's not all,' I said...
...The ultimate corruption of language, its use to confuse, castrate, hypnotize and destroy a victim, has hardly been so terrifyingly set forth since Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies...
...To do her complete justice, Miss Murdoch has the tact not to try to represent this alteration...
...He has never been other than a comic automaton, preoccupied with his meekness, his genuine Audubon prints, the vintage of his wine and the dishonesties on which his marriage and his various affairs repose...
...He remains the same meeching Milquetoast that he was before, and the idea that he will be changed, changed utterly, by contact with Honor Klein of all people, has its comic side...
...One sees them, of a domestic winter evening, propitiating the dark deities with Samurai swords and Russian roulette...
...team...
...That his yen for Honor should be heightened by a perception that, to gain her private ends, she has been having an affair with her half-brother, the same analyst who has successfully seduced Martin's wife shortly after she was seduced by his brother—well, given the milieu, this is not too unlikely either...
...She invokes (and, to an undetermined degree, represents) the "dark deities," the predatory instinctual life which the other zombies in the novel have "successfully" buried...
...Of course it is stupid old Martin who has these ideas of fine prose, and he is a satiric butt...
...The narrator Martin's passion for Fraulein Doktor Professor Klein is not altogether unlikely...
...yet, as a result, we are never sure it has taken place...
...Before we have finished shuffling and reshuffling them, the only combination which has not been made is A-Z...
...But what she thinks she is doing in becoming involved with an Ian Carmichael type like Martin is by no means clear...
...thus asserting the dominance of his will, but this exercise, though long overdue, seems to bring him no psychic relief...
...Hence when he is thrown into the maw of Miss Honor Klein, the Loathly Lady of the Cambridge Fens, it is hard to avoid the feeling that (though he is getting in one sense precisely what he deserves) the story has slipped out of Miss Murdoch's control...
Vol. 44 • May 1961 • No. 21
