So Foolishly in Love
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING So Foolishly in Love By Stanley Edgar Hyman Iris Murdoch is one of the younger British novelists who started publishing after the Second World War. They were crudely grouped...
...At the end of the book all is again serene, and in a final meditation Hugh assures us that all the forlorn lovers will forget their disappointments in time...
...he cries to Mildred, with the irony that she is secretly in the same boat, as are all the other characters in the book at whatever age...
...The problem is that Joyce and Woolf made a real revolution in the form of the novel...
...Mildred carefully knocks them over with her umbrella...
...The final complication is that, faithful to Randall as she is, Ann is also "dreadfully in love" with Felix, and she recognizes that in rejecting him she has also rejected, in Miss Murdoch's characteristic pun, "her own felicity...
...If the roses are life and passion, the opposing image of dank despair is the perpetual English drizzle...
...He took her to the Palatine and made love to her in the Temple of Cybele...
...Miranda's love for Felix, going back to her early childhood, is kept secret from the world, including Felix, who is in love with Miranda's mother Ann...
...Instead of wild fantasy, where she is superb, Miss Murdoch buttons up her style and tries to write naturalistically, producing, for example, arid pages describing the bric-a-brac in drawing rooms...
...Worst of all, Miss Murdoch indulges in a kind of false portentous foreshadowing...
...A few MAJOR SYMBOLS unify An Unofficial Rose...
...He took her to the Borghese Gardens and made love to her near the Fontana dei Cavalli Marini...
...In the novel's lovesick and tormented world, men are passive and women active, and another old title Miss Murdoch might have taken is Female Domination...
...At the same time, Randall remains in love with Ann even after he has left her...
...The author is best when most fantastic, like the image of Rome as an erotic tour conducted by Randall: "He took Lindsay to the Appian Way and made love to her behind the tomb of Caecilia Metelia...
...The book begins with the funeral of Hugh's wife Fanny in the rain, the roses on her coffin sodden, and from then on if it is not raining it has briefly stopped or is just about to begin...
...Penn shivers "with a sense of ills to come," and a doll transfixed with a dagger by Miranda is a "sinister little portent...
...Ann and Miranda, seared by passion, together watch a moth fly into a lamp and singe its wings...
...Hugh refreshes his spirit by communing with it...
...When Miranda rejects him he becomes not a man but a permanent boy, sets up the soldiers in a file, and weeps...
...There is precious little evidence of God's grace in the book, but that is perhaps Miss Murdoch's point...
...Another kind of love, heterosexual infatuation, strikes the middle-aged and the elderly impartially...
...Miss Murdoch does a number of things very well...
...At the start of the book, as everything starts to break up, Fanny's cat Hatfield runs wild...
...and they are eventually all smashed and slashed to pieces by Miranda in her desperate break with childhood...
...Miss Murdoch, it is now clear, never was Angry, or even Eager...
...Perm dreams of striding toward Miranda "through a rose-entangled forest...
...Other things are not up to these inspired moments...
...A box of lead soldiers that had belonged to Miranda's dead brother is used to opposite effect by Penn...
...Only love has clear vision," he tells Hugh...
...Felix loves Ann and wants to marry her, with the same selfless and lifelong devotion she feels for Randall...
...As Miranda pinches Penn, so Lindsay digs her nails into Randall, and at one point he thinks: "Lindsay bestriding him had better remain a private fantasy...
...I shall be beating Jocelyn...
...He took her to Ostia Antica and made love to her in the back of a wine shop...
...God's grace can lift and enlighten our poor human loves," he announces at one point...
...The wine runneth out, and the bottles perish, saith the Scripture...
...at the end, when order has been somewhat reestablished, Hatfield returns...
...skimpy city roses, "like little girls' breasts, small and pointed," remind Randall of his daughter Miranda...
...Love accepts the contingent," he tells Ann...
...Ann remains hopelessly in love with Randall after he has left her, a good and faithful wife, and as a result of his mistreatment even develops "a dark new passion" for him...
...Her prose is unsure, and if it is sometimes witty and stylish, it is as often clumsy or corny ("her childish adoration of that tall gentle-spoken demigod...
...Perm's love for Miranda starts in exhilaration and joy, turns into lust and sleepless nights after she has made him aware of the body by pinching him black and blue, and ends in frustration and weeping...
...Miranda, talking like a marriage counselor, sends her father off and keeps her mother from marrying Felix out of spite and jealousy...
...Most pervasive is the title image, the rose, whether "unofficial" (wild) or domesticated...
...We see the varieties of homosexual love in the pederastie passion of an elderly civil servant, Humphrey Finch, retired after "an incident in Marrakesh," for Perm, and in the love of an elderly writer, Emma Sands, for her female companion Lindsay Rimmer...
...it is like a sun, beaming down on the lovers and radiating the little warmth in their cold world...
...In the comic scene where she seduces him, even to taking off his pants, Lindsay remarks, not unreasonably: "I've had to fight every inch of the way...
...He took her to the English Cemetery and would have made love to her on Keats's grave, only some American ladies arrived...
...Emma may even have brought Randall and Lindsay together deliberately...
...He took her to the Catacombs...
...Old Mildred Finch, Humphrey's wife and Felix's sister, suddenly falls in love with Hugh Peronett, Randall's father, after the death of his wife, and much of the book's action consists of Mildred's elaborate contrivances to capture Hugh...
...It is as though Miss Murdoch, who is an Oxford philosophy don, aspired to something more than her wry comedy, but could not quite bring herself to write it...
...After Miranda rejects him, Penn takes up with Humphrey, who had courted him all through the book in an avuncular fashion...
...Ann in his view is "messy and flabby and open as a bloody dogrose...
...and ringing in the new ("I shall be happy...
...The purest of these loves is the marital, or the would-be-marital...
...It is honey-colored and glowing, at once art and the quintessence of the flesh...
...and so on...
...Miranda's dolls are felt by Ann as "little hostile presences...
...The third big symbol is a beautiful Tintoretto painting of "Suzannah Bathing," the property of Fanny, which Hugh eventually sells to enable Randall to go off with Lindsay...
...Her sixth novel, An Unofficial Rose (Viking, 344 pp., $4.95), confirms an earlier impression that she is the most talented and interesting of the group, for whatever that is worth...
...Over and beyond all these fleshly loves there is spiritual love, informally preached all through the book by an absurd Church of England clergyman, Douglas Swann, himself more than a little in love with Ann...
...We see Emma at the end of the novel, ringing out the old love ("Yes, I used to beat her...
...In bed with Lindsay, he dreams only of Ann, and at the end of the book it is clear that at some time and in some fashion he will return to her, and that she will be waiting...
...An Unofficial Rose is a natural history of love, and as such might have been called Loving, had not Henry Green pre-empted that title, or By Love Possessed, had not James Gould Cozzens gotten there first...
...I do not doubt that it is within her powers...
...the gardener's wife, Nancy, with whom Randall has a brief romp in the rose garden, is "a rose of a different sort...
...All she shares with the group is a return to old-fashioned novel forms, 18-century picaresque and 19th-century naturalistic...
...Two paired minor symbols are used effectively...
...The symbols are sometimes terribly pat...
...Lindsay is "shapely and complete like a complex rose...
...Hugh, meanwhile, has again fallen in love with Emma, who was his mistress many years before, and in his slavish devotion this stuffy grandfather becomes "a big podgy elderly faun...
...These hints of tragic violence come to nothing...
...Randall's art and trade is rose-growing...
...Now she's beating Randall...
...We see juvenile love in the passion of 14-year-old Perm Graham for his slightly younger cousin Miranda Peronett, and in her equally hopeless passion for the middle-aged bachelor Felix Meecham...
...Sometimes a description is perfect, as when Hugh kisses Emma's "dry, stained, bony hand," and pauses to drink in the smell of nicotine "in an ecstasy of memory" before kissing it...
...It is not a game of musical beds like Miss Murdoch's last novel, the wonderfully zany A Severed Head, but a wryly comic and sometimes touching exploration of the capacity of the human heart for large-scale investment, in most of its familiar varieties...
...Emma, who seems to be physically if not emotionally modelled on Colette, is, with the possible exception of Miranda, the toughest and most resilient of the novel's lovers...
...All the male action in the book is the result of manipulation and intrigue by the females: Hugh gives Randall the money to go off with Lindsay on the advice of Mildred, who wants Ann available for her brother Felix...
...Felix asks at one point, in connection with Miranda, and at least he doesn't...
...When Lindsay leaves her for a man, Ann's husband Randall, Emma promptly acquires another ambiguously named female companion, Jocelyn Gaster...
...Randall's love for Lindsay suddenly overpowers him after almost 20 years of marriage to Ann, and he struggles with the passion as helplessly "as a mystic struggles with his God...
...They were crudely grouped as the Angry Young Men, although it soon turned out that they weren't seriously Angry, just Eager, and they have since melted contentedly into the literary establishment...
...All the counterrevolution can do is bring the old cracked bottles up out of the basement, and pour them full of their new wine...
...To be at my age so foolishly in love...
...Who knows what is locked up inside a child...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 11
