Peter Conradi - The Saint and Artist - A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch

We are nonetheless to understand that ‘wisdom’ is what Jake is in the process of acquiring. Hugo and Jake’s whispered colloquy in the darkened hospital at night, where Jake risks and indeed loses his job, is the first of a series between artist and saint, always carried out at a pitch of difficulty in Murdoch’s work. Hugo, who has already divested himself of much, ends the book wishing to ‘travel light. Otherwise one can never understand anything,’ and feels the urge to ‘strip himself’ (223). He advises Jake to ‘clear out’, as he is doing.

’some situations can’t be unravelled,’ said Hugo, ‘they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you, Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can’t be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on…The point is people must just do what they can do, and good luck to them.’

‘What can you do?’ I asked him.

Hugo was silent for a long time. ‘Make little intricate things with my hands,’ he said. (229)

What Hugo is going to do about this is become a watchmaker (‘A what?’ asks Jake) in Nottingham (‘In where ?’), and when Jake asks ‘wildly’, ‘What about the truth? What about the search for God?’, Hugo replies, ‘What more do you want?…God is a task. God is a detail. It all lies close to your hand’ (229).

The scene is funny and touching and true. Hugo’s wisdom, we might say, is centrifugal and particular. His adoption of watchmaking – ‘an old craft, like baking bread’ – signals his calm absorption in the task of honouring the world’s details. He stands for a loving empirical curiosity about particulars, for reverential ‘attention’, that crucial Murdochian word (ad), and proposes to Jake that he renounce the grandiloquent – the search for God – in favour of the local – seeing life as task, as blundering on, and writing, by implication, as an unpretending craft which must also negotiate the detail and contingency of the world. His face ‘masked by a kind of innocence’, he calls Jake a sentimentalist who is always far too impressed by people. ‘Everyone must go his own way. Things don’t matter as much as you think.’

Jake, who famously classifies parts of London as necessary and parts as contingent, is understandably appalled by the notion of having to live outside London, which is to say of having to give up his position at the centre. Other artistfigures share this bias. Randall in An Unofficial Rose declares Australia, from which the innocent Penn comes, ‘a meaningless place’, and Hilary in A Word Child can bear only London near Hyde Park. Hugo, by contrast, is unable to conceive of himself at the centre to begin with, and, like all of Murdoch’s would-be saintly characters, and in this like Cordelia too, lacks the narrative skills which would dramatise his life as Jake consistently dramatises his (speaking throughout of ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’). Murdoch saints are always on the edge of the action, either leading happy lives or lives about whose unhappiness they have no talent for making a fuss, and which therefore lack any ‘story’. They exist, as Jake sees Hugo, as an unconscious ‘sign or portent’ for those less luckily situated.

Art for Murdoch presented the problems of true vision in a special form. She argued from first to last that particulars must be celebrated in a way that neither ties them up into some form of premature unity (symbolism) nor leaves them wholly outside the range of spirit (naturalism), condemned to banality.

In Bruno’s Dream Bruno thinks, ‘I am dying…but what is it like?’ (300). It is everywhere apparent in her work that Murdoch repeatedly asked herself ‘What is it like?’ of many disparate phenomena. In asking what the aged Bruno’s experience might be like she came up with, among other things, a man who, though he would not object to being loved by someone new, has settled for the moment to looking forward to a new kind of jam. That touching, and, surely, true ‘new kind of jam’ might stand for an emblem of how superbly and watchfully she can inhabit other experience than her own. It is a symptom of her tender-heartedness that Bruno is rewarded by the new person too. In that novel Bruno’s puritanical and self-enclosed son Miles keeps a ‘Notebook of Particulars’ in which he tries to overcome the problems of description. ‘How hard it was to see things,’ he thinks, and chronicles some marvels: ‘the ecstatic flight of a pigeon, the communion of two discarded shoes, the pattern on a piece of processed cheese’ (55). Some of the most brilliant passages in The Black Prince appear as answers to the question ‘What is it like ?’, and as her work proceeds the answers she solicits are to increasingly ordinary questions.

In her early essay ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, which is ascribed as a book to the philosopher Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil thirty years later, Murdoch wrote of the ‘shyness’ of experience and the problems of ‘cornering’ it: ‘It is difficult to describe the smell of the Paris Metro or what it is like to hold a mouse in one’s hand.’ When the oafish Otto in The Italian Girl asks, ‘Has it ever struck you that we don’t eat anything blue?’ (39), the wholly unblue food we customarily, unthinkingly eat becomes invested with a kind of strange glamour, invoked as it is from so close, yet so happily alienated a perspective. A less successful example occurs in Crystal’s recounting of her seduction by the grief-stricken Gunnar in A Word Child, when, in the middle of a long and circumstantial narrative, she tells how Gunnar had spoken of Lapland, where the reindeer ‘like the smell of human water, urine’ (251). Here the improbable-but-true fact is used to authenticate the improbable and not quite plausible liaison. Finally in Nuns and Soldiers when the recently widowed and grief-stricken Gertrude, in trouble with young Tim with whom she finds herself falling in love, thinks of her dead husband, ‘I shall tell Guy about it, he will help me, he will know what to do’ (248), the moment is truthful as only high art can be.

Murdoch called, citing Simone Weil, for a ‘vocabulary of attention’ (ad), and while it is other persons who are the worthiest objects of such skill, the natural world is always well-attended. In Bruno’s Dream Miles draws attention to the tiny sound of the cracking of swallows’ beaks as they snap up flies; in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Luca hears the minute crepitation of woodworm. The oddness of what we take for granted is insisted on throughout. In The Sea, The Sea Charles hears ‘a most extraordinary rhythmical shrieking sound’ (404) which it takes him a minute to recognise as his newly installed telephone. Similarly in The Time of the Angels Marcus, who has unknowingly fallen down a coal-hole, experiences the smell of the coal before he is able reassuringly to name it. In a variety of ways Murdoch’s work constantly draws attention to the holiness, or threat, of those minute particulars which dullness and self-absorption prevent us from experiencing afresh, and which language can hide or reveal.

This is to take, in a particular way, a romantic view of the function of art. I would argue that Murdoch is, in the best and most positive sense of the word, a romantic writer – the sense in which John Bayley uses the word, in Romantic Survival, of Yeats and of Auden. 12 Both colonise the modern urban world and in so doing give it back to us afresh. One might mention here the special poetry Murdoch gets out of London, the inclusion of the half-built motorway along which David wanders in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, the disused, abandoned railway line where Peter and Morgan embrace in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and Hilda’s disintegrating telephone in the same book. She has a special gift for finding, or rather ‘seeing’, such places and objects. In Under the Net the cold-cure centre in which Jake and Hugo meet, or the hairdresser’s in which Jake and Sadie meet, are further instances. Hers is the gift for making the strange seem familiar (the cold-cure centre) and the familiar seem strange (the hairdresser’s). Like Shakespeare, in Johnson’s view of him, she ‘approximates the remote, and familiarises the wonderful; the event [she] represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would be as [she] has assigned’. ‘Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form’ ( SG 86). One might quip here that it is easy enough to understand complex things: it is what is most simple that is most unyielding and mysterious. Wittgenstein pointed out that ‘the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes)’ (Investigations 129).