Even Mischa wants to reveal himself only to Peter, who, as A.S. Byatt pointed out in an excellent reading, is the only person shown to us in the role of neither victim nor predator.2 ‘Everyone has been going mad as usual,’ says Mischa. ‘You make them mad,’ Peter replies (205). Chapter 17, in which the two finally meet, resembles Jake and Hugo’s meeting in the hospital in that it represents something like a still centre, sandwiched between various arbitrary violences – Annette’s breaking of her leg, Miss Casement’s chopping down Rainborough’s wistaria. Its stillness also prefigures Julius and Tallis’s meetings in the kitchen in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, just as Mischa’s more fantastic deracination (‘Where was he born? What blood is in his veins? No one knows’ (35)) directly prefigures the more pointed discovery of Julius’s wartime internment in Belsen. In both meetings we sense a shared understanding between the two ‘spiritual’ characters. Peter is the only character whose pity for Mischa is shown uncorrupted by that longing to possess or destroy with which pity is here always associated. ‘If the gods kill us, it is not for their sport but because we fill them with such intolerable compassion, a sort of nausea’ (208), says Mischa, who is the chief repository of this nauseous compassion, a man reputed to cry when reading the newspapers, and who confesses to having killed a kitten when overwhelmed by it. ‘Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.’3 Pity as an active torment, symbolised through the animal world, is a great theme in Murdoch’s novels. There are weird communal ‘damaged animal’ dreams in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and Otto has a sequence of comic alarm dreams involving crushed or mutilated animals in The Italian Girl. In The Philosopher’s Pupil Gabriel is tormented by the desire to rescue a fish; in The Sandcastle Felicity cries childishly for a lost slug and for a butterfly flown out to sea. The Flight from the Enchanter reads in part as a meditation on the theme of pity and power; and Hitler, who, we are reminded, killed the pitiable and uprooted in the persons of gypsies and Jews, is, as Byatt has shown, a real presence.4 It is a tribute to the power of the later books that they make its treatment in The Flight from the Enchanter, for all its sharpness of outline and detail, seem abstract and whimsical in comparison. What you recall, as so often in the early books, is not so much the people as the wondrous set-pieces – Annette swinging on the chandelier, Mischa’s baroque party, the Dickensian Mrs Wingfield’s hilarious and uncomfortable persecution of the good Miss Foy.
Just as both Hugo and Jake are outsiders, so are Peter and Mischa. Peter’s mode of dispossession again silently opposes Mischa’s exoticism. Peter is caretaker of the symbols of Mischa’s own lost past, when Mischa was still rooted and still ‘belonged’: Peter collects photographs of Mischa’s now destroyed hometown and keeps them for him.
John Bayley has acutely observed that ‘the modern reflective consciousness cannot in some sense but see itself as taking part in a novel, the novel being the standard literary reflection in our age.’5 Against this might be set Simone Weil’s dictum that ‘Just as God, being outside the universe, is at the same time the centre, so each man imagines he is situated in the centre of the world. The illusion of perspective places him at the centre of space.’6 The artists Jake and, differently, Mischa, see themselves or are perceived as being at the centre. The saintly figures are struggling in some sense ‘to give up [the] imaginary position as the centre not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of [the] soul’.7 Decentring is the book’s theme. Peter, with the strength to survive at the edge of the world, contrasts with Nina whose dispossession demoralises her and, when no one sufficiently imagines her needs, leads to her suicide. Only for the saintly can virtue have no fixed address.
Calvin tells Rosa at the end of the book that ‘ [You] will never know the truth and you will read the signs in accordance with your deepest wishes. That is what we humans always have to do. Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones…The truth lies deeper, deeper’ (278). His is a point of view Murdoch has explicitly rebutted,8 and which within the book is echoed and answered by Peter’s avowal to Rosa, when his research into the script he was working on turns out to have been worthless: ‘One reads the signs as best one can, and one may be totally misled. But it’s never certain that the evidence will turn up that makes everything plain. It was worth trying’ (287). Peter possesses that ‘superior honesty required to tear up one’s theory’ (SG 96) when it is disproved. His ideal of a realism of approximations and towardnesses which depends on a certain unselfish directedness is Murdoch’s too. Both Peter’s and Calvin’s look like styles of relativism, but Calvin’s depends on the notion of an absolute we are being darkly cheated and deprived of. Peter’s is a more relaxed, disciplined and cheerful agnosticism.
The Sandcastle (1957) is a romance about the love of Mor, a prep-school master interested in politics, for the young half-French artist Rain Carter. Mor is divided between his sour and controlling wife Nan and the innocent, fey painter. Rain comes to the school to paint the retired headmaster Demoyte, a charming old despot. She loves Mor both as a man and as a substitute for her own, now dead, jealous father. The novel treats painting as A Severed Head was to treat sculpture – as a paradigm case of the problems of representing the human subject in art, and an implicit analogy of the mysterious creation of the novelist. The Sandcastle is consistently interesting, sensitive and moving, yet there is a slightness about its final effect which contrasts with our clear sense of the author’s gravity. Nan’s disappointment is never focused for us, and because it is hard to imagine the Mors’ marriage when it was successful, it is also hard to imagine the book’s aftermath. On the other hand Nan’s rebirth of desire for Bill once she feels rejected by him is perceptively done, and the novel is full of acute touches. There is also a characteristic division in the author’s sympathy which she has not yet managed fully to put to work. We experience her sympathy for Rain and the duller Mor, and therefore hope for the success of the affair. The idea-play, however, which comes from Bledyard, is on the side of respect for the proprieties of marriage. The Sandcastle is a less successful novel than the later study of adultery The Sacred and Profane Love Machine because the division in our sympathies between wife and mistress is so unequal. We begin to understand Nan’s disappointment but insufficiently to want Mor to return to her. The later book is more painful and distressing because we come to know both wife and mistress.
There is also a recurrent paradox in that the central characters, who have had so much loving attention devoted to them, can be, while fully animated, less alive or less ‘typical’ than some of the people only half-attended to at the edge of the book. Here Murdoch’s successes are the silly, gauche yet innocent and unselfish headmaster Everard, who preaches unheard that ‘Love knows! There is always, if we ponder deeply enough and are ready in the end to crucify our selfish desires, some thing which we can do which is truly for the best and truly for the good of all concerned’ (206); and the tender-hearted roguish tyrant Demoyte, who wishes Mor to have Rain in spite of, and because of, his being in love with her himself. Lastly there is the eccentric Old Etonian art master Bledyard. Demoyte and Bledyard represent two opposite types who often compel our sympathy in the early books, one with the charm of a complete worldliness, the other intensely other-worldly. Bledyard plays the role occupied by Hugo in Under the Net. He is the would-be saint who represents an intolerable, charmless ‘best’, the puritan an-aesthetic world of silence and truth. Just as Hugo argued for the purifying effect of silence, showing Jake how to renounce and be ordinary, so Bledyard is an artist who will not or cannot paint any longer and who constantly intervenes and acts as an unsolicited voice of conscience: ‘I have to bear witness…I think you are acting wrongly’ (211). Bledyard’s uninvited sermon to Mor in the squash courts, whence he has sent Rain away from a rendezvous, argues for what Mor finds an intolerable