The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch. Peter Conradi J.

of himself and then comes to resemble the pictures’ (me). She came to distrust Sartrian existentialism and British philosophy equally, and to see them as sharing a common ground in offering no barrier to romantic selfassertion. In a radio talk in 1950 she criticised both Sartre and Camus for presenting worlds which were simultaneously too intelligible and transparent, and also too lacking (unlike the world of Gabriel Marcel) in mystery – in which category she included nightmarish mystery – and magic. ‘This fact alone, that there is no mystery, would falsify their claims to be true pictures of the situation of man…We are not yet resigned to absurdity and our only salvation lies in not becoming resigned’ (eh). The same year she asked, à propos Simone de Beauvoir’s championing of T.E. Lawrence as an existentialist hero, ‘Should he be taken as the model of the “good man” for this age?’⁹ In a sense this question resonates throughout her writing, and its very subversive simplicity rightly disturbs us. What man are we being asked to admire in this novel or in that philosophy? And are the reasons just? By 1957 in a Spectator review she noted that the appeal of existentialism was its dramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social exaltation of the individual.¹⁰ If the central question she was later to ask in The Sovereignty of Good – what is it that might ‘lead to unselfish behaviour in the concentration camp?’ (73) – has any answer, it is not the ‘instantaneous’ values of the existentialist hero or of his Anglo-Saxon voluntarist counterpart. It is no accident that the plots of her novels until 1970 often concern the disruption of a court of settled, rooted English grands bourgeois by displaced persons and refugees. The theme is of course as old as Jane Austen, but Murdoch makes her own special use of it. She has written both of the ‘phenomenal luck of our English-speaking societies’ and, in the same article (sbr), of how such luck may obscure deep truth. These outsiders – the Lusiewicz twins and Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter, the Levkins in The Italian Girl, Honor Klein and Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head, Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat – may sometimes appear as twentieth-century versions of the sentimental or demonic egoists whose irruption into the innocent provincial redoubt Austen chronicled.¹¹ They as often, however, reveal the ‘deep truth’ hidden behind polite English manners.

      The exact moment at which her disaffection with existentialism began may now be hard to determine. The spiritual claim that quarrels with it is present as early as Under the Net; and in a sense this argument has continued.

      In the 1950s Murdoch began to read the great French mystic Simone Weil, whose influence on the novels A.S. Byatt has discussed in Degrees of Freedom. It is Weil’s strength that she does not, unlike Sartre, sentimentalise the position of being radically denuded and outside society. Murdoch has called Simone Weil’s Need for Roots ‘one of the very few profound and original political treatises of our time’(kv). It argues that the most terrible deprivation possible is the destruction of one’s past and one’s culture. Weil’s argument is that the affliction and degradation caused by the destruction of roots are such that they deprive all but the saintly person of the capacity to change or ‘unself’ from inside. The uprooted hurt and uproot others. Only for the saintly can virtue have no fixed address, in Weil’s philosophy and in Murdoch’s fiction. Morality depends, for Weil, on the slow attenuation or destruction of the ego, which itself requires a quiet environment. Sudden or violent deracination can mean complete or demonic demoralisation.

      It is not that existentialism (or formalism) are wrong to attack the substantial self. It is rather that their attack is for Murdoch in bad faith. In pretending that the essential self does not exist the existentialist may behave like an ‘egotist-without-an-I’. The Buddhist attack on the fictionality of the ego is more profound, for both Weil and Murdoch, because it is based on a realistic assessment of the limited capacity of the ego to decentre itself, and because it is nonetheless designed to alter perception and behaviour. The originality of Murdoch’s novels is that they are full of a sense of what it means to come from one of the luckier, stabler societies or sections within that society, in an unlucky century, but avoid false piety about either that luck or that misfortune. The make-believe of ordinary life and the painful destruction of ordinary human illusion can be carried out anywhere, in a refugee camp or at a tea-table. Nowhere is privileged.

      Just as her recoil from existentialism begins early, so does her attraction to a countervailing soul-picture which is, though absorbing much from Freud, religious yet (like Buddhism) atheist (and hence scandalous both to some Christians and to many humanists). Apart from a polemical letter to the New Statesman in 1941 defending the fellowtravelling Oxford Labour Group against J.W. Joad’s ‘liberal ethics of the nineteenth century’ and his facile invocation of ‘truth, beauty, goodness and love’,¹² Murdoch’s earliest prose publications are three reviews of books with Christian topics, written during the war for the Adelphi magazine. They already prefigure her developed ‘philosophy’ of the 1960s, which she pertinently called not so much a philosophy as a moral psychology (Caen, 1978) in its interest in the differences between people, and in ‘how conduct is changed and how consciousness is changed’ (Bellamy, 1977). These reviews, while making clear that she was non-Christian, also show that she was prepared calmly and sympathetically to consider the claim that ‘science and philosophy may come to rest afresh upon a specifically religious exposition of the nature of reality’. Two other passages seem relevant to later preoccupations. The first concerns her interest in the dualism of worldliness and unworldliness, and the problem of the contemplative’s ‘return to the Cave’: ‘One may sympathize with this horror that turns its face utterly from this world as a place of unrelieved filth and corruption – but the problem of the return to the Cave remains a very real one for Christianity.’ In the second she compares the detachment of the artist with that of the saint. The artist, she argues, is not ‘apart’ as the saint is: ‘He sees the earth freshly and strangely but he is ultimately part of it, he is inside the things he sees and speaks of as well as outside them. He is of their substance, he suffers with them. Of saints I know nothing…’¹³ That collocation of ‘fresh’ with ‘strange’ prefigures many of the effects of her novels. The ‘odd’ for her is often close to being or to revealing the beautiful.

      From 1948 to 1963, when she gave up full-time teaching, she was Tutor in Philosophy and Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 1956 she married the writer, critic and Oxford don John Bayley. John Fletcher has called theirs ‘one of the most fruitful literary and critical partnerships of our time, and remarkable in any time’.¹⁴ While Murdoch showed her novels to nobody until they were absolutely finished, she and Bayley shared a common humanism and an admiration for Shakespeare and Tolstoy as the writers who best succeed in creating the illusion that their characters are free.

      It is rare to find someone who excelled, as did Murdoch, both as a novelist and as a moral philosopher. The precedent at which she glances at various points is the founder of European philosophy, Plato. In 1968 she called herself a Platonist (Rose, 1968). As well as philosophy, Plato is rumoured to have written poetry which he later tore up, and I think that in Murdoch we may intuit what she saw in Plato in The Sovereignty of Good – some version of ‘the peculiarly distressing struggle between artist and saint’ (88). She spoke of this as a theme in her work in numerous interviews. She described the division between would-be saints – Belfounder, Tayper-Pace, Ann Peronett – who have the certainty and power which come as gifts of faith, and possess a mysterious radiance beneath their ordinariness, and the would-be artists – Donaghue, Meade, Randall Peronett – who are imposing form on to essentially uncontrollable nature. The saint is unconsciously good, silent, and for him it is action that counts. The artist is consciously, aesthetically creating his life. In an interview she suggested that the importance of this conflict had to do with the ways in which the temptation to impose form existed in life as much as in art: the value of truth must pull at both.¹⁵

      Thus the ‘ancient quarrel’ vivifies the