Iris Murdoch
THE NICE
AND THE GOOD
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Catherine Bates
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Also by Iris Murdoch
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
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Copyright © Iris Murdoch, 1968
Introduction copyright © Catherine Bates, 2000
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First published in Great Britain in 1968 by Chatto & Windus
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ISBN 9780099285267
TO RACHEL AND DAVID CECIL
About the Author
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in Philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then in 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a Fellow of St Anne’s College. Until her death in February 1999, she lived with her husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley, in Oxford. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature.
Since her writing debut in 1954 with Under the Net, Iris Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978). Other literary awards she received include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of philosophy include Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and Existentialists and Mystics (1997). She has written several plays including The Italian Girl (with James Saunders) and The Black Prince, adapted from her novel of the same name.
ALSO BY IRIS MURDOCH
Fiction
Under the Net
Flight from the Enchanter
The Sandcastle
The Bell
A Severed Head
An Unofficial Rose
The Unicorn
The Italian Girl
The Red and the Green
The Time of the Angels
Bruno’s Dream
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
An Accidental Man
The Black Prince
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
A Word Child
Henry and Cato
The Sea, The Sea
Nuns and Soldiers
The Philosopher’s Pupil
The Good Apprentice
The Book and the Brotherhood
The Message to the Planet
The Green Knight
Jackson’s Dilemma
Non-Fiction
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Existentialists and Mystics
INTRODUCTION
In a little scene towards the beginning of The Nice and the Good a young adolescent boy makes a doomed gesture of love to a young adolescent girl:
Pierce had covered the table with a complicated pattern composed of hundreds of shells arranged in spirals, tiny ones in the centre, larger ones on the outside. Adjusting the outer edge of the pattern he stopped to select a shell from a heap at his feet.
It is a typically Murdochian moment. Brought up from the nearby beach, the shells invade the household, bringing the sea and the seashore with them and breaking down the normally discrete categories of earth and water, land and sea. Under the influence of love the otherwise warring elements yearn one for the other and the animals, vegetable, and mineral worlds fuse with the human in a sympathetic and almost animistic universe of pre-Baconian correspondences. ‘My imagination lives near the sea and under the sea’, wrote Iris Murdoch once1, and in this as in other novels the sea sweeps in on an emotional tide that dissolves all rigid boundaries and in their place creates something rich and strange, an imaginative realm not unlike the ‘rich strand’ of literary romance. Whether in Tristan and Iseult, The Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare’s late romances, this tideland is a mysterious border-ground that owes allegiance both to land and sea – an ambiguous and ambiguating place where anything and everything might happen. Here things don’t go according to plan and the divisions or compartments which normally rationalise life give way to something quite different. It’s no accident, in fact, that much of the action of this novel takes place on the beach and in the sea-caves of the idyllic Dorset coast where the story is, for the most part, set.
Though small, light, and infinitely disposable, Pierce’s shells are more than just shells. The something-more – the excess that is to be carried over – is the great weight they bear, the whole burden of first (and in this case unrequited, love. For, and again this is one of Murdoch’s hallmarks, the physical world is never just the physical world. It is infused with metaphysical meaning, aglow with the extra dimension that is bestowed upon it by the artist’s l
oving gaze. No other writer except perhaps John Donne is so concerned to materialise feelings into things or to ram ordinary objects – shells, stones, pieces of glass – with metaphysical significance. Murdoch often wrote of this ‘thingy’ quality of the world. To see the world in all its concrete objectivity, its manifest over-there-ness, is a sign of proper attentiveness, of a patient and benevolent regard which, in its direction away from the self and out towards external phenomena, is akin to love. Even the contents of a rubbish bin can be lovingly described as if seen for the first time, the detritus of daily life attended to with a new, even startled eye. The kind of hyper-clarity that results makes us realise how rarely we apprehend reality in this way if, indeed, we ever apprehend it at all.
What makes this scene most characteristic of all, however, is the question it raises about art. For the shell design is, with its careful placements and overall eye to effect, nothing less than a work of art. Pierce’s spiral patterns imitate the Fibonacci spirals of the shells themselves, art and nature coinciding for once and testifying to God and man’s blessed rage for order in a universe that’s otherwise random and utterly prey to contingency. But the beauty does not last. For all its pained solemnity, Pierce’s gift is destined to go unheeded, unreceived. Intended as a welcome-home present for Barbara, home from finishing school for the summer holidays, the whole thing is, on her arrival, thoughtlessly, crushingly swept aside. Does its impermanence, its destructibility – the simple fact that it is refused – negate the gift, the labour of love? What is art’s place in a violent, uncaring world? Does it have a curative function? Is it there to make good an imperfect nature, to patch up, polish and finesse the raw material of experience, patiently restoring the rents in the fabric of life? Or does art make no difference whatsoever? Is it just another component of a world that is no more nor less contingent for its being there? Do terrible things happen regardless of whether art is there or not? The existence of Shakespeare’s plays or Schubert’s music did not prevent the Holocaust, after all. Is art – or good art, in any case – an isolated monument, then, one that rises serenely above the chaotic field of human happening, its symbols capturing the cultural memory and with it a whole archaeology of meaning? There are times when, in her reverential attitude to the great classics of literature and of Renaissance painting, Murdoch seems to imply the latter. But there are also moments when art’s ability to hold, bind, and even redeem experience are savagely mocked – when elegant patterns and formal contrivances collapse into hideous scenes of complication and sexual muddle which this novelist has made her own special trademark. Is art pointless, then? And, if it is, does that negate art or only affirm it still further? Besides, where in all this does the novelist’s own art lie?
The intimate relation between ethics and art is the one issue with which all Iris Murdoch’s writing – her philosophy as well as her fiction – is ultimately concerned. The Nice and the Good is no exception and its question-begging title draws particular attention to the Socratic quest for the good man. ‘What is a good man like? How can we make ourselves morally better? Can we make ourselves morally better?’ These questions, formulated here in ‘“On God” and “Good”’, an essay published in 1969, a year after The Nice and the Good, centre in that novel around the character of John Ducane, a middle-aged civil servant who is perceived by those around him to be a model of the upright man. Ducane does not necessarily share his friends’ good faith in him but he sees goodness as a serious aim and ‘had from childhood quite explicitly set before himself the aim of becoming a good man’. This ambition takes the form of regular if not always happy self-examination. If morality is intimately linked with art, then Ducane’s ethics are best described as theatrical. He early relinquishes a career at the Bar out of a dislike for the histrionics of that trade, but Ducane’s practical ethics are, for all that, entirely modelled on the drama. In the puritan mentality of his strict Scottish upbringing he characteristically sees himself as performing if not before the eye of God then before a personalised conscience, and either coming up to scratch or (increasingly) not. He is acutely conscious of the way others perceive him – the figure he cuts in their eyes – and, given that everything revolves around seeing, he is almost more upset at seeming to be a liar or a traitor that at actually being one. All this involves a no doubt laudable exercise of the imagination: the ability to imagine others’ views of oneself is co-extensive with the ability to imagine goodness, evil, or other people’s feelings, and is a prerequisite, of course, of the creative artist. There is a profound aestheticism in Ducane’s nature and when he attempts to perform good actions it is not surprising that the role to which he naturally reverts is that of the dramaturge. In his self-appointed role as deus ex machina he takes it upon himself to arrange two marriages (things happen in pairs in this novel), contriving, Prospero-like, to combine imagination with will in the control of otherwise recalcitrant human material. He is only half successful.
The figure with whom Ducane most obviously contrasts is that of Radeechy, the colleague whose mysterious suicide in the office one summer afternoon he is asked to investigate. If Ducane does his best to be a good man, Radeechy, it appears, did the opposite. Already known to have had interests in necromancy and magic, he also dabbled, it turns out, in the occult. A trip to the vaults beneath the government department where he worked – one of two such visits to the underworld in the novel – reveals all the paraphernalia of satanic ritual: bell, book, candle and all. Here Ducane finds the inverted crosses, demonic cryptograms, priestly vestments and dead pigeons of previously celebrated black masses, and these lead him, in turn, to a murky underworld of vice and crime. Radeechy is clearly an evil counterpart in whose studied inversion of the good, Ducane distressingly confronts his own opposite. Yet for all this the moralities of the two men are strangely alike, the one a parodic mirror-image of the other. Radeechy’s amateur dramatics have something in common with Ducane’s theatre of conscience for both rest to the same degree on the power of the human imagination. Radeechy’s posturings recall those of Dr. Faustus who rejects God in return for the supernatural powers that are granted him by magic: “But his dominion that exceeds in this/Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man” (Dr. Faustus, I.i.60-61). Faustus’s rhetorical flourish is meant to imply infinitude – the infinite reaches of the human mind. The trouble is that the human mind doesn’t in fact stretch all that far and Marlowe’s play is dedicated to showing up its pathetic limitations. This is one reason why Faustus’s demonic antics are, like those of Radeechy, so unimaginative, so derivative, in the end so downright silly. There is nothing supernatural here, only a pathetic reaching for the extreme. Paltry, dreary, and depressing are exactly how Ducane, when he gets to the bottom of the affair, finally judges Radeechy’s goings-on. But there is also a judgement of himself in this assessment. It is not that Ducane’s morality is bad. It’s rather that his goodness – fussy, humane, managerial as it is, a thing to be worked at and practised, a busyness that’s prone to ineptitude and self-consciousness – shares an essential quality with Radeechy’s evil. In both cases, good and evil are an inspiration, something to ‘become’, to be enacted and willed. This good and evil can be spoken and spoken about. It can be decided on and planned – arranged as deliberately and carefully as the artist disposes his characters or orders his creative material. Good and evil here have a familiar, homely, man-made quality. They are all too human – not other, not divine. They represent small evil and small good – opposite to one another, for sure, but, for all that, equal in scale.
The figure with whom Ducane contrasts more subtly is that of Uncle Theo – an enigmatic man whose uncertain past is divulged only at the very end and who is virtually the only character not to be paired off in the multiple couplings that make up the novel’s positively Shakespearean ending. Inscrutable from the beginning, Theo succeeds in deflecting others’ interest and curiosity in himself: ‘this lack of interest seemed to be caused in some positive way by Theo himself, as if
he sent out rays which paralysed other people’s concern about him. It was like a faculty of becoming invisible’. Pointless, undetectable and distinctly uncharismatic, Theo is either a very boring man or, as one of the other characters shrewdly suspects, someone who has, in the course of his undisclosed life, been through the inferno and arrived on the far side of despair. With his odd canine features and marked bond of mutual empathy with the family pet, Mingo, Theo appears to the others as a kind of dog-man. But this is not some demonic, Radeechy-style reversal of God. Rather, Theo embodies the paradoxical non-god of a resolutely godless world. ‘All metaphysics is devilish, devilish’, he says to the refugee scholar, Willy Kost:
‘There is no good metaphysics?’
‘No. Nothing about that can be said’.
‘Sad for the human race, since we are such natural prattlers.’
‘Yes. We are natural prattlers. And that deepens, prolongs, spreads and intensifies our evil’.
Theo, it is gradually revealed, has indeed progressed past good and evil into the Nietzschean beyond. And into the Freudian yonder, too – beyond the pleasure principle of a great copulating Nature which, in the animal as well as the human kingdom, he sardonically observes rutting all around him, out into the blankness and galactic silence of the death drive. Here, in the nothingness of Zen, Theo has confronted ‘the other face of love, its blank face’. All is vanity, and the pointlessness of existence is grasped – if emptiness can be said to be grasped – for what it is. At this point, the busy, self-justifying chatter of human ethics drops quite naturally away. From this beyond has nothing whatever to do with goodness, at least not with a goodness that can be spoken about, prayed for, or even made into art. It defies language, thought, and self. ‘The Good has nothing to do with purpose’, wrote Iris Murdoch in ‘“On God” and “Good”’, indeed it excludes the idea of purpose, “All is vanity” is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way to be good is to be good “for nothing” in the midst of a scene where every “natural” thing, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is, to necessity. That “for nothing” is indeed the experienced correlate of the invisibility or non-representable blankness of the idea of Good itself’. This is quite different from the homely, practical, well-meaning – in a word, ‘nice’ – ethics of a John Ducane. How small and insignificant they seem by comparison!