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 has written twenty-six novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, the Sea (1978) and most recently The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). Other literary awards 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. Her volume of poetry, A Year of Birds, which appeared in 1978, has been set to music by Malcolm Williamson.
ALSO BY IRIS MURDOCH
Fiction
Under the Net
The 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
The Nice and the Good
Bruno’s Dream
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
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
Something Special
Non-Fiction
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Existentialists and Mystics
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
AN ACCIDENTAL MAN
Iris Murdoch
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Valentine Cumningham
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Epub ISBN: 9781407018225
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Copyright © Iris Murdoch 1971
Introduction © Valentine Cunningham 2003
First published in Great Britain in 1971 by
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TO KREISEL
INTRODUCTION
AN ACCIDENTAL MAN, Iris Murdoch’s fourteenth novel, is a candidate for being her most discomfited and most discomforting one. If we think Shakespearean models – and Iris Murdoch often did – then this novel is not so much a tragedy (though it is deeply tragic) or a tragi-comedy (though it frequently does its bleakest moments as comedy, as farce even) but rather a kind of problem play, in the line of Troilus and Cressida no less, in which love is betrayed ignominiously, the morally lowest and most cynical flourish and unremittingly pessimistic visions of human goodness triumph.
It is not uncommon in Iris Murdoch’s fictions for the would-be good people and for goodness to flounder, for the godly to renege and to fall, for moral mayhem and evil to flourish, for moral crashes and smashes and disasters to abound and for some fearful accident to occur as the sign of humanity’s proneness to moral bad luck. But the scale of such negativity in An Accidental Man is what makes its pessimisms seem so arrestingly awesome. The centre of such overwhelmingly melancholic plotting is no-good Austin Gibson Grey, the novel’s self-styled ‘accidental man’ – a cynical destroyer, egoistic fantasist, liar, thief, promoter of hatred, the selfish user of his brother, his wives, all women, all his friends and also a killer. (Weirdly, Austin is said to rather resemble in character Murdoch’s friend, the refugee mathematician George Kreisel, always known as Kreisel, to whom the novel is dedicated.) Austin leads a complexly horrible life, wreaking havoc, breaking up people’s lives, destroying people and things and yet he comes through more or less unscathed. He is the totally bad hat who robs the bank, bumps off all the good guys, shoots the sheriff dead and yet walks off into the sunset at the end of the movie to do it all over again somewhere else. Fictions, we feel, shouldn’t end like that because that’s too muddled, too much of a problem, formally, morally. Hence ‘problem’ play. And it’s shocking when An Accidental Man does end like that.
It’s shocking not least because being ‘accidental’, making do with the accidentalism of the world, with what Iris Murdoch continually hailed as the ‘contingency’ of life, is normally for her the essence of the moral, of moral thinking and moral action and crucial to a novel’s being what she thought a novel should be, namely an agent of the good. Personal goodness, she kept on repeating in her moral-philosophical and literary-critical writings as well as in her novels, comes through accepting and coping with, not seeking to evade or adjust, the muddle and mess of the world in all its rebarbative detail, its confusing particularity. That’s what the reality and truth of the world consist in. That way come love and freedom. To not deny that is to be reaching out to the only Holy Grail that exists now, to be on the only road to salvation now that God is definitively dead. To live with the muddled particularity of the world is the only means of grace left us in our post-Christian world. And novels are only good if they register all that. Murdoch’s novels, her customarily rather preachy novels, usually preach some version of that sermon. What makes An Accidental Man especially bleak is that while the usual provocations to goodness on the Murdoch model, the usual terms in which she envisages the good life and the good novel, are all lavishly in place, continually named, offered, they defeat more or less everybody in the novel. Unusually for a Murdoch fiction, no one, or nearly no one, is saved. Life is presented in all its Murdochian ordinariness as contingency and mess and it all makes for a pretty complete disaster zone. And not just for Austin Gibson Grey. The ‘accidental man’ is only the acme, the centre of a whole scene of messily particular contingency which is not redemptive for anyone.
Garth, son of the accidentalist Austin, nephew of Austin’s brother Matthew who has returned from the East to save Austin, old friend of
American historian Ludwig whose engagement to heiress Gracie fills up much of the novel’s space, and (arousingly for Murdoch) a wannabe novelist, is one of the many in this very crowded novel (Murdoch packs her novels with people on principle: to write at length and at large is to be well on the way to being truthful, she thought). Like a lot of Murdoch characters trying to save their soul, he wants to live simply. He marks time by washing up at night in a Soho restaurant (Murdoch can’t help giving even her simple-lifers rather glamorous postings). He hates his job, dislikes all the kitchen sex-talk and the advances of an out-of-work actor, but when advised about other work, he hesitates, a reluctant existentialist.
The contingent details of choice disturbed him. Everything that was offered him was too particular, too hole and corner, not significant enough, though at the same time he realized with dazzling clarity that all decent things which human beings do are hole and corner . . . He had desired the freedom of having nothing to lose, no possessions, no ambitions, no hopes, but this did not feel like it . . . He had envisaged a cool duty but not this muddying anxiety.
He has seen, as it were, into the Murdoch idea of the good life signified in those key terms, the code language of his author’s moral philosophy – contingent, details, particular, freedom, muddying (even) – and has flunked their test.
Garth has no faith in God – which is normal with Murdoch’s characters: even the keenest of her believers tend to lapse, as Mavis (Matthew’s lover) and Dorina (Austin’s second wife) have done. But he has no idea of virtue either. ‘The idea of virtue is a fake-up’, he thinks, speaking as the true son of his father, ‘it’s like God’. But virtue is, for Murdoch, not like God in being a ‘fake-up’. Goodness is for her the necessary, demanding residue of the old theisms. The Sovereignty of Good, as her book of 1970 has it, replaces the old Christian Sovereignty of God. Being shaken by mess and contingency and particularity is part and parcel of being unattracted by goodness. So it’s meant to be no surprise when Garth finally takes up with Gracie, the ill-educated, selfish little rich girl who pokes fun at her granny’s funeral, who hates ‘muddles’ and is for Murdoch altogether too frivolous about the would-be sacred particulars of London, the Thames, a great art collection, all the usual holy places of Murdochian reality Gracie takes her boyfriend Ludwig to ‘the Wallace Collection to hear the clocks strike twelve and then to a pub with a funny name, passing by a flower shop where Ludwig would buy flowers to be later ceremonially thrown into the Thames from a particular bridge’. In Murdoch’s world you take the Thames and the Wallace collection seriously, or else. It’s no wonder either that Garth turns into a bad and popular novelist.
Garth’s commercially successful bad novel is about himself. It features an act of personal moral cowardice he keeps recalling, the day he failed a moral test on a New York street. He happened – accidentally – on two Puerto Ricans knifing a black man to death and refused to heed the victim’s cry for help. So, like the heedless priest in Jesus’s famous story about the Good Samaritan who helped the Jew who ‘fell among thieves’, Garth ‘passed by on the other side’. An ancient mythic story gets revived, gets re-enacted (it happens often in Murdoch’s novels), this time to find post-Christian man utterly wanting ethically, not a Good Samaritan.
Not everyone in the novel fails the challenge of the chance meeting. One-time diplomat Matthew is haunted by what he saw in Moscow’s Red Square – ‘an accidental passerby’ going over to demonstrators, shaking their hand, and getting arrested with them. Everyone else ‘passed by’. As did Matthew, the perpetual moral tourist, mere onlooker at the scene of moral challenge, who goes back to drinks ‘in a carpeted embassy’, ‘hung with minor masterpieces by Gainsborough and Lawrence’. The episode is the basis of the one real example in this novel of Murdoch’s favourite tutorial scene, when the philosophic master debates ethics with a star pupil, this time Matthew and Ludwig discussing the apparent moral heroism of the Red Square event and whether such ‘virtue’ is really illusory. Matthew’s story is important to Ludwig, the historian with the inherited Protestant Conscience, wondering whether to return to the USA and bear witness aginst the morality of the Vietnam War. Later on, miserable in his love life, Ludwig fails to go over and speak to mad, sad Dorina on a Bloomsbury Street, just before she dies, accidentally electrocuted in her bath in a ‘small hotel’. His remorse that ‘he had seen Dorina on the day that she died and had passed her by was so nightmarish’, that we assume it’s one reason he decides to stop his draft-dodging, and to go home to bear public witness about Vietnam, rather than taking up a comfortable post in Oxford. Ludwig goes to prison: ‘a solitary conscientious American’, Matthew calls him, thinking of that ‘solitary conscientious Russian’ in Red Square. ‘From the good, good actions spring with a spontaneity which must remain to the mediocre forever mysterious’. Matthew includes himself among the morally mediocre. Ludwig is, perhaps, the only one to be ‘saved’ in this novel. It’s important in Murdoch’s fiction to bear witness against the great occurrences of modern evil which haunt her people. All Ludwig’s European relations had died or been scattered in the Hitler period, like the families of the many Jewish refugees who throng Murdoch’s pages. Choosing martyrdom – giving up Gracie and Oxford and scholarship to go and testify against the Vietnam War – is an exorcism of the ‘ghost of Hitler’, a way of making up for all the Protestant Germans whose consciences didn’t stop them passing by on the other side, as well as putting things straight with the ghost of Dorina.
Ludwig is dull, priggish even – though not as much as Gracie’s mother thinks him – and not absolutely good, but he does, evidently, achieve for Murdoch a certain goodness. He makes good, is made good, in the way he responds to the awful ways of the world. Of the world which is ‘all there is’, in those momentous opening words of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the philosophy book which so absorbed Iris Murdoch’s attention. ‘This’ – i.e. coming cleanly through ‘the mess of his motives’ to respond to the ‘small pure undoctrined need to bear witness’ – ‘was how the world was, so this was what a man must do’. Matthew presses Ludwig on that so, the alleged imperative. They agree that if God were to exist He would live in that link. He doesn’t, but still, they conclude, the link holds good. Obeying some such ‘obscure imperative’, Ludwig thinks, is what ‘seemed to put him on the side of salvation’. He wonders, ‘Was this paralysed muddling on from moment to moment what moral thinking at its most difficult was really like?’ Murdoch’s answer in the silence of the text seems to be: yes, more or less, it is. Morality comes through not being overwhelmed by the muddle of the world.
All the others in the novel are overwhelmed, demented, deterred by the way of the world, its cruel particularity. Disinherited Aunt Charlotte tries to kill herself. So does big Mitzi, her career as an athlete ruined by a freak accident. Lethal accidents queue up bumper to bumper. Dorina’s dad accidentally kills a snake, Austin drunkenly runs over a little girl, Dorina dies when a bar-heater falls into her bath, little Henrietta Sayce falls to her death from some scaffolding. It’s hard to keep up with the novel’s death toll. And all these terrible real accidents are shadowed by possible accidents, by questions about accident and accidentality. Was the drowning of Betty, Austin’s first wife, in a canal lock really an accident? Was the traumatising primal scene in the quarry not merely an accident, when little Matthew kicked the stones down and Austin’s hand was hurt? When Austin bashes blackmailing Norman Monkley in the head with the metal case containing his awful novel and turns him into a vegetable it might or might not be the accident Austin claims. But whether all the novel’s accidents are accidental or not – and these people do seem awfully predestined to awful fates, if only by their novelist – their horror is never to be blunted by the farce which keeps intruding.
When Austin and Mitzi trash Ludwig’s little dinner-party for Gracie – drinking and brawling, knocking over the wine and a saucepan of eggs, with Austin crashing into the ‘eggy mess’ in the fireplace, breaking his glass
es and hurting his arm – we laugh, but the chapter of accidents is no joke. Even when he’s farcing about, Austin’s accidentalism keeps bringing home the awfulness here of the contingent. He’s repeatedly said to be devilish. God may have died for Iris Murdoch’s characters, but the devil seems to resist such a demise. Austin is satanic. One of his final terrible actions, getting Mavis away from Matthew, ‘contaminating’ her in revenge for Matthew ‘polluting’ Dorina in Austin’s view (Matthew merely gave Dorina refuge for three days), is characteristic. ‘Of course, Austin had not really done this “on purpose”. It had all been, like so many other things in the story, accidental. But it was too beautiful not to have also the product of instinct’. Accidental, on purpose: the result is the same – a vile act of demonic beauty. Austin is that recurrent Murdoch character, the modern Satan, a beautiful fallen angel, achieving a devilish beauty, indulging a kind of aesthetic of evil. It’s most gorgeously expressed, perhaps, when he smashes up Matthew’s wonderful collection of chinese porcelain – a malign perversion of aesthetic appreciation, an inverted sort of connoisseurship. He did it with a cast-iron table-leg picked up in ‘a nearby rubbish-tip’. Accidentally on purpose, no doubt. So much, we’re intended to think, for the redemptive power of the aesthetic which Murdoch wants to believe in, the grace of art which was temporarily Matthew’s blessedness. All smashed. And representatively, it would seem, of all the other potentially good and saving forces and powers which Murdoch so tantalisingly dangles before us and her people.
For this is the novel where the occasionally humanising touch, the handshake of Red Square, is overshadowed by what Austin does with his grotesquely pawing crippled hand; where novels, the greatest humanising medium for Murdoch, are written by inadequate Garth and foulmouthed fantasizing Monkley; where London’s great galleries, the National and the Courtauld and so on, Murdoch’s customary sites of aesthetic sacredness, are merely places for Ludwig and Gracie to do some kissing in; where, most terrible of all, love fails horribly in a catalogue of hopeless yearnings, bitterness, jealousy, bourgeois convention (George and Clara Tisbourne), parody (Charlotte’s loveless lesbian future with Mitzi; Gracie’s brother farcically reliving all those schoolboy fictions about passion behind the cricket pavilion), even murder (did Austin actually kill Betty?). As ever in a Murdoch novel, love takes many forms – which is the point of the Sophocles fragment which Ludwig’s gay Oxford classical colleague quotes in his letter from Athens towards the end of the novel (the Greek is untranslated, as usual: Murdoch expects her readers to be as learned as she is) – but here none of love’s many variant forms lacks flaws. And flawing of some kind is all over An Accidental Man.