Mor to crucify his desires and open himself to any hurt in concern for others. Freedom, for Bledyard, is total absence of self-concern.
Two other features of Bledyard’s case deserve note. One is that he is, with his speech impediment and his eccentricity, a ludicrous figure, mocked by all, including Mor and Rain. The scene where he gives a school lecture, at which the boys have substituted a slide of the digestive tract of a frog for the enormous Socratic head of the aged Rembrandt, is a triumph of controlled tone. The reader, like the audience, is convulsed with happy laughter, yet what Bledyard is saying has always about it a disturbing impractical truthfulness. We are made to feel that Bledyard is mocked rather as Christ was mocked. The mockery is partly Murdoch’s own irony and disguise, as with Socrates, for whom the ironies always were thickest when the approach to truth came nearest.
The second interesting feature of Bledyard’s case is his Platonic hostility to representational art. Just as Hugo approved of Leonardo’s deliberately having made The Last Supper perishable, and favoured the instantaneous obsolescence of fireworks, so Bledyard is interested in the debates about iconoclasm in the early Eastern Church and favours Byzantine art. He feels that a loss of proper reverence occurred in the Renaissance: ‘It is a fact…that we cannot really observe really observe our betters.’ (The repetition is a result of his speech impediment.) ‘Vices and peculiarities are easy to portray. But who can look reverently enough upon another human face? The true portrait painter should be a saint – and saints have other things to do than paint portraits’ (77).
Bledyard stands in relation to the rest of the book as do Hugo and Peter. Like anti-matter to matter, they are out of focus with ordinary human appetite. You can focus on either the saints or their artist antitypes – which is to say, on everyone else – separately, but not together. Their function in the books is to point to an (unrealisable) ideal which even they cannot wholly embody, though they are directed with a certain hope, faith and openness towards it.
Bledyard speaks two related kinds of wisdom. One is related to moral immediacy in personal relations, the other to the interplay of truthfulness and skill necessary to the artist. In this second area his effect is most palpable. He has a way of appearing in the book at crucial moments not just in Rain’s love affair with Mor but also in her attempts to picture and ‘see’ Demoyte. Each time he appears Rain recognises his authority and realises that a change in her painting is necessary. Her painting comes to seem, as I think art does to Murdoch, a provisional affair, never wholly finished. Art, like morality, must be pulled at by the value of a truth or perfection which is unreachable. Rain is desolate when Bledyard criticises her painting at an early stage, yet is helped by this criticism and rethinks her task. Finally, when she renounces Mor, she sees her representation of Demoyte once more anew and remakes what she has done again. At the same time Mor is held in his marriage, not by his own sudden conversion to Bledyard’s austerities, but by his wife’s brave and worldly cunning in staging a public scene. This compromises him and leaves him little choice but to pursue the political career she had formerly opposed.
As its title implies, The Sandcastle is much concerned with notions of form and permanence. Rain had been brought up on the tideless Mediterranean, where the sand was too dry to make a sandcastle. She finally tells Mor that, since he would have had to give up his political ambitions and his children for her, their affair would have been ‘all dry sand running through the fingers’ (300). Characters are throughout realised by their aesthetic preferences. Nan likes matching colour-schemes and moves everything in the house around as an expression of her need for control and territory. Demoyte lives in the magnificence of superimposed Persian rugs, drowning in splendour. Evvy’s apartments are drably unimaginative, and Bledyard characteristically lives in a stripped room, void of colour or comfort: ‘The floor was scrubbed and the walls whitewashed. No picture, no coloured object adorned it. The furniture was of pale wood and even the bed had a white cover’ (51). This recalls Hugo’s bedroom in Under the Net. Goodness, for Murdoch, depends on stripping away the consolations of a private world. Most art, like most morality, is a necessary realm of compromise and second-best.
The theme of the artist and the saint lies at the heart of An Unofficial Rose (1962) in the marriage of Ann and Randall Peronett, and is early dramatised in the row Randall stages to provide himself with a pretext for cutting loose and joining his mistress. A.S. Byatt has rightly drawn our attention to the book’s Jamesian qualities.9 James continues to haunt Murdoch at least until Nuns and Soldiers (1980), which partly reworks the plot of The Wings of the Dove. Here there is ‘beautiful’ speech, periphrasis on the part of the narrator, and the creation of a decorous golden world. Jane Austen is another presence, and Hugh presents Miranda with her works.
An Unofficial Rose is set in a Tatler world of two neighbouring Kentish houses and concerns the manoeuvrings which follow the death of Fanny Peronett. The title refers to the dog-rose of Rupert Brooke’s 1913 poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which, unlike the orderly flowers of Berlin, where Brooke is composing his poem, he perceives as sweetly undisciplined and ‘unkempt’. The poem, itself an improvisation, hinges on the conceit that nature in Germany is punctual and formally ordered, while in England it is gloriously free.
Thus Randall, a would-be artist too rapacious to succeed, is offended by his wife’s formlessness and feels stifled by her capacity for self-sacrifice. He lives for and inhabits a stylish world, farming cultivated roses, and objects to Ann in that she is as ‘messy and flabby and open as a dogrose’ (37). Ann is busy and unselfish and, while not odd as Bledyard is odd, has a shy awkwardness and stubborn self-withholding that offends Randall. In The Red and the Green (1965) the artist Barnie is similarly hurt by his good wife Kathleen’s unyielding, passive stoicism. Such virtuous characters have a special negativity which refuses the imagination of those they live with, perhaps a consequence of how hard they work at not imagining wrong. Such deliberate gracelessness offers the onlooker no imaginative foothold. This seems a just perception, and I know of no other novelist capable of making the point, or of relating it to the virtues of the artwork itself, since art depends on style and stylishness, and requires and feeds off form. ‘Goodness accepts the contingent. Love accepts the contingent. Nothing is more fatal to love than to want it to have form,’ the sententious vicar Douglas Swann says (UR 130). Art, in making its pact with contingency, must however embrace enough to test its own form without yielding to banality.
Freedom, too, is a subject of the book. Characters are frequently surprised when actions they had planned and claimed for themselves turn out to have been partly engineered by others. Randall discovers that his action in stealing Lindsay Rimmer from the aged detective-story writer Emma Sands, to whom she had been companion, was at least partly connived at by Emma: ‘His action was stolen from him’ (202). In direct contrast Ann finds that her inability to claim Felix Meecham for herself, despite their mutual love and despite her desertion by Randall, was worked at by her daughter Miranda, who was in love with Felix herself: ‘She had been part of someone else’s scheme’ (325). Randall, typically, resents this threat to his supremacy. Ann, as typically, does not.
This is not to say that even the most powerful and worldly characters can ever fully ‘own’ their actions. All have to suffer their own unfreedom, but do so with a difference. Even the ‘witch-like’ Emma, despite the tough and very quick-witted front she puts on, is after all abandoned first by Hugh, then by Lindsay, and is about to die. The prissily unappealing Miranda, who ensures her mother’s disappointment, is thwarted herself; and it is not impossible that Ann will get Randall, whom she still loves, back in the end.
If there is a pecking order in the book it has at the top not the ‘freest’ characters but simply those who most acutely and earthily see how things are. Lacking a taste for the fantasy of an unconditioned world, they thereby possess a power denied to those deluded by the notion of freedom. The theme recurs in Nuns and Soldiers. The whole complicated imbroglio of love and passion is held in being as the unstable product of a variety of different wills.
In relation to this pecking order Ann is the most passive and acquiescent, and Emma the most cunning and authoritative of the moral agents. Murdoch’s different sympathy for both seems clear. There is energy if not approval behind Emma,