The New Republic

Iris Murdoch: A Life

by Peter J. Conradi

(W.W. Norton, 706 pp., $35)

Click here to purchase the book.

I.How is moral philosophy related to narrative fiction? One would
think that the relationship ought to be an intimate one. Both
genres are concerned with character and choice, with motives and
imaginings, with the vicissitudes of passion. And yet, from the
time when Plato attacked the tragic artists, the relationship has
often been characterized by mutual suspicion, philosophers viewing
narrative literature as indulgent, emotional, and lacking in
normative clarity, writers of fiction viewing philosophers as
intolerant moralists who lack appreciation of what Proust calls the
"intermittences of the heart." But some cultures and some periods
have been marked by especially hostile relations between the camps.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, fiction and philosophy
drew close in France, with Sartre and Camus writing both kinds of
books and blurring the distinction. In the English-speaking world,
by contrast, things were very different. Very few noted
philosophers attempted fiction, and Iris Murdoch was the only
eminent novelist to publish serious works of moral philosophy.

To some extent, the reason for this estrangement was cultural.
British academic society had a marked distaste for the public
display of strong passions. For the typical Oxbridge don, novelists
were a little like actors: amusing at a distance, embarrassing if
they came too close. To some extent, too, the estrangement was
stylistic. Anglo-American philosophy was written in a very austere
and impersonal way, so that any incursion of narrative and emotion
into the text would be regarded as an embarrassing anomaly. But how
could a novelist not want to record the texture of concrete
particulars--what Murdoch once memorably described in the hallowed
precincts of the Aristotelian Society as "the smell of the Paris
metro or what it is like to hold a mouse in one's hand"? Her remark
was shocking in those quarters, because it insisted that such
details of experience were the stuff of philosophy as well as the
stuff of life. People were not yet ready to listen.

Above all, the estrangement between philosophy and literature was
produced by issues of philosophical substance. Moral philosophy in
the postwar period had become preoccupied--not surprisingly, given
the tumultuous times--with the moment of ethical choice, and with
the role of the will in choosing the appropriate action. R.M. Hare,
who had spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp and on the Burmese
railway, had no interest at all in the inner life, or in the effort
to cultivate the thoughts and the feelings of a person of good
character. He wanted a philosophy that would produce good in the
world and help us understand the nature of good action. His
analysis of moral language famously held that all moral statements
were in essence commands to act, and this soldierly conception of
morality became popular in a world intent on seeing the good defeat
the bad. (On the Continent, a similar emphasis prevailed: Sartre
depicted the moral agent as a free and isolated will, capable of
choosing courageously for the sake of humanity only if it could
first come to grips with the agony of being free.)

To this muscular conception of philosophy, the preoccupations of the
novelist--the vagaries of emotion and desire, the variety of human
character, the predatoriness of love--looked simply irrelevant, as
if one had suggested that a grandiose salon painting of "The Choice
of Hercules" could be improved by the addition of a floating
indeterminate sky in the style of Turner. But the
choice-of-Hercules conception of the ethical life left out a good
deal, and these omissions were damaging to the postwar
philosophers' own project of understanding how good can be done and
evil can be avoided. For evil is very likely to begin in the inner
world, with the struggle of love against infantile egoism and
ambivalence, the laborious effort to form patterns of thought and
action that defeat narcissism and acknowledge the reality of other
people.

Oddly enough, these British philosophers were all teaching the
Greeks, and they must have encountered there a richer view of the
moral life. Teaching Aristotle, they would have reflected that a
person's goodness does not consist in isolated moments of willing,
but rather in a lifelong effort to cultivate patterns of
motivation, attention, reaction, and, related to all these, choice.
The effort was a virtuous one only if these patterns became
genuinely rooted, suffusing the moral life. Aristotle certainly had
too simple and too sunny a conception of the obstacles to goodness
in the human personality, in part because he took no interest in
children; but his conception is promising in its general shape, and
it can be deepened by the addition of a more nuanced psychology.
Still, teaching Aristotle did not affect the substance of what
Oxford philosophers wrote--until much later, and under the influence
of Iris Murdoch.

Murdoch was, for many years, an anomaly: a celebrated and also
popular novelist, and at the same time a respected philosophy tutor
at Oxford, who throughout her career (even after she quit teaching)
continued to publish serious philosophical essays and books. For
most of this time Murdoch opposed any effort to connect her two
careers. In an interview with Bryan Magee in 1978, on the subject
of "Philosophy and the Novel," she offered a caricature of Oxbridge
philosophy at its driest as a definition of what philosophy was, and
a similarly extreme definition of the novel as uncommitted play, as
if to say to her baffled interlocutor: "See? You thought you'd do a
program about how my two careers are connected. But there's no such
connection, except in your well- intentioned head." As Peter J.
Conradi's book makes clear, Murdoch had a constant desire to
mystify and to prevent people from finding her where she was, and
this interview was a splendid case in point.

Needless to say, there are profound connections between Murdoch's
fiction and Murdoch's philosophy, and they become more apparent all
the time. For Anglo- American moral philosophy has by now achieved
a broader conception of its subject matter, which would today be
agreed to include the virtues and the vices, the nature of
imagination and attention, the vicissitudes of passion. And
Murdoch's novels, which once looked like stylized social comedy
portraying the foibles of the British upper middle classes, can now
be seen more justly as complicated meditations about the nature of
sin and the struggle of the personality with itself, in which
artistic attention is not only the organizing force that drives the
whole, but also, at the same time, an object of critical scrutiny.

The novels are a major part of Murdoch's philosophical contribution,
because one cannot fully make the case for the moral significance
of the strivings of the inner world without narratives that show at
length and in detail what Henry James called "the effort really to
see and really to represent," as it contends with "the constant
force that makes for muddlement." Conradi misses this, and thus he
misses Murdoch's large philosophical importance, assuming that
like- minded souls in Oxford, such as Philippa Foot and John
McDowell, are more important as philosophical writers about virtue
because they were writing more of the conventional sort of
philosophical work. What he fails to grasp (perhaps because he gets
most of his information about philosophy from Foot) is that the
ideas that Murdoch shares with these more conventional
contemporaries require for their full exploration a different and
riskier type of writing, which only she, with her complex erotic
gifts, attempted to deliver.

II.

In 1947, Iris Murdoch wrote in her journal: "For me philosophical
problems are the problems of my own life." Conradi's biography
makes it clear that Murdoch's life, like her work, was shaped by a
moral struggle against the forces of destructiveness and sadism.
Conradi is the editor of Murdoch's philosophical essays (a fine
volume called Existentialists and Mystics) and the author of a good
study of the novels. He was also a close friend of Murdoch's,
particularly in the final decades of her life. Elegy for Iris, John
Bayley's moving memoir of his wife's descent into Alzheimer's
disease, is dedicated to Conradi and his partner Jim O'Neill, and
the last chapter of Conradi's biography describes O'Neill bathing
Murdoch at a time when she could only say, with bafflement, "I
wrote."

Murdoch gave Conradi access to the journals that she kept for most
of her adult life (with some pages excised), and her friends, many
of whom are still living, have extensively confided in him. So this
is a biography rich in information, written in a humble and
tasteful way by an intimate whose aim is to put a lot of material
at the reader's disposal, obtruding his own personality as little
as possible. (Conradi, a Buddhist, introduced Murdoch to Buddhist
conceptions of "unselfing.") As Conradi says, it is not the only
sort of biography of her that will be written; but it is, I think,
a fine example of its kind.

Murdoch was born in 1919, the only child of an Anglo-Irish couple
who soon moved from Dublin to London, though they returned to
Ireland frequently for holidays. (Murdoch's identification with the
Irish was very deep.) Her childhood was a placid one, as she was
evidently the delight of her gentle father and her able,
enterprising mother. Success at school came easily, in studies and
in sports. After Badminton School she went up to Somerville
College, Oxford in 1938, where she read Mods and Greats, the taxing
undergraduate combination of Greek and Latin literature with
ancient history and philosophy. Her interest in Greek conceptions
of virtue thus got its start early, and she attended with great
enthusiasm Eduard Fraenkel's famous seminar on Aeschylus's
Agamemnon. (Fraenkel figures as a character in The Unicorn, one of
her odder and less successful novels.) She was deeply influenced
also by her philosophy tutor Donald MacKinnon, whose religious
sensibility put him at odds with the times. She joined the
Communist Party.

But this was wartime, and Oxford was greatly altered by the
departure of so many young men for the front. Murdoch's first great
love was Frank Thompson, the elder brother of the historian E.P.
Thompson. They exchanged intimate letters while he served in
Europe, and his death in Bulgaria in 1944 was a personal tragedy.
After receiving a first-class degree, Murdoch went to London to
work for the Treasury, sharing a flat with Philippa Bosanquet, later
Foot. (Shortly before this, Murdoch left the Communist Party. Her
past membership caused her no subsequent difficulty in Britain,
though for years it made trouble every time she wanted to visit the
United States.) In 1944, bored with the life of the bureaucrat ("I
am inefficient and administration depresses me"), she joined UNRRA
(the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), and
worked for two years with refugees and displaced persons, first in
England and then on the Continent.

After a period studying philosophy in Cambridge--where she briefly
encountered and was deeply impressed by Wittgenstein, though she was
critical of his destructive use of his power, his capacity to
destroy self-respect--she accepted a tutorial fellowship at St.
Anne's College, Oxford. For the next six years or so, she taught
philosophy by day, and by night she pursued the amazingly complex
erotic life that she had already begun in London. The reader of
Murdoch's novels tends to think that the constant changing of
partners is fantastic high comedy; but life and art were closer
than we thought. As Murdoch writes of herself, "Urge towards drama
is fundamental. I am 'full of representations of myself.'"

Murdoch typically carried on simultaneous affairs with multiple men
(and the occasional woman), affairs that were emotionally complex
and often involved the betrayal of a friend. Sex, Bayley opines in
Elegy for Iris, was of marginal interest to her where most of these
men are concerned. Conradi's biography casts doubt on this,
suggesting that she was a person of very strong physical passion.
But sex was certainly, for her, about more than pleasure: it was
about power, about mystification, about her own importance, about
the desire, as she puts it in her journal, "to give moderately and
yet have full attention."

She constantly caused pain to others, both the men who had to
compete with other concealed rivals and the partners of these men.
(Her friendship with Philippa Foot was broken for years on account
of the suffering that she caused Michael Foot when she left him for
the economist Tommy Balogh, a suffering for which Philippa consoled
Michael. Murdoch wrote that Philippa "most successfully salvaged
what was left after my behaviour," a characteristically self-
dramatizing way of seeing the situation.) "Let me do no harm to [him
or her]": this becomes a regular refrain in the journals. And yet
she goes on doing harm. ; "Why do people let enchanters walk into
their homes and destroy their relationships?"

Her lovers were almost all intellectually distinguished, and they
fell into two types: the gentle and childlike (usually close to her
own age) and the fascinating and cruel (usually much older).
Murdoch indulged her fascination with the second sort while
planning ultimately to settle down with the first sort. In the
first category were the anthropologist and poet Franz Steiner, to
whom she almost became engaged before he died young of a heart
attack, and the literary critic John Bayley, whom she married--her
"ideal co-child," in his words, with whom she had a relationship of
immense gentleness and intimacy that seems to have kept at bay, at
least for the most part, the more destructive aspects of her
character. They created together a world of shared childhood, in
which they called each other "Puss" and spoke a secret language, and
at the same time shared a sense of life that only two sophisticated
intellectuals could share. The marriage represented a remarkably
successful incorporation of disparate elements.

But for some time before the marriage, and during the early days of
her relationship with Bayley, the second sort held center stage.
Murdoch formed alliances with a series of difficult and
power-hungry older men, including Balogh and, most prominently,
Elias Canetti, a charismatic figure who was constantly surrounded
by worshipful disciples. Why Murdoch would spend even one evening
in his company is more than one can fathom from Conradi's and
Bayley's accounts of this loathsome and sinister egotist. Here is
Bayley, in Elegy for Iris, describing a conversation in which
Canetti asks him what he thinks of King Lear, and Bayley, after
doing his best to answer the question, asks Canetti the same:

He continued to be silent for what seemed a long time. Finally, he
spoke. "Friends tell me that my book is unbearable," he said.
Fortunately, I knew this to be a reference to his long novel Die
Blendung, and I nodded my head gravely. There was a further
silence. "King Lear is also unbearable," he pronounced at last.

I bowed my head. Shakespeare and his masterpiece would never be paid
a greater compliment than this.

Is this story true? (Bayley, who has publicly admitted to making up
love affairs in a more recent memoir, is certainly capable of
fabrication in the cause of maligning a rival.) But true or not in
its details, it seems to be largely right about Canetti, who was
grotesquely self-preoccupied, patently sadistic, incapable of
non-exploitative love. When she chose the gently devious Bayley
over the "great man," Murdoch ultimately chose wisely. And perhaps
Bayley's reaction to Canetti is the basis for that splendid moment
in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, one of her finest novels, when
Simon, the young, gentle, pleasure-loving gay man, simply tosses
Julius, the destructive enchanter, into his hosts' swimming pool.
Simon, like Bayley, looks like a lightweight, but his whimsical
humor, his ability to wear his heart on his sleeve, his total lack
of cruelty, are the novel's moral core.

The power of the enchanter, such a major theme in Murdoch's novels
as well as in her life: where does it come from? And what was it in
Murdoch that made it impossible for her to have the healthy "into
the swimming pool you go" reaction to these loathsome tyrants?
Murdoch puzzled over this, again and again, in journals and in
novels. Why do people let enchanters walk into their homes and
destroy their relationships? In part because of their
distinction--but she casts doubt on this source of erotic power by
stripping Julius, the Canetti figure in A Fairly Honourable Defeat,
of any real achievement. In part, no doubt, because of their wit
and charm. But Julius is charming in the way that Mephistopheles is
charming: he mocks everything that people hold dear, he gives the
appearance of depth and profundity because he claims that human life
is at bottom a sordid affair in which the baser instincts are
driving everything. (So Canetti, casting doubt on Murdoch's
political ideals, and insisting that the drives of the crowd
produce all real historical events.)

So this just pushes the question back a step: why do people want
this variety of enchantment? Murdoch's answer, in the end, is that
it is the power of destructiveness and negativity itself that
seduces, because many people have a sadomasochistic desire to be
crushed, and to crush others in turn. She felt this at a personal
sexual level. (Once she wrote in her journal that she felt herself
to be a sadomasochistic homosexual man.) From the male enchanters,
she endured--and evidently sought--an astonishing degree of
exploitation and psychological abuse. With the gentle men, and also
with women, she wanted to play, at times, the destroying man. (One
journal entry reads: "Then I began to kiss her passionately and was
desiring her very much. Understanding of what it would be to be a
man, feeling very violent %amp% positive, wanting to strike her
body like an instrument.")

Murdoch connects sadomasochism with moral nihilism, and hence
goodness with a gentleness that is free of sadism. For some,
gentleness is a kind of grace with which they are fortunately
endowed. (She once wrote that Bayley, like her father, was "a man
entirely without the natural coarseness %amp% selfishness of the
male.") For Murdoch, who found in herself much "male" selfishness
and coarseness, it became a lifelong project to achieve a
non-destructive relation to people. This struggle is the source of
much of her fiction.

It is natural for the reader of the biography to hope that it will
trace the struggle to some early source. One close friend does tell
Conradi that he thinks "something in Iris's past had introduced her
to the idea of evil." But nothing reveals to us what this something
is. Her father was a gentle man, her childhood was a happy one. At
most one might say that she won the Oedipal struggle too easily,
becoming her father's delight while her parents' very amicable
marriage was apparently almost totally asexual. While Julius's
destructiveness is explained--somewhat too easily--by making him a
survivor of Belsen, young Iris was head girl in a prestigious
school, a success at everything she tried, courted and loved by a
large proportion of those who knew her. The darkness seems
indigenous, lurking, inexplicable--and so it apparently seemed to
her. While initially sympathetic to psychoanalysis, she came to
feel that it told comforting, too-orderly stories about good and
evil, which she preferred to see as real, absolute forces in human
existence.

Murdoch thus came to see her own life, and life generally, as a
moral struggle against what we might without melodrama call
Mephistopheles: the nihilistic wiles of the self-insulating ego,
which seeks power and comfort, exploiting and using other people.
Its adversary is the moral imagination, which must strive
constantly toward a clear vision of the reality of other people,
one not marred by the ego's demands for control. One can see how
difficult the struggle against her tendencies to control must have
been from the extreme forms that it took, as she increasingly
cultivated a shapeless and asexual physical persona and domestic
surroundings whose squalor greatly exceeded even the British norm.

The novels, too, often associate neatness with egoism, vile filth
with virtue. Thus Tallis Browne in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, who
lives amid mold and vermin of all sorts, is a moral hero, in part
because of this neglect of surroundings, and Julius's controlling
sadism is revealed in his determination to clean the place up.
Worse still, it is supposed to be good for Tallis to take a
troubled teenage boy into his house--whereas this (no doubt
all-too- controlling) American reader keeps feeling that charges of
child abuse would be appropriate, both against Tallis and against
the mother who promotes this life- threatening and (so it seems to
me) quite sadistic arrangement. Bayley perceptively writes that
Murdoch wanted to have objects around her and yet did not want to
take care of them. Perhaps this neglect of the worldly was a part
of her exacting idea of virtue, though it can easily look like a
kind of aggression toward anyone who dares to come too close.
Toward the end of her life Murdoch also re-wrote past journal
entries, removing the names of sentiments, such as anger and
contempt, that she felt she should not have had.

Conradi, who knew Murdoch in the last decades of her life, feels
that her struggle was in the end successful. Her marriage to
Bayley, though a source of great happiness, was not without tumult.
A passionate lesbian affair in the early 1960s led her to resign
from St. Anne's (this is the only instance in which Conradi
conceals the name of a lover). One gets the impression that there
were other lesser affairs. Still, as time went on Murdoch
increasingly, if unevenly, distanced herself from her erotic self.
The philosopher David Pears has remarked upon her "luminous
goodness ... when she came into a room, you felt better." And many
have attested to her intense aliveness to others. Murdoch's moral
serenity seems proportionate to her focus on her husband. As time
went on, Bayley's elaborate jokes and small kindnesses struck her
as goodness itself. "4 January 1978. Puss singing in kitchen below.
He is a good man." A year later, quoting a silly yet sophisticated
impromptu Bayley poem about Strindberg and a skunk, she writes: "Of
such is the kingdom of heaven."

III.

For someone with such a tumultuous inner world, the muscular
choice-is-all school of moral philosophy could not be satisfactory.
Murdoch felt that we would get to the right choices only if we
understood better the forces militating against goodness. And in
her view the main force was our inability to see other people
correctly. We are always representing people to ourselves in
self-serving ways, she believed, ways that gratify our own egos and
serve our own ends. To see truly is not the entirety of virtue, but
it is a very crucial necessary part. And even where the overt
choices go along well, if the inner vision is lacking, then an
important part of virtue itself is lacking. (Here Murdoch agrees
with Aristotle: there is a morally large difference between
self-control and real virtue, even though the overt acts may look
exactly the same, because the self-controlled person has not yet
achieved the motives, the reactions, and the patterns of seeing
that are characteristic of the good person.)

To make this point clear for philosophers, Murdoch invented an
example that has become famous. In her lecture on "The Sovereignty
of Good," she asks us to imagine a mother-in-law, M, who has
contempt for D, her daughter-in-law. M sees D as common, cheap,
low. Since M is a self-controlled Englishwoman, she behaves (so
Murdoch stipulates) with perfect graciousness all the while, and no
hint of her real view surfaces in her acts. But she realizes, too,
that her feelings and thoughts are unworthy, and likely to be
generated by jealousy and an excessively keen desire to hang on to
her son. So she sets herself a moral task: she will change her view
of D, making it more accurate, less marred by selfishness. She
gives herself exercises in vision: where she is inclined to say
"coarse," she will say, and see, "spontaneous." Where she is
inclined to say "common," she will say, and see, "fresh and naive."
As time goes on, the new images supplant the old. Eventually M does
not have to make such an effort to control her actions: they flow
naturally from the way she has come to see D.

Murdoch claims that this change is of moral significance. Getting
the behavior right is one good thing; but getting the thoughts and
the emotions right is another, and in some ways a more fundamental,
good thing. She challenges moral philosophy to attend more to these
long-term tasks in vision and self-cultivation, to focus on
patterns of character that extend over a life rather than simply on
isolated moments of choice. The challenge was first voiced in her
splendid and highly critical book on Sartre, which appeared in
1953. Murdoch argued that because of his focus on the moment of
choice, Sartre could not understand the sources of good or evil,
which requires depicting "the mystery and contingent variousness of
individuals." To Sartre's impoverished world she contrasts "the
messy accidental world of the novel, so full of encounters and
moral conflicts and love."

Murdoch's challenge to moral philosophy was given its most forceful
articulation in 1970 in The Sovereignty of Good, which includes
three of her most influential essays, and it was expressed strongly
again six years later in The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished
the Artists. (The meandering Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,
Murdoch's expanded Gifford Lectures, which appeared in 1992, was a
much less successful treatment of these themes.) It was Murdoch's
early work that had a transformative impact on the discipline.
Younger philosophers, themselves reacting against the neglect of the
inner world, found illumination in the challenge of this example.
Now few would deny that the then-unknown subject of "moral
psychology" is one of the most important and fascinating branches
of ethics; or that thinking about the nature of the emotions and
the imagination, and what they contribute to moral choice, is one
of the most significant tasks of the moral philosopher.

There are major gaps in Murdoch's philosophical vision. She seems
almost entirely to lack interest in the political and social
determinants of a moral vision, and in the larger social criticism
that ought, one feels, to be a major element in the struggle
against one's own defective tendencies. Her examples, and her
characters, are almost always undone by something universal about
the ego and its devious workings, almost never by prejudice or
misogyny or other failings endemic to a particular society at a
particular time. Indeed, although her journals fairly often
complain about the hardship of being a woman at Oxford, she offers
us little guidance in understanding how sexism thwarts perception.
Race is almost totally unmentioned, except in the form of an erotic
longing for, and anxiety about, Jews--a theme in her own life as
well, but one that is never treated with the critical detachment
that it deserves.

Only with regard to the lives of gay men does Murdoch retain a sense
of the purely social and political obstacles to correct vision and
action. She was a vigorous crusader for the abolition of sodomy
laws, and in her fiction she depicted gay couples as fighting an
uphill struggle for love and self-respect in a society that makes
fun of them, or worse. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, the older gay
man Axel, working in Whitehall, has learned habits of secretiveness
and denial that make it hard for him to express his love to Simon,
or even to allow himself to be a person who fully loves. Simon,
treated by straight society as a sex addict, has learned to doubt
his own capacities for commitment and for goodness. But such
suggestions of a complex relation between virtue and its social
world should have played a more prominent role in the philosophical
essays and the novels: all too rarely does Murdoch suggest that
goodness requires reflection about social justice. Too often,
indeed, the absence of a more textured social world impoverishes
her characters, who seem to play out their erotic dance in a void.;
"Does the artist's vision have about it these aspects of
vulnerability, silence, and grace? Or does the artist's eye almost
inevitably look down with something like disdain at the beings with
one another, so obtuse and so lacking in nuance?"

Another problem, a deeper problem, is the tension between Murdoch's
Platonism and her vision of particulars. Murdoch keeps on suggesting
that "The Good" is a unitary abstraction of some kind, even while
all her writerly instincts work in the direction of showing its
irreducible many-sidedness and its kaleidoscopic variety; even
while she also insists that what it is to be a good person is to
see other particular people clearly. Her Platonism leads in the
direction of the big abstract entity, but her moral instincts--I am
tempted to call them Aristotelian--lead in the direction of the
variegated world of surprising humanity. This tension is never
fully resolved in the essays, where it simply sits there generating
difficulty, or in the novels, where the vision of the particular
predominates, but characters whom the writer appears to admire keep
on talking what sounds like nonsense about "The Good." This fault
in Murdoch's work may derive from her own experience of good and
evil as original powers that stand somehow outside her, not
generated by her particular biography. But they do mean that anyone
who wishes to make philosophical use of her work must choose
between the Aristotelian many-sidedness or the Platonic mysticism.
(I know which I regard as the more fruitful, in philosophy and in
life.)

Finally, there is an acute problem about action. Hare's vision of
life is certainly incomplete; but it contains much that matters
greatly. As the postwar generation knew, it does matter what one
does. If one resists tyranny and saves the lives of the innocent,
who cares if one was thinking "coarse" and "common" or, more
virtuously, "spontaneous" and "fresh"? Murdoch is so preoccupied
with the goings-on of the inner world that she seems almost to have
forgotten about the difference that action can make; and the
resulting obsession with one's own states looks strangely like
egoism, in a world in which a forthright commitment to action can
make the difference to people who are suffering, no matter whether
the agents' intentions are pure.

Many years ago I had dinner with R.M. Hare in Oxford. With typical
testiness, he complained about the new fashion for virtue ethics,
which had eroded, he felt, philosophy's commitment to good works.
Mentioning the cover of a book by one of his targets, which showed
a naked man carrying a question mark over his shoulder, he said
scornfully that this is what philosophy had become: meaning, I
think, that it was all preoccupied with our naked insides and the
interminable questions they pose, rather than armed for combat
against real bad people and things. I have some sympathy with this
way of seeing the movement that Murdoch inspired. Although there is
no doubt that the big questions of social justice and human
well-being need to be approached with an adequate moral psychology,
Murdoch herself tended to veer sharply away from those questions,
and even to suggest that in the end they did not matter, that the
only important thing was each person's struggle for
self-perfection.

That is a hopelessly egoistic vision of life, in a world in which
sharp thinking about poverty and prejudice may actually make a
difference to human lives. Whatever combination of Platonism,
Christianity, and Buddhism shaped her sensibility, it was an oddly
otherworldly sensibility in the end, as if we were already dead and
in purgatory. But we are still on earth, so if we must try to see
other people as well as we can, we must also try to create just
institutions and just laws. This does not mean that it is the duty
of every philosopher to talk only about justice; we all have our
own projects. The mistake in Murdoch is her subtle suggestion that
the search for justice is superficial.

IV.

Murdoch's philosophical vision is fulfilled in her novels, which
dramatize again and again the struggle to see clearly, in a world
of self-delusion, the revelations and the blindings of erotic love.
Although the more schematic essays were crucial in laying out the
essential elements of her view, showing what is really at stake
required the creation of extended patterns of vision and struggle.
The best of her novels, such as The Black Prince, The Bell, and The
Sea, The Sea, are plainly continuous with the themes of her
philosophy, and make good on its promises in a rich, devious, and
open-ended way.

Since the imagination played such a central role in Murdoch's moral
thought, she arrived at a grave and highly critical view of the
artist's moral role. In her view, artists are our guides to a
vision of the world: they shape and nourish, or they fail to shape
and nourish, the moral imagination. So art cannot evade morality.
The artist is inevitably a moral figure: for art either assuages
the ego, portraying an easy, flattering vision of the world and
making us cozy within it, or it challenges us outward, toward the
reality of others.

Where did Murdoch place her own fiction within the contrast between
great art and egoistic art that she develops in The Fire and the
Sun? In purgatory, no doubt: struggling to be pure, but full of
silly self-regard. Conradi is probably correct to see her own
parody of herself in the comic figure of Arnold Baffin in The Black
Prince, a popular novelist who produces a novel a year, all full of
high metaphysical matters and comforting the reader with the
sensation of having experienced deep thoughts. And some of the
later novels do seem pseudo-profound, in part because they give
expression to a monistic metaphysical vision that she never made
fully compelling in any genre. Still, the complex moral and
literary richness of Murdoch's best novels grows more evident all
the time, now that we no longer read them as realist social satire,
and can appreciate their allegorical elements.

There is an odd paradox in the relationship between the novels and
the morality that they (and the philosophical writings) contain.
The paradox is that their very coming-into-being would appear, by
the lights of Murdoch's morality, to be an immoral act, an act of
manipulation and excessive control. No artist wants to give an
unfinished work to the world as a token of her vision. "Here is my
messy moldy verminous novel": no writer says this. That is why
Tallis Browne is no artist; indeed, he cannot even finish the one
lecture that he keeps trying to write. Murdoch's art, like all good
art, is highly structured and controlled--a house neat and clean
enough to satisfy the most morally obtuse of her upper-class
British characters. Indeed, her novels draw attention more than
most to the presence of centralized control, as the characters
execute a complicated erotic dance whose choreographer is always
just offstage.

For such an artist, as Proust's narrator says, real people are just
material, the stones that the artist uses to build his monument.
The artist's vision of reality is finally a vision that he makes
completely, using and even exploiting others; and its relation to
the real surprisingness of people can never be morally simple.
Murdoch sought uncontrol and "unselfing" all her life, as a
corrective to egoism and sadism. Yet she so plainly seeks control,
too; and she knows it. Moreover, she herself makes Proust's
connection: in one period of emotional suffering, she observes in
her journal that "like Proust I want to escape from the eternal
push and rattle of time into the coolness %amp% poise of a work of
art." Can the perfection of art possibly co-exist with the attempt
to perfect one's life, as she sees that aim? In the form of such a
question the struggle renews itself, as the morality of art and the
artist's own rage for control become a topic of anxious rumination
on the part of characters, such as Bradley Pearson in The Black
Prince, who seem to be surrogates for Murdoch's own sense of
herself as artist. Does the artistic enterprise record and extend
the struggle against the ego, or is it the ego's most subtle
victory?

I connect this problem, very tentatively, to my own acquaintance
with Murdoch. We met in New York in 1985, and she invited me to
lunch at the house in Charlbury Road, Oxford where she and Bayley
lived at the time. I went round to the house, very nervous and
awkward, and sat for two hours in the chaotic kitchen being
scrutinized, as I felt it, by her sharp probing eyes. We talked
about Proust and Henry James, about postmodernism and current
developments in ethical thought, about Charles Taylor, whom she
admired, and R.M. Hare, whom she did not. All the while I felt that
her very intense gaze was going straight through me, to something
that was not me at all, but to which I was somehow related. More
than once I had the thought that Julian Baffin, in The Black
Prince, has about Bradley Pearson: "You don't really see me." I
cannot forget those predatory eyes, and the way they attended to
something of immense importance that was, as I say, not exactly
outside of me, and that was perhaps more real than me, but that was
not precisely me either. Nor can I ever forget the essential
mysteriousness of her face, so much more alive than most people, so
blazing with uncompromising passion, so intent upon things that were
not exactly in the room. (I remember thinking a sad thought: that
this was going to be the hoped-for friendship with a brilliant
woman, but it is after all an encounter with just another predatory
man. Erotic control and artistic control: where did one leave off
and the other begin?)

If the gaze of art is fixed on the person and is at the same time
intent on a creative work that appropriates and goes beyond the
person, the question is whether this gaze can ever be, in the
fullest sense, a humanly loving gaze, exemplary of the virtue that
Murdoch's philosophy describes. Why not? It sees more truly than
most loving people see. I had no doubt that Murdoch could have
described me, after an hour, far more precisely than any lover of
mine might have described me after some years. In this sense Proust
seems right when he says that art is the fully lived life, life
without patches of deadness and obtuseness.

And yet I believe that there is something more to loving vision than
just seeing. There is also a willingness to permit oneself to be
seen. And there is a willingness to stop seeing, to close one's
eyes before the loved one's imperfections. And there is also a
willingness to be, for a time, an animal or even a plant,
relinquishing the sharpness of creative alertness before the
presence of a beloved body. Does the artist's vision have about it
these aspects of vulnerability, silence, and grace? Or does the
artist's eye almost inevitably look down with something like
disdain at the muddled animal interactions of human beings with one
another, so obtuse and so lacking in nuance?

Still, if the novels were only tales of control, and their
characters only the creatures of a sadistic enchanter, they would
be, as Murdoch says, mediocre works. Some of them are indeed
mediocre. The Unicorn, for example, is a rather sordid and
pretentious melodrama about varieties of sexual sadism, in which
Murdoch's own self-hatred becomes a hatred of humanity. And often
the skepticism about human motivation is so thoroughgoing that one
can hardly breathe. But the best of Murdoch's novels get beyond
this. Perhaps this is because they are animated by a kind of humble
opening toward reality in all its surprising diversity, by a
quality of love for the world that even artistic polish cannot
defeat.

And notice, really, that the moral problem I have outlined arises
only for a writer who is both deeply moral (as Proust is not) and
who has an extreme horror of her own destructiveness--who will not
believe that anything she controls could possibly be all right for
others. It is the same problem as the problem of the filthy house:
only a certain sort of person would feel that her own efforts to
clean up must inevitably be sinister, bringing death and
destruction in their train. Someone less self-hating might think
that there is glory, not sadism, in the beautiful thing.

In the end Murdoch transcended in her best books her own horror of
control and cleanliness, allowing herself to express human love
(and the artist's love for her characters) in a shapely and
beautiful form. Consider this passage from A Fairly Honourable
Defeat, in which good prose and tenderness unite, for once, to
create a vision of happiness:

Simon went on through the hallway and out into the garden. The sun
was still warm and bright, though the evening star had
strengthened. The vine was hung with grassy green translucent
grapes and the leaves and tendrils glowed with a pale green
radiance, outspread and welcoming and still in the quiet sunlight.
Simon moved towards the vine, bowed his head under its shadowy arch,
and touched the warm pendant beads of the grape bunches.

Axel came out, removing his jacket and rolling up his white shirt
sleeves. The sun made gold in his dark hair. "I've asked the patron
to bring us a carafe of wine out here straight away. I'm just going
up to look at the room. You stay here."

Simon sat down at the table. The patron bustled over wearing purple
braces, with a carafe and two glasses. "Merci." Simon poured out
some wine and tasted it. It was excellent. The serrated green
leaves extended above him, before him, their motionless pattern of
angelic hands. The air quivered with warmth and a diffusion of
light.

Simon thought, it is an instinct, and not a disreputable one, to be
consoled by love. Warily he probed the grief which had traveled
with him so far, and he felt it as a little vaguer, a little less
dense. His thoughts of Rupert now reached back further into the
past, to good times which had their own untouchable reality. He
drank some more wine and raised his face to the dazzle of the sun
among the leaves and felt his youth lift him and make him buoyant.
He was young and healthy and he loved and was loved. It was
impossible for him, as he sat there in the green southern light and
waited for Axel, not to feel in his veins the warm anticipation of
a new happiness.

What is surprising in this passage is not just the suggestion of
happiness, but more particularly the suggestion of an erotic
happiness and even an erotic goodness, the Dionysian images linked
with the imagery of angels' hands. There is no false comfort in
Murdoch, but sometimes there is a comfort that is true.

By Martha C. Nussbaum

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