Iris Murdoch.

The critic and biographer Peter J. Conradi reports that in the four years leading up to the publication of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Iris Murdoch devoted herself to rereading the plays of Shakespeare. One sees the influence everywhere in her thirteenth novel, which presents a harmonious social world, its nucleus the marriage of Hilda and Rupert Foster, only to show that world exploded by the machinations of a seductive, baleful outsider, Julius King. Julius uses strategies of deceit taken directly from Shakespeare’s Iago: he isolates his victims in silence, making it seem impossible for them to speak to one another; he leverages their fears and jealousies; he curates reality with the aim of their torment.

Julius’s stratagems have their tragic result, but the richness of Murdoch’s novel comes from its success, unequaled elsewhere in her work, in combining Shakespearean tragedy with Shakespearean comedy. As in Much Ado about Nothing, love is induced by flattery; as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a conjurer shuffles affections like so many cards in a deck. To Murdoch’s rereading of Shakespeare is owed the peculiar nimbleness of this novel, its ease with ensemble scenes, its brilliant use of cross-cut dialogue.

These are a few of my reasons for thinking that A Fairly Honourable Defeat, while not the most perfect of Iris Murdoch’s novels (that distinction belongs to The Bell), is decidedly her best. But there are others. First, the book is enlivened by a kind of verbal energy almost unmatched in her other work, both in its intensity and its range. One finds this energy in the elderly Leonard’s Bernhardian rants; in the eerie, imperturbable calm of the late scenes between Tallis and Julius; in the wonderful formal conceit of dialogue scenes that all but replace the sometimes dreary psychological exposition predominant in Murdoch’s weaker books. Read More

Lafcadio Hearn. Photo courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. Accessed via New York Public Library Digital Collections.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of America’s best-known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe, and Stevenson have entered the established literary canon and are still read for duty and pleasure. Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with two remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan. Yet Hearn’s place in the canon is significant for many reasons, not least of which is how the twentieth century came to view the nineteenth. This view, both academic and popular, reflects the triumph of a certain futuristic Modernism over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what was once called “folk wisdom.” To witness this phenomenon in time-lapse, sped-up motion, one need only consider Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-born, Irish-raised, New World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated fin-de-siècle American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi Yakumo in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from a millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power.

History is a fairy tale true to its telling. Lafcadio Hearn’s lives are a fairy tale true in various tellings, primarily his own, then those of his correspondents, and with greater uncertainty, those of his biographers. Hearn changed, as if magically, from one person into another, from a Greek islander into a British student, from a penniless London street ragamuffin into a respected American newspaper writer, from a journalist into a novelist, and, most astonishingly, from a stateless Western man into a loyal Japanese citizen. His sheer number of guises make him a creature of legend. Yet this life, as recorded both by himself and by others, grows more mysterious the more one examines it, for it is like the Japanese story of the Buddhist monk Kwashin Koji, in “Impressions of Japan,” who owned a painting so detailed it flowed with life. A samurai chieftain saw it and wanted to buy it, but the monk wouldn’t sell it, so the chieftain had him followed and murdered. But when the painting was brought to the chieftain and unrolled, there was nothing on it; it was blank. Hearn reported this story told to him by a Japanese monk to illustrate some aspect of the Buddhist doctrine of karma, but he might as well have been speaking about himself as Koji: the more “literary” the renderings of the original story, the less fresh and vivid it becomes, until it might literally disappear, like that legendary painting.

The knowable tellings of Hearn are particular, interesting, and specific to the literary personae of Lafcadio-Koizumi, insofar as one is absorbed and lost in them. But this tremendously prolific producer of literature remains, somehow, elusive. Hearn tempts, or we could say “dares,” his critics to interpret his work and his life, but, in the end, he belongs to the reader who best surrenders to his stories and his own life-reporting. Read More