{"id":137720,"date":"2019-07-03T11:00:32","date_gmt":"2019-07-03T15:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=137720"},"modified":"2019-07-03T11:09:40","modified_gmt":"2019-07-03T15:09:40","slug":"iris-murdochs-gayest-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/07\/03\/iris-murdochs-gayest-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Iris Murdoch\u2019s Gayest Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Iris Murdoch.<\/p><\/div>\n

The critic and biographer Peter J. Conradi reports that in the four years leading up to the publication of A Fairly Honourable Defeat<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Julius\u2019s stratagems have their tragic result, but the richness of Murdoch\u2019s novel comes from its success, unequaled elsewhere in her work, in combining Shakespearean tragedy with Shakespearean comedy. As in Much Ado about Nothing<\/em>, love is induced by flattery; as in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, a conjurer shuffles affections like so many cards in a deck. To Murdoch\u2019s rereading of Shakespeare is owed the peculiar nimbleness of this novel, its ease with ensemble scenes, its brilliant use of cross-cut dialogue.<\/p>\n

These are a few of my reasons for thinking that A Fairly Honourable Defeat<\/em>, while not the most perfect of Iris Murdoch\u2019s novels (that distinction belongs to The Bell<\/em>), 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\u2019s 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\u2019s weaker books. <\/p>\n

Second, while there are the usual Murdochian archetypes\u2014the muddled philosopher, the shy youth, the wandering woman, the enchanter\u2014we find them here in their most fully embodied and least abstract incarnations. This is especially true of Julius, who has a presence, a reality, lacking in the more notional magi of The Flight from the Enchanter<\/em> or The Unicorn<\/em> or The Time of the Angels<\/em>. Julius\u2019s assault on Hilda and Rupert\u2019s harmonious world is more convincing for being more visible: we see the machinery of his influence; we watch as his victims succumb. Third, there is Murdoch\u2019s willingness to bare her own cherished beliefs to devastating critique in the savage and powerful assault Julius mounts on the book Rupert has spent a decade composing, which bears an unmistakable resemblance to Murdoch\u2019s own The Sovereignty of Good<\/em>, published the same year as A Fairly Honourable Defeat<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is what most moved me when I first read the book some twenty years ago, and what continues to move me most now: Simon Foster, Murdoch\u2019s most successfully rendered character, and his relationship with Axel Nilsson. Murdoch is famous for the plentiful and humane representation of lesbian and gay characters in her novels; but in none of her other novels is a same-sex relationship explored so deeply, and in no other is a marriage\u2014and it is a marriage\u2014between two men allowed to become the center of a moral world. This is a remarkable act of affirmation in a book published in 1970, just three years after the decriminalization of private homosexual acts in the United Kingdom; more remarkable still is that it remains, fifty years later, perhaps the most beautiful literary representation of a same-sex marriage I know.<\/p>\n

Much of the beauty of that representation lies in its distance from the seeming ideality so precious to Hilda and Rupert. Simon and Axel\u2019s relationship is rocky from the start; provisionality is constitutive of their union. Like all Murdoch\u2019s characters, the two men are recognizable types, and their marriage represents the coming together of quite different queer cultures. (It is a sign of Murdoch\u2019s investment in the affective lives of queer people that she can render those cultures so vividly, and imagine so richly the new thing their joining together might form.)<\/p>\n

Axel is conservative, reserved, very nearly closeted; he shudders at public (and sometimes at private) affection; he disdains not just the gay scene of bars and clubs but any socializing among gay men, what he dismisses as \u201cthat goddamn secret organization.\u201d Any performance of queerness\u2014Simon\u2019s \u201ctribal habits\u201d\u2014provokes a rebuke. He defines himself by a dignity that is sometimes indistinguishable from shame. (His most moving moment in the novel is his acknowledgment of the partial justice of this accusation after a confrontation with Hilda and Rupert\u2019s son, Peter.) He is horrified by gay male sexual communities, and haunted by Simon\u2019s own history of cruising the toilets at Piccadilly Circus station.<\/p>\n

Simon, by contrast, rather likes the habits of his tribe; faggotry seems a natural expression of his exuberance of spirit. He even, without at all compromising the joy and wonder he feels at the life he has made with Axel, thinks fondly on some of his cottaging adventures. The difference between the two characters is highlighted by a trick in the narration: in a novel willing to enter into the consciousness of almost all of its characters, Axel\u2019s interiority remains closed off to us. Simon, by contrast, is the first character whose point of view the novel adopts, and he remains throughout the book a particular focus of narrative sympathy.<\/p>\n

While working on A Fairly Honourable Defeat<\/em>, Murdoch referred to the book as \u201cthe Simon-novel,\u201d but Simon\u2019s centrality has not always been recognized. It\u2019s true that he\u2019s an unlikely hero for Murdoch. He\u2019s not a philosopher, for starters, and lacks even a philosopher\u2019s disposition\u2014his virtue consists in large part of an aversion to introspection. His vanity is all exterior; he would rather weave crowns of roses than cultivate his self-regard. This lack of moral ostentation leads Simon to be uniquely forgiving, in the novel, of the failures of others: having suffered Peter\u2019s cruelty, \u201che felt no impulse to blame Peter who was clearly in some sort of bad way himself.\u201d He alludes at one point to his \u201cexperience of being sneered at\u201d (and we see plentiful examples of this sneering in the novel) but this hasn\u2019t led to bitterness or to Axel\u2019s excessive concern for dignity. One feels it has instead released Simon from the peculiar flaw inherent in Rupert and Hilda\u2019s sense of morality, attachment to their own good image, and to the good image of their relationship. Love\u2014the central preoccupation of Murdoch and her characters\u2014consists for nearly everyone in the novel of judgment and instruction, a desire to change the beloved object; for Simon alone it manifests instead as affection and delight. (For Tallis, the novel\u2019s saint figure, love is steady resignation.) \u201cI don\u2019t even mind if you\u2019re selfish or frantic,\u201d Simon reassures Morgan, Hilda\u2019s relentlessly selfish and frantic sister.<\/p>\n

Even Simon\u2019s self-deprecation is generous, focused on what he feels is his failure to earn the love of others; his attachment to pleasure, and to moment-by-moment experience, saves him from a morbidly lacerating self-regard. (\u201cI am a man with a lot of nonsense about me,\u201d he thinks, weighing himself against Axel\u2019s standards; \u201cnonsense is indeed the element in which I live.\u201d) That Simon\u2019s judgment of himself is inadequate becomes clear in the novel\u2019s sweetest surprise: his heroism, which is instinctive and free of posturing. It occurs twice: in a restaurant where, alone and certain that he is merely redirecting violence to himself, he interrupts a racist assault; and in the marvelous pool scene where he finally physically defies Julius and so begins the unraveling of Julius\u2019s enchantment.<\/p>\n

Simon is dismissed by the novel\u2019s other characters as silly, unserious, superficial. He appears to be all surface, no depth, and it\u2019s certainly true that his attention is consumed by the visible world: he fiddles with flowers and sofa cushions; he lingers longingly at shop windows. And yet in Simon\u2019s character we find a scrambling of the usual values attributed to surface and depth; his attention to the sensuous world, to visible (touchable, tastable) surfaces, takes on the quality of a moral discipline. This is Murdoch\u2019s point, I think. The relationship between morality and attention is a central theme of The Sovereignty of Good<\/em>, in which Murdoch strives to recuperate \u201cthe metaphor of vision\u201d\u2014the idea that much of morality consists of trying to see an object or situation clearly\u2014after its demotion in contemporary moral philosophy in Britain.<\/p>\n

Much of her argument is concerned with coaxing morality down from the heights of academic philosophy, and with attempting to account for moral thinking in everyday life. Early in A Fairly Honourable Defeat<\/em>, Rupert insists that \u201clove is the secret name of all the virtues,\u201d a sentiment with which Murdoch would likely agree. But, as he finds himself ever more baffled by his strained relationship with his son and his increasingly confused and passionate feelings for Morgan, he conceives of love in heroic terms: \u201cThere is a path, he said to himself, because for love there is always one. But for him it was a mountain path with many twists and turns.\u201d<\/p>\n

But much of Murdoch\u2019s point in The Sovereignty of Good<\/em> is to subtract from the idea of virtue heroism conceived in this way. Far from a decisive, heroic ordeal, love\u2014and by extension virtue\u2014is woven into the fabric of dailiness. \u201cLove is knowledge of the individual,\u201d she writes, and necessary to that knowledge is attention conceived of as \u201ca just and loving gaze directed upon an individual.\u201d The exercise of this gaze comes not in singular actions but in a certain disposition toward the world, a way of being. \u201cThe task of attention goes on all the time,\u201d Murdoch writes, \u201cand at apparently empty and everyday moments we are looking, making those little peering efforts of imagination which have such important cumulative results.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such efforts of imagination\u2014apparently trivial, cumulatively profound\u2014are Simon\u2019s characteristic activity, and the particularizing, individuating gaze he turns on those he loves is the novel\u2019s most compelling challenge to Julius\u2019s claim that \u201chuman beings are essentially finders of substitutes.\u201d There\u2019s a curious, charming passage late in the novel where Axel\u2019s \u201crather dark and discreetly flowery tie,\u201d a particularly successful gift from Simon, leads to an extended reflection on Axel\u2019s sartorial tastes, and an account of Simon\u2019s slow and stealthy campaign to understand them:<\/p>\n

Later on, more tactful and with deeper knowledge of his subject, Simon conceived a special style for Axel, something darkish yet rich in colour, intricate and yet not startling in design. Like someone studying an animal on a new diet, Simon watched Axel\u2019s tie behaviour. After a considerable repertoire had been built up Simon was even able to compile statistics and thus to discover the point at which his own taste and Axel\u2019s tended to converge. The birthday tie was, in Simon\u2019s opinion, bang on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Simon\u2019s goal isn\u2019t to transform or correct the beloved, but to observe and comprehend him. \u201cOne can hardly ever see what another person is like,\u201d Hilda says; for Murdoch, love lies in the attempt. I spoke above about the very different queer cultures Axel and Simon represent, and Simon\u2019s careful curation of Axel\u2019s ties stands in for the larger effort of creating a space in which they can coexist. Simon revels in the daily tasks that make up the work of loving another, a more compelling demonstration of devotion than any of Morgan\u2019s theatrical declarations. It\u2019s through long, daily attentions of this kind that love attains reality in Murdoch\u2019s novels, that it becomes a fact that can withstand the vagaries of feeling. Heroic coups de foudre<\/em> nearly always falter in Murdoch\u2019s books, they prove passing or illusory; part of the essentially conservative world view of her novels is their reverence for structures built up by stable and habitual obligation.<\/p>\n

I use the word conservative<\/em> not with its current cramped political resonance but to characterize Murdoch\u2019s view that lives are more importantly structured by habit and obligation than they are left free to impulse or sudden passion. This tension\u2014between improvisational freedom and set obligation\u2014is conveyed by the way the novel\u2019s characters discuss their relationships in theatrical terms. The idea of acting or role-playing appears in the opening scene as an impediment to love, when Hilda laments her fractured relationship with her son: \u201cIf only I could stop acting the emotional mother and you the stern father.\u201d The idea occurs later in the novel in Morgan\u2019s relationship with Tallis (\u201cI must act a part, play a scene, to preserve myself, I\u2019ve got to\u201d) and in Julius\u2019s theory of substitution (\u201cAnyone will do to play the roles\u201d). In all these instances, the implication is that habitual roles are distinct from authentic relation, that to \u201cact a part\u201d is necessarily to compromise one\u2019s love. Only Tallis, who serves as a surrogate guardian to Hilda and Rupert\u2019s troubled son, articulates a different understanding:<\/p>\n

Tallis\u2019s Peter was a very different person from Rupert\u2019s Peter or even Hilda\u2019s Peter. Tallis knew that. With his parents Peter acted a part. Tallis had thought this was something bad but was just now beginning to believe that it might be an element of salvation. The separation from which so much had been hoped had conceivably stripped the boy of his last defence, the imperative need to keep up appearances. With Tallis Peter had no role and lived in a state of vulnerability and nakedness which was not too far from despair.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The roles that so many of the characters long to be free from are part of the world of \u201cappearances,\u201d and like Simon\u2019s cultivation of sensuous experience they have a profundity that may not be immediately apparent. The roles that structure the characters\u2019 lives\u2014son, mother, husband, partner\u2014are not so much theatrical as they are structural: they bind individual freedom and autonomy by insisting that meaningful identity is relational, that we are who we are because of our place in the structures made by our long-standing obligations and habitual attentions.<\/p>\n

That obligation and meaningful bonds are more important than freedom and autonomy; that love is something one does, not heroically or decisively but minutely and repetitively, so that minor graces become major facts of the world: these are common ideas in Murdoch\u2019s novels. It may be a flaw that the books make the points so determinedly, again and again, and there is truth in the criticism that Murdoch often seems more interested in philosophical argument than credible characters. But I think that there\u2019s less grist for that particular mill in A Fairly Honourable Defeat<\/em> than in any other Murdoch novel, and familiar truisms are renovated to a remarkable degree by their application to a same-sex union.<\/p>\n

The imperfections of this wonderful book lie elsewhere, in its late veer toward stock devices of melodrama: broken telephones, revelations of dark pasts, heavily foreshadowed mishaps by the pool. Even in this respect, though, the book is restrained, its melodrama almost as qualified as its perfect title. And the novel ends, unusually for Murdoch, in a less obviously determined, more open way, with vignettes that show us the elements of Hilda and Rupert\u2019s once peaceable world settling into a new constellation: Tallis at his kitchen table, Hilda and Morgan in America, Julius entering a restaurant in Paris.<\/p>\n

Simon and Axel, the sole surviving couple, are vacationing in France, and the final lines of their section point the way back, after the tragedy of the book\u2019s second half, to the affirmation of Shakespearean comedy. Simon \u201cwas young and healthy and he loved and was loved,\u201d Murdoch writes. \u201cIt 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 new happiness.\u201d As in so many Shakespearean comedies, an order that has been troubled and changed is reassembled around a new center, two individuals\u2014somewhat chastened, maybe in important ways reformed\u2014bound to each other by a slightly wiser love.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Garth Greenwell is the author of <\/em>What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN<\/small>\/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A <\/em>New York Times Book Review Editors\u2019 Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by more than fifty publications in nine countries and is being translated into a dozen languages. Greenwell\u2019s fiction has appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>The Paris Review, <\/em>A Public Space, and <\/em>Vice, and he has written criticism for <\/em>The New Yorker, the <\/em>London Review of Books, and <\/em>The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. He lives in Iowa City.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from Garth Greenwell\u2019s introduction to\u00a0<\/em>A Fairly Honourable Defeat<\/a>, by Iris Murdoch, reissued by Vintage Classics this week in the UK.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018A Fairly Honourable Defeat\u2019 is far from perfect, but in none of Murdoch\u2019s other novels is a same-sex marriage allowed to become the center of a moral world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIris Murdoch\u2019s Gayest Novel by Garth Greenwell<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u2018A Fairly Honourable Defeat\u2019 is far from perfect, but in none of Murdoch\u2019s other novels is a same-sex marriage allowed to become the center of a moral world.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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