Reading - Territorial Rights by Muriel Spark and Under the Net by Iris Murdoch

By chance, just after finishing reading a novel by Muriel Spark and one by Iris Murdoch, I came across a review of two of their novels by John Updike in the first issue of the New Yorker in 1975. 

As so often, Updike had interesting things to say.

First of all, I was heartened to see that my experience of Iris Murdoch's novels - that they leave no lasting impression, despite being well-imagined - was something Updike also experienced. He remarked that her characterisation and story telling is:

"so vivid & impressive ... endowed with all the substance her remarkable powers of imagination & introspection could fabricate" 

and yet his impressions of what he had read:

"do not last. Miss Murdoch is less Shakespeare than Prospero, holding us enchanted as long as we stay on her island, then the insubstantial pageant fades.”

I'm not certain that his identification of Murdoch's main theme is correct or more a reflection of his own obsessions:

"Her theme is "erotic love is never still.” In some of her novels the shifts of allegiance and attraction wrought by the inexhaustible, tempestuous force of erotic love approach the mechanical and unintentionally comic; a kind of square dance passingly links every character to every other. And, as in a mystery novel the murderer can be spotted because he is the least likely candidate, so the Murdochian hero or heroine can be counted upon to love, at last, and truly, the most repulsive figure of the opposite."

Updike's observations on the two novelists and their place in the literary order are perceptive, and I particularly like his observation about the legacy they contain from Shakespeare:

"They constitute a class by themselves—both so intelligent and fluent, so quizzical and knowing, both such resourceful mixes of feminine clairvoyance and masculine generalship, both such makers. Miss Murdoch, true, is copious and explanatory where Mrs. Spark is curt and oblique; she can hardly turn around in fewer than a hundred thousand words where the other can't bring herself to exceed novella length; she is wistfully theistic rather than flatly so, and concerned with goodness instead of with faith. The two of them together reappropriate for their generation Shakespeare's legacy of dark comedy, of deceptions and enchantmеntѕ, оf shuddering contrivances, of deep personal forces held trembling in a skein of sociable truces."

I like especially the understanding exhibited by the phrase "concerned with goodness instead of with faith"

Here are my more pedestrian comments on the particular novels I read by the two women:

Territorial Rights is set in Venice, and Muriel Spark moves her characters around that city as if they were chess pieces. They inhabit the usual Spark quasi-surreal atmosphere and coincidences abound. Everybody is absurd, no one is virtuous. A recurring Sparkian element, the possibility that reality is a novel written by an unseen hand, is once again hinted at. An easy read that I suspect is not quite as clever as Spark thought it was. 

Under the Net is an amusing, baffling book with some lyrical moments and quite a few laughs. It is narrated by a cheerful, fairly  aimless soul, and I suspect the meandering story is some sort of everyman parable of life's amiable meaninglessness. Or maybe it is just a meandering story. It is quite engaging and faintly intriguing while you are reading it, but it washes over you and is forgotten in a trice. Perhaps prophetically, it contains a piece of anti-Semitism uttered by a character called Lefty. 

The book is dedicated to Raymond Queneau, which probably provides a big clue to whatever was the author's intention.

Battered Penguins - Hemlock and After by Angus Wilson

Young fiction writers are often told that the secret of success is conflict. If this advice is correct then Hemlock and After, a novel that is about nothing less than the conflict between good and evil, ought to have been a terrific hit. Unfortunately for me though plot is less important than style, and I find Wilson's writing, like that of Iris Murdoch and, to a lesser extent, CP Snow, not entirely appealing. Despite the range and liveliness of Wilson's characterisation in  this book, and the detail and accuracy of his descriptions, for me the novel lacks warmth. This is also an  aspect of Murdoch's writing that strikes me each time I try her. It may be a quirk of mine, or, since they were contemporaries, there may have been something peculiar in the water when they were both alive.

The novel opens on the day that Bernard Sands, the book's central character, receives, 'Treasury's final confirmation of official financial backing' for 'the purchase and maintenance of Vardon Hall as a centre to provide leisure and support for' younger writers. For Bernard, a 'Grand Old Man of Letters' who has recently acknowledged his own homosexuality, this is the latest in a long line of successes. He is delighted, but as time passes his delight is diminished by a 'growing apprehension of evil that had begun this summer to disrupt his comprehension of the world.'

Bernard's apprehension of evil is hardly surprising given the monsters who surround him. There is horrible Mrs Wrigley, whose portrayal is so vivid I found it hard to convince myself, when I'd finished reading, that the lingering odour I thought I could detect existed only in my imagination :

"Despite the hot June evening, Mrs Wrigley's first action on getting back to the cottage was to light the paraffin stove. The smoke filled the stuffy airless little room. Mrs Wrigley's protuberant frog's eyes smarted and watered behind her thick steel-rimmed glasses. The smell of the paraffin spread to blend with the rank odour of stale sweat, the clinging scent from the half-empty tin of sardines on the table and the sickening, periodic whiffs mingled from bad meat and dog mess somewhere near the sink. These Mrs Wrigley did not notice. She took off her worn old red leather hat - disintegrating relic of the craftwork of some proud gentlewoman - revealing a close cropped mannish head of grey hair. She did not remove the old mackintosh which she wore over her bulky, shapeless form, although she was sweating with the long climb up the hill from the village. She put the kettle on the rusty gas stove which had been bought from some of Ron's winnings at the dogs only a year ago. While she waited for the kettle to boil she prodded with her boot at  an old collie dog with sores that lay in a basket under the table. Then pouring the boiling water into a teapot full of dead tea leaves, she drew the sardine tin towards her and liberally sprinkled the contents with vinegar.'

There is Hubert Rose who is engaged in a 'frenzied search to regain those wondrous secret childhood games beside which all the pleasures of the adult world were dust and ashes in his mouth', and who tries to justify his attempt to procure a small girl for himself with the argument that she 'was born into a world with nothing to offer her [and] is going to part with something she'll be giving away to Tom, Dick, and Harry in a couple of years, at an age when an ignorant society prefers to think she's bathed in childhood innocence instead of slum smut.'

Worst of all, there is dreadful Mrs Curry, 'an elephant figure of Mabel Lucie Attwell chubbiness', who resembles a 'huge, obscene parrot' and has a fondness for 'comfiness' and 'pretty little tiny things', furnishing her cottage with pictures of 'a bluebell wood, misty and shimmering, in which two tiny naked children sported' and 'a field of dancing daffodills into which a little girl had strayed without her clothes', about which she would observe, 'quite suddenly, "Poor little thing, she's lost her frillies"' or '"Naughty little things, they want a smack a bot, don't they?"' Her utterances, we are told, are always open to two interpretations, either pleasant or 'of such extreme obscenity that the mind reeled before it.' It is she who recognises Hubert Rose for what he is and sets about procuring what he desires.

In Mrs Curry's activities, Andrew O'Hagan pointed out recently in the London Review of Books, there are echoes of the Jimmy Savile affair. Strangely, there is an even closer parallel in the description of one character's fetishisation of her clothing, which mirrors the odd way in which Savile himself treated his dead mother's dresses:

"Celia Craddock preserved most of her old evening dresses ... going to her bedroom ... she would look at them, touch, stroke them and eventually would find herself seated on the floor, surrounded by the billowing pools of rich material."

Fortunately, in the midst of the ghastliness that takes up so much of the novel, there are moments of humour, some surprisingly Barbara Pym-like:

'"I can always get you turkey eggs when you want 'em," she heard Bill say. It was difficult to imagine when she would want them ...'

some more grim than Pym:

'She had been reminded ... of a long session with an analyst - that Bavarian, Dr Wengl, who had made you draw pictures - in which they had got stuck at her father's deathbed. Dr Wengl had insisted on her visualising the scene ... but they had got nowhere; all she could recall vividly was the intricate square of iron work at the bedhead.'

others possibly appealing only to an Antipodean English person, who recognises a peculiarly English kind of pleasure:

'It was more than comforting to find the famous vine so small and fruitless, the delphiniums so inferior and the shrubbery no more than a tangled mass of dusty St John's Wort. There was general conviction among the visitors that they could have done better at home. They settled down to an afternoon of satisfied disappointment'

or to those who have been to Leicester Square:

'The evening seemed cooler. Almost anywhere but Leicester Square would have reflected its summer beauty.'

Even more fortunately, amid the seemingly unrelenting corruption of the novel's characters, one figure of integrity emerges - Ella, the apparently insane wife of Bernard Sands, whose 'foggy picture of life' is pierced by 'letters and words [which] began to weave themselves - Minors, Lincoln, loins and then again minors, minors'. Once her 'armour of neurosis' is penetrated in this way, Ella rises to the challenge and sets out to frustrate Mrs Curry in her endeavours.

In case we have not picked up the message that in this mad world only the mad can be sane, Wilson underlines it by ensuring that, of all the characters, only Ella can see Mrs Curry as she actually is. Elsewhere the woman is described as 'a gigantic moored airship' of 'soft cushiony flesh'. She is given an almost supernatural, eternal quality when she is portrayed pondering her prey and asking herself, 'What, will the line stretch on to crack o'doom? All the love-starved and the needy, and all on bended knee'.

Through Ella's eyes, however, she shrinks back to normal size and becomes unthreatening, impotent and ordinary:

'She blinked at the huge figure before her in undisguised interest, taking in every detail of the broken veins around the nose and on the cheeks beneath the layer of powder, the old-fashioned shoes with pointed toes, the flesh forced into bulges around the corsets, 'Evil power' indeed, she thought with scorn ... Why! she was just someone's cook dressed up, certainly dishonest and probably a secret drinker.'

Ella is unafraid of Mrs Curry and is able to halt her progress temporarily. However, as Bernard recognises, Mrs Curry has 'a fertile imagination for evil'. She has not been defeated forever but only for the moment. The struggle against what she represents is neverending.

Despite this, Wilson permits a touch of optimism - or at least a reminder of a grandeur in existence beyond 'the rack of self-advancement and self-pity' on which people spend their lives in Bernard's social world - to creep into his book at its close. On the final page, he shows us Ella turning from the room she is in to look at the view beyond the window:

'It was really easier to concentrate on the clouds moving above and below like great golden snowdrifts'

she decides, and with that enigmatic sentence, hinting at distant splendour, the novel ends.

Battered Penguins XI

A Fairly Honourable Defeat is the first Iris Murdoch I've read. It was published in 1970 (and yet, amazingly, contains a reference to someone working on something called the 'Computer Forecast Working Party' - I had no idea computers had even been thought of all that time ago, let alone percolated down, if only as a concept, to middle class London, which is the novel's milieu). It appears to be some kind of reworking of the kind of Shakesperian comedy in which a mischievous spirit leads people astray for fun, confusing them about who they love and so forth.

The novel opens with 20-odd pages of straight dialogue, which is quite a daring way to begin a novel. Unfortunately, the experiment is 'brave', as Sir Humphrey would say, rather than particularly successful, partly because Murdoch has to burden it with slabs of exposition, which make the conversation flow in an unnaturally orderly way, rather than meandering about with endless broken sentences and countless digressions, as actual speech tends to do.

Similarly, while Murdoch's characterisation (notable for its unusually detailed visual descriptions; she supplies us, in a slightly Constable Plod kind of way, with hair colour, height, eye colour and even, bafflingly, in one case, something she designates as a 'slightly prissy mouth'),  is admirably fertile and inventive, the structure of the novel creaks a fair bit. She creates seven very vivid main characters but then proceeds to shove them in and out of situations that, while they highlight the points she wants to make about the nature of good and evil, love and illusion and humanity itself, do not entirely convince.

The book contains some good insights and is remarkably advanced about homosexuality (possibly the most sympathetic of the characters are the homosexual couple). At moments - for instance, when we are told of one character, 'He sat down on the divan bed and began to pick his nose' - it takes realism to extremes I have not encountered before.

It has some wonderfully comic moments - including a farcical sequence involving the disposal of a large pink teddy bear. The figure of Tallis's father, who, when he says to his son, 'I wish you were five again. I'd give you something. Not that beating ever did you any good. But my God I enjoyed it,' reminded me of Dudley Moore as the angry working-class father telling his effete son, Peter Cook, never to darken his own doorstep again, is consistently amusing, (I particularly like it when he tells his son he should get a shave,  because, 'you look like something growing on the side of a tree trunk.')

However, too much is left to the reader's kind indulgence, particularly when it comes to putting up with the idiotic pseudo-mystical thread  that runs through the text. The final revelation of terrible violence hidden in the past of two characters is probably meant to be shocking, but I found it merely gimmicky.

All in all, the book, though entertaining, is flawed and has, somehow, a hollow ring. I suppose it could therefore be described as a rare example of honesty in advertising. After all, the title tells any prospective reader the absolute truth: as a piece of fiction this novel is a fairly honourable defeat.

Men in Tights

Continuing my defence of my dog walking wages, in the edition of the LRB that I mentioned yesterday, I also found these gems.

1)  In a review by Julian Barnes, I discovered what I'd been looking for for years - someone else who doesn't like Hugo. Barnes quotes Richard Cobb's description of him as "France's National Bore".

2)  This Churchill comment (supposedly made to Stalin): " In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.".

3)  Best of all, as so often, some unintentional humour, from a review of recent books about Iris Murdoch. It turns out that, when Murdoch was 20, she and some friends from Oxford formed a touring concert party called the Magpies and travelled round the Cotswolds, bringing dance, ballads and "allegorical Tudor drama to varyingly enthusiastic audiences" (sounds a bit like the sort of thing Lucky Jim's professor was "keen on").

As Rosemary Hill, the reviewer, explains, quoting liberally from Murdoch's diary of the period:

"Here, not quite a writer yet and not quite at war either, Murdoch is at her most endearing, earnestly practising 'Greensleeves' on the recorder in a field full of cows, discussing the international situation while wondering with rather more urgency whether the scenery will turn up in time. The journal evokes a Betjemanesque interwar world of japes and ginger biscuits, 'strenuous breakfasts' and undergraduate tantrums. "Apparently while I was singing 'Love is a sickness' yesterday Denys [another troupe member] gave an appalling display of temperament because he couldn't find his tights."

The Magpies went over very well in Aston Bampton, where the local children did some songs and dances in the interval and were 'most spontaneous and charming', but at Northleach everything was ruined by 'a great mob of toughs at the back' who reduced Denys to tears and sent Murdoch into a rage by laughing all through her ballad. She was inconsolable, she notes, despite the rest of the cast being 'terribly upset for me' ...Talk of politics among the Magpies was desultory, even as rumours of war grew louder: 'We try not to think of it at all - and find it amazingly easy.'"