Odd Jobs (78 page)

Henry James had no use for the “fatal
cheapness
,” the “mere
escamotage
,” of the historical novel; if, after the exotic adventure of
The Name of the Rose
, we long for what James called “the palpable present
intimate
that throbs responsive,” we can turn to no more reliable purveyor of intimacy than Iris Murdoch, whose new novel,
The Philosopher’s Pupil
, is one of her biggest and best. It opens with a whirlwind of an argument between husband and wife, and its first paragraph is the most vivid description of driving a car in the rain—a “palpable present” sensation
par excellence
—that I have ever read:

Let this evocation stand as typical of Miss Murdoch’s magic when it works: the blunt successive sentences, with scarcely a dependent clause among them, yield up the superb “little demonic faces composed of racing raindrops” to remind us that not all is as simple and declarative and breathless as it seems—that a highly symbol-prone intelligence presides behind this hurrying actuality. In twenty-one unstinting novels now, this writer has mined her imagination and the world around her for philosopher’s gold. With rare concern and knowing, she writes, in a post-religious age, about spiritual activity, as it sparks along that interface where human perception breeds demons out of raindrops.

The quarrelling couple is George and Stella McCaffrey; the McCaffreys—Alexandra, the sixty-six-year-old doyenne of this wealthy family; George and Brian, her sons, in their forties; Tom, the twenty-year-old offspring of Alexandra’s dead husband, Alan, and a runaway, now also dead, named Fiona Gates; and Adam, the eight-year-old son of Brian and his wife, Gabriel—are at the center of the saga, which has so many other characters they seem to constitute the entire population of Ennistone, the small English city, “not exceedingly far from London,” where the action takes place in a busy period of about three months. The compressed time-span, the device of a disappearing and reappearing first-person narrator who knows impossibly much, and the emphasis upon a certain family and a provincial community, feel reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s later novels. If Miss Murdoch has deliberately refreshed her reading of these, it is a happy move; the Russian’s theatricality, wild humor, and troubled spiritual urgency are all up her alley. Like Dostoevsky, she is interested in people’s influence over one another—their
sway;
the bogies we make in one another’s minds; the gravitational permutations as spiritual bodies plunge on in their self-centered orbits.

The seminal event in
The Philosopher’s Pupil
is the arrival back in Ennistone of Professor John Robert Rozanov, who, after a humble youth in one of the city’s less fashionable districts, has found in the wider world fame as a philosopher and in America, where he teaches and lectures, some wealth. He has brought in his wake his granddaughter, Hattie Meynell, and her paid companion, Pearl Scotney, who by no great stretch of coincidence is half-sister to Alexandra’s venerable servant, Ruby Doyle, and cousin to George McCaffrey’s longtime mistress,
Diane Sedleigh; Rozanov installs Hattie and Pearl in the Slipper House, an elegant little Art Deco residence on Alexandra McCaffrey’s property, and, oddly keen to find a suitable mate for his seventeen-year-old ward, settles upon happy and innocent Tom McCaffrey. Tempestuous, demon-driven George, in the meantime, is ferociously obsessed—in one of those apostolic obsessions that torment Iris Murdoch’s characters and that all seem descended from a primal schoolgirl crush on Teacher—by Rozanov, whose unsuccessful pupil he once was. John Robert’s Olympian indifference to him rankles George to the point of murderous rage. The novel’s title, incidentally, is somewhat ambiguous. Though George would seem to have foremost claim to be the titular pupil, his wife, Stella, was also a student of Rozanov’s, and a more favored one; and Father Bernard Jacoby, a disbelieving Anglican priest, claims in a letter that “I was his last pupil and I failed the test.” And, in a droll final twist, a prize younger pupil of Rozanov’s, the American Steve Glatz, shows up in Ennistone and carries off the town prize, the rich and beautiful Anthea Eastcote, great-niece of the saintly Quaker philanthropist William “The Lizard” Eastcote—who, you should know, makes the first of several flying-saucer sightings reported in the novel. Another character worth mentioning is Emmanuel “Emma” Scarlet-Taylor, Tom’s androgynous young Irish friend, a brilliant student on his way to be a historian but distracted by Pearl Scotney and his own magnificent counter-tenor voice. The peekaboo narrator calls himself “N” and names the town after himself—N’s town, Ennistone. He is, we gradually learn, middle-aged, unmarried, something of a voyeur, and Jewish. Jewish also are Stella McCaffrey, Father Jacoby, and, one surmises, Steve Glatz. Enough plot, surely. There is plenty more of it, all sumptuously cloaked in Miss Murdoch’s unfailing and seemingly effortless provision of faces and costumes and hairdos, of furnished rooms and architectural façades, of histories personal and local, of delightfully individual toads in botanically specific gardens. She is the happiest imaginer in the English-speaking world, fearless and fresh whether she bares a night of homosexual initiation or a music lesson, a Quaker meeting or a murderer’s exalted frenzy, a dog’s impression of a fox or an old woman’s dream of dispossession.

This reviewer found
The Philosopher’s Pupil
more involving and satisfying than the previous, equally energetic and knowledgeable novels by Miss Murdoch that he has read lately—
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
and
Nuns and Soldiers
. Why? For one thing, love has been given something of a vacation here, or at least romantic infatuation shares with
other sorts of steam the propulsion of the characters. A certain friendly grit coats this little industrial town, with its “strong and long-standing puritan and non-conformist tradition.” Away from the dreaming spires of Oxford and the verdant squares of London, Miss Murdoch shows a bracing grasp of plain unpleasantness. In George McCaffrey she has created a fascinatingly nasty man—conceited, disappointed, muddled, and outrageous and destructive with a smugness that perhaps only an Englishman could muster. His brother, Brian, is saner but otherwise no great improvement; nor is tyrannical, corpulent John Robert Rozanov a very appealing apparition. Unless we call love George’s mad desire to impress Rozanov, or Stella’s aloof loyalty to her cruel and slovenly mate, erotic passion scarcely enters the plot until halfway through, and then in the ironic form of a knightly quest openly allegorized. Until then, and throughout, we are in the grip of a type of murder mystery, in which the question is not “Whodunit?” but “What did he do?” Did George try to kill Stella? And the psychological mystery the author has set herself to examine is not that of amorous affect but that of human destructiveness, bilious and incorrigible. Miss Murdoch, in short, has given her darker side some rein and her broad and shrewd perceptions of human nature some breathing space away from the doctrine of omnipotent Eros.
The Triumph of Aphrodite
is a masque rehearsed in the novel, but the reader is excused from seeing it performed.

Moreover, in the so thoroughly and affectionately constructed setting of Ennistone she has given her volatile spiritual dramas a solid stage. The town is distinguished by the presence of famous and ancient hot springs. The waters, dating back to Roman times and rumored to have medicinal and aphrodisiac qualities, are housed in a set of pools and Victorian structures called The Bath Institute. Almost all the citizens of Ennistone swim the year round, and the gatherings and encounters of the characters at this watery forum as they stand about in the near-nude like figures on one of Dante’s penitential terraces make a recurrently resonant image—souls and not bodies seem to be assembled. Miss Murdoch, with her painterly eye and theatrical sense, is a deviser of tableaux, of meaningful environments. When, during an impromptu revel outside of the Slipper House, a drunken Emma lifts the lid from his hidden gift and sings, the crowd freezes like a throng in Mallory: “And they stood where they were, as still as statues, some even in the attitudes in which the music had surprised them, kneeling on one knee or holding up a hand.” The Ennistone baths, with their constant steam and rumble issuing
from an unfathomable underground source—the earth’s subconscious, as it were—afford the novel’s vapors and machinations a hot center that yet is quaintly, sturdily actual. Tom, in his role of knight errant, descends into the heart, forbidden to the public, of the bath’s mechanism, a “mass of gleaming pipes, some very small, some enormous … a light silver gilt in colour, a very very pale gold, and covered with tiny droplets of moisture which glittered here and there like diamonds.” We are thrilled, and simultaneously acknowledge the symbolic dragon’s cave and the pragmatic marvel of Victorian plumbing. Water has often figured in Miss Murdoch’s work as the outward emblem of the amorous power that suffuses and overwhelms us; by enhousing it at the center of her city she has tamed and channelled and strengthened the symbol. Things fit; the novel’s furniture is irradiated by feeling, and functions as thing and sign both. When, toward the end, a UFO swoops low and blinds a character, we are not put off as if by whimsy; we know by now what is meant, and in what sense such things do happen. “The inner is the outer, the outer is the inner: an old story, but who really understands it?”

Of course, fault can be found, as with any free and generous production. In a field of characters so panoramically wide, not all ripen as perhaps was intended. Adam and his dog Zed rather fade away; Ennistone’s crowd of “bright young things” do little more than swell the scene. Though Father Bernard was mistaken for the main character by the person who writes up the
Times Book Review
’s “And Bear in Mind” section (for this novel was no best-seller), in fact the priest is flimsy, and a victim of the author’s tendency to hit and run, to fling scarecrows into her gardens. At one point during an electric-power cut, this faithless but compassionate cleric is ministering to a Miss Dunbury, who is near death, frightened, and deaf; so she can read his ritual consolations, he has her train a flashlight on his lips. What pathos and terror Bernanos or Graham Greene or even, in his clipped way, Evelyn Waugh would have extracted from this inspired tableau! But here it glances by, somehow campy. In a later scene the priest is found meditating to the sound of Scott Joplin’s “Sugar Cane.” Though he thinks, “But oh the desire for God, the desire, the desire,” it is “Sugar Cane” that gets, and keeps, our attention. The novel’s evident moral haphazardly falls to the priest to pronounce, in a letter penned from Greek exile: “Metaphysics and the human sciences are made impossible by the
penetration of morality into the moment to moment conduct of ordinary life:
the understanding of this fact is
religion
.”

Miss Murdoch has long been trying to rescue religion from an intellectually embarrassing theism. A headless chicken may flap about for a while, but it does not lay eggs; a Godless Christianity is scarcely more viable. Yet she continues to give us atheistic priests and nuns and patiently to record the subtle shades of disbelief and lapsedness—John Robert Rozanov is an unrepentedly lapsed Methodist, Diane Sedleigh a churchgoing but incredulous Anglican, Brian McCaffrey a Quaker in the same condition, Emma an Irish Anglican a bit envious of Catholicism, and so on. There is something dilute and wavering and flirtatious in all this that has enraged stout post-Christian critics like George Stade. But her rendering of these dim religious halftones is realistic, it seems to me, and for a literary artist very much to the point well put nearly forty years ago by Graham Greene:

The Philosopher’s Pupil
considerably resembles an early Murdoch novel,
The Flight from the Enchanter
. There the philosopher is in the dedication (to Elias Canetti) rather than the title; but both deal with teen-age females awakening to love and with the spell exerted upon a circle of characters by a charismatic shaman- or father-figure. The plots share small things in common: gypsies, carved netsukes, foxes—the Enchanter is named Mischa Fox, and Alexandra McCaffrey’s grounds are haunted by a beautifully actualized family of foxes. Reading these two books with their affinities, one is struck by the glittering edge possessed by the younger writer, a jaunty farcicalness reminding us that Miss Murdoch came of age in the days of Waugh and Huxley and Rose Macaulay and Nancy Mitford, that she cut her teeth on a novelistic style of savage
brightness and superior, heedless romp. One misses, in the later Murdoch, that unbaggy feminine sharpness—feminist, indeed;
The Flight from the Enchanter
is really about female uprisings—and the non-theoretical, “palpable present” bite to the heroines’ amours. Hattie Meynell, in
The Philosopher’s Pupil
, is vivid in quarrel but almost wordless in love, the inert object of a quest rather than a quester herself. Men have taken over the center of Miss Murdoch’s novels—the opposite of what happened in the oeuvre of Henry James—and a certain heavy scent of last night’s after-dinner cigars flavors the less dazzling pages. But all in all the earlier novel is greatly surpassed by the later, a book that seems as large as life, so large and various that no two people will read the same story in it.
Omnis mundi creatura, quasi liber et scriptura:
a book as replete as this one reverses the equation.