The Unicorn
Authors: Iris Murdoch
Table of Contents
T
HE
U
NICORN
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in Philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then in 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a Fellow of St Anne’s College. Until her death in February 1999, she lived with her husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley, in Oxford. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature.
Since her writing debut in 1954 with
Under the Net,
Iris Murdoch has written twenty-six novels, including the Booker Prize-winning
The Sea, The Sea
(1978) and most recently
The Green Knight
(1993) and
Jackson’s Dilemma
(1995). Other literary awards include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
The Black Prince
(1973) and the Whitbread Prize for
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
(1974). Her works of philosophy include
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
(1992) and
Existentialists and Mystics
(1997). She has written several plays including
The Italian Girl
(with James Saunders) and
The Black Prince,
adapted from her novel of the same name. Her volume of poetry,
A Year of Birds,
which appeared in 1978, has been set to music by Malcolm Williamson.
ALSO BY IRIS MURDOCH
Fiction
Under the Net
The Flight from the Enchanter
The Sandcastle
The Bell
A Severed Head
An Unofficial Rose
The Good Apprentice
The Italian Girl
The Red and the Green
The Time of the Angels
The Nice and the Good
Bruno’s Dream
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
An Accidental Man
The Black Prince
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
A Word Child
Henry and Cato
The Sea, The Sea
Nuns and Soldiers
The Philosopher’s Pupil
The Book and the Brotherhood
The Message to the Planet
The Green Knight
Jackson’s Dilemma
Non-Fiction
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Existentialists and Mystics
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
Iris Murdoch
T
HE
U
NICORN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Stephen Medcalf
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ISBN 9781409024538
Version 1.0
Published by Vintage 2000
15 17 19 20 18 16
Copyright © Iris Murdoch, 1963
Introduction copyright © Stephen Medcalf, 2000
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First published in Great Britain in 1963
by Chatto & Windus
Vintage
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ISBN: 9781409024538
Version 1.0
TO DAVID PEARS
Introduction
The first two thirds of
The Unicorn
seem to me to be among Iris Murdoch’s best work. The power of the narrative, the reader’s mere wish to know what happens next, embodies another strong development, from symbol through mystery to revelation. Both intensify from the strangeness of the opening, when Marian Taylor finds herself at an isolated railway station ‘helpless and almost frightened’, through the drive which takes her fifteen miles across a landscape which possesses both one’s visual and one’s symbolic imagination, to Gaze Castle, where the mystery which centres on its mistress, Hannah Crean-Smith, is elaborated without any single solution, until it issues in a revelation, Effingham Cooper’s vision of the death of self at the point of physical death in the bog. This part of the story reaches its peak after Effingham’s rescue, when he sees the three handsome faces of Marian, of Hannah and of Alice Lejour, who has been unrequitedly in love with him for twenty years, as like an icon of the Trinity, and his vision seems to have been perhaps ‘the truth, the very truth, which resided in [Hannah] in a sort of sleeping state and which made round about her the perpetual sense of a spiritual disturbance.’
Immediately after this the pace of the narrative changes, as Gerald Scottow, the factor at Gaze, announces that Hannah’s husband Peter, who has been absent for the seven years during which Hannah’s mystery has built up, is coming home. The mystery is shattered in the remaining third of the book by a headlong series of events, seduction, murder and suicide, which slow down only when Effingham sees, in a counter to the icon of the Trinity, laid out in the drawing room at Gaze ‘in the engraved twilight, as in a picture by Blake’ the three shrouded dead bodies of Hannah, Peter and Gerald. There is something over hasty in this whole sequence, which reaches its extreme in the next chapter, when Hannah’s servant Denis Nolan confesses to Marian that he had murdered Peter Crean-Smith ‘Because of what I saw at that other time. And what I feared for her.’ It is not even clear what ‘that other time’ refers to, although the phrase ought to bind the two parts of the story together.
The contrast between the two parts is without much doubt deliberate, even if it has, as I think, been overdone in the second part. In December 1959, two or three years before she wrote
The Unicorn,
Iris had ended an essay called ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ by saying that ‘A novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in; and to combine form with a respect for reality with all its odd contingent ways is the highest art of prose.’ Earlier in the same paragraph she had described the modern novelist’s quest for form as involving a temptation ‘to imagine that the problem of a novel is solved…as soon as a form in the sense of a satisfactory myth has been evolved’, at a moment which ‘any artist both dreads and longs for… the moment at which form irrevocably crystallises.’ This looks like an exact description of the first part of
The Unicorn:
and the second part is equally well described when she goes on ‘There is then the much more difficult battle to prevent that form from becoming rigid, by the free expansion against it of the individual characters. Here above all the contingency of the characters must be respected. Contingency must be defended for it is the essence of personality.’ I guess that she was describing here her own experience of writing
The Bell,
her then most recently published novel (1958), in which form and respect for contingency seem to be effortlessly combined. In the immediately succeeding novels,
A Severed Head, An Unofficial Rose,
and
The Unicorn
itself, the battle between the two was always in danger of becoming too self-conscious, with a paradoxical tendency to turn towards a
compelled
contingency for her characters.
A wider version of what for Iris underlies this contrast of form and contingency and the problem of their relation is, moreover, set up in the narrative of Marian’s arrival within the landscape itself and continues to the end of the book. In her essay, she wants to relate the two terms ‘sublime’ and ‘beautiful’, which she takes from Kant, to contingency and form respectively. Kant thought of the sublime as part of our response to nature, to ‘the spectacle of huge and appalling things’ as Iris calls it in another essay ‘On “God” and “Good”’ things like the Alps which ‘the imagination and the senses cannot properly take in’ so that ‘they cannot satisfy the reason, which demands a total complete ordered picture.’ Iris extends this response ‘which brings about a sense initially of terror, and when properly understood of exhilaration and spiritual power’ to include with nature ‘the spectacle of human life’. It is in fact for her the same as the tragic, the acceptance of the incomprehensible, of chance, death, and above all the manifold, as like as not antagonistic, and always on some degree resistant individuality, the contingency of other people. Beauty, which Kant thinks of as reposeful contemplation of an object that contains its explanation satisfactorily within itself, whether in art or nature, Iris like him relates to form, but brings closer to the sublime because they are both ways of unselfing. ‘We take’ she says in a third essay,
The Sovereignty of Good over other Concepts,
‘a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees’. Her example is the sight of a hovering kestrel, but it is clear from the context (she is talking about Plato) that she thinks too of a beautiful person, or of beauty in art.
The Unicorn
is set between two famous landmarks on the west coast of Ireland, the cliffs of Moher and the limestone country of the Burren. (John Bayley tells us in his memoir
Iris
that she conceived the idea of the novel on a visit they made to this area). The combination of these cliffs and the Burren, in their extreme remoteness, with the presence within two hours car ride of an international airport, the Shannon Airport, so close that at the end of a meeting with Hannah Effingham can see ‘a silver aeroplane’ coming down from a great height towards it, create the spiritual and social conditions of the story.
Marian when she gets off at the railway station in the limestone country thinks of it as ‘this appalling landscape’, and ‘appalling’ is a word, as we have seen, which Iris associates with the sublime. But as she leaves the station and sees the coastline of what in the book is called the Scarren, driven and instructed by Gerald Scot-tow, she changes her mind.
The sea was a luminous emerald green streaked with lines of dark purple. Small humpy islands of a duller pale green, bisected by shadows, rose out of it through rings of white foam. As the car kept turning and mounting, the scene appeared and reappeared, framed between fissured towers of a grey rock which, now that she was close to it, Marian saw to be covered with yellow stonecrop and saxifrage and pink tufted moss.
“Yes,” said Scottow. “Beautiful certainly…”
But the contrast with the sublime is recreated when they come to the cliffs.
Marian had read about the great cliffs of black sandstone. In the hazy light they seem brownish now, receding in a series of huge buttresses as far as the eye could see, striated, perpendicular, immensely lofty, descending sheer into a boiling white surge. It was the sea here which seemed black, mingling with the foam like ink with cream.
“They are wonderful,” said Marian. She found the vast dark coastline repellent and frightening. She had never seen a land so out of sympathy with man.
“They are said to be sublime,” said Scottow.
The landscape of the west of Ireland, and its sense of being beyond the ordinary world seems to have had something of the same effect on Iris, who was born in Dublin and lived most of her life in Oxford and London, as it did on another writer from a Protestant and English context who like Iris was fascinated by Plato, Edmund Spenser, in
The Faerie Queene.
This novel is one of those
(The Good Apprentice
is another) where Iris’s human figures and the relations between them, and the houses in which they live, seem to have the atmosphere of allegory conveyed through sight that they have in
The Faerie Queene.
It is I suppose to help in this effect that there is almost no naming of actual places, not even of Ireland: even the maids at Gaze are said to talk ‘in their own language’ not in Gaelic or Irish. Only ‘the Burren’ is recognisable in ‘the Scarren’, while I suspect that the name of the other great house, Riders, is an echo of the most famous literary association of those parts, Synge’s
Riders to the Sea,
set in the Aran Islands (which also, unnamed, Effingham can see from Hannah’s room). If this is so, perhaps Iris chose the name ‘Gaze’ to make the same contrast as she did later, equally oddly, in the title of the novels
Nuns and Soldiers,
between the contemplative and active lives. This contrast, as we shall see presently, is important in the novel, and although there is overlapping between the two houses, the centre of the contemplative life in it, Hannah, is the owner of Gaze, and the one wholly successful model of the active life, Alice Lejour, lives at Riders.
In
The Faerie Queene,
however, the landscapes are humanised, and their meanings are mostly – like the first one, the wood of Error – within the human mind. In
The Unicorn,
as we have already seen, the landscapes have their meaning in coming on human experience from outside. And even of the two first ‘appalling’ landscapes, the more beautiful, the more relatable to a sense of humanity, the Scarren, plays no part in the action. Only the study of Alice’s father Max, the Platonist philosopher who gives the most beautiful and rational account of Hannah and her mystery, looks out on the Scarren. The cliffs and the sea provide a constant menace: there seven years before the novel begins Peter Crean-Smith was nearly killed, whether accidentally or by Hannah we never know, and there Hannah kills herself. The sea terrifies Marian: only Alice casually remarks that she ‘used to swim a lot around here before I got too fat’ and has her nearest approach to success in love with Effingham as she lies in a pool beside it. (Swimming recurs in Iris’ s novels as a symbol of capacity to live within the unpredictable, contingent world.)
But some of the most important action takes place in a third region which edges the Scarren, the bog which is ambiguously inimical to human life Or beautiful. There Effingham nearly dies, has his vision, is rescued by Denis. From it issues two streams, the one with the salmon pool at its head which for Hannah and Denis images the soul’s approach (like the salmon emerging from its proper element to mount the waterfall) to God, and where Alice tried and Marian succeeded in seducing Denis – the other up the Devil’s Causeway where Denis murders Peter, which has the trout pool at its head where Pip Lejour explains to Effingham the circumstances of his seven year old adulterous affair with Hannah and of Gerald Scottow’s part in it. The bog is invisible from Max Lejour’s study; but it floods destructively down its two streams, and through it Denis finally vanishes, carrying with him, so far as it remains, the supernatural mystery of the story.
It is of the whole land that Denis speaks when Marian indignantly objects to Hannah’s seclusion ‘People can’t be just shut up. We’re not living in the Middle Ages’ – ‘We are here.’ That, like the image of the Unicorn itself, the beautiful uncatchable white beast who is a symbol for Christ, for Hannah, is a touch which recalls the
Faerie Queene.
So is the name which Marian finds for the whole area when she sees it from the south, near the little harbour of Blackport where ‘the landscape was gentle, ordinary, human. It was the end of the appalling land.’ Effingham repeats the name at the end as he leaves the little railway station on the north, in the Scarren, and closes ‘his eyes upon the appalling land.’
The appalling land, the land of the sublime, the land of unselfing: if the kind of name is Spenserian the ethic behind it is not. Iris like Spenser derives parts of her ethic and aesthetic from Plato, and therefore like Spenser makes the central pillars of her thought love and beauty. But whereas Spenser inherited his relation to Plato through the Neo-Platonists and Christianity, and believes in a universe that is translucent, ordered and hierarchic, Iris seems to have come to Plato through Simone Weil, whom she read in the mid-fifties, and through Freud. Simone Weil seems to have crystallised for her a distrust of power in all its forms, Freud a fear of fantasy and self-delusion, and both a conviction of the near total selfishness of ordinary humanity. In contrast with these three negative starting points she built up the notion of respect for reality of which we have already seen something, and therefore of a way of understanding the world, of loving its beauty, which is free of our fantasizing and sado-masochistic projections of power and selfishness. She found a model for this in Plato’s myth of the cave in the
Republic.
We find ourselves fettered in the darkness of a cave where we see only by the inconstant flames of our own desires: our business is to break out of this darkness and see by the light of something whose relation to our desires is like the relation of the sun to firelight. Iris accordingly believed, as Plato believed, that the ordinary practical choices of our life depend on our knowing what is good as an absolute value, which exists independently of our personal desires, and which makes sense of all that we experience, as the sun illuminates all our physical world. As Max Lejour puts it in
The Unicorn,
good is more than ‘a matter of choosing, acting’ because