An Accidental Man

About the Author

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

Non-Fiction

TO KREISEL

INTRODUCTION

AN ACCIDENTAL MAN
, Iris Murdoch's fourteenth novel, is a candidate for being her most discomfited and most discomforting one. If we think Shakespearean models – and Iris Murdoch often did – then this novel is not so much a tragedy (though it is deeply tragic) or a tragi-comedy (though it frequently does its bleakest moments as comedy, as farce even) but rather a kind of problem play, in the line of
Troilus and Cressida
no less, in which love is betrayed ignominiously, the morally lowest and most cynical flourish and unremittingly pessimistic visions of human goodness triumph.

It is not uncommon in Iris Murdoch's fictions for the would-be good people and for goodness to flounder, for the godly to renege and to fall, for moral mayhem and evil to flourish, for moral crashes and smashes and disasters to abound and for some fearful accident to occur as the sign of humanity's proneness to moral bad luck. But the scale of such negativity in
An Accidental Man
is what makes its pessimisms seem so arrestingly awesome. The centre of such overwhelmingly melancholic plotting is no-good Austin Gibson Grey, the novel's self-styled ‘accidental man' – a cynical destroyer, egoistic fantasist, liar, thief, promoter of hatred, the selfish user of his brother, his wives, all women, all his friends and also a killer. (Weirdly, Austin is said to rather resemble in character Murdoch's friend, the refugee mathematician George Kreisel, always known as Kreisel, to whom the novel is dedicated.) Austin leads a complexly horrible life, wreaking havoc, breaking up people's lives, destroying people and things and yet he comes through more or less unscathed. He is the totally bad hat who robs the bank, bumps off all the good guys, shoots the sheriff dead and yet walks off into the sunset at the end of the movie to do it all over again somewhere else. Fictions, we feel, shouldn't end like that because that's too muddled, too much of a problem, formally, morally. Hence ‘problem' play. And it's shocking when
An Accidental Man
does end like that.

It's shocking not least because being ‘accidental', making do with the accidentalism of the world, with what Iris Murdoch continually hailed as the ‘contingency' of life, is normally for her the essence of the moral, of moral thinking and moral action and crucial to a novel's being what she thought a novel should be, namely an agent of the good. Personal goodness, she kept on repeating in her moral-philosophical and literary-critical writings as well as in her novels, comes through accepting and coping with, not seeking to evade or adjust, the muddle and mess of the world in all its rebarbative detail, its confusing particularity. That's what the reality and truth of the world consist in. That way come love and freedom. To not deny that is to be reaching out to the only Holy Grail that exists now, to be on the only road to salvation now that God is definitively dead. To live with the muddled particularity of the world is the only means of grace left us in our post-Christian world. And novels are only good if they register all that. Murdoch's novels, her customarily rather preachy novels, usually preach some version of that sermon. What makes
An Accidental Man
especially bleak is that while the usual provocations to goodness on the Murdoch model, the usual terms in which she envisages the good life and the good novel, are all lavishly in place, continually named, offered, they defeat more or less everybody in the novel. Unusually for a Murdoch fiction, no one, or nearly no one, is saved. Life is presented in all its Murdochian ordinariness as contingency and mess and it all makes for a pretty complete disaster zone. And not just for Austin Gibson Grey. The ‘accidental man' is only the acme, the centre of a whole scene of messily particular contingency which is not redemptive for anyone.

Garth, son of the accidentalist Austin, nephew of Austin's brother Matthew who has returned from the East to save Austin, old friend of American historian Ludwig whose engagement to heiress Gracie fills up much of the novel's space, and (arousingly for Murdoch) a wannabe novelist, is one of the many in this very crowded novel (Murdoch packs her novels with people on principle: to write at length and at large is to be well on the way to being truthful, she thought). Like a lot of Murdoch characters trying to save their soul, he wants to live simply. He marks time by washing up at night in a Soho restaurant (Murdoch can't help giving even her simple-lifers rather glamorous postings). He hates his job, dislikes all the kitchen sex-talk and the advances of an out-of-work actor, but when advised about other work, he hesitates, a reluctant existentialist.

He has seen, as it were, into the Murdoch idea of the good life signified in those key terms, the code language of his author's moral philosophy –
contingent, details, particular, freedom, muddying
(even) – and has flunked their test.

Garth has no faith in God – which is normal with Murdoch's characters: even the keenest of her believers tend to lapse, as Mavis (Matthew's lover) and Dorina (Austin's second wife) have done. But he has no idea of virtue either. ‘The idea of virtue is a fake-up', he thinks, speaking as the true son of his father, ‘it's like God'. But virtue is, for Murdoch, not like God in being a ‘fake-up'. Goodness is for her the necessary, demanding residue of the old theisms.
The Sovereignty of Good
, as her book of 1970 has it, replaces the old Christian Sovereignty of God. Being shaken by mess and contingency and particularity is part and parcel of being unattracted by goodness. So it's meant to be no surprise when Garth finally takes up with Gracie, the ill-educated, selfish little rich girl who pokes fun at her granny's funeral, who hates ‘muddles' and is for Murdoch altogether too frivolous about the would-be sacred particulars of London, the Thames, a great art collection, all the usual holy places of Murdochian reality Gracie takes her boyfriend Ludwig to ‘the Wallace Collection to hear the clocks strike twelve and then to a pub with a funny name, passing by a flower shop where Ludwig would buy flowers to be later ceremonially thrown into the Thames from a particular bridge'. In Murdoch's world you take the Thames and the Wallace collection seriously, or else. It's no wonder either that Garth turns into a bad and popular novelist.

Garth's commercially successful bad novel is about himself. It features an act of personal moral cowardice he keeps recalling, the day he failed a moral test on a New York street. He happened – accidentally – on two Puerto Ricans knifing a black man to death and refused to heed the victim's cry for help. So, like the heedless priest in Jesus's famous story about the Good Samaritan who helped the Jew who ‘fell among thieves', Garth ‘passed by on the other side'. An ancient mythic story gets revived, gets re-enacted (it happens often in Murdoch's novels), this time to find post-Christian man utterly wanting ethically, not a Good Samaritan.

Not everyone in the novel fails the challenge of the chance meeting. One-time diplomat Matthew is haunted by what he saw in Moscow's Red Square – ‘an accidental passerby' going over to demonstrators, shaking their hand, and getting arrested with them. Everyone else ‘passed by'. As did Matthew, the perpetual moral tourist, mere onlooker at the scene of moral challenge, who goes back to drinks ‘in a carpeted embassy', ‘hung with minor masterpieces by Gainsborough and Lawrence'. The episode is the basis of the one real example in this novel of Murdoch's favourite tutorial scene, when the philosophic master debates ethics with a star pupil, this time Matthew and Ludwig discussing the apparent moral heroism of the Red Square event and whether such ‘virtue' is really illusory. Matthew's story is important to Ludwig, the historian with the inherited Protestant Conscience, wondering whether to return to the USA and bear witness aginst the morality of the Vietnam War. Later on, miserable in his love life, Ludwig fails to go over and speak to mad, sad Dorina on a Bloomsbury Street, just before she dies, accidentally electrocuted in her bath in a ‘small hotel'. His remorse that ‘he had seen Dorina on the day that she died and had passed her by was so nightmarish', that we assume it's one reason he decides to stop his draft-dodging, and to go home to bear public witness about Vietnam, rather than taking up a comfortable post in Oxford. Ludwig goes to prison: ‘a solitary conscientious American', Matthew calls him, thinking of that ‘solitary conscientious Russian' in Red Square. ‘From the good, good actions spring with a spontaneity which must remain to the mediocre forever mysterious'. Matthew includes himself among the morally mediocre. Ludwig is, perhaps, the only one to be ‘saved' in this novel. It's important in Murdoch's fiction to bear witness against the great occurrences of modern evil which haunt her people. All Ludwig's European relations had died or been scattered in the Hitler period, like the families of the many Jewish refugees who throng Murdoch's pages. Choosing martyrdom – giving up Gracie and Oxford and scholarship to go and testify against the Vietnam War – is an exorcism of the ‘ghost of Hitler', a way of making up for all the Protestant Germans whose consciences didn't stop them passing by on the other side, as well as putting things straight with the ghost of Dorina.