An Accidental Man (2 page)

Ludwig is dull, priggish even – though not as much as Gracie's mother thinks him – and not absolutely good, but he does, evidently, achieve for Murdoch a certain goodness. He makes good, is made good, in the way he responds to the awful ways of the world. Of the world which is ‘all there is', in those momentous opening words of Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Tractatus
, the philosophy book which so absorbed Iris Murdoch's attention. ‘This' – i.e. coming cleanly through ‘the mess of his motives' to respond to the ‘small pure undoctrined need to bear witness' – ‘was how the world was, so this was what a man must do'. Matthew presses Ludwig on that
so
, the alleged imperative. They agree that if God were to exist He would live in that link. He doesn't, but still, they conclude, the link holds good. Obeying some such ‘obscure imperative', Ludwig thinks, is what ‘seemed to put him on the side of salvation'. He wonders, ‘Was this paralysed muddling on from moment to moment what moral thinking at its most difficult was really like?' Murdoch's answer in the silence of the text seems to be: yes, more or less, it is. Morality comes through not being overwhelmed by the muddle of the world.

All the others in the novel are overwhelmed, demented, deterred by the way of the world, its cruel particularity. Disinherited Aunt Charlotte tries to kill herself. So does big Mitzi, her career as an athlete ruined by a freak accident. Lethal accidents queue up bumper to bumper. Dorina's dad accidentally kills a snake, Austin drunkenly runs over a little girl, Dorina dies when a bar-heater falls into her bath, little Henrietta Sayce falls to her death from some scaffolding. It's hard to keep up with the novel's death toll. And all these terrible real accidents are shadowed by possible accidents, by questions about accident and accidentality. Was the drowning of Betty, Austin's first wife, in a canal lock really an accident? Was the traumatising primal scene in the quarry not merely an accident, when little Matthew kicked the stones down and Austin's hand was hurt? When Austin bashes blackmailing Norman Monkley in the head with the metal case containing his awful novel and turns him into a vegetable it might or might not be the accident Austin claims. But whether all the novel's accidents are accidental or not – and these people do seem awfully predestined to awful fates, if only by their novelist – their horror is never to be blunted by the farce which keeps intruding.

When Austin and Mitzi trash Ludwig's little dinner-party for Gracie – drinking and brawling, knocking over the wine and a saucepan of eggs, with Austin crashing into the ‘eggy mess' in the fireplace, breaking his glasses and hurting his arm – we laugh, but the chapter of accidents is no joke. Even when he's farcing about, Austin's accidentalism keeps bringing home the awfulness here of the contingent. He's repeatedly said to be devilish. God may have died for Iris Murdoch's characters, but the devil seems to resist such a demise. Austin is satanic. One of his final terrible actions, getting Mavis away from Matthew, ‘contaminating' her in revenge for Matthew ‘polluting' Dorina in Austin's view (Matthew merely gave Dorina refuge for three days), is characteristic. ‘Of course, Austin had not really done this “on purpose”. It had all been, like so many other things in the story, accidental. But it was too beautiful not to have also the product of instinct'. Accidental, on purpose: the result is the same – a vile act of demonic beauty. Austin is that recurrent Murdoch character, the modern Satan, a beautiful fallen angel, achieving a devilish beauty, indulging a kind of aesthetic of evil. It's most gorgeously expressed, perhaps, when he smashes up Matthew's wonderful collection of chinese porcelain – a malign perversion of aesthetic appreciation, an inverted sort of connoisseurship. He did it with a cast-iron table-leg picked up in ‘a nearby rubbish-tip'. Accidentally on purpose, no doubt. So much, we're intended to think, for the redemptive power of the aesthetic which Murdoch wants to believe in, the grace of art which was temporarily Matthew's blessedness. All smashed. And representatively, it would seem, of all the other potentially good and saving forces and powers which Murdoch so tantalisingly dangles before us and her people.

For this is the novel where the occasionally humanising touch, the handshake of Red Square, is overshadowed by what Austin does with his grotesquely pawing crippled hand; where novels, the greatest humanising medium for Murdoch, are written by inadequate Garth and foulmouthed fantasizing Monkley; where London's great galleries, the National and the Courtauld and so on, Murdoch's customary sites of aesthetic sacredness, are merely places for Ludwig and Gracie to do some kissing in; where, most terrible of all, love fails horribly in a catalogue of hopeless yearnings, bitterness, jealousy, bourgeois convention (George and Clara Tisbourne), parody (Charlotte's loveless lesbian future with Mitzi; Gracie's brother farcically reliving all those schoolboy fictions about passion behind the cricket pavilion), even murder (did Austin actually kill Betty?). As ever in a Murdoch novel, love takes many forms – which is the point of the Sophocles fragment which Ludwig's gay Oxford classical colleague quotes in his letter from Athens towards the end of the novel (the Greek is untranslated, as usual: Murdoch expects her readers to be as learned as she is) – but here none of love's many variant forms lacks flaws. And flawing of some kind is all over
An Accidental Man
.

The old, once vital, remembered myths, still vivid in many characters' minds as they are in Murdoch's, prove to be mainly vain fantasies. People keep imagining they're redoing Biblical stories – Matthew washing Dorina's wounds like a Good Samaritan, Dorina rising again in ‘the joy of resurrection' after her three days at Matthew's place, Mavis thinking Dorina ‘died for us', Dorina aweing over Matthew as if he had ‘made' her like a Creator God. But like prayer for these characters, the old formulae are dead. They're vain repetitions. Charlotte might feel the ‘irresistible authority' of the old words of Psalm 23 as her mother Alison lies dying, but for the rest hunting out the Scripture is matter of farce (‘What number is it? Somewhere near the beginning'), before the priest arrives with his letting-down talk of Youth Clubs and ping pong. Matthew's feebleness as a moral saviour is only mocked by the suggestions of godlike powers. Compared with the philosopher kings and guides of the other novels, Matthew is very run-down. His own Master, the Buddhist Kaoru, is even less effective – distant, off-stage, silent. And why, we wonder, at the end, is Matthew running away to America with Ludwig? How good, in fact, is he, really? Indeed, and the question comes home with stunning force in this novel, how good is the good itself?

As ever, this Murdoch text comes heavily seeded with a vocabulary of the good.
Good!,
people keep saying,
good-good-good, jolly good, good for him
and so on. The great plethora of common English phrases involving goodness is always on these people's lips –
on to a good thing, with good wishes, good lover, good friend, too good for me, too-good-to-be-true
and the like – is no doubt a way of indicating, as usual with Murdoch, the presence, despite ourselves, of a moral sense, the residue of the God-eras, embedded in our ordinary language. But here this crypto moral vocabulary seems to mock rather than endorse the persistent moral conscience it might be thought to stand for. When, in his last conversation with Austin, Matthew studs his responses with
That's good, Good for him, Good
and the rest, it all seems dead, an inert parody of ethical thinking, cynically dismissive even. Austin's ‘A good thing too' when he hears of the charlady's ‘idiot child' being doomed to an early death confirms the sense of prevailing ethical upside-downness. ‘We are a very good-looking family' are Austin's final words. With them any faith we might have had in a meaningful ethical mindfulness contained in ordinary language just flies out of the window.

It's all a grim reflection on the prospects for a continuing ethical mindfulness in the modern world, commensurate with Murdoch's savagely jokey christenings here. J.L. Austin, one of Oxford's greatest ‘ordinary language' philosophers, has had his name appropriated by a linguistically casual monster. Kierkegaard, the great Christian agoniser and doubter, master-mind of existentialism, so admired by Murdoch, is now just the nickname of a dodgy motor-car – a piece of suspect material, passed back and forth between the characters, exemplum of the ordinary and the particular as a bad bargain. As old Alison lay dying, Charlotte answered the door to a neighbour concerned about a car blocking his garage, and she ‘looked out . . . at the beautiful, perky, ordinary, selfish, material world of motor-cars and evening appointments.' The ordinary never altogether lacks a beauty in Iris Murdoch's novels, but here that charm comes extraordinarily overlain with selfishness and triviality – especially the bourgeoisie's round of ‘evening appointments'.

The novel ends with one of several ‘evening appointments', a drinks party at Gracie and Garth's place, the last of Murdoch's party-pieces done as drama – a Pinteresque torrent, a heteroglossia of overheard voices, trivial, insincere, gossipy, distorting truth and the real into mere rumour and fantasy. The bourgeois, shallow Tisbournes are rampant. Evil Austin is there looking ‘gorgeous' and prating of his good-looking family. The bad novelist Garth is being congratulated all round on his ‘lovely' reviews. Proley Mary Monkley, one of the several low-life characters Iris Murdoch has brought into this novel – perhaps in some endeavour to meet her complaining critics and widen her usual exclusive social clientele of dons, philosophers, civil servants and people who know their Sophocles – the rare proletarian is tippling sherry like some Dickensian gargoyle in her apparently appropriate place, on the social margins, in the kitchen. Kierkegaard is ‘parked outside'. The moral worrier Matthew and the conscientious American Ludwig (he who objected to Gracie that what she called ‘an ordinary life' was ‘for most people . . . an extraordinary one') are both far, far away. The trivially minded crowd possess the good words, but these are provokingly empty of ethical content.
Good night, Good night, Good night
, they chorus, repeating, without knowing it, the farewells of TS Eliot's lowlife immoralists in the pub scene in
The Waste Land
, ‘Good night sweet ladies', words which were themselves a parody of Ophelia's farewell words in
Hamlet
. Here's a parody of a parody.
Hamlet
, a piece of the world's greatest literature, one of the most life-changing literary myths of the western world, itself of course a drama about the anguished ways of the Protestant moral conscience, has come down in the world, and for a second time in modern times. The touch of farce in the Eliot scene is, of course, as befits this novel, by no means absent from Murdoch's recall and replay of
The Waste Land
. But as ironically downbeat endings go, it would be hard, I think, to find a more despondent one than this. And it's utterly par for this novel's course.

2003

Contents

‘
GRACIE DARLING
,
WILL
darling, will you marry me?'