by Iris Murdoch
The attraction of exerting power over others appears frequently in Murdoch’s novels. In some cases, power is wielded by a seemingly weak character, as with Morgan or Peter in this novel, exploiting the conscience or charity of others. More notable, however, are those powerful figures who tend to recur in Murdoch’s fiction whose domination or control of others seems sinister. At times, their power is less real than perceived, as in Under the Net (1954), where the protagonist Jake becomes convinced that the movie magnate Hugo Belfounder is manipulating events when in fact he is not. Sometimes their menace is felt, although in the case of Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, only Simon initially fears him, while others ironically believe that his only threat lies in his being bluntly honest. Julius is a variant of the “Enchanter,” to borrow from Murdoch’s second novel, The Flight from the Enchanter, a character who dominates and manipulates largely by an inhumanly detached ability to perceive and exploit the vulnerabilities of others. Julius speaks of “human beings” as if they were another species he disdains, and he manipulates human nature as clinically as a hunter exploits the instinctive behavior of the animals he hunts.
During her employment by UNRRA, Murdoch worked among the wretched human detritus of the Second World War, people one might expect to have learned compassion through their own sufferings. She discovered that there were many for whom the endured horrors had the reverse effect. The eccentric philosopher Simone Weil writes of this phenomenon in an essay that was to influence Murdoch.
When harm is done to a man, real evil enters him; not merely pain and suffering, but the actual horror of evil. Just as men have the power of transmitting good to one another, so they have the power to transmit evil. One may transmit evil to a human being by flattering him or giving him comforts and pleasure; but most often men transmit evil to other men by doing them harm.4
Only at the very end of A Fairly Honourable Defeat—which an introduction should not betray—does the relevance of this observation become apparent.
Weil goes on to say that the transmission of evil is ended only by a person willing to sacrifice her- or himself by absorbing evil and suffering without passing them on to others. The long-suffering Tallis, abused by his father, deserted by his wife, exploited by Peter, used by multiplying immigrants, and haunted by what happened to his sister, represents this kind of figure. He is a shabby saint, muddling through in a haze of fatigue and distraction. His lifestyle may be modeled on that of Simone Weil herself, who refused to be an ivory-tower academic philosopher, worked in a factory, and devoted herself to charity work, her eventual death seemingly due to exhaustion. Tallis lives, to use that tired expression, in the “real world.” The physicality of his domain’s sticky floors, scuttling parasites, putrid odors, and mildewed leftovers contrasts with the cocktail-anesthetized order of the Fosters’ home. His immersion in the muddle of the quotidian stands opposed to Julius’s cool detachment or Rupert’s theorizing.
Iris Murdoch herself seems to have lived not in Tallis’s squalor but at least in work-focused disarray. In Iris and Her Friends, John Bayley recounts an amusing anecdote that illustrates this. On one occasion they had brought home a high-quality pork pie from “some superior delicatessen.” The pie was set down on the kitchen table as they entered, but when suppertime arrived, there was no sign of it, and its disappearance was never solved. From then on, whenever something became mislaid, they would say it had probably “Gone to Pieland.”5 The domestic muddle of Murdoch and Bayley, however, was a consequence of two very productive intellectuals leading busy lives. And in all his muddle, Tallis focuses on work, on trying to help others in practical ways, and he avoids judging or categorizing others. He holds on to the tangible, literally so, as he repeatedly is seen gripping the edge of the table.
Murdoch’s fiction frequently offers work as the way out of the self-serving fantasies of solipsism, even simple labor proving therapeutic. In her first novel, Under the Net, in which many of the patterns that will be elaborated in her later fiction are laid out with clarity, the protagonist has all his preconceived visions of his world shattered. Desolate, he spends days in a state of symbolic death, then begins a resurrection through a job as a nurse’s aide. He learns to accomplish simple tasks, to follow a regimen, and to pay attention to the physical objects with which he works. Likewise, in The Bell, the leading female character, Dora, shows a fondness similar to Morgan’s for “pistol shots and anger.” After her reckless grand schemes collapse, she, too, begins her recuperation with simple physical labor and learning to swim. No one other than Tallis seems very seriously engaged in work in this novel, unless it is Axel. Rupert’s comfortable routine seems indulgently dilettantish, a comfortable home away from home with a secretary to wait on him in place of Hilda. Small wonder that something mildly conspiratorial and with a whiff of danger has appeal for him.
Of necessity, then, work focuses attention upon an exterior reality rather than the “second best act” of overanalysis and fascination with one’s own thoughts or the allure of observing oneself playing a role. The other circumstance that Murdoch suggests may avoid the temptations of self-absorption and creating dramas is instinctive action. Instinct precludes the opportunity to complicate. It avoids entry into the mire of interesting means that subsume the putative end. Again, Tallis provides the illustration. His spontaneous actions in the Chinese restaurant and his immediately leading Julius to the telephone at the end of the novel show, as Axel says, that he is “the only person about the place with really sound instincts.”
A Fairly Honourable Defeat, then, incorporates many elements that are characteristic of Murdoch’s fiction. It certainly stands as a prime example of the “amatory gavotte,” its web of flirtations, affairs, and marriages incorporating all of its cast in its multiple relationships. Murdoch’s love relationships can take all forms: parental, sibling, conjugal, marital, heterosexual, homosexual, even, in at least one novel, incestuous. A Fairly Honourable Defeat does not incorporate that whole gamut but certainly explores many variant relationships. All too often, Murdoch shows, people—especially those with a shaky sense of self-identity—try to define themselves through a relationship. Thus we see Morgan, for example, having found that her husband’s compliance has failed to provide the structure she needs, turning to an affair with a dominating man. When that relationship fails, she looks for simplifying innocence with a boy, which in fact places more responsibility upon her than she wants. Consequently, she turns to a father figure, and when that culminates in disaster, she again reverts to the comforts of an indulgent mother figure. Simon and Axel are both, in their respective ways, uncertain of their relationship because of their own and other people’s perceptions of the nature of homosexual love. By the end of the novel they have learned to trust their love and that their contributions to the “defeats” that occur were due to their failures to do so. “It was a failure of love,” says Axel, having learned another of Murdoch’s lessons, that the form love takes matters less than its quality. But this education may be incomplete. Acknowledging that they have been too concerned with their own relationship to see clearly their responsibilities to others, Axel concludes, “To take refuge in love is an instinct and not a disreputable one.” Simon echoes those words, as if Murdoch wishes to underline them. An instinct, yes, and not disreputable, she seems to say, but not entirely honorable when it means turning away from responsibility to others.
The complications of the relationships, the intrigues, the keeping secrets to spare feelings, the miscommunications, the melodramatic scenes in this novel at times resemble an earlier Shakespearean comedy of errors. The opening pages of the book, consisting almost entirely of dialogue, feel like comic contrivance. Rupert and Hilda run through the cast of the novel, their situations, and prepare for the inevitable complications to follow. Yet while A Fairly Honourable Defeat remains lighter in tone than some of her other novels, a sense of threat, of the sinister, remains. And there is also real suffering, a distinctive characteristic in mu
ch of Murdoch’s comedy. Tallis rejects the temptation to think, like his embittered father, that “it all went wrong from the start” or that life is “a disastrous compound of human failure, muddle and sheer chance,” and we sense Murdoch shares in his rejection. But she has witnessed enough of that “compound” to know that it must have its place in comedy, or any philosophy, that addresses life truthfully. The comedy of humans’ “fairly honourable defeats” lies in their being distracted by superficial discomforts and failing to address real human suffering. People’s efforts to muddle through, to act morally and decently against life’s odds and their own foibles, become the source both of Murdoch’s comedy and of her compassion.
Murdoch at times even may seem unfair in making comedy out of confronting “nice” or ordinarily decent people with the moral challenges of severely testing situations. Does she recognize this when she offers Julius as a surrogate author figure within the novel, manipulating people as an author might fictional characters into morally testing plot situations? This kind of manipulation within her novels is a trait that is sometimes faulted. Her plots have been seen as sometimes overly contrived. The multiplicity of characters and (sometimes) a shifting of narrative perspective have been cited as making it more difficult to identify with or feel much engaged by any one character. Rubin Rabinovitz notes her “desire to fool the reader with sudden and unexpected twists of plot,” and one may well see that trait in the revelations about Julius’s past at the end of A Fairly Honourable Defeat.6 It is not a novel that entirely escapes any of these criticisms. On the other hand, some of these criticisms need to be weighed against the point that comedy is traditionally served by the contrived, the unpredictable, and the fantastic, and that its purpose is often more to comment on human nature than to probe in depth the complexities of an individual psyche.
The novel’s strengths, however, are equally typical of Murdoch. It displays her great powers of invention, her dazzling imagination, and her narrative skill in command of a complex plot. Her powers of characterization show in the range of characters and in the deftness with which they were penned. She captures a character with a defining gesture, a speech mannerism, even a pose. Her characters can be compelling, so that we feel their menace or vulnerability. The novels frequently generate the kind of suspense normally associated with a good mystery. She has a remarkable sense of the visual, scenes being laid out as if for the camera, and much of her humor is visual. But the great strength of Murdoch’s fiction is that while she spares us little in reminding us of the potential for folly or malice in human nature, hers is an affirming voice, compassionate, moral, and resolutely refusing the negative logic of a Leonard or the cynical detachment of a Julius. It is with that perspective that she can, with some irony no doubt but certainly with understanding, see our defeats as all too human and even “fairly honourable.”
—Peter J. Reed
NOTES
1 Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” Chicago Review, XIII, iii (1959), 52.
2 James Hall, The Lunatic Giant in the Drawing Room (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 1968), 181.
3 Sharon Kaehele and Howard German, “The Discovery of Reality in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell,” PMLA, December 1967, 555.
4 Simone Weil, Selected Essays 1934-43 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 30.
5 John Bayley, Iris and Her Friends (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Sons, 2000), 14.
6 Rubin Rabinovitz, Iris Murdoch: Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, No. 34 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 46.
To Janet and Reynolds Stone
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
‘JULIUS KING.’
‘You speak his name as if you were meditating upon it.’
‘I am meditating upon it.’
‘He’s not a saint.’
‘He’s not a saint. And yet—’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s in England.’
‘I know.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Axel.’
‘I didn’t know Julius knew Axel.’
‘That is characteristic of both Julius and Axel.’
Hilda and Rupert Foster, celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary with a bottle of rather dry champagne, were sitting in the evening sun in the garden of their house in Priory Grove, London, S.W.10. Hilda, a plumper angel now, reclined limply, exhibiting shiny burnished knees below a short shift dress of orangy yellow. Her feet were bare. Her undulating dark hair showed some needle-thin lines of grey. Her burly boyish-faced husband, whom she had at last persuaded to stop wearing shorts, sat openshirted, cooking in the sun. He was red, hoping later to be brown. His shock of abundant fair hair had faded with the years, becoming unglistening and dry while still undeniably blond. They were a handsome pair. They were altruistic, but treated themselves judiciously to luxuries. The latest one, to which they had not yet become accustomed, was a diminutive swimming pool which made a square of flashing shimmering blue in the middle of the courtyarded garden. The garden was enclosed by an old redbrick wall which was surmounted by a trellis bearing an enlacement of Albertine and Little White Pet, all now in outrageous flower. The air was dense with smells of roses and of the camomile which Hilda was attempting to grow between the paving stones.
‘Who told you?’ said Rupert.
‘The Evening Standard.’
‘Of course. I suppose Julius is rather famous now. And there was all that publicity when he gave up the biological warfare game.’
‘What was Julius working on exactly?’
‘Nerve gas. And a kind of anthrax which resists antibiotics.’
‘You were all praising Julius for chucking it. I blame him for ever getting involved in it.’
‘You have to investigate the stuff in order to find the antidotes.’
‘I hate that old argument. All evil lives on it.’
‘These borderlines in science are often rather shadowy, Hilda. A biologist may be pursuing something useful or something just interesting and he may happen to make a discovery of military interest. And by then he can’t switch off his curiosity. Anyway I suppose it’s better to paralyse people temporarily than to blow them to pieces.’
‘I’m not so sure. It seems such a betrayal for a biologist to meddle with warfare. And some of those diseases aren’t all that temporary. I think I’d rather be cleanly blown up.’
‘You might be mutilated.’
‘Oh don’t argue, Rupert. It’s too hot and I can’t think. You seem very anxious to defend Julius.’
‘Julius doesn’t need defending. He acted on principle.’
‘Men seem to imagine that that’s a justification of anything. He hasn’t made any sacrifice. He’s a distinguished bio-chemist. He can get a job anywhere in the world. And he has money of his own. Where did Julius get his money, by the way? Did he inherit it?’
‘Yes. I believe his people were bankers. You must remember, Hilda, that he had a marvellous lab and every facility and limitless funds at that place in South Carolina. What’s its name?’
‘Dibbins College. It’s written on my heart.’
‘Because of Morgan.’
‘Yes. But his work was financed by the military, wasn’t it?’
‘True. But the lab didn’t only deal with biological warfare and I know Julius was interested in a lot of other projects. He may never find such good working conditions in impoverished old Europe. ’
‘Well, he doesn’t have to stay in impoverished old Europe. He told the press he was giving up the work because he was bored. He didn’t talk about principles. His high-minded friends over here have dreamed up the principles.’
‘Julius is an ironical sort of chap. He wouldn’t bare his soul to the press.’
‘Well, I liked him for saying that. And actually I think Julius is someone who might do anything because he was bored.’
‘You mean the love affair with your dear young sister
?’
‘No. I wasn’t thinking of Morgan. That may have been serious for all I know.’
‘It certainly was for her.’
‘Yes. But I could never manage to see how Julius felt. Morgan’s letters were frantic but totally uninformative.’
‘What did happen between those two in South Carolina? And who left whom?’
‘I don’t know, Rupert. When my dear young sister arrives she will doubtless enlighten us.’
‘I wonder if Morgan realizes that her former lover is going to be in London too?’
‘Yes, it’s odd that they should both turn up here about the same time.’
‘You don’t think they’ve got a rendezvous in London?’
‘No. Morgan was so positive about their having parted. That at least was clear. I suspect it was all over some time ago really. I’ve no idea if she knows Julius will be around. It may be a nasty shock.’
‘Just when one’s trying to get over somebody.’
‘Well, we still don’t know who’s trying to get over whom.’
‘There’s no reason why they should meet, Hilda. Morgan will be staying here, I presume. But if Julius rings up I’ll entertain him at my club. By the way, does Tallis know that Julius is arriving?’
‘I doubt it. He has no contacts with Julius’s world. And he doesn’t read the evening papers, they aren’t serious enough. Does Tallis know that Morgan is arriving? That’s the prize question.’
‘Morgan didn’t say she’d told him?’
‘During the last year his name has not been mentioned!’
‘Well, I think Tallis ought to know. After all he and Morgan are still married to each other. She’s still Mrs Tallis Browne.’
