The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  New Statesman February 1973

  The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch

  The most consistently provocative thing about Iris Murdoch’s new novel is its title. Apart from being janglingly discursive in its own right, it extends a warm invitation to Miss Murdoch’s decriers – to the satirical rogues who might claim that The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is just an upper-middlebrow version of the earthier Love Machine of Miss Jacqueline Susann, dignified in accordance with those two percussive epithets: the motivation orchestrated by someone of a rather more philosophical turn of mind, perhaps, the heartbreak less perfunctorily considered, people going to bed with each other for somewhat better-read reasons, but essentially the same sort of thing. And indeed the present book is particularly vulnerable to such a conceit; persons, symbols and ideas do their usual coming and going, are bound upon the Murdochian Ferris-wheel of fire, yet we seem to have only the title’s ponderous word for it that they are doing so to much purpose.

  In the sweaty, hunted life of Blaise Gavender there are two loves. Harriet, his wife, sacredly tends their civilized Buckinghamshire home, blessing everything that falls beneath her damp, adoring gaze – the garden, the pets, the neighbours, and David, their lawful son. Emily, Blaise’s secret mistress, profanely idles away her days in a Putney love-nest, the sluttish resort of delinquent friends, feckless protégées, and little Luke, the child of their shame. Between these hearths Blaise scrupulously divides his anxieties, tormented alike by the beaming serenity of his wife and the impish disgruntlement of his mistress. Whatever the prolixity of Miss Murdoch’s scene-setting might lead one to believe, this can’t go on for ever: Blaise’s fool’s purgatory ends; the secret is out, and he must choose.

  And he goes on choosing. On the face of it Miss Murdoch seems to be doing little more than guiding the pens of a few Texan thesis-writers. Can she be saying merely that there are two sorts of love, that one gets boring while the other stays sexy, that it would be nice to have both and that it’s a shame we can’t? After a bit, though, one notices that the profane love has a habit of sounding a lot more highbrow than the sacred one. Blaise still goes to bed with Harriet and they enjoy a stately tenderness there, but his love for her is contingent, to do with decorum and self-preservation. Blaise’s love for Emily, on the other hand, is mindless and absolute; they flop into bed drunk, then bicker halitotically until morning; he’s glad to get away, desperate to return. It suits Miss Murdoch’s peculiar type of romanticism to elevate the profane love to a quite disorientating degree: ‘Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveres and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit …’ – this has a sacredness Miss Murdoch doesn’t find among the soft vacillations and tooling whimsies of Buckinghamshire. This love is, above all, blindingly erotic, which for Miss Murdoch at once renders it amoral and, in that sense, transcendent. As soon as her typically melodramatic conclusion allows the profane union to be solemnized, it becomes dully ‘sacred’, losing its Promethean edge.

  That title. It belatedly occurs to you that the epithets aren’t meant to be antithetical but complementary – like The Beautiful and Damned rather than The Naked and the Dead. As Blaise ferries from one love to the other, both women are illuminated in turn by a queasy attraction they perforce lack when he has actually to be with them. Harriet’s blandness becomes a sexy cool; Emily’s clamorous presence becomes his true Lawrentian locus. Each gives him what the other can’t supply – i.e., a change from the other one. Perhaps Miss Murdoch’s concern is not an easy distinction between two varieties of love so much as a slant on their interdependence. The shabby Blaise exemplifies this unhappy tendency, but the other characters are subject to it also. A foxy novelist, although popular with the girls, clings to the shade of his rotten wife; a portly queer nurtures the one love that will degrade him most. For solipsists, suffering has its own glamour: it can’t be shared.

  Such an angle on the book gives a sense of unity which the experience of reading it is unlikely to reproduce. Miss Murdoch is, of course, endlessly acute and insatiably empathetic, and as notes towards a psychology of the upper-middle classes the book has plain uses. The ingredient it lacks – an ingredient that enriched its predecessor, The Black Prince – is a linguistic centre of gravity, and without it the book sprawls. Literature is, among other things, a pattern of words, and an author’s more general procedures will always be reflected in its verbal surface. Just as Miss Murdoch’s prose covers all the options, chucking in a dozen careless phrases where one careful word would do, she similarly attempts to evoke and dramatize by sheer accumulation. The book contains as many elegant paragraphs as slovenly ones and for somebody who writes so fast Miss Murdoch writes dismayingly well. But it is bloated and it sags.

  I suspect that Miss Murdoch’s huge productivity is, paradoxically, a form of self-defence or self-effacement: 300 pages a year disarm a lot of criticism. She can’t, in the nature of things, revise much and probably she never re-reads; she just ‘gets on with the next one’. Were she to slow down – were she to allow one of those ominous ‘silences’ to gather, silences such as more tight-lipped novelists periodically ‘break’ – she would be accepting a different kind of responsibility to her critics and to her own prodigious talents. She would, in short, begin to find out how good she is, that strange and fearful discovery.

  New Statesman March 1974

  Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch

  Iris Murdoch is a believer: she believes in all kinds of things. She believes in magic, monsters, veridical visions, transcendent art, prophetic dreams, pagan spirits, God and the devil. But most centrally, of course, Miss Murdoch believes in love.

  Her poor characters suffer and exult, groan and gloat – and with classic symptoms. They throw up and black out. They can’t eat. They weep for joy. They pace the street, gazing up at forbidden windows. They live happily ever after. Sometimes the love is sacred, even courtly: instantaneous, infinite, unspoken, unrequited. Sometimes it is cheerfully profane: a sudden handclasp, and within seconds the paramours are making pigs of themselves in bed. No one is exempt; no one can resist. For better or for worse (and there are always some startling extremities on offer here), everyone must join the dance.

  Love being the unironical thing it is, the outsider tends to look on with a keen sense of the ridiculous. Nuns and Soldiers begins with a long death scene. Guy Openshaw is succumbing to cancer, distractedly mourned by his wife Gertrude. Throughout the ordeal Gertrude is tenderly monitored by the Openshaw coterie, which features Manfred, an eligible banker, Peter, a laconic Pole known as the Count, Tim, a furtive and penniless young painter, and Anne, a recently lapsed nun. (Strangely, Miss Murdoch has renounced the transsexual cast-list she normally favours. Where are all the Blaises, the Francises, the Hartleys? I had hoped that this might be the Murdoch novel where, at last, the heroine was called Butch and the hero Maureen.)

  Before he dies Guy tells Gertrude to marry the Count. After all, the Count has been ‘in love with Gertrude for years’. Now, he is in ‘a terrible frenzy’: ‘his love … filled every second with thrilling purpose’. But the Count also ‘loved Guy’. He is diffident. So is Manfred, who probably loves Gertrude too. Gertrude cries for a month: she feels dead. Anne tends her. They swear eternal love.

  Then gingery, indigent Tim approaches Gertrude to ask for money, egged on by his charmlessly foul-mouthed lover, Daisy. As a compromise Gertrude allows Tim to go and paint the Openshaw house in France. Tim travels to France, alone. He is ‘mad with joy’. To escape her suitors Gertrude follows him there. They get on each other’s nerves for a couple of days – then it happens. Tim feels it like ‘a fast approaching comet which suddenly fills up the whole sky’: ‘some vast cosmic force’ compels him. For her part, Gertrude feels that ‘something uncanny is happening’. Tim kisses Gertrude’s hand ‘avidly hungrily’ (a tautology, because ‘avidly’ already means ‘greedily’). ‘I love you,’
he says. ‘I think I love you too,’ Gertrude replies. The next day they make love and do a morns-dance together in the meadow. They quaff the ‘honey-joy’, the ‘honey-magic’: Gertrude’s body ‘hums with a sacred love-awareness’. Suddenly Manfred shows up and they all go back to London.

  Then Tim drops Daisy and moves in with Gertrude. Everyone is appalled. Anne moves out. The Count is in a ‘frenzy’ again, but one of ‘grief and misery and rage’. Then Tim and Gertrude break up. Everyone is relieved. Tim goes back to Daisy. In a sense, Gertrude goes back to Guy, indulging ‘this terrible love’ for her lost husband. At the same time, it is ‘as if she had fallen in love with the Count’.

  Then Tim and Gertrude get married. (They meet again by chance. There is ‘a celestial trumpet call’ and ‘no need of words’.) Tim redrops Daisy. Meanwhile Anne falls ‘terribly terribly in love with the Count’. But the Count is still in a frenzy about Gertrude, living ‘with black demons of jealousy’. Anne stays silent. Little does she know that Manfred is ‘terribly in love’ with her.

  Then Gertrude drops Tim, believing (wrongly) that Tim hasn’t dropped Daisy. Tim goes back to Daisy, ‘in a phantasmagoria of misery’. Anne suffers. The Count exults, having decided that he now loves her ‘more than he had ever loved her before’. Tim re-redrops Daisy. Gertrude, Anne and the Count go to France. Tim follows them, fearing a ‘terrible terrible rejection’ by Gertrude. He stands in the field where he and Gertrude once morris-danced so lyrically. Anne, still keen on the Count, observes his approach with ‘a fierce wild almost cruel joy’. But Gertrude sees him too; ‘Oh – Tim – darling – darling – thank God,’ she says.

  Then … Well, readers of this review are no doubt feeling sufficiently emotionally deprived as it is. Miss Murdoch’s novels are tragi-comic, in the sense that about half her characters live happily ever after, while the nuns and soldiers soldier on alone. They all inhabit a suspended and eroticized world, removed from the anxieties of health and money – and the half-made feelings on which most of us subsist. It is the burden of this particular work that the least-deserving are often the luckiest in love, their talent for happiness undeflected by the scruples and habits of self-preservation. They believe, as Miss Murdoch believes, that ‘love is their meaning’.

  It will already be clear that this is not one of the major Murdochs. Her books now seem to alternate or zigzag: The Black Prince (excellent) was followed by The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (relatively footling); ditto with A Word Child and Henry and Cato; and now after The Sea, The Sea, perhaps her most delightful book to date, comes the minor entertainment Nuns and Soldiers. It is breathless, gushing, and hopelessly uneconomical – which perhaps suits its theme. Miss Murdoch is very addictive, however. As with Nuns and Soldiers, so with the condition of love: you want to know how it will turn out, but you certainly don’t want it to end.

  Observer September 1980

  The Philosopher’s Pupil by Iris Murdoch

  Iris Murdoch’s fiction is habit-forming, which is just as well, since her oeuvre now outbulks that of Tolstoy or George Eliot. You can see the Murdoch-addicts, with their enlarged, telltale irises, queueing like ghosts in the public libraries and bookshops. Another novel will, for a time, ease their craving … Well, the new book provides a chance to kick the habit. A diluted version of the real thing, softening the pain of outright withdrawal, The Philosopher’s Pupil is a long course of methadone.

  It would be futile to summarize the plot. Life is too short. The book is too long. But it is possible to offer a Murdochian paradigm, one that will serve, in fact, for all her fiction since The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. Imagine the teaching staff of a toytown university. The men all have names like Hilary and Julian. The women all have names like Julian and Hilary. Everyone is on permanent sabbatical, but they look in each day to sample the hallucinogenic love-potions available in the SCR.

  The twenty-stone economist loves the nonagenarian philologist Ca nervous obsessive guilty angry craving’), who loves the alcoholic classicist Ca painful vertiginous thrilling urgent pressuring feeling’). The alcoholic classicist loves the deluded linguist Ca sudden piercing and obsessive jealous remorse’), who loves the schizophrenic sociologist (‘feeling very very sorry for him, feeling oh so much protective possessive pity-love, a sort of desperate sorry-for affection’). Meanwhile, in the town, everyone talks in a strangely outdated slang CI still play bridge, but that’s not your scene!’) while standing back in wonder as the campus hotheads do their stuff

  The Philosopher’s Pupil is a tale told by one of Miss Murdoch’s fastidious narrators. He is a rum sort of narrator, sometimes enjoying full authorial omniscience, sometimes operating as an ordinary member of the cast. Often he is helplessly reliant on rumour and speculation; often he dispenses hysterical interior monologues and seems to know the thoughts of all the characters, even those of pet dogs and wild foxes. Like Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince, ‘N’, as he is called, uses quotation marks for such vulgarisms as ‘sulks’, ‘commuters’ and ‘worthwhile activities’, as well as for phrases like ‘too good to be true’, ‘the wrong end of the stick’ and ‘keep in touch’. The reader reflects that a cliché or an approximation, wedged between inverted commas, is still a cliché or an approximation. Besides, you see how it would ‘get on your nerves’ if I were to ‘go on’ like this ‘the whole time’ …

  Apart from a weakness for quotation marks, ‘N’ also has a weakness for ellipses, dashes, exclamations and italics, especially italics. Each page is corrugated by half a dozen underlinings, normally a sure sign of stylistic irresolution. A jangled, surreal (and much shorter) version of the book could be obtained by reading the italic type and omitting all the roman. It would go something like this:

  deep, significant, awful, horrid, sickening, absolutely disgusting, guilt, accuse, secret, conspiracy, go to the cinema, go for a long walk, an entirely different matter, an entirely new way, become a historian, become a philosopher, never sing again, Stella, jealous, happy, cad, bloody fool, God, Christ, mad, crazy …

  The needless emphases and train-wreck adjectives are occasionally combined, as in ‘the remarkable unique personal sense of power’ and ‘some terrible ghastly frightening noise’. These locutions – and locutions such as ‘she was utterly utterly not English’ or ‘confronted by a thin thin blade’ – remind you at first of excitable conversation. But the prose has no basis in the rhythms of the spoken language. It is utterly utterly not English. It is non-writing, unwriting, anti-writing.

  ‘N’ would probably diagnose ‘loss of faith’ or ‘lack of conviction’ as the poison in Miss Murdoch’s prose. Why else the flailing repetitions and paranoid overkill? I think, though, that the answer lies the other way. Miss Murdoch’s style was never elegant, but it was crisp and precise, capable of preserving her macabre and often beautiful perceptions. Here it is a hectic, ragged thing whose only function is to establish the dramatis personae and launch them on their amorous dance. Miss Murdoch believes in her characters – the good, the bad, the ugly – and it is a belief ignited by love. That love is palpable, inordinate, scarily intense. It is far too strong a force to tolerate the thwarting intercession of art.

  Observer May 1983

  J.G. Ballard

  Crash by J.G. Ballard; War by J.M.G. le Clézio

  ‘To be responsible for the happiness of the Universe’, as W.H. Auden points out, ‘is not a sinecure.’ Equally, the apocalyptic-epiphanic mode in fiction is not for minor talents. It should be clear that the more superbly an author throws away the crutches of verisimilitude, the more heavily he must lean on his own style and wit. Experimental novels may have a habit of looking easy (certainly easier to write than to read), but their failure-rate is alarmingly high – approaching, I sometimes fear, 100 per cent.

  J.G. Ballard’s last ‘collage’ novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, had this to say on the subject of perversion: in our ‘post-Warhol era’, ‘violence is the conceptualisation of pain … psychopathology is the c
onceptual system of sex’. Yes, perhaps, or not. Crash doesn’t pontificate; here Ballard isn’t out to rationalize but to actualize, to show us the perversion from the inside. And this particular perversion needs all the actualizing it can get: beside it, Joyce’s penchant for excrement and Burroughs’s interest in scaffolds seem sadly quaint.

  At the start of the action the narrator has had a head-on car crash with a married couple: the husband was shovelled off the road, his widow and the narrator sensuously hospitalized before embarking on the inevitable affair So far, so sexy – but it is not until the narrator meets, and falls for, the ‘hoodlum scientist’ Vaughan that he learns the true delights of impacted windscreens, dying chromium, wound-profiles, genital mutilations and optimum sex-deaths. Entirely, exclusively obsessed with the car crash, Vaughan’s dream is to have a fatal collision with Elizabeth Taylor (Ballard has always shown an inordinate preoccupation with celebrities – see his restrained and sensitive short story ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’). As Vaughan trains for his sex-death by splatting dogs on pavements, lurching out of access roads for orgasmic prangs with female motorists, masturbating and taking snapshots at pile-ups, the narrator is led further into this tumescent heat-hazed car-scape to share Vaughan’s vision of the ‘whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant’.

  Just how sexy is this? What is Ballard getting at? Well, consider the way your own reaction to car crashes can be distanced: they’re bloodcurdling in real life, but not bad at racetracks, and really very appealing on film. As Ballard keeps saying, the ‘perverse’ (used sixteen times) marriage of technology and flesh has a certain ‘geometry’ (twenty-one times) which may become increasingly ‘stylised’ (twenty-six times). Scar-contours and wound-orifices provide a fresh repertoire of sexual possibilities; injury gives one a new awareness of one’s body; auto-perversion (the narrator reflects, fiddling with some leg-braces in a girl’s cripple-car) can offer ‘strange declensions of skin and musculature’.