It’s some time since I ventured into this blogspace – partly because although I’ve got through quite a lot of fiction this year, I haven’t been doing much re-reading. Well, there was Our Mutual Friend a few months ago, but somehow I didn’t want to spend time articulating my disappointment with this Dickens revisit (it’s just my opinion, of course, but despite some great set pieces – the opening chapter, for instance – OMF felt to me as if Dickens was going through the motions, over-complicating an already improbable plot for the sake of it. I wouldn’t put it in the Top Five of CD’s novels.)
But I’ve just now re-read Iris Murdoch’s 1954 novel, Under the Net, which I first read in either 1961 or 1963. The date is uncertain but I know where I read it: in Bart’s Hospital, and in both those years I was a patient, having work done on a kneecap that kept dislocating. A copy of Under the Net – a book club edition as I recall – was lying around in the ward I was in: having picked it up, my teenage self got through it without too much trouble, having little else to do. …
What did I remember from that first reading? Before revisiting Under the Net I had retained the knowledge that it was Iris Murdoch’s first novel, that it roamed around a Bohemian version of 1950s London, and that there were scenes set in a common cold research establishment. Nothing wrong there: the common cold place was actually ‘a delightful country house where one could stay indefinitely and be inoculated with various permutations of colds and cures’ (p62 in my Vintage paperback), for instance, and for the majority of the novel Jake, the first-person narrator, does indeed wander round London. What I perhaps hadn’t noticed the first time round, however, was Murdoch’s philosophical preoccupations that emerge, like rocks from under the soil of the narrative, as it were, in the course of the novel. (By 1954 she had been a philosophy tutor at St Anne’s, Oxford, for some while and the previous year had published Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. What Sarah Bakewell calls Under the Net’s ‘added existential flourishes’[1] are in my view an essential part of the novel.)
Jake, the narrator, makes a precarious living translating from the French, and it is his love life that seems at first to be the focus of the novel: thrown out of the flat he has shared with Magdalen, he goes in search of Anna, an ‘unfathomable being’ he says he once considered marrying (though he says, portentously, ‘marriage remains for me an Idea of Reason, a concept which may regulate but not constitute my life’). Jake’s passion for Anna is not reciprocated; she loves Hugo (more about him later) and it’s Anna’s sister, film star Sadie, who turns out to love Jake – the sort of A-loves-B-but-B-loves-C pattern that must be familiar to readers of other Murdoch novels.
But is it love that animates the narrative? Superficially, the plot is driven by Jake’s search for somewhere to live and money to support himself, but chapter 4 spells it out: ‘my acquaintance with Hugo is the central theme of this book’. First encountered by Jake when they shared a room in the common cold research establishment mentioned above, Hugo Belfounder is a fireworks tycoon turned movie producer whose ideas Jake has exploited for his only published book, a series of philosophical dialogues entitled The Silencer. At the end of the novel Hugo has left London to become a watchmaker in Nottingham, but he still ‘towered in [Jake’s] mind like a monolith’ (p268). As others have pointed out, some of what is attributed to Hugo is very reminiscent of the later Wittgenstein: “There’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings” (p66), or “the whole language is a machine for making falsehoods” (p68).
At other times he seems to have Murdoch’s rather than Wittgenstein’s opinions:
I remember his holding forth to me once about what an honest thing a firework was. It was so patently just an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. “That’s what all art is, really,” said Hugo, “only we don’t like to admit it … you get an absolutely momentary pleasure with no nonsense about it. No one talks cant about fireworks.” (p61)
The fireworks theme returns later in the novel, when Jake goes to Paris in search of Anna and glimpses her in a crowd of people watching a Fourteenth of July firework display. Ephemerality re-emphasised: he fails to find her after the crowd disperses.
Meanwhile there is a ‘proper’ philosopher in the novel – Dave, who is “professionally concerned with the central knot of being (though he would hate to hear me use this phrase), and not with the loose ends that most of us have to play with”, and provides Jake with somewhere to sleep, in his mansion flat off the Goldhawk Road. At one point, Dave is writing an article for Mind on “the incongruity of counterparts”: he had tried, says Jake, to explain the solution “but I had not yet got as far as grasping the problem” (p177). Elsewhere, the narrator mentions the philosophers Kant (p234) and Berkeley (p208).
The other subject of the novel is, without a doubt, London: immediately post-war London with its ruined Wren churches (interestingly, though, no one in the novel even so much as mentions the war, or having taken any part in it). There’s a splendid sequence where Jake, Dave and others are looking for Hugo: following up a note (Gone to the pub) found in his empty flat by Holborn Viaduct, they embark on an epic pub crawl – visiting the Viaduct Tavern, the Magpie and Stump, the George, the Skinner’s Arms and others – that culminates in a moonlit swim in the Thames. All of which prompts the thought: has anyone ever organised a walking tour of Iris Murdoch’s London? I have to say, though, that although her view of the city is on the whole convincing, she is wrong about route 88 bus, which is described on chapter 20 as going along Oxford Street (it doesn’t), and wrong in locating Rathbone Place and Charlotte Street in ‘Soho’ when they’re definitely in Fitzrovia.
Even in her first novel, Iris Murdoch had a developed talent for narrative that won her enthusiastic readers – and the Booker Prize – later, but there are places where her language is too elaborate and adjectival for my taste. Here for instance Jake is observing the chameleons in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes:
Very very slowly they were climbing about their cage, their long tails curling and uncurling with unspeakable deliberation as with a scarcely perceptible motion they stretched out one of their long hands to grasp another branch … with an almost unbearable slowness they brought another limb into play, and then relaxed into a rigid immobility. (p209)
Do we need ‘rigid’ in front of ‘immobility’? Why is their deliberation ‘unspeakable’? One could go on … I’m no Murdoch expert – apart from this, the only novels of hers I’ve read are The Bell, A Word Child and An Accidental Man – but my impression is that as the 1960s and 70s went on her novels became longer and more over-written. Did she not get the editor she needed?
Anyway, here’s a philosophical passage, from Under the Net’s last chapter, to end with. You could say it’s Murdoch’s own idiosyncratic version of existentialism:
Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, life itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and future.
Update: since I first posted this blog, Miles Leeson of Chichester University’s Iris Murdoch Research Centre has recommended – via Twitter – the 2008 book Sacred Space, Beloved City, which not only celebrates Murdoch’s love of London but also contains designated walks and illustrations. So even if there are no organised Under the Net walks, there’s that resource …
Even further update: inspired by a mention of the no 88 bus in a London Review of Books article by Andrew O’Hagan, I wrote a letter to that esteemed organ questioning Murdoch’s bus-route knowledge. And remarkably, she was more right than I thought: in the 1960s, and presumably earlier, the no 88 did run via Shepherd’s Bush and along Oxford Street.
As for my other recent reading, I see that eight of the last ten novels I’ve read have been by women – a marked change from earlier. Recommended from that eight: Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter, remarkable for its date (1884); The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig; and Catrin Kean’s Salt, which has just won a Wales Book of the Year award.
[1] Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (Chatto & Windus, 2016), p287
Old geezer re-reading 