Nuns and Soldiers (2 page)

Not everyone is capable of this type of self-abandonment, however. Yet we all need to be saved from our fear of death and our suspicion that life is essentially without meaning. We all seek ecstasy and an experience that takes us beyond ourselves. If we do not find this in conventional religion, we turn to art, music of all sorts, dance, sex, sport or even to drugs. This search for some form of transcendence is basic to our condition. Iris Murdoch is one of the few modern novelists to take this quest seriously. She is not afraid of themes that are often dismissed by the secular intellectual as ‘religious’. But instead of describing conventional faith, she depicts a spirituality of everyday life, showing what it is in human experience that lies behind the myths and practices which have become debased and incredible to an increasing number of people.

Art is one of the chief ways of endowing our lives with some ultimate value, and in some Murdoch novels, characters discover that a painting, for example, can startle them out of their self-obsession and give them intimations of a reality that is wholly separate from themselves, absolute, and entirely removed from their personal needs and desires. Tim Reede, a distant cousin of Guy, and his girlfriend Daisy are painters, but they are certainly not producing work of this calibre. They pride themselves ‘on being free and having no possessions’, but they have got stuck, artistically and personally, in a destructive mode of life and find that they cannot progress. Tim in particular lacks the dedication and discipline that is as essential for an artist as for a nun or a soldier. As a result, he can copy other artists’ work to perfection, but produces nothing valuable of his own. He is also chronically short of money.

But when, after Guy’s death, Tim goes to live in the Openshaws’ house in France, as a caretaker, he has a classic experience of the numinous. Long before human beings mapped their world scientifically, they developed what has been called a ‘sacred geography’. Certain places - mountains, groves, or rivers - have seemed to speak of ‘something else’. The devotion to a ‘holy place’ was one of the earliest and most universal expressions of the religious impulse, and is so common that it must tell us something about the way men and women have experienced the physical world as a place of wonder and mystery. Even today we have not secularized the world entirely: many of us have special places to which we like to repair in a moment of crisis or for renewal; these places may be linked with our childhood and have something of the glamour of beginnings; they may be connected with an important experience, when we felt we were living most intensely; or something strange in the locality may fill us with awe. Tim has no religious beliefs and certainly does not attribute his experience in France to a supernatural deity, but when he suddenly finds himself confronted by a great rock face, he feels that dread, exhilaration and joy, which the German philosopher Rudolph Otto describes in
The Idea of the Holy
as characteristic of an encounter with the Sacred. Tim is both afraid of the rock and yet irresistibly drawn to it; it is, in Otto’s words,
terrible et fascinans.
He also has ‘that pure, clean, blessed beginning-again feeling’. Immediately, he sits down and begins to paint, producing his first serious work for some time.

In his normal life, Tim is perpetually on the scrounge. Anne Cavidge once caught him stealing food out of the Openshaws’ fridge. He is constantly dodging and ducking; his motto is the Greek verb
lanthano
: I escape notice. In his ceaseless, uphill struggle for survival, he is often economical with the truth. But there is something about the rock and the small round pool beneath it that shocks him out of his endless compulsion to turn everything to his own advantage. It makes him aware of a dimension beyond himself. The rock is not a scene that Tim can exploit for his own profit, turning out one of his usual daubs to sell at his local Bloomsbury pub. He felt that it would be sacrilegious to drink from the pool or to bathe in it. And once he has glimpsed a reality which is entirely separate from his concerns (in Hebrew the word for ‘holy’ is
qaddosh
: Separate, Other), he is ready not only to paint again but to fall in love.

Few writers have been able to describe the cataclysmic and numinous experience of love as vividly as Murdoch. Today we tend to write more freely about sex than our ancestors, but can be rather embarrassed by the phenomenon of ‘falling in love’. But for Murdoch, love is no delusion but a revelation. The sudden realization that another human being exists in an absolute sense is another of the ways in which men and women have found holiness in our profane, flawed and tragic world. Out of the blue, Tim and Gertrude, Guy’s widow, are seized with love for one another. Gertrude experiences this visitation of Eros as an extremity. It is an ‘unmistakable seismic shock; that total concentration of everything into one necessary being, mysterious, uncanny, unique, one of the strangest phenomena in the world’. The beloved becomes an expression of everything that gives life ultimate value, rather as ‘God’ did in the age of faith. Like the disciplines of religion, love transforms the lover. Gertrude ‘had a new consciousness, her whole being hummed with a sacred love awareness’. Other characters in the novel speak of their love in similar terms.

For Murdoch, love is a transcendent experience, which takes hold of the lover in rather the same way as men and women used to feel possessed by a god.

Of course, a realist will see this as over the top. We know that human love rarely remains on this sublime level. The scales soon fall from our eyes, and we then see the beloved as he is, warts and all. But Murdoch is well aware that love does not often work out. In this novel, indeed, love is usually painful and hopeless. We find that there is a chain of suffering: the Count is in love with Gertrude, who is in love with Tim; Anne Cavidge loves the Count; Manfred, Guy’s cousin, is in love with Anne; and Mrs Mount is in love with Manfred. In the normal course of events, it seems, love is not returned. This revelation of holiness may seem a benign visitation at the outset, but it brings only pain. Yet this is where more ordinary human beings can become nuns or soldiers, because unrequited love itself can force us to transcend the self. It gives us nothing, for our devotion is concentrated on a person who is scarcely aware of our existence. As Anne explains to the Count, who feels that he cannot stay in London to be a daily witness to Gertrude’s marriage to Tim: ‘This is what Polish heroism is for, to be nobody and nothing, and try after all to enjoy it.’ Unloved lovers are soldiers like the Count, standing constantly to attention before the oblivious beloved. They are not unlike Anne, beseeching her ‘nonexistent God’. This type of love can go bad and lead to bitterness; or it can lead to a heroic self-abandonment, as, constantly disregarded, the self-important ego dwindles away.

The novel concentrates, however, on the story of Gertrude and Tim, who, like many of the heroes of mythology, has to undergo a series of ordeals, before he can make his love for Gertrude a viable reality. One peak experience is never enough; it has to be creatively integrated into daily life. A crucial moment in Tim’s spiritual journey is his final departure from Daisy, who has been his companion for years. For once, Tim is acting selflessly and against his own desires. He is deliberately walking into a terrifying vacuum. Yet both Tim and Daisy experience his departure as a moment of grace, but also as a death. They have deliberately chosen the annihilation of their relationship and, inevitably, are putting to death a crucial part of themselves. They can thus share a moment of revelation. When we look at somebody with our own well-being constantly in mind, we cannot see the person as he or she really is. Our vision is distorted by a subjectivity which is destructive and exploitative. When Tim finally has the courage to set Daisy free, he sees her transfigured. They no longer view each other through the prism of their own selfishness. Each feels that the other has become a god. They have seen what is sacred in the other.

Finally, Tim has to undergo ordeal by water. This is a frequent motif in Murdoch’s novels; characters often have to endure some watery trial before they can see their way clearly. In many cultures, the symbol of immersion in the deep represents a rite of passage, the emergence of a new reality or a profound transformation. We see this in the biblical myth of the Israelites who escape from slavery by passing through the miraculously parted Sea of Reeds. The Christian sacrament of baptism is another instance of this universal symbolism. Tim falls into a dangerous canal when, disregarding his own safety, he tries to rescue a drowning dog. This moment of gratuitous and disinterested compassion leads to his salvation. Swept along by the canal into the depths of the earth, he emerges safely into the sunlight, battered and dishevelled, and makes his final, successful return to Gertrude.

Human beings need salvation. This does not mean ‘going to heaven’, a concept which both Anne and Guy dismiss as an anti-religious idea. As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragility. But we will not be rescued by a supernatural deity nor by the crucified Christ. We have to make an effort of imagination to save ourselves. Murdoch’s novel shows that, in Robert Browning’s words, we have ‘finite hearts that yearn’, but, as St Augustine observed, it is this yearning that makes the heart run deep. It seems to be characteristic of the human mind to have experiences and to imagine realities that transcend it. Love, like religion, may be a delusion, but if we are sufficiently ingenious, it can sometimes save us. The Count tells Anne that for years his unrequited love for Gertrude brought him some consolation. ‘I did it all, I enacted both sides of the relation, and this could be done because she was inaccessible.’ He adds: ‘We dream that we are loved, because otherwise we would die.’ At the end of the novel, Anne reflects that this is also true of the religious quest. We imagine God or Christ to save ourselves from the bleak realities of our existence, but if it is truly creative this effort can itself bring a measure of relief. Jean-Paul Sartre defined the imagination as the ability to think of what is not there. It is, therefore, the chief religious faculty, since it enables us to conceive the eternally absent God. But in order to glimpse this transcendence, we must give ourselves away. It seems that the discipline of the nun and the soldier, which requires an absolute self-abandonment, brings its own freedom and its own peace.

The novel closes with Anne ‘homeless and free ... facing the void which she had chosen’. But it is not a depressing conclusion. Iris Murdoch was an important novelist because she reminded us of truths which the dearth of religion in our society has obscured. But she is able to merge this mythological vision with the comedy of manners. We are not simply suffering, yearning creatures. We are also absurd, and, in her kindly, dispassionate way, Murdoch points this out. There are moments of vintage Murdochian comedy in this novel. There is the robust, bracing humour of Daisy; the poignant vanity of Mrs Mount, who habitually rearranges her face before looking in the mirror, so that she always sees a radiant, serene and fulfilled image of herself; and the ludicrous egotism of Tim and Gertrude, as they fall back from their grand vision into the self-regarding complacency of marriage. Like all good comedy, Murdoch’s humour is rooted in sorrow and pain, but it also cuts us down to size, and reminds us that however great our aspiration, however much we suffer, and however arduous our quest, we remain little creatures, who should not take ourselves too seriously.

 

Karen Armstrong
2001

CHAPTER ONE

‘WITTGENSTEIN -’

‘Yes?’ said the Count.

The dying man shifted on the bed, rolling his head rhythmically to and fro in a way that had become habitual only in the last few days. Pain?

The Count was standing at the window. He never sat down now in Guy’s presence. He had been more familiar once, though Guy had always been a sort of king in his life: his model, his teacher, his best friend, his standard, his judge; but most especially something royal. Now another and a greater king was present in the room.

‘He was a sort of amateur, really.’

‘Yes,’ said the Count. He was puzzled by Guy’s sudden desire to belittle a thinker whom he had formerly admired. Perhaps he needed to feel that Wittgenstein too would not survive.

‘A naïve and touching belief in the power of pure thought. And that man imagined we would never reach the moon.’

‘Yes.’ The Count had often talked of abstract matters with Guy, but in the past they had talked of so much else, they had even gossiped. Now there were few topics left. Their conversation had become refined and chilled until nothing personal remained between them. Love? There could be no expression of it now, any gesture of affection would be a gross error of taste. It was a matter of behaving correctly until the end. The awful egoism of the dying. The Count knew how little now Guy needed or wanted his affection, or even Gertrude’s; and he knew too, in his grief, that he himself was withdrawing, stifling his compassion, coming to see it as fruitless suffering. We do not want to care too much for what we are losing. Surreptitiously we remove our sympathy, and prepare the dying one for death, diminish him, strip him of his last attractions. We abandon the dying like a sick beast left under the hedge. Death is supposed to show us truth, but is its own place of illusion. It defeats love. Perhaps shows us that after all there is none. I am thinking Guy’s thoughts now, the Count said to himself. I do not think this. But then I am not dying.

He pulled back the curtain a little and looked out into the November evening. Snow had begun to fall again in Ebury Street, large slow flakes moving densely, steadily, with visible silence, in the light of the street lamps, and crowding dimly above in the windless dark. A few cars hissed by, their sound muted and softened. The Count was about to say, ‘It’s snowing,’ but checked himself. When someone is dying there is no point in telling him about the snow. There was no more weather for Guy.