Introduction to Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (Vintage new edition 2019)
Iris Murdoch is grievously misunderstood. If you care about fiction, this should make you furious.
Twentieth and, inevitably, twenty-first century literature, television, film, are packed with female writers whose work is dismissed. Despite their genre-defining brilliance, Lucretia Martel, Andrea Arnold, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Sally Wainwright receive little of the reverence given to their male peers. In discussions of contemporary fiction, Toni Morrison, Ruth Rendell, Hilary Mantel, Ursula Le Guin, even Margaret Atwood rarely receive the worship heaped on Roth or Amis, Mankell or Franzen. Look further back, into post-war British fiction; how many of the great women writers, Elizabeth Taylor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Elizabeth Bowen, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark and, above all, Iris Murdoch, are read today? Rather than take them seriously, it is easier to side-line them; they’re too middle-class, too silly, too concerned with love, family, the endurance and pain and joy of domestic life to be important.
Is this the first Iris Murdoch novel you have ever picked up? If so, you are not alone. Her fiction is so extremely unfashionable that, to have reached this point, you’re a brave pioneer, virtually a Scott of the Antarctic of mid-twentieth-century novels. It isn’t your fault. Readers, and critics, who should know better, frequently dismiss her; they call her books arch, artificial, mannered, frantic. As literary criticism goes, this is like writing off Charles Dickens because he was too fond of a silly name, or Jane Austen because everyone gets married.
Just because Iris Murdoch’s novels are witty doesn’t mean they’re lightweight. The fact that her protagonists fall suddenly in love, eat terrible meals, almost die of drowning or exposure, strip, break into each other’s houses. doesn’t make them silly or melodramatic, just as their interest in philosophy and politics gives them depth, not pomposity. Yes, they are mockable – Monty loves Petra who loves Hugo who loves Bruno who loves Pip, on the coast, in summer – but whose work isn’t? And why does it matter, given that Iris Murdoch has a superpower: her unparalleled understanding of the pain of passionate doomed yearning, of despair, fear, lust, loneliness, of the grief and fear and irrationality which love can bring?
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch’s first novel, might seem, at least in summary, fair game. It contains suspiciously European-sounding academics, Socratic argument, farcical semi-crimes, French translators, large affordable flats in Central London. Could anything be less attuned to this miserably populist, anti-intellectual, austerity-ridden xenophobic age? And, although its characters don’t have the establishment jobs, the beautiful gardens and romantic good fortune for which her later work is criticised, they are nonetheless fans of gauzy fabrics, Pernod and existentialism; they include a firework manufacturer, a celebrity German Shepherd, a fairly honest bookie and a taciturn taxi-driver. Everyone writes letters; the City of London is a Blitzed wasteland of rubble and fragile churches, full of willowherb and potential. What possible relevance could such a book have now?
It has all the relevance in the world.
First, its protagonist, Jake, is an case-study in self-knowledge. Iris Murdoch, both as a philosopher and a novelist, was preoccupied with the concept of goodness: how to be unsmugly good, sincerely good; Good, as opposed to Nice, or self-serving, or deluded. In the course of Under the Net, the cheerfully broke Jake moves from teenage-level solipsism, a belief that the universe is ordered around him, that his face is a ‘tell-tale surface’ revealing every thought to a fascinated world and his intelligence and charm make anything possible, to the realisation that he is no more important than anyone else. He has ‘conceived things as he pleased and not as they were’ – he has crawled out from under the net of illusion and supposition – and this liberates him. Over and over again, Murdoch was to explore this theme, from the gloriously monstrous Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, obsessed with what he assumes others think of him, to flawed, puzzled, clumsy, wonderful Dora in The Bell, whose interest in people, and art, and trying to be honest, saves her from a bad marriage and points the way towards fulfilment.
And, as a consequence of this self-scrutiny, Jake develops a little emotional intelligence; not as much as his creator had, but enough to be a decent man. He evolves from scrounging taxi-blagging laziness worthy of Skimpole in Bleak House(‘there’s nothing that irritates me so much as paying rent’) through a bleak, albeit brief, depression reminiscent of Melville’s Bartleby, turning his face to the wall, to, eventually, understanding ‘the possibility of doing better’. By the novel’s end, Jake has resolved to earn money with a sensible job, to find a place to live for him and Mars. He might even begin to write a novel, possibly this novel, because he has started to notice the world around him.
In this, too, Under the Net excels. In Murdochland a sort of Ancient Greek pantheism rules, not in the form of merry bucolic spirits in tree-trunks but in the way that everything – animals, the horizon, nature, architecture, clothes – seems to think and feel, can terrify or give hope. The secret is curiosity: what Louis MacNeice called ‘the drunkenness of things being various’. To Hugo Belfounder, Jake’s obsession, everything is ‘astonishing, delightful, complicated and mysterious’. Hugo can find peace as a guinea-pig at a residential cold-remedy-testing clinic or as a watchmaker, because there is interest everywhere. As Murdoch wrote in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, ‘People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us’ and, although Under the Net is set in a hot dusty post-war central London, not beside mossy cliffs or monastic ruins, it too is made rich by noticing: sparrows, fire-escapes, cars, plywood representations of Roman market places.
And, consequently, everything is funny. I have a confession; until recently, I hadn’t read Under the Net. Every reference I’d seen was to a ‘comic novel’, to hilarious disasters, a ‘sprightly’ comedy of errors, allegedly influenced by its dedicatee, the French surrealist Raymond Queneau. What a horrible thought; little is less amusing than picaresquely madcap adventures and, although videos of people falling off swings and skateboards render me helpless, actual slapstick leaves me icy cold. So I ignored Under the Net and confined myself to Murdoch’s subtler, less jaunty-sounding work: The Bell, possibly her masterpiece, or my own favourite, the tragically underrated The Nice and the Good.
What a fool. If only I’d read as far as the point where Jake finds his copy of Beckett’s Murphy, one of the funniest novels ever written, I’d have understood. Under the Net is far better than those awful descriptions suggest, with much more in common with Murphy’s sanguine booze-cadging indigence than the brittleness of ‘comic novels’ or the studenty solemnity of surrealism. Time and again, Murdoch’s one-liners, her apparently casually-brilliant observations, offer unexpected snorts of suppressed laughter: ‘All about us, like a nest of disquieted wood-lice, policemen were crawling out from underneath pieces of boarding’; ‘his enormous eyes which looked at us sad and round and luminous as the eyes of a wombat or a Rouault Christ’; ‘the flâneurs were flaning’; or Hugo, escaping the hospital on all fours, carrying his possessions in his mouth ‘with the saliva dripping into the inside of his boots’.
Partly because of Jake’s narcissism, partly because of Murdoch’s wit, Under the Net is also exceptionally good on shame, self-consciousness and awkwardness, those intensely human characteristics which so pointlessly occupy much of our lives. Jake is always trying to enter places he shouldn’t be: ‘I am myself a sort of professional Unauthorized Person; I am sure I have been turned out of more places than any other member of the English intelligentsia.’ Even Mars the Alsatian is capable of sympathy, embarrassment, conveniently playing dead to make a speedy exit: ‘We [Jake and Mars] turned away, looking casual.’ And, in desperate situations, Murdoch’s descriptions of sights and smells and sounds, always so precise, make us indentify with Jake; she is a master of the creative writing rule of Show not Tell. When Jake breaks into the night-time hospital, his fear is real and believable; it is ‘strangely alive,’ its stairs ‘glittering, deserted, immense’ unlike the ‘small sound of [his] footfalls’. ‘There was a silence into which it seemed to me that I had just let loose a vast quantity of sound.’ Yes, there is also safe-breaking, theft, trespass and a riot, but these dramas happen every day, in real life. They are only melodramas to the dismissive.
One of the tasks of a novelist is to make the reader feel that they are in safe hands; that the structural underpinning of their story doesn’t rely so heavily on coincidence, contingency or ghosts that one stumbles, and disbelief returns. Admittedly, Iris Murdoch’s drama often relies on sudden meetings, misplaced letters, misunderstood visitors, even more than Shakespeare, Hardy, McEwan; does it matter? Don’t our lives depend on chance?
In any case, the vividness of Murdoch’s language makes every dodgy window and life-saving dog-flank utterly convincing. Unusually for a writer, let alone one who lived in North Oxford – I will insist on this until my dying day – she had extraordinary spatial awareness, virtually an engineer’s eye. Her ability to describe climbing drainpipes, Thames swimming, lock-picking and fighting gives her fiction the texture of reality, however extreme the situation. Fourteen years later it reached its apotheosis in The Nice and the Good’s shudderingly cold and scary cave-rescue scene but, even here, on Holborn Viaduct and in disused Hammersmith timber yards, Murdoch’s stone and feather and aluminium are wholly convincing, fiction-real, and that is enough.
And, lastly, Murdoch excels at describing love. In Under the Net, as in real life, and in all Murdoch’s novels, love is a prison in which everybody wants to be locked. It’s a universal mess because, as Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘the heart wants what it wants’, unfortunately. Almost everyone loves the wrong person: the preoccupied, or self-obsessed, or attached to someone else. When Jake is searching for Anna, whom he clearly should be with but isn’t, ‘every place lacked her and expected her’, yet he recovers impressively quickly even from the final blow to his belief that they are meant for each other. Jake and most of Murdoch’s other characters – like the woman herself, as her letters reveal - are capable of romantic volte-faces; they love deeply, painfully, sometimes miserably but then, when someone or something else comes along, they move on.
Perhaps, to the Murdoch-resistant, it’s these exhaustingly changeable devotions which make her work seem mannered, artificial. True, the ease with which her characters flick through the available love-options, married/widowed/divorced, young/old, celibate/frisky, sometimes maintaining several at once, can seem unlikely, if not enviable. However, it is also what makes her peerless: this understanding of how wrong, or right, or complicated, love can be. It helps that, decades before almost any other author, Murdoch understood that men can love men and it’s perfectly fine. The author Alice Thomas Ellis famously, and rightly, said, ‘Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters’ yet, because Murdoch’s women and dogs and teenagers and men and cats love each other fairly unrestrainedly, there is infinite, delicious scope for chaos, queerness, hope. ‘Given a fair field in early youth I think I might have become a pretty serious homosexual’ said Murdoch in a letter to her own friend and lover, Philippa Foot. In her fiction, given a fair field, most of her characters do pretty well.
And all this falling in love, which in Under the Net leads nowhere much, was to mature in Murdoch’s later fiction into the most delicate and satisfying plotting, the convergence of narrative strands which makes fiction such a primally satisfying pleasure. In The Nice and the Good, where John Ducane’s attempt to chuck one woman and win another are magnificently confused by his need to keep them ignorant of the other’s existence. And this, when he begins to investigate a blackmailer, leaves him horrible exposed to disaster. In The Black Prince, wives fall in love with the wrong husbands, adults fall for gender-fluid teenagers and the male protagonists, author-rivals Arnold and Bradley, are powerfully drawn to each other, under the shadow of Central London’s enormous Post Office Tower. Murdoch perfectly understood the importance of emotional peril, and the exciting uncertainty alcohol and madness can bring to fiction. Yes, her love-entanglements can be a little too symmetrical, too easily-resolved, but she never loses sight of the destruction and despair which emanate from wrong love.
Close to the beginning of Under the Net, Murdoch, and Jake, try out a theory. Jake, newly homeless, is in the ‘dusty, dirty, nasty-looking’ newsagents run by the ambiguous Mrs Tinckham, whose cat is, yet again, about to give birth. Mrs Tinckham has been encouraging her cat to mate with a local Siamese but ‘the beast will look everywhere but where your finger points’. While Mrs Tinckham worries about the imminent kittens’ parentage, Jake is feeling sorry for himself.
‘“People and money, Mrs Tinck,” I said. “What a happy place the word would be without them.”
“And sex,’ said Mrs Tinck. We both sighed.’
In the novel’s final scene, homeless again, but wiser, and politer, Jake returns to Mrs Tinck’s. A miracle has happened; it appears that the cat chose well after all. Her kittens are half-Siamese; specifically, two seem to be Siamese, and two perfectly ordinary. Even Jake can’t explain it but, this time, he is interested.
‘‘’I don’t know why it is,’’ I said. “It’s just one of the wonders of the world.”’
And that, precisely, is what’s saved him. He’s left behind hopeless love and the illusion of importance; he’s ready to work, and notice things, and that will be his salvation. In Murdoch’s novels, characters grow; they think about what matters, experience sorrow, guilt, heartbreak and passion, and try to be strong. Does it matter that this tends to happen in shabby London side-streets, in bosky woods or sunlit beaches, not in the White House or at war? Of course not. Fiction is about the variousness of being human, and Iris Murdoch, a complicated human and a great writer, is the perfect guide.
Pride and prejudice: the best books to help with coming out - for the Guardian, 2019
An exquisite kiss from Virginia Woolf, hot skin from Carol Ann Duffy … Charlotte Mendelson picks books to inspire LGBTQ readers
Everyone needs books, particularly the newly gay. Books make us feel less alone, and there is nothing more strengthening than reflections of our own complicated selves.
Yet most of the best books that might help with coming out are simply about the private yearnings we try to hide. Bookshops’ rainbow-jacketed YA fiction displays will change young lives; thank God for that. But all over the world there are women and men to whom exposure would mean imprisonment, disaster. For them, and all those who aren’t riotously born that way, great coming out books are often those whose protagonists come out to no one at all, not even themselves, yet which have a thrilling whiff of queerness.
Simply buying our first book by an author who might be gay can feel like a tremulous act of outness. But the process can begin earlier, when a character’s moment of same-sex love discreetly blows our minds. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway isn’t chiefly remembered for gayness, although her memory of “the most exquisite moment of her whole life” 30 years before, when she is kissed on the lips by Sally Seton, once shook me as it must shake so many sensitive proto‑gays.
Iris Murdoch’s fiction had the same effect. Her novels, unfortunately, lack the hot Sapphic-philosopher action that characterised her life. Nevertheless, her cheering kaleidoscope of straight and gay (male) love, her honesty about the pain of longing and her characters’ sexual adaptability mark all her books, but particularly my favourite, The Nice and the Good.
Poetry is another secret weapon. Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You” is an intimate homage to seeing one’s beloved in public; the earlier, filthier collections of Carol Ann Duffy, particularly Standing Female Nude and Selling Manhattan, are awash with hot skin and private sounds. Memorise them; lines such as “far from the loud laughter of men / our secret life stirred” can accompany you anywhere, like tiny superpowers.
Even better, poetry inspires. Mary Oliver, one of the American greats, is less known than she should be, beyond the bleak universe of motivational social media posts. Yet, perhaps partly because of her gayness, so many of her poems can bring strength and hope to those trapped in a bad relationship, the wrong relationship, the wrong life: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” has sustained me, as I hope it might you.
Alison Bechdel, acclaimed for her stunning books about her parents and the idea of the Bechdel test, first sidled to niche fame with the horribly titled cartoon strip Dykes to Watch Out For, now available in book form. DTWOF has all the insight and humanity of great fiction; it just happens to be a funny soap about a group of American gay people, raising families, falling in love, having sex and going on too many marches.
And, if you want to feel that there is hope, despite everything, read Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, a moving, riveting account of how families with children who are different do sometimes find a way through the complexity and increase the world’s sum of love, and pride.