The Nice and the Good Read online

  We may think we all know what goodness is and that we’d have no trouble in recognising it if we saw it. But the concept of the Good is, it turns out, difficult to understand, the more so for being haunted by a host of false doubles – power, freedom, purpose, reward, judgement – all of which, with Murdoch’s love of chiastic pairings, doubles and opposites, offer themselves as not-so-shadowy surrogates for a more obscurely grasped virtue. The Nice and the Good is, like all her novels, full of characters earnestly trying, hoping, and not infrequently praying to be good, all (sometimes comically, sometimes tragically) to no avail. For goodness is not a matter of will – or, as soon as it becomes so, it ceases to be goodness and becomes self. ‘Mystics of all kinds have usually known this’, she writes in another essay, ‘and have attempted by extremities of language to portray the nakedness and aloneness of Good, its absolute for-nothingness’ (‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’, 1967). By comparison with their noisier, self-justifying, and generally more meddlesome cousins, Murdochian saints are usually recognised by their quietness and inconspicuousness. Unlikely (and often unlikeable) characters, they tend to exist unparticipatingly at the very edges of the plot, and they frequently turn out to have some kind of discreet mystical leanings. Uncle Theo, though not quite a saint, is the nearest thing to it in The Nice and the Good, and only at the very end do we learn of his youthful adventures in a Buddhist monastery in India.

  The unspeakability of the Good – an article of faith in the mystical traditions of both the east and the west – also makes its appearance in western philosophy, or, more properly, in that branch of philosophy most concerned with questions of goodness, namely ethics. Wittgenstein enunciated it most austerely, perhaps, when he said that ‘ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental’.2 The only things which language can meaningfully express are the propositions of natural science – verifiable statements of fact, in effect. Anything else – any statement of value, any ‘ought’ or ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘that is good’ or ‘that is bad’ – has no verifiable status and is therefore strictly nonsensical or, as Wittgenstein would prefer, unsayable. This unsayability is indeed the very condition of ethics. ‘This running up against the limits of language is ethics … In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter’.3 The philosopher’s most eloquent statements are, consequently, what he does not say. ‘My work consists of two parts: the one presented here [in the Tractatus] plus all that I have not written’, Wittgenstein wrote to Ludwig Ficker in 1919:

  ‘And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it’.4

  The indefinability, ineffability and mysteriousness of the Good – the fact that it lies “beyond”, is uninteresting, invisible, will-less and not there to be “experienced” – is a topic to which, in her philosophical writings, Iris Murdoch reverts again and again. It creates something of a problem for the writer, however. If you cannot speak of the Good, how are you supposed to write moral books? The problem is rather different depending on whether you look at it as a moral philosopher or a moral novelist. Basically, the philosopher won’t and the novelist can’t. Enjoined to speak truth, the moral philosopher is bound not to utter falsehood or nonsense and so can only, when it comes to the unsayable, lapse into silence. The moral novelist, however, is not so enjoined. On the contrary, she is busy saying the unsayable. She has made her business that special realm of discourse in which propositions are neither true nor false because they are fiction. This is a most dangerous realm, as Plato warned, for, liberated from strict truth-content, words can do anything you like. The writer is free – as free to create the bad as the good, the false as the true. As Murdoch wrote in her long essay on Plato’s aesthetics, ‘we are able meaningfully and plausibly to say what is not the case: to fantasise, speculate, tell lies, and write stories … for truth to exist falsehood must be able to exist too’ (The Fire and The Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, 1976). As far as philosophy is concerned, all art is morally compromised and fiction in particular suffers an irredeemable taint.

  As a philosopher Murdoch is enough of a puritan and a Platonist to share this view. But as a novelist she doesn’t hold back. She is down there in the world with her characters – the unsaintly ones, that is – right in the thick of it, saying the unsayable, getting her hands dirty, and getting fascinatedly caught up in the web of words, irresistibly intrigued, charmed – tempted is perhaps the word – by all that is most false. Moreover, she shares her medium with her characters who are busy doing exactly what she is doing – dreaming up plots, setting things in motion, manipulating others, acting parts, making things happen, ordering people around. In the embroiled and complicated histories of those characters who use language and the structures of art for their own worthy or unworthy ends, the novelist looks critically, quizzically at her own procedures. Her vision of the corrupting power of words reflects necessarily upon her own practice. There’s a sense in which she is no better than her characters, no closer than they are to speaking or realising the Good. She is on a level with them – the level of ego, art, and lies which makes for so busy, justified, sentimental, just plain interesting a world. Down there in the human muddle of compromise and untruths she is able equally to create good and bad, to exercise the same magical powers, black or white, as a Joseph Radeechy or a John Ducane.

  The novelist cannot speak of the Good any more than the philosopher can. Given that she has opted for speech rather than silence, moreover, she condemns herself to the vain human prattling that is at bottom only falsehood or nonsense: ‘just gassing’. She shares the same fallen human world as her characters, joining in their jostling, moody, generally unsatisfying existence. She can only write of the nice and the bad, in effect. But there is one important difference – and it is a crucial one. The novelist is no closer to speaking of goodness than anyone else, but this does not cancel or negate her art. She has one unique advantage over the philosopher. She is able to show the Good by means of her carefully implied comparisons – the nice and the bad versus the good, the conspicuous versus the inconspicuous, the interesting versus the uninteresting. To this extent the novelist is able to rise above her characters. As they tie themselves in knots or go wrong or get absolutely nowhere she is able to show – without of course saying it in so many words – that language creates misunderstandings and that human efforts to organise, improve upon, and simply make sense of life offer only the false consolations of fantasy – of hopefully-cast narratives, of pre-existing role-models (caricatures for the most part) into which we’d like to see ourselves fit. It’s all hopeless. Being good doesn’t lie that way. But the novelist is able to reveal this in a uniquely truthful and even didactic way by virtue of her comparisons. Indeed, unnoticed, absent, ‘for-nothing’ as it is, the Good can be indicated in no other way.

  This is where the novelist has the edge over the philosopher. The philosopher will not speak what cannot be spoken, but the novelist speaks it in the only way that’s left open to human beings – through the force of negative example. For Iris Murdoch this is infinitely preferable to not saying anything at all. Indeed, it’s a kind of having it both ways. Art knowingly speaks falsehood. It acknowledges – even celebrates – the familiar human mish-mash and recognises that we are sinners all. When art points towards the transcendental or the sublime, therefore, it does so without spiritual pride. This is why, for Murdoch, the compromises of art ultimately win out over the purity of philosophy: ‘For both the collective and the individual salvation of the human race art is doubtless more important than philosophy and literature most important of all’ (‘“of God” and “Good”’). Lit
erary fiction is perhaps the most morally compromised of all the art forms. But, in the tumble of novels that speak so eloquently of her decision to opt for fiction over everything else, Iris Murdoch has bequeathed one of the most seriously examined oeuvres in the English language, and for that if for nothing else she has given her readers something most profound to be grateful for.

  CATHERINE BATES 2000

  1 Iris Murdoch, ‘Crest of a Wave’, Daily Mail, 23 November 1978.

  2 Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus (1921), trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1961), 6.421.

  3 Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness (1979), pp.68–69.

  4 Paul Englemann, ed., Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir (1967), p. 143.

  One

  A HEAD of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot.

  At one moment a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray, was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tiny hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgundy. Then came the shot.

  Octavian sat up, stood up. The shot had been somewhere not far away from him in the building. There was no mistaking that sound. Octavian knew the sound well though it was many years since, as a soldier, he had last heard it. His body knew it as he stood there rigid with memory and with the sense, now so unfamiliar to him, of confronting the demands of the awful, of the utterly new.

  Octavian went to the door. The hot stuffy corridor, amid the rushing murmur of London, was quite still. He wished to call out “What is it? What has happened?” but found he could not. He turned back into the room with an instinctive movement in the direction of his telephone, his natural lifeline and connection with the world. Just then he heard running steps.

  “Sir, Sir, something terrible has occurred!”

  The office messenger, McGrath, a pale-blue-eyed ginger-haired man with a white face and a pink mouth, stood shuddering in the doorway.

  “Get out.” Richard Biranne, one of Octavian’s Under Secretaries, pushed past McGrath, propelled McGrath out of the door, closed the door.

  “What on earth is it?” said Octavian.

  Biranne leaned back against the door. He breathed deeply for a moment and then said in his usual high-pitched and rather precise voice, “Look, Octavian, I know this is scarcely credible, but Radeechy has just shot himself.”

  “Radeechy? Good God. Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Octavian sat down, He straightened out the piece of cream-coloured paper on the red blotter. He read the unfinished sentence. Then he got up again. “I’d better come and—see.” He moved to the door which Biranne held open for him. “I suppose we’d better call Scotland Yard.”

  “I’ve already taken the liberty of doing so,” said Biranne.

  Radeechy’s room was on the floor below. A little crowd of people stood at its closed door, arms pendant, mouths open. They were being addressed by McGrath.

  “Go away,” said Octavian. They stared at him. “Go to your rooms,” he said. They moved slowly off. “You too,” he said to McGrath. Biranne was unlocking the door.

  Through the opening door Octavian saw Radeechy lying with his head turned sideways upon the desk. The two men went in and Biranne locked the door on the inside and after a moment’s thought unlocked it again.

  The reddish brown flesh of Radeechy’s neck was bulging out over his stiff white collar. Octavian wondered at once if his eyes were open, but the shadowed face could only have been seen by peering. Radeechy’s left arm hung down toward the floor. His right arm was upon the desk with the gun, an old service revolver, near to the hand. Octavian was finding it necessary to take a deliberate grip on himself, to respire slowly and assemble his senses and tell himself who he was. He had seen many dead men. But he had never seen a dead man suddenly on a summer afternoon in Whitehall with his flesh bulging out above a stiff collar.

  Octavian quickly informed himself that he was the head of the department and must behave calmly and take charge.

  He said to Biranne, “Who found him?”

  “I did. I was nearly outside his door when I heard the shot.”

  “I suppose there’s no doubt he’s dead?” The question sounded weird, almost embarrassed.

  Biranne said, “He’s dead all right. Look at the wound.” He pointed.

  Octavian moved nearer. He moved round the desk on the side away from Radeechy’s face and leaning over the chair saw a round hole in the back of the head, a little to the right of the slight depression at the base of the skull. The hole was quite large, a dark orifice with blackened edges. A little blood, not much, had run down inside the collar.

  “He must have pointed the gun into his mouth,” said Biranne. “The bullet went right through.”

  Octavian noticed the neatness of the recently clipped grey hair upon the warm vulnerable neck. He had an impulse to touch it, to touch the material of Radeechy’s jacket, to pulp it timidly, curiously. Here were the assembled parts of a human being, its clothes and carnal paraphernalia. The mystery appalled him of the withdrawal of life, the sudden disintegration of the living man into parts, pieces, stuff. Radeechy, who muffed most things, had not muffed this.

  Octavian had never particularly liked Radeechy. He had never particularly known him. Radeechy was one of those eccentrics, found in every Government department, who though highly intelligent, even brilliant, lack some essential quality of judgment and never rise above the rank of Principal. Radeechy was considered to have, in a mild way, “a screw loose”. He had seemed content, however. He had interests elsewhere. He was always asking for special leave. On the last occasion, Octavian recalled, it was to investigate a poltergeist.

  “Has he left a note?”

  “Not that I can see,” said Biranne.

  “That’s not like him!” said Octavian. Radeechy was an indefatigable writer of circumstantial minutes. “I suppose now we shall have the police here for the rest of the day, and just when I wanted to get away for the weekend.” He knew from the deepening of his voice that the dreadful moment had passed. Now he could be cool, business-like, soberly jocular.

  “I’ll deal with them if you like,” said Biranne. “I suppose they’ll want to take photographs and all that.” He added, “I must remember to tell them that I touched the gun. I moved it just a little to see his face. They might find my finger-prints on it!”

  “Thanks, but I’d better stay myself. Poor devil, I wonder why he did it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He was a pretty odd man. All that conjuring with spirits.”

  “I don’t know,” said Biranne.

  “Or perhaps—Of course, there was that awful business with his wife. Someone told me he hadn’t been the same since she died. I thought myself he was getting very depressed. You remember, that terrible accident last year—”

  “Yes,” said Biranne. He laughed his high-pitched little laugh, like an animal’s yelp. “Isn’t it just like Radeechy’s damn bad taste to go and shoot himself in the office!”

  “Kate, darling.” Octavian was on the telephone to his wife in Dorset.

  “Darling, hello. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” said Octavian, “but something’s happened in the office and I won’t be able to get down till tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh dear! Then you won’t be here for Barbie’s first evening home!” Barbara was their daughter and only child, aged fourteen.

  “I know, it’s maddening and I’m very sorry, but I’ve just got to stay. We’ve got the police here and there’s a terrible to-do.”

  “The police? What’s happened? Nothing awful?”

  “Well, yes and no,” said Octavian. “Someone’s committed suicide.”

  “God! Anyone we know?”
r />   “No, no, it’s all right. No one we know.”

  “Well, thank heavens for that. I’m so sorry, you poor dear. I do wish you could be here for Barbie, she’ll be so disappointed.”

  “I know. But I’ll be along tomorrow. Is everything OK at your end? How is my harem?”

  “Your harem is dying to see you!”

  “That’s good! Bless you, sweetheart, and I’ll ring again tonight.”

  “Octavian, you are bringing Ducane with you, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. He couldn’t come till tomorrow anyway, so now I can drive him down.”

  “Splendid. Willy was wanting him.”

  Octavian smiled. “I think you were wanting him, weren’t you, my sweetheart?”

  “Well, of course I was wanting him! He’s a very necessary man.”

  “You shall have him, my dear, you shall have him. You shall have whatever you want.”

  “Good—ee!”

  Two

  “YOU must put all those stones out in the garden,” said Mary Clothier.

  “Why?” said Edward.

  “Because they’re garden stones.”

  “Why?” said Henrietta.

  The twins, Edward and Henrietta Biranne, were nine years old. They were lanky blonde children with identical mops of fine wiry hair and formidably similar faces.