it is disproved. His ideal of a realism of approximations and towardnesses which depends on a certain unselfish directedness is Murdoch’s too. Both Peter’s and Calvin’s look like styles of relativism, but Calvin’s depends on the notion of an absolute we are being darkly cheated and deprived of. Peter’s is a more relaxed, disciplined and cheerful agnosticism.
The Sandcastle (1957) is a romance about the love of Mor, a prep-school master interested in politics, for the young half-French artist Rain Carter. Mor is divided between his sour and controlling wife Nan and the innocent, fey painter. Rain comes to the school to paint the retired headmaster Demoyte, a charming old despot. She loves Mor both as a man and as a substitute for her own, now dead, jealous father. The novel treats painting as A Severed Head was to treat sculpture – as a paradigm case of the problems of representing the human subject in art, and an implicit analogy of the mysterious creation of the novelist. The Sandcastle is consistently interesting, sensitive and moving, yet there is a slightness about its final effect which contrasts with our clear sense of the author’s gravity. Nan’s disappointment is never focused for us, and because it is hard to imagine the Mors’ marriage when it was successful, it is also hard to imagine the book’s aftermath. On the other hand Nan’s rebirth of desire for Bill once she feels rejected by him is perceptively done, and the novel is full of acute touches. There is also a characteristic division in the author’s sympathy which she has not yet managed fully to put to work. We experience her sympathy for Rain and the duller Mor, and therefore hope for the success of the affair. The idea-play, however, which comes from Bledyard, is on the side of respect for the proprieties of marriage. The Sandcastle is a less successful novel than the later study of adultery The Sacred and Profane Love Machine because the division in our sympathies between wife and mistress is so unequal. We begin to understand Nan’s disappointment but insufficiently to want Mor to return to her. The later book is more painful and distressing because we come to know both wife and mistress.
There is also a recurrent paradox in that the central characters, who have had so much loving attention devoted to them, can be, while fully animated, less alive or less ‘typical’ than some of the people only half-attended to at the edge of the book. Here Murdoch’s successes are the silly, gauche yet innocent and unselfish headmaster Everard, who preaches unheard that ‘Love knows! There is always, if we ponder deeply enough and are ready in the end to crucify our selfish desires, some thing which we can do which is truly for the best and truly for the good of all concerned’ (206); and the tender-hearted roguish tyrant Demoyte, who wishes Mor to have Rain in spite of, and because of, his being in love with her himself. Lastly there is the eccentric Old Etonian art master Bledyard. Demoyte and Bledyard represent two opposite types who often compel our sympathy in the early books, one with the charm of a complete worldliness, the other intensely other-worldly. Bledyard plays the role occupied by Hugo in Under the Net. He is the would-be saint who represents an intolerable, charmless ‘best’, the puritan an-aesthetic world of silence and truth. Just as Hugo argued for the purifying effect of silence, showing Jake how to renounce and be ordinary, so Bledyard is an artist who will not or cannot paint any longer and who constantly intervenes and acts as an unsolicited voice of conscience: ‘I have to bear witness…I think you are acting wrongly’ (211). Bledyard’s uninvited sermon to Mor in the squash courts, whence he has sent Rain away from a rendezvous, argues for what Mor finds an intolerable austerity. He denounces ‘happiness’ as a poor and a selfish guide, and pleads in effect for Mor to crucify his desires and open himself to any hurt in concern for others. Freedom, for Bledyard, is total absence of self-concern.
Two other features of Bledyard’s case deserve note. One is that he is, with his speech impediment and his eccentricity, a ludicrous figure, mocked by all, including Mor and Rain. The scene where he gives a school lecture, at which the boys have substituted a slide of the digestive tract of a frog for the enormous Socratic head of the aged Rembrandt, is a triumph of controlled tone. The reader, like the audience, is convulsed with happy laughter, yet what Bledyard is saying has always about it a disturbing impractical truthfulness. We are made to feel that Bledyard is mocked rather as Christ was mocked. The mockery is partly Murdoch’s own irony and disguise, as with Socrates, for whom the ironies always were thickest when the approach to truth came nearest.
The second interesting feature of Bledyard’s case is his Platonic hostility to representational art. Just as Hugo approved of Leonardo’s deliberately having made The Last Supper perishable, and favoured the instantaneous obsolescence of fireworks, so Bledyard is interested in the debates about iconoclasm in the early Eastern Church and favours Byzantine art. He feels that a loss of proper reverence occurred in the Renaissance: ‘It is a fact…that we cannot really observe really observe our betters.’ (The repetition is a result of his speech impediment.) ‘Vices and peculiarities are easy to portray. But who can look reverently enough upon another human face? The true portrait painter should be a saint – and saints have other things to do than paint portraits’ (77).
Bledyard stands in relation to the rest of the book as do Hugo and Peter. Like anti-matter to matter, they are out of focus with ordinary human appetite. You can focus on either the saints or their artist antitypes – which is to say, on everyone else – separately, but not together. Their function in the books is to point to an (unrealisable) ideal which even they cannot wholly embody, though they are directed with a certain hope, faith and openness towards it.
Bledyard speaks two related kinds of wisdom. One is related to moral immediacy in personal relations, the other to the interplay of truthfulness and skill necessary to the artist. In this second area his effect is most palpable. He has a way of appearing in the book at crucial moments not just in Rain’s love affair with Mor but also in her attempts to picture and ‘see’ Demoyte. Each time he appears Rain recognises his authority and realises that a change in her painting is necessary. Her painting comes to seem, as I think art does to Murdoch, a provisional affair, never wholly finished. Art, like morality, must be pulled at by the value of a truth or perfection which is unreachable. Rain is desolate when Bledyard criticises her painting at an early stage, yet is helped by this criticism and rethinks her task. Finally, when she renounces Mor, she sees her representation of Demoyte once more anew and remakes what she has done again. At the same time Mor is held in his marriage, not by his own sudden conversion to Bledyard’s austerities, but by his wife’s brave and worldly cunning in staging a public scene. This compromises him and leaves him little choice but to pursue the political career she had formerly opposed.
As its title implies, The Sandcastle is much concerned with notions of form and permanence. Rain had been brought up on the tideless Mediterranean, where the sand was too dry to make a sandcastle. She finally tells Mor that, since he would have had to give up his political ambitions and his children for her, their affair would have been ‘all dry sand running through the fingers’ (300). Characters are throughout realised by their aesthetic preferences. Nan likes matching colour-schemes and moves everything in the house around as an expression of her need for control and territory. Demoyte lives in the magnificence of superimposed Persian rugs, drowning in splendour. Evvy’s apartments are drably unimaginative, and Bledyard characteristically lives in a stripped room, void of colour or comfort: ‘The floor was scrubbed and the walls whitewashed. No picture, no coloured object adorned it. The furniture was of pale wood and even the bed had a white cover’ (51). This recalls Hugo’s bedroom in Under the Net. Goodness, for Murdoch, depends on stripping away the consolations of a private world. Most art, like most morality, is a necessary realm of compromise and second-best.
The theme of the artist and the saint lies at the heart of An Unofficial Rose (1962) in the marriage of Ann and Randall Peronett, and is early dramatised in the row Randall stages to provide himself with a pretext for cutting loose and joining his mistress. A.S. Byatt has rightly drawn our attention to the book’s Jamesian qualities.9 James continues to haunt Murdoch at least until Nuns and Soldiers (1980), which partly reworks the plot of The Wings of the Dove. Here there is ‘beautiful’ speech, periphrasis on the part of the narrator, and the creation of a decorous golden world.
