Unofficial Rose is set in a Tatler world of two neighbouring Kentish houses and concerns the manoeuvrings which follow the death of Fanny Peronett. The title refers to the dog-rose of Rupert Brooke’s 1913 poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which, unlike the orderly flowers of Berlin, where Brooke is composing his poem, he perceives as sweetly undisciplined and ‘unkempt’. The poem, itself an improvisation, hinges on the conceit that nature in Germany is punctual and formally ordered, while in England it is gloriously free.
Thus Randall, a would-be artist too rapacious to succeed, is offended by his wife’s formlessness and feels stifled by her capacity for self-sacrifice. He lives for and inhabits a stylish world, farming cultivated roses, and objects to Ann in that she is as ‘messy and flabby and open as a dogrose’ (37). Ann is busy and unselfish and, while not odd as Bledyard is odd, has a shy awkwardness and stubborn self-withholding that offends Randall. In The Red and the Green (1965) the artist Barnie is similarly hurt by his good wife Kathleen’s unyielding, passive stoicism. Such virtuous characters have a special negativity which refuses the imagination of those they live with, perhaps a consequence of how hard they work at not imagining wrong. Such deliberate gracelessness offers the onlooker no imaginative foothold. This seems a just perception, and I know of no other novelist capable of making the point, or of relating it to the virtues of the artwork itself, since art depends on style and stylishness, and requires and feeds off form. ‘Goodness accepts the contingent. Love accepts the contingent. Nothing is more fatal to love than to want it to have form,’ the sententious vicar Douglas Swann says (UR 130). Art, in making its pact with contingency, must however embrace enough to test its own form without yielding to banality.
Freedom, too, is a subject of the book. Characters are frequently surprised when actions they had planned and claimed for themselves turn out to have been partly engineered by others. Randall discovers that his action in stealing Lindsay Rimmer from the aged detective-story writer Emma Sands, to whom she had been companion, was at least partly connived at by Emma: ‘His action was stolen from him’ (202). In direct contrast Ann finds that her inability to claim Felix Meecham for herself, despite their mutual love and despite her desertion by Randall, was worked at by her daughter Miranda, who was in love with Felix herself: ‘She had been part of someone else’s scheme’ (325). Randall, typically, resents this threat to his supremacy. Ann, as typically, does not.
This is not to say that even the most powerful and worldly characters can ever fully ‘own’ their actions. All have to suffer their own unfreedom, but do so with a difference. Even the ‘witch-like’ Emma, despite the tough and very quick-witted front she puts on, is after all abandoned first by Hugh, then by Lindsay, and is about to die. The prissily unappealing Miranda, who ensures her mother’s disappointment, is thwarted herself; and it is not impossible that Ann will get Randall, whom she still loves, back in the end.
If there is a pecking order in the book it has at the top not the ‘freest’ characters but simply those who most acutely and earthily see how things are. Lacking a taste for the fantasy of an unconditioned world, they thereby possess a power denied to those deluded by the notion of freedom. The theme recurs in Nuns and Soldiers. The whole complicated imbroglio of love and passion is held in being as the unstable product of a variety of different wills.
In relation to this pecking order Ann is the most passive and acquiescent, and Emma the most cunning and authoritative of the moral agents. Murdoch’s different sympathy for both seems clear. There is energy if not approval behind Emma, and like her near-homophones Honor in A Severed Head and Hannah in The Unicorn – and, though rather differently, Millie in The Red and the Green – she is a psychopomp, one who leads the others towards some ambiguous wisdom. That her detective stories hilariously champion a hero of the will (‘Marcus Boode’) suggests that we are not to take her without irony. She is, however, earthy, witty, wise, and speaks always with a humorously forthright dryness, for a practical politics of the emotions. Compared with the men who surround her, she represents the toughness of commonsense itself. On her single visit to Grayhallock it takes her only a matter of minutes to intuit the various relationships.
The men in this book, as so often in Iris Murdoch, are weak and poor things who seem to be chasing phantoms. The women often provide ‘all the warmth and sense of the world’ (AM 324). The soft and romantic ‘ninny’ Hugh Peronett wishes to pick up with Emma after having dropped her twenty-five years earlier. His equally romantic if more caddish son Randall wants to ditch his wife for the sexy Lindsay. In wanting to reverse time (Hugh), or negate it (Randall), or simply escape (Felix’s brother-in-law Humphrey) , the men compare ill with the tougher-willed and more realistic women. Since the attempt to behave well can sometimes be accompanied by a new self-regard, Murdoch’s respect can sometimes go to the character who, while not behaving most ‘beautifully’, is at least not stupefied by self-importance. Mildred, who is guileful too, reflects some of her rival Emma’s practical horse-sense.
There is much in An Unofficial Rose to hold the interest, both in the intricate story and also in the touching respect which the author never loses for the love affairs of what are sometimes elderly people – Hugh is sixty-seven. Here as in Bruno’s Dream she paints the love affairs of the middle-aged without a trace of condescension. Few other ‘liberal’ novelists could have given us the sympathetic portrait of Felix Meecham the soldier, if only because his profession would at once have earned their mistrust.
If An Unofficial Rose finally is less successful than some of the other books it may be because its very tautness of design, with its closely interwoven destinies, is, for all its admirable economy, somewhat chill. In this it differs from the equally condensed A Severed Head (1961). The rhetorical point of the plot, which is to marry the idea of unfreedom to the idea of mystery, is made better there and elsewhere. The ‘love’ which the characters conspire to enjoy seems, perhaps, too clearly empty.
To put these points differently: the early novels often urge on us a patience with the world’s multiplicity which they cannot yet adequately enact. And this seems partly a result of the author’s unrelaxed investment in mystifying us. To appreciate a mystery you renounce the patient desire to see further and understand better. The early novels sometimes buy off our curiosity with bribes to our love of surprise; and surprise can itself become a ‘manner’, a convention, and can exhibit the human unfreedom it ironises. The later books, which are more relaxed and assured, more often get the balance right.
The individual worlds of these early books are nonetheless always beautifully imagined, fully and in detail ‘there’. There is in them a division of sympathy between two kinds of character: on the one hand the good characters who are in two senses eccentric, both decentred and also dotty or absurd – Hugo, Bledyard, Ann; and on the other hand the worldly charmers who talk a dry Realpolitik of the emotions – Mrs Wingfield, Demoyte, Emma. In some sense Murdoch narrates, as John Bayley said of Tolstoy, by two positives10 – Ann Peronett’s positive, and Emma Sands’s.
Elizabeth Dipple in her book Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit argues that An Accidental Man represents an indictment of the ‘ease of the frenetic, bitchy but comfortable bourgeois world’ to which its characters are too attached. Dipple suggests that ‘Only by jettisoning all the imagery of the culture and facing the ensuing blackness do characters begin to perceive reality, which is their religious duty.’ It is certainly true that Murdoch has written of movement towards ‘an impersonal pictureless void’ as part of a complete religion (FS 88). Dipple apologises for Murdoch’s rogues’ gallery of ‘hateful characters’ and argues of Austin in An Accidental Man that he is ‘an absolute triumph for Murdoch; the reader experiences a wonderfully pure hatred of him’. Twice addressing herself to Bradley Pearson’s question in The Black Prince – ‘And shall the artist have no cakes and ale?’ (349) – Dipple says, ‘the darkness of man’s squalid limitations must give a resounding “no”’.
