Money,
Marriage, and Literary Allusions
in
Iris
Murdochıs Nuns and Lovers
³When an artist takes a theme which has already been taken
by another and very different artist,
comparison of the two works is sure to amuse us,
and will probably, too, instruct us,
helping us to realize the peculiarities of each man more clearly than before² (1)
It is generally acknowledged that the plot of Murdochıs Nuns and Soldiers (1980) is indebted to Henry Jamesıs The Wings of the Dove (1902), just as previous novels such as An Unofficial Rose (1962) show unmistakable signs of Jamesian qualitiesı (2). According to her biographer Peter J. Conradi, from 1944-45 Murdoch read much Henry James and identified strongly with his heroinesı (3). In a letter written to David Hicks in September 1944 Murdoch confessed to feeling herself aligned to ³the rather splendid but definitely unsound character whom the author slowly & ruthlessly crushes in the second volume,² such as ill-fated Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (4).
Murdochıs interest in and admiration for James was shared by her husband, John Bayley, who confesses in Elegy for Iris that while he was immersed in the composition of an English critical study entitled The Characters of Love and feeling bewitched by Henry James,ı Murdoch had uncharacteristically allowed him to read a portion of a book she was writing. It was to be her fourth published novel, The Bell (1958). Bayley observed that he was so drawn by the intriguing opening sentence of the story, describing a married couple - Dora Greenfield and her husband - that that he felt inspired to supply an analysis of their relationship which was subsequently incorporated, its source unacknowledged, in the work (5). Bayley subsequently experienced some dissatisfaction with his contribution, believing that the passage he supplied read a bit too much in the Jamesian style, rather than merging into [his wifeıs] own inimitable originalityı (6).
In this paper I propose to compare and contrast Murdochıs Nuns and Soldiers not only with Jamesıs The Wings of the Dove but also to look at connections between James and his most famous discipleı - Edith Wharton - in such popular novels by Wharton as The House of Mirth (1905) and The Glimpses of the Moon (1922). It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flatteryı. As Harold Bloom demonstrated in his seminal study of the topic, The Anxiety of Influence, writers naturally affect each other and their works echo themes, styles and topics rehearsed in earlier published writings by other authors. I would like to explore the trail of influence originating in novels by Henry James and appearing over a hundred years later in books by Iris Murdoch. I would also like to touch upon the paradox, apparent in James, Wharton and Murdoch, that those who appear to act as foesı of the protagonists of their novels can accomplish the friendliestı of acts. Conradi characterizes this phenomenon as arising, in Murdochıs case, from her dualistic imaginationı (7), observing that many of the titles of Murdochıs novels reflect her ambivalence about her characters who, in the course of her stories, engaged in the painful discovery of moral level,ı find themselves acting contrary to their own wishes and achieving results opposite to those expected, intended or desired (8).
Jamesıs The Wings of the Dove has not, of course, always attracted favorable notice alone or exerted only a beneficial influence. In the opinion of the American critic Van Wyck Brooks, its heroine is the victim of the basest plot that ever a mind conceivedı (9). Milly Theale is an orphaned, shy, gentle girl -- immensely wealthy but terminally ill -- who is befriended by a fellow American, an impoverished but resourceful and socially-ambitious Kate Croy. The plotı which so horrified Van Wyck Brooks is one hatched by Croy, who conceives of the idea of throwing the man with whom she herself is in love -- Merton Densher, a journalist who lacks the means for them to marry -- into Millyıs path, in the hopes that Milly, too will fall in love with him and, on her death, make provision for Densher in her will, thus enabling Densher and Croy eventually to wed.
The tale is set in the early twentieth century in Europe and America, chronicling a vanished society in which a character like Croy, who inhabits the fringes of upper-class society must marry well or face both social as well as financial ruin. It is a world whose harsh necessities are similarly explored by James in an earlier work, The Portrait of a Lady, but in starker terms, with an innocent young American heiress, Isabel Archer, stalked and mercilessly exploited by a predatory compatriot, Gilbert Osmond, and his mistress, Madame Merle. On Millyıs death, Densher feels sufficient compunction to refuse her bequest, a delicacy of feeling unshared by Osmond, whose persecution of his rich prey continues after their marriage and the death of their only child, with Isabel feeling unable ever to leave her tormentor, even after learning of his treachery and vileness.
In her introduction to The House of Mirth Wharton marvels at rapid changes in the world which have rendered the social milieu she depicted in that work obsolete and nearly incomprehensible, resulting in its delineation of Old New Yorkı and particularly of its patrician society of the 1890s, of which both she and James had been members, to resemble such a lost, mysterious world as that once inhabited by the Egyptian Pharaohs (10). The plot of The House of Mirth springs from a situation scarcely credible nowadays: its heroine, Lily Bart, finds herself set on a course of irretrievable ruin because of her careless, casual acceptance of a bachelor friendıs invitation to take tea alone in his flat (11).
Murdoch might question Whartonıs assumption that the novelist of manners benefits from or requires a firm setting of traditions and conventions in which to configure a successful or convincing work of fiction. Her own reworking of Jamesıs theme of the poor adventurer or adventuress driven to the expedient of marriage to make his or her fortune is enacted in late twentieth-century London, in which a far greater variety of means for social and financial advancement lie at her protagonistsı disposal, and especially for its female characters. And yet, perversely, in many of her novels, Murdochıs characters can seem nearly as hopeless or helpless as Isabel Archer and Lily Bart. They seem to inhabit a fixed social world, a hierarchical cosmopolitan society in which nobody seems to work or, if they do, their schedules are extremely flexible but the pecuniary awards often considerable.
In such a novel as Nuns and Soldiers there is a distinct delineation between the ³haves² and the ³have-nots.² An unbridgeable gap appears to exist between characters like the dominating figure of Guy Openshaw - wealthy, cultured, the vortex of an exclusive social circle - and such impoverished hangers-on as the artist Tim Reede, a scrounger who raids his hostıs fridge surreptitiously for food which he can secrete in the capacious pockets of his mackintosh, to share subsequently in their local pub with his equally poor and ravenous mistress Daisy Barrett.
We learn of Guyıs successful career as a British civil servant, the head of a section of the Home Office, through information provided by the novelist or by memories of him supplied by his family and friends. It was work which left Guy sufficient opportunity to contemplate combining his career as an administrator with scholarly research, beginning a work on criminal law shortly after his marriage to the adoring Gertrude (12). But at the beginning of Nuns and Soldiers, Guy is beyond thoughts of work or study. He is bed-ridden, gripped by the cancer which will kill him at the age of forty-four, by the second chapter of the novel (p. 103).
Even on the brink of death, Guy is still the distributor of largesse and hospitality, supplied by his surrogate, his grieving wife Gertrude. Their elegant, expensive home on Ebury Street in London is frequented by a circle of intimates lovingly referred to as les cousins et les tantes. Only a few of the individuals who gather at the Openshawsı home for the weekly Visiting Hourı are actual blood relatives of the childless couple, but it is a longstanding custom which embraces friends and family alike, who are invited to partake in these informal gatherings, to drop in for a drink on the way home from the office -- a tradition which continues, if with a diminished circle of visitors, as Guy nears his end. The childless Guy is described by Murdoch as a frustrated pater familiası: an inherited tendency in Guyıs originally Jewish banking family...accustomed to play the responsible role of rich relations among poor relationsı (p. 22).
The visitorsı are still pathetically dependent on Guy, for a variety of reasons. His doting wife Gertrude cannot imagine life without him. His closest friend, the Count,ı is similarly perplexed by the problem of a continuing existence without the sustaining presence of the man who befriended him and rescued him from near total social isolation. Guyıs cousin Stanley Openshaw is another visitor,ı as is his ambitious, accomplished wife Janet, who apparently cherishes his company for reasons not altogether altruistic: it is hinted that she hopes that Guy will bequeath his wealth to her three children. These visitors,ı as well as the successful and rich Manfred, stylish Veronica Mount, the lawyer Moses Greenberg, the dashing Lord Balintoy and learned Gerald Pavitt, are some of the ³haves² in Guyıs circle. Like Guy, they are high achievers: rich and content with their lives.
The ³have-nots² are represented not only by Tim Weede, dependent on the Openshaws for money and food -- for the snacks he can devour on his visits and by the opportunity afforded him by these visits to raid a well-supplied fridge -- but also by a cousin named Sylvia Wicks, who resembles a stock character in the nineteenth-century Russian novel. She is the impoverished, once beautiful, widow who is a relative of a wealthy nobleman, who uses her visits to her patron to petition for money for a wayward son.
Nuns and Soldiers is a novel which resonates with echoes of other literary or artistic works. Just as a Sylvia Wicks has her roots in forebears in Tolstoy, so, in Gertrude in her widowhood, besieged by suitors, we readers are obliquely invited by Murdoch to find parallels in her situation with Penelope, awaiting the return of Odysseus.
From the beginning of the novel we learn of the Countıs longstanding adoration of Gertrude. It was a passion he enjoyed nourishing surreptitiously when Gertrude was safely unavailable,ı married to a healthy Guy, but, with the onset of Guyıs serious illness, finally diagnosed as inoperable cancer, the Count began to feel a kind of panic. He had cherished the position of enacting the role of the faithful knight in chivalric tale, the silent but loyal and devoted observer of his friendsı happiness. A shy, solitary individual, he dreaded the prospect of ever needing to abandon his passivity, openly to confess his love, to take active steps which might enable his eventually wedding Gertrude. But, although the Countıs feelings for Gertrude had never been expressed, Guy had intuited his friendıs secret and, on his deathbed, he seemed to bless their union, words overheard by the Count, standing outside the room (p. 102). It is a conversation the Count is unable to forget after Guy has gone, and he resolves to ask Gertrude for her hand in marriage one year after Guyıs death, despite the suitors who surround her, members of the circle of les cousins et les tantes, whom the Count mentally calculates as numbering at least six other men (p. 122).
When, most improbably, it transpires that it is actually Tim -- not even included in the Countıs list of potential rivals -- who will win Gertrudeıs affection, the trials that he faces first with Daisy and then with Guyıs widow as a couple are explicitly related to the ordeals experienced by Papageno in search of true love and happiness with Papagena in Mozartıs The Magic Flute (p. 278, p. 393). In the first flush of infatuation Tim likens Gertrude to King Arthurıs Guinevere and then, with chagrin, compares their love affair to the unlikely pairing of Queen Titania and Bottom in Shakespeareıs A Midsummer Nightıs Dream. He attributes Gertrudeıs sudden passion for him to magic wrought by the enchanting beauty of France, where their love affair unexpectedly blossoms as Tim is staying at Guyıs and Gertrudeıs rural cottage near Provence:
....itıs just something to do with this here, with this place, this landscape.
Weıre under a spell. But when we go away it will fade. Youıll see Iım just
a dull fellow with assıs ears. Gertrude, you are deluded, you canıt love me,
Iım not educated, Iım not clever, I canıt paint, Iım going bald (pp. 185, 193).
Before Timıs suddenly happening to fall in love with Gertrude and finding that his love for her is as quickly and unexpectedly reciprocated, the genial, un-ambitious Tim and his mistress Daisy lead a feckless life together as a couple, and one which seems perversely self-willed in its mutual destructiveness. Daisy is described as an accomplished painter who had evinced early great promise but, deciding she really wants to be a writer, she gives up her career as an artist, choosing poverty and obscurity as she labors unsuccessfully on producing novels which can find either publishers or readers. Tim is characterized as being less talented but more modest and cunning,ı who finds that he can keep both himself and his lover financially afloat by succumbing to the temptations of commercial art, drawing pictures of cats which at least find a market (p. 85).
It is Daisy who first suggests that Tim might make his association with Guy Openshaw and his circle a lucrative one, proposing that he ask les cousins et les tantes for money. She is also hopeful that the dying Guy may have bequeathed something to Tim in his will. These are some of the topics which preoccupy the couple as they spend drunken evenings at their favorite pub, the Prince of Denmark, eating the food Tim has confiscated from the Openshawsı well-stocked larder (pp. 95-97). Daisy usually concludes these discussions with the assertion that one of us will have to marry for moneyı (p. 97).
Ironically, Daisy inadvertently sets in motion the train of events which will ultimately rob her of her lover and financial mainstay when her nagging drives Tim to visit the newly-widowed Gertrude to ask for assistance. She responds to his request with the loan of the Openshaw cottage in Provence, which provides the congenial setting for Gertrudeıs and Timıs falling in love. On hearing Tim confess his romantic attachment to Gertrude, Daisy immediately assumes that Tim is acting on her behalf; she is grateful that heıd marry the bitch so that [they] could live on the proceedsı (p. 227). She is shocked and furious when she learns that Tim actually loves Gertrude.
Tim and Daisy as an impoverished couple driven to contemplate the expedient of marrying wellı to continue their own relationship differ from such literary predecessors as Merton Denshaw and Kate Croy in Jamesıs The Wings of the Dove and Lawrence Selden and Lily Bart in Whartonıs The House of Mirth in the sense that theirs appears to be a willful reluctance to seek the gainful employment which would allow them to wed. The strict social and economic conditions constraining Jamesıs and Whartonıs protagonists in strait-laced, rigidly hierarchical nineteenth-century American East Coast society are inapplicable to the modern-day London setting of Nuns and Soldiers. This might be seen fatally to weaken the very underpinning of Murdochıs plot, dependent as it is upon an illusion rather than harsh intractable facts and, indeed, on its publication, the novel attracted some less than favorable reviews (13).
These factsı are inescapable for Whartonıs and Jamesıs protagonists. They are what fuel the tragedy of The House of Mirth, culminating in the suicide of the failed social climber, Lily Bart. They are responsible for the ultimate irony concluding The Wings of the Dove. Kate Croy learns that her schemeı has succeeded, that Milly Theale has bequeathed money to her lover, Merton Densher, but Densher is unable to accept the money Milly has left him, and Millyıs death signals that of his relationship with Croy.
The interrelatedness of marriage and money is a theme as old as literature itself. It is a topic which found, perhaps, its most perceptive, eloquent analyst in Jane Austen, whose novels all revolve upon the central theme of the moral turpitude implied in marrying purely for financial profit while recognizing the dangerous recklessness of marrying solely for love, without due consideration for material or social proprieties.
The couple depicted in Whartonıs Glimpses of the Moon attempt to deflect their potentially tragic fate. Two impecunious inhabitants of Whartonıs Old Worldı Boston society -- Susy Branch and her lover Nick Lansing -- decide to disregard the imprudence of their romance and to wed, calculating that their scheme of relying on the patronage of well-connected, wealthy friends might ensure them at least a year of happiness. Susy seems to echo one of Austenıs hapless heroines in her bitter reflections on the blessed moral freedom that wealth confer[s] (14). They agree that their marriage...shall continue only as long as their wedding cheques can be made to last, or until one of them gets a better offerı (15). They nearly accede to the heartlessness implicit in this agreement, both almost taking up with new, rich partners, but their cynicism eventually dissolves in a recognition of the importance they must accord their love for each other, accompanied, providentially, by Nickıs finally being able to earn the money which will permit their reunion.
The characters in Nuns and Soldiers, like the typical inhabitants of Murdochıs novels, exist in what Martin Amis has described as a suspended and eroticised world, removed from the anxieties of health and money and the half-made feelings on which most of us subsistı (16). Does Murdochıs inability to connect with real life in her novels matter? Her biographer, Peter Conradi, thinks not, arguing, rather, that the task Murdoch set herself in such novels as Nuns and Soldiers was how to marry the inner and outer worlds, how to create fictions that honour both a strict causality and a strict sense of the privacy and ³freedom² that the moral agent might find himself endowed withı (17).
Notes
1.
Max Beerbohm, ³Jacobean and Shavian,² included in Henry James: A Collection
of Critical Essays, edited by Leon Edel (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-
Hall, Inc., 1963), p. 18.
2. See A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (London,
1965), p. 122 and Peter J. Conradi, The
Saint and the Artist: A Study of the
Fiction of Iris Murdoch (London: Harper and Collins, 2001), p. 74.
3. Conradi, Ibid., p. 200.
4.
Ibid.
5. John Bayley, Elegy for Iris (New York: Picador, 1999), pp. 42-3.
6. Ibid., p. 43.
7. Conradi, p. 92.
8. Ibid. Conradi observes that In Nuns and Soldiers, whose title enacts this dualism,
the acquisitve Gertrude hopes to go through life with the ex-nun Anne Cavidge...the
very image of the mutual usefulness of a worldly cunning and an other-worldly
wisdom. But these two poetries separate out.ı
9. Van Wyck Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James, quoted in Edmund Wilsonıs
³The Pilgrimage,² Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by
Leon Edel (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), p. 67.
10. See Edith Wharton, ³The Introduction,² The House of Mirth (London: Oxford
University Press, 1936, reprinted 1952), pp. v-xi.
11. Ibid., pp. x-xi. In her introduction, Wharton reflects with bemusement on her good
fortune in having published The House of Mirth at a time when a lovely girl could
besmirch her reputation by taking tea between trains at a bachelorıs flat,ı and observes
that the scandalı generated by such a proposition was in no small measure responsible
for the novelıs contemporary success.
12. Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (London: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 27. Here-
after, page references to Nuns and Soldiers are quoted within the body of the text.
13. See, for example, George Stadeıs New York Times review entitled ³A Romance
for Highbrows,² 4 January 1981.
14. Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon (London: Virago Press, 1995; first
published 1922), p. 177.
15. Ibid., p. vi.
16. Martin Amis, review of Nuns and Soldiers, ³Letıs Fall in Love,² Observer, 7
September 1980, included in Peter J. Conradiıs Iris Murdoch: A Life (London:
Harper Collins, 2001), p. 559.
17. Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, p. 325.