who violently and bullheadedly persists in all the wrong directions until time and experience—both under great pressure—and love from an unexpected quarter partially redeem him. His memoir, which covers one late May and June, and then a bit of an early-autumnal August, describes a series of derailments from his original intentions. He planned to leave the London theater scene, live solus, perhaps indulging in a poignant interlude with a sweet, boyish woman who used to be a (not very good) actress, Lizzie Scherer, whom he has kept on a string; he had twitched that string by sending her a lying, seductive letter just prior to the book’s opening. And he also plans to tell the story of his central love affair with an older actress, Clement Makin, now dead. Clement “made” him both professionally and personally, and despite their infidelities and separations, Charles was with her when she died. But before so much as a page can follow this orderly focus, Charles is visited by a horrifying vision. So distressed is the narrator that he can neither tell us immediately what it was nor continue with his original narrative plan. This derailment is a harbinger of the deluge of occasions when Charles’s experience vaults out of his control, and his narrative veers off its course into unmapped accidents as a veritable throng of Londoners appear at his doorstep (a convergence that peaks at a Whitsun revel both comic and eerie). These accidents are then interwoven with an almost equally strange sequence of daily routines, obsessively exact in their rendering, as if thereby to regain the thread that his fate has started to unravel. The story of Charles and Clement is never fully told. Charles does not succeed in a renewed affair with Lizzie. He does leave the theater scene but does not escape the moral aftermath of his time there. (Indeed, his past leads to his own near-death and to the actual death of a young man.) And finally, he moves tentatively into a state of solitude he has only begun to test. None of his plans works out—including the great last failed adventure at the novel’s core. “The country of old age” one critic called Charles’s environment, where everything he has done and left undone crowds in, like the dead in the underworld around the living hero. His attempt to steal happiness results in horrors. The gifts reserved for his age are destruction and remorse, what Yeats called “violence” and “bitterness.”
There is a contradiction built into the literary use of what we might see as the mode of Marsyas, the mode of lifelikeness or a realism of the physical as it leads to the edge of the spiritual: The catch is that although an artwork needs a shape, the ordinary world and our experiences within it are unformed and inartistic, an ill-sorted jumble of events and crisscrossing motives and roughly joined disguises—false and foolish integuments. Beauty of form is far removed from most lives. The texture of consciousness is sluggish when not venal (nobody really thinks in the shaped linguistic patternings of Hermann Broch’s Vergil or Beckett’s Watt or García Márquez’s patriarch or Coetzee’s magistrate), while the many occasions in literary art for tempting closure in the shaping of event are all too often triggered by fantasy or will. Paradoxically, it is this willed closure or neatness of finish that the true artist needs to resist, fending off the urge to smooth out the rough surfaces of pain, necessity, and accident. Instead, as in Shakespeare, exemplary in bearing witness to the terrible even in those plays most given over to a maniac tidying up of bodies in marriage and death, the goal is to render clearly and without flinching the truth of all the infinite varieties of untruth. Like Shakespeare, Murdoch canvasses the truth of untruth—human vanity, jealousy, idleness. “People lie so,” says James Arrowby to his cousin Charles, “even we old men do. Though in a way, if there is art enough it doesn’t matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art” (p. 173).
Does this model of the true art-of-the-untruth pertain in The