Iris Murdoch's 'The Bell'

On a January visit to Oxford in my Upper Sixth Form year, I purchased two of Iris Murdoch's novels in Penguin paperback - The Sandcastle (1957) and A Severed Head (1961); nearly two years later, at the start of my second year at University, I  bought The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). Re-reading the blurb on the backs of these Penguins, I dimly recall the story line of The Sandcastle, but not much else.


However, it was Murdoch's fourth novel, The Bell (1958) which I remembered (I thought) most clearly. I recently purchased a lovely dust-wrappered copy of the first edition and have just finished re-reading it.

Love, all kinds of love, is a constant and integral theme running through the novel. The Abbess, not encountered until towards the end of book, counsels Michael: 'Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it...we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimate failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected, but made perfect. The way is forward, never back'. There is a wide variety of love on display in the book: Peter Topglass's love for flora and fauna -  'he was a person who, like Chaucer's gentle knight, was remarkable for harming no one'; Paul's controlling 'love' for his wife; Mrs Mark's love of rules; Patchway's love for his garden; On Catherine, I was at one with Michael: 'he had never guessed, or tried to guess, what really went on in Catherine's mind'.  Her 'love' for him came out of the blue for me too! Is that my fault, or that of the novelist? Then, the kernel of the book, Michael's spiritual, and also carnal love (desire?) for Nick Fawley and, more fleetingly, for Toby Gashe.

Among other issues, The Bell addresses the religious and moral implications of homosexuality. Every novel Murdoch wrote after The Bell had at least one homosexual character. I hadn't realised, until many years later, that Iris Murdoch was bisexual, with several male and female affairs. Does this give verisimilitude to the descriptions of Michael's 'journey' - 'his belief that 'his religion and his passions sprang from the same source'? I found Chapter Seven (Michael's back-story) the most deeply felt of the book. Murdoch once told a friend that she inwardly identified with male homosexuals. Secondly, I had not grasped the historical context in which the novel was written. The Wolfenden Report was published in 1957; it concluded that criminalisation of homosexuality was an impingement on civil liberty. It also revealed the vocational tendencies of criminalised homosexuals to seek refuge through clerical and teaching positions. So very apt for Michael's career.

Bound up with love is power - the control exercised by Paul over Dora - 'his will arched over Dora like a canopy'; by both Nick and Toby ('for all his distaste for the situation he was sensible of a sort of pleasure in having gained power over Michael...') over Michael

The novel is book-ended by Dora Greenfield, a character I never warmed to; in fact, rather than feel compassion towards her, I felt irritated by her! whilst in no way excusing her vile husband, Paul.  Dora's view of marriage was, unsurprisingly, 'to be enclosed in the aims of another'. Says Noel Spens, her lover: 'you're unreliable and untidy and ignorant and totally exasperating...'. Maybe, at the end, 'Dora had survived. She had fed like a glutton upon the catastrophes at Imber and they had increased her substance.../', More substantial or not, I wanted to shake her throughout the book!

In Oxfam yesterday, I spotted (was it 'meant'?) and bought Peter Conradi's doorstop of a biography on Murdoch (2001) for a mere £3.99. I shouldn't have, but I did, read the pages relevant to The Bell. One should write one's own thoughts, however banal/commonplace. Still, there were some very helpful contextual points, which I didn't otherwise know. 'Michael, first of many muddled gay male 'seekers', is animated wonderfully from within: Iris's own search for peace of mind at Malling [Abbey]  from 1946 to 1949 lay behind the troubled quests of her leading characters.' Murdoch later admitted to identifying 'a little', with the Abbess, who, in the novel calls the Imber Court inmates a '"'kind of sick people disturbed and hunted by God", who can live neither in the world nor out of it.'

'Imber had retired from the world, but the world could still come to Imber to pry and mock and judge.' And a pretty harsh (but accurate?) judgement came from Noel Spens (who could not 'stand complacent swine who go around judging other people and making them feel cheap'): 'I don't think these people are consciously insincere, but they're just born to be charlatans malgré eux. I am sure there are all sorts of little feuds and delusions in this crackpot community...If people want to stop being ordinary useful members of society and take their neuroses to some remote spot to have what they imagine are spiritual experiences I'm certain they should be tolerated but I see no reason why they should be revered'. Earlier, Murdoch argues, 'Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed'. One feels this is the novelist's own credo. I think it is mine. Imber lasted just over a year.

There is much more that can be said; many more thoughts that I had as I read the book - on Nick Fawley; on James Tayper Pace; on the irony of reversal of roles - 'in the old days the Abbey used to be a curiosity in the grounds of the Court. Now the Court will be a curiosity in the grounds of the Abbey'. But already this Blog is too long.

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

My present view of Iris Murdoch has, alas, been coloured by two issues: the increasingly silly novels of her later years and the remorseless decline into Alzeimer's. For the former, I have to hand Christopher Hawtree's acerbic review of one of her last books, The Message to the Planet.(1989): 'Its themes are stated in [an] opening passage: silly names, dialogue never heard on the lips of one's acqaintance, possible lunacy... [a] torrent of twaddle'. I must admit, I had given up reading her, long before the 1980s, tiring of increasingly unrealistic characters. But I found The Bell well worth reading again.