Nuns and Soldiers

by Iris Murdoch

  I became a different person, I lived in a different world where everything was new and bright, but all my ordinary judgements left me. It was as if my mind was drained clean and I had a new mind, beautiful and clear but unfamiliar and hard to manage. All the dull old usual realities were gone.

  For Murdoch, love is a transcendent experience, which takes hold of the lover in rather the same way as men and women used to feel possessed by a god.

  Of course, a realist will see this as over the top. We know that human love rarely remains on this sublime level. The scales soon fall from our eyes, and we then see the beloved as he is, warts and all. But Murdoch is well aware that love does not often work out. In this novel, indeed, love is usually painful and hopeless. We find that there is a chain of suffering: the Count is in love with Gertrude, who is in love with Tim; Anne Cavidge loves the Count; Manfred, Guy’s cousin, is in love with Anne; and Mrs Mount is in love with Manfred. In the normal course of events, it seems, love is not returned. This revelation of holiness may seem a benign visitation at the outset, but it brings only pain. Yet this is where more ordinary human beings can become nuns or soldiers, because unrequited love itself can force us to transcend the self. It gives us nothing, for our devotion is concentrated on a person who is scarcely aware of our existence. As Anne explains to the Count, who feels that he cannot stay in London to be a daily witness to Gertrude’s marriage to Tim: ‘This is what Polish heroism is for, to be nobody and nothing, and try after all to enjoy it.’ Unloved lovers are soldiers like the Count, standing constantly to attention before the oblivious beloved. They are not unlike Anne, beseeching her ‘nonexistent God’. This type of love can go bad and lead to bitterness; or it can lead to a heroic self-abandonment, as, constantly disregarded, the self-important ego dwindles away.

  The novel concentrates, however, on the story of Gertrude and Tim, who, like many of the heroes of mythology, has to undergo a series of ordeals, before he can make his love for Gertrude a viable reality. One peak experience is never enough; it has to be creatively integrated into daily life. A crucial moment in Tim’s spiritual journey is his final departure from Daisy, who has been his companion for years. For once, Tim is acting selflessly and against his own desires. He is deliberately walking into a terrifying vacuum. Yet both Tim and Daisy experience his departure as a moment of grace, but also as a death. They have deliberately chosen the annihilation of their relationship and, inevitably, are putting to death a crucial part of themselves. They can thus share a moment of revelation. When we look at somebody with our own well-being constantly in mind, we cannot see the person as he or she really is. Our vision is distorted by a subjectivity which is destructive and exploitative. When Tim finally has the courage to set Daisy free, he sees her transfigured. They no longer view each other through the prism of their own selfishness. Each feels that the other has become a god. They have seen what is sacred in the other.

  Finally, Tim has to undergo ordeal by water. This is a frequent motif in Murdoch’s novels; characters often have to endure some watery trial before they can see their way clearly. In many cultures, the symbol of immersion in the deep represents a rite of passage, the emergence of a new reality or a profound transformation. We see this in the biblical myth of the Israelites who escape from slavery by passing through the miraculously parted Sea of Reeds. The Christian sacrament of baptism is another instance of this universal symbolism. Tim falls into a dangerous canal when, disregarding his own safety, he tries to rescue a drowning dog. This moment of gratuitous and disinterested compassion leads to his salvation. Swept along by the canal into the depths of the earth, he emerges safely into the sunlight, battered and dishevelled, and makes his final, successful return to Gertrude.

  Human beings need salvation. This does not mean ‘going to heaven’, a concept which both Anne and Guy dismiss as an anti-religious idea. As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragility. But we will not be rescued by a supernatural deity nor by the crucified Christ. We have to make an effort of imagination to save ourselves. Murdoch’s novel shows that, in Robert Browning’s words, we have ‘finite hearts that yearn’, but, as St Augustine observed, it is this yearning that makes the heart run deep. It seems to be characteristic of the human mind to have experiences and to imagine realities that transcend it. Love, like religion, may be a delusion, but if we are sufficiently ingenious, it can sometimes save us. The Count tells Anne that for years his unrequited love for Gertrude brought him some consolation. ‘I did it all, I enacted both sides of the relation, and this could be done because she was inaccessible.’ He adds: ‘We dream that we are loved, because otherwise we would die.’ At the end of the novel, Anne reflects that this is also true of the religious quest. We imagine God or Christ to save ourselves from the bleak realities of our existence, but if it is truly creative this effort can itself bring a measure of relief. Jean-Paul Sartre defined the imagination as the ability to think of what is not there. It is, therefore, the chief religious faculty, since it enables us to conceive the eternally absent God. But in order to glimpse this transcendence, we must give ourselves away. It seems that the discipline of the nun and the soldier, which requires an absolute self-abandonment, brings its own freedom and its own peace.

  The novel closes with Anne ‘homeless and free ... facing the void which she had chosen’. But it is not a depressing conclusion. Iris Murdoch was an important novelist because she reminded us of truths which the dearth of religion in our society has obscured. But she is able to merge this mythological vision with the comedy of manners. We are not simply suffering, yearning creatures. We are also absurd, and, in her kindly, dispassionate way, Murdoch points this out. There are moments of vintage Murdochian comedy in this novel. There is the robust, bracing humour of Daisy; the poignant vanity of Mrs Mount, who habitually rearranges her face before looking in the mirror, so that she always sees a radiant, serene and fulfilled image of herself; and the ludicrous egotism of Tim and Gertrude, as they fall back from their grand vision into the self-regarding complacency of marriage. Like all good comedy, Murdoch’s humour is rooted in sorrow and pain, but it also cuts us down to size, and reminds us that however great our aspiration, however much we suffer, and however arduous our quest, we remain little creatures, who should not take ourselves too seriously.

  Karen Armstrong

  2001

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘WITTGENSTEIN -’

  ‘Yes?’ said the Count.

  The dying man shifted on the bed, rolling his head rhythmically to and fro in a way that had become habitual only in the last few days. Pain?

  The Count was standing at the window. He never sat down now in Guy’s presence. He had been more familiar once, though Guy had always been a sort of king in his life: his model, his teacher, his best friend, his standard, his judge; but most especially something royal. Now another and a greater king was present in the room.

  ‘He was a sort of amateur, really.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Count. He was puzzled by Guy’s sudden desire to belittle a thinker whom he had formerly admired. Perhaps he needed to feel that Wittgenstein too would not survive.

  ‘A naïve and touching belief in the power of pure thought. And that man imagined we would never reach the moon.’

  ‘Yes.’ The Count had often talked of abstract matters with Guy, but in the past they had talked of so much else, they had even gossiped. Now there were few topics left. Their conversation had become refined and chilled until nothing personal remained between them. Love? There could be no expression of it now, any gesture of affection would be a gross error of taste. It was a matter of behaving correctly until the end. The awful egoism of the dying. The Count knew how little now Guy needed or wanted his affection, or even Gertrude’s; and he knew too, in his grief, that he himself was withdrawing, stifling his compassion, coming to see it as fruitless suffering. We do not want to care too much for what
we are losing. Surreptitiously we remove our sympathy, and prepare the dying one for death, diminish him, strip him of his last attractions. We abandon the dying like a sick beast left under the hedge. Death is supposed to show us truth, but is its own place of illusion. It defeats love. Perhaps shows us that after all there is none. I am thinking Guy’s thoughts now, the Count said to himself. I do not think this. But then I am not dying.

  He pulled back the curtain a little and looked out into the November evening. Snow had begun to fall again in Ebury Street, large slow flakes moving densely, steadily, with visible silence, in the light of the street lamps, and crowding dimly above in the windless dark. A few cars hissed by, their sound muted and softened. The Count was about to say, ‘It’s snowing,’ but checked himself. When someone is dying there is no point in telling him about the snow. There was no more weather for Guy.

  ‘It was the oracular voice. We felt it had to be true.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A philosopher’s thought suits you or it doesn’t. It’s only deep in that sense. Like a novel.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Count. He added, ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Linguistic idealism. A dance of bloodless categories after all.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  ‘But really, could I be happy now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said the Count. He was always, now, frightened that even in these sterile conversations something terrible might be said. He was not sure what he anticipated, but there could be something dreadful, a truth, a mistake.

  ‘Death is not an event in life. He lives eternally who lives in the present. To see the world without desire is to see its beauty. The beautiful makes happy.’

  ‘I never understood that,’ said the Count, ‘but it doesn’t seem to add up. I suppose it’s out of Schopenhauer.’

  ‘Schopenhauer, Mauthner, Karl Kraus - what a charlatan.’

  The Count looked surreptitiously at his watch. The nurse put a strict time limit on his conversations with Guy. If he stayed too long Guy began to ramble, the abstract moving on into the visionary, the mind-computer beginning to jumble its items. A little less blood to the brain and we are all raving lunatics spouting delusions. Guy’s ramblings were to the Count unspeakably painful: the helpless still self-aware irrationality of the most rational of minds. What was it like within? It was the pain-killing drugs, of course, the cause was chemical. Did that make it better? It was not natural. But was death natural?

  ‘Language games, funeral games. But - the point - is -’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.’

  ‘And without that?’

  ‘We can’t experience the present. I mean dying does -’

  ‘It drives away -’

  ‘Yes. Death and dying are enemies. Death is an alien voluptuous power. It’s an idea that can be worked upon. By the survivors. ’

  Oh we shall work, thought the Count, we shall work. We shall have time then.

  ‘Sex goes, you know. A dying man with sexual desire - that would be obscene -’

  The Count said nothing. He turned again to the window and rubbed away the misty patch which his breath had made upon the glass.

  ‘Suffering is such muck. Death is clean. And there won’t be any - lux perpetua - how I’d hate that. Only nox perpetua - thank God. It’s only the - Ereignis -’

  ‘The -’

  ‘That one’s afraid of. Because there is - probably-a sort of event - half an event - anyway - and one does wonder - what it will be like - when it comes -’

  The Count did not want to talk about this. He cleared his throat but not in time to interrupt.

  ‘I suppose one will die as an animal. Perhaps few people die a human death. Of exhaustion, or else in some kind of trance. Let the fever run like a storm-driven ship. And in the end - there’s so little of one left to vanish. All is vanity. Our breaths are numbered. I can see the imaginable number of my own - just coming - into view.’

  The Count continued to stand at the window staring at the huge slow illuminated snow flakes showering steadily out of the dark. He wanted to stop Guy, to make him talk about ordinary things, and yet he felt too: perhaps this speech is precious to him, his eloquence, the last personal possession of the breaking mind. Perhaps he needs me to make possible a soliloquy which soothes his anguish. But it’s too fast, too odd, I can’t play with his ideas like I used to. I am dull and I can’t converse, or is my silence enough? Will he want to see me tomorrow? He has banished the others. There will be a last meeting. The Count came to Ebury Street every evening now, he had given up his modest social life. Soon there would be no more tomorrows anyway. The cancer was advanced, the doctor doubted whether Guy would last till Christmas. The Count did not look that far ahead. A crisis in his own life was approaching from which he carefully, honourably averted his eyes.

  Guy was still rolling his head to and fro. He was a little older than the Count, forty-three, but he seemed an old man now, the leonine look quite gone. His mane of hair had been cut, more had fallen out. His scored forehead was a dome from which all else fell away. The big head had shrunk and sharpened, accentuating his Jewish features. A glittering-eyed rabbinical ancestor glared out through his face. Guy was half Jewish, his forebears Christianized Jews, wealthy men, Englishmen. The Count contemplated Guy’s Jewish mask. The Count’s father had been ferociously anti-Semitic. For this, and for much else, the Count (who was Polish) did constant penance.

  Trying at last to assert ordinariness the Count said, ‘Are you all right for books? Can I bring you anything?’

  ‘No, The Odyssey will see me out. I always thought of myself as Odysseus. Only now-I won’t get back-I hope I’ll have time to finish it. Though it’s so awfully cruel at the end ... Are they coming this evening - ?’

  ‘You mean - ?’

  ‘Les cousins et les tantes.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine so.’

  ‘They flee from me that some time did me seek.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the Count, ‘if there is anyone whom you would like to see, I can guarantee that that person would like to see you.’ He had picked up from Guy a certain almost awkward precision of speech.

  ‘No one understands Pindar. No one knows where Mozart’s grave is. What does it prove that Wittgenstein never thought we’d reach the moon? If Hannibal had marched on Rome after the battle of Cannae he would have taken it. Ah well. Poscimur. It sounds different tonight.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘The world.’

  ‘It’s snowing.’

  ‘I’d like to see -’

  ‘The snow?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Manfred?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s nearly time for the nurse.’

  ‘You’re bored, Peter.’

  This was the only real remark which Guy had addressed to him tonight, one of the last precious signs, in the midst of that appalling privileged monologue, of a continuing connection between them. It was almost too much for the Count, he nearly exclaimed with pity and distress. But he answered as Guy required him to do, as Guy had taught him to do. ‘No. It isn’t boredom. I just can’t pick up your ideas, perhaps I don’t want to. And not to allow you to lead the conversation - would be fearfully impolite.’

  Guy acknowledged this with the quick grimace which was now his smile. He lay quiet at last, propped up. Their eyes met, then shied away from the spark of pain.

  ‘Ah well - ah well - she shouldn’t have sold the ring -’

  ‘Who - ?’

  ‘En fin de compte - ça revient au même -’

  ‘De s’enivrer solitairement ou de conduire les peuples.’ The Count completed the quotation, one of Guy’s favourites.

  ‘Everything’s gone wrong since Aristotle, we can see why now. Liberty died with Cicero. Where’s Gerald?’

  ‘In Australia with the big telescope. Would you - ?’

  ‘I used to believe my thoughts would wander in in
finite spaces, but that was a dream. Gerald talks about the cosmos, but that’s impossible, you can’t talk about everything. That one knows anything at all ... is not guaranteed ... by the game ...’

  ‘What - ?’

  ‘Our worlds wax and wane with a difference. We belong to different tribes.’

  ‘We have always done so,’ said the Count.

  ‘No - only now - Oh - how ill’s all here. How much I wish I could -’

  ‘Could - ?’

  ‘See it -’

  ‘See?’

  ‘See it ... the whole ... of logical space ... the upper side ... of the cube ...’

  Through the door which Guy’s wife Gertrude had quietly opened, the Count could see the Night Nurse sitting in the hall. She rose now and came promptly forward, smiling, a sturdy brunette with almost dusky red cheeks. She had changed her boots for slippers but still smelt of the open air and the cold. She gave out an unfocused friendliness, her fine dark eyes rather vaguely danced and twinkled, she was thinking of other things, satisfactions, plans. She tossed and patted her wavy dark hair, and had a little air of capable self-satisfaction which would have been pleasing, even reassuring, in a situation which admitted of hope. As it was there was something almost allegorically sad about her detachment from the misery that surrounded her. The Count stood aside to let her in, then raised a hand to Guy and departed. The door closed. Gertrude, who had not entered with the nurse, had already gone back to the drawing-room.

  The Count, it should be explained, was not a real count. His life had been a conceptual muddle, a mistake. So had his father’s life. Of remoter ancestors he knew nothing, except that his paternal grandfather, who was killed in the first war, had been a professional soldier. His parents and his elder brother Jozef, then a baby, had come to England from Poland before the second war. His father, his name was Bogdan Szczepanski, was a Marxist. His mother was a Catholic. (Her name was Maria.) The marriage was not a success.