Enough Already

The Bell a novel by Iris Murdoch.  Penguin Classics.  296 pp.  $16.00.  ****

Iris Murdoch.  I can’t live with her and can’t live without her.  Years ago, when my mentor Wallace Fowlie had retired, he wasn’t interested in much modernist fiction, but loved Iris Murdoch, so he always had plenty to read.  My favorite New York Times reviewer, Dwight Garner, is a big fan, and wrote a major appreciation of her on the 100^th anniversary of her birth.  Someone from the #readingcommunity on Twitter recently said she had purchased all of the novels of Murdoch in new editions and was systematically rereading them.  I asked if she had any favorites.  She mentioned a couple that I had already read, but also included The Bell, an early novel, from 1958, that I didn’t remember anyone mentioning before.  It sounded like my kind of book, about “a lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people  . . . encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns.”  I thought I’d give it a try.

Murdoch was hugely talented and intelligent.  She was a fluent and apparently rapid writer who churned out one large novel after another when her career was in its heyday, and has many fans who love her.  I want to love her, and I admire her sentences and her intelligence.  But I inevitably feel her novels go on too long, that they’re full of descriptions and disquisitions that we don’t need to advance the action.

The Bell largely concerns a young woman, Dora Greenfield, who has been estranged from her husband but has decided to return to him.  She’s been living in London, and he resides at the above mentioned lay community, but not as a true believer; he’s an art professor, and is studying an ancient manuscript.  He’s devoted to academic work, and is fundamentally conservative; he respects the religious life around him without really participating.

I get it that Dora is mixed up and doesn’t know what to do with herself.  She says that she loves this man, an expression that I often don’t understand, especially in this case.  Her husband Paul is stuffy, arrogant, and abusive, stifling to his wife.  She seems like a free spirit, who would soar with a different kind of person.  He’s incredibly controlling, and she will not be controlled.  Perhaps they like this dynamic.

There is a subplot concerning a gay man that is fascinating but weirdly dated.  I was startled to read, in a book by Iris Murdoch (I had to remind myself it was published in 1958) the following sentence: “Michael Meade at twenty-five had already known for some while that he was what they world called perverted.”  He has a past, in fact, where he was at a school with a young man named Nick, and he was aware that Nick shared his orientation while being even more ambivalent about it than he.  They had a close mentor student relationship which got emotional and physical (to the extent of clasping hands) but never sexual.  It nevertheless exceeded appropriate bounds, and Michael knew it.  In the end, Nick not only blew the whistle on Michael, out of youthful shame, no doubt, he exaggerated what had happened, and put all the onus on Michael (who was the older responsible party to be sure).

Michael was dismissed from his position and fled the teaching profession altogether.  His real wish was to become an Anglican clergyman; he was sincerely religious.  But now that he has joined this lay community where he feels very much at home, who should show up but his old nemesis Nick, now an aging and not especially attractive alcoholic who obviously needs help, but has no religious feelings and no wish to be in such a community.  He’s there because his sister—with whom he’s very close—is part of it, in fact its prize pupil.  She intends to become a nun.

As if Michael doesn’t have enough problems, another young man has arrived in the community, attractive and energetic, quite religious, and slated to enter Oxford in the fall. Toby lives in the same house as Nick, whose best friend is a bottle of booze, and Michael finds himself attracted to him.  As is Dora, for that matter, and anyone who likes attractive young men.  Dora is attracted to Michael as well; he seems to be the kind of gay man who attracts straight women.  Another woman with the hots for Michael—though we find out only near the end—is Catherine, the nun-to-be.  This sounds like a situation where things can’t end well, and they don’t, except that Dora manages to tear herself away from Paul, Toby makes it to Oxford, Michael gives up his dream of being clergy.  Maybe they do end well, come to think of it.  But the community of lay believers is a casualty.

I liked the book at the end.  Dora—whom everyone in the community frowned on because she was a wayward wife, liked to visit the local pub, returned to London now and then for some fun, didn’t really take part in community life—shakes her head and realizes she might not be so bad after all.  But there were long stretches in the middle—sermons by Michael and also by a fatuous bore named John—where I thought, I get it, Iris, these people are dopes.  Well meaning dopes, but dopes.  I don’t need to hear them being dopey.

I always wind up thinking she needs an editor (except in The Sea, The Sea, her masterpiece).  But who would have had the nerve to edit Iris Murdoch?