22 Dec. 2019
When an authoritative book on
post-World War II Irish fiction is written, it will be fascinating to see how
William Trevor and Iris Murdoch are considered. Not so much their literary
qualities, which are undeniable, but whether or not they are embraced as Irish.
They were almost
contemporaries. Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919, William
Trevor Cox in County Cork in 1928. Murdoch died in 1999, Trevor in 2016. Both
lived their entire literary lives in England—Murdoch’s parents moved to London
when she was just a few weeks old; Trevor went there at age 26 in 1954, the
year Murdoch’s first novel, “Under the Net,” was published to rousingly good
reviews.
I do not know if they ever met
or read each other. They had a few things in common, such as a love of Russian
literature. Murdoch, who was renowned as both a philosopher and novelist, was
drawn to the more philosophical writers Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Trevor leaned
toward the painterly sensibility of Chekhov, with whom he was destined to be
compared.
They were alike in one other
way: Although they lived in England, the subject of much of their writing was
Ireland. Certainly there was nothing new about this; many prominent Irish
poets, novelists and playwrights who spent most of their adult life abroad, from
Wilde and Shaw to Edna O’Brien, did the same. This dual citizenship has
afforded the Irish abroad a perspective unique in Western literature, except
with the exception of exiles like Vladimir Nabokov.
Of the great poet Louis
MacNeice it was said that “to the Irish he often seemed an exile, to the
English a stranger.” MacNeice, whose father, a widower, left County Antrim for
England when he was 10, wrote angrily and eloquently about his connections with
the country of his birth, and in “Valediction” he perhaps summed up the mindset
of the Irish writer abroad:
“But I cannot deny my past to
which my self is wed,
The woven figure cannot undo
its thread.”
William Trevor, the greatest
Irish-born writer since Joyce not to be afforded the honor of the Nobel Prize,
was often—too often—referred to as “the Irish Chekov.” He never denied his
interest in or similarities to the great Russian; most of Trevor’s and
Chekhov’s stories involve people living outside what is called the mainstream,
and who are not particularly bothered by or even aware of that fact. Like
Chekhov, Trevor’s stories are about the pursuit, capture and dissection of
ordinary life.
But Trevor’s method, entirely
his own, puts his people in extraordinary places where a lightning flash gives
sudden illumination to some dark corner of their personality. Trevor’s
atmosphere is often pervaded by a vague whiff of impending dread that is alien
to Chekhov. In these stories about lonely, repressed spinsters, middle-aged
salesmen, solitary drinkers, weary shopkeepers, petty thieves, and in one case,
a serial killer, Trevor never raises his voice or introduces a note of
melodrama; surely he subscribed to John Stuart Mills’ dictum, one revered by
Yeats, that “Rhetoric is heard, poetry is overheard.”
Here’s another distinction
between the Irishman and the Russian: Chekhov wrote several long stories but
only one novel, while Trevor may be judged by future generations of readers to
have been a greater novelist than story writer. Perhaps the most misleading
characterization of Trevor is that he was a great writer of stories who dabbled
in longer fiction. Trevor himself may have contributed to this fallacy when he
told The New York Times many years ago, “I start writing away, and sometimes I
find myself, to my considerable horror, in the midst of a novel.”
If one of Trevor’s finest
novels, “Fools of Fortune,” began as a short story, one can imagine the horror
of its characters when they found their angst was to spread out over 200 pages.
Published in 1983, “Fools of Fortune” is set during and after The Troubles,
which pitted not just Catholics against Protestants but neighbors and even
relatives against one another with a ferocity that even Americans during the
Civil War never experienced. Readers of Trevor’s stories and other novels,
particularly “The Story of Lucy Gault,” will find a similar atmosphere and
theme in “Fools of Fortune.”
But the novel isn’t about the
war, it’s about its consequences. As Francine Prose points out in its
introduction, “one of the most striking things about the book is the extent to
which it takes time as its subject.” As Trevor said in an interview, time “both
heals and destroys, depending on the nature of the wound.”
“Fools of Fortune” spans 60
years, during which we see, as a character says, “Destruction casts shadows
which are always there. … We will never escape the shadows of destruction that
pervade Kilneagh [the estate house torched by the British Black and Tans].”
The story has the sweep of a
long historical novel but is told with the compactness of a master of short
fiction. It doesn’t end so much as wind down. The characters, Trevor writes,
“are aware that there is a miracle in this end”— a quiet miracle, that is, not
to be confused with a happy ending.
The salacious wit of Iris
Murdoch is the perfect antidote for the ominous aura of Trevor’s work (and vice
versa). In the recent flood of appreciation that surrounded her 100th birthday
on July 15, critics were torn between “Under the Net” (1954) and Booker Prize
winner “The Sea, the Sea” (1978) as her best novel; I favor the light, fast
nastiness of the former. (The title has been traced by scholars to a treatise
by the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein—good luck figuring it out.)
The protagonist of “Under the
Net,” Jake Donaghue, is a sometime artist, hack writer, and translator who
always manages to scrape by. “It’s easier to sell junk when you’re known,” he
finds, “than works of genius when you’re unknown.” He is either a gadfly or
ingratiating, depending on his mood, and desperately in search of a moral
compass. After turning down an easy windfall, he worries: “What prevented the
closure of this mutually rewarding deal? My principles. Surely there must be
some way round. In similar fixes, I have rarely failed to find one.” When in
need of advice, he goes to a museum and talks to the painting, Franz Hall’s
“The Cavalier”; the painting talks back to him. When he is barred admission to
an entrance for authorized persons, he decides, “I am myself a sort of
professional Unauthorized Person.”
The novel covers a few days in
his life when he seeks shelter from friends after being thrown into the streets
by his lady friend, who’s tired of his shiftlessness. (Rather than beg for
forgiveness, Jake “followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in
moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.”)
Over those few days, Jake is
down and out in both London and, for a while, Paris. He manages to connect and
reconnect with a wide strata of bohemians, from actresses to gamblers to movie
producers and a soapbox Socialist. This is all done in search for the love of
his life, whom he scarcely acknowledges until about halfway through the book.
It’s a picaresque novel, if the term can be applied to a story in a modern
urban setting.
There would seem to be no way
that he could avoid a bad end, but, remarkably, Jake, with a little help from
his friends—including an aging and engaging movie wonder dog named Mars—has an
epiphany.
On an impulse, he takes a job
as a hospital janitor, though his coworkers are mildly suspicious of him:
“Perhaps some obscure instinct warned them that I was an intellectual.” Still,
he discovers “a feeling which was almost entirely new to me, that of
having done something.” By the novel’s delightfully unexpected end,
Jake sheds his cynicism and rediscovers the literary ideals of his youth.
Purists may not regard “Under
the Net” as an Irish novel, though Jake Donaghue is of Irish descent, as is a
cousin from Dublin with whom he shares some adventures. Jake bears a bit of
resemblance to Gulley Jimson, the reprobate painter in Joyce Cary’s 1944 novel
“The Horse’s Mouth,” and a 1955 Donaghue would see a kindred spirit in
Sebastian Dangerfield from J.P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man.”
For her own part, Murdoch was
always ambiguous about her Irishness. In 1978 she told Philippa Foot that she
felt “unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred”—a sentiment only an
Irishman or woman could hold. In 1965, her controversial novel “The Red and the
Green” was published, and she came to regret its mildly Irish Republican
leanings. According to her biographer, Peter J. Conradi, she sympathized in
later years with the Northern Irish anti-Catholic bigot Ian Paisley.
Conradi argues, “No one ever
agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris’s Belfast cousins
today call themselves British, not Irish … [but] with both parents brought up
in Ireland, and an ancestry within Ireland both North and South going back
three centuries, Iris has as valid a claim to call herself Irish as most North
Americans have to call themselves American.”
You can agree or disagree, or
you can disregard politics and simply read Murdoch because she’s an outstanding
novelist.
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