A Fairly Honourable Defeat Read Free

through in a haze of fatigue and distraction. His lifestyle may be modeled on that of Simone Weil herself, who refused to be an ivory-tower academic philosopher, worked in a factory, and devoted herself to charity work, her eventual death seemingly due to exhaustion. Tallis lives, to use that tired expression, in the “real world.” The physicality of his domain’s sticky floors, scuttling parasites, putrid odors, and mildewed leftovers contrasts with the cocktail-anesthetized order of the Fosters’ home. His immersion in the muddle of the quotidian stands opposed to Julius’s cool detachment or Rupert’s theorizing.
    Iris Murdoch herself seems to have lived not in Tallis’s squalor but at least in work-focused disarray. In Iris and Her Friends , John Bayley recounts an amusing anecdote that illustrates this. On one occasion they had brought home a high-quality pork pie from “some superior delicatessen.” The pie was set down on the kitchen table as they entered, but when suppertime arrived, there was no sign of it, and its disappearance was never solved. From then on, whenever something became mislaid, they would say it had probably “Gone to Pieland.” 5 The domestic muddle of Murdoch and Bayley, however, was a consequence of two very productive intellectuals leading busy lives. And in all his muddle, Tallis focuses on work, on trying to help others in practical ways, and he avoids judging or categorizing others. He holds on to the tangible, literally so, as he repeatedly is seen gripping the edge of the table.
    Murdoch’s fiction frequently offers work as the way out of the self-serving fantasies of solipsism, even simple labor proving therapeutic. In her first novel, Under the Net , in which many of the patterns that will be elaborated in her later fiction are laid out with clarity, the protagonist has all his preconceived visions of his world shattered. Desolate, he spends days in a state of symbolic death, then begins a resurrection through a job as a nurse’s aide. He learns to accomplish simple tasks, to follow a regimen, and to pay attention to the physical objects with which he works. Likewise, in The Bell, the leading female character, Dora, shows a fondness similar to Morgan’s for “pistol shots and anger.” After her reckless grand schemes collapse, she, too, begins her recuperation with simple physical labor and learning to swim. No one other than Tallis seems very seriously engaged in work in this novel, unless it is Axel. Rupert’s comfortable routine seems indulgently dilettantish, a comfortable home away from home with a secretary to wait on him in place of Hilda. Small wonder that something mildly conspiratorial and with a whiff of danger has appeal for him.
    Of necessity, then, work focuses attention upon an exterior reality rather than the “second best act” of overanalysis and fascination with one’s own thoughts or the allure of observing oneself playing a role. The other circumstance that Murdoch suggests may avoid the temptations of self-absorption and creating dramas is instinctive action. Instinct precludes the opportunity to complicate. It avoids entry into the mire of interesting means that subsume the putative end. Again, Tallis provides the illustration. His spontaneous actions in the Chinese restaurant and his immediately leading Julius to the telephone at the end of the novel show, as Axel says, that he is “the only person about the place with really sound instincts.”
    A Fairly Honourable Defeat, then, incorporates many elements that are characteristic of Murdoch’s fiction. It certainly stands as a prime example of the “amatory gavotte,” its web of flirtations, affairs, and marriages incorporating all of its cast in its multiple relationships. Murdoch’s love relationships can take all forms: parental, sibling, conjugal, marital, heterosexual, homosexual, even, in at least one novel, incestuous. A Fairly Honourable Defeat does not incorporate that whole gamut