An Accidental Man

by Iris Murdoch

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A scintillating novel of fate, accidents, and moral dilemmas

Set in the time of the Vietnam War, this story concerns the plight of a young American, happily installed in a perfect job in England, engaged to a wonderful girl, who is suddenly drafted to a war he disapproves of.

What is duty here, what is self-interest, what is cowardice? Austin Gibson Grey, the accidental man of the title, is accident-prone, also prone to bring disaster to his friend sand relations. He blames fate. But are we not all accidental, one of his victims asks. Fate and accidents make deep moral dilemmas for the characters in the long and complex tale.

Release date: March 1, 1988

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 448

Sample

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS

AN ACCIDENTAL MAN

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then in 1948 became a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she lived with her husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature.

Iris Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels, including Under the Net, her writing début of 1954, the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, the Sea (1978) and, more recently, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). She received a number of other literary awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of philosophy include Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysia As a Guide to Morals (1992) and Existentialists and Mystics (1997). She also wrote several plays, including The Italian Girl (with James Saunders) and The Black Prince, an adaptation of her novel. Her volume of poetry, A Year of Birds, which appeared in 1978, was set to music by Malcolm Williamson.

Iris Murdoch died in February 1999. Among the many who paid tribute to her as a philosopher, novelist and private individual was Peter Conradi, who in his obituary in the Guardian wrote ‘Iris Murdoch was one of the best and most influential writers of the twentieth century. Above all, she kept the traditional novel alive, and in so doing changed what it is capable of ... She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest is relaxed. We are fortunate to have shared our appalling century with her.’

IRIS MURDOCH IN PENGUIN

Fiction

 

Under the Net

 

The Flight from the Enchanter

The Sandcastle

The Bell

A Severed Head

An Unofficial Rose

The Unicorn

The Italian Girl

The Red and the Green

 

The Time of the Angels

The Nice and the Good

Bruno’s Dream

 

A Fairly Honourable Defeat

An Accidental Man

The Black Prince

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

A Word Child

 

Henry and Cato

The Sea, the Sea

Nuns and Soldiers

 

The Philosopher’s Pupil

The Good Apprentice

The Book and the Brotherhood

 

The Message to the Planet

The Green Knight

Jackson’s Dilemma

 

Non-Fiction

 

Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues

Metaphysics As a Guide to Morals

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1971

First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1972

Published in Penguin Books 1973

 

 

 

Copyright © Iris Murdoch, 1971 All rights reserved

 

ISBN: 9781101495858

 

 

 

 

 

 

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To Kreisel

‘Gracie darling, will you marry me?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘Yes.’

Ludwig Leferrier stared down into the small calm radiant un-smiling face of Gracie Tisbourne. Was it conceivable that the girl was joking? It was. Oh Lord.

‘Look, Gracie, are you serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘But I mean—’

‘Of course if you want to back out of it—’

‘Gracie! But — but — Gracie, do you love me?’

‘Can you not infer that from what I said just now?’

‘I don’t want inferred love.’

‘I love you.’

‘It’s impossible!’

‘This is becoming a rather stupid argument.’

‘Gracie. I can’t believe it!’

‘Why are you so surprised?’ said Gracie. ‘Surely the situation has been clear for some time. It has been to all my friends and relations.’

‘Oh damn your friends and relations — I mean — Gracie, you do really mean it? I love you so dreadfully much—’

‘Don’t be so silly, Ludwig,’ said Gracie. ‘Sometimes you’re just a very silly man. I love you, and I’ve done so ever since you kissed me behind that tomb thing in the British Museum. I never thought I’d be so lucky.’

‘But you expected this?’

‘I expected it now.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘So are you now dismayed?’

‘No! I’ve loved you for ages. But you’re so sort of grand. Everyone’s after you.’

‘I’m not grand. And that’s a very vulgar way of putting it.’

‘Sorry—’

‘I’m small and ignorant, whereas you know everything.’

‘As if that—! I thought I was one of hundreds.’

‘Well, you’re one of one.’

‘You’ve been so calm !’

‘A girl has her pride. Shall we now go hand in hand and tell my parents?’

‘No, please — I say, will they mind?’

‘They’ll be delighted.’

‘I somehow thought they wanted you to marry that guy Sebastian.’

‘They want what I want.’

‘They won’t mind my being American?’

‘Why should they? Especially as you aren’t going back to America any more.’

‘You said once they wanted you to marry an Englishman.’

‘Only because anyone else might take me away. But you won’t. We’ll be living in Oxford.’

‘I don’t know about Oxford. Oh Jesus, Gracie, I can’t believe it, I’m so happy — Darling, please—’

Gracie’s divan bed, on which they were sitting was very narrow and fitted in beneath a long white shelf. Small fat cushions, which Ludwig hated, and which Gracie referred to as her ‘pussy cats’, further reduced the sitting or lying area. Ludwig banged his head on the shelf. One hand burrowed under Gracie’s warm thigh. His head sank and he felt the roughness of his cheek against the smoothness of her taut dress. Crushed close together, two hearts battered in their cages. No screen of calm now. Ludwig groaned. He had never made love to her. The thing was anguish.

‘Mind the table!’

He began to fall off, twisting a rubbery leg to avoid a crash, and subsided embracing the coffee pot while Gracie above him stifled laughter. ‘Ssh, Ludwig!’

The Tisbourne’s house in Kensington, pretentiously called Pitt’s Lodge, was a narrow poky little gentleman’s residence cluttered with elegant knick-knacks masquerading as furniture. Ludwig had already broken two chairs. Behind the papery walls of the small rooms Gracie’s parents were omnipresent. Now just outside the door Clara Tisbourne was calling down to her husband, ‘Pinkie darling, the Odmores want us for the second weekend.’ It was an impossible situation even if Gracie had been willing. He could not take Gracie to his own apartment because Gracie disliked Mitzi Ricardo. Mitzi also disliked Gracie and referred to her as ‘little Madam’ until she realized that Ludwig loved her. Perhaps it would have to be the British Museum again.

‘Whatever shall we do?’ he said to Gracie.

‘About what?’

They had never discussed sex. He had no idea whether Gracie was a virgin. Must he now tell her about his campus amours? Oh Christ.

‘Here. Yes, I know. Dear Ludwig, just sit quietly and hold my hand.’

He looked into the mysterious guileless eyes of the girl to whom he had committed himself, his life, his future, his thoughts, his feelings, his whole spiritual being. She was so fantastically young. He felt centuries older than this opening flower. He felt coarse, gross, ancient, dirty. At the same moment it occurred to him that she was almost totally a stranger. He loved, he was engaged to be married to, a complete stranger.

‘Gracie, you are so pure, so true.’

‘That’s your silly talk.’

‘You’re so young!’

‘I’m nineteen. You’re only twenty-two.’

‘When shall we get married? How quickly can one get married in England?’

‘We’ve only just got engaged. Please, Ludwig. You know the way mama bounces in.’

‘What’s the use of being engaged? I want—’

‘It’s nice being engaged. We shall be a long time married. Let’s enjoy our engagement. It’s such a special time. I’ve so much liked the first five minutes of it.’

‘But, Gracie, how are we going to—’

‘Besides, mama will insist on a big white wedding and those things take ages to organize.’

‘Surely we don’t have to have all that crap? Gracie, you know you can always get what you want—’

‘Well, I want it too. It will be such fun. I’ll have Karen Arbuthnot as a bridesmaid—’

‘Gracie, have a heart—’

‘We couldn’t get married now anyway with grandmama so ill. Supposing she were to die on our wedding day?’

‘Is she very ill?’

‘Aunt Charlotte says she’s dying. But that may be wishful thinking.’

‘I feel so terribly afraid I’ll lose you.’

‘Don’t be idiotic. Here’s my hand here, feel it.’

‘Gracie, poppet, are you sure you don’t mind—’

‘What? Ludwig, you’re trembling.’

‘It’s all so sudden. I’ve been in such a state these last weeks.’

‘About little me?’

‘Yes, about you. And about — Yes. Gracie, you’re sure you don’t mind what I’ve done? I mean my not going back ever, my not going to fight, you know—’

‘Why should I mind your not wanting to fight in a wicked war? Why should I mind your choosing to live here in England with me and become English?’

‘Later on you might want to go to America and we couldn’t, I guess.’

‘I don’t want to go to America. You are my America.’

‘Dear Gracie! But — you don’t think it’s dishonourable?’

‘How can it be dishonourable to do the right thing?’

How indeed.

They were sitting side by side, precariously, as if they were on a boat. Ludwig held her right hand tightly in his. His left arm was stretched round her shoulder. His bony tweedy knees were pressed against her sleek knees, pale brown and shiny through openwork tights. She smelt of young flesh and toilet soap and pollen. Oh God, if they could only take their clothes off! Outside it was raining. Warm early summer rain playfully caressed the window. A bright subdued light showed the small pink and white houses opposite against a dark grey sky which shone like illuminated metal. There would be a rainbow somewhere above the park. Elsewhere that war was going on, high explosive and napalm and people killed and maimed. There were people out there who had been at war all their lives.

The crucial date had passed. He had torn up his draft card some time ago. But until lately there had been a way out. Now there was none. He had taken a carefully considered step and with it had chosen exile. He had no regrets, except about his parents. He was their only child. It had been the achievement of their lives to make him what they could never be, genuinely American. They would never understand.

‘Have some more elevenses,’ said Gracie. ‘Have some Tennis Court Cake. I know you like marzipan. Have some Russian gâteau.’

Her little bedroom, which she called her sitting-room, and in which indeed they had so far done nothing but sit, was cosy and prim. Its formality and order were those of a child. This schoolroom neatness, this bitty folky flowery charm, represented, Ludwig suspected, not only Gracie’s unformed taste but also some vanished era in the taste of her parents. He had once heard Gracie resisting Clara’s enthusiastic ideas about redecorating it. A growing miscellany of pictures now fought with the sprigged wallpaper: small Impressionist reproductions, engravings of hawks and parrots, photos of the Acropolis and Windsor Castle and the Taj Mahal. Yet Gracie knew nothing about architecture, nothing about birds, and constantly mixed Van Gogh up with Cézanne. Indeed she appeared to know very little about anything, having firmly left school early and refused any further education. What on earth is one to do, he had once thought, with a girl who has no idea who Charlemagne was and who doesn’t care? Later he admired her nerve and came to prize her calm ignorance. She was without the pretensions and ambitions which powered his own life. Her simplicity, her gaiety, even her silliness lightened his Puritan sadness. Yet he also knew that she was no mere kitten, this almost-child. There was a formidable will crushed up inside this unfolding bud.

‘No thanks, no cake.’

‘Have a jelly baby.’

‘No. I’m still feeling kicked in the stomach.’

“Well, I’m hungry.‘

Gracie was a great eater, but remained slim. She was a pale miniature-looking girl with a small well-formed head and a small eager face. She had glowing powdery flesh, very light blue eyes, and wispy half-long silvery golden hair. When she was petulant she looked like a terrier. When she was self-satisfied, which was often, she looked oriental. She was not coquettish, yet she was very conscious of herself as a young and pretty girl. Her tiny mouth was aware, thoughtful, stubborn. She seemed to Ludwig like a precious relic, an heirloom of vanished feminine refinement, something almost Victorian.

‘Do you think you’ll get the Oxford thing?’

‘Gee, I hope so. I try not to think about it. It matters so much.’

‘I’d like to live in Oxford. It’s such a pretty place. And you can get into the country.’

‘You won’t mind being the wife of a stuffy old ancient history don?’

‘Don’t be absurd, Ludwig. Do you think I want to marry an astronaut or something? I only wish I wasn’t such an ignoramus. I’ll just have to keep quiet and smile. I suppose there are wives like that in Oxford. Still the rest of the family will make a show. Papa was a Senior Wrangler and mama was at Bedford and of course Patrick—’

Anxiety about the Oxford job had contributed to his torment, he wanted that job so dreadfully. Oxford had in these months grown huge and wide and magnetic in his consciousness. This too was a kind of being in love. He pictured himself there like a man picturing paradise. He feared disappointment like a man fearing hell. Of course whatever happened now he would stay on in England after his London scholarship year was over. Athena had here sufficiently seized him by the locks. All the elements of his case were clear to him and he had no more doubt about the rightness of his decision. The war was a piece of absolute wickedness in which he would take no part. He would not fight for the United States of America in that war. But neither was it his task to make politics, to shout and speechify and martyr himself. I am not a political animal, he told himself repeatedly. He was a scholar. He would not waste his talents. He would stay in England, where by a pure and felicitous accident he had been born, and take part in the long old conversation of Europe. To regret that his role was in so many ways an easy one was purely sentimental.

The analysis was clear and the decision was made. Only his protestant conscience, like a huge primitive clumsy processing machine, obsolete yet still operational, continued to give him trouble. If only he could take that awful uncomprehending misery away from his parents. He dreaded their letters in which, in language which both offended and touched him, they begged him to come home and get himself ‘straightened out’. Did they really think he must be mad? He dreaded their confused reproaches, their fear. Old European terrors, inherited from generations of wandering ancestors, coursed in their blood and made them shudder from breaking the laws of the United States and evading its decrees. And there was their dreadful wrong-headed pride. Grief at his absence, fear of bureaucracy, what the neighbours thought, it was all jumbled together.

His father’s family were devout protestants from Alsace. His mother’s family were Lutherans from Bavaria. His maternal grandfather, who disappeared during the war and was thought to have died in a concentration camp, had been a minister. A strong and rigid disapproval of Hitler had led both families to migrate westward, and Ludwig’s parents had met soon after the war in Mont-de-Marson where Ludwig’s father had been working as an electrical engineer. They soon decided to emigrate to America, but while waiting for their visas went first on a brief visit to England so as to improve their English. Here, with what now seemed an intelligent prescience, young Ludwig had achieved an English birth, and with it the right to British nationality, although before his first birthday he was already in the U.S.A. He grew up happily enough, normally enough, as an American child, his parents’ joy. Yet in his blood too old European things lived and waited, and as he became an adult and an intellectual he found himself an unidentified person, a changeling. He inherited the physical awkwardness of his parents and their deep conscientious anxiety. He grew up into problems which they had hoped to leave behind. He was uneasy with his hybrid name. He felt ashamed of being an Aryan German and yet also ashamed of having ceased to be one. His parents, perfectly bilingual in French and German, spoke only English at home, laboriously conversing even when they were alone together in this language which they never fully mastered. Ludwig learnt his French and German at school. His parents were grateful to America, and the glow of that gratitude was shed over his childhood.

When he came at last to Europe no blood relations awaited him. All had died or scattered. What mainly confronted him was the ghost of Hitler. This and many other things needed to be exorcized. As a historian and as a man he needed somehow in thought to undergo the whole passion of recent history, but he could not do it. Faced with what he had so significantly missed, his intellect became hazy and faint. He remained outside it all and yet burdened by it as by something heavy forever trailing behind him, a part of himself which he could never properly see. In America he felt European, in France he felt German, in Germany American. Only in England, which he found in some ways most alien of all, could he somehow forget or postpone the problem of who he was. The company of other historians suited him, Oxford and Cambridge scholars, jokey unexcited men who just took him for granted and assumed quietly that of course he would stay and become British. He was so grateful for that.

There will be a time, he thought, beyond all this, when I shall work calmly on remote important things, and when all this anguish will be over. Meanwhile he knew, engaging his conscience with his reason as if these were independent sovereigns, that he did not feel guilty only because he was disappointing his parents. He felt guilty exactly as they did because he was disappointing the U.S.A., because he was breaking the law, because he had decided not to return, because he feared death and would not be a soldier, because he was behaving as cowards and traitors behave. He accepted the guilt with a kind of calm as if it were not an admonition but a mere phenomenon, an experience, a punishment: a punishment for what was happening right now in the little white house in Vermont where his parents brooded over the incomprehensible doom which their son had pronounced.

The decision was made, completed like a long journey, but still strange to him, and rediscovered every morning with a painful lurid surprise. Of course it was no accident that he had mismanaged the whole thing so horribly. This particular muddle he recognized as, for himself, characteristic. If he had elected to be British much earlier he would never have been drafted. He had, he bitterly put it to himself, hoped to get away with it, hoped to have without drama the best of both his worlds. His drafting had been deferred and deferred again. He had thought and thought but without ever quite bringing himself to make up his mind. There was so much involved, so much at stake. He knew he could stick if he had to, and also he knew himself as in some ways an instinctively timid man, a quiet man who was unwilling to raise his voice, unwillng to be stared at. The final summons came unexpectedly. And now he could not defy it with impunity. As far as the United States was concerned he was in bad trouble. Scurrying now for the bolt hole of another nationality would not save him from the automatic retribution of the country which he was so precipitately abandoning. This aspect of the matter, once he did decide to stick, he deliberately refrained from examining in detail. It seemed that at least fifteen years must pass before he could return without facing immediate arrest. With his claim for British nationality pending it was, he had been advised, unthinkable that he should be extradited as a deserter. But as an American he was now done for.

How much, apart from his distress for his parents, this would really hurt, he had not yet been able to estimate. He was quite certain that he was acting rightly. But this did not make it burn less. He suffered his pangs of guilt and fear and loss and waited for these sufferings to pass. There would be a time for reconciliation and quiet work and the treasure caves of Europe, a time, oh God, for Gracie. He had told her these things, but only in a cool and abstract way. He did not know whether he was glad or sorry that she had accepted them without puzzlement, without profound questioning. With how much of the real tangle and torment would it be fair to burden her; and if he was to marry her would it be right to burden her with less than all?

Her little strong right hand was gripping his. ‘What a pity Patrick is too old to be a page.’

‘A page? Oh sure. I can’t see Patrick as a page! I hope he’ll approve?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Gracie, licking her fingers and still holding his hand, so that he felt her tongue on his palm. ‘He said you were the only genuine intellectual among my swains.’

Patrick was Gracie’s youngest brother. He was still at boarding school. He was bookish and ambitious.

‘Will your parents come over for the wedding?’

Would they? Would they want to? So many things were happening so fast, creating new worlds in which old instinctive ways of acting were no good any more.

The rain suddenly pattered on the window like a handful of pebbles, then grew quiet again. The room brightened with a vivid dark golden light.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who will you have as your best man?’

‘Must I have a best man? Well, I guess I’d have Garth if he were over here by then, you know, Garth Gibson Grey.’

Ludwig felt a faint electrical shock. Guilt again possibly. He had thought a good deal less about Garth in recent weeks, though when he had first arrived eight months ago the return of Garth had been the thing to which he had most looked forward. He had made Garth’s acquaintance when they were both students at Harvard. Garth, a graduate of Cambridge, England, had been his first close English friend. Garth was studying philosophy. They had immediately started an argument which went on for days, weeks, months. The Harvard philosophers did not think highly of Garth. But Ludwig decided he was one of the most remarkable men he had ever met. He longed for Garth to come back so that they could experience England, Europe, together. He had made all his great decisions since their last talk. He had mentioned them in letters, but without emotion. Garth had replied laconically ‘Good,’ then written about other things, then stopped writing altogether. He was due home in July, but July was still a long way off. And now there was Gracie.

Ludwig recognized the little guilty shock as a realization that when Garth came he would no longer be alone. He would no longer be waiting. I am surrendering my aloneness for ever, he thought, clutching Gracie’s hand. What would Garth think about this engagement? Garth and Gracie, whose families were acquainted, had known each other slightly since childhood. It was through Garth, or more immediately through Garth’s father, Austin Gibson Grey, that Ludwig had met the Tisbournes, Charlotte Ledgard, Mitzi Ricardo, Mavis Argyll and many other of those fearfully English English with whom he now felt so surprisingly at home. Garth had suggested to Ludwig, who was to precede him to England by a year, that he should look up Austin. ‘You may be able to help my father,’ he said cryptically. Austin had certainly helped Ludwig, finding him digs at Mitzi’s place, introducing him to people, setting him on the path to Gracie. Had Ludwig helped Austin? Austin was not easy to help. ‘Austin is hopeless,’ George Tisbourne used to say. ‘Elder brother trouble of course.’ Austin’s elder brother Matthew was a horribly successful diplomat. Austin was not so good at coping. Ludwig rather liked Austin’s hopeless-ness. It relaxed his nerves to see Austin flounder. Of course poor Austin had serious troubles, but for some reason one could never take them too gravely. How surprised Austin would be about Ludwig and Gracie! ‘Not a chance,’ Austin had judged when Ludwig told his love. And what would Garth say? Garth would say nothing. Garth the lone wolf. But Garth would be in some way disappointed. He would feel that Ludwig had been absorbed into ordinariness. They don’t like each other, Garth and Gracie, Ludwig had earlier intuited from Gracie’s chatter. He could see why. And he felt now with a kind of sadness and a kind of pride what it was like to be responsible for the being of another.

‘Do you find that your ears stick to your head at night?’

‘I don’t know, poppet.’

‘Mine do, it does feel funny. You’ve got such nice sleek animal ears. Some men have such coarse ears. Ludwig, do do something for me. Cut your hair very short, the way it used to be. I love it furry.’

‘OK, honey. But it looks so sort of grey when it’s short.’

‘I like it nice and grey.’

He had begun to grow his hair, it occurred to him guiltily, to please another girl.

‘And another thing, Ludwig darling.’

‘What, angel?’

‘Don’t go to see Dorina like that any more.’

F