Iris Murdoch - Jacksons Dilemma

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 and grew up in London. She trained as a philosopher at both Oxford and Cambridge, and was for many years a fellow of St. Annes College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy. She wrote several works of philosophy, among which are Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, The Sovereignty of Good, and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. She was also the author of twenty-six novels, including The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978; The Book and the Brotherhood; The Message to the Planet; and The Green Knight. She died on February 8, 1999.

Edward Lannion was sitting at his desk in his pleasant house in London in Notting Hill. The sun was shining. It was an early morning in June, not quite midsummer. Edward was good-looking. He was tall and slim and pale. He was very well dressed. His hair, slightly curling, thickly tumbling down his neck, was a dark golden brown. He had a long firm mouth, a rather long hawkish nose, and long light brown eyes. He was twenty-eight.

His beautiful mother had died of cancer when he was ten. He had seen her die. When he heard his fathers sobs he knew. When he was eighteen, his younger brother was drowned. He had no other siblings. He loved his mother and his brother passionately. He had not got on with his father. His father, who was rich and played at being an architect, wanted Edward to be an architect too. Edward did not want to be an architect. He studied mediaeval history at Cambridge. Informed by his father that he should now earn his living somehow, he joined a small academic publishing house which dealt with the kind of books Edward liked. Unknown to his father he employed himself at publishing for only two mornings a week, devoting the rest to reading, and attempting to write historical novels, even poems. When Edwards father died Edward shed tears and wished he had behaved better to his father, who had left him the house in Notting Hill, and the estate, and the handsome house in the country. The name of the house was Hatting Hall, a name regarded as ridiculous by Edward and his brother Randall when they were children.

Hatting Hall, half Tudor half Georgian, having by now lost some of its larger property, was now content to own big beautiful gardens and some miles of adjacent meadows. Through these meadows ran the narrow stream of the river Lip, passing through the village known as Lipcot. Lipcot, high up upon the far side from Hatting, after giving its name to the river, was now becoming nothing more than a hamlet, consisting of a few small houses, some smaller genuine cottages, a few shops, and a pub. Upstream, recently restored, was a sturdy bridge, leading to what the villagers called civilisation. The Hall owned the land on its own side down to the river, together with half of a much disputed fragile bridge, the land on the other side, for a considerable distance, being the property of the only other grand house in the vicinity. Farther down the river, on the Hatting side, reached by an ancient stone bridge, upon a little hill (land owned by Hatting) was a fourteenth-century church, complete with a little rectory and a tiny congregation. The other grand house up from the river and among many trees, was called Penndean after the Quaker family which had owned it, and still owned it since the days of William Penn. In fact Penndean was older still, its original name being lost. It had thereafter been diminished by fire as well as being (as Edwards father said) messed about by the Victorians. Edwards grandfather had had some feud with the inhabitants of the other House (their family name was Barnell). Edwards father had been polite. Edward was polite.

Edwards ancestors had not perpetually possessed Hatting Hall, being by descent Cornishmen, and having only acquired Hatting late in the eighteenth century, the previous owners being obligingly bankrupt. This Cornish legend pleased Edward and Randall, but displeased their father, who did not care for piratical ancestors feasting on myths. He preferred to take up the line of the unfortunate but titled gentry from whom the Lannions seized the charming and romantic residence. Even before the chaotic troubles of his grown-up life Edward had been aware of his odd aspect, his being rather fey, even as being, perhaps because of the Cornish past, under a curse. This withdrawal had also, at school and much later, led to his being called a prig, a prude, a puritan, even a weirdo. He did not greatly mind such treatment, or even being lonely and secluded - but he found himself at times mysteriously frightened. He sometimes had a sensation of being followed. He even pictured himself as a criminal, perhaps a terrorist, who had been reformed, but knew that his erstwhile comrades were on his track and would certainly kill him. He seemed to remember that when a child he had played some sort of game like that with Randall. Later, when he was over twenty, he had another very remarkable and puzzling experience; but of these matters he did not speak to anybody. Edwards father had never recovered from Randalls death, Randall had always been his favourite. Randall was merry, Edward was taciturn. With surprise, moreover, he now found himself the master of Hatting Hall. This discovery which in itself might have cheered him up, filled him at first with alarm, though later he found that things went on much as before. The staff, the eople as his father had called them, the butler and gardener Montague, his wife the maid Millie, continued as before, perhaps almost as before, since Edwards father (Gerald Lannion) had been more self-assertive and explicit than the kinder and vaguer young master. Edward continued to stay much of the week in London, abandoning the publishing house, attempting another historical novel and trying to write poetry.

Then, when he was settling down and assuming that now nothing would ever happen, there was a change, a bright light, a fresh wind. He had a little earlier, partly in connection with his fathers death, made some sort of mild relationship or reconciliation with the inhabitants of Penndean. At that time these had consisted only of an elderly man, known as Uncle Tim somehow connected with India, and a younger but over forty man, his nephew called Benet. Meeting him in the village, Benet had asked Edward if he would come to lunch. Edward, just returning to London, had said sorry, he could not. A little later Edward, again in London, learnt from Montague by telephone that the old man at Penndean had just died. Edward felt sorry, he realised now that he would have liked to have met him. He sent a letter of condolence to Benet. A little later still he accepted an invitation to lunch. He liked Benet, and was able to glimpse the gardens of the house not visible from the road, but he did not get on with Benets friends and refused a subsequent visit. The time was now late autumn. Invited yet again a little later he accepted, finding that the party consisted of Benet, the local Rector on visit, a handsome middle-aged woman with a great deal of glossy brown hair (Edward recognised her from the last occasion), another good-looking woman evidently from Canada, and her daughters, two pretty young girls, one nineteen, one twenty-one, one called Rosalind, the other Marian. Benet explained to Edward that the girls surname was that of the (now dead) father, Berran, while their mother, subsequently married to a Canadian whom she later left, was called Ada Fox, that the girls had been to, and now left, a girls boarding school, and that they had all rented a cottage in Lipcot for holidays. During lunch the girls reminded Edward that they had met him more than once in the street when they were inhabiting their cottage. Ada, sitting next to Edward, told him that the girls had just completed a trip with her to Scotland, after which she would return to Canada leaving them with their new flat in London to amuse and educate themselves. London is itself an education, she said, and Edward, sitting next to Marian on his other side, nodded sagely.