BOO KS
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Miss Howard's account of an upper-class marriage that failed and
her slow exposure of her Mrs. Fleming's growing awareness that that
failure had become her children's doom is explicated with so much
grace that we are almost convinced that it matters to Miss Howard,
that it should matter to us. Technically, the book is a delight; merely
fondling its textures is pleasurable in itself; and the device by which
the story moves backward toward the beginning in which its end is
already implicit is skillful and apt. But the effect is of something as
derivative and nostalgic and finally pointless in its pursuit of sensibility
as was the American pursuit of sentimentality. Without even the sem–
blance of a politics to give it a public show of relevance, it becomes
merely a demonstration that such things can-alas!-still be done. The
notion of a refined and witty upper class fully capable of savoring
every nuance of its own dissolution is, after all, as much a myth as the
vision of the noble peasant or pander; and both myths must justify
themselves to the imagination. This they no longer seem able to do.
What was passion and symbol in James has become in Miss Howard
only
chic.
Ten pages into the book, I had the embarrassed sense of
having got into the Ladies' Room by mistake. Two hundred pages deep,
I began to feel like the man whose wife has dragged him along shopping.
There is not finally much point (certainly not for me) in long reflec–
tions on the color that one's skin must get before one can wear white
effectively. Merely being a woman is an insufficient excuse for such
insistence upon the feminine. H enry J ames was female enough to define
a limit for the novel in this regard; and there was, we remember, a
special point and tension for him in defining himself thus against the
American notion of the masculine.
No, such books as
The Long View
remain mere necromancy in ele–
gant surroundings, not merely the dying fall of a lost music, but the
vain evocation of the dead musician.
The Flight from the Enchanter,
on the other hand, has for me the sense of a beginning, the sort of
grossness of effect, the willingness to be inept (along with certain real
triumphs of phrasing and realization) that means its author has come
alive. The protagonists of Miss Murdoch's novel come from the same
level of English society as Miss Howard's; as a matter of fact, their
chief female characters inhabit the same quarter of London; but Miss
Murdoch's people no longer circle the delicate wastes of Henry James
or Virginia Woolf. They inhabit our own vulgar deserts and are plagued
by terrors familiar enough to be almost reassuring. They are the chil–
dren of the Bohemian fringe of Miss Howard's world, the offspring of
lady Socialists and Feminists, inheritors of magazines which have
