A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Oh So English Tragedy... Not

I have never met anyone of the types in Murdoch’s The Severed Head. I doubt anyone has. I can only trust her that they have some meaning: those independently wealthy landed gentry who can remain perfectly civil when their best friends run off with their wives. Martin, the husband in question, can in fact maintain that “He’s still my best friend,” about the American cad, Anderson. And Antonia, the out-of-love wife, without the least embarrassment, can say to her soon to be ex “We won’t let go of you, Martin,... We’ll never let go of you.” Who are these people really?

The stiff upper lip, psychological repression, emotional aridity - these seem like cliches of the English personality. Add to these, things like pea-soup fog, late trains, and vague derision of anything European as Jewish and downtrodden and the question starts to form: Is good old Iris doing a send-up, employing that other cliche of English character, irony, to undermine her own narrative?

I live only two miles or so from one of Murdoch’s fictional locations, ‘Rembers’, a house set on the edge of the Cotswolds in the actual stone village of Sibford Gower. It’s less than 20 miles from Murdoch’s Oxford college and undoubtedly she knew the place well. Yet she describes the house as being constructed of a timber frame with light pink infill panels, a sort of Elizabethan bordello.

I don’t claim to know every house in Sibford Gower, but I can say categorically that nothing like the Rembers described exists there. Historically, timber-framed houses can’t be found for miles yet into neighbouring Warwickshire; and modern planners would never have permitted such an atrocity in a village of honey-coloured stone. For me this tips the intention of the book from polite irony to serious sarcasm.*

A trivial observation? Perhaps, but Murdoch is never trivial with her details. In her literary philosophy, everything signifies. I think what Rembers signifies is the sincere falsity of the book. Even if there are characters like this in reality, they are incorrectly placed. They belong more in the Mittel Europa of 1900 than the Middle England of 1976. In fact I think they are Freudian ‘types’ - Oedipal, Electral, Narcissistic, etc.

That is, Murdoch’s characters are mythical figures playing out psycho-analytic roles. They are not parodies of Englishness but of psychological theory. And in good Murdochian style, they represent how psychological theory has invaded (infected?) our intelligence and conversation. There’s just enough in psychological theory to be plausible but not nearly enough to account for the neuroses of those who formulated it, or who currently practice it.

Murdoch tips her hand as to motive early on when she has Martin suggest about Anderson, the psychiatrist, that “Anyone who is good at setting people free is also good at enslaving them, if we are to believe Plato.” He also criticises the philosophical foundation of psycho-analysis as “a metaphysic of the drawing-room.” The imaginary head cannot be severed from the reality of the body to which it is attached without severe distortion, not to say disfigurement. In short, psychoanalysis is simply badly thought out philosophy of mind and should receive the disrespect it deserves.

*Another indication of her displacing hints, as it were, is her aside that Rembers overlooks the River Stour. It can’t, because Sibford Gower is on the River Sib, a tributary of the Stour. She directs with misdirection.

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