The Book Chain: Six Degrees and the Invention of Sex

Long before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, bookish teens had Iris Murdoch. As the poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) explained in Annus Mirabilis, sex was invented in 1963 

    Sexual intercourse began
    In nineteen sixty-three
    (which was rather late for me) –
    Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
    And the Beatles’ first LP. 

For almost a decade before that, Murdoch was letting her readers into the secrets and mysteries of sexual relationships and the moral and emotional chaos of love and obsession.

This month’s #sixdegrees challenge starter (see sidebar left) is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. In his 1898 novella, the title expression refers to the ever-increasing heightening of psychological tension and fear.

When correcting the proofs for publication, James wrote in a letter that he had managed to scare himself so much he was afraid to go upstairs to bed. 

Add one of the more modern and vulgar meanings of the word screw, make it plural, and it makes an excellent sub-title for any number of Iris Murdoch’s novels. Take A Severed Head for example.

I’ll get to the #sixdegrees book chain in a later post but for now, here’s:

A Severed Head:
Or The Turns of the Screws 

There are basically six main characters. The narrator Martin Lynch Green, his wife Antonia, his brother Alexander; the psycho-analyst Palmer, his half-sister the Cambridge anthropologist Honor and Georgie, an economics lecturer.

Honor is almost always referred to as Honor Klein. (Martin as the story’s narrator clearly wants us to know that she is Jewish and his emphasis on this is anti-semitic,  heavy-handed and tiresome.) When Martin greets her at Liverpool St. Station it is during a sulphurous pea-souper of a London fog brimstone even gets a mention. The perfect atmospheric hellish background for the first encounter. 

Inoffensive, mild-mannered, bourgeois, wine merchant, amateur historian Martin Lynch-Green gives Honor Klein the power to turn him into a violent house-breaking savage.   

Later in the novel, standing feet apart and hands behind her back, in her ancient dark green suit, staring, she explains it all to Martin:

Your love for me does not inhabit the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all. Because of what I am and because of what you saw I am a terrible object of fascination for you. I am a severed head such as primitive tribes and old alchemists used to use, anointing it with oil and putting a morsel of gold upon its tongue to make it utter prophecies. And who knows but that long acquaintance with a severed head might not lead to strange knowledge. For such knowledge one would have paid enough. But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.

Iris Murdoch had no siblings but novels are full of them. Martin’s sister Rosemary plays a useful bit part. 

As the novel begins, Martin seems to have a life of perfect contentment.  After a leisurely afternoon with his mistress, he sinks into the comfort of his home. Imagine a glass stirrer tinkling in a jug of chilled martinis beside a small bone china dish of cocktail biscuits. The room is tastefully decorated with swags of red and green for it is almost Christmas.  He awaits the return of his wife from her session with her head-shrinker. 

At peace with the world and with myself I breathed the 
quiet air, lying relaxed and warm in the bright multi-coloured 
shell which Antonia and I had created, Vhere silk and silver 
and rosewood, dark mahogany and muted gilt blended 
sweetly together against a background of Bellini green. I 
sipped the frosted fragrant Martini which I had just prepared 
for both of us and thought myself, I dare say, the luckiest of 
men.

This glass bubble of complacency and content is about to be shattered

Indeed at that moment I was happy with an idle thought- less happiness which was never to come, with that particular quality of a degenerate innocence, ever in my life again.

Murdoch is a spellbinder and in that story that follows she unravels and re-ravels the emotional lives of her characters. And what a wreckage it all is! As if adultery, betrayal, self-delusion and infidelity were somehow insufficient, we also have abortion, a suicidal overdose, violence, and a whole lot of drunkenness. (Martin does a deal of self-medicating as he reels from the emotional onslaughts of love.) 

Antonia’s announcement on the return from her session with the slithery Palmer Anderson sets in motion a whirligig of events that will uproot the lives of the main characters and send them on a frantic merry-go-round of unstable relationships and changing partners. Old secrets are revealed and new illusions take flight.

The only stable relationship in the book is between the two secretaries in Martin’s office who clearly manage his wine business and their emotional lives with a steady hand. Martin envies them:

Miss Seelhaft looked up every now and then to see if I was 
all right. She and Miss Hernshaw, once again informed of my 
fortunes before I came to tell them, had with a perfect tact 
combined discreet congratulation with respectful solicitude. 
They gave their nod to the conventions, but did not pretend 
not to notice the extent to which I was worn out and wretched. 
They were full of little kindnesses and generally treated me 
as an invalid.... We all, they strenuously and I with a 
languid acquiescence, kept up the fiction that the business had 
scarcely been able to carry on without me. 

... Miss Hernshaw, who played mother to us, came in at that point 
with the tea. As she passed Miss Seelhaft she brushed her arm 
against her friend’s shoulder as if by accident. I envied them. 

Murdoch was letting her readers into the secret of the moral and emotional chaos and sexual folderol of adult lives but chose a lesbian couple as a marker of normality. 

It’s a tribute to Murdoch’s storytelling that she is able to get away with all the sexual permutations, drama and folderol. And she even pulls off a more-or-less satisfactory ending for all concerned. 

As Georgie says of Palmer Anderson: “Anyone who is good at setting people free is also good at enslaving them.”

My next post will play by the rules and follow a chain of #sixdegrees. See https://booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com/  and  https://booksaremyfavouriteandbest.com/6-degrees-of-separation-meme/

Meanwhile a playful digression:

I’ve always loved playing with words that run on and connect and the same with names: Authors for example:

O Henry James Joyce Cary Grant Wood

Ok so the last two are cheating a bit as neither Cary Grant nor Grant Wood is known for his writing. But you get the idea. 

And you can play the same game with book titles;

Turn of the Screwtape Letters for Literary Ladies Must Live and Let Died in the Wool Sack 

The Turn Of The Screw – Henry James
    The Screwtape Letters – C.S.Lewis
        Letters For Literary Ladies – Maria Edgeworth
            Ladies Must Live and Let Die – Alice Duer Miller 
              Died In The Wool – Ngaio Marsh 

Or…

The Turn Of The Screwtape Letters From London Fields Of Glory Road

The Turn Of The Screw – Henry James
    The Screwtape Letters – C.S.Lewis
        Letters From London – Julian Barnes, C.L.R.James
            London Fields – Martin Amis
                Fields of Glory – Jean Rouaud
                    Glory Road – Robert A. Heinlein

Or…

The Turn Of The Screwtape Letters Home Is Where We Start From Russia With Love In The Time Of Cholera

The Turn Of The Screw – Henry James
   The Screwtape Letters – C.S.Lewis
      Letters Home – Sylvia Plath
         Home Is Where We Start From – D.W.Winnicott 
           From Russia With Love – Ian Fleming 
              Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez 

The possibilities are endless.