From her education
in art she had acquired no positive central bent or ability, not even any
knowledge of the history of painting, but rather a sort of craving for
immediate and ephemeral “artistic activity.” This had by now become, in perhaps
the only form in which she could know it, a spiritual hunger. She and her
comrades had indeed observed certain rules of conduct which had something of
the status of tribal taboos. But Jessica had never developed the faculty of
colouring and structuring her surroundings into a moral habitation, the faculty
which is sometimes called moral sense. She kept her world denuded out of a fear
of convention. Her morality lacked coherent motives.
The novelist is
not using Jessica as a generalized stand-in for Young People These Days: The
Nice and the Good overflows with a
complexity of characters, and Jessica is only one of many players. But as I
read Murdoch’s delineation of Jessica’s spiritual vacuum, I allowed myself to
sink, if only for a moment, into that comforting delusion of age—the assurance
that, despite all of youth’s advantages, we older ones can at least depend on
the solid structure of our hard-won “moral habitation.”
In my case, simple
addition was all I needed to pierce such automatic self-satisfaction. Murdoch
published The Nice and the Good in 1968.
In that year I was four years old, younger than the novel’s youngest child,
ripe for indoctrination into Jessica’s school of the “perfect but momentary,” a
classroom where paper creations are crumpled and discarded, clay sculptures
squeezed into shapelessness. Nothing her students construct is ever shared or
cherished. “‘So it’s all play,
Miss?’ a child had said to Jessica at last in a puzzled tone. At that moment
Jessica felt the glowing pride of the successful teacher.”
Of course,
literary time is distinct from earth time, but author and reader live in both
realms. Murdoch invented a character who was from the same generation as my
kindergarten teacher, and now I’m tempted to allow this character to
encapsulate my glib, pushing-fifty assumptions about vapid youth culture,
paltry educations, and moral incoherence.
My automatic
reaction appalls me. Today my own sons are more or less the age of Jessica the
character, but they are nothing like her. Their lives are not “denuded out of a
fear of convention.” History matters to them, as does a moral habitation. I
should never have considered lumping them into any category of vacuity, yet
somehow the novelist lured me into grave error. Her description of Jessica
dredged up my own moral incoherence, not theirs.
In her essay “My
Vocation,” Natalia Ginzburg writes,
As a vocation
[writing] is no joke. . . . We are constantly threatened with dangers whenever
we write a page. . . . The days and houses of our life, the days and houses of
the people with whom we are involved, books and images and thoughts and
conversations—all these things feed it, and it grows within us. It is a
vocation which also feeds on terrible things, it swallows the best and worst in
our lives and our evil feelings flow in its blood just as much as our
benevolent feelings.
Part
of the terror of the vocation is the way in which it encourages a writer to
manipulate “the best and the worst in our lives.” She may hope that, in the
long run, she consorts with cruelty for the sake of Good or Truth. But writing
is dangerous and damage is done, not just once but again and again. “Evil
feelings flow in its blood.”
Reading
is no less terrible a vocation. I sat down at the kitchen table and opened a
novel that tricked me into making false and flippant assumptions about two
young men whom I love with all my heart. It may be the task of a great writer
to push her readers into the quicksand, but the reader’s task is less clear.
What do I do next, now that I’ve recognized my treachery? The easy answer is
“Never again make a snap judgment about another human being.” But that answer
doesn’t erase my shame.
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