The Love Machine

Abstract

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Murdoch was still uncertain about the path her career was to take. Undaunted in her desire to write more plays, she was still finding it difficult (Peggy Ramsey read Joanna, Joanna in August 1968 and had pointed to some very old-fashioned theatrical techniques).¹ Working on her plays on a cold evening in June 1969, she seemed to hear a message saying ‘WAIT’ (IMC, p. 115). Perhaps the inner voice was a cautionary one. She turned back to the novel and the 1970s were to be prolific years. Unsurprisingly, though, a distinctive feature of the first novel of the decade is its dramatic structure. The first draft of A Fairly Honourable Defeat was begun in June 1968 after Murdoch’s relationship with Brigid Brophy had ended.² The desire for a clarity of form may also have been a refuge from the complexity of her personal life. In her journal at that time she had noted that the people she loved were the unworldly and it is the meek and unassuming Tallis Browne, the good man of the novel, and his counterpart, the cruelly sadistic Julius King, on whose quality of consciousness she meditates. (Julius is based in part on Murdoch’s lover, Elias Canetti, to whom she was still emotionally attached.) Murdoch pointed to the fact that A Fairly Honourable Defeat has a clear allegorical structure: Julius represents Satan, while Tallis represents Christ, and they are opposed in their struggle for Morgan, who represents the human soul.³