There are no poems saluting women achievers on this website. Which, thinking about it, is somewhat of an oversight. In my defence, I should say that none of my poems salute achievement of any kind whatsoever, being caught in the matrix of adolescent indie-snob celebration-of-failure that so exhaustively determines my every waking moment. I’d promise to try harder, do better; but you’d know it was a lie.

There is however this, which is about the late Iris Murdoch:

The heart is in the region of goodness, circling

slain virtue like a weeping carrion-bird

or common shitehawk. Nobody will mind

if just this once you give in to the loins’

impeccable sympathies. Even I would not

hold you to those choices, although neither

do I hurry to cut you loose. Perhaps I mean

niceness after all, although distinction

is not nice. Virtue could be propriety

and who would notice? What might help establish

the deceased’s identity? Who are you, dear?

Nothing that will mend. With even gesture

commend to the small mercies of corrosion

the ill-behaved and dreamy heroine.

The reference here is to Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good, from which the sequence Noble Mice takes its title. Murdoch is interested in goodness, and in sex, both of which are finally incompatible with niceness. Sex may additionally be incompatible with goodness; but Murdoch I think is an optimist about that. Her characters are seldom good, but their sexual drives are in a sense innocent, and have the (didactic) virtue of confronting them with the hypocrisy of their own niceness. A truly good person would not necessarily be asexual; at least, that’s the gamble, the irreducible postulate (if I can come over all George Steiner for a moment. Oh, behave!). Those for whom trying to be good entails trying to be asexual inevitably come unstuck in Murdoch’s novels.

Distinction is not nice (although - aha, a pun! - distinctions are often said to be); and one’s sexual choices involve a kind of brute discrimination, “the loins’ / impeccable sympathies” being incorrigably what they are. One could presumably distinguish on this basis between two kinds of “promiscuity”: the kind that arises out of wanting to be nice, to be undiscriminating; and the not-nice kind that arises out of knowing what one wants and how to get it. Hence Houellebecq’s complaint that the “sexual revolution” was ultimately anti-egalitarian, since what it unleashed was in fact the most nakedly discriminatory exercise of libidinal preference, a dismantling of the “unbeatable slow machine / that brings you what you’ll get” in favour of whatever it was Larkin thought he glimpsed out of those high windows. But Houellebecq’s porno-paranoid positioning of himself as the “little guy” in the sexual marketplace is itself a sexual attention-getting strategy, albeit an absolutely terrible one. What he says he wants is for women to be nice to him, in default of their actively discriminating in his favour; but this entails giving up altogether on Murdoch’s goodness, which would both selflessly accept the unfavourable sexual choices of others and pitilessly (in the first instance, un-self-pityingly) assert its own desire and demand for love.

The decay of Murdoch’s faculties is imagined by this poem as tragic not because of the fineness of her intellect, but because of her existential commitment to distinction and discrimination, to goodness rather than niceness. I admit to some impatience with “the ill-behaved and dreamy heroine” of Murdoch’s novels (there’s always at least one, and I usually find myself wanting to slap some sense into her by about midway through the third chapter), and there’s a particular heartlessness in presenting “the small mercies of corrosion” as something to be contemplated with the same “even gesture” with which Murdoch lays out the fates of her own characters. But the irony is presented as-is - “[e]ven I would not / hold you to those choices”, adopt a morally rigid stance that would turn contingency into fate and mortal mishap into just desserts.

I promised a while back to write (at The Weblog) about Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work, but no particularly compelling angle subsequently suggested itself. It might however be worth trying to read it in the light of the distinction between niceness and goodness, and the ambiguity of eros in that scheme.