 First British edition cover | |
| Author | Iris Murdoch |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | John Sutcliffe [1] |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
Publication date | 1974 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 327 |
| ISBN | 0701120150 |
| OCLC | 466353218 |
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1974, it was her sixteenth novel. It won the Whitbread Novel Award for 1974.
Blaise Gavender is a psychotherapist with a wife and a sixteen-year-old son, living near London in a comfortable home called Hood House. Unknown to his wife Harriet, he has been having an affair with another woman, Emily McHugh, for nine years, and Blaise and Emily have an eight-year-old son named Luca. For years he has been putting off telling Harriet about Emily, but finally is forced to do so when Luca secretly visits Hood House and the truth threatens to come out. Blaise vacillates between the two women, hoping to be able to maintain relations with both, but eventually he chooses to leave Harriet and live with Emily.
Montague (Monty) Small, the Gavenders' neighbour and family friend, is a popular detective novelist whose wife Sophie has recently died. He knew about Blaise's affair and helped him by inventing a fictitious patient who required overnight visits to London, thus providing Blaise with an excuse to be away from home when visiting Emily. After Harriet finds out about the affair, the still grieving Monty is called upon to be her confidant as well. Monty's friend Edgar Demarnay, who was in love with Sophie, arrives on the scene and becomes embroiled in the situation, trying to "save" both Monty, whose grief threatens to cause an emotional breakdown, and Harriet, whose part he takes against Blaise.
The title is a reference to Titian's painting Sacred and Profane Love , which was used as the basis for the first edition's cover. Peter J. Conradi notes that Titian's painting is a "puzzle painting" in that a single model is shown both nude and elaborately dressed, so that the boundary between sacred and profane love is unclear. Rather, they are presented as "cases of a single principle of Eros in two different modes of existence and in two grades of perfection". [2] :271
Doubleness is an important theme of the novel. [2] :266 Blaise has relationships with two women, who initially inhabit two separate spheres of life. Each of them has one son. The book has two main male characters, Monty and Blaise, both of whom have snobbish mothers. Both Monty and Blaise, while financially successful, are dissatisfied with their professions and contemplate changing them. Monty sees himself as a schoolmaster, while Blaise wants to become a doctor. The theme of doubleness extends to the two types of love, sacred and profane. [3] Blaise feels "that Harriet was his sacred love and Emily his profane" [4] :342 He sees himself as leading "a double life" and as "a man of two truths, since both these lives were valuable and true". [4] :80
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is one of four Murdoch novels that take male adultery as a major theme. Harriet, Emily, and Blaise are all given narrative focus, and are all treated somewhat sympathetically by the author. However, Blaise's egotism and moral failure are clear throughout. [3]
The novel contains descriptions of at least twenty dreams that are recalled by Harriet, Monty, Blaise and Harriet's son David. These dreams are disturbing and frightening, combining "some mixture of horror or terror, grief and fascinated pity". [2] :277 The subject of dreams is also relevant to Blaise's work as a psychoanalyst.
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine was widely and generally favourably reviewed, and won the 1974 Whitbread Novel Award. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] The London Magazine found it "another example of the most individual collection of novels, sixteen now, since Dickens". [10] The Time reviewer called it a "glittering examination of love's disguises in the London suburbs" and a "deliberately humorless antifarce" and compared its narrative tone to that of John Updike's 1968 novel Couples . [8]
Several contemporary reviewers commented on the title. John Wain pointed out that Blaise's "sacred" love for Harriet is characterized by "selfishness and possessiveness", while his erotic "profane" attachment to Emily has "a depth and a purity, in some ways self-forgetfulness", making a clear moral distinction between the two states impossible. [9] The Time reviewer saw the title as indicating Murdoch's intention of "exploring mind's mechanistic aspect". [8] Martin Amis found the title "the most consistently provocative thing" about the novel. [7] It is too simple, he concluded, to equate Harriet and Emily with sacred and profane love respectively, and to see them as opposites. Instead, Amis suggested that Murdoch's point is that the two varieties of love are interdependent.
Murdoch biographer and scholar Peter Conradi describes The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and Henry and Cato (1976) as "two lesser but still undismissible works" from "the time of Murdoch's great flowering". [2] :266 The philosopher Martha Nussbaum focussed on The Sacred and Profane Love Machine in her analysis of Murdoch's Platonic views of sexual desire. [11]
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
John Oliver Bayley, CBE, FBA, FRSL was a British academic, literary critic and writer. He was the Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford from 1974 to 1992. His first marriage was to the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch.
The Sea, the Sea is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1978, it was her nineteenth novel. It won the 1978 Booker Prize.
John Barrington Wain CBE was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group known as "The Movement". He worked for most of his life as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio.
Under the Net is a 1954 novel by Iris Murdoch. Set in London, it is the story of a struggling young writer, Jake Donaghue. Murdoch's first novel, its mixture of the philosophical and the picaresque has made it one of Murdoch's most popular novels.
The Whitbread Awards (1971–2005), called Costa Book Awards since 2006, are literary awards in the United Kingdom, awarded both for high literary merit but also for works considered enjoyable reading. This page gives details of the awards given in the year 1974.
Peter J. Conradi is a British author and academic, best known for his studies of writer and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who was a close friend. He is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kingston and has been Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College Oxford and Research Fellow at University College London.
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Sacred and Profane Love is an oil painting by Titian, probably painted in 1514, early in his career. The painting is presumed to have been commissioned by Niccolò Aurelio, a secretary to the Venetian Council of Ten, whose coat of arms appears on the sarcophagus or fountain, to celebrate his marriage to a young widow, Laura Bagarotto. It perhaps depicts a figure representing the bride dressed in white, sitting beside Cupid and accompanied by the goddess Venus.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat is a novel by the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch. Published in 1970, it was her thirteenth novel.
The Bell is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1958, it was her fourth novel. It is set in a lay religious community situated next to an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns in Gloucestershire.
The Unicorn is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1963, it was her seventh novel.
The Message to the Planet is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1989, it was her twenty-fourth novel.
The Nice and the Good is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1968, it was her eleventh novel. The Nice and the Good was shortlisted for the 1969 Booker Prize.
An Unofficial Rose is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1962, it was her sixth novel.
The Sovereignty of Good is a book of moral philosophy by Iris Murdoch. First published in 1970, it comprises three previously published papers, all of which were originally delivered as lectures. Murdoch argued against the prevailing consensus in moral philosophy, proposing instead a Platonist approach. The Sovereignty of Good is Murdoch's best known philosophy book.
Henry and Cato is a novel by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1976, it was her eighteenth novel.
An Accidental Man is a novel by Iris Murdoch, which was published in 1971. It was her fourteenth novel.
The Time of the Angels is a philosophical novel by British novelist Iris Murdoch. First published in 1966, it was her tenth novel. The novel centres on Carel Fisher, an eccentric Anglican priest who is the rector of a London church which was destroyed by bombing during World War II. Fisher denies the existence of God and the possibility of human goodness in a post-theistic world. The novel, which has elements of Gothic fiction, received mixed reviews on its publication.
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist is a book by Iris Murdoch. Published in 1953 by Bowes & Bowes of Cambridge, it was Murdoch's first book and the first book about Jean-Paul Sartre's work to be published in English.