Nicholas Mosley is thought of as an important but almost incomprehensible novelist. For 60 years, he has tapped away like some mad cryptographer, transmitting messages in an unknown code. Occasional successes—Accident was made into a film, Hopeful Monsters won the 1990 Whitbread prize—have heartened but not distracted him. I recently met Mosley—whose books are being published in new editions by Dalkey Archive Press—in his basement flat in north London. Aged 84, he seldom goes out. His voice sounds tired; sometimes it trails off into silence. Yet the occasional flash of the eye and whooping laugh betray inextinguishable high spirits.
Genealogy is not usually the best introduction to a writer, but Mosley's is odd enough to mention. He is the grandson on his mother's side of Viscount Curzon, from whom he inherits the title Lord Ravensdale. He is the son of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists and at one point the most unpopular man in Britain. Psychological dogma insists that such a man must be deeply "damaged" and that his work must be an attempt to "come to terms" with his calamitous parentage. But Mosley shows little sign of damage. He was lucky enough to have passed his youth in institutions—Eton, the Rifle Brigade, Oxford—where his father's misadventures were viewed with irony, not outrage. And he distanced himself from his father's politics in the 1950s, so has no bad conscience on that score. Today, he remembers his father with affection. "I could talk to him about anything. He saw every side of the question."
Mosley entered adulthood without any of the usual pressures. The son of a notorious rogue, he had no expectations to disappoint. And he was independently wealthy, so could do what he wanted. Together with his first wife, Rosemary, he embarked on an experiment in living of the kind that would later be called "alternative." They bought a hill farm in Wales and reared sheep and chickens. They made valiant if sporadic efforts to bring up their children without any help. They read Freud and Jung. She painted. He wrote.
Mosley's early novels, published in the late 1940s and 1950s, are written in a turgidly tragic manner derived from Faulkner. Their heroes are burdened with an obscure sense of guilt, which they can expiate only by sacrificing themselves or others. In 1957, Mosley stopped writing fiction. When he started again in 1963, it was in the style that has stamped his work ever since. And what a style it is. Its hallmark is a rejection of all the contrivances by which novelists have traditionally drawn readers into their worlds. His characters have no personality; they speak in flat, jerky sentences prefaced by "he said—", "she said—." Mosley has a stammer—an unconscious reaction, he believes, to his father's facility with words. His style is the literary equivalent of a stammer: it is hesitant, tentative, clumsy yet oddly delicate.
Mosley's style sets him well outside the solidly realist mainstream of the English novel. Writers such as Beryl Bainbridge, Alan Hollinghurst and (latterly) Ian McEwan see themselves almost as historians or sociologists, taking pains to get every period detail, every nuance of class and culture, right. The results are deathly in their exactitude. Mosley has no interest in such verisimilitude. "The only reality one can hope to get is of a separate order, the order of storytelling," he wrote as a young man to his friend Hugo Charteris, "and to try to get any other is a mixing-up of two worlds, like the hope that by getting a portrait 'accurate' enough it will suddenly come to life and speak, which it won't."
Not being a realist, Mosley has often been labelled by critics both friendly and hostile as a modernist or even an experimentalist. But Mosley is not interested in stylistic experiment for its own sake; he has nothing in common with William Burroughs or the nouveaux romanciers. For him, style is important only as a vehicle of moral truth—indeed, style is moral truth. It is inseparable from his moral vision. But what exactly is his moral vision? To answer this, we must return to those years in the 1950s and 1960s when Mosley temporarily abandoned fiction. He was at this time part of the circle surrounding the charismatic monk Raymond Raynes. "I was enormously impressed by him. He was a very old-fashioned Anglo-Catholic in his formal presence, but when one met him and talked to him personally, he was extraordinarily open and gentle and undogmatic." For seven years—"a traditional Old Testament stretch"—Mosley followed the rules. "I made a conscious decision to go to church on Sundays, go to communion, make my confession, and so on. I became a churchwarden down in our little village church in Sussex; I ran a little Christian youth club on the housing estate; I did my stuff as a good churchman should."
However, Mosley was too intellectually restless to fit the Anglican mould. The relentless stress on self-sacrifice—"the cross"—jarred. Liberation came when, laid out with malaria, he read the Bible from beginning to end. Taken as a whole, it seemed to be saying to him that obedience and self-sacrifice are not the key to salvation, that they merely perpetuate the cycle of earthly misery. What is required instead—here the language becomes tortuous—is a certain "state of mind" or "style" through which God's intentions might be discerned. Christ himself said that he must depart so that the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, might come, "who will guide you into all truth." In other words, the period of childhood, of moral rules, is over; henceforth human beings must look out for themselves. Mosley developed these ideas in a book, Experience and Religion (1965), which marked, as he later put it, "a signing-off from the regular routines of organised religion." From now on, theology would take the form of fiction.
I sound a note of scepticism. Doesn't this owe more to Nietzsche than to Christ? Isn't it really a superman philosophy, or an invitation to move beyond good and evil, tailor-made for a self-indulgent aristocrat? Not at all, protests Mosley. "One is not dispensing with God, one is learning what God really, really, truly is. I feel that God is actually active in the world, inside oneself. Commandments say you mustn't sin, yet Jesus liked sinners, so what do you do? Are you permanently split? The Holy Ghost is something that gives you the power, the internal means, to know when you should do one or the other, when you should pay more attention to keeping commandments, or when you should… you know… oh, one can't put it into words!" What Mosley can't put into words, of course, is the heretical thought that the Holy Ghost might sometimes require us to sin. To say that would be tantamount to licensing evil. Yet we all know, intuitively, that a rigid adherence to principle can stifle life, whereas sin sometimes liberates. Perhaps it is only in the form of jokes and parables—or novels—that such truths can be spoken.
This interdependence of good and evil is central to all Mosley's work. Take Accident (1965), his fifth novel. Stephen, a philosophy don at Oxford, is married with two children but attracted to his glamorous student Anna. His seems a straightforward moral dilemma: duty versus desire. But it is not that simple. For even if Stephen remained faithful to his wife, would he not simply be storing up brownie points to use against her in future? That is not the style of the Holy Ghost. So he instead constructs a story that enables him to be, as it were, both faithful and unfaithful. He selects a surrogate, his novelist friend Charlie, to have an affair with Anna in his stead. And he selects another surrogate, Anna's student admirer William, who is killed when she drunkenly crashes his car, to take the rap. Stephen has arranged everything perfectly. He has (symbolically) slept with Anna and been punished for it, yet in reality he has not slept with her and is not responsible for William's death. He is both satisfied and guiltless.
Accident is a very odd novel. The plot makes sense only on a symbolic level, in which one person can—like Christ—stand for another. And it portrays Stephen as a hero of sorts, whereas in conventional terms he is something of a shit. These complexities didn't make it into the 1967 film. Harold Pinter's screenplay follows the details of the novel closely enough, but soaks the whole thing in an atmosphere of scarcely suppressed aggression and lust, culminating in a scene immediately after the accident when Stephen presses himself upon a drunk, half-conscious Anna. His previous balancing acts are revealed as evasions rather than as subtle attempts to be faithful and unfaithful at once. "I wrote a strong letter to Harold," says Mosley. "I said—look, this really makes it all so awful. She's lying unconscious, and he suddenly goes and crawls into bed with her, this 45-year-old don with an unconscious undergraduate. I just don't think people do this sort of thing. And Harold wrote back and said: well I just think people do do this sort of thing."
The history of Accident is emblematic of Mosley's strained relationship with the literary establishment. His technical experiments are admired, but his intimations of meaning, of good emerging out of evil, are regarded as somewhat embarrassing. The standard modern view sees life as a battle for sex and power, fought under empty skies. Literature's job is simply to reflect this meaninglessness in elegant and interesting prose.
Mosley's conflict with the literary world came to a head in 1991 when, following the success of Hopeful Monsters (1990), he was invited to join the Booker prize judging panel. It was a disaster. "There were five judges, and we could pick six books. They fixed the voting so that none of my six got on the shortlist. And I could see no point in their books at all. To them it was all style, you see, style, style, style. Nowadays we specifically like books that don't have any meaning." Mosley resigned from the panel, firing off with an article in the TLS defending the "great tradition" against the modern novel of elegant despair. He admitted, though, that it is no longer possible to write like Jane Austen or George Eliot. Those novelists took for granted a social and moral order that has ceased to exist. The heroes of modern fiction lack anything to conform to or to rebel against. What does it mean to talk about good and evil today?
The convolutions of Mosley's style arise out of this central difficulty—that of writing about morality after the disintegration of the traditional language of morality. His heroes must tread a vanishingly thin line, on one side of which lurks cynicism and amoralism, on the other a (cynical and amoral) appeal to duty. One of the emblematic figures of Hopeful Monsters is the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, who as a commander in the war against the Romans chose to escape the besieged town of Jotapata rather than commit suicide with his troops, thereby incurring the eternal hatred of loyal Jews. To stay alive, to be happy—what a sacrilegious notion! But for Mosley, Josephus is a luminous figure, the prototype of the modern hero who refuses to immolate himself on the altar of convention. Such heroes are hard to write about. They lack the easy romantic pathos. They appear suspect, immoral even. A new style—complex, ironic, questioning—is needed to do justice to these hopeful monsters.
We have been talking for almost four hours—Mosley loves the "yakety-yak." Yet at the same time he mistrusts words. "I think the Holy Spirit is really saying—stop talking, you're not going to get anywhere with words. You're going to get as far as the crucifixion. But then you've got to shut up, stop talking." But he doesn't stop. He keeps yakking away, beaming out his coded messages to whoever will pick them up. "People—even people who like my novels—sometimes say to me, rather sadly: we don't quite understand what you're getting at. And I say: I don't blame you… I don't sometimes."
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