All About Knowing

ACCIDENT by Nicholas Mosley. 192 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.

Iris Murdoch (A Severed Head) has put readers on warning that novels by Oxford philosophy dons are apt to baffle as well as entertain. The same warning applies to Accident, by Nicholas Mosley (who is, coincidentally, the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, former chief of the British Union of Fascists), which is about an Oxford philosophy don, and which raises the art of the intellectual tease to the level of mild torture. There is no doubt that in Accident a fictional design of subtlety and distinction has been attempted. But it is a literary jigsaw puzzle with perhaps some extra pieces belonging to another design slipped in.

The book seems perversely dedicated to confusion, like Oxford's linguistic philosophy which, from a puritan devotion to clarity, actually makes it very difficult to say anything about anything. Professor Stephen Jervis (and Novelist Mosley with him) struggles against this self-denying ordinance. After all, the intellectual show must go on. This is a novel. It is, the reader is told by one character, not about characters or society, but "about knowing."

Knowing what? Picking up clues or philosophic crumbs like a capriciously fed pigeon, the reader will learn that Stephen is married to a beautiful wife whom he loves, that he has two children, and that he does his job more or less well. He is also 40 years old, has problems of identity, and, more specifically, "can't keep his hands off the girl students." It is not really his hands but his irresponsible voyeurism that is Stephen's trouble.

There is an automobile accident. William, an aristocratic undergraduate, is killed, and Anna, another student, is carried from the wreckage by Stephen--who is responsible in no ordinary legal or moral way, but is unhinged by guilt. Glimpses of his previous history indicate that he has enjoyed a sort of vicarious pleasure in the love affairs of his students and friends. He has had a doggish don's weekend in London with a former mistress, an affair that seems to have done no harm; yet, without apparent cause, his wife falls desperately ill in his absence. In one episode, a parody of war is enacted by rich undergraduates at a great country house; the aristocracy, we are told in a blurred Freudian attribution, is good only for causing death--their own and others. There is a fancy-dress party at another country house, once notorious as the scene of diabolic revels.

But these are all enigmas. Nor is the situation made clearer by the intimation that one of Stephen's contemporaries, a freelance careerist of the emotions called Charlie, is the hero's Doppelgaenger. It is even suggested that the story is Charlie's not Stephen's; thus, although written throughout in the first person, it should actually be in the second. If so, the moral of the story seems to be that a man cannot be trusted to write his own history, and that even his best friend will have trouble with his obituary. Is the don dead? And who donnit?

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