This essay was the Introduction to the first Dalkey Archive edition of Catastrophe Practice, published in 1989.
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    Nicholas Mosley's life and work have been unified by his search for a style with which to mirror the realities of human life. Life is "a matter of multifarious interlocking dramas, false starts, unfinished strands, might-have-beens, which jostle for the attention of consciousness." A true-to-life portrayal would embrace our flickering internal motion as well as our sense of its relationship with the external world. It would require a reflexive style of language - and hence of thinking and conduct - through which we niight jointly come to terms with our complexities and paradoxes, and so gain some comfort. The broadest and most refined contribution to this project is Catastrophe Practice.

    All of Mosley's writings are explorations of traditional values: love, commitment, learning, the renewal of life. Their vitality and authority are derived partly from the fact that they are linked with his direct, sometimes very intense, experience. Thus in the successive novels the central characters may be reidentified, as it were, in their successive stages of learning and evolution, the body of work deriving coherence from the life. However, in order to give a brief overview it will be helpful to divide Mosley's work into three phases.

    The four novels of the first phase, from Spaces of the Dark (1951) to Meeting Place (1962), are concerned with escape from entrapment in the conventions of postwar English society, which are seen to be hypocritical and life-denying, and preservation of the returning soldier's ideals. In the earliest novels there are the outlines of two of his central themes: that the conventional linear narration of stories, which posits characters who are all-of-a-piece, is a simplification and falsification; and that one should try to nurture and encompass ail of the possibilities of life, coming to understand complexity through the recognition that one's seif is complex.

    The novels of the second phase represent a departure: each experiments with narrative technique and language in an attempt to convey what cannot be spoken about directly, a sense of that more hopeful dimension of life in which we find freedom and meaning. Whereas the earlier work is verbally quite dense - Mosley has described the writing as rhapsodic - Accident (1965), Impossible Object (1968), and Natalie, Natalia (1972) are sparse and elliptical, more effectively engaging the reader and generating intellectual and emotional immediacy. Accident, which was made into a film and is perhaps the best known of Mosley's titles, raises many of the topics of Catastmpbe Practice: the relationship between acting and not-acting, for example, and the view that people are not characters but things moving occasionally in jumps, the large changes being discontinuities similar to those later modeled in mathematics-topology by catastrophe theory. In Impossible Object Mosley asks how love, which flourishes on the tension of war, is to be sustained in ordinary life. The reply, elaborated in Natalie, Natalia, is that paradox is an essential feature of life - what is taken to be destructive providing the seeds of growth and adaptation - and in order to preserve one's optimism and liveliness one must develop the style of consciousness which embraces the motion between the poles - loyalty and betrayal, ecstasy and madness, Natalie and Natalia. This is a battle with onesef which one wins by learning to traverse a kind of internal no-man's-land. It is in Impossible Object that Mosley first employs those Escher-like images - patterns which can only be grasped in a dimension outside the ones in which they are depicted - as models of the processes and patterns of life. And it is in Natalie, Natalia that he explores the indirect strategies of self-management and self overcoming which seem to be required for love and happiness, and which are so prominent in Catastrophe Practice. The politician Anthony Greville, finding himself at a crisis in his marriage and his job, remarks, "In a dark wood, at the middle time of life, I went on trying to explain myself to myself. I might waylay myself like a bandit."

    The plays in Catastrophe Practice and the five associated novels represent a third phase of Mosley's work. Although the previous novels employ multiple narrators and shiiting viewpoints, they are mainly concerned with the efforts of individuals to diagnose their predicaments and realize some freedom, largely by establishing a balance, or releasing some tension, between the conflicting parts of themselves and between their private experience and their public life. However Catastrophe Practice focuses upon the functioning of individuals as parts of a living, interpersonal network, and it demonstrates more than it describes the means of their connectedness. The six central characters are discovering that their separate efforts to "do their own thing," to enact their own construals of the circumstances, generate a common ground and fortuitously bring about common ends - that is to say, cooperation and liveliness. Thus the personal effort of self-expression and self-understanding is magnified and found to be the source, and consequence, of social integration. The success of their endeavour is represented by the child, life,  whose birth is an indirect consequence of the conduct of all of the characters.

    Insofar as it is the regard for what is life-giving that is pivotal for the characters, attention to the symbolic role of the child helps to clarity the organization of Catastrophe Practice as a whole. The identity of the child's father is something of a mystery, and his birth is something of a miracle: these are circumstances with a venerable history in religious tradition. But it is not so obvious that the demonstration in the plays, as well as being a reflection of what is happening in the Catastrophe Practice series, is a representation of what might be going on in the growing child and from the child's point of view. Thus there are interpretations nested in interpretations - which is the way the mind works - held together in some further network by the reader. In Skylight there is the gnarled surtice of the brain and the actors, who are partly real and partly mythic, struggling, like ideas, to convey their messages. In Landfall there is a waiting room, in a hospital or an airport, where a man might have to choose between his wife and his childd. There is also Mosley's recurring theme of transcendence, for in order to escape, or to be born, or just to stay lively, it may be necessary to die and then come alive again on a different level, with one's perspective transformed. Finally, Cell displays the structure of the body and of the mind, integrated by processes of experiment and listening, and by the activity of Siva who, with her third eye, is able to see inward to herself. Clearly Catastrophe Practice is not just one ingeniously contrived story; rather its significance and coherence are in what you, the reader, make of it.  In this respect, it is uncompromisingly realistic, a riddle of processes and connections- of function and feeling as well as of cause and effect - which are always available to those who search for them.

    The two volumes of Mosley's autobiography, Rules of the Game (1982) and Beyond the Pale (1983), reveal how his experiences have been threaded through the fiction. Like Bert in Imago Bird (1982), Mosley grew up on the periphery of that "mad, grown-up world" of war and political and personal intrigue. His father was the enormously talented, slightly larger-than-life politician Sir Oswald Mosley(1896-1980); his mother, also a politician, was Lady Cynthia (neé Curzon); and his step-mother is Diana Mosley (neé Mitford). It is easy to see why Mosley would be interested in political themes. The deeper explanation is that as a child he learned about character structure the hard way, by trying to survive as a spectator of highly politicized lives. Evidently he was shown that in their wheeling and dealing on a tightrope between the public and the private, and in their mixed posturing and sincerity, politicians are emblematic of the human predicament. This points to the central paradox, that you cope most effectively by learning to feel at home where you actually live, and that is not quite in the ordinary world of objects and the dramas of all-of-a-piece characters, but in a kind of gap - an added dimension running parallel, like a fiction - between what you know or sense about life and what you can say. This is another approach to that interpersonal, psychic network upon which our life - our liveliness, to borrow Mosley's idiom once again - depends. His writing is evidence of his belief that shaping ourselves and fulfilling a role in that network is an aesthetic concern. It seems that his fiction would have to show what he has learned about life because for him the literary effort and the effort to understand himseff in relation to the wider network are just different aspects of the same aesthetic project.

    The essays in Catastrophe Practice are radiant with Mosley's wit and absolute sincerity, and they leave no doubts regarding the breadth of his philosophical curiosity. His career may be viewed as an attempt to meet a challenge posed by the philosopher Stephen in Accident:  to come to terms with the ineffable realities of life beyond the unbending language of philosophy. Like so many of Mosley's protagonists, Stephen also thought that one began to fulfill one's responsibilities to others by taking responsibility for oneself.  But this is an ethic which would have to be actually lived in order to be proved.
                                                                                                                                                             John Banks