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Iris Murdoch: A LifeWhen Dame Iris Murdoch died of Al zheimer's disease in 1999, Harold Bloom, the American academic who in the opinion of many is the world's leading literary critic, wrote that there were now after Murdoch's death 'no first rate writers left in Britain'.
He ranked her only below Proust as an original and endlessly provocative theorist of the tragi-comedy of sexual love.
Martin Amis, one of the few British authors entitled to feel slighted by Professor Bloom's remark, observed that Dame Iris's characters inhabit a 'suspended and eroticised world, removed from the anxieties of health and money and the half-made feelings on which most of us subsist'.
Malcolm Bradbury noted: 'In a day when fiction has grown more commercial, sensational and morally emp 1944 r ty, it is a joy to return to her work - with its sensuous pleasures, fantastic invention, high intelligence and moral dignity. Of all the post-war English novelists she has the greatest intellectual range, the deepest rigour.'
She also had her detractors, notably the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who declared Dame Iris to be, 'a lady not known for the clarity of her views'.
Perhaps Berlin, now widely regarded as a man who endlessly recycled the ideas of others and is commonly mistaken for the man who composed White Christmas, was present when Iris presented a lecture entitled, 'The Ontological Proof of God'.
She was not of course claiming to have found proof of God's existence but proof of 'good'. Her career managed to survive this crucial misprint.
The adjective 'Murdochian' has entered the language to describe a world of baroque coincidence and erotic imbroglio. It could hardly be otherwise as Murdoch used her own life as a template for her novels.
Although often portrayed as a sort of unwordly, detached, academic duchess of north Oxford, this image, as this truthful yet compassionate biography makes clear, is far from the truth.
She had taken Aldous Huxley's advise that 'It is is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters'.
Until her long and happy marriage to Oxford English professor John Bayley, she had been bisexual, and for the time promiscuous, with a liking for rough sex particularly with the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Elias Cannetti, with whom she would often have sex in his favourite armchair while his wife was in the kitchen preparing supper. Almost all of her novels contain at least one sadistic encounter.
John Bayley must have been aware of what marriage to Iris would be like when he wrote to her: 'I could live in any contradiction indefinitely with you, and never mind the mornings when one wakes up early and alone.'
And as an Etonian, he would not have noticed the domestic squalor in their Oxfordshire farmhouse. A friend observed 'there were so many smells they cancelled each other out'. Mice were treated as pets but not rats.
One of this book's many positive qualities is that it is a wonderful evocation of life at Oxford just before and during the war. So many middle European academics and students had fled Hitler that the language most commonly heard on the buses of north Oxford was German.
English speakers included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Roy Jenkins, Lord David Cecil, Denis Healey, Robert Conquest as well as Murdoch.
One of her tutors was the philosopher Donald Mackinnon upon whom Tom Stoppard modelled the character of George, the professor of moral philosophy in his play Jumpers. Murdoch had a 'cerebral affair' with the famously-eccentric Mackinnon. One of his students, Dennis Nineham, a future Regius professor of divinity at Cambridge arrived for a tutorial to find Mackinnon in the bath. He threw on some appalling clothes and took Nineham to the Lamb and Flag pub where he bought his student a whisky and himself a double.
Oblivious of his surroundings, a pub in wartime brimming with soldiers and sailors, he paced up and down the bar, which quickly fell silent saying, 'You see, when Kant says this, he means to say that, and this is crucial!' The performance lasted for about half-an-hour and when he'd finished the entire bar erupted with entranced applause at this exotic manifestation. Few of them had understood a word of what they had heard but the British enlisted man always recognised a superior being when he saw one.
However, throughout this book, one gains the impression that there were so many Iris Murdochs - teacher, philosopher, novelist, devoted friend, wife and lover that no one really knew her. The author almost admits as much when he quotes Scott Fitzgerald's comment: 'There was never any good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he is any good.'
Absolutely. But Peter Conradi, a friend of Murdoch's and one of the beneficiaries of her pounds 2 million estate, has done a pretty good job of presenting the Iris that he knew. An avalanche of Murdoch biographies are in production as is as a film starring Judi Dench. No doubt all will portray a different Iris but this biography feels authentic, is for the most part discreet and occasionally hilarious.
This article, which was distributed via Reuter's, appeared on the Fox News Website, on November 1, 2000. Thanks to Mike for sending me this article from The Financial Times (UK), which appeared in The Birmingham Post (UK), on November 10, 2001.
