In memory of Iris Murdoch

A. N. Wilson

The following is an edited extract from a talk recently delivered to the Royal Society of Literature

There is a memorable preface to Balzac's La Peau de Chagrin in which the great French novelist contrasts those authors such as Byron, Hoffmann and Voltaire who were, as he says, les hommes de leur genie' and those like Rabelais who gave the lie to their literary image — Rabelais being a sober, abstemious figure, the least 'Rabelaisian', in fact, imaginable.

Many novels are a form of autobiogra- phy, but many more are forms of self- projection, which is different. Iris Mur- doch's are no exception. And yet I think many of us who felt we knew her, or half knew her, were surprised by the fiction. The daimon, as Kipling would have called it, which animated the enormous, prolific output was not something which was obvi- ous when we met our Iris. John Bayley once told me that he was so disturbed by The Bell that he found himself unable, for many years thereafter, to read Iris's novels, and would pretend to her that he had done so whenever the next typescript was shoved his way for inspection. He had been dis- turbed by an imagination which was not the Iris he knew. If even he felt this, it is not surprising that so many of us who were no more than acquaintances felt it.

I knew Iris for nearly 30 years and never felt I knew her at all. I used to think this was because she was the reverse of my 'type' — whatever that means. She was pas- sionately serious, and enjoyed talking about such questions as whether it made sense to pray even if, as she was certain was the case, there was no God. I am not in this sense serious at all and find such conversa- tions excruciatingly embarrassing. 1 don't think Iris knew the meaning of the word embarrassment in this sense. 'How's your prayer life, old thing?' she asked a mutual friend of hers and mine whom she hadn't seen for two years. He was furious — and rather hated her for asking the question, I think. Did she notice that this was not the way that 'normal' people converse?

One doubts it. One doubts, in the last 30 years, whether she noticed much at all out- side the confines of her fantasy life — her shared fantasy life with John, and the intense, mysterious inner life which she so obviously had and into which she entered compulsively and obsessively as she com- posed her books.

People used to say when she was alive and in full vigour that they would see her at parties taking in everything which was said to her, asking relentless questions and staring with such penetration that they felt she looked through them into their very souls. I never felt this at all. I always felt that Iris lived entirely in her own world, her own perceptions, and that she was one of the least observant persons I ever met. When John and I used to go on and on about how much we admired Barbara Pym, it made her furious. Really furious. She minded, and was jealous. But also, I think, she could tell from the things we said that Pym was precisely the sort of artist that Iris herself wasn't and had never wanted to be — the sort who in Hardy's phrase 'used to notice such things'. Pym's notebooks and

diaries and letters reveal exactly the same person that we meet as the intelligence behind her novels. To this extent, Pym is a transparent figure, instantly attractive, but also like Stevie Smith in this sense, disarm- ing: you can't tell how many of the effects are flukes, or whether she knows what image or what art she is projecting.

Iris Murdoch is the reverse of this. In person she was like an atheist Reverend Mother. An interviewer once asked me the nature of my relationship with Iris and I replied that the easiest way qf describing it was to say that I was Julie Andrews and she was the old Mother Superior singing 'Climb Every Mountain'. It was the only occasion when I've ever been pompous

enough to telephone an interviewer after- wards and beg her to remove a phrase. I feared it would offend Iris, that she wouldn't understand it and that she would dislike the sense that there was a tease. She laughed a lot but did not have what the rest of us would call a sense of humour. And I was fairly sure that she would not have heard of The Sound of Music.

There is a mystery in what I am talking about, actually, because in one sense, though taking in very little of the contem- porary scene and being quite exceptionally unobservant about it, in a more superficial way Iris was on another level instinctively in tune with her times. And I think this is one reason for her prodigious success as a writer. She was, like most of her contempo- raries among the intellectual classes, a woman of the extreme left in the 1930s. She joined the Communist party; it appealed to her religious nature. In the postwar years, and in particular in the years after the invasion of Hungary, she became a straight supporter of the Labour party. But she was Old Labour, not in the sense that we use the word, but in the sense that she believed in equalities of intellectual opportunity being extended to all by the grammar schools. In her memorable phrase, when comprehensive education was introduced, she said that we don't have mixed ability football teams. This issue alone made her change her political alle- giance. Her husband had always been natu- rally on the right. Had she noticed? One doesn't know.

She moved increasingly to the right her- self in political views. One of the last coherent conversations I had with her, before the devastations of Alzheimer's became apparent, was when she urged with passion that those who had small c conser- vative views such as mine should, must, had a duty to vote for nice Mr Major. Her views on Ireland had reverted to those of her Ulster ancestors and changed radically over the 30 years or so since she wrote The Red and the Green — the only thing, she once told me, which she was ashamed to have written.

The really interesting revolution which happened to western Europe and America in the middle years of the 20th century was the sexual revolution. Iris was not merely in tune with it but slightly ahead of it. Her chronicles of emotional chaos among the opinion-forming classes suggest what many of that generation instinctively have felt — that the most interesting thing to have hap- pened in their lifetimes wasn't Suez or the Cold War but Wolfenden and the liberali- sation of the divorce laws.

The novels concern, and inhabit, the intensity of passion — the passion of peo- ple who fall in love with one another, deeply, uncontrollably and usually with painful results, though sometimes with comic ones. If you go through the oeuvre, you will find that this, very often, is all that happens to the huge majority of the char-

acters. We are told that some of them work in the civil service. Others are teachers or, if in holy orders, professional atheists. But the world of work is not one which Iris ever chose to investigate or describe. There are no Pym-like evocations of office life in her novels, for example. No one comes home on the tube obsessed by envy or hatred of their boss. No one talks obsessively to their wife or husband about their ambitions or their financial worries. With the exception of The Sandcastle — a rather cruelly accu- rate portrait of two Oxford friends here turned into a schoolmaster and his wife — and the acknowledged portrait of Professor Fraenkel at the beginning of The Book and the Brotherhood — he's called Levquist — there are almost no realistic evocations of any of the professions, nor of industry nor of industrial life. She is obsessed by monks and nuns but interestingly we never even see inside a cloister.

In other words, the characters of Iris's books, at least the ones she wrote after about 1960, do not really exist in our world. She made no attempt at what we should call 'realism'. The dramas of the books, as in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, take place inside the author's head, rather than in some attempted photographic represen- tation of the real world. It is this, I think, which gives the Murdoch world such an intense, hothouse 'feel'.

Equally, you could say that the classes do not really exist in Murdoch-land in the way they do in England. There are people who live in big houses in the country, but they do not do any of the things such country people do in, say, Gloucestershire or Wilt- shire. They don't hunt or gossip, or sit as magistrates or discuss real things like the price of sheep, or the vicar ruining the ser- vices in the parish church. Similarly, we are told that some of the urban characters have poor or lower-class backgrounds, but we never meet their parents or see inside their houses. They themselves live in the same London flats as everyone else.

The other thing to be said about the books is that though they contain, from the middle to late phase, at least, a great deal of seriousness — serious people, having serious conversations — very little happens in them which we should regard as serious. It is true that there are some deaths — in Nuns and Soldiers, there is a superb evoca- tion of Gertrude's desolation in widow- hood; in The Good Apprentice there is a terrible death of a young man by drugs. But the latter is not a novel about drugs or death any more than Nuns and Soldiers is one about bereavement. Gertrude is soon off on the Murdoch emotional merry-go- round, falling madly in love with a young man who practises a number of highly con- trived and unbelievable deceptions on her. It becomes once again a novel about pas- sions.

The novelist is sometimes one who puts their own life into story form in the most artless of ways. We all have smiled at the blurbs of modern novels in which the sum- mary of the story and the author's potted biography seem interchangeable. Iris was not this sort of novelist. She never told the story of her childhood nor did she write novels of academic life to be compared with those of C. P. Snow or Malcolm Brad- bury in which there might be recognisable portraits of the Fellows of St Anne's. Instead, I see her fictions as an endless series of make-believes, of Iris imagining herself in different roles like the only child with a crowd of imaginary friends: we see Iris thinking of herself as a randy atheist priest, as a fundamentally flawed, idealistic, male homosexual trying to lead a good life on the edges of a religious community, etc. etc.

The Black Prince is a novel in which Iris plays at least two roles, possibly all the roles, in the story. She is Arnold Baffin, the ridiculously facile, overproductive, success- ful writer, whose books, when described, sound exactly like Iris Murdoch's. Bradley Pearson is a more complicated character. On the one hand the name is an allusion to a particular way of reading Shakespeare. Bradley is the great humanist critic in whose footsteps John Bayley trod when he wrote The Characters of Love. Pearson is an echo of the second half of Shakespeare's 'Well, he's got your halo.' name. Arnold — he also has a famous crit- ic's surname as his first name — represents the fluency, the fatal fluency of Shake- speare turning into the trashiness of much of Iris's work. Pearson represents her aus- tere desire to banish bad art from her writ- ing and reading. Bradley falls in love with the child of Arnold, an androgyne called Julian who dresses like Hamlet. It is entire- ly characteristic of Iris, incidentally, that when a don at Oxford asked her if her new novel was about a famous mediaeval war- rior, she should have expressed amazement that the phrase 'the Black Prince' could summon up any associations in a reader's mind other than thoughts of the Prince of Denmark. Rereading The Black Prince I was struck again by its amazing pace, the sheer fervour and energy with which it is written and with which the characters torment themselves on the rack of self- indulgent love feelings. It is possibly the last entirely successful novel she wrote.

There is another figure who crops up in many of the books, taken by some to be a projection of Elias Canetti but, I would submit, another of Iris's self-images, and that is the figure of the great sage, the figure who influences a whole group of people and who might conceivably possess the secrets of the universe.

Iris, of course, had seen this sort of hero- worship at work in the course of her life. She'd attended Wittgenstein's classes at Cambridge and seen the bizarre spectacle of the English disciples so besotted with the Master's voice that they actually spoke English with a Viennese accent. She'd seen Sartre in action in a Belgian cafe. She'd herself been painfully and deeply in love with Canetti, apparently accepting his pre- posterously high opinion of himself to the end of her/his days. So, of course, if you are one sort of fiction reader — the sort who thinks that all novels aspire to the condi- tion of the roman a clef — then you will think that figures like Crimond in The Book and the Brotherhood, or the similar gurus in The Philosopher's Pupil and Mes- sage to the Planet, 'are' portraits of Canetti. But Iris herself fantasised about writing a book which would contain a Message to the Planet or which would change mankind's perception of the Good. She very much wanted, as all her conversation in the last 25 years showed, to make of her own version of Platonism/ Buddhism/ Heidegger/ Simone Weil a sort of secular religion to which modern atheists could legitimately respond. She wanted to rescue the inner life as a concept in philosophy, and to resurrect ethics as a great philo- sophical subject.

She did hope that her Gifford lectures would become such a project and was bit- terly disappointed when they came out just like a series of middle-brow philosophy tutorials. Hence her obsessive writing and rewriting of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. 'It's my one big book, my one seri- ous book,' she often said to me. Its badness haunted her, depressed her. As she wrote it, the gurus in her novels became both madder and more vulnerable, If you think, as I do, that fiction like this operates on a different plane, then I think that these gurus, or Dichter as John Bayley calls their real-life equivalents, are once again parts of the inner fantasy-game of Iris's own silent existence when she sat with the A4 pads empty before her and wrote and wrote and wrote in her clear, round hand. Very little disturbed her. She could write anywhere. I remember when John broke his ankle with Pott's fracture one winter and was taken to the cottage hospital in Banbury, she sat at the end of his bed, writ- ing calmly for day after day, while he lay back like a schoolboy whose mother had been allowed to stay in the san, eating grapes and reading James Bond or women's magazines.

There is perhaps only one near-perfect Murdoch book, and it is certainly the one which at the moment seems to have sur- vived the slump in her literary reputation. And that of course is A Severed Head. Here is a book which triumphantly succeeds on its own terms, which is in its own way entirely original and strange, which no one else could have written, and which certainly bears rereading. It is also, and this is rather an important point, exactly the right length. Nearly all Murdoch's books were too long. Notoriously, she refused to allow them to be edited. By saying they were too long I do not merely mean that they were repeti- tive and prolix, which they were, but that they lost any sense of what, as works of art, they were trying to do. When she said that she had worked them all out in her head before putting pen to paper, we knew that she must have been deceiving herself, for they are not — the books after The Black Prince — like that. They ramble, they over- flow with superfluous dialogues and extra- neous characters.

But A Severed Head is different. From the gripping opening, when Martin Lynch. Gibbon lies on the hearth-rug with Georgie his mistress and considers the question of whether his wife knows 'about us', to the end, when he finds himself the hopeless prisoner of love for the formidable Honor Klein, there is not a superfluous scene.

As the novels of Iris Murdoch appeared, from the early 1950s onwards, there is a sense in which they represent a phenomenon. They tell us much about the preoccupations of her generation. Revolu- tions always seem inevitable when they have happened. Often they seem effortless. Iris did not write about sex so much as about passion. She isn't a prophetess of the sexual revolution in the sense that Ger- maine Greer might have been, or in a dif- fering way Simone de Beauvoir. But for 30 years she went on patiently telling stories which drew on her own — by now largely irrecoverable — hoard of inner fantasies, memories and desires, but which touched a much wider common chord. The tight-

lipped, monogamous, heterosexual English middle classes lapped them up. I suspect that if, in times to come, there passes a generation which does not read her books as avidly as her own did when they were first published, there will come another generation.

They will take down A Severed Head from the shelf and read this strange story of a wine merchant who is unlike any wine merchant in history. He never seems to do any work. He spends his entire time rush- ing between one passionate scene and the next — from the arms of his mistress, to those of his wife, to his wife's analyst-cum- lover, the rather sinister American, Palmer, and the sublimely terrifying half-sister and lover of Palmer, Honor Klein. The wine merchant fell in love with Honor, it will be remembered, when he burst in and saw her in bed with her brother.

What an extraordinary decade, our future historian will conclude, the 1950s were. (The book was published in 1961.) This is the decade when such diverse fig- ures as the poet Christopher Logue and the novelist John Braine had their heyday, when Elizabeth David began to educate the English palate, when Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were producing their best canvases, when Elizabeth Frink was sculpt ing and Dan Farson was propping up Soho bars, and Iris Murdoch was wowing the civil servants and schoolteachers who were her natural readers with a story of serial fornication and incest. It was an uproari- ously successful play when she dramatised it with J. B. Priestley. And they say that the Fifties was a dull and uneventful decade.

In some strange way Iris Murdoch explained a generation to itself. Reading her novels, they re-educated themselves morally, decided what their priorities were, both in law and in ethics, and rebuilt the world which the Old Gang had destroyed in the wars. She had her place in this, pos- sibly an important place. She gave enor- mous enrichment and pleasure with her books. No doubt if we knew the whole of her emotional history, and knew how often and how easily she fell in love, for example, we should feel that we knew something of the mysterious, sometimes violent and ungentle daimon which produced those novels.

If those of us who in the second half of her life (and who knew her chiefly as the wife of John Bayley) delighted in her gen- tle, playful but schoolgirl-serious company could never quite match the woman we thought we knew to the fictions with their teeming passion, then we can remember the one with affection and gratitude, and enjoy the others as we may.

The full text of this lecture will be published in the next issue of News from the Royal Society of Literature.