Peter Conrad
Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher, who has died aged 79, was one of the best and most influential writers of the 20th century. Above all, she kept the traditional novel alive, and in so doing changed what it is capable of.
She was not the heir – as she early and wrongly imagined – to George Eliot, but to Dostoevsky, with his fantastic realism, his hectically compressed time-schemes, his obsessions with sado-masochism and with incipient moral anarchy. Her best novels combine Dostoevsky with Shakespearian romance and love-comedy.
Murdoch was born in Dublin, an only child. Though her family moved to London in her first year, her Irish origins mattered to her. She would claim to feel Irish, even Anglo-Irish, all her life.
She ascribed to her lack of siblings both a happiness that she only later came to understand to have been exceptional, and also an inspiration to write, as a way of inventing imaginary brothers and sisters (twins abound in her early books). She later said she would not have tolerated a sibling, but by then she was cooking up the plot of The Green Knight (1993), which depends upon a murderous sibling rivalry, a theme at which she excelled.
Between 1938 and 1942 she was up at Oxford reading Greats. “She was absolutely captivating,” a contemporary, MRD Foot, recorded. Ten days after she had finished her exams she was conscripted to the treasury. From 1944 to 1946 she worked for the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Association in camps in Belgium and Austria. Some feeling about homelessness and exile and “an utter breakdown of society” came out of that experience.
Then she was in love with two victims of Hitler. Frank Thompson was captured and executed by the Nazis. The poet and anthropologist Franz Steiner, a scholarly Czech-Jewish refugee, lost both his parents through death in a concentration camp, and suffered a coronary in 1949 from which he never fully recovered. He died in November 1952. That year, she had met John Bayley at Oxford and they married in 1956.
Under the Net, her first published fiction, was her fourth written one. TS Eliot at Faber had refused a predecessor on grounds of paper- shortage, in terms just sufficiently cold to make her decide not to send him any of the successors. This must count as one of Eliot’s less far-sighted critical – and financial – judgments. Murdoch went on to publish some 30 works of fiction and philosophy, including such highly praised and always readable novels as The Bell, A Severed Head and The Sea, the Sea, which won the 1978 Booker Prize.
Her rhythm of around eight months’ gestation, followed by about six months’ writing, once established, did not often vary. “No more novels, no more philosophy,” she would despairingly cry to friends during the composition. This was a ritual cry, which only turned true towards the end, with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
She seemed proud that she could not type or use a word-processor. She used a fountain pen for two drafts – “One should love one’s handwriting”.
She wished to keep herself out of her novels. Yet in Bradley in The Black Prince she created one ironic and very unflattering self-portrait. But she had something important to say about desire and about human difference, and their relationship with goodness.
She could capture those moments of startled vision when we see our world without preconception. She could describe the ordinary and make it magical.
A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) marvellously retells the story of Much Ado About Nothing with a modern-day Christ and Satan added, in South Kensington. The Black Prince (1973) is by far the most self-revelatory and yet also the most artificial of all her dark comedies, with its meditation on Hamlet and on the black Eros. The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker prize in 1978, is enabled by The Tempest, just as The Good Apprentice (1985) is by the parable of the Prodigal Son and The Green Knight (1993) by Sir Gawain. All these combine myth with realism, and are built to last.
IRIS wrote Gothic 20 years before Angela Carter, and romance years before David Lodge. It is striking to read the latter’s strictures, in a review of A Fairly Honourable Defeat as a romance, 15 years before he turned to explore the same sub-genre himself. She helped pioneer writing about homosexuality as merely one part of human life. It is typical of her quiet subversiveness that it is only the gay partnership that survives in A Fairly Honourable Defeat – the heterosexual relationships all fall apart under the strain of a typical Murdoch plot.
Indeed she kept a debate about human difference alive, through the bad years when the fools of both extreme right and left had sheepishly pretended that it did not matter, or even did not exist anyway. Human difference also meant moral difference. How is it that some human beings are morally better than others? What is it that might make a man good, even in a concentration camp?
The Sovereignty Of Good (1970), The Fire And The Sun: Why Plato Banished The Artists (1976) and Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals (1992) have been important to theologians, to aestheticians, and moral philosophers, and seem likely to remain so. She could not believe in a personal god demonic enough to have created the world whose sufferings are so clear to us, yet wanted religion to survive, too. She was taught a form of Buddhist meditation also, and wanted Buddhism to educate Christianity, to create a non- supernatural religion. God and the after-life were essentially anti-religious bribes to her. Her vision of the world as sacred looks forward to ecology and the Green movement.
VISITING a cottage I share in mid-Wales in 1995, a cottage which abuts a graveyard, Iris Murdoch asked happily and with much interest: Do you know many of the dead people in your cemetery? Dying was, for her, not simply the intensely significant Wagnerian last moment that Christianity can make of it, but rather an undramatic part of everyday moral life. Redemption meant for her the Buddhist hope that one might gradually, moment-by-moment and day- by-day, learn to perceive less selfishly.
Such a process of learning is necessarily a calling-into-question of what is normally meant by `identity’. Indeed, she would often speak of herself as having no strong identity. And yet the capacity so to forget herself depended equally on an unusually strong sense of who she was. In the bar of a train in 1981, an enthusiastic lady greeted Iris Murdoch as Margaret Drabble. `How can you tell,’ Iris quizzically and patiently enquired `that I’m not Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, or Muriel Spark?’ `I’d know you anywhere Margaret,’ cried the enthusiast.
She connected goodness, against the temper of the times, not with the quest for an authentic identity so much as with the happiness that can come about when that quest can be relaxed. We are fortunate to have shared our appalling century with her. I count myself among the many who hope to have been taught by her, and who will miss her terribly.