Isn’t it time we embraced Iris Murdoch again?
Born 100 years ago, the prolific author has fallen out of fashion – but no one has ever written better about tangled love lives, says Iona Mclaren
Research uncovered real-life love polygons that were just as convoluted as those in her novels
Beneath their bourgeois skin, they are closer in spirit to science fiction than to the Hampstead adultery novel
Iris Murdoch, who was born in Dublin 100 years ago this July, was one of the finest minds of her generation. A philosophy tutor at St Anne’s, Oxford, for 15 years, she wrote complex, literary novels that managed to sell like thrillers.
She was so popular in her day that, as soon as she died, in 1999, a film –
Iris, starring Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent – was made about her life and her decline with Alzheimer’s disease. Yet that seems a long time ago. Now, she is about as unfashionable as a novelist can be without falling out of print. The question is: does she deserve it?
Certainly, she has her eccentricities. Within the pages of her 26 novels, which typically focus on the moral dilemmas and sexual predilections of a group of upper-middle class characters, odd tics exist. Rather too many of her fictional creations, as the critic Colin Burrow put it, “either are or could be called Hugo”.
It hasn’t helped her posthumous reputation that The Sea, the Sea, the novel which won her the Booker Prize and which many new readers are tempted to start with, is one of her longest and hardest to like, with its fussy, bullying, egomaniac narrator Charles Arrowby.
Then there are the plots, so neatly patterned and capriciously symmetrical that they verge on the grotesque. You are never given a love triangle when a more interesting shape could be accommodated. Martin Amis, a great Murdoch defender, summed up her 1983 novel The Philosopher’s Pupil as “the 20-stone economist loves the nonagenarian philologist who loves the alcoholic classicist [who] loves the deluded linguist who loves the schizophrenic sociologist”.
Even in her best novels – Under the Net (1954), The Bell (1958), The Nice and
the Good (1968), A Fairly Honourable
Defeat (1970) – there is abundant idiosyncrasy. Character types – like “the enchanter”, a sinister man who tries to impose his will – recur, as does the setting of an English summer heatwave.
But one of the many things that makes Murdoch interesting is the amount of crimes she appears to be able to commit without failing to make each novel likeable and, in the final analysis, worth having read. She is one of those writers – like Anthony Powell or, in a very different mode, Raymond Chandler – who offer a steady drip-drip of observations about life in general, and it is the high calibre of hers that encourages the reader to indulge her in other respects.
Of Michael, the homosexual teacher in The Bell, for instance, she writes: “By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation, he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle.” Michael is the first
in Murdoch’s remarkable series of sympathetic portraits of homosexual men – and this in 1958, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence.
When on form, she is also, crucially, a matchless comic writer. Take this, from The Nice and the Good: “Pierce, brown-complexioned, brown-haired, brown-eyed, possessed a large nose which descended in a straight line from his brow, giving to his plump waxen face a somewhat animal quality. An impulse to stroke him down over brow and nose like a pony had already troubled, in half conscious form, a number of people, including some of his masters at school.”
Those troubled schoolmasters are the perfect finishing touch, something Murdoch was very good at. Consider, from the same book, the final flourish to her pen portrait of the manservant Fivey, who “irritated Ducane by eating peppermint creams in the car and by singing Jacobite songs, rather drearily, as he went about his household tasks” and announced unexpectedly one day that his mother “was a mermaid”. “‘A mermaid in a circus, you understand,’ Fivey had added in his slow Scottish voice. Ducane did not ask whether she was a real mermaid or a fake one. He preferred not to know.”
Some of Murdoch’s observations are briskly cynical about how women behave. In her first novel, Under the
Net, the hero Jake reflects: “I find that women are often especially charitable and receptive if one visits them at the hairdresser, perhaps because they like being able to show off some captive member of the male sex to so many other women when the latter are not so fortunate as to have their male retainers by them.” That is Jake saying it, not her, of course, but Murdoch does tend to be stern on female vanity, and her most successful books often feature men as the main characters and revolve around male dilemmas. “I identify with men more than women, I think,” Murdoch said in 1977. “I don’t think it’s a great leap… one’s just a human being.”
Murdoch’s own love life was as baroquely convoluted as anything in her novels. As a definitive biography by Peter Conradi made clear in 2001, she had a string of affairs in her youth, with both men and women. “One of my fundamental assumptions is that I have the power to seduce anyone,” she wrote in 1948, and Conradi’s research uncovered real-life love polygons that were just as convoluted as those so-called “fantastical” relationships in her novels. “M.R.D. Foot was crazy about Leonie, who adored Frank, who was hopelessly in love with Iris,” went one passage in Conradi’s biography.
The people Murdoch consorted with were also colourful in the extreme – from her diabolic lover, the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti, whom Murdoch’s husband John Bayley later described as
“Pluto, God of the Underworld”, to acquaintances such as Indira Gandhi, Wittgenstein, Dylan Thomas and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Yet many people have tangled love lives without being able to write entertaining novels about them. Murdoch’s gift was to force the reader to inhabit such unusual (to put it mildly) psychological situations – for instance, breaking into a house in Cambridge to find your best friend and former shrink, who has stolen your wife, in bed with his own sister (A Severed Head, 1961) – and put across precisely how that might feel in entertaining, convincing prose. And this is the crux. It may be the case that, in her books, as Martin Amis put it, “The men all have names like Hilary and Julian. The women all have names like Julian and Hilary”, but beneath their bourgeois skin, they are closer in spirit to science fiction than to the Hampstead adultery novel, because they want to transport you somewhere very, very strange indeed.
Yet Murdoch – for all her modish blurring of the boundaries between the male and female point of view – is unfashionable now, perhaps because she wrote too many books, which became too similar, leading people to wonder when she published a new novel, as they did of Anita Brookner: “Which one of the old ones is it?” Yet the things about her that are bad are far outweighed by the things that are nice, and indeed by the things that are good.