The Two Iris Murdochs
Iris Murdoch, Anne Rowe, Liverpool University Press, 2019, 160pp, £16.99 (paperback)
Why Iris Murdoch Matters: Making Sense of Experience in Modern Times, Gary Browning, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 234pp, £19.99 (paperback)
The centenary of the birth of Iris Murdoch has been the occasion of a wideranging reassessment of her copious body of writing. If her work in fiction seemed to slip from view following her death from Alzheimer’s in 1999, it was largely because a mass of secondary literature accumulated in its wake. A clutch of personal memoirs, including a trio by her late husband, the Oxford don John Bayley, as well as former colleagues, students and occasional intimates, a compendious volume of her correspondence over sixty years, together with Richard Eyre’s 2001 film biopic Iris, with Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent, have all helped eclipse her literary achievement itself. There is, to be sure, an Iris Murdoch Archive at Kingston University, an Iris Murdoch Research Centre at Chichester, and an Iris Murdoch Society that publishes the annual Iris Murdoch Review, as well as a now formidable tonnage of critical literature, so a certain professional interest in her, despite that eclipse, endures.
In one sense, this is only to be expected for a writer who was one of the towering figures of the post-war British novel, whose consistently prolific output in fiction spanned forty-one years, who was a recipient of the Booker and many another literary prize, and was awarded the DBE in 1987. From another perspective, however, the critical attention to which her work is now treated sits at an oblique angle to the reception it was accorded throughout the second half of her literary career. As her novels grew longer and more loosely spun from the late 1970s on, it became the fashion among reviewers in the broadsheets to take them less than seriously. It proved to be
an eminently pasticheable style (a temptation to which the present reviewer did not fail to succumb in a passage of his own postmodern debut novel), a precipitate of George Eliot’s philosophical flights, Henry James’s dialogic modes, the spiritual struggles of the Russian nineteenth century, and the subjective interiority of Sartre’s narratives. Ethical musings of handwringing urgency laced with adjectival pile-ups; extended descriptions of landscape, the architecture and furnishings of houses, the clothing, jewellery and makeup worn by principal characters; insistent italicisations flashing like warning beacons throughout every page; and – perhaps most notoriously – defiantly non-naturalistic Platonising dialogue that does little to distinguish the individual voices one from another... these all became the hallmarks of her mature style. If readers in the cheap seats of popular fiction found her work lacking in narrative focus, those in the intellectual dress circle felt that it harboured pretensions to profundity on which it too often failed to deliver.
These critical predispositions became hard to resist, and yet as so often the terrible full stop that a writer’s demise puts to their corpus of work, even in late life and amid circumstances of personal distress made painfully known (Dame Iris made a public avowal of her inability to write any longer in 1995), prompts a retrospective assessment of it in toto. And on this allembracing view, it has emerged once more as one of the momentous careers in latter-day Anglophone literature.
There are two Iris Murdochs. One is the fertile maker of fictions. The other is an ethical and political philosopher schooled in the Oxbridge tradition, who lectured for many years at St Anne’s College, Oxford and the Royal College of Art, and a productive author of speculative texts, most notably in moral theory. Her first book in 1953 was one of the earliest Englishlanguage monographs on Sartre, and was followed by collections of lectures-turned-essays such as The Sovereignty of Good (1970), a pair of Platonic dialogues in the authentic Athenian idiom, with Plato himself and Socrates among the interlocutors, a late baggy monster based on her Gifford Lectures, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), which earned more courteous bafflement than it did concrete admiration, and a late unfinished
study of Heidegger, now awaiting its imminent posthumous appearance. Murdoch insisted throughout her career that her philosophical writings and her novels were not to be cross-referenced to each other. They were two entirely different and separate enterprises, not least because, as she put it in a BBC interview with Bryan Magee in 1977, ‘Literature entertains, it does many things, and philosophy does one thing’. The latter element of the postulate is so eminently refutable as hardly to justify the raising of an eyebrow, and yet she looks and sounds adamantine in her self-assurance as she says it. The insistence that she dwelt in two households, both alike in dignity, but with no shared ground between them, can safely be counted one of those writers’ pieties that nobody need believe, rather akin to Ibsen’s late statement that he had never written a naturalistic drama, only symbolic poetic ones like his last works. ‘Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea’, Murdoch writes, ‘and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port’. And again: ‘Love is the general name of the quality of attachment and it is capable of infinite degradation and is the source of our greatest errors’. The first reflection comes halfway through her 1958 novel The Bell, the second in the 1967 lecture, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’.
Indeed, what is most nourishing about her work in both disciplines is precisely that they cross-fertilised each other. The philosophy is informed by a general context of empirical this-worldliness in the Anglophone tradition, what she called ‘a kind of inconclusive non-dogmatic naturalism’, while the novels are, from the outset, shaped by a philosophically structured consciousness of the more and less disastrous realities that embroil their people, their style a mode of ‘dramatising … making figurative, the act of thought,’ as George Steiner puts it in an appreciative Foreword to a late anthology of her work, Existentialists and Mystics (1997). None of this is to suggest that simply putting philosophical utterances into the mouths or minds of characters makes a novel philosophical, but Murdoch’s characters construct their responses, either effectively or calamitously, to their predicaments by means that involve theoretical objectivisation, the choreography of ethical concepts, sometimes even the invocation of specific thinkers in psychoanalytic theory or specific mystical traditions.
Two recent critical studies of Murdoch’s oeuvre make patient attempts to bring order to these entanglements. Anne Rowe, a scrupulous Murdoch scholar of many years’ standing, has written a slim but comprehensive overview of the writer’s career, attending successively to aspects of her output in both genres, encompassing matters intellectual, spiritual, experiential and geographical (there is a fine chapter on Ireland and London as the two lodestones of Murdoch’s cultural orientation, despite her long residency in north Oxford). Rowe is properly inquisitorial of Murdoch’s lifelong aspiration to found a transcendent notion of the Good in a personal morality that had to do without a mythological God, but needed nonetheless some kind of external metaphysical referent for its sustenance. The enemy was not organised religion, it turned out, but nihilism, the vacuity to which existentialism, which Murdoch perspicuously skewered in the early 1950s as a late form of sceptical bourgeois liberalism, reduced the individual subject.
The political theorist Gary Browning expatiates more fully on these and related issues, examining in turn, and in impressively attentive detail, Murdoch’s reflections on modern experience, metaphysics, the craft of fiction, morality and politics. Under that last head, she followed a highly familiar twentieth-century British trajectory from membership in the Communist Party in her early twenties to a less pragmatic quasi-Marxist theoretical commitment, overturned eventually by the post-1956 mood of liberal disillusionment, and then finally an unabashed conservative retrenchment, born of distaste for comprehensive education, trade union militancy, Irish republican violence, and the leftward démarche of Michael Foot’s Labour Party. Fearful for the fate of the individual in an atomised society, she appeared to find its possible salvation in the Thatcher ascendancy and the ideological obstinacy of Paisleyite Unionism. Browning does not allow the hagiographical tone to prevail, and is not apprehensive in pointing out that her prescriptions for the development of public policy are light on specific schematic detail, or that her assessments of Plato sometimes give the impression of not being ‘overburdened by scholarship’.
What is missing largely from both Rowe’s and Browning’s studies is a
meticulous evaluation of the relative merits of the novels, which they both treat as uniformly important, and correspondingly over-defend where the critical consensus was not encouraging. This is regrettable, not least because it has the effect of selling short her genuinely better accomplishments. After a couple of discursively experimental texts in the French vein, and an early false start with a rather naïve domestic English novel in The Sandcastle (1957), her mature style suddenly emerged fully formed in The Bell, the story of the emotional, spiritual and sexual intrications of a lay religious community in Gloucestershire. Despite a faintly careless, perfunctory final chapter, it remains one of the scintillating works of post-war English fiction, peopled by sharply drawn, fascinating characters, circling around an inescapable literary symbol in the shape of the medieval bell lying in the ooze of centuries at the bottom of a lake, waiting, like Chekhov’s pistol, to be fatally detonated.
The meander through differing tones and approaches in the early 1960s took in her shortest and silliest novel, The Italian Girl (1964), a threeact Jamesian divertissement written in brief theatrical set-pieces, their preposterous revelations and pantomimic gestures gushing out with haemorrhagic force. And then, in the years that followed, came the rivalrous intrigues of A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), the acute poignancy and blood-stopping prescience of Henry and Cato (1976), the tale of a Roman Catholic priest’s emotional embroilment with a delinquent adolescent boy, the expansive maritime anthem of doomed love in The Sea, The Sea (1978), and – outstandingly the best of the late epics – The Good Apprentice (1985), a Tolstoyan family drama of misery and guilt, unfolding over nearly six hundred fraught and gripping pages.
What unifies Murdoch’s fictional canon, if anything does, is her interrogation of the ruses and evasions and unbridled indulgences of transgressive desire. There are incests and adulteries, sexual obsessions with the underaged, murderous jealousies and self-dissolving griefs at every age. She was, famously, a gifted observer of gay sexuality, both before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 and after. She depicts the unselfing involved in all sexual desire without prurience or sensationalist relish. It is one of the
facts of life that binds human experience to a hopeless contingency, from which the hope of a stern but redemptive moral learning might germinate. Via Blake’s road of excess, Murdoch’s survivors reach, if not always the palace of wisdom, then at least the local habitation that might be given a name. ‘When everything is broken’, she wrote to Raymond Queneau in apparently Nietzschean spirit in 1945, ‘our strength is reborn’. In the last days of Europe’s disintegration, it was a brave thought indeed, but in the never trivial domestic contexts in which the alliances and sunderings of her fictional characters are played out, the breaking of the self is so often its only chance for coming into its own.
It has become a truism of reception theory with regard to Iris Murdoch’s novels that, however absorbed they become in the reticulations of the plots in their immediate encounter with them, many readers find they remember little or nothing about them soon after finishing. To some extent, this may be attributable to her tendency to hold a number of narrative strands in homogeneous tension, rather than privileging one and letting the others bubble along as sub-plots. At a deeper level, though, what it suggests is the modern reader’s antipathy to self-reflection and the emotional overwroughtness it often provokes, a disinclination to consider the ethical implications and spiritual weight of events, amid conditions of widespread forgetfulness. There is no other way, Iris Murdoch’s novels teach, of giving form to the formless, distilling meaning from the contingent in life, than of thinking patiently and compassionately on it, thereby restoring what Marx, in his tender address to the drugged comfort in religion, called the heart of a heartless world.