Remembering Iris Murdoch

Letters and Interviews

J. Meyers

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137352415
• eBook ISBN: 9781137347909
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: German Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This annotated edition of the unpublished letters that Iris Murdoch wrote to Jeffrey Meyers includes her discussion of writers from Conrad to Updike; her quarrel with Rebecca West; and her difficulty with Alzheimer's. With both scholarly insight and personal reflection, this volume will deepen our understanding of Murdoch's complex life and work.

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Remembering Iris

Abstract: “Remembering Iris” sketches Iris Murdoch’s achievements, her life and loves, and long marriage to John Bayley. The author describes his meetings and interviews with Murdoch; her appearance, environment, skillful teaching, warm personality; her many intellectual interests and tastes; her moral values.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Remembering Iris Murdoch: Letters and Interviews. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137347909.

I

Iris Murdoch is now firmly established as one of the greatest English novelists in the second half of the twentieth century. Between 1953 and 1995 she published twenty-six novels, six plays (three originals and three adaptations from her fiction), five books of philosophy, an opera libretto and a book of poetry. Her novels explore erotic mysteries, the quest for personal salvation, and the dark struggles between good and evil. They provide, as Malcolm Bradbury observed, “sensuous pleasures, fantastic invention, high intelligence and moral dignity.”¹

Iris received many honors. She won the £10,000 Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea (when her friend, the philosopher Freddie Ayer, was chairman of the committee), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince and the Whitbread Literary Award for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. She was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College, Dublin, and Queen’s University, Belfast. In 1976 she was named Companion of the British Empire and in 1987 Dame of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood.

Iris’ formidable books, still in print, have sold extremely well both in English and in twenty-one foreign languages, and she left an impressive estate of £1,803,491. More than thirty books have already been written about her, including memoirs by A. N. Wilson and by John Bayley (which inspired the film Iris), and a biography by Peter Conradi. Her manuscripts are at the University of Iowa; and her library, with many annotated books, her own first editions, some of her letters and Conradi’s research papers are at the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies at Kingston University in Surrey. I believe the ninety-six letters from Iris in this volume (fifteen brief or repetitive ones have been omitted) and three from John Bayley, along with this memoir and our two interviews, will deepen our understanding of her bohemian life and complex work.

After Iris’ death in 1999, I read the memoirs and biography to learn more about her life before I knew her. Jean Iris Murdoch, the only child of a father who was a civil servant and a mother who aspired to be an opera singer, was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919. Her Protestant family moved to England in 1920, a year before Ireland became independent. She grew up in London but spent her two-week childhood holidays with the rest of her family in Ireland. She was educated at the high-minded, progressive Badminton School in Bristol, where she was a classmate and friend of Indira Gandhi. She then studied classics, ancient history and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1938 until 1942, receiving a first-class degree.

As an undergraduate she flirted with Communism and joined the Party to express her solidarity with sufferers. Even someone as morally sensitive as Iris could, by adhering to the Party line (which could suddenly change, as George Orwell observed, while you went to the bathroom during a meeting), remain blind to the political horrors of the Soviet regime: the Ukraine famine, the Purge Trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Russian invasion of Finland. Cold baths and irregular Greek verbs prepared her to become a junior civil servant at the wartime Treasury, the most prestigious branch of the civil service, from 1942 to 1944. Once there, still full of misguided idealism, she passed information about her work to the Communists.

From 1944 to 1946 she did refugee work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Belgium and Austria, and witnessed massive human suffering during and after the war. Many of the refugees were forcibly repatriated to face certain death in Russia, and some of them were machine-gunned as soon as they walked down the gangplank to their homeland. In Brussels she met Jean-Paul Sartre, the subject of her first book, and reading his Being and Nothingness brought her back to the study of philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1947–1948. She came within the aura of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but was not his pupil. From 1948 to 1963 she taught philosophy at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. In 1956 she married John Bayley, an eminent literary critic who would become Warton Professor of English at Oxford, and lived at Cedar Lodge, in Steeple Aston, a village fifteen miles north of the university. From 1963 to 1967 she taught philosophy at the bohemian Royal College of Art in London.

The photograph of the young Iris in the National Portrait Gallery in London reveals an astonishingly beautiful face that, according to the theory of her beloved Plato, reflected the inward beauty of her soul. She had a helmet of blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, square nose, high cheekbones, sensual lips and full breasts. Many sex-starved Oxford students fell madly in love with her and she turned down many proposals.

The influential headmistress at Badminton shared a bedroom off Iris’ dormitory with another woman, but she was also a “moral guide” who discouraged intimate friendships among her girls. Her personal example gave an imprimatur to Iris’ lifelong propensity to lesbian affairs with various butch types, including her best friend, the philosopher Philippa Foot, and an unnamed temptress who once threatened her marriage. She was asked to leave St. Anne’s to avoid a lesbian scandal, and lesbianism helps explain Iris’ sympathetic portrayal of homosexuals.

Throughout her life Iris was surprisingly, often enchantingly promiscuous—sexually benevolent and generous. As a girl at Oxford she cried when a young man tried to undress her, but later solemnly announced, “I have parted company with my virginity [and feel] relieved from something which was obsessing me.”² Once she got the hang of it, she became terribly keen on sex—both with those she was attracted to and those she wanted to console. If a man desperately wanted her, he could very often have her. Riveted by “the metaphysics of the first kiss,” she wrote that there had never been an impulsive moment “when I have trembled on the brink of such a [passionate] exchange & drawn back.”³ One of her fundamental assumptions was that she had the power to seduce anyone. Alluding to Crime and Punishment after she’d been thrown out of lodgings by several indignant landladies, she exclaimed that if they were in Russia, the last one to chuck her out would have been “destined to be killed with a hatchet.”⁴

The “shaggy little Shetland pony” could, like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, smash up things and creatures and then retreat into her vast carelessness. But she too was rejected, first by an Oxford contemporary and then by an emotionally bullying Hungarian. She wept easily and was once seen crying in a bus. When a colleague tried to comfort her, she nervously reassured him with, “I’m quite all right. It’s just this love business.”⁵ In her novels she is not merely an omniscient narrator, but firmly in control of her unruly characters. It’s fascinating, knowing about her sex life, to imagine her in the grip of passion or falling short of her own high moral standards. And it’s surprising, with all her reckless sexual adventures, that she never got pregnant. There’s no evidence that she ever had an abortion (which might have prevented her from having children), though she helped other women procure an operation that was illegal until 1967.

The most notable of her legion of lovers were the English soldier Frank Thompson, the Italian historian of the Roman Empire Arnaldo Momigliano, the Czech anthropologist Franz Steiner and the Bulgarian novelist Elias Canetti. The handsome and heroic Thompson (born in 1920) was tall, thin, fair-haired and brilliant, a gifted poet and passionate idealist dedicated to opposing fascism. After parachuting into pro-Nazi Bulgaria and fighting on the side of the partisans, he was betrayed and captured. He nobly affirmed his Communism and (contrary to the Geneva Convention) was summarily executed in June 1944. Thompson and his men all died while raising the salute of freedom. The villagers, Conradi writes, “were sobbing, many present declared the scene was one of the most moving in all Bulgarian history, that the men’s amazing courage was the work of an English Officer who carried their spirits, as well as his own.”⁶ Iris admired T. E. Lawrence, one of Thompson’s great heroes and models. Both men were blond, blue-eyed, Oxford-educated Englishmen who led foreigners in guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Lawrence carried the plays of Aristophanes into battle; Thompson carried the poems of Catullus. Lawrence had also been captured, but after being tortured and raped had managed to escape.

Momigliano (1908–1987), Steiner (1909–1952) and Canetti (1905–1994)—like her adored Oxford Classics professor Eduard Fraenkel (who lusted for Iris, was allowed to stroke her arm but never bedded her)—were much older, eminent, exiled and physically unattractive European Jews. Their friendship allowed her to continue her refugee work, and satisfied her intense need for father-figures and intellectual gurus. Iris, who felt that “any worthwhile person ought to have at least some Jewish blood,” declared: “I am practically a Jew myself.”⁷ The short, bespectacled Steiner, with his scrawny physique and weak heart, was the absolute antithesis of the young, handsome and heroic Frank Thompson. Canetti (no pin-up himself) condescendingly described Steiner as “small and so slight. . . . His face was uncommonly ugly: a high, receding brow, helpless eyes in perpetual agitation. Weepy speech. . . . A less attractive person one could scarcely imagine”—all of which profoundly appealed to Iris.⁸

Steiner (the only one of these gurus who was not married) was—like his namesake, countryman and hero Franz Kafka—sweet, frail and sickly, suffering, neurotic and blocked. He too needed an axe to break the frozen sea inside him. His cardiac condition made their lovemaking a precarious and near-fatal event. “In the end it happened,” he wrote of his passive role. “But she was afraid because of my heart. Neither of us made a single spontaneous movement.”⁹ Two weeks later, he described a pathetic and humiliating but deeply moving scene, worthy of the tortured relations of Kafka and Milena Jesenská: “We undressed, but on the draughty sofa my pains became once again severe. She was the more sensible of the two of us, told me to have a rest, and then helped me into my clothes. All that with so much concern, goodness, love and tact that this evening brought us closer to each other than a successful union.”¹⁰ Soon afterward, Steiner died at the age of forty-three and joined Thompson in Iris’ private pantheon of martyrs.

The deaths of Thompson and Steiner left the field clear for the jealous, brutal and monstrous Canetti. In a perverse twist, he came from Bulgaria where Thompson had been executed. John Bayley described Canetti as “squat, almost dwarfish, with a massive head and thick black hair, he looked like a giant cut short at the waist.”¹¹ Like Iris’ philosophical hero Ludwig Wittgenstein, Canetti was both brilliantly numinous and destructively demonic. He not only disbelieved in God but also hated Him, and declared “the Day of Judgement would happen when the human race arose with one voice to condemn God.”¹² His most influential book, Crowds and Power, reduced history to blood-lust, slaughter and a Nietzschean will to power. If the gentle Steiner appealed to her maternal side, the egomaniacal Canetti satisfied her need to submit to a domineering tyrant. Iris recalled that Canettti had electrified her with his sado-masochism: “Physically, he is violent, never quiet, with me. He takes me quickly, suddenly, in one movement as it were. . . . He holds me savagely between his knees and grasps my hair and forces my head back. His power. He subjugates me completely.”¹³

Canetti had several mistresses as well as a one-armed wife who waited patiently in the adjoining room when he took Iris to bed. His malicious description of their first sexual encounter contradicts everything that’s ever been written about Iris. Blaming her for his own inept performance, he remarked: “Quickly, very quickly, Iris undressed, without me laying a finger on her. . . . She lay unmoving and unchanged, I barely felt myself enter her, I didn’t sense that she felt anything, perhaps I might have felt something if she had resisted in some form. But that was as much out of the question as any pleasure.”¹⁴ Canetti, unlike the gentle Steiner, expected her to play an active role and to arouse him. He was, strangely enough, not excited when the beautiful young woman suddenly undressed and was ready for sex. After she left him, he retaliated in a posthumous book. It’s difficult to understand Iris’ slavish submission to Canetti. But she was intellectually, emotionally and sexually curious, and seemed to have a Lawrencean desire for the extremes of sexual experience.

In 1956 Iris published her second novel, Flight from the Enchanter (in which Canetti appears as the evil Mischa Fox), and after three tormenting years finally broke with him. Iris had by then fallen in love with the equally bookish and brilliant, yet quixotic and tolerant John Bayley, whose bold attempt to rescue her from Canetti was like Orpheus’ trip to the Underworld. Born in Lahore, India (where Kipling’s Kim begins) in 1925, he was six years younger than Iris. Educated at Eton, he served in the army from 1943 to 1947, and in 1950 earned a first-class degree (as Iris had done) in English at New College, Oxford. John taught at New College and at St Catherine’s from 1955 to 1992.

When they desperately needed a place to embrace and kiss, Iris and John instinctively headed for the library. Climbing the iron stairs to an empty stack, they hid among the shelves and held on to each other in the half darkness. John wept with joy. She admired his intellect and moral character, and seduced the timid virgin. After their marriage, they lived in contented squalor—at one point their roof leaked on the exact spot where they lay in bed—for the next forty-three years. But her bisexual love affairs, though less frequent, continued. The English novelist A.N. Wilson, their fri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Remembering Iris
• 2  Letters
• 3  Interviews
• 4  On the Memoirs of A. N. Wilson and John Bayley
• Index