The passionate and the good
Philip Hensher
IRIS MURDOCH: A LIFE by Peter J. Conradi
HarperCollins. £24.99, pp. 736, ISBN 0002571234
Any feeling reader will confess, I think, to distinct ambivalence about Iris Murdoch. It is all too easy to make her sound absolutely ridiculous; her plots permutational, her tone gushing, her symbolism crude and external. There are books of hers in which she manages to squeeze 15 separate sexual relationships out of a group of eight people; and by the time you've done that, the light is fading and there's not a lot of point in starting to talk about anything else much. Her dialogue can be absolutely atrocious; she has no shame whatever in writing sentences like 'My body is aching for the embrace of you, my love,' or 'Oh God, Hilary, I do love you so terribly,' or 'Human beings are roughly constructed entities full of indeterminateness and vaguenesses and empty spaces.'
In the end, one does come to the conclusion that her range of interests is not quite wide enough to sustain work of such massive bulk: one wants her to talk about money or politics or anything but that ceaseless harping on love and virtue. Ivy Compton-Burnett is reported as saying, 'I do wish that she had not got involved in philosophy. If she had studied domestic science or trained to be a Norland nurse, I'm sure her books would have been much better.' There is something in that; the books do have too narrow a range of represented humanity, and go too quickly into discussions of abstract states. And yet, in many ways, one reacts viscerally to them as marvellous, magical books. A half-dozen of them are appallingly readable; at their best they swipe away the objection of implausibility by their romantic sweep.
I think she abandoned too much by plunging into the richly patterned romances of her later years. Too often, motivation, psychology, plausible behaviour just disappear, leaving behind the intricate play of symbol and action, like a gaudy Jonsonian masque. That is to sacrifice a great deal, hut I think what you can say for Murdoch is that, like very few other novelists, she showed the generations of novelists who followed her some unsuspected possibilities. A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden is a much richer novel than anything Murdoch ever did, but its revolutionary play of realism, masque, symbolism and self-willed mythologies is surely the synthesis Murdoch had pointed to and hoped to achieve in something like An Accidental Man or The Bell. And later novelists, few of whom would openly admit to admiring Murdoch, nevertheless explored a particular vein of explicit artifice, of display and revelation, which she first opened up. I never believe anyone who tells me that they find Iris Murdoch unreadable. Deplorable, perhaps; fascinating, always.
In a way, one doesn't really want a biography of Murdoch. It opens up the question of how someone so formidably intelligent could be so careless and even silly when it came to putting a work of art together. A Fairly Honourable Defeat is justly regarded as one of her best things, but even that is full of absurdities. There are small irritations — Tallis' next-door neighbours are Sikhs for half the novel, and Muslims for the rest — but the bigger ones can only be regarded as a failure of intelligence. The plot is wildly implausible; the liaison at the centre of the novel would collapse if either party remarked, as lovers tend to, 'The first time you wrote to me. . ." How could someone so able and intelligent perpetrate something so daft?
These are questions which the novels, alone, don't raise. But a biography is always going to reveal a truly intelligent and extraordinary woman, and make us feel, somehow, that the novels were not entirely worthy of her capacities. There is no doubt at all that she was astonishingly intelligent. She cut a swathe through Oxford both with her quick academic masterv and her famous, pale, kobold-like beauty, seducing men and women without seeming to try, Two big passions left a mark: one for Frank Thompson, E. P. Thompson's brother, who died a hero's death in the Balkans, and who seems to have been the one man who could keep up with Iris intellectually (his letters are certainly clear-sighted and perceptive on every subject). The other, for Franz Steiner, emerged from a more general fascination with the middle-European émigré population; another 'emigre, Eduard Fraenkel, was among her most important teachers, and Murdoch's life was for years entwined with that bogus sage. Elias Canetti.
After Steiner's early death from a weak heart, Murdoch published her first, hugely successful novel and married, to everyone's mild surprise, John Bayley. The tone of their marriage was set by Murdoch's reply to his proposal, when he asked her whether there was anything that appealed to her about the idea of marrying him. 'Well, yes,' she said. 'I rather like to think of you coming home in the evening, and me rushing out to say, "Darling, the badgers have broken into the garden." ' Bayley's Harold Skimpole routine was already highly developed, and the ménage at Cedar Lodge at Steeple Aston soon created its own mythology; the mice which Conradi says, entering into the fantasy. 'they early on watched planning to confiscate Iris's Mars Bar'. The vast acres of unused rooms — a diningroom, a sauna, a 'groom's bed-chamber', a 'gardener's earth-closet' — went unexplored by anyone except the mice. The freezing cold and the leaking roof and the Sellotape on window cracks — some people found it charming, and some, like Stuart Hampshire. 'beyond bohemianism'.
This unworldliness was all very well, and conformed to part of Murdoch's character, but there was certainly a part of her which wanted more worldly pleasures. In a way, she was not far from Dora in The Bell, who longs for 'jazz records and sandals and multi-coloured skirts'. Certainly she rather relished being accosted by Noel Coward at the Connaught with the words 'I'm a screaming Murdoch fan?' even if, 'unfortunately', the conversation was cut short by the arrival of Princess Margaret. Since her death, her image has been of a sweet, rather vague lady who turned up to receptions in galoshes and who lived, like a fiveyear-old, off Mr Kipling's cakes with thousands of pounds stuffed under the mattress. (There is going to be a film, with Dame Judi Dench, and one knows, alas, exactly what it will be like.) Nice as the Mrs Tiggywinkle image is, it doesn't really account for the toughminded philosopher, or the fact that Murdoch went on breaking the hearts of men and women for years after her marriage. No doubt a great deal of attention will be paid to these affairs, but I think the interesting thing about them is what one had already surmised from the novels at their most disenchanted, their most worldly; sometimes, one would like to think, Murdoch just got sick of all that Mr Mouse and Pie-Land and the boring badgers breaking into the boring garden, and went off to have some serious fun with the grown-ups. The one thing that can be said for Peter Conradi's biography is that it is properly respectful, and properly determined to be the life of the writer. Everyone knows, alas, the story of Murdoch's last years, and for a while her decline into dementia seemed likely to blot out her substantial achievement as an artist. It must be said that there was something extremely distasteful about the spectacle of her husband's various books on the subject; Murdoch had had nearly 50 years' opportunity as a writer to set down her own life had she wished to. She did not, and it was difficult to share in the admiration and sympathy for her husband, who published the most intimate details of her life once she was incapable of forbidding it. Whatever the motive behind Bayley's intimately confessional memoirs. Conradi says that 'it helped him', which may be true, and that it 'hurt no one', which is demonstrably false — they seemed rather less sensitive when one considered the domestic circumstances in which they must have been composed.
Bayley's books raised a number of ethical questions about biography. Conradi's life, which is a more orthodox account and a more balanced one, is not as awkward. But there are some questions here which linger in the mind. There is a strange futility about the book, and at very few places does Conradi establish any plausible connection between Murdoch's life and her novels. From the beginning, and increasingly, she
preferred to draw entirely from her imagination rather than from observation. Hardly any of her characters have any original in real life; Elias Canetti, perhaps, inspired some of her mage-like figures, but there is no obvious portrait of herself in the novels, or of Bayley, or anyone else close to her. Nor do the frantic romance-plots bear much relationship to her own existence. Given that, you start to wonder what the point of a biography is: when exploration of a life can't illuminate the life's work, it inevitably starts to seem rather prurient. It's not altogether Conradi's fault — and it should be said that this is a good, tactful biography but rather the fault of the genre.
Whether her books will survive, I find a question almost impossible to answer. Certainly, at the moment, her serious reputation is at a low point, and the flaws and longueurs of her work are all too evident. But there is, as well, the question of what she meant to a whole generation of novelists, and the introduction of fantasy and artifice into the English novel. Useless, too, to deny that in half a dozen novels the apparent silliness is spectacularly outweighed by thunderous, shamelessly dramatic scenes and developments. The value of even her best things, The Black Prince or A Word Child, is for the moment not quite clear. What we can still surrender to is their interest and the shameless, absorbed pleasure they give.
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