Iris Murdoch by Peter J Conradi
Cohen, Richard
BOOKS She used to write novels Iris Murdoch A Life Peter J. Conradi W. W. Norton and Co., $35, 706 pp. Richard Cohen There was never any good biography of a good novelist," confided Scott...
...Conradi writes that he wanted to write the first book about her (the culmination of twenty-one years' involvement), but not the last...
...so maybe Wilson's book will yet appear...
...It is sad that Wilson has not completed his own work, not least because Bayley and Conradi brought considerable pressure on both him and his publishers (I had long since moved on) not to do so...
...She is a marvelous subject for a book...
...Conradi makes his account of her last two years as moving as one might expect, more so than the filmed version...
...Four years later she added: "One of my fundamental assumptions is that I have the power to seduce anyone...
...Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was a very good novelist, and certainly seems many people...
...He has been given unfettered access to Murdoch's papers, and his list of acknowledgements is impressive...
...She was to make of the relations of Eros and intelligence a whole philosophy," he writes...
...Equally atmospheric are Murdoch's days at Oxford, her time in the Communist Party, and her growing realization of her extraordinary talents...
...You'll learn," she said quietly...
...In the meantime, Conradi's biography is a more than useful beginning...
...At a party a few months before, she had put her arm around a friend and fellow novelist and said, matter-of-factly, "I used to write novels...
...In 1944, aged twenty-five, she wrote, not in jest, "I am afraid I am not yet really eligible for inclusion among the harlots of history," while conducting three affaires (her word) simultaneously...
...Her schooldays at Badminton are well captured (though her initial unhappiness there was likely due to what a school contemporary-unquoted by Conradi- called "her turning up several weeks late, and smelling": only someone who has experienced British boarding school can appreciate the unkind truth of that memory...
...Conradi's biography describes her life as "full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers, and philosophers of her time...
...Nonetheless, Murdoch herself comes alive in all her contradictions...
...His reticence was unnecessary: Bayley has not only penned two autobiographical works about his and Iris's lives, but has given his consent to the current film about her and this biography, which describes the Canetti and Brophy relationships in full...
...Some of his portraits are especially well done-Murdoch's dictatorial headmistress, Beatrice May Baker, her Oxford philosophy tutor, Donald MacKinnon, with whom she felt herself in love...
...Conradi is good on the older lovers, who generally ended up hurting her, and the gentle, childlike ones, such as Thompson and Bayley: she needed both kinds...
...Iris means "Goddess of Rainbows" and Murdoch "navigator": Conradi could have done with both better direction and more color...
...Murdoch's many loves-including Michael Foot, Asa Briggs, David Hicks, Canetti, Tom Balogh, and, of course, Bayley himself-are exhaustively described, with much new information, particularly from her own letters and journals...
...Murdoch, more than any of those five, concerned herself with the meaning of goodness, how to live properly, how to understand suffering...
...I hope you will be well...
...The great Catholic writers of the British Isles of the last century are Greene, Waugh, Golding, Spark, and (possibly) Burgess...
...Was that how people were...
...Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1997...
...After some months of research, Wilson came to see me to say that he would like to publish two versions of her life-one, for while her husband John Bayley was still alive...
...Besides books of philosophy and poetry, she wrote twenty-six novels and four plays while working in the Treasury department, for Austrian refugee camps, and, for over a decade, as an Oxford don (from which post she resigned after a lesbian affair with a student...
...There couldn't be...
...That philosophy is the background to much of the second half of the book, as Murdoch abandoned communism for existentialism, later Anglo-Catholicism, then Buddhism...
...On leaving Oxford (with a first-class degree) she wrote to Frank Thompson how she now wanted to "learn jujitsu, German, translate Sophocles, learn to draw decently, buy expensive and crazy presents for my friends, really go into the subject of comparative mythology, read many very basic books about politics, learn about America, psychology, animals, my God I could go on for ever...
...Richard Cohen There was never any good biography of a good novelist," confided Scott Fitzgerald to his notebooks...
...An evident labor of love, this book is weighed down by superfluous detailing (the contents of a picnic, lists of irrelevant companions) and by constant small repetitions...
...Random House will publish his book on the history of sword-play in the fall.-play in the fall...
...Richard Cohen is a freelance book editor and writer...
...the man she expected to marry, Frank Thompson, killed in the war...
...the other, detailing Iris's affairs with Elias Canetti and Brigid Brophy, only later...
...Those who met her, men and women, regularly fell under her spell, and it is not hard to do so as a reader...
...But she could also be cruel, feckless, detached, indecisive, jealous, touchy, vain...
...But the helping hand of Bayley exerts too firm a grip: one senses Conradi looking for his approbation, keen to show himself a valued insider...
...He is too many people, if he is any good...
...And of course I did-and should have expected Murdoch's own life to have been just as tortuous and wrenching as the lives of her fictional creations...
...There are good stories, and good details: I liked all her many early paintings showing ladders...
...She would copy out in a faltering hand, on lined paper, letter after unfinished letter, beginning, "My dear, I am now going away for some time...
...The biography is dedicated to Bayley, just as Bayley's Elegy for Iris is to Conradi: no intrinsic harm in that, but a biographer can get too close...
...Over her life she had ascribed to her many qualities-goodness, kindness, strangeness, shyness, simplicity, naivete, high seriousness, imagination, generosity, lay sainthood are just a few...
...But she was never a simple follower of any one doctrine...
...In 19801 offered her neighbor and fellow novelist A. N. Wilson a contract to write her biography, and he was happy with the commission, as was she, despite her initial dismay...
...My trouble is that I am obsessed with my soul," she admitted, a confession of both her self-absorption and her high earnestness...
...I remember reading all her novels (up to then) in one gulp in my early twenties, and asked a friend, then in her late eighties, whether Murdoch's fictional world was really like life-the incredible coincidences, the small groups of people caught up in convoluted ties of love and hate, Eros ruling all...
...the Svengali-like Canetti himself...
Vol. 129 • March 2002 • No. 6
