"I am an indefatigable letter writer," Iris Murdoch wrote to a friend in 1968. "I am pretty good at conversation by letter." A new, insightful book, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 testifies that she was right on both counts.
After spending the morning on her novels and philosophical writings, Murdoch would move to her second office and sit down at a desk that once belonged to J.R.R. Tolkien to write her letters – at times spending up to four hours a day on them, and answering every one that she received.
Murdoch, who died in 1999, was an Irish-born British author and philosopher who wrote 26 novels including the 1978 Booker Prize-winning The Sea, the Sea. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, two Murdoch scholars from Kingston University, have diligently assembled more than 760 of Murdoch's letters – only 36 of which have previously been published. They range from her schoolgirl days to her final years, and stop just short of when the lights went out and shut down her brilliant mind.
Like Orwell's letters, Murdoch's correspondence constitutes a kind of surrogate autobiography, the nearest to one we will ever get. If not a vital corrective to Peter Conradi's official biography Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), this collection is at least a valuable complement, revealing as it does a fuller portrait of Murdoch at work and at play, as a writer, thinker, friend and companion.
In the first section, we witness Murdoch growing up very quickly. As war looms, she reveals her defiance and a commitment to London: “I love the city, and if it’s going to be smashed up, I want to be there.” At Oxford she studies Greats, explores the “seamy side” of the city, and, as a card-carrying Communist, exhorts a friend to recognise “the highest stage of society, the Soviet world state.”
In 1944, two years after graduating, she joins the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. It is on her travels overseas that she becomes entranced by the intellectual dynamism of European café culture. In Brussels she is charmed by Jean-Paul Sartre, and in Innsbruck she befriends the writer Raymond Queneau, with whom she exchanges letters for 30 years.
A return to Oxford to teach philosophy brings rewards but also the realisation that she is not an intellectual. “I am not good at the sort of talk which is a facade and not communication,” she tells Queneau. She turns her back on academia to write a novel, which, like those that follow it, is a heady blend of mystical realism and moral philosophy, playful ideas and rigorous thought.
"[A]rt is doubtlessly more important than philosophy," she explains later in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), "and literature most important of all."
In that first novel, Under the Net (1954), the protagonist, Jake, is sternly told that "Love is persecution". We read Murdoch's letters and are struck by her admission that although love brings "great glory... the main results are anxiety, misery, despair, destruction, inability to work". Love indeed persecutes and deals her many cruel blows. In 1946, David Hicks breaks off his engagement to her by letter. Four years later, Michael Oakeshott ends their affair. In both instances Murdoch takes the news with remarkable equanimity, urging Hicks not to be downhearted or to throw himself away on someone unworthy, and telling Oakeshott, "I'm very glad to have known and loved you. It is good to love like this."
Several times we see Murdoch either rebuffing advances, or refusing full-scale commitment so as not to wreck her marriage. However, that marriage is conveyed as one of convenience. John Bayley is barely mentioned. He appears nowhere in the letters as a suitor – one minute Murdoch is single, the next she isn’t – and once he is her husband he is there only as background noise (“John is typing upstairs in bedroom”) or given as a reason for a failed liaison (“My moves are a bit unforeseeable because John’s are”), or as part of a tacked-on sign-off (“John sends much love”).
Murdoch falls in and out of love but also displays many other sea changes in mood and belief over the years, some of them extreme lurches. She swings from the far left to voting for Thatcher, goes from scorning Plato (“a vile casuist”) to being profoundly influenced by him, and from revering Samuel Beckett to being “through” with him. In a letter from 1939 she professes to being “quite astonishingly interested in the opposite sex, and capable of being in love with about six men at once” – but tells Brigid Brophy years later in 1964, after a series of affairs, that unlike her she is an “austere puritan” and against promiscuity. Is this a genuine transition, one wonders, or a bout of disingenuousness, or merely a ploy to make an over-zealous admirer cool down?
There are many types of letters here: letters about Murdoch's craft, her writing and her teaching; letters about friendships and loves, about travelling, reading, painting, living; letters to people she cared for, to readers, publishers, politicians and newspapers. They are chatty, frank, intimate, elegant and erudite. In places they yield huge, gleeful revelations, from shock opinions (Jacques Derrida talks "the most terrible tosh") to surprise confessions: "I just can't work this afternoon... I just want to sit by the fire and read Woman's Own."
When she writes “I detest letter-writing” we don’t believe a word. Curiously, there are very few letters in which Murdoch discusses philosophy, and none at all that comprise one side of a war of words (“I have no taste for dramas of this sort”). What most of them perfectly illustrate is the tremendous pace at which Murdoch lived and worked, sometimes being “idiotically busy” as she juggled people and churned out novels.
The Iris Murdoch that emerges is a richly complex character. She exhibits youthful idiosyncrasies (“My latest pastime is reading Homer aloud in the Underground”) and adult follies. She is routinely self-deprecating (“I fear I was tiresome, dogmatic, and not fully there during lunch!”), especially about her work (“I have finished a novel... They never seem to get any better”). And yet she is quick to lavish praise, attention and affection on others: the student she takes under her wing is addressed as “Dear child”; stalwart friends are “My angel” or “Dearest creature” or, in one case, “Darling sphinx”.
Many letters end with love, embraces and devotion. We hear, pithily, of her literary preferences: Henry James is “the only novelist I know who really says everything”; William Faulkner “sharpens my zest for writing”; Charles Dickens “is good – though so careless”; and Thomas Mann is “too symbolical in some awful way... what can one do with a language which calls Venetia Venedig?”
She stands up for writers under duress, championing D. H. Lawrence during the Lady Chatterley trial and voicing her consternation at the “The [Salman] Rushdie business”. On being made a dame of the British Empire in 1987, she says “I am royalist of course”.
Two traits stand out. The first is the young Murdoch’s tendency to resist neat categorisation, to define herself not by one of two easy options but by a third of her own devising. In 1939 she tells a friend she is neither a Christian nor an atheist; “My religion, if I have one, at the moment is a passionate belief in the beautiful.” And in terms of roots, she writes in 1945 that “I’m not of any particular country. There’s Ireland, there’s England – but if I have a fatherland, it would be something like the literature of England perhaps.”
The second trait is an agonising neediness that on occasion borders on obsession – an emotional intensity that Murdoch channelled into her fiction. She worries about delayed responses from recipients and constantly apologises for any offence she may have caused. She is in thrall to Elias Canetti, with whom she has a long affair, and throws herself at Queneau, who repeatedly turns her down. “I know there is nothing I wouldn’t give up for you if you wanted me,” she writes in 1952, shortly after meeting him in Paris. “If you wanted to see me I would come any time at a moment’s notice.”
The last letter, dated September 1995, is brief and jerky, and ends somewhat poignantly with the words “Please forgive all this stumbling –”. The editors judiciously allow Murdoch to bow out here, and spare us further letters written once Alzheimer’s had taken hold. Instead of looking ahead to those dark ellipses of illness, decline and death, we look back on what we have read and marvel at a full and productive life.
Murdoch famously said that the point of philosophy was to "clarify" while the point of literature was to "mystify". Living on Paper, a brilliant feat of scholarship, helps clarify and demystify a complicated and formidable woman of letters.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer based in Edinburgh.
