Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995

by Iris Murdoch, Avril Homer (Editor), Anne Rowe (Editor)

Here, for the first time, is Iris Murdoch's life in her own words, from her schoolgirl days to her last years.

The letters show a great mind at work – we see the young Murdoch struggling with philosophical issues and witness her anguish when a novel won’t come together. As well as her sharp sense of humour and irreverence, they also reveal her personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its complexity: her emotional hunger and her tendency to live on the edge of what was socially acceptable. We see how this fed into her novels’ plots and characters, despite her claims that her fiction was not drawn from reality.

These letters bring us closer than ever before to Iris Murdoch as a person. They make for an extraordinary and intimate reading experience: she is wonderful company.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Philosophy, Biography Memoir, Memoir, British Literature

686 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2015

About the author

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch

Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.

"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bayley in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mur...

Reviews

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading Iris Murdoch's letters for 7 months, a few pages at a time. There's a reason she is my favorite novelist and you can find hints at why in her correspondence, though she doesn't talk much about her own books. Instead, her letters are full of love, requited and not, friendship, faith, politics, philosophy, intellect and passion. I feel like I've lived with her for most of this year and I'm sorry now to leave her behind.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

BOTW

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06pssb5

Description: Throughout her life, Iris Murdoch wrote thousands of letters. Mostly to friends and lovers.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 to Hughes and Rene Murdoch. While still a baby the family moved to west London. In 1938, Murdoch won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read classics. After gaining her first-class degree, wartime work in the Treasury ensued before, in 1944, she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and was posted to Belgium and Austria, where she worked helping those displaced by the war.

Murdoch left UNRRA in 1946 and, after a year's postgraduate studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, was appointed as a philosophy tutor at At Anne's College, Oxford. In 1954, while still at St Anne's, Murdoch debut novel Under The Net was published.

In a writing career that spanned over 40 years, Murdoch published 26 novels, five books on philosophy, six plays and two books of poetry. Her novel The Sea, The Sea won the 1978 Booker Prize and, in 1987, she was made a Dame. She remains one of the most celebrated British novelists of the 20th century.

1: This episode focuses on her years as an Oxford undergraduate when she was full of hope and political idealism.

2: In this episode, which embraces the years 1942-1944 when Murdoch was working at the Treasury, the letters to her Oxford friend, Frank Thompson, are particularly poignant.

3: Iris Murdoch had not seen David Hicks since 1938 when they were both at Oxford, but she continued to write until, in November 1945, they finally met up again. This time in London and with dramatic consequences.

4: For 30 years, the French writer Raymond Queneau and Iris Murdoch exchanged letters. The Frenchman was her muse and, in Murdoch's chaotic private life, perhaps the one constant.

5: Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy had an intimate friendship for many years, but Murdoch's letters reveal how volatile the relationship could be.

'Frank Thompson is better known in Britain as brother of the historian EP Thompson, but in Bulgaria he is a national hero. Attached during the second world war to Special Operations Executive (SOE), he was parachuted into the Balkans to work with Bulgarian partisans; after two weeks of eating salted leaves and live wood-snails, he was captured, tortured and murdered by the Nazis.'Source

Raymond Queneau a French novelist, poet, and co-founder of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), notable for his wit and cynical humour.

The music used on this programme is Near Light by Ólafur Arnalds

[Antonomasia]

At last!
Ever since the Iris biopic was released, I've wanted to read about Murdoch in her own words, and bemoaned the absence of a memoir so often that it was getting boring. Letters will do very, very nicely instead.

[Pekka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Iris,

I started reading your letters on the beach on a sweltering summer day (as a keen swimmer, you probably would have approved), and they took me all the way to the coldest and darkest winter nights. It's a pity that you can't read this, but thanks anyway, I'm going to miss your missives. Maybe it's time to start rereading your novels, all 26 of them.

Your fan forever,
Pekka

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not finished but I am done. I'm de-flittered. I went into a room locked the door and covered the windows so I could illegally peek ahead. More of her social and love life flitting from one to the other. When in her letters she does mention what I was seeking, her brilliant mind battling with philosophic and academic issues. When it occurred it was simply a brief reporting. A huge disappointment. Maybe I'll read the A.S. Byatt Bio on her.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Throughout her life, Iris Murdoch wrote thousands of letters. Mostly to friends and lovers. This episode focuses on her years as an Oxford undergraduate when she was full of hope and political idealism.

2/5: In this episode, which embraces the years 1942-1944 when Murdoch was working at the Treasury, the letters to her Oxford friend, Frank Thompson, are particularly poignant.

3/5: Iris Murdoch had not seen David Hicks since 1938 when they were both at Oxford, but she continued to write until, in November 1945, they finally met up again. This time in London and with dramatic consequences.

4/5: For 30 years, the French writer Raymond Queneau and Iris Murdoch exchanged letters. The Frenchman was her muse and, in Murdoch's chaotic private life, perhaps the one constant.

5/5: Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy had an intimate friendship for many years, but Murdoch's letters reveal how volatile the relationship could be.


Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 to Hughes and Rene Murdoch. While still a baby the family moved to west London. In 1938, Murdoch won a place at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read classics. After gaining her first-class degree, wartime work in the Treasury ensued before, in 1944, she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and was posted to Belgium and Austria, where she worked helping those displaced by the war.

Murdoch left UNRRA in 1946 and, after a year's postgraduate studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, was appointed as a philosophy tutor at At Anne's College, Oxford. In 1954, while still at St Anne's, Murdoch debut novel Under The Net was published.

In a writing career that spanned over 40 years, Murdoch published 26 novels, five books on philosophy, six plays and two books of poetry. Her novel The Sea, The Sea won the 1978 Booker Prize and, in 1987, she was made a Dame. She remains one of the most celebrated British novelists of the 20th century.

The music used on this programme is Near Light by Ólafur Arnalds

Living On Paper: Letters From Iris Murdoch 1935-1995
Editors: Avril Horner and Anne Rowe

Readers: Imogen Stubbs and Nigel Anthony

Abridger: Pete Nichols
Producer: Karen Rose
A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06pssb5

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Iris Murdoch one of the most interesting and learned writers of our time. I've read only a handful of the novels and some of the philosophy. These letters inspire me to become more involved with her novels which, we're told, are powered by her philosophic ideas.

I didn't get a sense of her deep intellectual currents from the letters. Almost all of them are personal rather than concerned with her writing or teaching. Because she cared deeply for those she corresponded with, they're more affectionate and newsy than informative about her professional life. Strongly influenced by Simone Weil and Plato, for instance, she thought Good a real moral force in the world and the moral life a realistic goal. Her fiction, novels often about good and evil, carry the same ideas as her philosophic thought.

These appraisals of her beliefs and character, however, are hidden deep in the letters. For the most part they offer little insight into her fiction or philosophy. I think they stand too much alone, without enough accompanying explanation of how they directly relate to Murdoch as a person, novelist, and teacher. I came away with a sense of what a fine, loving person she was, and I enjoyed the letters for that, especially since so many of them are love letters. There is some repetitiveness, though. And I thought I didn't learn enough about Murdoch the novelist and philosopher.

[James Klagge · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fact that I finished a 600 page book in a few weeks indicates I found it interesting. On the other hand I marked in pencil passages that I found, well, noteworthy, and there were only about 3 dozen, which is only about 1 every 17 pages. Nevertheless, the letters were quite readable. I would have edited it much more severely, but I can imagine others found things interesting that I didn't.
Murdoch is interesting to me because she was both a philosopher and a novelist. Her philosophical views (mostly from the '50's through the '70's) were somewhat influential. I especially liked her little book "The Sovereignty of Good." Yet she felt very unconfident, disclaiming (pp. 395 & 489): "I am not a philosopher." But later in her life (p. 571) she calls philosophy a sort of "addiction" for her. She was an extraordinarily productive novelist, publishing 26 novels over 40 years. I have read just two of her novels--I especially liked "Under the Net," and somewhat liked "A Fairly Honourable Defeat."
Murdoch was one odd bird, at least in her personal life. She was bi-sexual, carrying on multiple seemingly physical relationships with both sexes at the same time, sometimes through a couple decades, with people as much as 20 years younger or older than she was. At least on the evidence of these letters (I haven't read her biography) she was very faithful to these people (and to her husband) over decades as a friend as well. In the mid-60's she characterized herself three times (pp. 293, 304 & 347) as a "male homosexual in the guise of a female," whatever that means. Perhaps the most positive spin on her polyamory is what she wrote (p. 347) "I can't divide friendship from love or love from sex--or sex from love, etc." And she had quite a healthy appetite for friendship.
While she must have met a large number of famous people, she doesn't write much about them. She has a nice description of Sartre (p. 35), and while she liked Derrida as a person (pp. 511-12) she despised his views (pp. 511-12 & 573) and refused to consider him a "philosopher." She met Wittgenstein twice briefly, but there was nothing about those meetings here, unfortunately.
Scattered throughout the letters are striking obiter dicta:
1967, p. 337: "I think the Beatles ought to be jointly Poet Laureate." This gives her the distinction of suggesting a literary prize be given to musicians almost 50 years before the Nobel Committee got around to the same idea.
1988, p. 548: "…revolting women's studies. Oxford now has a (ghastly) women's studies [major]."
1988, p. 550: "Of course schoolchildren should never be allowed to come near philosophy."
The one thing that gave me a person connection to the letters was her correspondence with Philippa Foot, whom I knew as a professor during my graduate studies at UCLA. Murdoch twice reprimands her (pp. 363 & 376) for writing illegibly in her letters, and even the address! I can identify with this, as comments that Foot wrote on seminar papers were in fact routinely illegible.

[Inga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Það er afrek að ná að mála svo heildstæða mynd af marglaga og þversagnakenndri manneskju í gegnum bréf. Ég mun sakna þess að byrja daginn á að lesa bréf eftir Murdoch, eins og ég hef gert síðustu tvö ár.

[Stephen Brody · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Some subtlety can be so voluptuous”

“I am so sorry I went to sleep. How charming of you to attribute it to drink”.

“One should rest more. Potter around. Admire one’s Chinese plates. Much love, Iris”.

I’m not quite sure I approve of this habit of publishing the letters of people who have achieved fame from writing other things but are no longer here to defend themselves against misinterpretation or criticisms of their private lives from others whose own behaviour might not always bear too much similar scrutiny, even when – as with Virginia Woolf ‘s – the letters were intended to be preserved. It’s far too profitable an industry for publishers and ‘editors’, rather unpleasantly parasitic in other words. There’s a stern instruction in one letter from Iris Murdoch to a close friend: “Destroy this and all letters. And keep your mouth shut” – an instruction evidently not carried out. On the other hand nor can I resist pouring over some of these collections, and that of Murdoch’s letters was of course irresistible because although I was an avid reader throughout almost all her literary life of everything she produced as soon as it appeared she herself remained an impenetrable mystery – high-minded moralist or mocking joker, the ultimate ivory-tower dweller or worldly sophisticate, blue-stocking or flapper, or even possibly just a very clever lunatic? A rare television appearance sometime in the ‘eighties only deepened the mystery – a quite ordinary-looking woman with a pudding-basin haircut speaking in perfectly-assured and cadenced grave sentences with the voice of complete authority. She’d waived away the taxi sent for her and set off into the London drizzle afterwards in a shabby old raincoat. This book starts to disclose the human being behind the enigma.

One doesn’t always realise the extent of one’s good fortune until well on in life. Part of mine, I see now, was to have been taken up as hardly more than a raw boy by a few people from the generation before mine, that born in the period between the two Wars, and how can the peculiar tone of that possibly be described to a younger one which appears to bear absolutely no relation to it, or indeed dismisses it entirely? Although Murdoch of course only became known in the late 1950’s and continued for another forty years, nonetheless she carried with her exactly the imprint of her early background and education, apparently largely impervious to subsequent influences though nor was she unaware of them, sometimes gently exasperated by the importunities and emotional ‘sufferings’ of others while passing with only the lightest touch over her own. It’s a great delight to resurrect that sort of understated throw-away half-gossipy English style, brittle but sometimes with deadly effect, now completely vanished, where even the War was a rather jolly occasion, the sort of things that so beset and deeply worry us now shrugged off as a bore, things of the utmost trivia raised to melodrama and perfectly outrageous behaviour was a matter of course and the subject of much amusement. As in this (1943) Mitford-ish example, so frivolously and tactfully à propos, to a male friend stranded facing the German tanks somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East: “Darling the mice have been eating your letters … I am very angry about this, chiefly because your letters are rather precious documents, but also because I am not on very good terms with the mice, and the fact that I have been careless enough to leave valuables lying around where they could get at them can be chalked up as a point to them. One day I shall declare serious war on the mice in a combined trap-poison operation. At present I am just sentimental with a fringe of annoyance. I meet them every now and then, on the stairs or underneath the gas stove, and they have such nice long tails”.

There was also, amongst the intellectual classes with their customary naivety, a great deal of intensity over the improvement of the human lot; conscientious young men rushed off in proletarian gear to interfere futilely in Spain’s internal affairs while their female counterparts in ‘rational clothing’ forget them immediately in their adulation of the heroes of Stalin’s brave new world. As a young under-graduate Murdoch joined into all that with all appropriate enthusiasm while voraciously reading a staggering quantity of books of every sort and acquiring with apparent ease a knowledge of several languages. The ‘communism’, naturally, was short-lived because she’d actually read the 19th cent Russians who understood these things far better. By the age of twenty-seven she wrote that “I wish I could be Christian. There is such worth there – and values which are real to one”. ‘Values’ and ‘religion’ remained central themes in all her writing, both philosophical and fictional, for the rest of her life – by religion, it should go without saying, she didn’t mean going to church on Sundays. Later, she grew to “hate” as she said the Labour Party for its deliberate erosion of the past, and the Communists for their insistence on a mindless uniformity and ugliness: “The Party, like the medieval church, has its tentacles right down into the remotest corners”.

One thing is decidedly clear from these letters, Murdoch was anything but a nun, although nuns appear in a very rosy light in one or two of the novels and in Nuns and Soldiers she could have been describing herself, or an aspect of herself, in the person of Anne Cavidge who relinquishes a vivacious and popular life to enter a convent to ensure a clear conscience, discovering only later what a restrictive bore (in more high-falutin’ language of course) that can be. In her time her love affairs bordered on the scandalous, and would have crossed that border had she been less adept in keeping her right hand in ignorance of the left. She was, in fact, quite a heart-breaker, even a femme fatale, through her rejection of possessiveness and espousal of what is now called polyamory; she herself referred to her own nemisism, an inescapable agent of someone else’s downfall (as in the character of Anna Quentin in Under the Net, the first novel: “her existence is one long act of disloyalty…constantly involved in secrecy and lying to conceal from each of her friends that she was so closely bound to all the others”). As a young woman she was drawn towards somewhat gloomy-sounding rumple-suited and be-spectacled pipe-smokers older or much older than herself. We won’t say anything so silly as a ‘father-fixation’ – Murdoch didn’t care for ideas of therapeutic causality (“Of course mechanics and psychoanalysis can offer us some useful generalities about ourselves. But every thing that is important and valuable and good belongs to that little piece of us which is not mechanical and no-one who is not bemused by philosophy or a youthful mood really doubts the existence of this piece”). Various other ladies, not all of them entirely benign, were passing figures of attraction too, even if ‘platonically’ (“Dearest Queen of the Night”). It means nothing to say that her romantic choices seem very odd when most people’s romantic choices are fairly incomprehensible to anyone else; the single apparently most un-rumpled man, Raymond Queneau, remained studiously out of reach in spite of a cap being thrown repeatedly at him: “if your letters to me could be slightly less impersonal I should be glad”. Elias Cannetti, unattractive in photographs, was all too available, exercising what sounds like a decidedly unwholesome influence on the impressionable Miss Murdoch; this rather sinister figure is alluded to in The Flight from the Enchanter and probably elsewhere. All was grist to the literary mill, just about every human aberration appears somewhere or other in her novels and there’s no doubt she knew what she was talking about; there’s nothing like diversity and variety in these matters for learning all about the best and worst of human nature. It was perhaps inevitable that this dangerous woman should finally marry the dullest of them all (“his chief drawback is tendency to mope like a dog in kennels when I am not there”) and whose chief virtue, perhaps, was that he hadn’t the imagination to cause trouble. I doubt that she was a woman who would seriously have wanted competition in any matrimonial setting: (“I am a homosexual in female guise, which puts me of course in a rather difficult position”, as she observed more than once, how tongue-in-cheek it’s difficult to say).

By her late forties Iris Murdoch’s reputation was so well established that she admits to often being exhausted from a gruelling round of professional commitments – lectures, public speaking not only at home but around the globe, at a stage turning out another novel every year - that the letters (because her sociable relations did not diminish) become noticeably more cursory or even slightly impatient, though without any other change of tone. Her energy was extraordinary, and of course, as ‘word processors’ had yet to be invented and she would have turned down that aid even if they had, everything was written by hand. She noticed that the world was changing, as it always is, and although for a while sympathetic to a new form of rebelliousness in the young, deplored most of it. This was particularly true in education, always her special field as a teacher at Oxford: “it is very unfair on clever or even cleverish people … not only to be forced by fashion and the few to spend time in some form of agitation but also (and this is what really gets me) to enjoy its fruits in terms of popular teachers and easy courses. … Of course young people will choose what’s easier, that their yet unexpanded imaginations and sensibilities can deal with. But the expansion is education, and that is what hurts. Yes, I am stern and sadistic towards the young, and this is what makes me a jolly good teacher”. She might have despaired had she known to what extent a student protest of the time over ‘dry academic courses’ was going to lead to a virtual elimination of a genuine education in the best sense.

It’s somewhere here that I still have a little puzzlement about Iris Murdoch. The Nice and the Good was the title of one of her cleverer novels. That the characters were “not very good at all” just adds a piquancy to the story. She herself was as nice and as good as anyone can hope for, along with being formidably intelligent, an extraordinarily rare combination. Did she ever quite realize how rare, that most of the human race is not particularly any of those things? ‘Love’ will sort everything out, she seems to be saying. Will it for the unlovable? Her affection for those she knew was, no doubt, returned, but although she knew a lot of people they were almost exclusively academically-inclined and ‘civilised’ and good manners were a necessary attribute – a lapse in that direction was properly reproved (“You have sent me a very wolfish letter full of hostility… Do not bite me in this hasty way… And don’t put me into lists. I deserve paragraphs and poems to myself”). She wrote to someone else: “I lived in a universe of perfect harmony until I was thirteen and went to boarding school and found out that the world was not composed purely of love but it was too late by then”. Even her characters meant, according to some critics, to be more or less the very embodiment of wickedness don’t seem terribly awful; if anything, it’s the tormentedly self-questioning socially-conscious ones who are more suspect for their blindness and hypocrisy. There’s one delinquent and devious youth in Henry and Cato who complains to a would-be benefactor, an aspirant priest, that “you don’t understand ordinary folks” – don’t understand because the benefactor is guiltily in love with him and conceals that under a cover of altruism of which this mauvais garçon is very well aware and exploits. In front of an image of a crucified Christ, he observes with more down-to-earth morality: “it’s a terrible thing to look at if you think of it, the nails and all that blood. If a gang done that they’d get ten years, even if the bugger survived”. In the novels almost everyone is almost permanently in a well-bred muddle, that’s part of their appeal because - intentionally or not - it’s often so comical and because their creator was such a superlative story-teller; in her philosophical writings there’s a sort of vagueness about that part of the world which is not well-bred at all, where ‘evil’ is rather conventionally summed up by totalitarianism and refugees (with whom Murdoch worked after the War) and, later, ‘environmental issues’ and so on, failings of attention to use one of her favoured expressions rather than of motivation (“There are all kinds of hard fates in the world, but all kinds of graces and alleviations come unexpectedly when one has entered into them”) . Actually, her views on ‘current affairs’, predictably liberal-ish, often seem peculiarly superficial and unreflective, as if she were agreeably accommodating to those of her correspondents rather than really caring or taking too much notice on her own account. She gave her approval to Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi (with whom she’d been at school and continued occasionally to correspond with), yet there’s no comment on the latter’s sensationally gruesome end nor any apparent observation that both ladies were regarded by many as veritable monsters. Perhaps it was that she held the view that good and evil are not just always present in an unalterable balance but that each is necessary for the other. I’m not remotely denigrating Murdoch’s profound wisdom and talent, indeed reverential admiration and the greatest delight in everything she wrote is quite undimmed after this book, it’s just that she wasn’t for nothing the greatest proponent in our times of a genuinely ‘aristocratic’ Platonism and had no truck with kitchen-sink literature (“such tosh”; rather oddly she had no liking either for Flaubert and only reservedly for George Elliot, her favourite writers were Dickens and Proust and Dostoievsky). There was a genuine sympathy for the underdog but not a preference for his company. Perhaps that had something to do with her aversion to anything ‘psychological’, but perhaps it also accounts for why many novel-readers find her incomprehensible or even insufferable (judging by some of the comments in places like this): though accurately and meticulously observed and drawn the characters could seem to bear little relation to anyone one knows, usually without visible means of support but quite untroubled by financial embarrassments or practical domestic irritations, breaking even if they’re rather stupid into improbably intellectual dialogues at the drop of a hat, usually existing or claiming to in a state of high moral consciousness whether they live up to it or not and in sharp contrast to such other great writers as Proust or Balzac or George Elliot or Marguerite Yourcenar for example, whose characters are almost alarmingly recognizable and have a sort of extra hard fierceness and ‘realism’ about them. Murdoch herself offers a very insightful observation, that the main difficulty for the novelist is to keep a balance between real people and images; the main difficulty for herself she must have meant, since all novelists of this calibre are unique. Philosophy of course, or Murdoch’s brilliantly-inspiring variety of musings on how to be good without god and in which she was equally prolific even though she says more than once that philosophy is “too difficult” for her, deals only in imagery, and the real difficulty – since no other person has equally combined the two interests so formidably – is that they don’t exactly mix (though it could as well be asked, what is a ‘novel’ anyway, or what is ‘philosophy’ come to that). A certain perplexity arises from the suspicion that although Murdoch had a strong sense of humour she had little or no sense of irony any more than she had – even if sounds rather rude to say it – much of a sense of ‘good taste’ (in material objects), never developing in that respect beyond a conventional school-girl. Or perhaps just a reluctance to use those - if one likes - frivolous senses for reasons of preserving another one; she very much disliked ‘cruelty’ and it would be tempting to say that she wilfully preserved a sort of innocence which is more Oriental than ordinarily Western (she knew a lot about Oriental religions and was much taken with them). Amusing or not according to taste, her characterizations are in no way satirical or in jest, they are vehicles for exploring moral dilemmas or even abstractions – dilemmas to which the baser and greater part of humanity pays little or no heed. Since her death these disparities have become even more pronounced, the last remnants of the world she inhabited so little time ago no longer existing. A pity, since as she said the Socratic Dialogues were not intended to provide answers but to induce thought about the questions, and Plato in spite of himself was one of the few great poets.

There are very charming qualities in these letters. They’re unfailingly kind and tactfully polite – ‘compassionate’ and ‘understanding’ to use currently over-worked and therefore largely degraded language – while not conceding an inch in false flattery or compromise of principles, nor above gently chiding the correspondent for lack of the same. To the often tiresomely exigent and generally second-rate Brigid Brophy: “To hell with these bloody metaphors … I am not a great writer. Neither are you. I have never of course really told you what I think of your work, though what I have said is truthful. In fact I don’t think critically in detail about what you write. I love it as an emanation of you and admire what is patently admirable in it.” Or as an aside to a young admirer and temporary paramour to whom she’d been generous in reply to a gushy thank-you note: “That meal was lunch by the way. We are not U enough to call it luncheon”. By never picking quarrels and giving her friends the benefit of the doubt she kept most of them for most of her life or theirs. Also, the letters are very attractively self-effacing, in “good form”, the casual reader would never know that the writer was so eminent and famous; there’s an occasional passing reference to feeling a bit drained after finishing another book, nothing else, no discussion of them or any fishing for praise and a deliberate repulsion of any attempts at ‘interpretation’. (I wonder if her friends actually read her books or liked them if they did?) Above all is the sparkling sense of immediacy, that they’re just hastily written conversations, not composed ‘for the record’. Reading them it’s not so difficult to believe that writing more novels than any other author caused her no great difficulty, they’d already been completely worked out in her head in the course of doing other things so that putting the words down was nothing more than taking dictation, and that’s a truly phenomenal talent.

Presumably these letters would be of little or no interest to other than Murdoch admirers already conversant with her work yet in them we see her practising what she preached, a rare accomplishment in itself and from which there are many lessons to be learned by everyone. Regrettably, I fear insofar as she’s remembered at all in the wider public consciousness, thanks to the self-seeking diligence of memoirists and film-makers, it’s as a helpless and rambling old woman and it can only be hoped that her shade finally sees the irony of that.

[Tatyana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I adore the texture of your mind"

"your words all coloured and warmed by you."

"I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture."

"How little one understands other people. You’ve always been very separate from me, though I love you so much – this in a good way. But I don’t understand you either though trust you completely. All love."

"It is true that I am unhappy, but I am far from being ‘at a loss’. As far as recent events are concerned, it is not a matter of slow poison, but of a heavy blow from which one must slowly recover."

"I deeply hope that life is recovering in you, and each day is less sad; hard to speak of this too. Oh dear – just loving you very much indeed."

"Anything I shall ever write will owe so much, so much, to you."

"I don’t seem to have a real gift for making you happy, and others have it, that’s that."

"… you made for once quite a sensible suggestion … that we should make each other happy. Let us do that. It may need a little care at first (like holding together two bits of cracked china …)"

"Dear poetical old, most rationalistic and romantic of beings, I put my arms round you and remind you that I love you."

"I know I am unsatisfactory and that I must just ask you (and earnestly, because this matters to me) to put up with me as I am."

"You, and loving you, have always meant for me more life – and I do think that we can, as you say, ‘belong to each other’s happiness’."

"I certainly don’t feel any inhibition about asking for your heart. I ask for it shamelessly and need it …"

"I am so tired. If you were here I would just touch you and feel better."

"I wish I could think of something to delight you. You need not speak of having little to give me. Just by existing and by letting me speak to you, you give me an immense amount. You make me want to bound about you and about the idea of you like an excited dog."

[David Curry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995, while revealing Murdoch as even more enigmatic than as suggested by her fiction, engaged me and moved me along better than many a novel.

Murdoch is all of 23 years old when she writes to Marjorie Boulton in an August 16, 1942 letter: “ … my latest pastime is reading Homer aloud in the Underground. There is such a racket that no one can hear you — and the hexameter goes very well with the rhythm of the train.”

Murdoch’s multiple, often simultaneous, romantic involvements, which included both men and women and were not always reciprocated, dominate the letters. When the married Raymond Queneau suggests that she should undergo psychoanalysis, an activity she has long held suspect, she replies negatively in a January, 1958 letter: “I don’t think either that this is just blind resistance or prejudice. There is of course an insuperable obstacle which is cash! Here, one needs a private income, or to write detective stories, to afford a ‘proper’ analysis. … Anyhow, my God, if I had that much money, I’d go to Sicily or buy a Lucat tapestry!"

The collection has been admirably edited by Avril Horner and Anne Row. Through a footnote, we learn that one of the alternative titles Murdoch considered for her debut novel, Under the Net, was Dialogue of One. I think I might have preferred that.

Murdoch was always a political activist and argued at one point that those who understand and support socialism should present it as a moral concept. (Can’t we go a step farther and argue that capitalism is obviously not a moral concept?) On June 19, 1968, she wrote a letter to the editor of The Times in defense of a prominent leader of the student protests in Paris:

“Sir, Danny Cohm-Bendett is not a criminal, and what he has to say, whether w e agree with him or not, is interesting and important. Why all this undignified fuss about admitting him to our country? What has happened to the nation in whose museum reading room Karl Marx worked unmolested?”

Later in her life, Murdoch became more conservative, and the later letters frequently show disdain for the Labour Party.

As someone who feels that various isms — deconstructionism, Marxism, feminism — rendered the teaching of literature in American colleges and universities more or less absurd for at least a quarter of a century, I took great pleasure in Murdoch’s disdain for Jacques Derrida and Paul de Mann. “Tosh” is her recurring word to describe their work. She’s also forthright about her discomfort with Virginia Woolf and with James Joyce’s Ulysses. (On the other hand, she repeatedly recommends the work of John Cowper Powys, whom I’ve put on my must-read list.)

If you have discomfort with the notion of reading someone’s collected letters, reconsider. Some of the finest experiences in my reading lifetime have been the letters of Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, even Louise Bogan, and - to be sure — Anton Chekhov. I’m happy to add Murdoch to that company.

[John Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction assesses the author’s promiscuity and effect on a wartime lover. She was being honest in the letters to him I read. I hadn’t realised Theo died shortly after as a result of Vincent Van Gogh’s suicide.

I’ve never accepted that the labour put into a product had much to do with its value to the consumer. Her favourite word, ‘muddle’, makes an early entry and stays the course. She’s naively a communist, a useful idiot as so many of her university peers were. She writes ‘living this easy pleasant life I have a perpetual sense of guilt and desire to hurt myself,’ she does find the means to do. She’d almost given up thinking of people and actions in terms of value but her tutor makes her re-evaluate her thinking in that respect and give credence to the moral value of an inner life not subject to others’ observation. She spied for the communist party when working for the Treasury. She was onto Kierkegaard. I was too, at university before the theology students got to him in their course, and from that I found her as a philosopher, on Sartre.

She noticed a general tendency to want to be loved without reciprocating and goes on to describe what would make a good psychological novel, living with a man she didn’t love, falling in love with another a friend was ditching and causing misery bien sur to the first man, saved by the friend’s falling in love with him, while she was finding out the man she did love was the very devil and so she ended up hating him and herself but quite unable from fushionlessness to end the suffering being inflicted on all four. I can’t compete with that. Terrific and probably artistically useful. What I was doing comparably was being candidly in love with Christo de Wet in the Divinity Students Residence, defeating his god who was endorsing his impotence and exhausting myself in the process.

She’s conscripted into the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration which doesn’t have the imagination to understand what the displaced person problem really is. Her French came in handy though. Her fiancé meets somebody better and is let off the hook, leaving her relieved but with an increased horror of all ties, especially marital. He wants back but she says no. I think this may be where she gets her idea of ‘chance’ from. She might have married him, hooked by sex, as she would have the one who got himself killed or another who died just in time. It’s all looking pretty chancy. She can’t take up a fellowship at Vassar; the Americans won’t give her a visa on account she’d been a communist. She does get in later but has to apply for an eighteen month visa each occasion and on one the embassy loses her passport. That’ll larn her.

She becomes a Xian again but is persuaded to rethink her religious views by yet another charismatic man who, incidentally, thought her a British bore. The ‘net’ of the title of her first novel, ‘Under the Net’, refers to that of language Wittgenstein identified as barrier to truth and translation of thought into language. Looking for a book, under the direction of my unconscious my arm rose and hand picked out ‘Under the Net’, written by someone I’d thought of as a philosopher only.

Bad faith is defined as when someone under social forces adopts false values and forfeits his innate freedom to act authentically, a small price to pay for social acceptance I’d’ve thought like the lie of Christ resurrected.

‘I must say the thing and be rid of it,’ she says. Me too. I read out a story that moved a friend to tears, thinking I was in love when I’d written love out. Murdoch visited an abbey out of remorse and drew on her knowledge of it in writing The Bell.

Oxford gets her down because it’s so intellectual and she’s not and doesn’t like intellectuals, so she says while knowing nobody else much. When a friend calls her genteel, I’m inclined to agree. ‘Are you happy? Do you love and are you loved?’ she asks, ‘I know that compared with this jobs are as nothing.’ ‘How much I want to be admired. People said how much they’d enjoyed my voice on the radio and I felt pleased with myself.’ ‘I can certainly live without you – it’s necessary. You know what it is for one person to represent for another an absolute. There is nothing I wouldn’t give up for you if you wanted me. I know from my own experience how in a moment of need one is just as likely to rely on someone one met yesterday.’

She doesn’t meet the expectations of her publisher. Good for her. Giles Gordon, the agent, would’ve taken me on if I’d met his. I stopped CORRESPONDENCE at the printer’s because the publisher was obdurately insisting on misattributing the book. In her second novel Murdoch proffers attention to reality as the means by which obsessive masochistic fantasies may be overcome and goodness made accessible and learned, good being the object of love. The editors’ commentaries relate the fiction to the life. Murdoch championed the novel of character. A Severed Head prefigured the Profumo Affair. The intense and reckless liaisons within her novels reflected the sexual mores of the time and her own. She is she thinks like her books. Her characters are all her. ‘I can’t divide friendship from love or love from sex – or sex from love. If I care for somebody I want to caress them. I am not a lesbian, in spite of one or two unevents. I am strongly interested in men but don’t really want normal heterosexual relations. I am a male heterosexual in female guise, evident from the novels where it is male queer relations which carry the most force from the unconscious.’ She does initiate a sexual relationship with another woman to remove emotional barriers. ‘I cannot think of any corner of the universe where sex is not present.’ ‘I don’t portray real people; it would inhibit imagination.’ Magic, like sex, is everywhere ‘just over a certain borderline when a kind of will-to-power radiation takes possession of up till then innocent or harmless or spiritual images or activities or states of being,’ an intimation of the unconscious coming out and taking over perhaps.

I sent her my novel and had a critical letter in reply. I’m thinking of sending a copy of it to the editors who asked for such. She tells off a friend for making a carbon copy of a letter to her he showed to somebody else. He should not make copies of personal letters. Why not? I discarded the idea myself in writing to Betty Clark because it’d militate against spontaneity.

She says Islam is a rotten religion which owes much of its popularity to its absolute and fundamental degradation of women. Ireland likewise is an awful country, of bogus charm, although she regards herself as an Anglo-Irish Protestant. She loathes the IRA and objects to American support for a united Ireland. She’d be a Leaver on the grounds of our sovereignty that we’ve had for a very long time whereas France and Germany want to run Europe between them.

[Laura Degenhardt · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is hard to believe that these letters were not later edited by Iris Murdoch for style and coherence. Even when, as we are told by the editor, Murdoch's writing in the later letters shows the effects of the dementia that took her life in 1999, she still maintains the warmth, humour and clarity that run through all of the letters from this 60-year period. Murdoch's correspondents are diverse, and in this collection of letters, many of the correspondences last for decades. I do find discomfort at times in reading a collection of this sort, even years after the death of the writer, as much of this writing is intimate, and I feel should perhaps have remained private. However, this is a privileged insight into the opinions of a wonderful mind. I have since reading these letters begun to revisit Murdoch's published works. The biographical notes and editorial additions to this collection are a very useful reference for wider reading around Murdoch's philosopher contemporaries.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The editors of this collection of Iris Murdoch's letters have done a good job in selecting ones which add to the biographical detail which is available in other books. The connections she made to friends, lovers, and colleagues are given extra depth with her own words, along with the odd letter to politicians and The Times, showing how concerned she was with other matters outside her own sphere of teaching, writing and the life of an academic in general.

The overriding impression from them all is one of a woman who cared deeply. Her concern for others is almost overwhelming at times,and although there are ways in which their complicated lives could be seen to feed into the pages of her novels, as she says in one of the letters, her characters are not based on real people but are the result of the use of her imagination. Towards the end there are indications of how Alzheimer's was affecting her memory and abilities, and this makes for sad reading, but overall the book is evidence of a strong, amazing writer who had a real joy for life and people.

In 1994 I was lucky enough to meet Iris Murdoch when I worked at Blackwell's in Oxford and we provided a bookstall at one of her last public engagements at St Anne's College. Listening to her speak (and sing as she was wont to do on occasion), would have been enough, but luckily during the break I was able to ask her to sign a copy of her novel A Message To the Planet for me. She was without a doubt one of the sweetest, nicest authors I have met, and I will always treasure this moment, and remember the smile she gave me, seeing a young bookseller who read her novels, at a time when this book shows she had doubts over her contribution to the literary world. Of course I will carry on recommending them, including this one to anyone who wants an intelligent, well-observed novel or insight into the life of a writer.

[David Gross · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping for a lot more meat on the bones. Instead most of the letters are pretty spare and superficial. Useful I suppose for biographers trying to piece things together, and okay I guess for people who want to voyeuristically peer over Murdoch's shoulder as she juggles her love affairs, but also lots of trivial stuff like this letter from 1964:

My dear, just to say I'll hope to see you this Wednesday Oct 21 - drinks at Harcourt Terrace circa 6.30 - where I've asked one or two people (no one very novel, I'm afraid) - and will hope to dine with you afterwards. (Should get rid of the drinkers by 8 or so.) Don't worry if you don't feel like coming - I'll suggest other times. But much hope see you - then or very soon. Hope all's well with you - with much love, Iris.

[Eric Kalnins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and informative read. Fuller review to follow

05.23

[Eileen Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I was not really a fan of her work, this collection of letters show a different side to the person I imagined.
They are informative and telling.
She came over as funny, intelligent and loving.
I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Princeton University Press via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

[Cathy Beyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this, but boy it took me a long time to read. Since I am a fan of Murdoch's work, this gave me a much better insight in to her thoughts and feelings. Good for fans with a lot of time on their hands.

[Shannon]

I'm going to have to set this book to "hibernating" until I can buy my own copy of it. It is intriguing and I adore Iris Murdoch but I can't just sit and read 600 or so pages of letters all at once.

[Katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliantly edited, insightful re Murdoch's inner life. I had no idea she wrote poetry. You may wish not to know about the slide in her political views. A great read.