DEE WILSON CONSULTING

The December 19, 2024 issue of The New York Review of Books, contains a fascinating and exasperating article about the English novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, "Irresistible Iris," by Frances Wilson. Discussions, biographies, memoirs and movies about Iris Murdoch have continued to appear periodically since her death in 1999. Her husband, John Bayley, published the first volume of his Iris trilogy, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch in 1998 when Murdoch had Alzheimer's and followed with two additional books, Iris and the Friends (1999) and Widower's House (2001). Ian Wilson, who might be conventionally described as a friend of Iris Murdoch, published Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (2003). I read Ian Wilson's biography a few years ago and was distressed enough to send him a written rebuke, which was the only time in my life I have been motivated enough to tell off a biographer. With friends like Ian Wilson, who needs enemies?

 

Peter Conradi published a biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001) which Frances Wilson describes as "hagiography." Conradi then returned to the subject of Murdoch's life in Family Business (2019) eighteen years later.  Francis Wilson describes Conradi as a caregiver, disciple, and biographer. In addition, Elias Canetti's, Party in the Blitz (2010) contains a venomous attack on Murdoch, perhaps understandable from a former lover whom Murdoch used as a model for a charismatic demonic force in one of her early novels. In addition, David Morgan's, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch was published in 2010. Francis Wilson comments: " ... her afterlife does not seem simple at all. It comes instead as a story of discipleship, rivalry and control as five men compete over a woman whose face, body, imagination and character entirely elude them."   

 

The interest in Iris Murdoch's life, character, character and many love affairs has increased as the regard for her 26 novels and her philosophical writing has decreased during the past few decades. Frances Wilson asserts that John Bayley, her husband, once stated that he only read the first four of her novels , and only pretended to read the others by finding a few sentences to mention to Murdoch. Both Ian Wilson and Frances Wilson are dismissive of Murdoch's fiction. Frances Wilson asserts that Iris Murdoch wrote only seven good novels, without naming the seven novels except for The Bell ( 1958) and The Black Prince ( 1973 ). This opinion seems over specific yet is true in a general way. Murdoch wrote a novel every year or two for three decades. A few of these novels are excellent, most were easily forgotten and a few were poor. In my view, this is not a bad batting average for a prolific novelist. 

 

Frances Wilson maintains that Murdoch aspired to vanish into her fiction, but instead filled her novels with characters who were reflections of herself. There is a grain of truth in this criticism which could be said of many novelists, i.e. that their imaginations of the inner worlds and lives of the characters they create is limited to the range of types of people they could have become. Frances Wilson also asserts that Murdoch was unable to create memorable characters, though she discusses at length two memorable characters from The Black Prince. However, while Wilson's criticism of Murdoch's novels is overstated, it contains an element of truth: Murdoch's strength as a novelist is not in her characters, but in the intelligence and insight she brings to the description of their inner worlds, and of her unmatched analysis of the many dimensions of romantic love and love more generally. 

 

Regarding the subject of romantic love, Murdoch knew whereof she spoke. In her personal life, Murdoch had a superpower: when she was 29 she wrote: "One of my fundamental assumptions is that I have the power to seduce anyone," including both men and women. Frances Wilson comments: "and she continued to do so throughout her marriage." Wilson asserts that during her courtship with John Bayley, "Murdoch was emotionally entangled with David Hicks, Arnaldo Momigliano, Asa Briggs, Elias Canetti, John Simopoulos, David Pears, Hans Motz, Brigid Brophy, Peter Ady and Audrey Beecham." For most people, this would be enough romantic involvement for a few lifetimes, but not Murdoch because her superpower was also her super vulnerability; she fell in love quickly and easily.  Wilson states: "She could love, Murdoch said, ten people at a time, none of whom knew about the others, and all of whom received her undivided attention." An entertaining novel could be written about how Murdoch managed the logistics of several simultaneous romantic entanglements, which rarely lasted longer than a year. In Murdoch's life, romantic attachment was sudden, swift and powerful in that it offered complete immersion (accompanied by sexual pleasure) in the mind and heart of the beloved. Murdoch was not a beautiful woman (I would describe her as plain) though Conradi was impressed by "the hypnotic grace" of her appearance. At first glance, Bayley has written, she was devoid of sex appeal, a reminder to be wary of first impressions. Her superpower was not based on physical beauty; it was based on her fascination with others and her ability to lose herself in her lover, but only briefly. 

 

Iris Murdoch was Irish, born in 1919 to a middle class family from Northern Ireland. Her father was a civil servant, a group of people who appear frequently in her novels. "She described her family as a "perfect Trinity of love." Her family moved to London before she was a year old. She attended Oxford and began teaching philosophy at Oxford in her 20's. Murdoch was close personal friends with a celebrated group of female philosophers at Oxford that included Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foote and Mary Midgley, whose relationships are the subject of Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (2023) by Clare Mac Cumhall and Rachel Wideman. This book includes the story that Murdoch and Philippa Foote were (for awhile) roommates, which did not stop Iris from sleeping with Foote's fiancé. 

 

Frances Wilson believes that the early popularity of Murdoch's novels was due to the sexual and romantic free for all of her plots: "living in squares, loving in triangles, with everything at sixes and sevens," as Lytton Strachey said, "ladies in love with buggers, and buggers in love with womanizers." And: "She wrote as a philosopher, but no one read her for the metaphysics." Re this view, I must protest in that I did read Murdoch's novels (at least in part) due to her philosophical themes, and I also read quite a bit of her philosophy, especially The Sovereignty of Good ( 1970)  which I recently reread to my benefit. In Murdoch's philosophy, as in her novels, what stands out is intense spiritual longing for the Good, accompanied by the lack of a belief in God.

 

Murdoch was influenced by Simone Weil, and like Weil (who died at age 34 in 1943) Murdoch was impressed by how humans protect themselves from the truth of their feelings and the reality of other lives through ego friendly fantasies, daydreams, and the mental/ emotional haze created by strong emotional reactions. She was astute in a way her critics rarely are of how the human mind shapes itself through countless daily acts of attention and inattention. Per the Gospel verse, humans see the world "through a glass darkly." From this perspective, Iris Murdoch's romantic powers were a way of briefly transcending the self, only to be safely returned to the safe harbor of romantic fantasy followed soon by disillusionment, for how many humans can bear the weight of romantic love, marred (as it tends to be) by delusion and the desire to appropriate the beloved?    

​

-- Dee Wilson

 

deewilson13@aol.com