“Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” wonders Daniel Deronda, watching Gwendolen Harleth at the roulette table. The face of Iris Murdoch, as it appears on the books that have shaped her afterlife, inspires the same question. Here she is with her square jaw, pug nose, and Joan of Arc haircut on the cover of Peter Conradi’s hagiography, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), looking sidelong at the reader with her elsewhere eyes; here she is again, reticent and remote on the first two volumes of John Bayley’s Iris Trilogy, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998) and Iris and the Friends (1999); and again, with the reserve of a postulant nun, on the front of A.N. Wilson’s Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (2003). Murdoch photographs are less a likeness than a Platonic idea. A mood, a mind, a deep, private center of being: this is what philosophy, or literature, or high seriousness looks like. Her face carries some “central, large, and simple meaning,” as Rebecca West said of Murdoch’s novels, “which one has, somehow, just missed.”
Wilson, invited by Murdoch to write her biography before she replaced him with Conradi, describes the “hypnotic grace” of her features, while for Bayley, to whom Murdoch was married for forty-three years, her face was “always mysterious” but “not in any conventional sense pretty or attractive.” It was her “total absence of anything that…constituted sex-appeal” that attracted Bayley to Murdoch in the first place, minimizing, he fruitlessly hoped, the competition. Elias Canetti, in the chapter in Party in the Blitz (2003) titled “Iris Murdoch,” says that her face, particularly during sex, was as beautiful “as a Memling Madonna.”
Murdoch’s own response to her face was complex but consistent. “I haven’t a face any more,” she told Frank Thompson in the 1940s. “I don’t think of myself as existing much, somehow,” she said in relation to her portrait by Tom Phillips in the National Gallery. In A Word Child (1975) she coined the term “unpersons” to describe the true artist’s invisibility, and in her journal she wrote that she wanted, like Dostoevsky, to be able to say “I never showed my ugly mug.” It would have been a happy day when, in the summer of 1981, she was accosted on a train by a stranger who thought she was Margaret Drabble. “How can you tell,” asked Murdoch, addressing his mistake philosophically, “that I’m not Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, or even Iris Murdoch?” “Margaret,” the stranger replied, placing his hand reassuringly on her sleeve, “I’d know you anywhere.” “I am nothing,” says Tim in Murdoch’s final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), written as Alzheimer’s took hold of her mind.
Since her death at age seventy-nine in 1999, Murdoch’s unreadable face has, in the UK, become better known than any of her readable books, whose characters often also have unreadable faces. Palmer, the incestuous psychoanalyst in A Severed Head (1961), has “something abstract in his face. It was impossible to pin wickedness or corruption on to such an image.” James Arrowby’s face in The Sea, The Sea (1978) is “not a very coherent” one. “It is as if a fuzzy cloud hangs over it.” In Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001), adapted from Bayley’s first two memoirs, Murdoch’s older face is played by Judy Dench and her young one by Kate Winslet. Dench is particularly good at portraying what Bayley, the devoted cuckold hero of the story, calls the “lion face” of Alzheimer’s sufferers, which “indicates only an absence.” When Iris smiles, “the lion face becomes the face of the Virgin Mary.” Being “struck,” Bayley writes, “by the almost eerie resemblance between the amnesia of the present and the tranquil indifference of the past,” he struggled to distinguish the absence indicated by Murdoch’s lion face from her earlier absence of ego.
Bayley, who first saw her, “absent and displeased,” cycling “slowly and rather laboriously” past his Oxford college, fell instantly in love. Meeting her properly at a party at St. Anne’s, the women’s college where Murdoch had a fellowship in philosophy, was an “almost supernatural” experience. The party was a “hotbed of emotion”; everyone there “seemed to be in love with Iris”; everyone she knew, Bayley soon realized, found her “fearfully…almost diabolically attractive.” “One of my fundamental assumptions,” Murdoch wrote when she was twenty-nine, “is that I have the power to seduce anyone,” and she continued to do so throughout her marriage.
Falling in love always happens instantly in Murdoch’s world, generally as the result of a conversation and never without violence. “I felt as if my stomach had been shot away, leaving a gaping hole,” says Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince (1973), of falling in love with Julian, the teenage daughter of his rival, Arnold Baffin. So in love is Pearson, who can only perform sexually with Julian if she is dressed as Hamlet, that he vomits outside the opera house where they hear Der Rosenkavalier. Most of Murdoch’s novels contain homosexuals, and the seven best books—including Under the Net (1954), The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea—have male narrators. Entirely at ease in her polymorphous perversity, Murdoch described men from the inside. “What am I?” she asked her journal on December 11, 1966. “A male homosexual sado-masochist.”
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For thirty years Murdoch held her generation in thrall. John Updike recalled the excitement with which A Severed Head was passed around “as a species of news: it revealed that anyone could love anybody, and frequently did.” In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1962 parody of the novel, “A Jaundiced View,” published in Who Do You Think You Are, a character named Flavia sits beneath a “dark and contingent cedar tree…her pet marmoset on her shoulder, her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head.” Flavia is in love with Hugo, Hugo is in love with Augustina, Augustina is in love with Fred, Fred is in love with Flavia, Moira is in love with Fred, and Alex is in love with Moira. Murdoch is a gift to parodists: in a throwaway passage in Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, Wilson imagines the Murdoch version of Pride and Prejudice, with Mr. Collins as an “agonised atheist priest” having an affair with Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and Lizzie discovering that Darcy is in love with Wickham, hence his intervention in Wickham’s elopement with Lydia. Louis MacNeice’s dying wish in 1963 was for a novel by Murdoch. Introducing himself to Iris at a party in 1971, Noël Coward announced, “I’m a screaming Murdoch fan!”
She was as significant to the British counterculture of the 1960s as D.H. Lawrence, but following the eulogies and obituaries, it didn’t take long for Murdoch’s twenty-six novels to be consigned to the oubliette of literary history. Even before her death the consensus was that having aimed high, aspiring to the level of Proust or Henry James, she landed somewhere in the middle. While Bayley airily compared her to Shakespeare, Colin Burrow in the London Review of Books described her work as “French farce being redescribed by Sartre.” For Canetti, who was often the model for her monsters—Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) and Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea—she was a “passionate schoolgirl” with “a—buried—robber’s nature” who achieved only “a vulgar success.” “I still believe in her greatness,” says Wilson, “or near-greatness, or sort-of-greatness; though I’d be hard put to define what I mean.”
Having discovered Murdoch in the 1980s, when her best work was behind her, I came of age through her fiction. I had recently moved to London, where her novels are largely set, and she showed me how Londoners who were true to themselves lived. Her first novel, Under the Net, was a picaresque farce inspired by Samuel Beckett and Raymond Queneau (she was copying them as hard as she could, Murdoch said),but her terrain became Englishness. Murdoch’s middle-class bohemians are the descendants of Bloomsbury: 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 womanisers.”
She wrote as a philosopher, but no one read her for the metaphysics. We read her for the plot and to figure out the relationship between high intelligence, emotional incontinence, erotic extremism, and moral virtue. “It was plain,” Virginia Woolf wrote in a 1920 review of Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, “that sex had for him a meaning which it was disquieting to think that we, too, might have to explore.” This was also the case for Murdoch, who wrote with Lawrentian conviction about love and sex and whose characters likewise suffer from the “nightmare of mental awareness,” as Bayley put it in his first critical work, Characters of Love: A Study in the Literature of Personality (1961). Before we were embarrassed by her, Murdoch was considered an elevating experience—which is another thing she has in common with Lawrence. Like one of her mages, she had us under a spell whose power is now hard to explain. Even Conradi, who was her disciple before becoming her caregiver as well as her biographer, describes his relationship with Murdoch, in his memoir Family Business, as an “enslavement.”
I didn’t bother reading Murdoch’s last four novels, but Bayley, it transpires, read only the first four, stopping with The Bell (1958). Considered by many her best novel, it was written in the first year of their marriage and is set in a lay community attached to a convent of Benedictine nuns. According to both Conradi and Wilson, Bayley was so frightened by what he found in The Bell that he did not risk another, only pretending to have read the twenty-two that followed. For the next thirty-five years, whenever Murdoch handed him her manuscripts for comment, he took them away, flicked through the pages, and drew her attention to a randomly chosen sentence that he claimed to admire.
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So what did Bayley find in The Bell, apart from melodrama, adultery, hysteria, horror, love, hate, rivalry, entrapment, Plato, Kant, serious talk, and ceaseless thinking? The novel, about the secular need for religion (“there is a God but I do not believe in him”), is both urgently awake and proceeds as if in a trance. Boiling inside its own gothic-realist-mythical-fantasy structure, it begins, as do other Murdoch novels, with an attempted escape, but instead of leaving her controlling husband, Dora Greenfield, a latter-day Isabel Archer, keeps returning to him. Trapped in cycles and repetitions, with more going on in their unconscious minds than we could possibly grasp, the characters, often doubles of one another, live double or triple lives. Murdoch created, as Elizabeth Bowen said, “a world,” but her world is not, in the way of Shakespeare’s worlds, one we recognize because it is inside us. Murdoch’s world is amusing to her readers but has meaning only to Murdoch.
Conradi and Wilson have characteristically different approaches to Bayley’s revelation that he read only her first four novels. Conradi, bound by the restraints of the devotee, bridles when difficult material demands closer scrutiny. Bayley, Conradi explains, avoiding eye contact with the reader and covering in a sentence the central lie of what he calls the “legendarily happy” marriage, was “disturbed and astonished by the imaginative intensity [of] his outwardly placid wife.” Wilson, prodding the beast, suggests that Bayley felt “the persona of the novelist who had created this book was completely uncongenial, not at all the person he thought he knew, thought he loved, thought he had married.” What Bayley believed, Wilson suggests, is that Murdoch’s absence of a self outside her books enabled her to inhabit multiple characters inside them: everyone in The Bell is a version of Iris. Spreading herself thin, she thus practiced another form of promiscuity in her novels.
Turning a blind eye to her books as well as her affairs, Bayley wrote in Iris: A Memoir that “Iris has always had—must have had—so vast and rich and complex an inner world, which it used to give me immense pleasure not to know anything about.” In Widower’s House (2001), however, the third memoir in the trilogy, he says something more striking about the difference between Iris as a wife and Iris as a writer:
The self who was with me was not the self who wrote, but she never seemed to commune with any other self in her own writing, either. One odd reason why the characters in Hardy’s novels are often unsatisfactory is that they are outside himself. Iris’s were all inside her.
But, as Bayley may have suspected, Murdoch’s characters are alive for only as long as the novel is being read. There is no Miss Bates in her fiction, or Mr. Micawber, or Jude, or Humbert Humbert. Her characters, like their faces, are abstract, as though a fuzzy cloud were hanging over them. My own suggestion is that what Bayley understood from her first four novels was that Murdoch saw herself, in her facelessness, very clearly: her mysterious psychology was the material she worked with. The character of Anna Quentin in Under the Net, for example, was “not all that it should be,” her existence being “one long act of disloyalty.” Anna is constantly involved in “secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others.”
When Bayley and Murdoch met in 1954 they had each written their first novel. Bayley’s In Another Country (1955), based on his experiences as an officer in Germany at the end of the war, was as promising a debut as Under the Net, but he did not write his second novel, Alice (1994), until Murdoch had completed her last, after which he published three further novels in rapid succession. “If the tree close beside me dies,” he explained in Iris and the Friends, “I have that much more light and air.” Murdoch could not, she said, “write fast enough,” and between Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978, she produced a novel a year, after which it was one every two years. Bayley, meanwhile, wrote about novels and novelists and also, like Murdoch, about love. The Characters of Love is a study of three dramas of marital betrayal: Othello, Troilus and Cressida, and The Golden Bowl. “Many things,” he writes in the introduction, “remind us of the alien worlds that impinge upon our own, but the experience of love does so most forcibly of all.” His masterpiece, The Uses of Division: Unity and Disharmony in Literature (1976), explores the possibility that in the most fertile imaginations the writer’s right hand has little idea of what the left is doing.
Bayley’s Iris Trilogy is a strong example of this process. Hailed by critics as “the greatest love story of our age,” the memoirs were seen by Murdoch’s friends as a jealous husband’s revenge for his wife’s fame and faithlessness. Were it not for Bayley’s trilogy and Eyre’s film Iris, Murdoch would be remembered as an artist rather than an emblem of Alzheimer’s, defecating on the carpet and watching Teletubbies, and Bayley would not be remembered at all. In Family Business, Conradi says that he offered to step down as biographer when he learned that Bayley was also writing about Murdoch, and he describes Bayley’s first volume as
an act of appropriation, and a seeing-off of rivals for her affection. Iris had formerly belonged to her readers and friends; now, finally and unsettlingly, she belonged to John, and he was marking this change of ownership. That he made my partner and me dedicatees was partly gratitude for our roles as carers, partly propitiatory.
There were “tears and heated rows” when Conradi discovered that a second and third volume were on their way. Wilson himself was “sickened” by Bayley’s
repeated claims…that his wife, such an intensely private person, would have wanted “fame” of this kind. The books that he wrote about her, which began as an exercise in tender recollection, appeared to me a Pandora’s box of which he quite clearly lost control.
Bayley’s subject was marriage, also one of Murdoch’s great themes. “In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner,” she wrote in A Severed Head. “A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.” After reading the Iris Trilogy, my own interest in them as a couple was no longer in what it was like for Bayley to be married to Murdoch but in what it was like for Murdoch to be married to Bayley. “I sometimes push my head at Iris,” he writes in Iris and the Friends, “saying, ‘I hate you, you know! I REALLY FUCKING WELL HATE YOU!’” Bayley’s memoirs increasingly echo Murdoch’s novels, this particular line repeating Bradley Pearson’s in The Black Prince: “‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’ All spouses are murmuring that to each other all the time. It’s the fundamental litany of marriage.”
Murdoch has had what Conradi calls “a simplified afterlife” in the sense that a complex human being has been reduced to either a confused child or a sacred and profane love machine. But if Bayley’s trilogy is read alongside Conradi’s Life and Wilson’s Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, and if we also consider Conradi’s Family Business, Canetti’s Party in the Blitz, and David Morgan’s With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (2010)—an account, in the form of a letter to Conradi, of his erotic entanglement with Murdoch when she was his tutor—her afterlife does not seem simple at all. It becomes instead a story of discipleship, rivalry, and control as five men compete over a woman whose face, body, imagination, and character entirely elude them. Each is writing in opposition to the others, all are unreliable narrators, and taken together their attempts to capture the essence of Iris Murdoch echo the denouement of The Black Prince, the novel described by Wilson as the writer’s “examination of her own daimon, of those aspects of her nature which fed into the novels.”
The Black Prince is also an examination of Murdoch’s marriage. Bradley Pearson, the book’s narrator, is a Shakespeare critic and unsuccessful novelist, while Arnold Baffin, his best-selling former pupil, has produced, as Wilson points out, the works of Iris Murdoch. As a novelist, Baffin “lives in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea.” Pearson, who condemns Baffin’s oeuvre in a review that he decides not to publish, then sleeps with Baffin’s wife and daughter before buying all his books in order to reread them, and instead destroying them with a knife. In the postscript, when the novel’s principal players—Baffin’s wife and daughter, Pearson’s ex-wife and ex-brother-in-law—are invited by the editor to comment on their portrayals, they show no understanding of who Bradley Pearson is.
“How,” Pearson wonders, “can one describe a human being ‘justly’?” Conradi’s Life lays down the facts. The only child of a civil servant father who came from Northern Ireland and a middle-class mother from the Irish Republic, Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. The family moved to London before she was a year old, but she always saw herself as an Irish unionist, and maintained a trace of the accent. She described her family as a “perfect Trinity of love,” and tried to reproduce this idyll by loving everyone she met. She joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, studied Classics at Oxford, and was the Zuleika Dobson of her generation. Graduating with a First, she worked during the war in the Treasury and spied for the Russians; she met Sartre in Paris in 1945, Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1947, and returned to Oxford later that year as a fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Anne’s College. Her friend Frank Thompson was murdered in Bulgaria during the war; Murdoch later suggested they had been engaged, which was not true. She was, however, engaged to the anthropologist and poet Franz Steiner, who died of heart disease, aged forty-three, in 1952. She met Bayley two years afterward.
Conradi, whose doctoral thesis on the fiction of Iris Murdoch was published as The Saint and the Artist (1986), pays close attention to her writing, friendships, warmth, kindness, and lack of narcissism (she described herself as “nauseated” by good reviews). Meanwhile the sheer weight of the affairs he uncovers, multiplying at the speed of the Malthusian growth model, threaten to bend the book in half. During her courtship with 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. She was “one of us,” Beecham said, until “that horrid little man” took her away.
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. David Morgan says that her “full attention span” lasted about a year “before her ‘emotional promiscuity’ kicked in and she fell for somebody else.” Her involvement with Canetti, “the primal power figure” who initially forbade Murdoch from seeing Bayley, continued into the first years of her marriage. Until Conradi’s biography, none of her friends knew that Murdoch’s relationship with Canetti had been sexual and that they made love in the armchair while his wife was in the next room. “Had Iris really belonged to Dr. Canetti, all these years [we’ve] been married?,” Bayley wondered in Iris and the Friends.
Was Murdoch’s promiscuity an expression of her philosophy, or her philosophy a justification for her promiscuity? Either way, she lived according to her own moral code. Her freedom to seduce, she believed, was an expression of freedom in general and a mark of respect for “otherness,” but in her journals she was more quizzical. What, she asked, “does this endless capacity for new loves shew…that I am very shallow, unstable? I can’t think this.” Reading through her earlier entries, Murdoch noted on November 16, 1968, that the “business of falling in love with A, then with B, then with C (all madly) seems a bit sickening.” “Loving others,” Conradi gallantly suggests, was Murdoch’s “way of both knowing them, and of losing herself.” Eighteen years later, however, when Conradi returned to his Life of Murdoch in Family Business, he saw that he had been “protecting” her from the world as he had once protected his mother. His “devotion” had been too “fantasy-ridden” to allow him to express his “difficulties understanding Iris’s extra-marital relationships. I could imagine being in love with two people but, the idea of being in love with ten mystified and confused me.”
Wilson was dropped as Murdoch’s biographer, Conradi writes in Family Business, because she “found he was gossiping & passing on things she told him in confidence.” But Wilson also admits in Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her that he was reluctant from the start. How would he deal with her affairs or describe the filth of her house, including its strange smell? And what about “the Irish problem”? Murdoch falsely claimed, in the author’s note on her novels, that she was Anglo-Irish, implying that she came from the Ascendancy tradition of horses, hunts, and big houses, but the Murdochs were lower-middle class. When Wilson arranged to meet some of the Northern Irish relations Murdoch had told him were dead, his fate was sealed. Wilson “would have made us all feel dirty,” Murdoch’s closest friend, Philippa Foot, told Conradi when he was given the job instead, and Conradi dutifully gives the material a good wash.
Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her is the book Wilson did not, and could not, then write. He describes his surprise, for example, when, having appointed him as her biographer, Murdoch
placed both forearms on my shoulders and stared dreamily, almost amorously, into my eyes….The flickering moment was the only one when I felt I had glimpsed what her life of a hundred emotional intimacies had been like.
Should he go to bed with her? Wilson wonders. “Dammit, why not?” Conradi, in Family Business, says that he experienced a similar sexual charge in his early friendship with Murdoch, which they discussed. David Morgan, whose relationship with her involved heavy kissing but, she ruled, no sex, was “surprised” that Wilson “thought of going to bed with her—how did he dare?”
Murdoch, Bayley writes, “never went to bed with any of her colleagues, or indeed with any other woman,” which is a lie. It was to avert a scandal over an affair with the classicist Margaret Hubbard, which came so close to destroying their marriage that she left St. Anne’s in 1963 and took a teaching job at the Royal College of Art, where she initiated the relationship recalled by Morgan. The entanglement with Morgan, twenty years her junior, might serve as the blueprint for her other relationships. His immediate “sensation” on meeting Murdoch, he recalls, was that “I knew her.” She was famous, with an author photo on her books. Her familiarity unleashed his desire to confess, so he initially “talked too much…. Why didn’t I shut up? I even—horror of horrors—remember her once snapping at me, If only you would let me get a word in edgeways.”
Murdoch’s effect on Morgan recalls that of the late Queen Elizabeth II. In Q: Voyage Around the Queen, a psychopathology of the British need for royalty, Craig Brown suggests that the ubiquity of the monarch’s face on stamps and coins created a similar sense of intimacy, the royal absence of expression giving her the aura of a confessor or psychoanalyst. Brown describes, as a drama student, being one of several people introduced to the queen at a party. She was “a total stranger,” he recalls, “and yet wholly familiar,” and he found himself telling her about Brecht’s alienation effect. “I was unstoppable,” writes Brown. Morgan’s unstoppable talk was about his own trinity of love: obsessively in love with Magda, he was sleeping with Paulette; before long Iris, befriending both women, had made herself part of the story.
Widower’s House, the magnificently weird and least admired book in Bayley’s trilogy, describes his first year without Iris. Now considered a catch, he is pursued by Margot, who arrives at his Oxford home with mops and casseroles and climbs into his bed:
I remained as immobile as a spider trapped in an empty bath…. I could only want to escape, and this was hardly practicable when it was three in the morning and we were lying in bed together…. Would Margot expect me to—well, do anything?
He is then also pursued by a former student named Mella:
As I turned to fill her mug, Mella was suddenly on me. Her arms went tightly round my neck… Mella’s face was against my nose. I had difficulty in breathing… “Please John,” she was saying. “Let me come to you. I’ll look after you, I promise. I won’t bother you. I’ll go out. I’ll clean the house and everything.”
Margot and Mella become friends, and Bayley is trapped again, this time in a perfect trinity of love. Escaping from his house while Mella is preparing herself for him in the bathroom, he catches a plane to Lanzarote to see his old friend Audi, whom he then marries. “I believed that Iris was with me once more, joining us and making three with us in the warm breath of the night.”
“A biography of a writer which came close to understanding the mystery of its subject,” Wilson suggests, “would in all likelihood have ceased to be a biography. It would in fact have become a novel.” Bayley later confessed to having made up the story of Margot and Mella. So what readers thought was a memoir was in fact a parody of a novel by Iris Murdoch. Bayley may not have read her books, but she still provided his plots.
