Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography

IRIS

MURDOCH

A Life

PETER J. CONRADI

For John Bayley and for Philippa Foot

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

INTRODUCTION

I INNOCENCE Fairy-Tale Princess 1919–1944

1 ‘You ask how Irish she is?’ 1616–1925

2 No Mean City 1925—1932

3 The Clean-Cut Rational World 1932—1938

4 A Very Grand Finale 1938–1939

5 Madonna Bolshevicka 1939–1942

6 This Love Business 1942–1943

7 ‘A la Guerre, comme à la Guerre’ 1943–1944

II INNOCENCE LOST Storm and Stress 1944–1956

8 A Madcap Tale 1944–1946

9 Displaced Persons 1946–1947

10 Cambridge 1947–1948

11 St Anne’s 1948–1952

12 Franz Baermann Steiner– 1951-1952

13 Conversations with a Prince 1952–1956

14 An Ideal Co-Child 1953–1956

III INNOCENCE REGAINED Wise Child 1956–1999

15 Cedar Lodge 1956–1961

16 Island of Spells 1961–1965

17 What a Decade! 1965–1969

18 Shakespeare and Friends 1970–1978

19 Discontinuities 1971–1978

20 Icons and Patriarchs 1978–1994

21 ‘Past speaking of 1994–1999

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

About the Author

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

AFTERWORD

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Iris Murdoch wrote to her friend the painter Harry Weinberger in October 1985, when he was contemplating writing his memoirs, ‘how precious the past is, how soon forgotten’, regretting how little she had researched her own family. She told her old refugee-camp friend Jože Jančar in about the same year to expect a call one day from her biographer. When ‘feeling mortal’ in 1963 she had sent some poems to her publisher at Chatto & Windus, Norah Smallwood, explaining, ‘I would like one or two of these poems to have a chance of surviving.’1 She lodged a story, her family tree and her husband John Bayley’s Newdigate Prize poem with her literary agent Ed Victor in the 1980s. How she was remembered mattered: she once startled a Jesuit student who had quoted St Augustine by asking, ‘Have you any evidence that he was a good man?’ She kept in London a copy of H. House’s Sketches for a Portrait of Rimbaud, and a well-thumbed Life of Shakespeare by A.L. Rowse. She encouraged Stephen Gardiner in his biographies of Jacob Epstein and Elisabeth Frink.

The idea of a biography of her was first mooted by the publisher Richard Cohen.2 At first appalled, she later consented to her friend A.N. Wilson writing it, and Chatto showed interest in commissioning the book as a Socratic dialogue. At some point in their researches, after 1990, both she and Wilson cooled to the idea. Probably Dame Iris wanted only intellectual biography, at least during her lifetime, though she was resigned, as she told the American biographer Jeffrey Meyers, to the matter being resolved after she had ‘departed this scene’. I raised the issue at the end of 1996, the year when Iris and John Bayley and my partner Jim O’Neill and I had started to spend weeks together in Radnorshire. It did not seem right that the life of so remarkable a person should go unrecorded, and I hoped that it would be written by someone sympathetic.

I had loved her work since finding The Bell in Oundle school library around 1960, and thought, like tens of thousands, ‘These books are about me.’ I wrote my Ph.D. on her Platonism (later published as The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch), and we met at a lunch party in 1981 to celebrate her honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia. Eighteen months later, listening to her give the ten Gifford lectures in natural theology over a fortnight in Edinburgh, and argue that the good man literally sees a different world from the mediocre or bad man, I was shocked into a new way of thinking. We met again, and I discovered I was a Buddhist. (Talking to her old Oxford contemporary M.R.D. Foot about Iris’s converting Frank Thompson to Communism in March 1939, we decided she was always a collector of souls.) This interested her. John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (US title Elegy for Iris) suggests I taught her about Buddhism; at first she taught me.* We met for lunch, once or twice a year, often at Dino’s in South Kensington. She liked the first-floor restaurant, where there were sometimes no other diners: despite her partial deafness, she could hear there. On one such occasion, having just learnt to stand on my head in a Hatha-Yoga class, I offered to demonstrate. She declined, but put the incident into The Good Apprentice, when Meredith stands on his head for Stuart. She was appalled to learn that there were Tibetan teachers who had love affairs with their students. She said fiercely, ‘I have committed many sins, but never that one,’ referred to it in The Message to the Planet, and introduced me to her friend Andrew Harvey, who had recently written the Buddhist-inspired A Journey in Ladakh, whom I think she hoped might wean me from my teachers. In 1988 she invited me to join her and John for Christmas lunch, but this invitation came unworkably late (Christmas morning). She attended a seminar on her work in 1989 at Kingston University, where I taught, and Kingston awarded her an honorary doctorate at the Barbican in 1993, where she gave away degrees. She sent me as a gift a typescript liberally annotated in her hand of her radio opera The One Alone,3and after I had completed a three-month Rocky Mountain group meditation retreat came to dinner, to witness, perhaps, any effects. One was that, though no one has influenced me more, she alarmed me less. I lent her Heidegger’s volumes on Nietzsche for her work-in-progress; discussed her work with her at symposia: in 1987 at the Free University of Amsterdam, in 1992 in Alcala de Henares in Spain, in 1994 at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Around 1992 she put my and Jim O’Neill’s blue-eyed collie into The Green Knight as Anax, which involved meeting and much conferring about detail. That we lifted the dog up interested her and made its way into the text. When I read the proofs, I wrote to her as if from the dog, suggesting emendations I was not sure a non-canine critic might effect. She replied (to the dog, whose influence exceeded that of Chatto editors) implementing the changes. In 1997 I collected her essays, which Chatto published as Existentialists and Mystics. Although the four of us became from 1996 until her death like ‘family’, I had the not uncommon sense of not knowing her, and was astonished to learn that in her will she had left me a Gandharva Buddha and a bequest and, although an inveterate destroyer of letters, had kept a number from me about Buddhist matters.

The matter of a biography rested until the summer of 1997, when I asked Iris how she felt about it, and she replied, ‘You’re a good friend.’ We made cassettes together. She enjoyed helping, gave affirmative character references –? tip-top person’, ‘A splendid woman'; advised reticence on one (unimportant) matter. She was thrilled when introducing her old friend Philippa Foot and hastened a meeting with her brother-in-law Michael Bayley. As late as 1998 she identified her grandmother and first cousin Cleaver from photographs, and her response to three beloved names – Franz, Frank, Canetti – endured. Of the third she remarked in May 1997 with poetic ungrammaticalness, ‘His name shudders me with happiness.’ As she gradually forgot her past, I rediscovered it. It sometimes seemed as if I were becoming her memory. There was something magical, and humbling, about revivifying someone so richly and intensely endowed with life. To her Oxford contemporary Leo Pliatzky she wrote in 1946, ‘I’m glad I was born when I was, [aren’t] you? I’m sorry to have missed pre-war Paris, but Lord, this is an interesting age.’4

2

A major artist is a contested site, and, rather as the Queen has an official birthday, is bound to acquire official friends. Iris, instantly memorable,* also made each friend feel uniquely befriended. Only the vainest believed that this was literally true, and she, who befriended so many, was known to few. This biography is a quest for the living flesh-and-blood creature hidden beneath the personae in which many invested: the blue-stocking, the icon, the mentor and John the Baptist to other writers who, that work satisfactorily fulfilled, could vacate the scene to others uncommemorated. The Indian writer Ved Mehta optimistically believed she had ‘no enemies’. She was sometimes portrayed as a bourgeois grandee living an unworldly detached intellectual life, a stained-glass ‘Abbess of North Oxford’ cut off from reality, inventing a fantastical alternative world for compensation. ‘Real life is so much odder than any book,’ she wrote to Philippa Foot:5 her life was as exciting and improbable as her fiction. Much in her fiction thought to be ‘romance’ turned out to be realism. Her novels are not just stylised comedies of manners with artificial complications, but reflect lived experience, albeit wonderfully transmuted. If, like Yeats, she was ‘silly, like us’, her gifts, as Auden put it, survived it all.

She has been claimed by many: as an example, magus or mentor both to younger writers and to seekers; by Stirling University, where the Scottish Assembly voted the astonishing figure of £500,000 to help fund an Alzheimer’s Centre in her name; by St Anne’s College, Oxford, where a graduate scholarship may be called after her. She is to be acted by Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet in a film. Oxford University plans to raise two and a half million pounds for a chair in geriatric psychiatry in her name. There will surely be further memoirs. One task of the biographer must be to give the artist’s ‘mana’, power or prestige, back to herself. Another, to return the reader to her best work

The critic P.N. Furbank in Encounter once gallantly blamed his disappointment with The Italian Girl on the unrealities of Oxford life, on which he thought the book based. The Iris who wrote to Raymond Queneau of her love of ‘this precious enclosed community … with all its pedantry & its intellectual jokes’,6 who lived at number 43 Park Town in North Oxford in 1940, at number 16 in 1948, and at number 58 in 1950, is not the whole story. This biography is a quest for other Irises: the Irishwoman; the Communist-bohemian; the Treasury civil servant; the worker in Austrian refugee camps; the Anglo-Catholic retreatant; the Royal College of Art lecturer; the lifelong devotee of friendship conducted at a distance and by letter – what Nietzsche in The Gay Science called ‘star friendship'; the Buddhist-Christian mystic. The recent past is too close for objectivity, and this book might have been entitled ‘Young Iris’. The period 1919 to 1956 is least known, and least discussed in John Bayley’s memoirs of Iris. In 1997 no fewer than three Badminton schoolmistresses, who knew Iris from 1932, were still with us. That period was soonest likely to disappear from view. I would focus on the so-called formative years: the time before the creative confusion of youth gave way to a greater stability.

How extraordinary her life proved to be: nothing was as I expected, yet it was real as well as fantastical. She played two opposite and heroic parts: a Colette de nos jours, hard-headed, hard-working, ardent and sometimes humiliated, presiding over her own emotional life and so a role-model for other women;7 the second other-centred to the degree that she lost much sense, in the service of her ‘conjecture’ about the Good, of who she was.

How does one write about someone who thought she had ‘no memory, no continuity, no identity'? Periodically rediscovering her own journals, Iris kept surprising herself: ‘What an Ass I was!’ Yet, as a novelist, she had digested and reworked her experience: it might be that she had finished with and shed the earlier persona. She certainly agreed with T.S. Eliot that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.’ Suffering interested her.

I believed, as Dorothy Thompson – sister-in-law to Frank Thompson, who loved Iris during the war – put it, that ‘The articulate members of a generation speak for many others besides themselves,’8 and planned a book in two parts, one leading up to Iris’s marriage in 1956, recording her imaginative indebtedness to her Oxford generation, the second concentrating on her work. After I had drafted seven chapters, however, Tom Hicks made Iris’s letters to his father David available to me; these were soon purchased by the Bodleian Library, and considerably complicated my view. A three-part structure now seemed apt. Iris saw human life as a pilgrimage away from fantasy and towards reality. Her own life fitted this template: Innocence/Innocence Lost/Innocence Regained. She honoured the irreducibility of her friends and I wished in turn to explore, but not explain away, her mystery. The book is also an interlinked series of short stories, each partly cultural history, recording what it was like to be at Iris’s schools in 1925 and 1932, at Oxford in 1938, at the Treasury during the war, in the DP camps just afterwards, among the German-Jewish émigrés of the 1950s, at the RCA in the 1960s. This necessitated deciding what to leave out. As a non-philosopher, I had to leave authoritative ‘placing’ of her thought to others. It became apparent that those looking for in-depth literary criticism would have to find it in my earlier book The Saint and the Artist, itself in part intellectual biography, whose third edition comes out simultaneously with this biography. There was little space to describe foreign trips (seven in one year alone). Many who knew her loved her and wanted to claim her for their own. Despite this gift of becoming instantly important to others and the many and great debts I owe to later friends, there was little Space to explore recent friendships, which in contrast with those negotiated before the age of thirty are ‘apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions’.9

Michael (M.R.D.) Foot wrote after Iris died: ‘Her light was once marvellously bright; and you are lucky to bathe in so much of it.’ I felt that luck. Closeness to one’s subject is simultaneously a strength and a liability, and I wanted to write the first biography of Iris, but not the last: to start the job of setting her work in the context of the cultural/intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century, of the generation who struggled to come to terms philosophically and emotionally and artistically with Stalin and Hitler, with existentialism, and with the slow collapse of organised religion. She left behind edited journals (1939–1996) which constituted an invaluable resource, carrying her unique ‘voice’.

‘How can one describe another human being justly?’ the narrator of The Black Prince asks. Iris was, as many of her friends put it, more passionate for truth (generally the faintest of all human passions, A.E. Housman observed) than anyone they had known. Trying to tell the truth in the right way was challenging, and if this is anywhere achieved, I owe much to the hundreds who helped: to the generosity of the British Academy for their 1998 award of a small grant, to Magdalen College, Oxford, where I was happily Visiting Fellow in Hilary term 1999, and to Professor John Sutherland for inviting me to be Honorary Research Fellow at University College, London. Chapter 1 plunders, with their permission, the scrupulous genealogical researches both of Mr Arthur Green and of Iris’s second cousin Canon Crawford. Professor Roy Foster kindly vetted what I had written on Iris’s ‘Irishness’, and Chapters 1 and 16 benefited greatly from his kindly and authoritative guidance. Professor Miriam Allott read Chapter 2; John Corsellis Chapters 8 and 9; Marija Jancar Chapter 9; Mrs Anne Robson Chapter 11: all made helpful suggestions. Professor Dorothy Thompson generously allowed access to the closed collection of Thompson papers, and she and Frank Thompson’s biographer Simon Kusseff helped with limitless patience; Simon read Chapters 4 to 7, and fine-tuned many points therein. Michael Holroyd commented on a number of passages. Professor Dennis Nineham shared his theological expertise. I’m deeply indebted to very many librarians and archivists: among them Christopher Bailey at Viking New York; Eugene Rae at the Royal College of Art; Pauline Adams at Somerville College, Oxford; Jane Read at Froebel College; Diane Elderton, Librarian of Ibstock Place School; Dr David Smith at St Anne’s College; the British Library; all the staff of the Modern Papers room at the Bodleian Library; and Michael Bott at the University of Reading Library, where Dame Iris’s Chatto archives live. My gratitude to Alison Samuel of Chatto for facilitating access, and to Daphne Turner for having researched that huge archive, amongst much else. Although Fletcher and Bove’s Iris Murdoch: A Primary and Secondary Annotated Bibliography (London and New York, 1995, new edition forthcoming) shows that there are many of her letters in public collections in libraries scattered worldwide, I have relied much more heavily (except where indicated) on privately held letter-runs, and am deeply grateful that so many were made available to me.

I should like particularly to thank Mrs Olive Scott for allowing me access to James Scott’s journals, Professor Jeremy Adler for access to Franz Steiner’s papers and Johanna Canetti for her father’s. I met with great kindness on many journeys: from Sybil Livingston and Cleaver Chapman in Belfast; from Billy Lee in Dublin; from Susie Ovadia and Jean-Marie Queneau on two trips to Paris; from Allan Forbes in Boston and on Naushon island; from Maria Panteleev in Bulgaria; from Lois MacKinnon in Aberdeen. This biography is the culmination of twenty-one years of research, teaching and publishing on Iris Murdoch.

I owe to my other great teachers, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, their having taught me the courage to look closely.

I owe much to the following: Janet Adam Smith, Pauline Adams, Professor Jeremy Adler, Peter Ady, Sir Lawrence Airey, Professor Miriam Allott, Mulk Raj Anand, Lord Annan, Professor Elizabeth Anscombe, Jennifer Ashcroft, John Ashton, Reggie Askew, Lord Baker, Sir Peter Baldwin, Lady Catherine Balogh, Stephen Balogh, Jonathan Barker, Betsy Barnard, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham, Margaret Bastock, Brigadier Michael Bayley, Denys Becher, Paul Binding, Hylan Booker, Dr Marjorie Boulton, Cheryl Bove, Lord Briggs, Michael Brock, Anne Brumfitt, Dame Antonia Byatt, Carmen Callil, Clare Campbell, Johanna Canetti, Sir Raymond Carr, Hugh Cecil, Jonathan Cecil, Cleaver Chapman, Professor Eric Christiansen, George Clive, Alex Colville, Robert Conquest, John Corsellis, Milein Cosman, Jean Courts (later Austin), Barbara Craig, Rosemary Cramp, Vera Hoar (later Crane) and Donald Crane, Julian Chrysostomides, Don Cupitt, Marion Daniel, Peter Daniels, Gwenda David, Barbara Davies (later Mitchell), Jennifer Dawson, Rt Hon. Edmund Dell, Patrick Denby, Barbara Denny, Kay Dick, Professor Mary Douglas, Professor Sir Kenneth Dover, Professor Sir Michael Dummett, Moira Dunbar, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Lilian Eldridge, Anne Elliott, Professor Dorothy Emmet, Leila Eveleigh, Professor Richard Fardon, Rachel Fenner, Professor John Fletcher, Professor Jean Floud, Professor M.R.D. Foot, Allan Forbes, Anthony Forster, Professor Christopher Frayling, Honor Frost, Lady Fulton, Reg Gadney, Margaret Gardiner, Stephen Gardiner, Susan Gardiner, Tony Garrett, Professor Peter Geach, Antonia Gianetti (later Robinson), Phillida Gili, Victoria Glendinning, John Golding, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Carol and Francis Graham-Harrison, Sister Grant, Marjorie Grene, John and Patsy Grigg, Dominic de Grunne, Michael and Anne Hamburger, Sir Stuart Hampshire, Tiril Harris, Jenifer Hart, Andrew Harvey, Lord Healey, Katherine Hicks, Tom Hicks, Wasfi Hijab, Professor Christopher Hill, Professor Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Holroyd, Laura Hornack, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Maurice Howard, Gerry Hughes, Priscilla Hughes, Psiche Hughes, Professor Sally Humphreys, Rosalind Hursthouse, Julian Jackson, Dan Jacobson, Mervyn James, Jože and Marija Jancar, Lord Jenkins, John Jones, Madeleine Jones, Sandra Keenan, Sir Anthony Kenny, Sir Frank Kermode, Charles Kidd, Francis King, Ruth Kingsbury (later Mills), Ken Kirk, Todorka Kotseva, Professor Georg Kreisel, Michael Krüger, Nicholas Lash, Michel Lécureur, Billy Lee, David Lee, Dr Ann Leech, Professor George and Alastine Lehmann, Sir Michael Levey, Peter and Deirdre Levi, Deirdre Levinson, Paul and Penny Levy, Mary Lidderdale, Professor Ian Little, Penelope Lively, Sybil Livingston, Professor Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Professor David Luke, Richard Lyne, Katherine McDonald, Professor John McDowell, Ben Macintyre, Shena Mackay, Dulcibel MacKenzie, Lois MacKinnon, Michael Mack, Holga Mackie, Aubrey Manning, Sister Marian (Lucy Klatschko), Noel and Barbara Martin, Derwent May, Stephen Medcalf, Mary Midgley, Professor Basil Mitchell, Julian Mitchell, Juliet Mitchell, Gina Moore, David Morgan, Professor Brian Murdoch, Professor Bernard and Pamela Myers, Professor A.D. Nuttall, John O’Regan, Margaret Orpen (later Lady Lintott), Susie Ovadia, Valerie Pakenham, Lynda Patterson (later Lynch), Denis Paul, Kate Paul, Professor David Pears, Sister Perpetua, Professor D.Z. Phillips, Barry Pink, Julian Pitt-Rivers, Sir Leo Pliatzky, Frances Podmore, Elfrieda Powell, Joseph Prelis, Jean-Marie Queneau, Lord Quinton, Kathleen Raine, Professor David Raphael, Professor Marjorie Reeves, Professor Herbert Reiss, Frances Richardson, Gloria Richardson, Pierre Riches, Peter Rickman, Barbara Robbins, Professor Kenneth Robinson, Anne Robson, Professor Stanley Rosen, Dr Anne Rowe, Bernice Rubens, Chitra Rudingerova, Gabriele Rümelin (later Taylor), Geoffrey de Ste-Croix, Inez Schlenker, Olive Scott, Elizabeth Sewell, Jenny Sharp, Patricia Shaw (later Lady Trend), John Simopoulos, Jan Skinner, Jewel Smith, Prudence Smith, Peg Smythies, Polly Smythies, Professor Susan Sontag, Natasha, Lady Spender, Naku Staminov, Peggy Stebbing (later Pyke-Lees), Professor Frances Stewart, Professor Anthony Storr, Professor Sir Peter Strawson, Professor Paul Streeten, Irene Sychrava, Richard Symonds, Professor Charles Taylor, Dorothy Thompson, Olivier Todd, Professor Richard Todd, Svetlana Toderova, Ann Toulmin, Professor Stephen Toulmin, Jeremy Trafford, Jeremy Treglown, Nancy Trenamen, Professor Rachel Trickett, General Slavcho Trunski, Jane Turner, Garth Underwood, Anne Valery, Anne Venables, Nicholas Veto, Ed Victor, Audi Villers, Sir John Vinelott, Margaret Vintner (later Rake), Janice Wainwright, Rosemary Warhurst, Baroness Warnock, Harry Weinberger, Lord Weidenfeld, Dee Wells, Anne-Louise Wilkinson (later Luthi), John and Anne Willett, Professor Sir Bernard Williams, Charlotte Williams-Ellis (later Wallace), Susie Williams-Ellis (later Cooper-Willis), A.N. Wilson, Colin Wilson, Anne Wollheim, Professor Richard Wollheim, Professor David Worswick, Max Wright, Werner Wunsche, Pat Zealand (later Trenaman).

My agent Bill Hamilton gave unstinting support and excellent advice; I’m grateful to Phillida Gili, Emma Beck and Humphrey Stone for helping me find, and allowing me to use, the photos taken by their mother Janet Stone; and to the Schiller National-museum, Marbach-am-Neckar, for the transparency of Conversation in the Library, 1950. While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright-holders of photographs, in some cases this has proved impossible. I would be grateful for any information which would enable me to rectify such omissions in future editions.