Though long known among academics and middle-class intellectuals, Iris Murdoch, novelist and philosopher, became in her final, shadowy years, and without her knowing it, a household name. When Alzheimer's took hold, her husband, John Bayley, in two unsettling memoirs, told the story of how she sailed into the darkness, her brilliant mind no more.
Now, two years after her death, Peter Conradi, friend and admirer, in this authorised, first biography, focuses not on her illness but on family background, early life and influences, her Irishness, her education, her politics, her life as civil servant, academic and novelist, identifying many Murdochs in one.
Named for the goddess of rainbows, Murdoch, like her namesake Iris, was "many-coloured, protean, hard to pin down". Thus we have Murdoch the scholarship schoolgirl, headgirl and brilliant undergraduate, the dazzling intellectual and determined writer. We catch brief but memorable glimpses of Murdoch skiing, canoeing, ice-skating, swimming. She dances with Dylan Thomas, prays (with rosary beads) in Westminster Cathedral, meets Sartre, visits Bowen's Court, travels to the US, India, Israel, China, supports David Norris's campaign to decriminalise homosexuality, teaches philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford and the Royal College of Art and produces 26 novels, philosophical works, plays and volumes of poetry. There is also an, as yet, unpublished journal, dated 1936 to 1996, from which Conradi quotes.
Born at 59 Blessington Street, Dublin in 1919, Murdoch came from a family that was Irish and Protestant on both sides for 300 years. She often claimed she was an Irish Murdoch - "I'm profoundly Irish and I've been conscious of this all my life" - and, shortly before she died, announced: "At least I'm Irish. That's something."
An only child, Murdoch grew up in London and could never understand "two's company, three's none", describing her relationship with "Doodle" and "Rene" as "a perfect trinity of love". Her parents, for all their importance, figure little here.
Murdoch encountered the unusual early on. At Badminton School, Miss Baker, the headmistress, an extraordinarily enlightened and inspiring educationalist, slept with Miss Rendell, the games teacher. There the young Murdoch not only discovered "the great greedy pleasures of learning", but the school took in refugees and "we knew about the concentration camps considerably before the idea was taken seriously by the general public".
The book's central section is both the most interesting and, understandably, the most disjointed. During those urgent, uncertain war years, Murdoch joined the short-staffed civil service. London first, where she worked in the Treasury, and later Belgium and Austria with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In 1944 there were eight million refugees in Europe and, years later, when Murdoch wrote fiction, she almost always included the outsider, the displaced. Her letters to talented, idealistic Frank Thompson, whom she met at Oxford and who was executed in 1944 in Bulgaria, capture the times: "Jesus God how I want to write" says Murdoch. "I want to escape from the eternal push and rattle of time." Thompson's death haunted Murdoch for the rest of her life.
Conradi shows us Murdoch in the making, and the making of Murdoch. She believed primarily in Plato, thought Freud reductionist, Christ not divine. The disappearance and weakening of religion were, for her, the most important thing that has happened to us over the past 100 years and the whole range and riches of her mind are charted here.
But the images that dominate and endure are of Murdoch's complex emotional, intellectual and sexual life. I lost count of her lovers, male and female. She had several intense relationships, often simultaneously, and refused numerous offers of marriage. One ex-lover described her as "monumentally unfaithful", and there was something monstrous in her three-year affair with Elias Canetti, whose wife would let her into their flat and make a meal for the three of them afterwards. In her journal,Murdoch wrote: "\ held me savagely between his knees and grasps my hair and forces my head back. His power. He subjugates me completely."
The 1940s and early 1950s were troubled years politically and personally, and Conradi appropriately calls this section of the book "Storm and Stress". But in 1956, Murdoch married John Bayley, six years younger, and moved to Steeple Aston, where they lived for 30 years. Rarely apart, their "legendarily happy marriage" survived her several affairs and "a mutually obsessional attachment to a woman colleague that threatened scandal" which led to Murdoch's resignation from St Anne's.
It was at Steeple Aston, in 1984, that I first met Iris Murdoch and by then she had become what Martin Amis called a "beautiful and benignant nun". Yet to say I knew her is vain and foolish. We met several times, corresponded for years; I interviewed her for The Irish Times, and she gave me signed copies of her work; but very few were lucky enough to know her. Though sympathetic, interested, generous, she also believed that "there are not many people whom one wants to know one".
Receiving as many as 70 letters a day, she sometimes spent up to four hours replying. Conradi is right in saying that "her friendship ennobled you", but if people spoke of Murdoch's saintliness, this book is no shrine to St Iris.
One could be forgiven for thinking Murdoch's elaborate fictions far-fetched, but Conradi clearly and convincingly illustrates how life enters art. Murdoch often disclaimed any link between people she knew and fictional characters. But we need only learn that Murdoch once travelled to Italy with an Italian-speaking Jewish Alexandrian, Pierre Riches, who later converted to Catholicism and became a priest (the first of a long series of gay or bisexual men friends) to realise that art imitates life. And she did admit late in life that "there were friendships which influenced me deeply when I was younger, and something to do with them is in my books because it is within me".
In the late 1960s, Murdoch re-read all of Shakespeare in order to enhance her own work. It did. And parallels are drawn between her novels and Shakespeare's plays, especially The Tempest, her favourite. Conradi also points out that Bayley wrote a paragraph in Chapter One of The Bell, though he fails to mention that he also contributed the funny, unforgettable sentence "Only a fool would despise tomato ketchup" to her Booker prize-winning novel, The Sea, The Sea. Bayley told me so himself. Murdoch deliberately compartmentalised her life, kept friendships separate and abhorred autobiography as "morally sickening". Conradi's task was a difficult one and towards the end he quotes Scott Fitzgerald: "There was never any good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he is any good". But this book succeeds admirably in capturing the many Murdochs.
The literary biography is yet to be written, but that may be even more difficult - she refers only once to literary life in 60 years of journals. Meanwhile, this biography, thoroughly, exhaustively researched, sends you back, with increased understanding and interest, to the work.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin