Thanks for reminding me that it's high time to re-read Iris Murdoch. I devoured her books one after the other as a teenager, besotted by the language and the ideas, but I'm sure a lot of her insights went right over my naive little head at the time.
1
Thank you, Mr. Garner.
An excellent tribute to an amazing woman. I became addicted to Iris Murdoch's fiction in the 60s. I was living in Belgium at the time and waited impatiently for the each new novel to be published. I wrote to her once, and to my amazement, she responded. We were to meet in Steeple Aston, where she was living at the time. Alas, crossed wires prevented our meeting. When I returned to the US and started my graduate work, I chose to write my MA thesis on A Fairly Honourable Defeat. With PhD in Philosophy of Religion in hand, I continued to be fascinated with Iris Murdoch's Ethics in The Sovereignty of the Good and in her later philosophical works. I also continued to write about her novels and her philosophy. As she and John lived next door to one of my Oxford colleagues, I would often hear wonderful stories about her. Iris Murdoch was a singular individual whose intellectual and emotional energies provided me with a window through which to see a world beyond my own and a road map toward it. She remains among the most significant influences on my life of the mind.
6
Excellent article, thank you. An Post, the Irish postal service, is issuing a commemorative stamp for Iris on July 11.
1
Thank you, Dwight Garner, for this piece that gets the essence of Iris -- as I can call her, as she was (a very thoughtful) godmother to our elder daughter. John and Iris came to us (usually for lunch) regularly, as we did to them in their various houses. Yes, they both loved food; but John had the habit, thinking he might get hungry later, of putting a baked potato in his jacket pocket, and eating it in the car after a day or two . We have hundreds of family stories about Iris and John. Once, in drink, I diffidently said to Iris that perhaps there was a bit the character of Chas. Arrowby in me? She answered, "Of course. But he cooks like John."
6
Quite interesting article precise and engaging at the same time highly informative. Thanks for such an intellectual work on a great hitherto less known great litterateur, Murdoch
3
Lovely remembrances of Murdoch's work. I read her 1st 10 novels in a midwife school bed after delivering a daughter in an unfamiliar country.
She jumped off the pages of each book as if she was hovering over me, and kept me nearly sane post-partum.
Your piece brought tears and pain to think she'll be forgotten.
3
No mention that she was also a philosopher. The Sovereignty of Good (1970, but essay published earlier) was a very special book for me. "Humility," she writes, "is not a peculiar act of self effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all the virtues." Learning to respect reality is a lifetime's work.
3
Was my fav until 'the green knight' written under the influence of dementia. Was very disappointed to find that she was mortal. I loved her; like i love Cormac McCarthy.
1
Amen to your praise of “The Sea, The Sea.” I read Iris Murdoch 30 years ago, when I was in my early 20s, and found her so astute, clever, funny. I always figured she didn’t have much audience in America but must have had an enormous following elsewhere. It’s dismaying to see she’s fallen out of conversation. Among the books you list as your favorites are all of mine, too. It seems high time I returned to them!
3
Your article made me listen to her interviews which are available online. The sound of the recordings were low so I couldn't go working around but I need to sit down, watch and listen. I feel like I am listening to a very profound lecture which I would die for during my university days. Her intensity of gaze is at times frightening but it is as intense as the power of her words. One can't gaze in another manner with that piercing intelligence. I admire her for being able to combine literature and philosophy for it is rare. I was happy to find out that Cologne City Library here in Germany has her books in their archive. I took home four of her books mentioned in the article. Thank you for this feature.
4
Odd how some writers are almost immediately forgotten after they die, even though they were highly thought of until right before they died. Among those I value highly, Thomas Berger comes to mind, along with John Fowles and Peter De Vries. John Barth, who still lives, is another waiting to be dismissed. He's already in that process now. Grievously and shamefully undervalued and under-discussed now. his downward trajectory has been going on for some time. He, like Murdock (and Fowles), is very much an intellectual novelist, and I can't think of two novels whose stories better encapsulate a coherent philosophy than his two youthful forays, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. Fowles and Barth also knew how to create dazzling plots that made their ideas palpable.
4
If Iris Murdoch has a literary heir, it’s Ali Smith, with her intellectual play and solidly British sensibilities. Yet despite my appreciation of Smith’s work, I can’t say that reading it gives me the feeling of having “swum very near to a whale” as Dwight Garner so aptly says of Murdoch’s work. Not yet, anyway.
2
Murdoch is humorless. That's why she has faded away.
1
Murdoch was my favourite author in my early 20s. I still admire her books, but haven't been tempted to return to them since then. I may have overdosed (as this review suggests, the novels do tned to repeat themselves), but I also think that like Dostoevsky, she is particularly an author who speaks to the strong emotions and big questions that animate and sometimes obsess young people.
5
"The intellectuals and artists and eccentrics in her lesser books seem to be moved like lethargic wooden chess pieces, making you feel like you’re trapped in the lower intestine of some baroque scholarly superstructure."
Keats coined the term "Negative Capability" to explain Shakespeare's art; NYT reviewer Dwight Garner opts for Inexplicable Negativity- as in, I have no clue what he is saying except that he says it really negatively....
3
Funny. I knew exactly what this meant and excerpted the quote to save because it is such a perfect take on Murdoch. It spoke to me. Guess that’s what makes horse races.
2
In the late 1980's a poetry critic, whom I greatly admired, told me his favorite author was Iris Murdoch. He collected first editions of all her books. So it was I feel in love with the writings of Iris Murdoch. My first motive was to see what the person I loved, at that time, loved about Iris Murdoch's novels. So my search was for "keys" or insights into the psyche of why this well-known teacher/critic seemed to adore Iris Murdoch. In the process of reading her novels I fell into the depths of love and loss within the stories. Such eventually mirrored my relationship with the person who introduced me to her work. So in grieving I found comfort and courage in believing Iris Murdoch had experienced what she wrote about and whatever happened, she came through.
I wrote her twice near the end of her life. A framed letter of her response is like a "relic" emanating "presence." Amid
the dark times people experience in her books, there is also a radiance shining through, patches of love that endure . . ..
Echoing Plato's cave imagery, which she wrote about in her philosophical reflections along with admiration for Sartre's existentialism. A remarkable woman for all seasons. Thank you for this wonderful review by Mr. Ganer
21
One doesn't read an Iris Murdoch book. She somehow manages to read it to you. Her voice is just that clear. Her plausible, yet eccentric, characters are so present you can smell them. Let us hope that her centennial sees her work gain a fresh readership.
19
"The Unicorn" was given to me by one of my philosophy professors, an old greek scholar sporting polka dot bow ties, chevalière on the pinky and all; very murdochian in type. And then I read one after the other, "The Philosopher's Pupil", "The Black Prince", "The Nice and the Good", "The Sacred and the Profane Love Machine", "The Message to the Planet"... So happy I still have so much to read, but up to now my favorite Iris Murdoch novel is "The Book and the Brotherhood".
11
The woman I took up with following the collapse of my domestic arrangements in 1986—a college friend of my estranged wife—very cannily pressed upon me her copy of “A Severed Head.” I’d read no Murdoch hitherto. “My god,” I told my companion afterward, “I’ve been *living* this book.” “I know,” she replied.
12
Thank you, Mr. Garner, for this wonderful appreciation. I am so glad to have had the experience of a very long, drinky lunch with Iris and John in Oxford circa 1994. They called each other Pussy. As we left the restaurant, John noticed that I had left my (multiply refilled by John) wine glass half full. Pussy, look, more wine! he exclaimed, picking up my glass, precisely tipping half of it into her empty glass, and then together they clinked glasses and drank them down in one go.
35
Fantastic article, wonderful comments. I too as an American reader came to Dame Iris later in my life, turning 46 in 2004, when I bought and read The Sea, The Sea. So funny and sharp and comic in the British manner, but then more and more serious and thoughtful. A lot going on in all her books, and they bear and give pleasure in reading after reading. And then I found Under the Net on the bookshelf of my building's laundry room. Another lifelong pleasure!
8
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for bringing Iris Murdoch back into the light! She has been a favorite of mine since the 1970s, when, after seeing the film of A Severed Head, I read the novel. I was instantly captivated. I’ve read all the novels except The Italian Girl and The Red and the Green. I only slowed down as her work became a bit predictable toward the end. Her last few tended to be the same mixture as before, but the novels of her prime are glorious — The Sea, The Sea, in particular. I hope this piece will reactivate interest in her work. You have done a great public service.
8
I discovered Murdoch late in life - in the 1990's - started with The Severed Head. I was enthralled! It became a sport for me to look through secondhand bookshops for Murdoch finds in English. Now I wish I'd kept them !! (space problem). Many of Murdoch's works are translated into Danish - I live in Denmark - but I couldn't bear reading a translation of an English or American author unless absolutly necessary. Thanks for everyone's reading tips!
5
Thank you for sharing your appreciation for one of my favorite books of all time. The Sea, The Sea was the first Murdoch I ever read; and it is still my favorite. I have given it to a number of friends over the years, insisting they had to experience the unpredictable strangeness and powerful emotions of the story. I believe it should be one of those 'must reads' during a person's lifetime. Occasionally, when my husband and I have very little to eat in our cupboards, we will put together our best version of an 'Arrowby' snack: grabbing and throwing together whatever would make the weirdest flavor combination. The food choices seem a metaphor for the various passionate configurations and activities that occur: bizarre, sweet, bitter, disgusting and tantalizing. The most memorable love story ever told.
6
I read A Word Child on my bed in Milan in 1987. The machinations of the underground, was there a cafe stop in the tube that he stopped at? I remember the meetings at the pond in a park in London. Why this novel haunted me so much I do not know. I read many more of her novels but this kept nagging on my memory.
6
In an unpublished memoir I wrote this: "I found [in the library stacks at Birmingham-Southern College in the late 1950s] critical biographies of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman that cemented my early and private impressions about their sexual nature. I also encountered Iris Murdoch down in those stacks, again by serendipity and her knack for good titles. Reading those early novels I wasn’t sure I liked her but I did find her interesting, and that early flirtation grew into great love in my middle years. I stumbled upon Patrick White’s The Tree of Man and Voss, the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship with him. Or at least his works. I collected all of their novels over time and they traveled about New York and back down to Alabama with me. All gone now." Gone because failing eyesight made it impossible for me to read books in hardcopy any more. I kept here the bit re Patrick White, another writer who has fallen into neglect. Perhaps both he and Murdoch require a level of careful commitment most readers today no longer can give. Perhaps both are too complicated to be summed up in a tweet. Perhaps their sexual natures are too complicated to fit into today's rage for over-specific labels. Perhaps their wise and deep understandings of the complications of the human heart don't fit our times. But remember: Herman Melville fell into disrepute for a long time before he was rediscovered. I believe one day the world will discover the likes of Murdoch and White.
6
my mother collected all of her books in hard back and now I have the pleasure of reading them over time. Insanely good.
5
Now I’m inspired to read The Sea, The Sea. I read several of her novels years ago. Later I read a review of her work by Joyce Carol Oates. The thesis of the review was that all of Murdoch’s works are an extended commentary on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. That makes sense to me.
4
I adored Murdock because she added philosophy about women and men to her books instead of just having simple romantic plots like many of the books of that day. She was a cut above the typical sex filled romance novel that usually captured the best seller list. She was also a champion of women's rights at a time when that was starting to be noticed. I implore young women of today to read more serious authors like Murdock and not be stuck in the middle of inferiority. She is great.
7
The titles themselves of her philosophical works convey whole worlds of thought worth exploring—again and again.
4
"A Severed Head" is a very very very very creeeeeepy book!
2
I'm so happy to see this piece. When I was in my 20's I was addicted to Murdoch, reading one after the other, and each new one as it came out. My favorites are the same as Mr. Garner's, but I would add "The Sacred & Profane Love Machine."
8
There's not a writer alive or dead that doesn't yearn to be understood. Appreciated, as in this testament, is gravy.
6
And, if I forgot to mention, thank you for this memorial.
6
What a woman! She's a role model for women (and all) writers everywhere.
4
I just finished The Green Knight and sent a copy to 3 friends... I loved it!
4
@denise falcone
I remember reading that book and loving it. The oddity of characters entranced me.
2
@denise falcone only one that I didnt like, she was developing dementia when she wrote it.
Books can change a person’s life by cracking a mirror. Iris Murdoch did that for me. How she laid bare the imperfections of every character she invented and with empathy made them dance, alone or together, awakened my senses and made love the reason not just to live but to question everything.
8
Great article on an overlooked and underappreciated author. My fav is "The Sea, The Sea."
5
It's a shame that this essay doesn't go beyond Murdoch's novels to discuss her philosophical essays. Her work in virtue ethics and also in aesthetics is still valuable, and her book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is a masterpiece.
13
I started reading my first Iris Murdoch novel tonight. Henry and Cato. I had noticed the headline on this story and, coincidentally, Bookbub offered the book for sale. I'm already grateful for the bread crumbs that have led me to her. I'm so tired of the modern taste for one-sentence paragraphs, and with Murdoch I'm plunging into thick, long paragraphs of lovely, witty, thoughtful, intelligent English!
I love the enthusiasm in the comments.
Thank you.
8
Henry and Cato is one of her best.
1
Literature must throw out most writers on a regular basis, or where would we be. I’d like to see a study of what’s still in print 20, 50, 100 years later, and why.
Music is the same. If I was forced to listen again to Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears or the Bee Gees I think I would rather die.
2
@Garret Clay Ahh, but I love Iris, Bach, Mahler, Chicago and BS&T. The Bee Gees, not so much.
4
@Demetroula I am with you, especially Mahler! And I loved reading Iris Murdock!
2
Saw the film, never read any of her books but after reading this article I will be, should be a refreshing break from Karl Ove who has been consuming most of my reading time.
2
It's worth taking note of another large part of Iris Murdoch's brilliant oeuvre: her philosophical writings. Her reputation among philosophers—as shown by the range and quality of writing inspired by her essays, and by the use of her short book The Sovereignty of Good in courses—has never been higher.
8
So weird I was thinking about her randomly just a couple of days ago. And thinking of picking up The Aea The Sea again.
2
I got into Iris Murdoch slightly backwards, seeing the wonderful British film version of A Severed Head, with Sir Richard Attenborough, Lee Remick and a ton more of the best British actors from the Sixties. Hysterical. Watching that film is to see how good art can survive and even thrive in any medium.
From there, reading her books was a natural. But I still have a great affinity for A Severed Head, if only because it is such a wickedly funny image for a comic novel of manners.
4
Thanks for this. I read quite a few of her books back in the day - a lifetime ago. Some were gems, some a slog. Can't now remember which was which. But after reading this piece I'm inclined to re-read at least one of her better books. Her death - as of a number of other authors - saddened me.
3
I’ve never stopped reading and re-reading Iris Murdoch since discovering her work 30 years ago. Her books may not be showing up at Goodwill as once they did because current fervent fans won’t part with them in their lifetimes. Her fiction is part of my personal canon of modernists that includes Patrick White, Australia’s first writer to win the Nobel Prize. His books are also less often stocked by booksellers, and may not enjoy as extensive an international readership as they once did — but very much worth finding. Like Murdoch, he is a consummate storyteller gifted with rich imagination, mordent humor, and an unflinching view of human beings, their passions, ambitions, failures and foibles, and especially their relationships with the natural world, though she is the greater and more overt philosopher. High in my modernist canon is also the novelist and playwright Natalia Ginzburg, whose style in the original Italian is quite different, though she sees and tells with distilled insight of comparable depth and resonance. All three created realistic, credible gay and lesbian characters.
4
I studied Murdoch’s works at Northwestern with the wonderful Professor, Elizabeth Dipple. What always struck me about Murdoch was that she distrusted the structure of the novel - its consonance and “sense of an ending” even as she also loved the structural beauty of the novel. She often included ridiculous coincidences or grotesque acts to propel her novels to their end, as if to illustrate that we can certainly make sense of our stories, but that this meaning is unstable and often ill-founded. In this way, she was a perfect bridge between modernism and experimental authors. I do hope recognition of her contributions to literature increase over time.
8
That was wonderful, Dave Robertson. Very well expressed.
1
One of my favorite novelists. Glad to see her getting some attention. In a New York Times Book Review pan of Nuns and Soldiers, someone named George Stade described her novels as "Harlequin romances for highbrows." To which I say, "What's wrong with that?"
My memory is that in a New Republic piece on Murdoch, Joyce Carol Oates mentioned that she had asked her why her protagonists were often men, and Murdoch replied that she felt men led more interesting lives. Not a comment that would endear her to many nowadays, and I wouldn't have agreed with it even in 1978, but since the article brought up the question, I thought this worth mentioning. Still, many of her Murdoch's most compelling characters were women.
3
Thank you for this excellent article. When I first discovered Iris Murdoch's books, I was too young to fully understand or appreciate them. It's time for me to revisit them!
4
I discovered Iris Murdoch on my own many decades ago. I am so happy to see her recognized in this article. I've read nearly all of her novels. Surely, she is one of the greatest English-writing novelists of the 20th century. Her books display so much passion, philosophy and wit, while being incorrigible page-turners. May she regain a spot in the pantheon of great British novelists. She was a true gem.
12
Thank you, Mr. Garner, for reminding some admirers of Iris Murdoch that it is her date of celebration. Earlier a neighbor visited and he was surprised to see so many books by 'Murdoch'; and I explained that she was a great philosopher, not to be confused with any other by that name.
'Nothing in life is accidental', she wrote in one of her nearly 28 novels, and it was a young affinity for unicorns in yesteryears that led this reader to her work of the same title. When a great love and I separated, he went in search of clues in our apartment and this is how he discovered Iris Murdoch.
One of our great highlights together was her appearance at the YMCA on Lexington Avenue. She was quiet and there was a sense of wisdom that enveloped the large room with her presence.
"Life on Paper" reflects her ascent from student days to full maturity where magic and goodness are intertwined. As for strong alliances, she was to write how over the years they grew closer and closer apart.
'Forget-Her-Not', with plans to place some Iris in a flower pond, and revisiting her 'Good Apprentice' which begins 'I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no longer worthy to be thy son'.
David Brooks of The New York Times wrote an essay about Redemption recently, and the above novel by Iris Murdoch, may offer some links as to whether the young man in her story of good versus evil, is forgiven.
2
My favorite writer is Flannery O'Connor, which attracts me to Mr. Garner's review of the wry Iris Murdoch.
Commentators here bemoan an absence of Ms. Murdoch's published work nowadays, but as one who reads most books in electronic media (Nook, Kindle, Google ebooks), I am finding an abundance of her work and plan, from this article, to begin reading The Sea, The Sea and others of her work.
5
my first reading by iris murdoch was the short book, 'sartre, romantic rationalist', for a course i was taking. i went on to read 'the red and the green', the first i knew anything about the issues in ireland, and then throughout the 70's and 80's read the latest novels. it's impossible for me to choose a favorite as i loved reading so many. and i appreciate the titles of many, 'the nice and the good', 'the black prince' , 'the sacred and profane love machine' are examples.. her philosophical and amused take on our human interactions sometimes on our own with ourselves, and often with family and/or friends, from living to dying, makes the novels both unique and universal...
4
Based on reading "The Black Prince" and "The Sea, The Sea," it isn't too surprising to me if Murdoch is less read now, although her work is surely worth exploring.
But to take "The Sea, The Sea" in particular: this is a portrait of egotism in the form of the diary of an individual so self-centered that, as in "The Black Prince," even the accuracy of his narrative is suspect.
Murdoch's realization of the central character, mercilessly sustained over the course of 500 pages, is convincing and must be definitive.
This can be fascinating or not.
For those not interested in exploration of egotism per se, unfortunately, the novel's dramatic development is far from convincing.
Opinions seem to be divided as to whether this is explained and compensated for by Murdoch's using the narrative events as an artifice to explore philosophical views. I tend to think not.
2
I have loved her books since 1980, when I read The Sea, The Sea, and my life was changed forever. My favorites are The Green Knight and Nuns and Soldiers, but I have also lived, breathed, and re-read many others. Some of her characters are more actual to me than most persons in the three-dimensional world. I have never been able to articulate easily what I love about her work, except to say that it is filled with good, evil, love, humor, and story lines that seem both real and allegorical at the same time. I get that there are those who have never heard of her. Or that some might be annoyed by the density of her prose or the (sometimes hilarious) multiplicity of her characters. But readers with a lukewarm reaction? Hard to fathom. Thank you, Dame Iris!
28
I have loved Iris Murdoch's novels, and have read practically every one - well, except for "The Italian Girl," which I later discovered was being written during the onset of the Alzheimer disease.
I did not know that her reputation has suffered over the last few years; for me she will always be one of the most inventive writers whose imagination captures the complexity of life in literature.
I agree with one commenter who cites "A Fairly Honourable Defeat" as one of my favorites, though "The Sea, The Sea" is certainly up there too. One can go on and on....
18
@Marisa Leaf
Slight correction: The Italian Girl was published in 1964. Jackson's Dilemma was her last novel, published in 1995. I haven't read Jackson's Dilemma, for the reason you point out. I just think it would be too painful. I have read everything else and am slowly starting on a re-reading program. Started with The Nice and the Good, then The Sea, The Sea, with Nuns and Soldiers (the first of hers that I read, the one that got me started) probably next.
3
@Marisa Leaf,
Glad you mentioned "The Italian Girl", remembered the outline here, but planning to order a copy of the above, (which was more likely written between The Unicorn, The Red and The Green, and The Time of The Angels) with more to be authored in her long and rich writing career.
@Marisa Leaf The Italian Girl is an early one!
What a pleasure to read this article! I discovered Murdoch 45 years ago and I have reread my favorite books of hers many times. Several other readers have mentioned some of my favorites. I especially value the casual observations about life and love that are sprinkled throughout her novels and that remain true through the decades: From "A Fairly Honorable Defeat": "How can one live property when the beginnings of one's actions seem so inevitable and justified while the ends are so completely unpredictable and unexpected."
10
Iris Murdoch was a good philosopher and an outstanding writer. I loved A Severed Head. I doubt that and the others that Mr. Garner mentioned will go out of print--or if they do --will be brought back into print. She was a great comic novelist and a keen observers of the anxieties of 20th century man.
She had a sad decline, suffering from dementia in her later years. Her last novel was shockingly bad, with a limited vocabulary, simple syntax with little variation, and empty characters. And yet, Harold Bloom, in the NYTBR, gave it a favorable review.
3
What a wonderful appreciation piece. I read "A Severed Head" for a Philosophy in Literature class, was immediately smitten, and read every Iris Murdoch book I could get my hands on. It makes me so sad that she's out of print, disregarded by the youth (I could never talk my own erudite children into reading her -- maybe a mini-rebellion because I talked her up so much) -- but those who don't read her are missing a rich literary experience. My own personal favorite -- "A Word Child."
11
@Judy
Surprised so few mentions of "A Word Child" - my favorite also, although it's been a while and there are many I've never read. The last few she wrote I found unreadable.
1
A brilliant novelist and philosopher. I teach philosophy for a living, and do my best to keep Iris' work alive. For the newcomer, my personal favorite Murdoch novels are:
The Bell
Nuns and Soldiers
The Unicorn
The Good Apprentice
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
13
My favorite Murdoch novel is The Bell, which I've read three times. It has one of the most amazing descriptions of falling in love ever written.
11
I was so delighted to see this article since I am currently re-reading The Sea, The Sea for the second time and it is even better than what I remember. Her empathy for characters who even she may not totally love may be one of the reasons she has fallen out of favor. We have less and less of that in our increasingly self-centered culture. It seems that people would rather read about the vampires and zombies, the perfect mascots of a tech obsessed world. Her books were written for and represent a truly endangered species: adults.
16
I've always loved her books. Reading one of them, you found yourself caught in this world of people, ideas and relationships that were simply enthralling. I was distressed because many of her books are not in our library. I just recently bought two that I had not read - The Bell and The Italian Girl - and am looking forward to entering the marvelous world she can create. There is no one writing like her today.
6
Back in the early 1970s, newly divorced and in desperate need of some feminist role models, Iris Murdoch - and others such as Doris Lessing - came to the rescue! In their lives as well as in their art, they showed me that all sorts of ways of being were possible, and I've always been most grateful.
12
I first read Iris Murdoch in England in 1965, while taking a course with the also incomparable Malcolm Bradbury. The book was The Severed Head, which I have read several times since. I had no idea that she was no longer being read. I will now cherish even more my pile of those orange Penguin paperbacks . Thanks for this article .I hope it inspires a new generation of readers.
10
What always drew me to Murdoch's characters is the way love drives them into a state of chaos or madness in as much as it brings them to an exalted goodness. The dividing line between the two is sometimes very thin.
5
@James Thank you! This is exactly IT. And why her books appeal so much to our younger selves. All passion.
Her philosophical works are still read in philosophy departments, where she is actually relatively popular, all things considered.
2
I am right now reading "The Philosopher's Pupil" from 1983, a treasure that I left to the side when I started obsessively chewing and swallowing her books about 20 years ago. She has, simply, no peer. Her worst book contains sparkling truths. I am only happy that I saved several volumes unread as gifts to myself. Payday is sweet.
11
@Lauren Paul
Saving her books as unread gifts! I wish I'd thought of that! Her books are a marvel.
1
Thank you for this tribute to Iris Murdoch. I was introduced to her books by Mary MacMahon, who worked in the now long-gone book section of Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago, in the 1970s. Mary, an enthusiastic Anglophile, also gave me the original cast album of “Valmouth,” a musical that should be revived.
3
@James Fleming I love Valmouth! And have both the original and the Chichester Festival recordings!
Oh my gosh, it’s been a long long time(late 1970s) Maybe I have found the summer reads I’ve been struggling to find. (what is going on with contemporary fiction?). Thank you, thank you for the Iris reminder! Siri
9
@Siri bardarson Contemporary fiction useless. A lot of navel studying. Whining.
Excellent appreciation of a very fine writer, full of smart observations and turns of phrase. But I'm puzzled by the claim that nobody reads her. She is regularly recommended and read by gay men and lesbians. And many straight readers continue to go to her, too. Just yesterday, in fact, a novelist friend, a straight man, included her in his short list of three or four writers whom he can count on to give him pleasure. I don't know how many readers a writer must have to be considered read, but Murdoch is not doing so badly.
8
Wonderful article, wonderful writer.
4
Mention also how readable she is typically. Just flat out entertaining. Artifice? Take it up with Shakespeare. Too much going on? George Eliot did the same. I can only believe she anticipated all the major criticisms and forged ahead regardless.
8
Murdoch novels out of print? Appalling, but all too much of a piece with certain other realities.
3
Barbara Pym too.
18
Five years ago two friends and I began reading all 26 of Iris Murdoch's novels in publication order, discussing them by email. It took us two years. Reading her entire oeuvre gives one a clearer perspective of her talent and philosophy and puts even the duds on a higher plain.
Next month the three of us are meeting up at Somerville College in Oxford for our own private celebration of Murdoch's centenary (one of the friends also graduated from there). In preparation, we're rereading three of our favourites: "Under the Net" (it remains funny as hell), "The Unicorn" and "An Unofficial Rose." (I also adore "The Bell.") For the record, all three of us feel "The Sea, The Sea" is overrated and the Booker was awarded as an overdue consolation prize.
My favourite Iris quote is from an interview and is framed next to my bookshelf: "A readable novel is a gift to humanity." Murdoch's novels are gifts that keep on giving. I hope a new generation will discover her.
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One of my favorite writers and yes so unknown, especially in the states. I've met too many well read people but especially woman, who have never even heard of her and (I agree) her masterpiece The Sea, The Sea. Thank you for the reminder to reread her work.
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@Corinne It was a Swedish friend who turned me onto Iris Murdoch in our twenties. I went on and read everything. One scene I remember typical of her magisterial view of the world from that particular British viewpoint..A woman is being driven to a cottage in the country. When they get there the owner is nowhere to be found but...they find a bottle of slivovitz and fall into bed together, she and the chauffeur and have mad delirious sex. Just divine.
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One of my favorite writers--thank you for resuscitating her--she's been beached too long. Has anyone writer an excellent, reasonably objective, biography?
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Peter Conradi has written an excellent biography of Murdoch.
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I've read all her novels purely for pleasure, and read The Sea The Sea twice, for double the pleasure. Please let's not let her fade away.
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The Nice and the Good (called "unimportant" in the NY Review of Books) - is a yarn about nice people who are or are not good, has a beautiful digression on the need to love Death and Change and turns into a bit of a ripping yarn. Let's please keep Iris Murdoch's books on shelves and in the hands of readers. I think I've read them all, but if not Christmas is coming.
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@ATCAyers
Totally! "The Nice & The Good" is one of my faves, and also the first novel I read by Dame Murdoch and which sent me deep into her world --- as hand-turned and eccentric as, say, a Wes Anderson tableau. I think I read 15 novels in a row, lying in bed, eating ice cream sandwiches! The only one I would refuse to read again is "The Italian Girl." A few of her big 80s books are excellent too: Great fun to read, their flaws vital to the their flow. "The Philosopher's Pupil," "The Good Apprentice" . . . Long live!
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Under the Net is my favourite Murdoch novel: a novel about philosophical ideas that is also a hilarious picaresque adventure and love story. Maybe Murdoch also wrote some duds, but I've not come across them. Nothing I ever read of hers was boring.
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A few years ago I published an essay, "The Great Yearning: Spiritual Mysticism and Aesthetic Morality==Vedanta, the Perennial Philosophy, Schopenhauer, and Iris Murdoch."
She loved Schopenhauer who loved Vedanta. To know this sheds harmonious light on her life and work.
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I am rereading 'An Unofficial Rose' - listen to Iris Murdoch and Frank Kermode discussing this novel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lsZm9zKhug&t=1280s
to appreciate how much the intellectual world has changed.
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Thank you for this beautiful piece, Mr. Garner. I am always astounded at how few people I know have read her work. The Sea, The Sea is also my favorite. It was this novel and Severed Head - both read shortly after I graduated college - that made me fall in love with Murdoch and literature. I think I might have to read it again this summer.
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I'm also a big fan of Iris Murdoch. I've read most of her novels, and I agree that The Sea, The Sea is her best. (Charles Arrowby is hilarious!) That said, she is completely outside of contemporary taste. She writes wonderful descriptive passages that excite the mind. Her dialog crackles with wit and intelligence. Today, people think such writing is old fashioned and pretentious. Adjectives and adverbs have been banned if you haven't noticed. I predict that in a few years, if novels still exist, they will only be available as sound files read by recognizable celebrity voices. Their length will be determined by the average national commute time.
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Thank you for this (re) appreciation of Murdoch and her work. I have always loved her fiction, and “The Sea, The Sea” is one of my favorites of all time. It’s unusual and deep but also extremely funny. I work in a bookstore and will clamor to get her work (at least the books still in print) back on the fiction shelf.
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I was a big fan of Murdoch in post-college days and plowed through a bunch of used Penguin editions, but I find her novels heavy going three decades later. Great characterizations but the whole is much less than the sum of the parts and I bog down about halfway through.
I agree that "The Sea the Sea" is the best of the ones that I have read.
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The Sandcastle and Nuns & Soldiers are thrillingly good. I read them decades ago and still remember them vividly.
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@Daniel O yes I think Nuns and Soldiers is one of her best and I like Harry and Cato and The Bell. She was brilliant and heads and shoulders above what passes for novels these days. Her philosophy is beautifully knit throughout all of her writings. Those who do not know her work are missing the essence of good writing.
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One of the all time great writers, thinkers, and personalities. Thanks Dwight Garner for you usual insightful and well expressed comments on her works.
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I love The Sea, The Sea. A frequent experience with Murdoch: I think about how much I hate the characters all the way through, and then when I finish it, I think it's the most amazing book I've ever read.
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Finding and devouring Iris as an adult, and realizing no one (in the US) really knew her work, gave me a private, delicious relationship with her books.
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I wish this important essay didn’t give such prominence to a description of Ms. Murdoch’s looks. Women just can’t escape the physical appraisals, no matter their intellectual brilliance.
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@Stacey Stowe. The physical description of Murdoch is perfectly fine and good. The fault lies in not bothering to describe male writers with such care.
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I'm headed to the beach for vacation, and packing two Murdoch novels, as I always do. Pure bliss.
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As a philosopher, may I add that Murdoch was also a philosopher (Oxford), who not only wrote the first English introd. to Sartre's philosophy, but published (1970) 'The Sovereignty of Good', which produced objections to it as well as to most British ethical views of the time.
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“I would come to her even if I had to wade through blood.”
That's a beautiful sentence. I love The Black Prince because of the following sentences about solitude (I might not have remembered it word for word, that's why I didn't put it in quotation):
I have never lived close to the sea with only the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, which is no sound but the murmur of silence itself.
Now, that's blissful.
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@Daniel Solomon Allow me to share a favourite quote, from Under the Net. “I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.” The same book had a line about parts of London being essential and other parts being contingent, which I think of often when discovering or living in a new city.
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It began with The Good Apprentice, freshly out of college and working in a bookstore. It swept me away and for the next decade I read about two Murdoch novels a year until I had read all but three of them: The Black Prince, the last one—Jackson’s something (?), and I never finished Bruno’s Dream. Her books are commitments for sure but so ultimately rewarding. I was always overwhelmed by her descriptions of the English landscapes and their power—the real, magical power of the land. And when she wrote about water—it was terrifying and seducing.
I’ve tried to get others to read her books but they open them up and ask, “Where is the dialogue?” Yes, you must be ready for that. Maybe her later books needed a good editor and she’d have survived a fairer run but her works are the backbone of my reading knowledge now and for that I am thankful.
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@Joseph
I read everything of hers I could find, and after I finished one I would hand it off to my daughter.
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@Joseph "The Good Apprentice" was my first Murdoch, also. I had joined the Book-of-the-Month Club in hopes not only of expanding the reach of my voracious reading appetite but also to satisfy a vanity that wanted to think of myself as "well-read." And what did such vanity hurt, if it introduced me to the likes of Dame Iris? Like you I was "swept away" - what an accurate phrase for leaping into the river that is Murdoch and her writing. I began collecting and reading her novels. Lately I've been in rapturous discussions about them with my friend, the novelist Garth Greenwell, who has written a new introduction for a novel of hers to be re-issued this summer. (Friend or no, he wouldn't offer me a sneak preview.) Garth's enthusiasm and the pending re-issue suggest to me that Mr. Garner's pessimism is not entirely justified. At least I hope not.
I can never decide which is my favorite. "The Sea, The Sea"? "The Black Prince"? "The Bell"? "The Good Apprentice"? I re- and re-re-read them all, and fine new riches every time.
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@Joseph,
"Jackson's Dilemma", where the critics find Dame Murdoch's voice on paper failing, but was enjoyed nonetheless.
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Barely remember it but do know I loved “A Word Child”. Also, remember tins of beans being often opened to pour on toast as DINNER, for heaven sakes!
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@PL Beans on toast is classic British fare for dinner (tea). The beans are not the sickly sweet American version, but rather a more savory, tomato-y version. I actually resort to it as a comfort food myself from time to time, now that I'm back in the States.
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@Pamlet Beans on toast — ugh! But mushy peas? Ah, there’s a feast!
The Nice and the Good (called "unimportant" in the NY Review of Books) - is a yarn about nice people who are or are not good, has a beautiful digression on the need to love death and change" and turns into a bit of a ripping yarn. Let's please keep Iris Murdoch's books on shelves and in the hands of readers.
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Thank you. A very enjoyable piece.
Perhaps it's time for a re-release of the 2001 feature film "IRIS" ?
The true story of the lifelong romance between Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley, from their student days through her battle with Alzheimer's disease.
Director: Richard Eyre
Writers: John Bayley (books), Richard Eyre (screenplay)
Staring: Judi Dench, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet
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@T. Stewart And the then-unknown - and then unsung - Hugh Bonneville - now famous worldwide as the Earl of Grantham, Lord of television's Downton Abbey - is the young Mr. Bayley.
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Iris was starting to review my book on metaphysics when she got sick. I am who I am in part because of this great human being. Thank-you for your article.
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The Black Prince is one of the funniest books ever written. Up there with Lucky Jim.
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It is the first time that i hear from Iris Murdoch, i'll check her out.
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@Siegfried You will be amply rewarded! She is incomparable, and obsessively readable. Congratulations (in advance) on your new literary addiction.
The Black Prince and The Sea The Sea are two of my favorite novels. Discovered both of them within the past several years. They are timeless and wonderful.
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"Many of her books are out of print." Not true. In the very recent past I was able to buy online all but one of her novels and two philosophical works - METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALITY and the large anthology put together for Penguin by Peter Conradi. All brand new.
The crazy thing is
Here in the States half of the novels are published by Penguin but these are not on sale in the UK. In the UK the other half is published by Vintage, and those can only be bought in Britain.
Probably something to do with her having been a member of the Communist Party.
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most are readily available through Amazon...if you care to use that platform [full disclosure: I am a poor, starving doctoral student with an Amazon Prime account].
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I fell in love with Murdoch in the early ‘80s, starting with "Under the Net." My favorite, though, is "A Fairly Honourable Defeat" with its astoundingly wicked character Julius King.
It always amazed me how conversations between her characters were like worlds into themselves; I often didn’t care about whatever the plot was. I just wanted to stay in that moment and absorb every delicious nuance, every morsel of human mores and machinations.
Hopefully, at least libraries have copies of these wonderful books.
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@Nancy Jo
The dog who eats raw meat!!!
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@Nancy Jo,
It is brilliant, and also one of my favorites revisited over the years, and as Julius or 'Satan' walks jauntily in the autumn sunlight of Paris, he finds himself at the rue Jacob where he begins to examine a restaurant menu. "The sun was warm upon his back. Life was good'.
In remembrance of Dan Jacobs, author of 'The Brutality of Nations', his favorite street and the City where good Americans go to die.
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One of my favorite passages is this exchange from Murdoch's Message to the Planet:
"Why are you so afraid of the name of God? Is not that something that human beings should remember and are in danger of forgetting? He has the concept, and so have you."
"The concept is empty."
"If it is empty it is there. Nothing could be more important to this planet than preserving the name of God, we must not abandon it, it is entrusted to us in this age, to carry it onward through the darkness--"
In a piece about Murdoch in America Magazine (a Jesuit publication) from a couple of months ago, the author writes:
The existential novel, she argues (and Murdoch literally wrote one of the first books on Sartre), is the natural heir of those 19th-century worlds. It is just that now God is dead and we are all we’ve got... "Is some very much deeper change now coming about; and what is the place of literature in this scene?" she asked. She confessed the question was unnerving: There was something "here which haunts one and which is not too easy to formulate. Has literature always depended on a sort of implicit moral philosophy which has been unobtrusively supported by religious belief and which is now with frightful rapidity disappearing?"
So, yes, Iris Murdoch still matters. More than ever perhaps.
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Terrific essay. Mr. Garner is virtually alone among critics in his ability convey what it actually feels like to read literature. His work is stripped of academic posturing and preening. He makes you realize why we read books. Thank you.
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A glorious (fun, witty, methodical, serious, farcical, erudite, wild) woman, thinker and writer -- I cannot begin to appropriately articulate the love and appreciation I feel for Iris Murdoch... Though the sentiments and (brilliant) characterizations of her in this essay approximate mine exactly. THANK you for helping spread the word...
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Thank you. I have never read Ms. Murdoch’s novels, but will seek them out today.
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Thank you. I recently reread "Bruno's Dream" and "The Black Prince" and they hold up magnificently.
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One of my favs. She created a whole universe.
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excellent treatment of a phenomena. thank you very much
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Odd that the writer of this article failed to mention that "Under the Net" was included in the Modern Library 100 greatest English Language Novels of the 20th Century.
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