On June 20th, they unveiled a plaque to Iris Murdoch, at 29, Cornwall Gardens, London, where she lived for much of the last portion of her life. She loved South Ken, the Gloucester Road, the plane trees, the Italian restaurants (she always chose Osso Buco, and I never saw her finish a helping) the pubs where she drank bad white wine. Lots of it, sometimes with whisky chasers. (“Never allow your palate to become accustomed to good wine” was one of the adages she early implanted in my soul.
I was once on the radio and asked by an interviewer how I would categorize my relationship with this extraordinary being - prolific novelist, profound neo-Platonist philosopher, life-enhancer. It was the only occasion when I have been pompous enough to ring an interviewer after insist they remove an answer from the records. I was frightened it would make me look high camp. What I said was that the best way I could find of describing how I felt about her was - I was Maria in the Sound of Music, and she was the Reverend Mother, singing “Climb Every Mountain”.
As it happened, Peggy Wood, the Abbess in the musical film, bore a striking resemblance to Iris, and I have often thought that the novelist would have been rather a happy nun. You might think th8is surprising, given the fact that, by all accounts, she had an amorous life, but the older I get (and I’m sure she would have agreed with this) the more I see that in the strange workings of the Sacred and Profane Love Machine, there are many overlaps, and those who are passionate in one sphere will likely be fervent in another.
Iris was an encourager. It is a rare quality in writers. Most writers do not encourage their younger fellow-scribblers. She never read much of other people’s work, but she was generous, and urged one to keep writing. In my case, I did not need much engagement, but I although I am one of those who are said to have written “too much”, as she was, I don’t regret it for an instant. I remember her saying to me once - we were discussing E.M.Forster - that she felt like saying, “Come on, Forster - six novels, that’s not much - get on with it - write another - pull your socks up”.
Incidentally, I only once set eyes on EM.Forster
. I did not recognize him, though I had “done” Howard’s End for A Level. . This moustachioed old man in a tweed cap was coming down the staircase which led to the college rooms of Iris’s husband John Bayley. When I got to John’s rooms, he was looking abashed. He poured us both a glass of cooking-sherry and then began to have the giggles. He had written an article in The Listener in which he expressed the view that Forster would have been a more interesting writer if he had “come out” as a homosexual. The great man was furious, and had told John Bayley that such words would besmirch his reputation, even (rather out of date this) land him in trouble with the law. A few weeks later, Forster died.
Anyway, the unveiling. It was a strange occasion for me. I looked around in the (quite sizeable ) crowd - 50 or so people, and wondered where “they” all were - they, being the friends. Where was old John Simopoulos, dedicatee of The Bell? Where was Raymond Queneau? Where was the great Margaret Hubbard - who had been so passionately in love with Iris that Iris had to leave her job at St Anne’s - on the insistence of the Principal - because the affair was “causing scandal”? Where was Brigid Brophy, whom I sometimes thought the love of Iris’s life? Or Philippa Foot? Or Elizabeth Anscombe? Where were Stephen and Natassha Spender? I knew most of these (not Queneau), and of course - they had all gone into the realm of light, like Iris herself. The only person there I recognized was Alan Hollinghurst, who was devoted to both the Bayleys, and they to him.
A clergyman came and shook me by the hand. I liked this. I had no idea who he weas, but the (usually very high) surface in her novels. Iris’s friend and mine was the Rev Gerard Irvine. They were exact contemporaries as undergraduates, and whenever I spoke of one to the other they always same - that they had not changed one bit since first me in their first year at Oxford. Gerard comes into several of her novels, especially henry and Cato, but not, I think, one of the really weird ones, The Time of the Angels.
I had always supposed that this brilliant title referred to an idea Iris had thought up for herself. Only very recently have I discovered that the notion comes from the German philosopher Heidegger, who in turn got it from the poet Hoelderlin. That is, that the gods - or God - have mysteriously vanished from the earth but there are still vestiges of Them/Him left , as it were in the atmosphere and the Angels still hover. We live, not in godless times, but in the time of the angels.
Not believing in what she called “a personal God” did not make Iris an atheist in the reductionist materialist sense. She fervently believed in the Sovereignty of Good, in the Absolute difference between Good and Evil, as had been exemplified, during her lifetime, by the political struggles of Europe. Her work for UNRRA after the Second World War, and her encounters with refugees from Hitler made her acutely conscious, always, of the disaster of making morally false choices. And she had a rather simple Irish Protestant (au fond) sense that we were all required to live a Good Life.
The novels are an extraordinary world of their own. No one else could have written them. Among other things, they drew the moral landscape of the times through which they lived, and chronicled our changing attitudes to love. Of what might crudely be called real life, she knew very little . She and John lived in a stranger rarified world.
They knew no one outside London “Bohemia” and Oxford. When Iris was giving the Gifford lectures in Scotland, John was so lonely that he tried to travel up by train to see her. It terrified him. He found himself opposite a man who leaned over and tried to engage him in conversation. “Now, you’d be a lawyer”, I expect, said the man. “S-s-s-sort of”, poor John stammered. “Where are you going to?” John did not want to say Edinburgh, in case he was stuck with this line of questioning for four hours, so he managed to say - with great difficulty on the letter “B” - B-b-Birmingham” . Of course, under the man’s gimlet stare, John felt that, when the train reached Birmingham, he had to get out. Dismayed by the whole experience, he went back to Oxford, and Iris, some hours later, was frantic with worry, wondering why he was not on the train when it pulled into Waverley station.
I tried to write about my friendship with them both in a book called Iris Murdoch as I knew Her.
It hurt him, and his second wife, Audi, and some of the friends. I was sorry about that, because all I had been trying to do was to rescue Iris from the false representations of a film about her life, starring Judi Dench, which had somehow missed the point. I had come to feel, in latter days - before her illness engulfed her - that their in many ways beautiful and jolly relationship was also, when viewed from other angles - a prison house. Hence - Hartley, the strange heroine of The Sea, the Sea, kept a prisoner by her testy, jealous little husband. In early days, John was my close friend. Then, one day, Iris suggested we met, just her and me, in London. A friend we had in common raised her eyebrows. “Does John know?” she asked. “I don’t know - I had not thought about it”. “When he finds out, that will be the end of your friendship”. It was true. Having had a lunch or dinner with John every few weeks for for ten years, it never happened again. We saw Iris and John in company, but I never had another encounter with him a deux.
Marriage is a funny business, and so is love, and she was a very beady analyst of both. I love her more and more as a person, in retrospect. As for the novels… I have one reservation. Is it me? Everyone says how FUNNY they are. Reviews regularly used to say that they were great comedies. And in one of the speeches by the Iris Murdoch Appreciation Society at Cornwall Gardens the other day, this view was repeated. I have never ONCE laughed at any scene in any of her books. Kingsley Amis and P.G.Wodehouse and Dickens have me in stitches. I am gripped by Iris’s world, and by the stories she told, and I can remember her cheery, smiling face, but I would not really have said she had - exactly speaking - any sense of humour at all. She was gripped by the sadness of things. I remember once a friend of hers and mine, Rachel Trickett, telling Iris how much they admired A Severed Head, and the way she had depicted the adulterous relationship. Someone else present plugged the “comic” line, saying how amusingly Iris had shown that the caddish married man plays along Georgie, his studenty mistress. It is indeed brilliant, forensic in its analysis, but.. funny? While her friends told her how funny it was, Iris’s large eyes welled up - “It is all so true”, she said, “people really ARE like that”.
She had an abbess-like ability to sense one’s emotional vulnerabilities. I remember in the late 1980s when my life turned upside down, and I met someone whom I knew I could not live without - my future wife. I had lunch with Iris. e did not share confidences with one another - that was not the nature of our friendship. We talked about ideas, religion, books, and our friends. I remember once, fatuously, making a complimentary remark about a Cambridge cleric called Don Cupitt, who had caused a splash by writing a book called The Sea of Faith. He was one of the “trendy vicars” , popular in the 1960s and 1970s who did not believe in God. She fumed at the idea of him, and at what she conceived to be his total misreadings of Wittgenstein’s “Language Games”. He had bought into materialist reductionism. He wasn’t a philosopher, he wasn’t s theologian… She literally tugged at her hair when his name was mentioned.
But on this occasion, we were not talking of Don Cupitt, or of Plato or of Simone Weil, whom we both idolized. No: she paused ,over her unfinished Osso Bucco, stared sadly at me and said, “I think you are very much in love with someone”.
It was true - and still is, as it happens : but how did she know? I had not told anyone.
As the worthy speeches continued in Kensington, I remembered the Yeats line about “all the Olympians - a thing never known again”. My God, I was lucky to have known her, and to have been taught by dear , funny, clever, John Bayley, and to have moved, for a time, in their strange world. A Time of the Angels indeed.