Sun, Oct 28, 2001 page19

• For Murdoch, goodness was a substitute for a god that had died

  A new biography of novelist Iris Murdoch looks at a woman once described as `monumentally unfaithful,' who nonetheless helped a generation define morality

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  I knew Iris Murdoch, the renowned English novelist. We met in Bangkok in 1995 where I'd been sent by an in-flight magazine to interview her. She and her husband, Professor John Bayley, were in Thailand as celebrity guests at the SEA Write Awards, an annual event honoring South East Asian writers. As I'd been invited for the whole six-day gathering, I found myself in her and Bayley's company much of the time.

  Even though she was already exhibiting early symptoms of the Alzheimer's Disease of which she was to die four years later, she nevertheless still displayed a peacefulness and equanimity that was remarkable. She was much impressed, for example, by Thai Buddhism. She said once that whereas in the West the edifice of Christianity appeared to be crumbling, in Thailand people were going about their Buddhist observances without the slightest sense of there being any crisis of faith. "How wonderful it would have been to have been born and brought up a Buddhist!" she said to me one hot, rainy Thai afternoon.

  Iris Murdoch: A Life is written by a recently retired literature professor who was an old friend of the Bayleys. He lives with his partner in central Wales, UK, and Bayley and Murdoch used to drive over there and spend time in their rural retreat. Conradi's dog features in Murdoch's novel The Green Man (1993). She approved of his idea of becoming her biographer and left him all her journals, complete except for certain passages, which Conradi here assesses as being around 5 percent, that she'd cut out with a razor blade.

  When Iris Murdoch's novels began to appear in the 1950s, the feeling was widespread among the young that traditional civilization was on the way out. They'd been educated by high-profile writers such as T.S. Eliot to believe that the modern world was a wasteland, that the old myths were dead and nothing had taken their place. Murdoch's books both accepted this situation, in that they presented remarkably contemporary characters, and at the same time were full of myth-like events -- mysterious, paradoxical, and also somehow deeply significant. They were peopled by human beings who, despite the presence of buses and cars, trains and radios, were acting out their lives in mythic ways that appeared to go back to the ancient Greeks.

  India, China and Japan were at the start less obvious presences. Nevertheless, Asia's influence grew. Though the trip is not mentioned in this biography, Murdoch told me that she and Bayley had in fact been to Thailand before, in the 1960s. They'd been driven from Bangkok into Cambodia, she said, and had visited Angkor Wat. In addition, she visited China in 1979, and Japan three times between 1969 and 1993. She also traveled to India in 1987, with the British social historian E.P. Thompson, to attend a conference on the legacy of Indira Gandhi, with whom she'd been at school.

  Much of the ground for this biography has, unfortunately for its author, recently been covered in John Bayley's three volumes of memoirs. Even so, there is a large amount of factual material here, some of it new. Most attention focuses on the large number of lovers Murdoch had before her marriage. One of these, the literary critic W.W. Robson, described her as "monumentally unfaithful" at the time.

  Crucially important for her was a three-year affair with the aristocratic Bulgarian polymath Elias Canetti, author of Crowds and Power (1960) and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. Murdoch was 34 when it began in 1953. Canetti lived in London, and his wife would, apparently without complaint, routinely cook dinner for the three of them.

  Murdoch began her adult life as an academic philosopher, and this book reveals that when she resigned from her fellowship at Oxford's St Anne's College in 1963 the reason was an emotional involvement with a female colleague. Lesbians and gay men feature in her novels with surprising frequency for that era, and Conradi states that she had no prejudices about what people did together in bed, but strongly disliked light-hearted discussion of passionate affairs in public. She herself, he says, never gossiped.

  Conradi has already written a critical book on Murdoch's novels and again analyses many of them perceptively here. He comments, for instance, on how she liked to use a male first-person narrator, and never a female one, and that the age of these narrators was always the same as hers at the time of writing.

  Iris Murdoch stands in the tradition of Oxford scholars who also found time to become popular writers. J.R.R. Tolkien is the most famous of this group, and it may be significant that the Bayleys bought his roll-top writing desk after his death in 1973. Murdoch used it to answer letters. I possess two of these, written -- like her novels -- by hand with a fountain pen. I asked her in Bangkok if she submitted her novels to her publisher hand-written. "Of course," she replied. "How else? They type it out and send it back to me. Then I check it and make additions." When I mentioned computers, she shuddered. She said she suspected they gave the illusion of excellence when in reality it wasn't there.

  Despite this aversion to technology, her books were hugely successful financially. By the late 1980s she was receiving an advance of ?50,000 for each new novel, and that only for the UK rights, plus over 50 percent royalties.

  The idea of goodness is at the heart of both Murdoch's novels and Bayley's critical works. For each of them it was a substitute for the god that had died. And in the final analysis it was Bayley's playful innocence that rescued her from the hypnotizing predatoriness of Canetti, who comes over here as a monstrous enchanter.

  But what this book amply demonstrates is that hers was a full and very complex life, peopled by academics and celebrities on every hand, and that no simple "explanation" can possibly account for all, or even any, of its events.

  Publication Notes:Iris Murdoch: A Life

  By Peter J. Conradi

  706 pages

  Harpercollins
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