Rereading Iris Murdoch

A 20th century author for the 21st century

Why Iris

The weather, the day, the month are unclear in my mind. What is certain is that some day in the spring of 2003, in a long-shuttered bookstore, I stood in front of a tall wooden shelf stacked with as many Penguin Classics as it could bear. I was 19 and hoping to read through Modern Library’s 100 best novels of the 20th century. Several books by an Iris Murdoch caught my eye with their serious but simple titles remnant of mythopoetry: The Bell. The Sea, the Sea. The Good Apprentice. Nuns and Soldiers.

That day I selected The Bell but I cannot say why. Only the whens and wheres. Since 17 I’ve kept a log of every book I complete (nothing scanned or even 3/4 finished) in a year, but I do not need the log to remember finishing The Bell in a patch of green grass under a high blue June sky. I liked it. I loved it. And I was unsure what to make of it. A few days later I began The Sea, the Sea and put aside it after a few pages. In September I tried again and it clicked; it clicked overwhelmingly.

Charles Arrowby was a real antihero. Not the Hollywood kind, who comes to bless our hedonism and tell us good intentions are all that matter. Today’s antihero seems to mean someone for whom all is forgiven if they occasionally “do the right thing,” for whom even self-loathing is just another variety of consumerist self-fixation. Goodness, or perhaps it’s better to call this parody merely “rightness,” is reduced to the benediction of a cultural milieu which vocally condones justice but in its lifestyle and silent metaphysics holds to Falstaff.

Iris Murdoch won’t let Charles Arrowby get away with it. Here was a character with a seemingly complex inner life, loads of self-rationalizations and twists and turnings, yet what was clear was that in all the mazes he constructed for himself was the fundamental fact of his failures to be honest or to love. He constructed delusion after delusion in his sea-side retirement temple of the self, drawing in other humans to sacrifice to his “antihero” dreams of capping a life of hedonism off with a fabricated love he pretended could finally be selfless at the end.

It was the book I’d been waiting for, especially since reading Simone Weil’s Waiting for God that winter. Steeped in a Unitarian upbringing, wanting to believe in a personal God, I found myself a bit alone at the rise of Bush-era evangelical “saved”-ism and its mirror inversion, the New Atheism movement. My personal milieus were entirely of the “God is fake and for stupid people and history has been solved if only people would stop reading bronze age books.” Being “good” was apparently easy or irrelevant; it was often equated with being “smart,” which was also rather fuzzy and seemed more to quietly mean “holds our opinions.”

The decade of Jon Stewart’s weary eye-roll was not a decade for curiosity, and any journeys of self-introspection tended to end in public professions of not being enough of an activist, not being ardent enough in the dualist battle between good and evil (political parties). Manias for policing microaggressions emerged, which equated to enforcing contemporary dogmas in every interaction. One was either saved or not-saved, though those who described the rising tendency of progressive activism to mimick fundamentalist damnation theologies were received with annoyance. Self-introspection turned out to be a one-way street, a tool solely to increase the dose of the dogma and a yoke to place upon the neck of one’s enemies. The social media world was full of angels and ready to burn its demons, and it was easily, completely certain it knew who did and didn’t possess Goodness.

Goodness. An easy word that had been all figured out after the 20th century triumph of the therapeutic in our media and institutions. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was out-of-date. In the mid-2000s I ran through The Green Knight, The Black Prince, Nuns and Soldiers, The Nice and the Good, The Book and the Brotherhood, Under the Net. “M” was the first letter I visited in any bookstore. She had written 26 novels, a play, and roughly 3 books of philosophy. They were not all easy to find before Amazon. It took years to obtain copies of The Unicorn, The Time of the Angels, The Philosopher’s Pupil, The Red and the Green, Bruno’s Dream. Dated books from a British woman writing in the 60s and 70s; if there was anything timeless there it didn’t matter, because the concept of timelessness itself was obsolete. All the media despised eternal metaphysics and loved the social media justice crazes of the month. But for me, Iris Murdoch was holding open a door in a world of increasing noise which was attempting to gild the cold nausea of materialism.

It was a door she never fully entered but also a door she refused to close. Many of the scholars who took/take Iris Murdoch seriously were and are of the activist persuasion; it is probably almost impossible to get a job in academia and not be one, but it does cloak her books, which are about all kinds of people and for all kinds of people, in an aura of cloistered philosophical fog. It’s a fog that also, oddly, seems to do precisely what she so often seemed intent on smashing up: a certainty of one’s own positional goodness. Like the characters who endure the most bitter periods of unveiling, these critics seem to believe Murdoch, who had affairs with both men and women, is re-establishing belief in Original Sin… but only for one’s ideological enemies.

It is a particularly absurd reading of Murdoch because her books are so much about revealing how misguided and deadly it is to believe the pain of living can be solved easily, or that delusions are solely the property of others. Murdoch understands partisans: she was a youthful one herself. She sympathizes with utopians and dualists. She was always sympathizing with people. Her characters are messy because she was messy and knew messiness. Her life was full of delusions about what love could do, about what people want from one another. But she was, completely, committed to honesty. Simone Weil convinced her to pay attention, and that meant paying attention not only to her intentions, but to every tiny little interaction, to every unintended consequence, to every bit of wishful thinking which strewed roses over the paths away from goodness, attention, reality. Fantasy is the stuff of our intentions; reality is where the living out of our intentions happens.

This is the door Murdoch holds open. Her books are a majestic testimony to cause and effect, to the reality of consequences. Iris Murdoch is not a utopian. All dualism is a form of utopianism, and in the end perhaps all such oppositional philosophies are doomed to atheism, whatever vestments they don in the meantime. Iris Murdoch is claimed by atheists as an atheist; to an extent she was, and yet believing she would take that as a compliment is perhaps one of the gravest insults one can give her work. Iris Murdoch believed in goodness and she saw herself as a Platonist and she believed in cause and effect while immersed in a milieu which ridiculed all of those things. It was the second half of the 20th century. The progressive tide was reaching its full height, and in those years Platonic goodness and cause and effect were decidedly out.

Nonetheless, this is the woman who bought J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing desk after his death (he gives a gentle boast to his son in one of his letters that he had received a warm fan-letter from her). Iris Murdoch wrote contemporary novels and not mythopoetry, though that her heart clung to it is apparent in many of the objects, themes, and supernatural occurrences in her novels. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to accept let alone love a personal God without a sense of mythopoetry. But it is also difficult, perhaps impossible, to practice the sort of goodness we believe a personal God wants from us without the attention to mundane cause-and-effect relationships that Iris Murdoch put into every story.

This metaphysical commitment to a cause-and-effect which transcends and rebukes our desires appears in almost every novel as the presence of an immovable force. It is a shifting presence: sometimes it is in the inertia of one of her saint-like characters, their passive yet overwhelming refusal to be provoked. It can be malevolent, an inscrutable will which revels in stripping away the houses of fantasy constructed by those with inadequate humility. It can be the presence of the sea; a desire for revenge; a stream of thought slowly leading to madness which a character will not let go. This immovable force will not give way to the flux of desires with a plea, a pill, or partisan politics. It is beyond us, it destroys our lies, it forces us to let go of our delusional pursuit of control. We didn’t make this world. We didn’t make ourselves. Perhaps it is time to pay attention.

This profound commitment to cause and effect disarms readers. The building noise inherent in the world of advertising and social media make this immovable force , jarring and uncomfortable. An immovable force is the last thing the “moral arc of history” accepts. All must and should give way before our increasing control, which is the product of our totally free minds…right? The alternative requires an honesty that seems brutal, and a humility which can devastate one’s sense of order. More than that, it throws into doubt (as it should) our sentimental and onanistic distortions of love. What is love? Is love enough? One could say Iris Murdoch’s books are a long answer in turning the questions back Alasdair MacIntyre-style: Whose love? How do we love? In my youthful naivety these questions didn’t seem to be a personal attack, but simply a vastly needed corrective to the pablum of the culture, a critical reminder of how difficult it is to see people clearly, to still love them, and to be honest about our inadequacy of doing so fully. But what I found a tonic seemed intolerable to about half the people I lent her books. As a few noted repeatedly: “But her characters are all so horrible!”

What? But who on earth could look around and see angels & saints? And who could look at her characters and see only horror? Did they not also evoke pity, pity at their folly, at their hopefulness that meaning well and securing their treats was enough? It seemed unreasonable, a refusal to examine the utopian cultural dualism which was hardening hearts and fueling self-destructive practices.

But it wasn’t. The discomfort with Iris Murdoch’s immovable forces, her Platonic vision and her devouring characters immersed in the therapeutic language of self-rationalization is the natural result of our cultural milieu. Her books make us uncomfortable because they are mirrors in a time when mirrors have become a profound insult. This unforgivable crime is magnified by her repeated refusal to be cynical or pornographic. As she wrote in The Message to the Planet: “But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.” Pornography is the cynical end of advertising, and her rejection of it is perhaps why even the academics who love her are not quite sure to do with her as she looks, clear-eyed, at the cartoonish archetypes populating the cultural psyche.

Her characters do horrible things, but most of them aren’t cynical, and cynicism was and is fashionable, even or especially when mawkish sentiments lay just beneath the posturing. Therapeutic advertising wins even when it pretends to be defeated, and this is inevitable in a libertarian materialist culture where anything transcendent is denied. All become pornographers, selling everything either as dollar or instagram post. Murdoch centers the problems of love and sexual desires in her novels, yet nothing is designed to titillate, nor even, despite some readers, make us cynical towards the confused characters caught up by deceitful beliefs. Her characters fall in love, desire one another, are rendered to states of madness, even commit terrible crimes, but these encounters are not fodder for a dogmatic cause of liberation. Instead they are rendings in the tissues of distracting lies, allowing us to glimpse the reasons why what we call love so often isn’t.

Indeed, her stories are antidotes to the pornographic reduction of the person to a thing. Turning love into the glorified consumption of other human beings is deadly, it kills love, it destroys the universe. For Murdoch cynicism and sentimentality went hand in hand to make people self-deceivers, and without an ability to accept the truth about their deeds they would continue to be ruled by delusions which devour them. The characters who leave an impression of goodness in the reader acknowledge and transcend desire, turning love only and ever into a gift, not a request. They become her ordinary saints, loving and looking beyond themselves.

Iris Murdoch said she was not a great novelist. I disagree. If Charles Dickens is a great novelist, exemplary of the 19th century, then Iris Murdoch is the perceptive novelist of the 20th century needed for the 21st century. The Victorian era was willing to talk about its social injustices; indeed, talking about it helped relieve their guilt. The 20th century was caught in a hurricane of social change wrought by the preceding centuries of rising materialism. We fought the demons we wanted to fight, but beneath the waves lurked forces we could not bear to see or name. There, at its high-water mark, she perched above the waters and peered unflinchingly into the depths, illustrating this practice of honesty and humility for the social media age to come.

She recorded what she saw in the deeps. She did so meticulously, tenderly, and honestly. As the waters began to withdraw, the wreckage began to show. It shows more every day. Our reluctance to hold ourselves accountable, our delusional hedonism masked as virtue, our escapism, our blithe belief in our moral rectitude: the hideous consequences are before us if we have the humility to see. As the progressive materialist force pulls back to reveal its apocalyptic desolation, though, there is a desperate quest to retreat. The phenomenon has been painfully well-documented, a society of Mrs. Jellybys turning from the actual world and relationships of their lives to tilt at endless windmills. Nor should it go unsaid that this is not just a personal failing: every institution, every tech-master, every tearing away at civic trust accelerates this retreat into the worst sort of fantasy.

It must not be. However overwhelming “nudge” culture is, however tempting the virtual world, all our acceptance of this fantasy realm does is to pull down the few things which remain to orient us: like our neighbor’s face. If Iris Murdoch was unsure at high tide how to name God, she was not at all unclear of what would happen to a world which pretended it was easy to live without God. She knew exactly what noise would arise, how our hearts would harden, and how our first hope lay in quietly looking around and being honest. You cannot accept even Christ if you clasp your ears and shut your eyes and drone on and on over anything that might penetrate the delusional fortress of certitude. But that is exactly what is taking place in the prisons we are being enticed into building for ourselves, partnering with malevolent actors in our destruction of Creation with false promises of something “better,” but whose actual content remains, purposefully, undefined.

The idea

Perhaps that is why I picked up The Unicorn six weeks ago. I could not remember The Unicorn very well; perhaps I read it in 2005, 2006? There was a woman, a prisoner, in a gold gown in a hazy room, and then dark clouds. Well, May was cold and gloomy, the sun had withdrawn, and the rocky Irish coast sounded timely. To hear the sea, rather than the algorithm: that is better.

I had previously read most of Murdoch’s novels, finishing about 22 (did I finish Bruno’s Dream? I cannot recall and my reading lists are apparently not all in one place). Some were re-read maybe half-a-dozen times (The Sea, The Sea, The Black Prince, The Green Knight, and The Bell). Too many times have I been humbled by her books. Time and again I think I have learned; time and again I find I am starting over.

It was in The Unicorn, a story which involves a character suffering for years in a sort of private prison, that a line came to me which caused me to sit up and hold the edges of the book, breathless. At 42, that doesn’t happen much anymore. Here it was: to suffer, and not to pass it on.

I won’t go into the trains of metaphysical speculation and practical questions which led that to be the right idea at the right moment. How much suffering is worsened by how we throw it away miserably like a hot potato; how like, perhaps almost just another form even, states of suffering are to physical sickness. Wendell Berry once asked: what does it mean to throw something “away”? Where is “away”? And for long I had asked myself: what does it mean “to cure”? Is it simply to erase? Or to transform? What kind of suffering is useless suffering — and what is useful, important, even necessary? Do particulars, even particular sufferings, mean anything?

For days the line sang in my heart like a bell. My morning runs felt easier and lighter. I had needed to hear again what it meant to put one’s heart and deeds under a microscope. That one should I had no doubt; that one should do it without self-indulgent scrupulousness I agreed, but that one should find a sort of gladness in it, that “my yoke is easy and my burden light,” that I had forgotten. One’s suffering can be pushed on to others all too easily, not just in ordinary ways, but even by focusing on the self to the point of failing to recognize where ordinary good cheer is wanted and needed. The temptation is there every moment of the day. More insidiously, one can believe one is suffering without passing it on, but instead be hardening and hardening, one’s eyes a little colder, the voice a little more bored. The yoke is easy and the burden light; also the razor’s edge is thin.

Shortly after finishing The Unicorn I picked up The Time of the Angels, and midway through it seemed clear the time had come to re-read her works. I began reading her as one sort of person in 2003; now, over half a lifetime later, in 2026, the world and myself have changed; or, perhaps as C.S. Lewis would say, come more and more to a point, to a sharper, clearer version of ourselves. I’d like to take a step back, with one foot in my first readings all those years ago, and one foot in today, and see what has happened or is happening. What has come to a point?

Iris Murdoch made me believe attention, real attention, is enough. It’s love. But attention is being gobbled up, caricatured, or “optimized” by the efficient managers who run the therapeutic and profane advertising machines. How does one stand duty over one’s self before this terrible apparatus? She taught me a way a long time ago, and it brought me to the Eucharist. The world goes on all the same, faster and angrier, and it’s tempting to go right along with it. Still, it was Murdoch who repeated the humbling words of Blessed Julian of Norwich: All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. I do not control the world; we barely even control our own hearts. It is enough of a mission, more than enough, to try to do that well.

The project

So for my own sake, to do my work well, I will be rereading her books over the coming year, hopefully finishing them by the end of next summer. I am not reading them in order, and below you may find the loosely ordered list so that those who would like to read any of them with me over the coming year may do so.

While Murdoch published 26 novels, I will not be including the final one, Jackson’s Dilemma. It was written in the midst of her Alzheimer’s illness. It is widely acknowledged her sickness affected the novel, but less rarely discussed as to why her vulnerability was nonetheless put up for sale. That it was published seems a betrayal of a woman who so carefully documented the illusions and delusions of the human heart. The book is a sad record of the dimming of her earthly mind, and it should have been kept private or for research purposes. So I will keep it so.

In order to review these works fully, there will obviously be plot reveals. I may give a brief glimpse of a coming book at the end of a review in order to help people decide if they wish to read it. If you do, I advise not reading the full review until your own completion. Murdoch’s books hinge so often upon an ethical version of Tolkien’s eucatastrophe — the shocking realization that good intentions are not enough, that our most trifling actions have countless consequences. It’s important not to blunt the moral impact of her books, which are often described as intellectual soap operas, by preemptively knowing which delusions will be shattered. Her books may seem like a soap opera, but the reason they are important is because they reveal the way the busy desires we conjure up, the sordid desire to fill our lives with noise, are a distracting attempt to cloak our failure to pursue goodness.

Clearly these reviews will not be those of an academic. One reason I have always been attracted to her novels is the lack of excessively didactic philosophizing; in her books philosophy begins and ends in people and what they actually do. A related reason for my fondness is her devotion to the stuff of this world. The thoughts of our head do not take place in a vacuum, and the objects around us are not a mere backdrop. It’s a soft approach to Incarnational theology. Things make their own indictment of our misdeeds, revealing in their way the dramas of original sin: a stone taken wrongly from the sea, a saffron curtain too heavy with dust, a kitchen sink as the misery of the universe, an umbrella of vengeance. They all call us to be still, to notice, to put down our false dreams and work with love towards the hallowing of these small things.

This search for communion with reality transcends dogmas and formula. Life in her novels happens to intellectuals, and it also happens to janitors and housewives, and she thought and acted as if intellectuals, janitors, and housewives and their sinks all have inner lives with moral dilemmas that are perilous, enchanting, and meaningful. It was what her characters did with the stuff of their mind and the persuasion of their hearts that mattered, whether they were writing books or washing dishes. Her books are for all people, so perhaps it’s alright for a homemaker and mere lay metaphysician to discuss her books, as I’ve known them.

Practical details regarding the project

Reviews will not used a numbered rating system. Different people will get different things from her books and a numbered system would distract from the central ideas of each book, which should not always be placed in competition with one another. Rather my reviews will focus on who I think may find something in a particular book, as well as what I found there.

As stated in my previous post, most of these reviews will be for paid subscribers (with exceptions for the first review and several others, considering how these books tie in with other roaming interests). As also stated, if this is a project you would like to follow and you cannot manage a paid subscription, you have only to ask and I will gift you one. It is my dear wish that those who wish to participate in a discussion can do so, that those who are not interested in this project are not bombarded with dozens of emails regarding it, and that spoilers can be fully revealed as her books cannot be adequately discussed without awareness of the plot’s resolutions. Additionally, if enough subscribers say they enjoy this series and would like me to fully open it, I’ll do so.

The Lists

For those interested in the reading list for the next year, here is my rough plan which is, as my children and my own kitchen sink are happy to remind me, subject to change. It includes two biographies, both authorized and unauthorized (I have only previously read the unauthorized), one group biography of her Oxford clique, two of her philosophical works, one by her archetypal “enchanter” figure Elias Canetti, and, if the timeline is held and actually wrapping up next summer, then one by her Oxford colleague Mary Midgley.

1. The Unicorn (May - finished)

2. The Time of the Angels (June - finished)

3. A Fairly Honorable Defeat (June - finished)

4. The Flight from the Enchanter (July)

5. The Black Prince (July)

6. Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson (August)

7. An Accidental Man (August)

8. Bruno’s Dream (September)

9. The Nice and the Good (September)

10. The Italian Girl (October)

11. Metaphysics as A Guide to Morals (October)

12. The Green Knight (November)

13. A Word Child (November)

14. The Good Apprentice (December)

15. A Severed Head (December)

16. The Book & the Brotherhood (January)

17. Crowds & Power by Elias Canetti (January)

18. The Sacred & Profane Love Machine (February)

19. Metaphysical Animals by Cumhaill & Wiseman (February)

20. The Red & the Green (March)

21. An Unofficial Rose (March)

22. Nuns & Soldiers (April)

23. The Philosopher’s Pupil (April)

24. The Sandcastle (May)

25. Message to the Planet (May)

26. Iris: A Life by Peter Conradi (May)

27. Under the Net (June)

28. Myths We Live By by Mary Midgley (June)

29. Henry & Cato (June)

30. The Bell (July)

31. The Sovereignty of the Good (July)

32. The Sea, the Sea (August)

While not giving each book a numbered rating, out of curiosity to how my thoughts towards these works may shift during the re-read I decided to order them at the present moment from most to least favored. It’s a little unfair to some as for several of them my recollections are very vague. The one ranked last, however, I do recall getting quite sick of and finishing only with grim annoyance. Of the 25 novels, I remember finishing 22. The other 3 are unfinished or completely unremembered. Again, Jackson’s Dilemma is excluded. The unfinished/unremembered are listed as U/U. From most to least favorite, here they are:

The 25

1. The Sea, The Sea

2. The Green Knight

3. The Black Prince

4. Henry & Cato

5. A Fairly Honorable Defeat

6. The Bell

7. Under the Net

8. A Word Child

9. Nuns & Soldiers

10. A Severed Head

11. The Good Apprentice

12. The Italian Girl

13. The Unicorn

14. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

15. The Book & the Brotherhood

16. An Accidental Man

17. The Nice & the Good

18. The Sandcastle

19. An Unofficial Rose

20. The Red & the Green

21. The Time of the Angels

22. Message to the Planet

    U/U: Bruno’s Dream

    U/U: The Philosopher’s Pupil

    U/U: The Flight from the Enchanter

If you follow along with this project, I do hope you enjoy it. If you haven’t yet read one her books, I hope you try one and find something good for your life there.

“I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will in His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.” - The Bell