BOOK OF THE DAY: Iris Murdoch: A Writer at WarEdited by Peter J Conradi Short Books 303pp £16.99
IRIS MURDOCH is 10 years dead and how she lives on is of concern to her official biographer Peter Conradi.
I saw her name on a bookbag the other day and wondered if Conradi would approve. He certainly disliked the Kate Winslet/Judi Dench film: Murdoch, in life “so august, remote and intensely private”, was reduced, says Conradi, to an Iris who was either “bonking or bonkers”.
What Conradi, a devotee at the shrine of Dame Iris, wants to celebrate is "the one thing about her that was truly remarkable – the freedom of her mind". He certainly achieved that in Iris Murdoch: A Lifeand here he offers letters and diaries from her twenties, hoping that it will give us Murdoch, writer and thinker. There is no bonking.
But where should one's portrait of the artist begin? The school essay? The holiday postcard? The diary? There's the painting by schoolboy Louis le Brocquy and the poem, October Thought, by 19-year-old Séamus Heaney. But both are far more interesting within the context of their later achievements; so too with Murdoch's early writing.
This book is in three parts: a diary and a series of letters to two male friends and fellow communist party comrades but the time of writing, 1939-1945 , is what makes it interesting.
This is the world of Oxford undergraduates in love with life and ideas and talking late into the night. A group of bright young things become a troop of travelling players in August 1939, The Magpie Players, and Murdoch’s diary tells of their adventures. It’s an innocent, joyous account. It charts the programme – ballads, songs, dramatic, comic interludes – and the practicalities of scenery and costumes as in “Mother of God preserve me from the simple sewing machine”. Murdoch liked being Irish and this stage Oirishness – a letter begins “Frank, me darlin’” – is forgivable. Murdoch fans reading how she “found a field with a convenient stone wall in it where I sat and played Greensleeves to the cows” will remember how oddly and entertainingly Greensleeves features in her Booker prize-winning The Sea, the Sea, 40 years later.
Frank Thompson was reading Classics at Oxford when he met his “dream-girl – a poetic Irish communist who’s doing honour mods. I worship her”. She also flirted with David Hicks, her other correspondent, but Thompson was killed and the war meant a seven-year separation from Hicks. Murdoch knows that she is “very talkative on paper”, and “can live in letters”. She also knows that “it’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest sounding damn silly being smart sounding rather slick”.
Murdoch always admired the loose baggy monster that was 19th century fiction and her own elaborately detailed and leisurely novels can be glimpsed in this diary description: “Our rooms are perfect Victorian period pieces, bristling with horrid restless ornaments, sickly with sentimental pictures of dogs and cats, putrid with bad hunting prints and photographs of army groups of the 1860s.” The letters reveal a more rigorously analytical, focused engagement.
Of course the book’s the thing. And Murdoch wrote some marvellous ones. But these letters and diaries from the war years reveal a mind alive to what Conradi calls “the complexity of the inner life”. This is resilient Murdoch: “I feel, even at the lowest moment, such endless vitality inside me.” Undoubtedly, a book for the aficionado which Conradi hopes will help “reclaim the living writer as she begins her adult life”. That it does.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin.
