Iris Murdoch’s emotionally hectic novels have been enjoying a comeback lately, with an excellent Radio 4 dramatisation of The Sea, the Sea, and an equally gripping rendition, on Woman’s Hour, of A Severed Head. Her books are distinguished by the rate at which her characters fall in and out of love with one another, usually leaving streams of chaos and pain behind them.
Iris’s letters, especially the ones which were written before she began to write novels, were blueprints for the fiction. In one confessional epistle, to David Hicks — not the interior designer, but an Oxford chum of the same name who had become a British Council lecturer — she outlined the state of play in November 1945:
I went to live with a young man whom I did not love but whom I was sorry for because he was in love with me, and because he has a complex about women (because of a homosexual past) and because he was about to be sent abroad at any moment. This was one Michael Foot of Oxford, whom you may remember. In the midst of this, the brilliant and darling Pip [Philippa] Bosanquet came to lodge at Seaforth, who was then breaking off her relations with an economics don at Balliol, called Thomas Balogh, a horribly clever Hungarian Jew. I met Thomas, fell terribly in love, and he with me, and thus involved Michael in some rather hideous sufferings…
And so on. In the course of time, having helped to break up Philippa’s marriage to Michael Foot (it was M.R.D. Foot the historian, not Michael Foot the politician), Iris then had a madly passionate fling with Philippa herself. To Brigid Brophy, another lover, Iris wrote in 1960, by which time she had become a famous novelist: ‘I am, I think, rather like my books.’
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in