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Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her
A brilliant, controversial and insightful biography from the author of the universally acclaimed The Victorians.
A.N. Wilson’s tutor at Oxford was John Bayley, and it was there that Wilson met Irish Murdoch. He remained a close friend of them both, and it was at Iris’s pleading in 1988 that he agreed to write her biography. The biography was bound to be controversial, and Wilson pulls no punches in his attack on Bayley’s own book on Iris and the portrayal of her as an Alzheimer’s victim. Instead, he gives us back the fiercely intelligent novelist and philosopher, and shows us a relationship that was deeply loving yet profoundly eccentric, and very unconventional for its day.
From the Hardcover edition.
A.N. Wilson’s tutor at Oxford was John Bayley, and it was there that Wilson met Irish Murdoch. He remained a close friend of them both, and it was at Iris’s pleading in 1988 that he agreed to write her biography. The biography was bound to be controversial, and Wilson pulls no punches in his attack on Bayley’s own book on Iris and the portrayal of her as an Alzheimer’s victim. Instead, he gives us back the fiercely intelligent novelist and philosopher, and shows us a relationship that was deeply loving yet profoundly eccentric, and very unconventional for its day.
From the Hardcover edition.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
A.N. Wilson
137 books250 followersAndrew Norman Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist, known for his critical biographies, novels, works of popular history and religious views. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and former columnist for the London Evening Standard, and has been an occasional contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 17, 2019
This pseudo biography should have been called “My Life at Oxford, where I met Iris Murdoch.” While we get a sort of a timeline on her life, the book focuses more on the following: the author’s challenges with his own life, his social connection with his subject and her husband that spanned over thirty years and hampered him from creating objective distance, the personalities he met at Oxford, and his attempts to understand Murdoch’s philosophy of life and its role in her fiction.
Irish Murdoch is an interesting personality: a bright soul, a philosopher, an unbridled lover of men and women, an acclaimed author, an eccentric, and an atheist who believed in Christ. A.N Wilson was Murdoch’s husband John Bailey’s student at Oxford. He affectionately calls them IM and JOB respectively. Wilson is conflicted about his decision to become an Anglican priest and is falling in and out of his faith when the Bailey’s take him under their wing, neither to encourage or discourage but to support and later promote his literary career. In the process, Wilson is exposed to the cloister-like literary and academic community at Oxford, where male professors ride their bikes to the college halls for dinner at night while their wives eat baked beans at home and look after the kids. There are tea parties and dinners organized by the Baileys which Wilson and his family are constantly invited to. Given this familiarity, Wilson finds it difficult to refuse Iris when she requests him to write her biography, and he is unable to probe behind the “affairs” she has been associated with due to his relationship with her. All he knows is that IM was a single child of Northern Irish heritage (she traded on the Irish connection a lot although she never lived in Ireland), was raised in a “trinity of love” by her parents and had no children of her own; she and JOB have an arms-length marriage, she absorbed in her work and a stream of lovers, he absorbed in his work and quite celibate, but both with an affection for each other and a bond that endures until death do them part. And it doesn’t end there, for roles reverse and JOB who had always played the support role to IM, goes onto become a successful author and IM becomes the permanent poster girl for Alzheimers victims.
Given that her sexual adventures were out of bounds (except on one occasion) Wilson turns his attention to IM’s philosophy and her literature. IM came of age when existentialism was a continental fad and when the English preferred the narrower Logical Positivism; although she denied being an existentialist, many of her novels were existentialist and she also wrote a book about Sarte. A fan of Kant and Plato, Moral Philosophy was her official beat which she taught at Oxford and London. JOB and his colleagues beat God out of her, although she claimed to be religious. She was a Marxist who fell out with Socialism after the war and became a right winger instead.
On the literary front, she meticulously outlined her novels before starting. She drew heavily from her exploits with lovers to write about people in love, usually upper middle class, educated people living unhappy lives with their spouses; extra-marital affairs were required to keep everyone grounded. She never portrayed lesbian love although that was her stronger leaning. She used family names for characters. There was usually priests and nuns grappling with their faith or the loss of it, a guru-like character who commanded his disciples (allusions to a couple of sado-masochistic affairs IM had with Elia Canetti and Professor Fraenkel) and the philosophy was sprinkled in as material that she had gathered, no different from an author who had been in the army throwing in war scenes, or a sailor adding in ships into their books. She refused to admit that she wrote philosophical novels. She refused editing and was accused of many inaccuracies. After awhile, her plots developed a sameness and she started to repeat herself. Wilson spend a lot of time in this book analysing some of the novels that made her famous and this is a strength of this biography, I feel.
The tragedy in Iris’ story is when she starts to lose it. The house starts to become a pigsty with the lack of maintenance. The cars (they had to be VWs only) smell of animals and stale tobacco. Very soon, IM is walking around, shitting everywhere and crying like a three year old. What baffles the biographer, a frequent visitor to the Baileys, is why this eminent couple, with two million pounds sterling to their name, could not have hired domestic help and a nurse to help Iris in her last days.
We are however spared the gory details that were made explicit in the movie Iris, based on the two memoirs that JOB wrote after his wife’s death, which Wilson considers resentful, misogynous and envious of IM. However, one wonders whether this was JOB hitting back for years spent in the secondary role of this power couple, for the ignominy of the “cuckold” title bestowed upon him by his free spirited and freely loving wife. We can only be humbled when we realize that this story is a great example of the frailty of life: the mighty shall be humbled in the face of death, and Iris Murdoch was not spared, just as none of us will be.
Irish Murdoch is an interesting personality: a bright soul, a philosopher, an unbridled lover of men and women, an acclaimed author, an eccentric, and an atheist who believed in Christ. A.N Wilson was Murdoch’s husband John Bailey’s student at Oxford. He affectionately calls them IM and JOB respectively. Wilson is conflicted about his decision to become an Anglican priest and is falling in and out of his faith when the Bailey’s take him under their wing, neither to encourage or discourage but to support and later promote his literary career. In the process, Wilson is exposed to the cloister-like literary and academic community at Oxford, where male professors ride their bikes to the college halls for dinner at night while their wives eat baked beans at home and look after the kids. There are tea parties and dinners organized by the Baileys which Wilson and his family are constantly invited to. Given this familiarity, Wilson finds it difficult to refuse Iris when she requests him to write her biography, and he is unable to probe behind the “affairs” she has been associated with due to his relationship with her. All he knows is that IM was a single child of Northern Irish heritage (she traded on the Irish connection a lot although she never lived in Ireland), was raised in a “trinity of love” by her parents and had no children of her own; she and JOB have an arms-length marriage, she absorbed in her work and a stream of lovers, he absorbed in his work and quite celibate, but both with an affection for each other and a bond that endures until death do them part. And it doesn’t end there, for roles reverse and JOB who had always played the support role to IM, goes onto become a successful author and IM becomes the permanent poster girl for Alzheimers victims.
Given that her sexual adventures were out of bounds (except on one occasion) Wilson turns his attention to IM’s philosophy and her literature. IM came of age when existentialism was a continental fad and when the English preferred the narrower Logical Positivism; although she denied being an existentialist, many of her novels were existentialist and she also wrote a book about Sarte. A fan of Kant and Plato, Moral Philosophy was her official beat which she taught at Oxford and London. JOB and his colleagues beat God out of her, although she claimed to be religious. She was a Marxist who fell out with Socialism after the war and became a right winger instead.
On the literary front, she meticulously outlined her novels before starting. She drew heavily from her exploits with lovers to write about people in love, usually upper middle class, educated people living unhappy lives with their spouses; extra-marital affairs were required to keep everyone grounded. She never portrayed lesbian love although that was her stronger leaning. She used family names for characters. There was usually priests and nuns grappling with their faith or the loss of it, a guru-like character who commanded his disciples (allusions to a couple of sado-masochistic affairs IM had with Elia Canetti and Professor Fraenkel) and the philosophy was sprinkled in as material that she had gathered, no different from an author who had been in the army throwing in war scenes, or a sailor adding in ships into their books. She refused to admit that she wrote philosophical novels. She refused editing and was accused of many inaccuracies. After awhile, her plots developed a sameness and she started to repeat herself. Wilson spend a lot of time in this book analysing some of the novels that made her famous and this is a strength of this biography, I feel.
The tragedy in Iris’ story is when she starts to lose it. The house starts to become a pigsty with the lack of maintenance. The cars (they had to be VWs only) smell of animals and stale tobacco. Very soon, IM is walking around, shitting everywhere and crying like a three year old. What baffles the biographer, a frequent visitor to the Baileys, is why this eminent couple, with two million pounds sterling to their name, could not have hired domestic help and a nurse to help Iris in her last days.
We are however spared the gory details that were made explicit in the movie Iris, based on the two memoirs that JOB wrote after his wife’s death, which Wilson considers resentful, misogynous and envious of IM. However, one wonders whether this was JOB hitting back for years spent in the secondary role of this power couple, for the ignominy of the “cuckold” title bestowed upon him by his free spirited and freely loving wife. We can only be humbled when we realize that this story is a great example of the frailty of life: the mighty shall be humbled in the face of death, and Iris Murdoch was not spared, just as none of us will be.
April 21, 2011
As Wilson said after it came out, this is anti-biography: glorious, meandering musings which intertwine thoughts on Iris with the nature of biography; the relationship between subject and author; the relevance (or not) of private life to the work of an artist, and beautiful, dreamy memories of an Oxford where people turn around to find Christopher Tolkien smoking away in a corner, or Iris giggling and sneaking around a friend's house trying to peer inside.
I'd wanted to read this since it came out, and held off because the reviews were quite disgruntled, and I faithlessly didn't want her to be, I don't know, "ruined". Wilson himself felt something similar when she asked him to be her biographer. But after JOB's works, works which exposed his dying wife and made her an object of pathetic pity, that Wilson realized he could write about her and her eccentricities without belittling them. Indeed, watching Wilson point to the flaws in her writing and the struggles in her mind and the bizarre things she often said and did made her a far, far more likable (admirable even?) human being, and one who regained all the mystery and dignity that JOB's memoirs denied her.
As a final aside, those who think Wilson a pompous, selfish narrator might do well to examine some of his other biographies. He nearly disappears inside his other works, except for the fact that the reader is very aware that the writer is an exceptionally clear and compassionate thinker. The IM book is about someone he actually knew quite well, and he wrote it as an older man who had become disenchanted with biography - especially in regards to what the peering and ruffling up had done to IM. I think this is another marvelous work of his, and am grateful for the images of a bright-eyed lady cheerfully pouring another round of cheap wine and calling everyone Old Thing. Oh, and I want to re-read everything she wrote. I count that a success.
I'd wanted to read this since it came out, and held off because the reviews were quite disgruntled, and I faithlessly didn't want her to be, I don't know, "ruined". Wilson himself felt something similar when she asked him to be her biographer. But after JOB's works, works which exposed his dying wife and made her an object of pathetic pity, that Wilson realized he could write about her and her eccentricities without belittling them. Indeed, watching Wilson point to the flaws in her writing and the struggles in her mind and the bizarre things she often said and did made her a far, far more likable (admirable even?) human being, and one who regained all the mystery and dignity that JOB's memoirs denied her.
As a final aside, those who think Wilson a pompous, selfish narrator might do well to examine some of his other biographies. He nearly disappears inside his other works, except for the fact that the reader is very aware that the writer is an exceptionally clear and compassionate thinker. The IM book is about someone he actually knew quite well, and he wrote it as an older man who had become disenchanted with biography - especially in regards to what the peering and ruffling up had done to IM. I think this is another marvelous work of his, and am grateful for the images of a bright-eyed lady cheerfully pouring another round of cheap wine and calling everyone Old Thing. Oh, and I want to re-read everything she wrote. I count that a success.
April 15, 2013
I have admired a number of A.N. Wilson's books--but this one was a disappointment. Two thirds of it was taken up partly by whining about how he could possibly succeed at the task of writing her biography--he really didn't want to for a number of reasons, but he had promised her he would--and partly by malicious gossip about students, lecturers, fellows, and professors at Oxford. He dishes out left-handed compliments and funny-nasty tidbits about everyone from Alan Bullock, A.J. Ayer, and Helen Gardner to Hugh Grant. Much of it had nothing whatever to do with Iris Murdoch. I got the impression he was settling scores with people he grudgingly admired but didn't much like, many of whom are dead and can't respond. I can see why members of the royal family got irritated with him for accepting invitations to dinner and then writing indiscreetly about the table talk. The mean-spirited gossip was allowed to infect his view of Murdoch herself. But the other third of the book partly redeemed it--he discussed her Platonic realism in some detail, and he genuinely admires (parts of some of) her novels. But until the very last chapter his admiration is always qualified in what seem to me to be petty ways. The last chapter finally (and sensibly) tells the reader to ignore what has been said in the earlier sections and just read her novels in order to discover what a great soul she was. Which is what I intend to do.
March 7, 2012
This is a fairly non-traditional biography. I take all biographies with a grain of salt, and I don't think Wilson can be said to get more at the 'truth' of Iris Murdoch because he knew her - in fact, if anything it makes him less reliable. That said, his shifting perspective and erudite style is very enjoyable to read, and at many points in the narrative I found myself smiling. It's an interesting snapshot of university life in Iris Murdoch's era. Some of the criticism of her philosophy and literature gets a little murky and comes across as being in love with its own vocabulary. I've been working my way through her novels, and it was interesting to read this alongside that.
March 18, 2016
Those Brits do keep writing, don’t they? I look at the titles by A. N. Wilson, who is my rough contemporary (two years younger than I, actually) and I’m astonished, and somewhat ashamed, to see thirty books. (Compared to six for me. Eight on the outside.) The topics he has taken on, even just in non-fiction, are astonishing. Tolstoy. Jesus. Paul. God. I thought you needed to be an expert on a subject to write a book about it, but I’m not sure that qualification operates in the British mind. If you wake up one day and have an inkling to write a book about it, by Jove pull out the foolscap, put a new nib on the pen, and get started. We’ll worry about organization later.
That’s certainly the case with the subject of this book, Iris Murdoch, who wrote a 500 page novel at the drop of a hat (and often, according to Wilson, repeated herself, or ran out of steam—after an interesting initial start—halfway through). It seems to be the case with Wilson. It was the case with Murdoch’s official biographer, Peter J. Conradi, whose book on Buddhism was the most haphazardly thrown together thing I’ve read in many a moon. I think the Brits got in the habit of writing well and writing quickly early on at their public schools (that’s private schools to you, Yank); after all, if they didn’t turn out something good they’d be caned to within an inch of their lives, possibly buggered as well. Writer’s Block was not an option.
Wilson was compelled to write his book by John Bayley’s book about his wife, Iris, and especially by the movie of the same name, starring Kate Winslett as the young Iris and Judy Dench as the older. Wilson left his second viewing of the movie in a rage. John Bayley—famous as an Oxford don—had been his tutor at university, and had introduced the young man to his wife early on. Wilson had known her for the last thirty years of her life. It enraged him that this vital and alive woman had suddenly become the face of Alzheimer’s, and would forever be remembered that way. He felt that Bayley, in creating that loving but somewhat condescending portrait, had brought that situation about. He even suggests that Bayley was jealous of Murdoch’s fame, wanted to reduce her in that way. Wilson wants to right this wrong, and jumps right in.
The man writes marvelously, I have to say. He captured my attention immediately and didn’t lose it except when he spoke about Western philosophers, a subject which greatly interested Murdoch, who started off as a philosophy student and wrote several nonfiction books. He didn’t seem to have a plan, but improvised well (he has one chapter where he gives us a standard biograph of Murdoch, so we can get the information we need). I can’t say that he made me want to run out and gobble up her novels. He has as many complaints as kudos about her work. But he’s written a lively work, and brings his subject to life.
Her sex life in particular. The woman we think of now as a dotty old lady was wildly promiscuous for much of her life, having affairs with her mentors, her colleagues, and anyone else who was interested. (Wilson himself thought of having a tumble with her at one point, then thought better of it.) Her friends believe that by nature she was a lesbian, and most enjoyed making love with women, but she lived in the male world of the British university, knew what men wanted and gave it to them, just to be friends. When Wilson was a young man, Bayley asked him to come along when he popped in on a fellow don who was known as a lady’s man, persisted even when Wilson was reluctant, and when they got to the man’s rooms found him not in bed (thank God) but intertwined on a couch with Iris herself. Nobody made a big deal of this embarrassing circumstance, which mortified the young Wilson. If the general gossip throughout the book is any clue, such behavior was de rigueur among the British intellectuals. No one even raised an eyebrow.
Murdoch and Bayley were famous for their dinner parties with bad food and cheap wine (they served the cheap stuff so they could drink a lot), for the appalling filth and disarray of their apartments, but also for the distinguished company. They knew most of the great writers and intellectuals of their day. I honestly don’t understand why they put up with the filth. Wilson goes into detail at one point.
“The small kitchen, and above all the bathroom in the flat, are dirty on a scale which it would require a new vocabulary to describe. The loo is not merely stained, but encrusted, a bas-relief of limescale, ancient excrement and some not so ancient. Sink and shower grimy. The soap filthy, hair-matted, grey. In the kitchen, a thick mud of blackened grease coats sink, stove and the heaps of unwashed crockery. In each of the living-rooms is an unmade single bed, socks, underwear, jumpers scattered on its rumpled candlewick bedspread. Books spill from shelves on to carpets. The armchairs are the sort which get left to the end of a sale and are usually unsold, even to the cheapest furniture trader, the auction house paying for their removal by scrap-merchants.”
I do wish that Wilson had included a list of Murdoch’s best work. He hinted at various titles he liked, but didn’t come up with a definitive list. (Everybody mentions The Severed Head, and the man whose review got me started on all this also suggested The Philosopher’s Pupil. I myself have good memories of The Sea, The Sea, which I read when it came out and which won the Booker Prize.) Murdoch—not surprisingly—wrote about erotic romps, philosophical thought, charismatic teachers or masters who compelled the attention of their pupils. She had a strong interest in religion and mysticism, though she never committed to anything (the British seemed determined to think their way into religion, the worst way, in my opinion, to approach it).
I sometimes wondered how much Wilson really liked Murdoch’s work, he had so many caveats. But toward the end of the book’s first section he gave us a wonderful tribute to her as a person, which really sold me.
“Whether she qualified for the epithet ‘good’ is ultimately perhaps a pointlessly censorious question. She was certainly something rather different, a life-enhancing person. Though her acute mind ranged over the deepest questions of which thought is capable, she was by nature joyous. She had said a universal yes to life, and that was perhaps one reason so many people felt joy in her company. There was also the palpable fact, which could not be analysed, that she was deeply lovable.”
And toward the end of the book he said the same thing about her as a writer, startling me a little, because of his earlier quibbles.
“The chaos of the human heart in its quest for sacred and profane love—this was IM’s great theme. She did not merely speak for a whole generation, as she fashioned her novels and struggled with her metaphysical essays and books. She was also, to those who knew her personally, a Wise Woman, a person quite out of the ordinary.
“The privilege of having known her was incalculable. . . . Her novels, more than any other, inspired me to want to be a novelist. . . . Her patient, humble example of working life was an example to any writer. Nulla dies sine linea, as Erasmus decreed—not a day should pass without writing something.”
This is a model memoir as far as I’m concerned, funny, gossipy, full of personal opinion, and bringing its subject to life. I may not run out and read all her work, but I’m going to sample the best. I’m as interested in the person as I am in the writer, but the person comes through in the work.
www.davidguy.org
That’s certainly the case with the subject of this book, Iris Murdoch, who wrote a 500 page novel at the drop of a hat (and often, according to Wilson, repeated herself, or ran out of steam—after an interesting initial start—halfway through). It seems to be the case with Wilson. It was the case with Murdoch’s official biographer, Peter J. Conradi, whose book on Buddhism was the most haphazardly thrown together thing I’ve read in many a moon. I think the Brits got in the habit of writing well and writing quickly early on at their public schools (that’s private schools to you, Yank); after all, if they didn’t turn out something good they’d be caned to within an inch of their lives, possibly buggered as well. Writer’s Block was not an option.
Wilson was compelled to write his book by John Bayley’s book about his wife, Iris, and especially by the movie of the same name, starring Kate Winslett as the young Iris and Judy Dench as the older. Wilson left his second viewing of the movie in a rage. John Bayley—famous as an Oxford don—had been his tutor at university, and had introduced the young man to his wife early on. Wilson had known her for the last thirty years of her life. It enraged him that this vital and alive woman had suddenly become the face of Alzheimer’s, and would forever be remembered that way. He felt that Bayley, in creating that loving but somewhat condescending portrait, had brought that situation about. He even suggests that Bayley was jealous of Murdoch’s fame, wanted to reduce her in that way. Wilson wants to right this wrong, and jumps right in.
The man writes marvelously, I have to say. He captured my attention immediately and didn’t lose it except when he spoke about Western philosophers, a subject which greatly interested Murdoch, who started off as a philosophy student and wrote several nonfiction books. He didn’t seem to have a plan, but improvised well (he has one chapter where he gives us a standard biograph of Murdoch, so we can get the information we need). I can’t say that he made me want to run out and gobble up her novels. He has as many complaints as kudos about her work. But he’s written a lively work, and brings his subject to life.
Her sex life in particular. The woman we think of now as a dotty old lady was wildly promiscuous for much of her life, having affairs with her mentors, her colleagues, and anyone else who was interested. (Wilson himself thought of having a tumble with her at one point, then thought better of it.) Her friends believe that by nature she was a lesbian, and most enjoyed making love with women, but she lived in the male world of the British university, knew what men wanted and gave it to them, just to be friends. When Wilson was a young man, Bayley asked him to come along when he popped in on a fellow don who was known as a lady’s man, persisted even when Wilson was reluctant, and when they got to the man’s rooms found him not in bed (thank God) but intertwined on a couch with Iris herself. Nobody made a big deal of this embarrassing circumstance, which mortified the young Wilson. If the general gossip throughout the book is any clue, such behavior was de rigueur among the British intellectuals. No one even raised an eyebrow.
Murdoch and Bayley were famous for their dinner parties with bad food and cheap wine (they served the cheap stuff so they could drink a lot), for the appalling filth and disarray of their apartments, but also for the distinguished company. They knew most of the great writers and intellectuals of their day. I honestly don’t understand why they put up with the filth. Wilson goes into detail at one point.
“The small kitchen, and above all the bathroom in the flat, are dirty on a scale which it would require a new vocabulary to describe. The loo is not merely stained, but encrusted, a bas-relief of limescale, ancient excrement and some not so ancient. Sink and shower grimy. The soap filthy, hair-matted, grey. In the kitchen, a thick mud of blackened grease coats sink, stove and the heaps of unwashed crockery. In each of the living-rooms is an unmade single bed, socks, underwear, jumpers scattered on its rumpled candlewick bedspread. Books spill from shelves on to carpets. The armchairs are the sort which get left to the end of a sale and are usually unsold, even to the cheapest furniture trader, the auction house paying for their removal by scrap-merchants.”
I do wish that Wilson had included a list of Murdoch’s best work. He hinted at various titles he liked, but didn’t come up with a definitive list. (Everybody mentions The Severed Head, and the man whose review got me started on all this also suggested The Philosopher’s Pupil. I myself have good memories of The Sea, The Sea, which I read when it came out and which won the Booker Prize.) Murdoch—not surprisingly—wrote about erotic romps, philosophical thought, charismatic teachers or masters who compelled the attention of their pupils. She had a strong interest in religion and mysticism, though she never committed to anything (the British seemed determined to think their way into religion, the worst way, in my opinion, to approach it).
I sometimes wondered how much Wilson really liked Murdoch’s work, he had so many caveats. But toward the end of the book’s first section he gave us a wonderful tribute to her as a person, which really sold me.
“Whether she qualified for the epithet ‘good’ is ultimately perhaps a pointlessly censorious question. She was certainly something rather different, a life-enhancing person. Though her acute mind ranged over the deepest questions of which thought is capable, she was by nature joyous. She had said a universal yes to life, and that was perhaps one reason so many people felt joy in her company. There was also the palpable fact, which could not be analysed, that she was deeply lovable.”
And toward the end of the book he said the same thing about her as a writer, startling me a little, because of his earlier quibbles.
“The chaos of the human heart in its quest for sacred and profane love—this was IM’s great theme. She did not merely speak for a whole generation, as she fashioned her novels and struggled with her metaphysical essays and books. She was also, to those who knew her personally, a Wise Woman, a person quite out of the ordinary.
“The privilege of having known her was incalculable. . . . Her novels, more than any other, inspired me to want to be a novelist. . . . Her patient, humble example of working life was an example to any writer. Nulla dies sine linea, as Erasmus decreed—not a day should pass without writing something.”
This is a model memoir as far as I’m concerned, funny, gossipy, full of personal opinion, and bringing its subject to life. I may not run out and read all her work, but I’m going to sample the best. I’m as interested in the person as I am in the writer, but the person comes through in the work.
www.davidguy.org
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February 14, 2022SUMMARY - Devilment of the sort Murdoch herself conjured. A countetpoint to Bayley, full of gossipy annecdote, and ultimately a more whole sense of Murdoch the woman.
___________
Critics of Wilson's biography widely dislike that he has so much of himself in the book. Yet in revealing the author's hand, I felt the (inevitable) biases are made clearer. Neither Wilson nor Murdoch are depicted gilt-edged. How refreshing.
I will agree with reviewers who say that Wilson's biography ideally shouldn't be read in isolation. But then which should? There is a delicious counterpoint between Wilson's faintly demonic (certainly confrontational) cover-image of Murdoch as impish sinner. Her barely-concealed affairs are laid barer, but I don't think it descends to exploitation. The image is instead a necessary counterpoint to Bayley's soft-focus Iris as mewing, blank-faced, Teletubby-loving 'Alzheimer's Lady'. Both can be true; neither fully encapsulates the whole.
On the books, I cannot fault Wilson. How true that so many achieve greatness over 150 pages only to dissipate (p. 169). Wilson helps us understand why: Murdoch carefully plotted novels, but tended to lose interest and jump ahead to her next project before completion (p. 130). The exhausting love triangles may be truer than I believed possible, based on Murdoch's own amorous exploits.The tangled results, though, also attest to their author's boredom.
On specific novels of note, I would completely agree with Wilson that 'The Bell' is (at least to my current reading up-to-and-including 1980) the only one that is really a fully-fledged classic. I wasn't as impressed as Wilson with 'A Severed Head' (though very good), and would say the 1970s seemed overall more consistent. Wilson's attention to 'Henry and Cato', however, I would echo - and it seems it was one point he shared with Bayley.
The chapters examining Murdoch's interests in existentialism (esp Satre) and Heidegger lost me. I did emerge, though, with a much clearer sense of Iris off-guard - a woman who asked questions but rarely if ever volunteered of herself, and whose vanity meant she disliked reading (or even considering) other authors. Reviewers have claimed malice on Wilson's part, but I left the book feeling a much more human sense of Murdoch and even Bayley. We must all read between the lines, and Wilson comes across as thin-skinned too - I would argue, to his credit.
___________
Critics of Wilson's biography widely dislike that he has so much of himself in the book. Yet in revealing the author's hand, I felt the (inevitable) biases are made clearer. Neither Wilson nor Murdoch are depicted gilt-edged. How refreshing.
I will agree with reviewers who say that Wilson's biography ideally shouldn't be read in isolation. But then which should? There is a delicious counterpoint between Wilson's faintly demonic (certainly confrontational) cover-image of Murdoch as impish sinner. Her barely-concealed affairs are laid barer, but I don't think it descends to exploitation. The image is instead a necessary counterpoint to Bayley's soft-focus Iris as mewing, blank-faced, Teletubby-loving 'Alzheimer's Lady'. Both can be true; neither fully encapsulates the whole.
On the books, I cannot fault Wilson. How true that so many achieve greatness over 150 pages only to dissipate (p. 169). Wilson helps us understand why: Murdoch carefully plotted novels, but tended to lose interest and jump ahead to her next project before completion (p. 130). The exhausting love triangles may be truer than I believed possible, based on Murdoch's own amorous exploits.The tangled results, though, also attest to their author's boredom.
On specific novels of note, I would completely agree with Wilson that 'The Bell' is (at least to my current reading up-to-and-including 1980) the only one that is really a fully-fledged classic. I wasn't as impressed as Wilson with 'A Severed Head' (though very good), and would say the 1970s seemed overall more consistent. Wilson's attention to 'Henry and Cato', however, I would echo - and it seems it was one point he shared with Bayley.
The chapters examining Murdoch's interests in existentialism (esp Satre) and Heidegger lost me. I did emerge, though, with a much clearer sense of Iris off-guard - a woman who asked questions but rarely if ever volunteered of herself, and whose vanity meant she disliked reading (or even considering) other authors. Reviewers have claimed malice on Wilson's part, but I left the book feeling a much more human sense of Murdoch and even Bayley. We must all read between the lines, and Wilson comes across as thin-skinned too - I would argue, to his credit.
July 1, 2021
Going from reading Murdoch's books and existing within her imagination, to seeing her on the periphery of someone's life as a flawed and often bumbling or fairly uninteresting figure was a weird and perhaps unwelcome experience. I tried to read another Murdoch novel afterwards but didn't feel properly immersed, I think because of reading this biography. Many parts of this book were interesting, and although I complained while reading it I was often mentioning passages to my friends. Read it if you already know a lot about Murdoch's life, it might be a useful corrective. But- against the author's wishes- much of the content felt perverse. Sections of a life brushed over too quickly, a personality reduced to a paperback. Left me feeling a bit gross.
August 29, 2018
Very good book.A nice engaging conversational style of writing,enjoyable to read the gossip about writers in their private life,the discussion of philosophy was a bit beyond me.but over all an engaging picture of a major writer
March 5, 2021
This has interesting moments, but there's as much about Wilson, as about Murdoch. After quite a lot of quite nasty stuff, a sugary last few paragraph is a bit disingenuous.
June 6, 2016
Sadly this book is more of a memoir of Wilson than a biography of Iris. Sadly he is into ranting and is taking out his grudges against JOB (Iris's hubby) and his ex wife and the world in general.
If you are looking for a bio of Iris then its not the right one. :(
If you are looking for a bio of Iris then its not the right one. :(
August 27, 2007
When I die, I want A.N. Wilson to write my biography.
July 19, 2009
So much better than John Bayley's Iris book, though JB was her husband and ANW only a friend. ANW brings her to life as JB never did, plus adds lots of scurrilous gossip, which I love.
September 10, 2013
Hated every word of it !!!! AN Wilson is a waste of space !!! And if he thinks he knew her, he has no clue what he is talking about !!! This is not a biography of Murdoch but a novel about her!
January 24, 2014
Malicious and meandering.
Want to Read
April 14, 2009stamped, catalogued
February 8, 2016
115 pages through and damn, this man is full of himself. no thanks.
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