In November 1993 proofs of Heidegger, to be dedicated to Stanley Rosen,1 arrived. After attempting to edit them, Iris decided that this book, on which she had been working for six years,2 was no good and should be abandoned. It argued that the two thinkers who most deeply disturbed philosophical thinking in the twentieth century were Wittgenstein and Heidegger – the latter the most influential, if not the greatest, philosopher of the century – and bemoaned the fact that so few were interested in both. The world of philosophy was divided into two kingdoms, each either unaware, or actively contemptuous, of the other. Iris liked the openness of the early Heidegger to the idea of the Holy, and feared the obfuscations of the later Heidegger. He lacked the concept of goodness, his philosophy remote from the concerns of common life. She continued to call for a new theology: ‘The sun of Good is darkened, our life has no horizon, the great multifarious ocean of world-being has gone, the waters are dried up.’ She noted the paradox that our world is terrible, also sacred and that ‘the “simplicity” of mystics, or of, in some instances, great artists, is an achievement related to a comprehensible visible human road which begins on our doorstep.’
Her theory of two kingdoms was soon validated. Philippa Foot, deputed to ask Iris for a contribution to a Festschrift in Phillipa’s honour, declined Iris’s offer of the script of a lecture on the Ontological Argument for the Existence of Good with the excuse that – even though Iris addressed Good (rather than God) – the flavour was too theological. No clearer instance of how far Iris had drifted from the Oxford analytic school could be desired. Nor could such a reminder be pain-free. At the University of Chicago in May 1994, by contrast, a conference was held on her philosophy: although the theologians publicly rebuked her for her atheism, such notable philosophers as Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond honoured her achievement.3 Another conference on her thinking would be held at the Philosophy Department at Brown University, Rhode Island in 2001.4 Iris had helped restore moral philosophy to the people, showing its importance as something other than a remote, enclosed speciality, an arcane ritual conducted by an elite within the academy. She wrote a recommendation for the cover of Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man (1979), which explores the continuities between humans and other animals.5 The influential psychoanalyst Nina Coltart wrote in Sloucking Towards Bethlehem (1993) that rarely had she seen the inner nature of human consciousness so well evoked as in The Black Prince.6 Monthly public discussions on diverse issues held at the Café Philo in the Francis Hotel in Bath are based on principles derived from Iris’s philosophy. In 1996 a Benedictine monk from Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick wrote to Chatto to say, ‘I would like to speak with her. More than that, I feel I should speak with her': the monks at Glenstal felt inspired by their understanding of some of her 1980s novels to reorganise their abbey. Soon a well-known cartoon series presenting in simplified form the age’s significant thinkers to the masses published The Beginner’s Guide to Iris Murdoch, to join Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Buddha.
Iris believed in a timeless human nature, and a perennial philosophy that might address it. Subversively unfashionable, this lends her best comedies their sense of the mythic. Yet of course all her thinking came out of a precise historical moment: the ‘Existentialist’ moment when God the Father departed the scene. She thought the disappearance or weakening of religion the most important thing that has happened to us over the past hundred years.7 Plato, who preceded Christ, succeeds him also for her. She wanted the idea of the holy to survive in a partly terrible world.
It is her strength that all her life she was alive to the world’s uncanny beauty too. In 1935, a schoolgirl, she had noted, ‘If a visitor from Mars were to see this free land …’. This interplanetary note, which showed her at a remarkable distance from the world we share, yet perceiving it with a surreal immediacy, marked her always. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat Morgan comments, ‘People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us: white campion, self-heal, bryony, vetch.’8 To a television interviewer, on the importance of her sense of the comic, she said that a visitor from another planet should be told that ‘this is the planet where we make jokes all the time, and in terrible situations, in prison and so on, we make jokes.’9 To John Haffenden: ‘I want there to be religion on this planet.’ To Harry Weinberger, of his gift to her of a Tibetan ritual dagger: ‘How nice objects are – I’m glad we live in a thingy world.’10
Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 1997: the simplicity of the child soon augmented the simplicity of the mystic. She copied out in a faltering hand many times, on lined paper, letter after unfinished and undated letter, beginning, ‘My dear, I am now going away for some time. I hope you will be well …’. At a party of Beryl Bainbridge’s in 1996 Iris put her arms around Bernice Rubens and said, ‘I used to write novels.’ ('Why weep for the end of life?’ Seneca is said to have asked: ‘The whole of it deserves our tears.')
Her journal entries reduce to a heart-rending simplicity.
1 August 1993. My friends, my friends, I say to the teacups and spoons. Such intense love for Puss – more and more.
1 July 1995, of a peaceful Thames swim. Indescribable. Holiness. Only one yacht quietly passed.
October 1995. The Cloud of Unknowing in the which [sic] a soul is oned with God.
November1995. Dorothy Thompson writes, Edward has died. (And Frank -)
February 1996. At last, and continuously, snow. Poor little birdies. Astonishing.
Among her final entries, on 8 June 1996. We swam in the Thames, in our usual secret place, for the first time this year. Ducks, geese, swans – a delightful man comes swimming in – we talked – no one else in the whole huge area. He swimmed by, swimmed off, conversation, beautiful. The area: immense field, river, another immense field, no one, no sign of the road on other side, cows wander. Poor cows!
She had always lived among and through her characters. Like the dying Balzac summoning Doctor Bianchon whom he had invented in the Comedie Humaine, she started to address her own creations. Her character Moy in The Green Knight had fretted over the fate of the rare black-footed ferret. When a friend wrote to say that it was alive and well in North Dakota, she noted, ‘I must tell Moy.’11 In June 1996 she wrote, ‘How I wish I could talk to Jackson’ – the hero of her confused final novel Jackson’s Dilemma, over-respectfully received the previous year. One of the stories Eva Lee had entranced young Iris with, sitting on the rocks in Dun Laoghaire harbour in the 1920s, went: ‘They went on and on and on, and then they came to a dark place. And then they went on and on again, and they came to another dark place’ – repeated ad infinitum. Iris liked this simple tale. The metaphor returned in December 1997 when she mentioned, with grim exactitude, a friend she had heard nothing from ‘since I began sailing away into the darkness’.
John was not ready until late to have ‘respite care’. From each part of Iris’s life friends rallied, gaining him brief intervals of relief. Julian Chrysostomides would drive from Reading to walk with her. Marjorie Boulton helped. Philippa gave her lunch every Friday: she observed how Iris brightened after a photographer arrived to take her picture. Frances Lloyd-Jones, John’s ex-pupil George Haines, Penny Levy, Audi Villers, among many, lent support. In May 1995 John and Iris came to stay with me and my partner Jim O’Neill in Cascob, Radnorshire, where I had a birthday party. The following summer they came for a week. It was the first of many visits. We all four went abroad, to stay in Philip and Psiche Hughes’s house in Provence in 1997, with Audi Villers on Lanzarote, and with Natasha Spender at Mas Saint-Jerôme in 1998. Philippa joined us twice in Wales.
Iris was in 1996 intensely depressed, lamenting her inability to write. ‘I don’t have a world,’ she said. Cascob offered distractions and a sense of family. She loved Radnorshire, hated leaving, swam often in our small lake, walked on the hills, watched birds, gardened, tended our dog. When she got anxious, we sang – Anglican hymns, Irish airs, folk-songs, ballads, French chansons, songs from the 1930s. ‘Singing rescues me,’ she remarked. Among the many gifts she loved John for – such as patient good humour, and courage – practicality did not rank high. She herself when well had planned ahead, organised trips, bought tickets. Cascob offered what Gloria Richardson aptly called ‘boy-scout’ help. She would kneel each visit on a meditation-cushion ('Just like Lady Jane Grey getting ready for execution,' John encouraged her) to have her hair washed, purring with pleasure when it was blow-dried. When, once, she screamed on being bathed, Jim screamed too, and got her to admit that she enjoyed screaming, at which point she laughed. He bought her, on two occasions, multiple sets of clothes from the British Legion shop in Knighton. She was thrilled. A fashion parade ensued.
‘How did this anguish start?’ she one day reasonably enquired. If her affliction has the effect of unmasking one, then gentleness and kindness were her kernel. Deserted by language, she found other ways of communicating love or gratitude: through physical affection – she would kiss the hands of friends – or by bowing with her hands together in prayer. Beauty of mind gone, that of spirit remained. The last visit happened when Michael Bayley drove Iris and John down after Christmas 1998, weeks before her death. Michael, John and I walked through the sessile oak-woods of Litton Hill, in hail, while Jim washed and tended to Iris and read to her from the newspapers. She said gently, in what was perhaps her last coherent sentence: ‘I wrote.’ Jim agreed. ‘Yes darling, you did.’
John was writing too, his ‘beautiful and terrible’12 Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. Those closest understood that this helped him. But few artists can have declined under such a glare of publicity. She attended the launch party in Blackwell’s, Oxford, looking both bereft and confused. Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara sees the Bodhisattva as willing to be, according to the various needs of the Other, like a bridge, a boat, or a road – whatever the situation requires: hundreds of letters from carers of Alzheimer’s victims (of whom there are 750,000 at the time of writing) showed appreciation for John’s breaking of a taboo. Others felt Iris was cast in this very public role of quixotic benefactress without her consent. Like the gentleman witnessing Lear’s madness, it was a ‘sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch/Past speaking of in a king!’
The old schoolhouse at Cascob abuts a graveyard. Iris had asked happily in 1995: ‘Do you know many of the dead people in your cemetery?’ Although she had in interview expressed a fear of death, she also maintained that dying should ideally be, not the significant Wagnerian last moment that Christianity can make of it, but an aspect of the daily attempt to perceive less selfishly, which she tied, in a godless world, to mysticism.13 What we term mystical experience is incommunicable. Here one kingdom is indeed deaf to the other. Mysticism has been called an experimental science of self-transformation codified only in the East, an inward Path towards direct cognition. The dictionary tells us that the mystic is the person who, believing in the apprehension of truths beyond understanding, seeks, by contemplation or self-surrender, identity with or absorption into the deity or Ultimate Reality. The mystic has opened her heart to find beyond words a direct way of knowing. Cousin Cleaver wrote from Belfast in 1997 encouraging Iris to return to Christ.14 But the goodness of the mystic, she believed, though often connected to the life of one of the great world religions, goes beyond it.* She thought this vision lacking in the West, and needed for its wholeness, and her Plato is a visionary, educated by wonder. A key moment in her oeuvre comes when the fool Effingham in The Unicorn, sinking in the bog, comes to understand that ‘with the death of the self a perfect love is born’. Mystic: one who has died and therefore fallen in love with the whole world.
Gloria Richardson researched and found a nursing home, The Vale in Oxford, where Iris, with a teddy-bear she named Jimbo,15 felt at home, and where she died on Monday, 8 February 1999, at four in the afternoon. On television that night news of her death preceded that of King Hussein of Jordan and the latest difficulties of President Clinton. Like many in the last stages of her affliction, she had declined food and drink for some time. Her brain was donated to Optima.† At her own request, none attended her cremation; nor the scattering of her ashes ‘North of J8 flower-bed’, as the undertakers vouchsafed, at Oxford Crematorium; and no memorial service followed. You could sense in the public tributes ‘a rather stunned realisation of her originality and energy and daring’.16 Philippa, whom Iris recognised days before her death, remarked, stricken, ‘She was the light of my life,’ adding, typically and judiciously: ‘A good number of people will feel this.’ Iris was – always – quite simply the best human being Philippa knew, free from malice, pettiness or self-absorption. The deceptively large sum (£1,803,491) the newspapers cited as Iris Murdoch’s estate included the values of the London flat and Oxford house, both in her name. She had never had much grip on her finances, giving plenty away, but much had accrued. Among thirty-two friends remembered in her will were four writers: Josephine Hart, Andrew Harvey, Peter J. Conradi, A.N. Wilson. By surviving one month, John became sole heir.
Clare Campbell once asked, ‘Do you really think that if you die on Sunday, the whole of reality goes on into Monday without you?’ Iris replied very consideringly and slowly, ‘Yes – I think – I – do.’ With that a shutter came down, and she wouldn’t go on. Her fiction remained. ‘Once I’ve finished a novel IT, not I is telling its story, and one hopes that it will – like some space-probe – go on beaming its message, its light, for some time …’17
* Iris’s second cousin Max Wright succinctly distinguishes between the expectations he felt a Brethren childhood inculcated, and the very different freedom from hope and fear for which Simone Weil’s mysticism stands (Told in Gath, pp.37–8).
† At the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, specialising in Alzheimer’s research.