CHAPTER 10: Cambridge
1 Women were first permitted to graduate from Cambridge only in 1948.
2 LTA, 9 January 1999.
3 He returned to act as clerk to a refugee council in Nablus; then, once Nablus was absorbed into Jordan, taught in Syria and, after gaining a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Gainesville, Florida, the American University in Beirut; then worked for Unesco, emigrating to the USA C1981.
4 'Her attention moved during the year from Hijab to Shah.’ Hijab, CWA, February 2000.
5 Peter Geach (ed.), Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, (London and New York, 1988).
6 J: 29 April 1968.
7 In her unpublished Heidegger book (1993) IM claimed that Wisdom (not Broad) was her supervisor. Broad was later attacked by Donald MacKinnon for believing that moral philosophy could be studied ‘in gentlemanly detachment from the agonising choices and dilemmas of the practical moralist': Christopher Stead, obituary of Donald MacKinnon, Guardian, 5 March 1994. This suggests one motive for IM’s move. Another was Wisdom’s greater closeness to Wittgenstein.
8 Letter to RQ, 14 October 1947.
9 Letter to PF, 24 April 1948.
10 Wasfi Hijab, CWA, 13 February 2000.
11 'Some Hitherto Unpublished Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Georg Henrik von Wright', Cambridge Review, vol. 104, no. 2273, 28 February 1983, p.57.
12 CWA.
13 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
14 Stephen Toulmin, LTA, February 2000; and interview with Wasfi Hijab, 13 February 2000.
15 Wasfi Hijab, e-mail to author, 9 March 2000.
16 Wasfi Hijab, e-mail to author, March 2000.
17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ed.? . McGuinness and G.H. von Wright, Cambridge Letters (Oxford, 1995), p.305.
18 6 November 1947.
19 So she told Sir John Vinelott in 1993. See also Jeffrey Meyers, Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers (Wisconsin, 2000).
20 29 January 1968.
21 In April 1948.
22 A holiday during which they were obliged once, for want of better accommodation, to spend the night in a ruined Wessex cottage; they were mainly friends, not lovers.
23 25 March 1977.
24 3 November 1947.
25 See P. Odifreddi’s celebratory Kreiseliana: About and Around Georg Kreisel (Wellesley, 1996), passim.
26 See JB, Iris, op. cit.
27 Odifreddi, Kreiseliana, op. cit., pp.12, 20.
28 Wasfi Hijab, CWA, 13 February 2000.
29 Kreisel, CWA, 4 March 1998.
30 So she vouchsafed to Sir John Vinelott when she gave a talk in 1993 at Gray’s Inn, of which he was then Treasurer.
31 B. MacGuiness, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig (1889–1921) (London, 1988), p.131.
32 Kreisel, CWA, 4 March 1998.
33 Ved Mehta, The Fly and the Flybottle (Harmondsworth, 1963), p.52.
34 J: 25 July 1947.
35 Peter Strawson, CWA, 11 March 1999. That IM continued in this belief, found strange by PF, is shown by Chapter 9 of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London, 1992), entitled ‘Wittgenstein and the Inner Life'. See also Fergus Kerr in Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 14, autumn 2000, passim.
36 J: 10 November 1947.
37 J: 4 November 1947.
38 J: 17 November 1947.
39 A letter to Michael Hamburger (at the Brotherton Library, Leeds University) makes this clear. On a draft for Book 2, Chapter 10 of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, IM wrote in the margin: ‘make more Kafkaesque'.
40 Sartre, pp.48–9.
41 J: 6 March 1948.
42 Wasfi Hijab in February 2000 remembered only IM’s excellent literary style, and had no recall of having walked out, an idea the cruelty of which distressed him.
43 J: 19 October 1947.
44 To PF, June 1947.
45 To PF, July 1947.
46 When IM was writing her monograph, Olivier Todd, who knew Sartre well through his first father-in-law Paul Nizan, asked Sartre – not known for anglophilia – whether he wished to meet IM. ‘No,’ he replied
47 Sartre (second edition, London, 1987), Chapter 1.
48 To RQ, 5 October 1947.
49 J: 1 March 1948. IM notes an asymmetry between first and third persons in both Sartre’s and Wittgenstein’s treatment of emotions.
50 Sartre (second edition), Introduction.
51 Hence her re-interpretation of Angst: the fear, not of freedom, but of unfreedom. See EM, passim
52 See ‘Existentialists and Mystics', EM, pp.221–34. The fact that the ‘mystical’ heroine Simone Weil is also a heroine to Existentialists, as IM notes (p. 157), complicates the dualism.
53 15 and 22 October. The venue is not named in IM’s journal notes. Milein Cosman attended a talk given by her in that church at around this time.
54 To RQ 9 July 1946.
55 J: 1947, no further date.
56 Sartre, pp.78–9.
57 Warnock, A Memoir, op. cit., p.93.
58 EM, p.59 et seq.
59 22 March 1950, in Reading archive. Senhouse wrote, as a translator of de Beauvoir, to thank IM for her broadcast The Existentialist Hero.
60 To RQ 27 February 1949.
61 23 March 1954.
62 25 July 1947.
63 13 May 1953.
64 e.g. to DH, October 1945.
65 J: 17 October 1947.
66 J: 24 October 1947.
67 'Communism': an address given at a Conference of Clergy and Youth Leaders in Carmarthen, 18 April 1950, under the auspices of the Provincial Youth Council of the Church of Wales.
68 Letter to PF, 24 April 1948.
69 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London, 1994), p.xvii.
70 Letter to LP, August 1946.
71 Todd read Moral Sciences at Corpus, Cambridge, 1947–49.
72 19 April 1956.
73 Foster, W.B. Yeats, Vol. I, op. cit., p.27.
74 Letter to DM, May 1964.
75 J: 12 December 1948.
76 J: 26 November 1958.
77 Daphne Williamson, a student of Anscombe’s, quoted Mrs Tinckham as sitting like a serene Buddha, wreathed in tobacco smoke and surrounded by cats: Anscombe didn’t have cats, but did have lots of children, went in for long silences, had a serene face, and sat in tutorials wreathed in smoke. Williamson had mentioned the resemblance to a fellow-student who shared the recognition.
78 Chapter 5.
79 Yorick’s wife Polly Smythies believed that Anscombe, devoutly Catholic, had fallen in love with IM.
80 Elizabeth Anscombe, CWA, 17 April 1998.
81 Undated letter, ‘August', probably 1959.
82 For a fuller account of such figures within the novels see Peter J. Conradi, ‘The Metaphysical Hostess', English Literary History, xlviii, summer 1981, pp.427–53.
83 Nuns and Soldiers, pp.60–1.
84 The Good Apprentice, p.50 (my emphasis).
85 Harriet in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, p.228.
86 Stuart in The Good Apprentice; interview with Pamela Callaghan, Weekend, BBC Radio 4, 18 April 1982; interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982.
87 Letter to DM.
CHAPTER 11: St Anne’s
1 To RQ, 22 October 1948.
2 As a flurry of anxious letters from IM shows.
3 On 22 July she writes, protesting too much, apologising for her ‘nerves of the day before. It will be pure joy to be so near to you. I feel less & less fear & more & more joy.’
4 MRDF, CWA, 9 February 1998.
5 Humphrey Carpenter, The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–96 (London, 1996), p.111 et seq.
6 See EM, pp.108–15.
7 Ibid, pp.151–3.
8 Ibid, p.115.
9 Anne Robson, LTA, June 1999.
10 Hart, Ask me no More, op. cit., Chapter 9.
11 Marjorie Reeves, CWA.
12 'Just to ask my eternally recurring question, whether you would like to be Principal of St Anne’s?’ IM, letter-card to Jane Lidderdale, date unreadable, but the stamp bears the head of Elizabeth II, hence 1953.
13 On 27 January 1953.
14 Janet Adam Smith, telephone CWA, January 1998.
15 This view was shared by JB and Marjorie Reeves – that Plumer was strict, disliking all liaisons, while Lady Ogilvie was more liberal.
16 Active in education, wife to Vice Chancellor of Belfast University and to Principal of Jesus College. Widowed C1948.
17 See JB, Iris, op. cit., passim. Also Mary Warnock, LTA, 4 July 1999, confirming this adoration, which Jenifer Hart and Rachel Trickett attested.
18 e.g. Anne Brumfitt.
19 IM changed Ann Venables’s life in 1948. Rejected by Lady Margaret Hall for medicine, and wanting to be a psychologist, IM took her in to do PPE, changing to PPP in her second year. IM started probing, wanting to know what made her ‘tick'. Venables remembers IM as an excellent moral tutor, and very easy to talk to. IM went to her wedding.
20 Learning of this, IM invited Levinson for a drink; friendship followed.
21 Anne Robson, CWA. Robson’s friend Josephine Boulding crossed the Parks in Trinity term 1952, so the lover was almost certainly FBS.
22 Julian Chrysostomides.
23 From 58 Park Town (end of 1951 to 1952), King Edward Street, June 1953. A letter of 10 January 1950 to MB mentions another ‘impending arise de logement'. And to RQ, 20 January 1950: address given as Musgrave House, St Anne’s, as ‘I’ll be leaving Museum Rd.'.
24 Katrin Fitzherbert, True to Both my Selves (London, 1997), p.281.
25 Other ‘Dancing Economist’ parties were given by Teddy Hall, subsequently Professor of Archaeology who studied the Turin shroud; by Dick Sargent, wealthy Worcester economist; and by Nicholas (finance correspondent of Spectator) and Audrey Davenport. Asa Briggs, CWA.
26 Hart, Ask me no More, op. cit., p.147.
27 Ian Little, CWA, 27 April 1998.
28 Warnock, A Memoir, op. cit., p.159.
29 Asa Briggs, CWA, 13 March 1998.
30 Dan Davin, Closing Times (London, 1975), P.108.
31 The two had not met in 1944 when the novel appeared. See Maclaren-Ross, Memoirs of the Forties, op. cit., p.191.
32 Wendy Campbell-Purdie and Fenner Brockway, Women Against the Desert, with Forewords by IM and Lord Boyd Orr (London, 1967), pp.11–13.
33 For reading Starkie’s Rimbaud; see J: 10 November 1947.
34 Davin, Closing Times, op. cit., p.65.
35 Rosemary Cramp (who did wear gloves), CWA.
36 Mary Douglas saw her thus in about 1948. CWA, 11 February 2000
37 Mehta, The Fly and the Flybottle, op. cit., p.50.
38 Potnia dendropuleia, potnia theeron.
39 So Elizabeth Sewell recalls IM telling her; the Greek wording suggests Artemis.
40 22 October 1948.
41 IM to RQ, 27 February 1949.
42 e.g to Betsy Barnard, Rosemary Warhurst, Mother Grant.
43 Jennifer Dawson, obituary in The Ship (year-book of the St Anne’s College Association of Senior Members), 1999.
44 Lively was interviewed by IM, who asked, ‘What were you reading on the train here?’ ('Hemingway, fortunately!') but was never taught by her.
45 See also discussion between IM and Mother Grant written into J 1992–96, p.9, dated 30 November, probably 1948.
46 Thus her 1993 journal, p.11. And Mother Grant, telephone CWA, 21 June 1999.
47 Mother Grant, LTA, 1998.
48 Echoed by Harry Weinberger, May 2000.
49 Letter to JB, 20 July 1999.
50 Warnock, A Memoir, op cit., p.19.
51 Ibid, Chapter 2.
52 In The Sovereignty of Good.
53 Stuart Hampshire, CWA, 18 March 1998.
54 IM reviewed Gellner’s Words and Things in the Observer, 29 November 1959. See Mehta, The Fly and the Flybottle, op. cit., Chapter 1.
55 Ryle in 1948 had instituted a popular and important new postgraduate degree in philosophy, the B. Phil.
56 Williams acknowledges IM as a Wittgensteinian influence in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Collins, 1985), Chapter 8, n5
57 Norman Birnbaum in ‘Up or Down to Oxford', in The Reading Room, 3rd issue (New York, 2001), pp. 79–94, recounts how Berlin attended throughout spring 1962 a seminar hostile to Berlin’s position, co-convened by IM and Birnbaum on the Marxist concept of alienation. Birnbaum’s assertions therein that IM was on the editorial body of New Left Review have proven as unfounded as his belief that Julian Mitchell co-edited Universities and Left Review. See also Birnbaum’s letter in New York Times, 18 December 2001, and PJC’s reply, 13 January 2002.
58 Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Boston, 1991), Chapter 11.
59 Mark Platts, Ways of Meaning (London, 1979), p.262, n6.
60 John McDowell, LTA, and Mind, Value and Reality (Harvard, 1999).
61 Michael Dummett felt Ryle would speak dismissively and was a source of narrowness, a view with which not all concur.
62 Ryle, interested in German phenomenology in the 1920s, had reviewed it when it first appeared.
63 S. Aldwinckle, Christ’s Shadow in Plato’s Cave: A Meditation on the Substance of Love (Amate Press, Oxford, 1990), Foreword by IM.
64 On 17 November 1950. IM’s paper does not appear to have survived.
65 To David Pears, CWA, 8 July 1998.
66 Rev. Professor Christopher Stead, LTA, 11 March 1999.
67 David Pears, CWA, 8 July 1998. Compare IM’s journal reference: ‘At a wonderful St. Antony’s ox-roasting in June 1953, [Ayer] was short and rude to me as usual. Then stared at me a lot as we danced. I felt his great sexual magnetism.’
68 See also her essays ‘Thinking and Language', ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ and ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ (EM, pp.31–76).
69 David Pears, CWA, 8 July 1998.
70 Dennis Nineham, CWA.
71 Ibid.
72 To Dennis Nineham.
73 Basil Mitchell, in Philosophers who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of Eleven Leading Thinkers, ed. J.K Clark (Intervarsity Press, 1993), recalled her presence: p.42.
74 Basil Mitchell confirms that this was a meeting of the Metaphysicals, these being all core members; CWA, 23 June 1999.
75 The group went on until Basil Mitchell’s retirement in 1984. John Lucas, visiting Mitchell in June 1999, came up in Michaelmas 1953 to a Fellowship at Merton and confirms that IM was present at at least one meeting – so it was probably in late 1953 or early 1954 that she left.
76 Clark, Philosophers who Believe, op. cit., p.43.
77 Robin Waterfield, in an introduction to the Delos Press’s 1989 edition of IM’s ‘The Existentialist Political Myth', says that this was the talk IM gave for the Socratic Club during Hilary term 1952, her respondent being Dr Eric Mascall.
78 Aldwinckle, Christ’s Shadow in Plato’s Cave, op. cit., p.10.
79 In Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Minneapolis, 1981), p.x, Anscombe gives a milder account of this famous confrontation.
80 As Ryle pointed out; see Mitchell in Clark, Philosophers who Believe, op. cit., p.2.
81 November 1942.
82 Compare Julian Chrysostomides’s Professor Joan Hussey, who spoke around 1956 of IM’s simplicity and unspoiltness, and how rare both are, observing something IM was never to lose.
83 Frances Partridge, Memories (London, 1981), p.87.
84 To RQ, 17 November 1949.
85 Sources: John Simopoulos, CWA; and J.
86 Jean Floud, CWA, 16 March 1999: Lichtheim (C1913–73) killed himself ‘after feeling inferior to Habermas with whom he had been staying'.
87 Later married to the philosopher Sarah Waterlow, he recalled IM with great affection in two telephone calls in 1999.
88 LP recalled that IM and Hal were at some point engaged.
89 J: 30 June 1954: ‘I am terribly to blame for all this duplicity. (I feel this when it is being unsuccessful.)’
90 Hart, Ask me no More, op. cit., p.126; and CWA.
91 Jennifer Dawson’s recollection of tutorials in The Ship, op. cit.
92 Anthony Quinton, CWA.
93 Robson’s future wife Anne Moses, approaching his room in the back quad at Lincoln when he had just received IM’s letter breaking off the relationship, heard what she thought was quarrelling and shouting. Passionately angry, Robson explained to her that he and IM had been seriously committed to each other, but that IM had been unfaithful to him with ‘a Hungarian’ who had just died (see Chapter 12). He had written asking her to return to him, but had been refused.
94 A Severed Head, Chapter 19.
95 J: November 1953.
96 Momigliano’s diary notes, in Italian, were returned to IM after his death by his wife.
97 J: 18 January 1953.
98 Possible misrecall: DH’s letter jilting her arrived on 18 February 1946.
99 See Graham Lord, Just the One: The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard, 1932–97 (London, 1997), pp.86, 329
CHAPTER 12: Franz Baermann Steiner
1 Postcard to her parents, probably 20 September 1951.
2 Letter to DH; and letter from Arnaldo Momigliano.
3 Oddly enough Milein Cosman, who drew IM c1940, believes she may have sketched FBS at Somerville on some open occasion in 1941, only later learning his identity.
4 He wrote to Isabella von Miller-Aichholz on 11 February 1951, and to EC on 2 December 1951, that he still lived in ‘enforced, degrading solitude'.
5 Copied by IM into J, January 1994, with no indication when this letter was written to her.
6 Possibly he and IM had been introduced through the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt, who had also studied English under Leavis and who certainly by 1966, if not before, knew Wallace Robson (both are shown serving on the board of the Oxford Review in that year). See also Srinivas in Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilisation: Franz Baermann Steiner, Selected Writings, Vol. II, ed. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon (Oxford and New York, 1999).
7 Summers, ‘The Lost Loves of Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
8 Taboo, Truth and Religion: Franz Baermann Steiner, Selected Writings Vol. I, ed. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon (Oxford and New York, 1999),? .40.
9 As Adler saw.
10 Peter Rickman of City University, who knew FBS’s parents in Prague, the father with a limp and a dry sardonic wit, recalled that FBS before 1943 was sexually highly promiscuous. CWA, 11 February 2000.
11 David Wright, ‘Franz Steiner Remembered'.
12 Mary Douglas, CWA, 11 February 2000. Leach’s tale is told in his preface to Political Systems of Highland Burma (Athlone, 1971).
13 Srinivas’s journal, 15 June 1945.
14 Michael Hamburger, A Mug’s Game: Intermittent Memoirs (London, 1975), p.187.
15 Taboo (London, 1956), with a preface by E.E. Evans-Pritchard.
16 Helga Mackie, CWA.
17 Mary Douglas, in ‘Franz Baermann Steiner Celebrated: From Prague Poet to Oxford Anthropologist, a Workshop', at the Institute of Germanic Studies, London, 11 February 2000.
18 On 19 March 1939.
19 The friend was Anne Hamburger, wife of the poet Michael.
20 A later journal vouchsafes this. Also Momigliano’s diary for August 1952 where he is jealous when IM, in Rome with him, writes to FBS in Spain.
21 See Chapter 11.
22 They were walking also with the psychiatrist Paul Senft, who later worked with R.D. Laing and with Foucault.
23 This must be a first draft, since the second was started only on 18 July 1952, three months before FBS’s return.
24 This was also six days after his birthday.
25 From 18 October until 18 November 1952.
26 FBS regarded the picture of Balogh as an ill omen. IM’s journal, by contrast, makes her sound somewhat recovered. Sitting with Nickie Kaldor at the Mill pub in Cambridge and looking at the ducks in October 1947, she recorded a sudden liberation. On 11 February 1952, a day full of activity, ‘in a crazy state of mind’ IM had gone ‘chez the Alohgs (why have I forgotten how to spell Thomas’s name?)’ to pick his wife Pen up to go to a psychoanalytic group. ‘It was off – stayed & talked with Pen and Thomas till 9.30, indifferently. T. took me back in the car. No communication. Sad. I took his hand as I got out. No response.’
27 Jeremy Adler however, in ‘Franz Baermann Steiner Celebrated', op. cit., reported a letter from FBS to EC envisaging in detail the consequences of FBS’s marrying ‘out'.
28 ‘Junges Weib in Spiegel’ and FBS’s ‘Bild einer Heimkehr'.
29 Jeremy Adler, CWA, 11 September 1997
30 In London, two hours before his departure from England, they had bought a delightful rattle on which little birds were moving to and fro. The toy rattled away as they walked to a restaurant, en route to the station. ‘It was if there were three of us, also as if we had been given an omen and a fertility symbol. Our present to this Spanish child, which was a stranger to us, made us feel married, as we had never felt before. And now the child is dead’ (FBS’s journal, 11 November 1952).
31 Also: ‘What is Canetti-like in me, is how again and again, he transforms himself into the beloved. As with Canetti, no love without transformation’ (FBS’s journal, 12 November 1952).
32 Compare ‘A highly interesting conversation [not with IM] about Jewish mysticism and Chassiduth [and the] absolute necessity of bringing together non-gnostic 31 elements of Jewish mysticism …’ (FBS’s journal).
33 One Dr Braun.
34 Wilfred Evill’s paintings at 39 Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, London.
35 J: 1994. See also letter to Gunther Adler: ‘I did not think he would die, I could not believe it.’
36 So Heinz Schenk, who was present, recalled her to his wife Hazel.
37 David Pocock to Jeremy Adler, 13 June 1997.
38 16 December 1952.
39 John Jones, LTA, 8 July 1999.
40 See footnote, p.280.
41 FBS’s name, like FT’s, recurs in her journals. She noted in June 1953 how he had stowed notes of facts in piles of cigarette boxes. Around 1985 she transcribed and wrote his name on a story from Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (?.350).
42 About a hundred unpublished typewritten poems dating from around 1959 bear the inscription in IM’s hand: ‘To those for whom these poems were written they are now dedicated'. Only on ‘Invocation’ – i.e. a poem to commemorate the dead – are any initials inscribed in pen by IM, to indicate identity: WFT [William Frank Thompson] and FBS. ‘The cenotaph of ceremonious death/With images of tenderness I’ll strew'.
43 FBS, Fluchtvergnüglichkeit: feststellungen und versuche, eine Auswahl von M. Hermann-Röttgen (Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 129–38. A propos solipsism, EC complained that FBS cared more about the publication of his poetry than about the dead and dying in the Blitz.
44 IM travelled from London to Oxford to see Waissman, who spoke precisely and volubly of the Vienna circle, then showed her Tommy’s room, his yacht, and photographs. She stayed with him till Karl Popper came later.
45 Byron, Don Juan III, stanza viii.
46 p.51.
47 IM, letter to Sue Summers, 12 April 1988.
48 In The Flight from the Enchanter, The Nice and the Good, A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Jeremy Adler argues that Ludens in The Message to the Planet also owes something to FBS: Taboo, Truth and Religion, op. cit., pp.49, 90.
49 'A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989.
50 Mary Douglas, in ‘Franz Baermann Steiner Celebrated', op. cit.
51 FBS: Orientpolitik, op. cit., p.74.
CHAPTER 13: Conversations with a Prince
1 IM to Michael Hamburger, C1993–94. EC invited FBS on 5 July 1952 to greet Iris specially on his behalf (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Schiller Nationalmuseum, Marbach). IM wrote formally to EC – signing both her names – proposing a meeting in Paris, undated but possibly August/September 1952, when her journals circumstantially suggest she may have been there. On 4 June 1952 she wrote to RQ, who became a friend of EC, mentioning her interest in the thinking of ‘Canetti, Kojève, Hegel'.
2 EC’s 1993 account (see Chapter 20) differs: he saw her to Finchley Road Underground station; a long, poetical and probably partly fictitious account follows.
3 IM acknowledged to JB having been EC’s lover until late 1955.
4 His name was excised by IM c1990.
5 JB, ‘Canetti and Power', London Review of Books, 17 December 1981–20 January 1982, pp.65–7.
6 Jeremy Adler, CWA, 11 September 1997.
7 Rathleen Raine, Autobiographies (London, 1991), p.297.
8 Kathleen Raine, CWA, 1 January 1998.
9 Honor Frost, CWA, 16 February 1998.
10 See Jeremy Adler on her novel Die Gelbestrasse, in the European, 22–24 June 1990, pp.4–5; and Julian Preece, ‘The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Magd-Canetti: On the Psychology of Subservience', in Modern Austrian Literature, vol. 28, no. 2, 1995,? ?.53–70.
11 Born 3 November 1916, in a taxi: Susie Ovadia (née Benedikt), LTA, 19 February 1998.
12 Benedikt (1882–1973) was the son of Moriz.
13 To her parents from Downshire Hill, November 29, no year but probably 1943.
14 The Centre Pompidou catalogue for its exhibition on EC gives the date of that affair as 1933; friends recall that it was ‘passionate'.
15 Judging from testimony from Marie-Louise’s close friend Milein Cosman, and from Friedl’s sister Susie. EC, however, learnt the news of Friedl’s death from phoning Marie-Louise: IM’s J, 12 April 1953: ‘He learned the news at Monveith, phoning Marie Louise'.
16 Gardiner had gone to Fingest to give birth to her son by J.D. Bernai.
17 Allan Forbes, telephone CWA, 21 September 1999; LTA, 23 December 1999.
18 Anne Hamburger, CWA.
19 Veza Canetti to Gwenda David and Kathleen Raine; and probably to others.
20 Published in America as Tower of Babel
21 Sontag was told by two people in Stockholm, one a publisher, the second a writer who went on to become a member of the Swedish Academy, that her essay ‘Mind as Passion’ (New York Review of Books, 25 September 1980, pp.47–52) was ‘most influential’ in putting EC at the top of the list for the 1981 Nobel Prize (fax to author, dated December 1998, from Sontag’s assistant Benedict Yeoman). Sontag and EC never met.
22 See EC, The Play of the Eyes, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York, 1986), p.228.
23 EC, Memoirs (New York, 1999), p.744.
24 Ibid.
25 e.g. John Simoupolos, Pierre Riches (who thought him a ‘terrible man, very very very difficult … very violent'), Julian Chrysostomides. EC’s was, in December 1998, the last name IM recognised.
26 So Jeremy Adler attests he said in his Büchner Prize speech. The theme runs throughout his writings.
27 Secretary of the Anthropological institute, Phyllis Puckle, Institute Secretary to Professor Srinivas. See FBS: Orientpolitik, op. cit., p.10.
28 In his final book, Aufzeichnungen (Munich, 1992–93), pp. 17–24.
29 Among others Hans Keller and Milein Cosman-Keller in the 1950s, and his publisher Michael Krüger as recently as the 1990s. Krüger, LTA, 19 September 1997: ‘Whenever I talked to [EC] he came back to IM, and especially the love-affair between IM and Franz Steiner was a subject that interested him until his last days.’
30 IM’s journals give, by contrast, a day-by-day account of how, after 28 November, she and EC became close over a fortnight.
31 Summers, ‘The Lost Loves of Iris Murdoch', op. cit., passim.
32 Louis Dumont, letter to Richard Fardon, 9 May 1997.
33 The Times, 6 December 1952.
34 Secret History: Killer Fog, Channel 4 TV, September 1999.
35 Carol Graham-Harrison, CWA.
36 These are inferences based on the initials IM uses (consistently) in her journals.
37 EC, Aufzeichnungen, op. cit., passim.
38 'A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989.
39 M. Atze (ed.), Ortlose Botschaft: Der Freundekreis H.G. Adler, Elias Canetti und Franz Baermann Steiner im englischen exil, Marbacher Magazin, no. 84, 1998, p.15, for the exhibition in the Schiller Nationalmuseum, Marbach, September-November 1988.
40 Jeremy Adler, John Simopoulos, Allan Forbes, CWA, LTA.
41 Pamela Myers, CWA, 11 May 1998; Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham, LTA, January 1998.
42 EC, Notes from Hampstead,1954–71 (New York, 1998), p.8.
43 See Atze, Ortlose Botschaft, op. cit. EC replied to only one in three of FBS’s letters, Veza sometimes writing in his stead.
44 Raine, Autobiographies, op. cit. Also letters from Raine and CWA, 1 January 1998.
45 Her husband Constant Huntingdon was head of the publishing company Putnams. EC flirted with their daughter Alfreda Urquhart by moving his sponge closer to hers in the bathroom each day. He was angered when Rudi Nassauer used the story in his novel containing a portrait of EC, The Cuckoo.
46 Allan Forbes, LTA, 23 December 1999.
47 Graham-Harrisons, CWA, 31 December 1997.
48 See Raine, Autobiographies, op. cit., and Douglas Botting, Gavin Maxwell: A Life (London, 1993).
49 Raine, Autobiographies, op. cit., p.298.
50 Gwenda David, CWA.
51 Susie Ovadia, LTA, 11 February 1998.
52 See Botting, Gavin Maxwell, op. cit., passim.
53 To Milein Cosman he spoke insultingly of his patron-mistress of fifty years Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and of his neighbour Gwenda David.
54 To Michael Hamburger, C1994: ‘I am sad to hear of Canetti being unpleasant to him (hurtful jokes).’
55 See also Chapter 18.
56 During her 1982 Gifford lectures IM named the ancient Greeks as the only people free from sado-masochism.
57 Like a character in Henry James. JB, ‘Canetti and Power', op. cit., PP.5–7.
58 Atze, Ortlose Botschaft, op. cit.
59 Hymning EC’s warm heart, nobility, and humanity: see Chapter 12.
60 Sebastian Haffner, New York Review of Books, 20 November 1997, p.20.
61 Completed 1948, published 1955.
62 See FBS: Taboo, Truth and Religion, op. cit.
63 Carol Graham-Harrison, English translator of Crowds and Power, CWA, 31 December 1997.
64 Mary Douglas, LTA; and Sontag, ‘Mind as Passion', op. cit.
65 As Friedl’s sister pointed out, CWA, April 1998.
66 Source: Honor Frost. Carol Graham-Harrison says (CWA, 6 July 1999) this is almost certainly apocryphal: EC didn’t like to travel, and they would certainly have heard via either EC or Veza. Milein Cosman (CWA, 8 July 1999), who met EC only in 1950, says it is ‘certainly a fantasy'. EC spoke much to Cosman’s husband Hans Keller, who had so terrible a time after the Anschluss. Given that EC told them the story of his Nobel Prize three times, he would certainly have mentioned the Auschwitz trip to them.
67 EC, Notes from Hampstead, op. cit., pp.8–9.
68 Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York, 1961), p.316.
69 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 1880–1939 (London, 1992)’? ?.29–31.
70 Susie Ovadia, CWA: ‘Perhaps the strict, severe, ridiculous order of this flat evidenced disorder elsewhere.’
71 e.g. Bernice Rubens, Susie Ovadia.
72 Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith (London, 1988), pp. 172–3, points out Friedl’s likeness to the young Simone Signoret, whom IM also resembled.
73 3 May 1953.
74 'I have still not conquered death,’ EC remarked to Jeremy Adler in the 1990s, his eyes bright with insanity.
75 Both Allan Forbes and Susie Ovadia confirm that neither island was within their gift.
76 Susie kept a journal in 1953.
77 See e.g. review of Friedl’s The Dreams, Listener, 9 February 1950.
78 Gotheburg diary, dated 8 May only, probably 1951.
79 To Gwenda David, walking in Well Walk one day; also to Margaret Gardiner. Susie does not recall Friedl or anyone else mentioning EC’s physical or verbal brutality: LTA, 27 August 1998.
80 Evidence for the termination of her pregnancy by Goldman at EC’s behest comes independently from three different sources: Friedl’s first cousin Margaret Gardiner, living in London; Friedl’s sister Susie in Paris; and Friedl’s ex-lover Allan Forbes in Boston.
81 Allan Forbes, LTA, November 1998.
82 To Bernice Rubens. EC boasted to Forbes that he had never slept with Veza since they married. This boast was probably false – and Veza, though in love with EC’s brother Georges, would not, Rubens believed, have ‘wandered'. Forbes did not think the story that EC ordained Veza’s abortions improbable.
83 Conceivably based on the strongly left-wing and feminist weekly review Time and Tide (1920–77).
84 The Flight from the Enchanter, p. 173.
85 Allan Forbes, LTA, 23 December 1999; EC was ‘no Andre Gide'.
86 EC, Aufzeichnungen, op. cit., p.20.
87 J: February 1953.
88 One sole exception: when she thought she had lost her purse and borrowed £10 from Norah Smallwood in January 1968.
89 He also admitted that he stole his brother Georges’s letters to Veza to see what they were ‘plotting’ about his visit to Paris.
90 A view of EC with which Adler’s son Jeremy concurred.
91 W.H. Auden, ‘I September 1939'.
92 Hartley, Hearts Undefeated, op. cit., p.82.
93 J: 6 October 1953.
94 Olivier Todd, CWA, 13 September 2000.
95 Under the Net, p.31 (my emphasis).
96 Susan Gardiner, CWA, 31 January 1999.
97 EM, p.21.
98 The portrait now hangs in the Principal’s dining-room. Von Motesiczky wrote to Canetti that IM ‘really has a very good face if one understands that she is a man and not a woman'. Ines Schlenker, ‘Painting the Author: The Portrait of Iris Murdoch by Marie-Louise von Motesizky', IM Newsletter, no. 15, pp.1–4.
99 John Wain the novelist; Lyne was Assistant Secretary to the Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies and had arranged a day-school on the contemporary literary scene.
100 Letter from R. Lyne to JB, 20 September 1998.
101 JB, Ms and the Friends: A Year of Memories (London, 1999), p.194.
CHAPTER 14: An Ideal Co-Child
1 Summers, ‘The Lost Loves of Iris Murdoch', op. cit.; also JB, Iris, op. cit., passim.
2 J: 12 November 1952.
3 J: 27 January 1990; the date of Noel Martin’s letter is 27 October 1942.
4 A character in Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay.
5 See Warnock, A Memoir, op. cit., p.6o.
6 Peter Strawson, CWA.
7 Barry Pink, a friend from Cambridge in 0934, CWA, 10 August 1998; also Peter Daniel, CWA, March 1998.
8 Polly Smythies, CWA, January 1998; Peter Daniel explains that they asked him trick questions.
9 Reading University archive, 1 December 1977.
10 The Changing World, no. 1, summer 1947, pp.72–81. Yorick’s lecture-notes, together with those of Rush Rhees and James Taylor, were used in L. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Beliefs (1970) and in Wittgenstein’s Foundations of Mathematics (1970).
11 Clive Donner, ‘I once met Iris Murdoch', The Oldie, September 1999,? .15.
12 See Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, op. cit., passim.
13 e.g. CWA, 1983.
14 IM so identified the black jazz-singer in her unpublished Heidegger.
15 To RQ, 28 June 1954.
16 J: 12 July 1947.
17 Under the Net, Chapter 2.
18 Source: Arnaldo Momigliano, letter to IM.
19 To RQ 28 June 1954.
20 Thus Chatto’s records assert, though it is always possible an error has crept in.
21 The Right from the Enchanter, p.221.
22 Ibid, p.242.
23 In his doctorate, extracts from which are published in FBS: Orientpolitik, op. cit.
24 e.g. IM to Michael Hamburger, 1993–94: ‘Canetti is not anywhere in my novels by the way! I would not want to “copy” people, I invent them.’ Brotherton Library, Leeds University.
25 EC, The Human Province (London, 1986) pp.32 et seq.
26 Graham-Harrisons, CWA, 31 December 1998.
27 Allan Forbes ate two meals a day during this Moroccan trip with EC, and finds it unimaginable that EC would not have mentioned this episode. He now wonders whether it was an invention, albeit a brilliant and suggestive one.
28 EC, Memoirs, op. cit., pp.551–77.
29 As all three Cecil children recall, CWA, 20 March 2000.
30 To DM, probably mid-1960s.
31 Kenneth Robinson, CWA.
32 IM, ‘What I See in Cinema', British Vogue, 112.8, August 1956, pp.98–9; reprinted in Vogue Bedside Book, II (London, 1986), pp. 186–7.
33 JB, CWA, 1996.
34 As David Cecil pointed out to Paul Binding.
35 Under the Net, p.157.
36 Earlier JB wondered whether Iris had bought at Elliston & Clavell on the Cornmarket a bright-blue fine linen top. The dress fits the recollections of others.
37 Later Robinson, reading French at St Anne’s 1952–55.
38 Daily Telegraph, 25 July 1998, p.16.
39 Ibid.
40 From a letter by Keats.
41 Daily Telegraph, 25 July 1998, p.16.
42 These funded his late novel George’s Lair.
43 A.N. Wilson, review of JB, Iris, op. cit., ‘The True Story of how He Finally Captured Her', Literary Review, September 1998.
44 Despite JB’s later jest (in Iris and the Friends, op. cit.) that he had lived for forty-three years with the most intelligent woman in England and never had a serious conversation with her. See also Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, op. cit., passim.
45 JB, ‘Character and Consciousness', New Literary History, v, winter 1974, pp.225–35.
46 John Goode, ‘Character and Henry James', New Left Review, 40, 1966, PP.55–75.
47 W.H. Auden, Poems 1930 (London, 1930).
48 JB, The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolution (London, 1956), p.69.
CHAPTER 15: Cedar Lodge
1 To DM, undated, 1964.
2 To Vera Crane, 23 November 1957.
3 In March 1958 IM inherited £3,374 in shares from a wealthy great-uncle, William Hughes Murdoch, a Liverpool doctor.
4 JB disputes whether the electric fire was there for long. It was independently spoken of by the present owners of Cedar Lodge, July 1999, and by others.
5 To e.g. Vera Crane in June 1971, a six-page letter about nurseries and plants; as to others.
6 Sunday Times, 5 May 1957.
7 Derwent May, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Best Seller in the Swim', Observer, 26 November 1978.
8 See Jeremy Lewis, Kindred Spirits: Adrift in Literary London (London, 1995), Chapter 7, ‘King William IV Street'.
9 Norah Smallwood to IM, 6 March 1975.
10 R. Todd, Encounters with Iris Murdoch, op. cit., p.17.
11 Gwenda David to Marshall Best, 19 January 1954 (Viking New York archives).
12 IM to Marshall Best, 27 September 1956.
13 IM to Norah Smallwood, 2 December 1963.
14 They were helped by the Novice Mistress of the Community of the Epiphany in Truro, the Anglican sisterhood where they sometimes stayed; the name they chose to go by – Epiphany Philosophers – derived from the name of the sisterhood. At the time The Bell was being written they met in a lovely tower-mill off the Norfolk coast (with which Iris had nothing to do), discussing, sharing chores, following the Offices. The young physicist Ted Bastian, Richard Braithwaite and Dorothy Emmet lived together with some students from 1966. Dorothy Emmet, CWA.
15 Iris’s undated letter could also conceivably refer to Sister Marian’s acceptance into the Catholic faith in 1952.
16 Her journal makes no reference to staying, but Sister Marian points out that the Mass Iris attended was in the small hours: LTA.
17 EM, pp. 171–86.
18 The Bell, p.99.
19 New Statesman, 15 November 1958; Spectator, 7 November 1958; The Times, 6 November 1958; 7X5, 7 November 1958.
20 Letters to MB and to DM, 1964. Also John Grigg, CWA.
21 To Vera Crane, 23 November 1957.
22 Meyers, Privileged Moments, op. cit.
23 His salary in 1950 a ‘personal scale’ of £1,200-£1,500.
24 Sir Lawrence Airey, CWA, 11 December 1997.
25 See Chapter 1.
26 Gill Davie, ‘I Should Hate to be Alive and not Writing a Novel: Iris Murdoch on her Work', Woman’s Journal, October 1975, pp.64–5.
27 May, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Best Seller in the Swim', op. cit.
28 Held at Iowa University.
29 See Frank Baldanza, ‘The Manuscript of Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head', in Journal of Modern Literature, February 1973, pp.75–90 for an excellent account of her working methods.
30 JB, Iris, op. cit., p.38. His passage appears on p.10 of The Bell.
31 A Severed Head, p.14.
32 To Norah Smallwood, C1964. She contrasts it with An Unofficial Rose, ‘a public object in the traditional sense'.
33 John Updike’s review of this book, New Yorker, 1 October 2001.
34 Peter Green, ‘Bomb in a Bloomsbury Eden', Daily Telegraph, 16 June 1961; and Ronald Bryden, ‘marvellously and seriously funny', in ‘Phenomenon', Spectator, 16 June 1961.
35 Dan Jacobson, ‘Farce, Totem and Taboo', New Statesman, 16 June 1961; Anonymous, ‘Leisured Philanderings', TLS, 16 June 1961; Philip Toynbee, ‘Too Fruity to be True', Observer, 18 June 1961; Barbara Everett, Critical Quarterly, autumn 1961, pp.270–1; Rebecca West, review of An Unofficial Rose, Sunday Telegraph, 10 June 1962.
CHAPTER 16: Island of Spells
1 He took her round a Dorset printing works for Bruno’s Dream; IM to Rachel Fenner, 3 September 1967.
2 To LP, 6 October 1968.
3 1887–1974.
4 1889–1974.
5 Interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982.
6 Meyers, Privileged Moments, op. cit., p.62.
7 See Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (London, 1987), pp.116–17.
8 e.g. Dennis Nineham, Vera Crane.
9 A point I owe to Victoria Glendinning, CWA, 31 September 2000.
10 To Norah Smallwood, C1964, she also wrote of her earlier fear that the ‘personal’ nature of A Severed Head might surprise and displease readers. See Chapter 15.
11 EM, p.283.
12 Ibid, pp.271–2.
13 IM, ‘Notes on my relations with my characters', unpublished, C1967.
14 11 February 1954.
15 Susan Sontag saw Fox, by contrast, as merely ‘effortlessly superior’ to the English. See Sontag, ‘Mind as Passion', op. cit.
16 EC, The Human Province, op. cit, P.75.
17 Marjorie Locke (Sister Ann Teresa), CWA, June 1998.
18 An estimate: Locke had burnt them. CWA, June 1998
19 Angus Wilson, ‘Who Cares?', Guardian, 8 June 1962, p.5. ‘The strange things that happen in Pelham Crescent!’ wrote IM in RW’s copy of A Severed Head: the Wollheims then lived in that street, where Palmer has incestuous relations with his sister. Chapter 18, below, suggests Wilson was partly right that IM now moved in new social worlds.
20 Dan Davin, Closing Times, op. cit., p.61.
21 A Chatto & Windus letter from the early 1970s showing IM’s total sales figures – i.e. including hardbacks, paperbacks and book clubs – up to 31 March 1972 gives: Under the Net 242,945; The Flight from the Enchanter 148, 116; The Sandcastle (oddly – this may be an error) 29,346; The Bell 56,042; A Severed Head 58,367; An Unofficial Rose 223,471; The Unicorn 108,352; The Italian Girl 124,796; The Red and the Green 136,564; The Time of the Angels 82,960; The Nice and the Good 131,508; Bruno’s Dream 104,963; A Fairly Honourable Defeat 52,959; An Accidental Man 86,039.
22 Arthur Green, ‘The Worlds of Iris Murdoch', op. cit.; and A.N. Wilson, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Characters of Love', in News from the Royal Society of Literature, 2000, pp.56–65.
23 Jeremy Trafford said he was upper-middle class; Anne Wignall claimed to be ‘Aristocratic, darling, what else?’
24 Letter to DM, 20 June 1964.
25 The story – undated – is written into the manuscript of the first draft of The Sandcastle, a draft begun on 29 August and finished on 18 September 1955. Perhaps ‘Aunt Noonie’ was Eva’s foster-mother Mrs Walton. Billy Lee, who knew Mrs Walton from 1939 until her death in 1944, did not recall this (CWA, 12 February 2001).
26 Inaccurately ‘puffed’ on its republication in 1999 as hitherto unknown. Its reputation is clarified in ‘The Problem of Gender in Iris Murdoch’s “Something Special” ‘, in Journal of the Short Story in English (University of D’Angers Press), no. 21, autumn 1993, pp.19–27.
27 Eva’s widower Billy Lee, CWA, December 1999.
28 Billy Lee, however, points out that Mrs Walton’s shop had a single, not a double, counter, and so was not large (CWA, 12 February 2001).
29 In 1944 and 1941 respectively. See Chapter 1.
30 See Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, op. cit., p.305.
31 To DH, 12 June 1945.
32 To DM, undated.
33 J: 1 November 1964.
34 IM to Viking, 17 March 1956.
35 See footnote, p.49.
36 Points for which I am indebted to Professor Roy Foster and Victoria Glendinning.
37 Peter Somerville-Large, The Irish Country House: A Social History (London, 1995), p.141; Valerie Pakenham, The Big House in Ireland (London, 2000), p.79; guidebook to Belvedere House, County Westmeath; J.S. Lyons, The Grand furies of Westmeath (privately printed, C1840); The Autobiogaphy and Correspondence of Lady Granville, Mrs Delany (1861–62, six volumes). Frances Gerard gives a notable account in Some Celebrated Irish Beauties of the Last Century (London, 1895).
38 The Unicorn, p.6o.
39 As Malcolm Bradbury noted: ‘Under the Symbol', Spectator, 210, 6 September 1963, p.295.
40 The Unicorn, p.92.
41 In fogbound ‘Jerusalem’ in 1958, moreover, both a Thames barrage and a primitive answer-machine are projected, decades before either would exist in real life.
42 The Unicorn, p.43.
43 Robert Scholes, The Fabulators (New York and Oxford, 1967); in an interview with Laura Cecil IM derided this.
44 Phrase used of the tarot pack, with which she entertained herself in the 1950s; one card in particular ('La Papessa') struck her as herself. J: 15 June 1952.
45 See Harold Hobson, ‘Lunch with Iris Murdoch', Sunday Times, 11 March 1962, p.28.
46 The Unicorn, p.54.
47 Stuart Hampshire and Raymond Carr, CWA; IM, CWA.
48 The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, P.325.
49 In, respectively, Under the Net, The Bell, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, The Philosopher’s Pupil.
50 See Chapter 11.
51 Letter to DM.
52 Letter to DM.
53 12 February 1971.
54 The other, recalled by Carol Graham-Harrison, was by Philip Toynbee, presumably in the Observer.
55 27 March 1963.
56 The Unicorn, The Time of the Angels, The Nice and the Good.
57 Two letters from Steeple Aston, October/November 1963 and December 1967.
58 The Ship (year-book of the St Anne’s College Association of Senior Members), no. 53, 1962–63, p.4.
59 IM wrote to the Principal on 21 December 1962, resigning with effect from the end of March 1963, since it had already been agreed that she was on sabbatical for her final term (summer 1963).
60 J: 8 September 1963.
61 Letter series 30 December 1963 to 31 January 1964.
62 In Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (London, 1984).
63 P.N. Furbank, ‘Gowned Morality', Encounter, 23, November 1964, pp.88, 90.
64 Sister Marian, LTA.
65 J: 13 February 1970.
66 David Lee (Eva’s eldest son), CWA.
67 A point I owe to Professor Roy Foster (LTA, 31 July 2000).
68 Arthur Green, ‘The Worlds of Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
69 Guardian, 16 October 1965.
70 Chevalier, ‘Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch', op. cit. p.92. Thus Christopher Bellman is shot by a sniper’s bullet, ‘no one knew from which side'; Perry Arbelow in The Sea, The Sea, having acquired ‘a darling little theatre in Londonderry that’s only a tiny bit bombed', is also shot during the Troubles by an unidentified terrorist.
71 Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., p.84.
72 F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, op. cit., p.377.
73 Curiously, E.P. Thompson in Beyond the Frontier, op. cit., would, independently, describe FT’s death as having the same symbolic value as that of Irish Nationalists in the Easter Rising.
74 The Red and the Green, p.235.
75 Sean Lucy, Irish Independent, 24 December 1965; Joy McCormick on Bruno’s Dream, Hibernia, 28 February 1969; Sean O’Faolain, Irish Times, 16 October 1965.
76 For example, Lady Millie: ‘It’s not your freedom or your youth I’m after envying at the moment'; Pat: ‘And don’t be after touching that.’ Dictionaries of Hibernian English indicate the Gaelic ‘after’ approximates to the English perfect tense. Professor Roy Foster agrees that Lady Millie would not affect a brogue unless deliberately guying the natives (as does, for example, Charlotte Mullen in Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte) or indicating non-Britishness (like the two Anglo-Irish grandes dames towards the end of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September). IM’s usage lacks subtlety (Professor Roy Foster, LTA, 31 July 2000). See Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, op. cit., p.106.
77 So Roy Foster has argued: Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London, 1988), p.492.
78 Canon Crawford, IM’s second cousin, and amateur Richardson genealogist, CWA.
79 To A.N. Wilson – see his ‘Iris Murdoch and the Characters of Love', op. cit. However, at Caen in 1978 she championed the book.
80 The author’s Royal Society of Literature obituary of IM, News from the Royal Society of Literature, 2000, pp.86–91.
81 Honor Tracy to IM, October 1979. The letter continues: ‘They have nothing to grumble about. Nothing prevents them from moving down if they wish but they don’t, knowing well how much better off they are up there. And no one down here wants them either, whatever they may say. The amount of sheer humbug is breathtaking, and when you think what it has lost in lives and cripplings and blindings. But you know all this.’
82 To the author, 1982.
83 To MB, July 1985.
84 To MB, 11 March 1983.
85 IM, CWA, C1985.
CHAPTER 17: What a Decade!
1 J: 19 March 1969.
2 J: 26 April 1969.
3 IM, interview with Ronald Bryden, Lively Arts, Radio 3, 14 February 1968.
4 Letters to LP make clear that by November 1963 she is setding into both job and flat.
5 In spring 1967 she was granted a sabbatical to visit Australia, and recommended Graham Martin to replace her.
6 Official letter, 21 June 1963.
7 He was, Humphrey Spender recalled, looking for moral principles and structure outside himself, an ex-Marxist, now Roman Catholic, with a flat in South Kensington but a main home in Cambridge.
8 The Black Prince (1973), The Three Arrows (1973), A Word Child (1974).
9 J: 7 January 1965.
10 DM, LTA, 13 February 2000.
11 Rachel Fenner, CWA.
12 IM, letter to RW, 17 July 1991: ‘Steeple Aston is best address except for letters arriving Tues to Thursday first post.’ Confirmed by Rachel Fenner.
13 IM to LP.
14 IM to LP, 15 March 1959.
15 JB, CWA.
16 She kept exam papers in Cornwall Gardens.
17 Source: Jenny Sharp, RCA 1964–7, fashion designer.
18 Gadney and she discussed the RCA in 1979.
19 In the words of one of IM’s RCA colleagues.
20 Christopher Frayling, The Royal College of Art: 150 Years of Art and Design (London, 1987), p.190.
21 DM, LTA, 29 February 2000.
22 Inference: her exam papers are addressed to second-year students in tutorial groups G, H, J, K.
23 Letter to RW, undated, 1967.
24 David Hockney (ed.? . Stangos), David Hockney (London, 1977), p.42.
25 Frayling, The Royal College of Art, op. cit., passim.
26 Christopher Frayling was appointed.
27 Some books in the series, such as Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, sold more copies than many best-selling novels.
28 Frayling, The Royal College of Art, op. cit., p.164; Riley when an RCA student in 1952–55 had not yet experimented with this form.
29 Alex Seago, Burning the Box of Beautiful Things (Oxford, 1995).
30 Ibid, p.212.
31 Ibid, p.26.
32 Letter to DM.
33 Ronald Bryden (with A.S. Byatt), ‘Talking to Iris Murdoch', Listener, 4 April 1968,? ?.433–4.
34 Letter to DM, summer 1964.
35 Paddy Kitchen, A Fleshly School (London, 1970), p.62.
36 The Time of the Angels, pp. 163–5.
37 The Sovereignty of Good, p.72; collected in EM, p.359.
38 As she acknowledged in ‘John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
39 See W.K. Rose, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch', Shenandoah, xix, winter 1968, pp.3–22.
40 An e-mail from Canetti scholar Michael Mack confirms that this was a favourite book.
41 IM, interview with Ronald Bryden, Lively Arts, BBC Radio 3, 14 February 1968.
42 The Nice and the Good, p.96.
43 Mary Douglas (CWA, 11 February 2000) believes FBS might have shared such a habit.
44 'Premium Books', in New Fiction Society, 1, October 1974, p.8.
45 A discussion, the MS of the novel held at Iowa University shows, given to Jake and Hugo in an early draft of Under the Net, later cut out.
46 The Nice and the Good, p.350.
47 Tolstoi and the Novel (London, 1966), winner of the 1967 W.H. Heinemann Award.
48 See Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, op. cit., passim, for extended discussion of this point.
49 A point developed in The Saint and the Artist.
50 19 December 1965.
51 Frederic Samson, Concepts of Man (RCA, 1979), with a foreword by Christopher Cornford; and Dotes and Antidotes (RCA, 1979).
52 Fashion student Jenny Sharp.
53 Jenny Sharp however recalls his description of the death of his mother, not in the Holocaust, and the problems of being ‘with’ her at her deathbed.
54 Humphrey Spender’s hypothesis.
55 Iris wrote to the Guardian, adding a short tribute to Eve Watt’s obituary of Esme Ross Langley; Guardian, 25 August 1992, p.35.
56 J: 1 February 1964.
57 28 August 1975.
58 Undated, summer 1968. Hilda in the novel also resembles Philippa in that both loved their sisters more than their mothers, whom they risked excluding: when, around 1930, the Bosanquet family nanny left, Philippa and her sister plotted to leave home with her.
59 Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 14, British Novelists Since 1960, Part I, A-G, ed. J. Halio (Detroit, 1983): S.J. Newman on Brigid Brophy, pp.137–46.
60 Michael Levey, LTA, 9 January 1998.
61 'A Jewelled Occasion', Sunday Times, 19 January 1964, p.37.
62 Bertram Rota Booksellers, item 80, catalogue 150, spring 1967, p.3.
63 Michael Levey, LTA, 9 January 1998.
64 'Neglected Fictions', TLS, 18 October 1985, pp.1179–88. IM also nominated Honor Tracy’s The Straight and Narrow Path.
65 Francis King, LTA, 29 December 1998.
66 (London, 1967).
67 Michael Levey, LTA, 6 February 1998.
68 This does not survive.
69 The Black Prince, p.191.
70 For example, J: 12 August 1951: ‘A day and a half of weak-kneed misery. Wisdom and courage – names for love … summoning my forces and the great positive of loving. Yes.’
71 The Philosopher’s Pupil, p. 121 (my emphasis).
72 J: 26 June 1971.
73 Letter to RW, 0966.
74 See e.g. Virtue Ethics, ed. R. Crisp and M. Slote (Oxford, 1997).
75 As Anthony Kenny observed: ‘Notes and Queries', New Statesman, 18 October 1971, pp.389–90; see also Listener, 7 January 1971, p.23.
76 As Anthony Quinton remarked: ‘Proper Study of Mankind', Sunday Telegraph, 29 November 1970.
77 J: 17 November 1953.
78 'The Idea of Freedom', IM in conversation with David Pears, Logic Lane/Oxford Philosophy series, Chanan Films Ltd, 1971.
79 Michael Bellamy, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch', Contemporary Literature, xviii, 1977, pp. 129–40.
80 RW, CWA.
81 28 February 1970: the reason for this sit-in is not identified.
82 So Samson would complain to Humphrey Spender. IM to Rachel Fenner, undated internal memo on RCA paper, 1966: ‘I am an old traditionalist.’
83 To Rachel Fenner, 16 August 1964: ‘Might Plato be right about mediocre art that it veils reality? As in fact very few people are made for sanctity this fact need not be important to the majority.’
84 The Times, 10 February 1970.
85 This Maurice is unidentified by surname; Noel Annan in The Dons (London, 1999) confirms how important IM’s friendship was for Bowra.
CHAPTER 18: Shakespeare and Friends
1 Convictions, edited by Norman Mackenzie (London, 1958), included essays by, among others, Peter Shore, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Hugh Thomas and Paul Johnson. ‘A House of Theory’ appeared on pp. 158–62; reprinted in Partisan Review, 26.1, winter 1959, pp. 17–31 and in Power and Civilization: Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. D. Cooperman and E. Victor (New York, 1962), pp.442–55.
2 'Morality and the Bomb’ in Women Ask Why: An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Nuclear Disarmament (CND, London, 1962) pp.1–6.
3 'The Moral Decision About Homosexuality', Man and Society, 7, summer 1964, pp.3–6; reprinted in The Humanist, 80.3, March 1965, pp.70–3.
4 The Irish law was liberalised in 1993.
5 '… provided of course that the animals are consulted and their consent obtained. Iris’s worst enemy, if she has an enemy at all except among the envious and less successful, would have to admit that she always joins in a laugh against herself.’ Two undated letters to Sister Marian, probably C1976 and 1977, the date of vol. 2 of Michael MacLiammoir’s memoirs, referred to by Honor Tracy.
6 'Political Morality', Listener, 21 September 1967, pp.353–4; reprinted in Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, ed. C. Woolf and J. Bagguley (London and New York, 1967), pp.56–7.
7 Sir John and Sally Vinelott (he read Moral Sciences at Queen’s, Cambridge, 1947–50 and met IM then) were fellow-guests at a dinner IM gave at Harcourt Terrace, and witnessed the row. The flat was tidy, IM a competent cook.
8 18 June 1968, p.9; 31 August 1968, P.7.
9 The phrase is Michael Ignatieff’s on Anna Akhmatova, in Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1999), p.168.
10 Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit. pp.56, 86.
11 Independent, 24 March 2000, p.7. He replied that she could acquire one from H.M. Stationery Office.
12 Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., p.56.
13 Letter to DM, C1966.
14 The Times, 16 January 1960, p.9.
15 For Julian Mitchell’s diary see Guardian, 5 April 1969; for Adrian Henri’s, TLS, 10 April 1969.
16 2 July 1973, p.15.
17 13 April 1975, p.8.
18 With a distinctly different tide: ‘Socialism and Selection'; both in 1975.
19 Tim Devlin and Mary Warnock, ‘The Blackboard Jungle', article-review of What Must We Teach?, New Statesman, 21 October 1977, pp.546–8.
20 W.K. Rose, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch', Shenandoah, xix, winter 1968, pp.3–22.
21 J: 7 September 1969.
22 Interview with Ronald Bryden, Listener, 4 April 1968, pp.432–6.
23 In his essay ‘Charles Dickens'.
24 A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom (second edition, London, 1994), p.ix. Byatt declares herself ‘sometimes dismayed by its solemn, almost Leavisite insistence on making severe judgements'.
25 'A Sort of Mystery Novel', New Statesman, 22 October 1965, p.604.
26 EM, pp.283–4.
27 Spectator, 3 September 1965, p.293.
28 Paul Bailey, ‘Naming Love', review of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Guardian, 21 March 1974.
29 IM’s phrase in interview with Ronald Bryden, Listener, 4 April 1968.
30 See JB, Iris, op. cit.
31 As Stephen Wall pointed out à propos A Word Child in the 7X5, 18 April 1975. Martin Amis’s blow-by-blow account of the plot of Nuns and Soldiers in his review in the Observer, 7 October 1980, is hilarious and unfair in exactly this way.
32 A Fairly Honourable Defeat, p.233 (my emphasis).
33 See Chapter 13: Kathleen Raine accurately observed that EC’s quarrel with God was in the ancient Jewish tradition stemming from Job.
34 e.g. interviews with Heyd (University of Windsor Review, 1965), Rose (Shenandoah, 1968), Bellamy (Contemporary Literature, 1976).
35 See Meyers, Privileged Moments, op. cit., p.67.
36 In Morgan acting as destructive henchperson to Julius there may also be an unconscious echo of IM acting as cruel sidekick to Thomas Balogh in 1943–44.
37 The Times, Weekend section, 12 September 1998, p.2.
38 Like Saward in The Flight from the Enchanter: both Saward and Tallis lost a sister when young.
39 Though Axel, unlike Joll, is a civil servant rather than politics don at St Antony’s.
40 Frank Hauser, who directed EC’s unsuccessful play The Numbered in Oxford in 1956, asked Joll to arrange a gathering afterwards at St Antony’s. EC arrived with ‘entourage'. Golding and Joll also met him for dinner at the Graham-Harrisons.
41 R. Parikh found Kreisel both ‘bored’ and ‘Machiavellian': Odifreddi, Kreiseliana, op. cit., p.95. See Chapter 10.
42 LTA, 11 February 1998, before she had read A Fairly Honourable Defeat.
43 The artist Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham believed that the painters of St Ives were well able to make mischief by themselves. She recalled EC with affection. Clement Glock had been his driver-lieutenant on that visit.
44 See Chapter 13.
45 LTA, 27 August 1998: ‘He was quite unable to let go completely of an intimate.’
46 EC, Auto da Fé, p.155.
47 Curiously enough Susie Ovadia knew of the same tale, though set on the north side of Hyde Park, and told of Friedl rather than of Marie-Louise. CWA.
48 A Fairly Honourable Defeat, p.225.
49 Letter to PF, undated, 1968.
50 The Nice and the Good, p.47.
51 The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, vols 3, 4, 1958–9 (London, 1978–79), p.21. Rachel Trickett and Wallace Robson were sometimes said to have made up, with John Bayley, Cecil’s trio of best students.
52 Following which Cecil became a professor.
53 Rachel Cecil, Teresa’s Choice (London, 1958).
54 Frances Partridge, Hanging On: Diaries 1960–63 (London, 1998), p.52.
55 The Nice and the Good, p.15.
56 See e.g. David Cecil’s introduction to Lady Ottoline [Morell]‘s Album (New York, 1976) pp.3–14.
57 Hugh Cecil, LTA, 27 October 1999.
58 Partridge, Hanging On, op. cit., P.75.
59 Frances Partridge, Other People: Diaries 1963–66 (London, 1993), p.67.
60 CWA, 13 January 2000.
61 Frances Partridge, Good Company: Diaries 1967–70 (London, 1994), p.148.
62 Janet Stone, Thinking Faces 1953–79 (London, 1988), p.18.
63 9 August 1961.
64 'A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989.
65 From IM’s eulogy, St James’s, Piccadilly, 20 July 1979 (published by Warren Editions, 1981).
66 Obituary, Guardian, 2 February 1998, p.16.
67 Stone, Thinking Faces, op. cit., pp.7–8.
68 16 July 1969.
69 See JB, Iris, op. cit., pp.35–6.
70 Stone, Thinking Faces, op. cit., p.28.
71 JB, CWA, April 1998.
72 Emma Stone’s recollection. IM wrote her a poem about a horse on that holiday.
73 From IM’s eulogy, St James’s, Piccadilly, 20 July 1979.
74 Stone, Thinking Faces, op. cit.
75 Sources: John Vinelott, who saw her thus attired at the Cambridge University Vacation Club around 1950. And JB, who recounted IM similarly prepared with Rene’s help at the party for The Right from the Enchanter in March 1956.
76 The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, op. cit., p.256.
77 LTA, 25 November 1999.
78 A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooh of Barbara Pym, ed. H. Holt and H. Pym (London, 1984), p.308.
79 See The Letters of Kingsley Amis, op. cit., passim; and Martin Amis, Experience (London, 2000), p.357n.
80 'The Idea of Freedom', IM in conversation with David Pears, Logic Lane/Oxford Philosophy series, Chanan Films Ltd, 1971.
81 Partridge, Other People, op. cit., p.282.
82 J: 6 December 1968.
83 Letter to MB.
84 DM, LTA, 13 February 2000.
85 This new verb, borrowed from the person from Porlock who interrupted Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan', occurs in Bruno’s Dream, though in a letter to Chatto, 11 February 1985, IM misremembers the novel as The Time of the Angels, which contains the different coinage ‘oblivescent'.
86 For example, J: May 1966: ‘[x] called unannounced yesterday! Furious, but calmed down and took them to lunch in Woodstock & then into Oxford.’
87 J: 31 May 1991.
88 J: 21 December 1987; compare J: 1 March 1981: ‘I feel I am becoming more silent and awkward, as I was when I was young.’
89 J: 26 September 1969.
90 Audi Villers, CWA.
91 'A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989.
92 J: 23 June 1968.
93 J: 12 August 1971.
94 Film producer associated (Peters, Fraser & Dunlop believed) with A Severed Head.
95 Letter to DM.
96 Letter to DM, 1964.
97 e.g. to Barbara Craig, Principal of Somerville, at a college dinner, and to Audi Villers on first meeting in 1967.
98 Letter to LP, January 1970.
99 In January 1966.
100 J: 15 December 1976.
101 J: 10 June 1969.
102 J: 3 October 1969.
103 J: 16 January 1977.
104 The Black Prince, p.173.
105 Byatt, Degrees of Freedom, second edition, op. cit., p.338. In a LTA, December 2000, Byatt indicated a strong dislike for the phrase ‘literary mother'.
106 23 May 1970.
107 LTA, 10 July 1995.
108 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York and Oxford, 1973).
109 log Gabriel Pearson, review of The Black Prince, Guardian, 22 January 1973.
110 Found among IM’s papers; but also referred to in The Sovereignty of Good, where she speaks of puritanism and romanticism as ‘natural partners and we are living with their partnership still', EM, p.366.
111 The Black Prince, pp.66–7.
112 See Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, op. cit., for a fuller development of this idea.
113 See Lorna Sage, ‘Female Fictions', in The Contemporary English Novel, ed. M. Bradbury and D. Palmer (London, 1979), pp.67–87; ‘No Trespassers’ (review of The Fire and the Sun), New Review, September 1977, pp.49–5o; ‘The Pursuit of Imperfection', Critical Quarterly, xix, no. 2, summer 1977, PP.67–87; Women in the House of Fiction (London, 1992), pp.72–83; ‘In Praise of Mess: Iris Murdoch 1919–1999', TLS, 19 February 1999, p.12.
114 And IM dreamt of her friends ‘doubling’ – J: 17 February 1969: ‘Dream other night, about DH. Later saw it was “really” A[lasdair] C[layre] not DH. Never thought of these two doubling before.’
115 The author twice witnessed IM contradict JB when he spoke of this identification: in Amsterdam in October 1986, and at Alcala de Henares in 1992.
116 EM, p.195.
117 J: 27 June 1971.
118 Both in her journals, 1970–72, and also in The Black Prince.
119 Philip Larkin’s playful traducings of the text of The Flight from the Enchanter (see Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London, 1993), pp-318–19) read as reactions against high-mindedness and ‘high diction’ alike.
120 J: 31 December 1953- See also n45, above: ‘He was quite unable to let go completely of an intimate.’
121 J: 13 January 1953.
122 The Sea, The Sea, p.52.
123 Ibid, p.6o.
124 e.g. J: 19 July 1970.
125 Letter to DM, undated, 1964.
126 IM commended John Blofield’s The Way of Power: A Practical Guide to the Tantric Mysticism of Tibet (London, 197o) to the author.
127 'John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
128 DM, LTA.
129 Natasha Spender, LTA.
130 J: entries March/April 1969.
131 Interview with Jackie Gillott, Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4, 22 November 1978.
132 New Statesman, 25 August 1978.
133 Listener, 24 August 1978, p.250.
134 Spectator, 26 August 1978.
135 The Times, 24 August 1978.
136 IM spent much of the prize money on paintings by her friend Harry Weinberger.
137 A.N. Wilson, review of Ben Rogers, A.J. Ayer: A Life, Guardian, 19 June 1999. Besides Ayer and May, the other Booker judges in 1978 were Angela Huth, P.H. Newby and Clare Boylan. The other shortlisted novels were Kingsley Amis, Jake’s Thing, Andre Brink, Rumours of Rain; Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop, Jane Gardam, God on the Rocks, Bernice Rubens, A Five-Year Sentence. Ayer praised The Sea, The Sea for ‘the force of its imagery, its delineation of character, and its descriptive power', Tablet, 2 December 1978.
138 An internal Chatto memo dated 4 December 1984 gives hardback sales to that date of 37,264 for The Sea, The Sea; 23,799 for Nuns and Soldiers; 16,277 for The Philosopher’s Pupil There was also a ‘dramatic dropping-away of sales of translation rights'.
CHAPTER 19: Discontinuities
1 In his notebooks; quoted New York Review of Books, 4 February 1999,? .3.
2 En route to Norwich, where she was to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of East Anglia.
3 J: 26 July 1970.
4 To JB; to the author.
5 J: 6 April 1978.
6 IM to Rachel Fenner, 23 March 1968: ‘Have lectured in Italian & impressed myself.’ But also 9 April 1968: ‘My Italian absurdly simple for speaking purposes.’ See ‘The Response of Italian Critics', Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 14, autumn 2000, for further details of this lecture.
7 Letter to Harry Weinberger, 18 January 1982.
8 November 1981.
9 A Word Child, p.98.
10 Of Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, p.145.
11 J: 12 August 1971.
12 Undated.
13 Peter Lennon, Sunday Times, 26 November 1978.
14 The Black Prince, p.200.
15 Mikhail Bakhtin’s brother Nikolai had arrived in England in the 1930s and moved to Birmingham University around 1946. It is more probable that FT was referring to Mikhail.
16 The Sea, The Sea, p.477.
17 EM, p.87.
18 The Sandcastle, p.77.
19 'John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit. See also Hilda Spears’s study, Iris Murdoch (Basingstoke, 1995), passim, for discussion of the point.
20 J: 19 January 1980.
21 British Library, Modern Manuscripts, Peggy Ramsey archive deposit number 9625.
22 Peggy Ramsey to IM, 8 August 1969. The play referred to was Joanna, Joanna.
23 IM to Peggy Ramsey, 17 January 1975.
24 An Unofficial Rose in 1975 by Simon Raven; The Bell by Reg Gadney in 1982 for television; The Sea, The Sea for BBC Radio 4 by Richard Crane in 1993.
25 See John Fletcher, ‘A Novelist’s Plays: Iris Murdoch and the Theatre', in Essays in Theatre, vol. 4, no.1, November 1985, pp.3–20.
26 J: 12 February 1971.
27 Peggy Ramsey to IM, 23 February 1968.
28 IM to Peggy Ramsey, 12 May 1977.
29 The Black Prince, p.91.
30 The Sea, The Sea, p.160.
31 J: 31 August 1970.
32 See e.g. interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982; and with Pamela Callaghan, Weekend, BBC Radio 4, 18 April 1982.
33 In 1969.
34 J: 16 February 1970.
35 IM to PF, 31 May 1982.
36 See Chapter 17, passim.
37 'An Evening with Iris Murdoch', Bristol Medical-Chirurgical Journal, August 1986, p.91.
38 Letter to DM.
39 'The Moral Decision About Homosexuality', op. cit.
40 Interview in Ziegler and Bigsby (eds), The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, op. cit.
41 MM, CWA and LTA, 22 June 2000.
42 Frances Stewart, LTA, 6 January 2000.
43 A Word Child, p.6.
44 J: 7 September 1969.
45 Interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982.
46 To RQ, 11 August 1947.
47 John Grigg, CWA.
48 Peter Levi, LTA, 25 November 1999.
49 Weekend, BBC Radio 4, 18 April 1982.
50 DM’s recollection.
51 Malcolm Bradbury, Who do you Think you Are? (London, 1976), pp.166–71.
52 An Accidental Man, p.405.
53 'In Memory of Iris Murdoch', Spectator, 18–25 December 1999, pp.79–81.
54 Iris dreamt its opening conceit, of a child’s face glimpsed in a tree, just as she dreamt of the swimming girls David spies upon.
55 An Accidental Man, A Word Child, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea. See Chevalier, ‘Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch', op. cit., for IM’s comments on the play.
56 J: August 1971.
57 J: 12 May 1969.
58 Interview with Pamela Callaghan, Weekend, BBC Radio 4, 18 April 1982.
59 J: 12 March 1971.
60 J: 22 May 1971.
61 J: 21 November 1971.
62 J: 14 July 1979.
63 J: 12 August 1971.
64 J: 5 February 1972.
65 'Who is the Experiencer?', Questioning Krishnamurti (London, 1996), pp.99–128.
66 Ishiyamadera belongs to the esoteric Shingon sect (the word ‘shingon’ meaning ‘mantra'), the sole sect to keep alive the tradition of the Mahavairocana Sutra, brought from China by a towering figure of Japanese religious history in 804–5. The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. M. Eliade, vol. 13 (New York, 1987), pp.272–7.
67 At an unknown time (CWA, 1989). Don Cupitt believes it was in the 1970s.
68 Though JB takes another view in Iris, op. cit., IM mentioned her meditative practice to the author, to PF and to John Simopoulos.
69 J: 14 January 1972.
70 IM hoped that keeping philosophy going alongside her fiction ‘somehow fed my whole mind and made everything better … [But] maybe it has stolen from the novels some greater intellectual strength?’ J: 20 February 1969.
71 'John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
72 J: 4 February 1954.
73 EM, p.372.
74 Simone Weil, Notebooks, vol. 2, trans. A. Wills (London, 1956), pp.383–4.
75 EM, P.345.
76 Ibid, pp.492–3.
77 Interview with John Barrows, ‘Living Writers – 7',John o’ London’s, 4 May 1961, p.495.
78 IM, ‘Force Fields', review of A.S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden, New Statesman, 3 November 1978, p.586.
CHAPTER 20: Icons and Patriarchs
1 J: 14 August 1969.
2 John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
3 W (formerly Women’s Wear Daily), 18–25 October 1985, p.54 et seq.
4 J: 30 May 1982.
5 Letter to DH, 11 November 1945.
6 March 1991, unpublished. Tricycle no longer has it.
7 The Making of a Mystic, Channel 4 TV, 1993.
8 'Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual', in M. Antonaccio and W. Schweiker (eds), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago, 1996), PP.29–53.
9 John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit.
10 IM recycled this dream in The Green Knight, pp.366–7, where it is given to Bellamy James.
11 30 January 1949.
12 J: 12 July 1983.
13 Herbert Art Gallery, Jordan Well, Coventry, 26 March-24 April 1983; and Duncan Campbell Contemporary Art (undated, but autumn 1994).
14 23 July 1988.
15 Gabriele Annan, ‘Murdoch at the Gallop', Sunday Telegraph, 13 September 1987, p.16.
16 15 September 1942.
17 IM, CWA, C1985.
18 BBC Radio 4, April 1982.
19 Interview with Pamela Callaghan, Weekend, BBC Radio 4, 18 April 1982.
20 Martin Amis, review of Nuns and Soldiers, ‘Let’s Fall in Love', Observer, 7 September 1980.
21 For The Italian Girl she read and annotated D. Attwater’s Eric Gill: Workman (London, undated).
22 To Sir John Vinelott, 1993.
23 Kreisel, CWA, 4 March 1998.
24 He was devastated by the loss of his parents and requested that the fact of their murder by the Nazis be engraved on his tombstone in Cuneo.
25 2 November 1978. Faulks replied with great courtesy, but without giving any ground.
26 By Jeremy Lewis; (Carmen Callil, telephone CWA, July 2000).
27 To Allegra Huston, undated, but C1986.
28 Roger Lewis, ‘A Dangerous Dame', Telegraph Weekend Magazine, 8 July 1989 pp.16–19.
29 Carmen Callil to Ed Victor, 22 December 1988.
30 Before The Good Apprentice she had used ‘oblivescent’ in The Time of the Angels and A Word Child.
31 IM to Jeremy Lewis, 11 February 1985.
32 Honor Tracy to Sister Marian, 6 February 1977.
33 A letter (undated) to Harry Weinberger reassures him about how easy a TV appearance is – there are ‘so many cameras one ceases to notice them'.
34 They met Avebury through their Oxfordshire neighbours Michael Campbell (brother of Patrick Campbell, Lord Glenavy, the stammering broadcaster) and his Canadian friend Bill Holden.
35 1911–1984.
36 Stephen Spender, Journals 1939–83, ed. J. Goldsmith (London, 1985), p.305.
37 Noel Annan, LTA, 14 October 1999.
38 IM to Norah Smallwood, 23 September 1980, à propos Nuns and Soldiers and her opera The Servants.
39 Spender, Journals 1939–83, op. cit., pp.409–10.
40 To what degree such values are a function of money is discussed in Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, op. cit.
41 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p.496.
42 S.L. Jaki, Lord Gifford and his Lectures: A Centenary Retrospect (Edinbugh, 1995), p.42.
43 TIS, 27 September 1985, pp.1047–8.
44 Interview with Pamela Callaghan, Weekend, BBC Radio 4, 18 April 1982.
45 Meyers, Privileged Moments, op. cit., P.72.
46 Where she appeared unexpectedly at St Brides crypt, Fleet Street, C1992 – David Daniels, ex-UCL and Fellow of Hertford College.
47 Roger Scruton, Velvet Revolution, Appendix 1. Kathleen Wilkes e-mailed that IM came to one AGM and made a generous donation.
48 Anthony Powell, Journals 1987–89 (London, 1996), p.97.
49 CWA, February 1992.
50 W.B. Yeats, ‘The Choice', Collected Poems (London, 1960), p.278.
51 R. Lewis, ‘A Dangerous Dame', op. cit.
52 'A Certain Lady', Bookmark, BBC TV, 29 December 1989.
53 Bradbury, Who do you Think you Are?, op. cit.
54 It was published in full in Muroya and Hullah, Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, op. cit., pp.49–53.
55 The party included the politician Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, Sir Richard Attenborough. Other conference participants were Bella Akhmadulina, Chinua Achebe, Régis Debray, Mulk Raj Anand, Yuri Zhukov, Simone Weil, Germaine Greer.
56 Indira Gandhi was shot by one of her bodyguards on 21 October 1984.
57 London Review of Books, 7 May 1987, pp.20–1.
58 London Review of Booh, letters, 17 February 2000.
59 Letter to PF, dated ‘St Valentine’s Day'. Since the SDP was formed in March 1981, the year is probably 1982.
60 Michael Brock, official historian of Oxford University (who shared at Corpus with Pat Denby), LTA, 22 June 1999.
61 Unpublished interview with RW, 17 July 1991.
62 J: 5 March 1989.
63 Letter to PF, late 1982.
64 Letter to Kenneth Baker, 25 April 1988. Baker was Secretary of State 1986–89.
65 It was replaced by the University Funding Council (UFC).
66 Kenneth Baker, LTA, 17 November 1999.
67 To PF, undated but probably 1975.
68 The photograph of Rene at Buckingham Palace in JB, Iris, op. cit., described as taken on the occasion of IM’s DBE, is in fact on the awarding of her CBE. Rene had died two years before Iris was awarded the DBE.
69 In this she followed, reputedly, her father as well as, by common consent, her elder sister Gertie.
70 Letter to Harry Weinberger, 28 April 1986.
71 J: 14 March 1989.
72 J: ‘His letter is very brief: nothing but “Thank you very much – I look forward to reading your novel. It is for me a double joy. As I expect you know I’ve been two or three times to London, always on the spur of the moment, etc.” Very brief.’
73 See Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, op. cit.
74 To Norah Smallwood, January 1963. One hundred pages of poems, entitled ‘Conversations with a Prince', are at the Brotherton Library, Leeds University.
75 Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Conversation with a Mastermind', Sunday Times, 29 September 1995.
76 See n30 above.
77 Powell, Journals 1987–89, op. cit., p.186.
78 In April 1989.
79 Kate Kellaway, ‘Pile High Club', Observer, Life section, 24 September 1995, PP.68–9.
80 Spectator, 27 May 1995, p.63.
81 EC, Memoirs, op. cit., p.825; A Word Child p.8o. A Czech friend or her trip to Prague in 1969 might also, of course, have taught her this.
82 EC’s publishers plan a collection which is likely to include this.
83 Jeremy Adler confirmed that Canetti was entirely compos mentis to the end. CWA, 8 May, 2001.
84 IM’s Englishness, which A.S. Byatt had praised in 1989, was apparently now a liability. Byatt too admitted ‘to a certain curiosity as to what she would have been like if he [JB] hadn’t made her as English as she has become'. Ian Hamilton, ‘An Oxford Union', New Yorker, 19 February 1996.
85 'John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit..
86 Rosemary Varty.
87 25 July 1994.
CHAPTER 21: ‘Past Speaking of
1 To Rosen’s delight, IM wrote him a ‘fan letter’ (her expression) some time in the late 1980s, à propos his collection of essays The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry. He then sent her a copy of his Plato’s Symposium, which she received with great generosity. A friendship developed, based on a shared love of writing and reading poetry, and frustration with ‘analytical’ philosophy. IM read his manuscript The Question of Being, a very extensive criticism of Heidegger, for Yale University Press and cited him admiringly in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals as the philosopher who best understood the contemporary scene.
2 J: 20 April 1987: ‘I am spending a lot of time trying at last to understand Heidegger – all his ideas, and his development. Wish I had thought of this earlier!’
3 The conference’s proceedings were published as Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, op. cit.
4 Papers included Maria Antonaccio, ‘The Virtues of Metaphysics: A Review of Iris Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings'; Richard Moran, ‘Vision, Choice and Existentialism'; Roger Crisp, ‘Moral Value: Iris Murdoch and the Benefits of Stopping to Look'; Martha Nussbaum, ‘Love, Perception and Illusion in The Black Prince'; and Peter J. Conradi, ‘Holy Fool and Magus: The Uses of Biography in Under the Net and The Flight from the Enchanter'.
5 MM’s Heart and Mind, Beast and Man, Wisdom, Interest and Wonder, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers all cite IM.
6 Nina Coltart, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (London, 1993), pp. 186–7.
7 EM, p.27.
8 A Fairly Honourable Defeat, p.186.
9 Interview on Icelandic TV, shown on Bookmark, BBC TV, 4 September 1981.
10 4 April 1982.
11 J: 18 January 1994.
12 A phrase used by a friend in letter to JB.
13 See e.g. John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch', op. cit.; or The Good Apprentice, passim.
14 Canon Brian Mountford recalls how IM, in the early 1990s, would occasionally be seen standing in the back of Oxford’s University Church of St Mary the Virgin, and gave one talk there, in the library: so many came to hear her that the doors had to be closed once the room was filled, to the vexation of those excluded. But she could never entirely leave Christianity, she could never embrace its myths of Virgin Birth and Resurrection either; and God (see Afterword) remained to her an anti-religious bribe, like the idea of an afterlife.
15 Our 1998 Christmas gift. IM divined his name.
16 Lorna Sage to JB, 22 March 1999.
17 Interview with Susan Hill, Bookshelf, BBC Radio 4, 30 April 1982.
AFTERWORD
1 Antonaccio and Schweiker, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, op. cit., p.3.
2 The Times, 28 November 2000.
3 Harold Bloom, ‘A Comedy of Worldly Salvation', New York Times Book Review, 12 January 1986, pp.30–1.
4 Sage, ‘In Praise of Mess', op. cit.
5 Time, 22 February 1999.
6 For a further exploration see Peter J. Conradi, ‘Iris Murdoch and Dostoevsky', in R. Todd, Encounters with Iris Murdoch, op. cit.; reprinted in Dostoevski and Britain, ed. William Leatherbarrow (Oxford and New York, 1995), pp.277–91.
7 Joan McBreen (ed.), The White Page (An Bhilog Bhan): Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets (Dublin, 1999). IM’s ‘Motorist and Dead Bird’ is on p.174.
8 Somerville College Report, 1998, pp.135–9.