Iris Murdoch
Influenced by many, including Freud and Sartre, and a committed Russophile, Iris Murduch was nonetheless a complete individual with an inspired moral sense. Irish-English Dame Murdoch was a novelist, playwright, critic and philosophy professor. A prolific philosophical novelist who brought ethical commitment, narrative energy and a huge intellect to fiction. Once asked how long she took off between books, she replied “about half an hour“. She wrote a varied and dazzlingly unique twenty-six novels, chock full of colorful puppet people she manipulates in elegant but diminishing design. Her books are an unusual compound of intricately patterned plot, ingeniously twisty-turny storytelling, unlikely incidents, audacious symbolism as functions of character and action, provocations of myth and philosophy, and a blend of magic and suspense and revelations of the belief that the power of art and mythology is a means to an understanding of something greater than the self. Â
After The Sea, The Sea, for which I have no words to describe, my favorite is The Black Prince. Bradley Pearson is the psychologically complex narrator, an unsuccessful, middle-aged writer, self-conscious and obsessed with perfection. His predatory friends, family and associates collectively thwart his attempts to retire to the isolation he needs to create his “masterpiece”, Bradley’s answer to the “foul contingency” of his experience. Serious reflections on nature and art are interrupted by outrageous scenes of farcical domestic frenzy, ringing phones, shrieking doorbells and overwrought humans, including a depressive and suicidal sister, scream out and spell disaster. Bradley falls stupidly in love with the young daughter of his closest friend – and maddeningly commercially successful – literary rival. HIs love for Julian awakens his omnipresent Black Eros, a source of love and art. In the end, Bradley is sentenced to life in prison for a murder he did not commit.
In the 1950s, Murdoch wrote, “We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age, in which the dogmas, images, and precepts of religion have lost much of their power and we have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality.” Highly celebrated in the UK, England, under-appreciated everywhere else, Iris Murdoch was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987. The last years of her life were a descent into Alzheimer’s – at first thinking it was simply writer’s block – which she described while still lucid as “being in a very, very bad quiet place, a dark place”.
Recommended Reading: The Sea, The Sea, The Bell, The Black Prince, The Severed Head, and everything else.
