Iris Murdoch: A Life [Hardcover]

Peter J. Conradi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2001

In "Iris Murdoch," Peter Conradi assesses the remarkable intellectual and cultural legacy of the celebrated philosopher and beloved novelist. Depicting her personal life in extraordinary detail -- her student days at Oxford, her Communist activities, her early affairs, and her enduring marriage to John Bayley -- he also deftly interprets her philosophical works and twenty-six novels with brilliant clarity and insight. Murdoch emerges as a writer who in her early years imagined herself as the heir to George Eliot but later found a kinship with Dostoevsky's fantastic realism, his obsessions with sadomasochism, and his philosophical fascination with moral anarchy. Relying on ninety-five hitherto unseen diaries, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of letters, Conradi has written a riveting biography that is as much an absorbing history of literary England from 1940 to the present as it is a vivid depiction of one of our greatest twentieth-century writers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Peter Conradi is literary executor of the estate of Iris Murdoch (1919-99) and was her close friend in the 1980s and '90s, so sensible readers will not expect this to be a warts-and-all biography of the distinguished novelist and philosopher. What they get instead is a warm, appreciative portrait focused on Murdoch's formative years: happy Anglo-Irish childhood; intellectual fulfillment at Oxford University, where she joined the Communist Party and formed many enduring friendships; a stint in the civil service and work with refugees during World War II; and the postwar decade, when she began to write the intellectually challenging yet wickedly entertaining novels that made her reputation. John Bayley movingly described his wife's struggle with Alzheimer's disease in Elegy for Iris, and Conradi wisely does not reiterate that material. He concentrates on recapturing the intense young woman who awed fellow students with her brains and enticed men with her blonde hair and generous figure, yet kept everyone at a slight distance, finding epistolary relationships more manageable than the tangled sexual intrigues her fiction explores so acutely. She had many affairs, including a painful one with expatriate (and married) European intellectual Elias Canetti, but marriage to Bayley in 1956 gave her the stability she needed; over the next 40 years she produced 25 steadily more assured and provocative novels, from Under the Net through A Severed Head and The Black Prince to The Green Knight. Conradi uses interviews and Murdoch's journals to good effect in a lengthy but readable text that illuminates the personal experiences that so intimately informed her fiction. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

It has been nearly two years since Iris Murdoch's death from Alzheimer's and the publication of her husband John Bayley's memoir Elegy for Iris. It seems fitting that the beloved philosopher and novelist should be the subject of a biography nearly as idiosyncratic and charming as she herself was. One of the numerous oddities of this one is its construction: each chapter is broken into numbered sections rarely more than four pages long. This allows the author (Murdoch's longtime friend and biographer of Angus Wilson) to ramble back and forth chronologically, examining a few years at a time through different perspectives literary, romantic, philosophical and gradually progress forward. The overall effect is leisurely, informal, highly literary and more than a bit uneven. In the first half, Conradi faithfully traces Murdoch's family background and intellectual development, painstakingly tracking down her earliest Latin teachers or the history of modern Irish sectarianism, as the moment requires. But the second half ends as if winded, streaking through 16 prolific years in one short chapter, mentioning Murdoch's knighthood almost in passing. The book's great strength lies in its characterizations ("She had a way of staring down at her glass, listening very carefully to the speaker, possibly indicating also that the glass was empty"). Documenting Murdoch's eccentricities and legendary kindnesses, Conradi succeeds in reviving her presence. Thus, readers who seek a few last glimpses of Murdoch's rare personality will be gratified by this affectionate, if disorganized, tribute; those looking for closure or hoping to make sense of the narrative of her life will not.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393048756
• ISBN-13: 978-0393048759
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,037,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good for some readers, not for others, May 11, 2007

By 

bookloversfriend (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Iris Murdoch: A Life (Hardcover)

This comprehensive biography gives you the life and thoughts of Iris Murdoch, her development as a writer and as a person.

Her sex life is included, but her relationships are merely mentioned. This is a completely G-rated book, no descriptions, no scenes. The purpose is as much to say whom she did NOT sleep with as it is to say whom she did. Iris was quite gregarious and preferred one-on-one conversations. She met with and had drinks with many different people. Most of these she did not sleep with. But she lived completely by her inclinations of the moment, so men knew that it was always possible they might end up in bed but that they probably wouldn't. This made Iris far more popular than if she had slept with everyone she met.

Also, Iris never seemed to drop or break up with anyone. She just moved on. She was usually involved with several people at any one time, but didn't talk about it. Like all women, she was susceptible to pretty men, and even though she was no beauty herself, she did get involved with two such men. When they dumped her, she was deeply hurt. Men didn't usually dump her. This led to her holding back in relationships, "never giving all the heart" (as Yeats put it). And this may be one factor that led to her ubiquitous portrayal of distanced relationships in her novels.

The other factor is some of the other men she got involved with, especially Canetti. This individual hated women (p. 349). He was "jealous, paranoiac and a mythomaniac" (p. 355). Women, including Iris, adored him to the point of enslavement. He kept many women going at the same time, but hated if any of his women had more than one man. He was also a sadomasochist (p. 357 ff). After having sex, he would contemplate the woman with "a sort of amused hostility" (p. 358). One among the many things he hated was decent people. The characters in his fiction are as sick as he. In 1981 he was given a Nobel Prize for Literature (which tells you something about the Nobel Prize for Literature). His cynical view of people influenced Iris's portrayal of her characters.

This biography also covers in detail Iris's intellectual development, and here is where most readers will get lost. The biographer presents detailed issues in philosophy that Iris wrestled with and assumes the reader is familiar with them. For professional philosophers, this material is interesting and it is refreshing not to have to wade through a lot of entry-level explanations of what Sartre thought, what this is, what that means, etc. Most readers, however, will find this material unintelligible.

Iris hated analytic philosophy and never seems to have learned much of it. As a result, her own thought bounced around wildly, from Marxism in the `30s, to an interest in existentialism, to Catholicism, to Buddhism, etc. Her philosophical thought and writings are rather muddled, as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, among others, were quick to point out when Iris read papers before other professionals. Still, her book on Sartre was one of the first in English and sold well. Sartre was a hot topic in the early 1950s. After Sartre's work was translated into English by Hazel Barnes in the mid-fifties, a better understanding of Sartre began to spread. Even though Iris spent an afternoon in a café talking one-on-one with Sartre, her understanding of his work was limited. Her book should therefore be considered obsolete at this point.

The book is, for the first time, vague about whom she did and didn't sleep with after her marriage to John Bayley. She was 37. He was 30. Iris, never pretty, was definitely showing her age by then. It is tempting to view this marriage as an insurance policy. John was a good-natured, easy-going person. He cooked the meals and generally seems to have behaved as a faithful dog. He was a virgin until she slept with him. Their housekeeping with "beyond bohemian", i.e. nonexistent. For instance, they bought a cheap old country house with no plumbing or heat, but plenty of space. In an abandoned greenhouse they made a small pool. It is an indication of the mentality of both that he hung an electric heater by a string over the pool to provide heat while they were in the pool. He did not read her work in manuscript and sometimes not after publication. Iris did not allow editing of her novels by her editors.

The biographer's preferences about her novels are very much present and are stated as established truths rather than his preferences. Her novels in the 1980s did present more "good" people than previous ones, but there was so much mysticism and so much "metaphysics as a guide to morals" that some readers will be less than thrilled.

20 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Worst. Biography. Ever., May 30, 2002

By 

Karen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Iris Murdoch: A Life (Hardcover)

Can you write a biography without being in love with your subject? The question isn't really relevant to this work, because I don't see any evidence that Conradi can write at all. There's plenty of evidence for his fawning, puppy-dog adoration of Dame Murdoch. There's plenty of evidence for half of Oxford's fawning, puppy-dog adoration of her, along with about a fourth of the population of London and assorted Americans and Continentals. Conradi could have called his book "Iris Murdoch and All the People Who Went to Bed with Her: Lives" or "Iris Murdoch: She Almost Makes Me Wish I Weren't Gay" or "Iris Murdoch: If You're English, Your Parents Probably Had Sex with Her. Yes, Both of Them." The bulk of the book is a catalog of love affairs and intrigues that would be over-the-top for a high school prom queen, mixed up with feeble stabs at placing Murdoch's intellectual development. What there's little evidence for is any sense of irony or humor on Conradi's part. I personally could not plop down one-sentence references to Simone Weil, the allegory of the cave, or Holocaust survivor guilt like a giant blob of oatmeal in the midst of a candyfloss paragraph giving me details of Murdoch's vast network of flirtation without intending to be funny. Conradi isn't funny. He's just incoherent.

This obsessive focus on Murdoch's status as sweetheart to the philosophical regiment is not only incredibly boring to read, it's offensive in the same way focus on Doris Lessing's motherhood is offensive. Male writers and intellectuals who leave a child in the care of others, as did Lessing, or who lead complicated romantic lives on a Murdochian scale, are not presented to the world by others as if these are the central facts of their existences. Conradi's book communicates that the most important parts of Murdoch's life were her sexual intrigues. This is an unforgivable reduction of an important moral philosopher and it's going to take me all day curled up with "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals" to stop feeling icky at having been exposed to it.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Bad and the Good: an uneven biography, December 18, 2008

By 

Frank Richards (Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Iris Murdoch: A Life (Hardcover)

Review of IRIS MURDOCH, A Life
By Peter J. Conradi
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001


This book is a rich source of research material for those interested in Iris Murdoch. It presents some chronology and summarizes many of her journal entries. Remembrances of her friends and associates are also related. The book dwells on the significant (and perhaps some insignificant) relationships of her life.

This biography is in need of editing in my opinion, because it hasn't a coherent framework. It begins with a chronological account, but fails to maintain that approach to the end. Halfway through it switches concentration to journal entries, which move about in time as they are presented. To perhaps unfairly exaggerate, `in 1967 Iris wrote that blah blah, but in 1963 she also said yadda yadda, while in 1965....' This makes the evolution of her thought difficult to follow.

The book does not present a coherent summary of Murdoch's philosophical approach. There are interesting notes on her novels but they are not comprehensive. One glimpses the recurrent themes, but these aren't presented in an orderly fashion. In short, there is a lack of integration of the life, the relationships, the philosophy and the novels.

The author would have done well to stick with the chronological approach, perhaps presenting Murdoch's philosophy as contained in the books she published and analyzing/presenting her novels in the sequence in which they appeared and as they were embedded in other aspects of her life at the time, such as Murdoch's many relationships. As another reviewer notes, the last ten years of her life are presented in a page and a half or so. One wonders at what was omitted. Nevertheless, the book does present extensive material for the reader.

One of the strongest points of the book is its presentation of Murdoch's self-awareness and continual self-examination. As is evident from her journals, she looked at her own development and feelings toward others and thought about self-improvement. She certainly lived the examined life. Another point of emphasis is her skill at interpersonal relations, to the extent that she seems not to have made any enemies at all during her lifetime. A remarkable person.

My overall impression is that the book was rushed into print. I do wish the author would reissue an edited edition.