Iris The Destroyer of Book Clubs

Kristalynn Busskohl on the Great and Terrible Iris Murdoch

Dear Republic,

In spite of the scurrilous suggestion (I think) that I made a typo in a contest e-mail, I really enjoyed this essay on Iris Murdoch — one of these writers it’s sort of easy to pretend to have read but whom it’s nice to actually learn something about.

Look forward to reading submissions on “What Is The Best Case Outcome For The University” / “How To Save The University” (due April 7) and “What Has Happened To Literary Men (due April 13) — with submissions sent to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com

-The Editor

IRIS THE DESTROYER OF BOOK CLUBS

In September of 2022, I was scrolling through The New York Times newsfeed on my phone when I read an intriguing headline, it was called, “The Novel That Made Karen Armstrong Quit Her Reading Group.”

I love a bit of gossip, and I’m always interested in a novel that would make someone quit a book club. So I clicked on the article, which turned out to be a regular feature interview with an unnamed questioner. The responses seem like they come from an email chain that’s been edited into clipped responses, most annoyingly the following exchange which gave birth to a headline but failed to entice a follow-up.

Has a book ever brought you closer to another person or come between you?

Years ago, I belonged to a reading group and on one occasion, at my suggestion, we discussed A Fairly Honorable Defeat, by Iris Murdoch, whose work I always enjoy. But the response was explosive. Even close friends were vitriolic in their disapproval, dismissed it as “evil,” and there was an upsetting aura of righteousness in the room. The book may not be a masterpiece, but it did not deserve this response. I have never returned to the book club.

Modern fiction makes me roll my eyes more than it surprises me. Regardless of genre, it is running low on stylistic spark. No verve, no voice, no hope, little dialogue. The scenes don’t scene because the characters don’t act on anything very often, and these plots, starved of motion, drift along, a flat tone in the key of third perspective, while its characters bloviate in beds or snort cocaine at parties.

As a contrast, that book that Armstrong suggested, A Fairly Honorable Defeat, had a twist that shocked me. I can think of twenty pages that might cause an argument with a friend or blow up your book club. I love that phrase, “an upsetting aura of righteousness.” It made me so curious that I even thought about emailing Armstrong, an 80-year-old religious scholar, to see what I could find out. But as I only have until Wednesday to write this, I should turn to Iris herself, the author I am pegging with audacity to the term ‘underrated.’

Audacious because Iris is certainly not under-published or unknown. In fact, when I went back to the contest email to find the target word count (made a little oopsie there too, but let’s not dwell), I was horrified to find that not only was I calling Iris Murdoch underestimated, I was supposed to be insisting that she was historically underestimated. An overlook on my part, because her books experienced their last revival in the early 2000s. Kate Winslet played her in a biopic. She is the author of twenty-four novels, some literary criticism, a book of poetry, and collaborative efforts on film adaptations and plays, a winner of the Booker, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But these days, I think she gets more contemporary attention from the books she wrote on philosophy and less on her novels.

That’s a shame! That’s a reason to write an essay!

To place our object in space and time, Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919, but grew up in London. Her education was interrupted by the war. She spent 1942 at the Treasury, and while she was there, she copied Treasury pages for the Communist party. In a volume of her published letters, the introduction tells us that she took those copied pages to a “dead-letter drop in Kensington Gardens.”

When I watched a video of an interview she did with Bryan Magee, I could envision her being a Communist spy. Something in the way she holds back facial expressions. Her serious tone. Severe, but lively. When she smiles, you really notice it, because she smiles so rarely. It was the first time I had seen her on video, and it made me think of an Art of Fiction interview, conducted by Jeffery Meyers, that Iris sat for when she was 71 years old. It may not have been her last interview, but it was certainly among her last, because she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997, and she passed away two years later.

In that interview with Meyers, when he brought up her membership in the Communist Party, she had this to say:

I was a member of the Communist Party for a short time when I was a student, about 1939. I went in, as a lot of people did, out of a sense which arose during the Spanish Civil War that Europe was dangerously divided between left and right and we were jolly well going to be on the left. We had passionate feelings about social justice. We believed that socialism could, and fairly rapidly, produce just and good societies, without poverty and without strife. I lost those optimistic illusions fairly soon. So I left it.

No mention of spying, or any papers in Kensington Gardens.

By 1947, she was able to return to academic pursuits. She went back to studying philosophy, becoming a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. And starting in 1954, while she was a university lecturer in philosophy, she started turning out a novel nearly every year.

I like to think that if Iris herself were to have chosen her persona, she would have split herself and dug two paths to separate houses: the house of the artist and the house of the philosopher. Either way, as a result of this rut, we can learn how literature is different from philosophy. Her answer, given over and over again, never changes. In the video interview with Bryan Magee she puts it like this, “These two branches of thought have such different aims and such different styles, and I feel very strongly that one should keep them apart from each other…And besides, literature is for fun, literature entertains. Literature does many things and philosophy does one job.”

Literature is for fun. When I started this, I didn’t realize she had already made my entire point for me, and so succinctly. Literature entertains. But does it anymore? And why should it? Let’s look at Iris for an example of the stylistic fun I’m referring to, from A Fairly Honorable Defeat:

Simon was feeling nervous. He sometimes wondered if other people’s minds were as hard for them to control as his was for him. It was not easy to find out such things. It was no use giving himself instructions and upbraiding himself for being irrational. Immense flights of fantasy were taking place. During the last few days he had lost Axel in any of a dozen different ways, all somehow connected with Julius. Simon tried hard to be generous in his thoughts. That at least he could usually manage. His temperament helped him to turn all conceivable blame onto himself. He did not seriously imagine that Julius would deliberately try to steal Axel. As far as he knew Julius had no interests of that sort at all. He did not imagine that Julius would deliberately make any sort of trouble for him. He simply feared that the proximity of this very intelligent and high-powered old friend would open Axel’s eyes. Axel would suddenly see how flimsy Simon was, how unsophisticated, how lacking in cleverness and wit, how hopelessly ignorant about important things such as Mozart and truth functions and the balance of payments. ‘There’s just not much there,’ Axel had once damningly said of an acquaintance. And here, how much is there here? Simon wondered.

Now, you’ll notice that the topic under discussion doesn’t have to be humorous itself for Iris to give that sense of the syntactic levity that my brain interprets as good, clean word fun. She can even manage it when there is someone lying dead in a pool; read this next bit from the same book:

Morgan looked down on the familiar garden. The sun was just beginning to come out and a faint steam was rising from the wet pavement. The swimming pool looked somehow odd. Morgan gripped the window ledge. Something weird and awful was in the pool, seeming to occupy nearly all of it. Something dark, like a huge dangling spider. A great bundle, some immense animal or —Morgan’s glass fell to the ground. She ran to the door and fled moaning down the stairs. The French windows of the drawing room had swung open, Morgan reached the edge of the pool. Her legs gave way and she sat down with a whimper. A fully clothed human body was floating in the pool below the surface, arms and legs outspread and dangling.

I should admit that even though Iris does a lot of things well, there’s a reason we forget about her. Her sentence-level writing is often bursting its buttons. All of her novels that I have read are about well-off people with obsessive interest in problems they’ve created for themselves. Critics said this about her books too, so do people on Reddit, and I’ve read plenty of articles over the past few days that say that if she spent more time editing and less time turning them out, she might have written a masterpiece. I don’t know, I loved her Booker prize winner, The Sea, The Sea. It is the best of hers that I’ve read, and in my opinion, very close to a masterpiece. She knew what her writing was meant for, her style leading us further in and holding our interest, like a neon arrow to the spiritual relationship we have inside ourselves. We may forget about Iris, but it is wonderful to be reminded.

I came across an essay Iris herself wrote in 1961, entitled “Against Dryness.” In it, she defines dryness as,“smallness, clearness, self-containedness,” and makes this point, which I thought was a wonderful example of the merging of her two selves, the philosophical and the literary. Not didactically, she told The Paris Review that she didn’t think she should be both teacher and entertainer in her novels. But she did think we should view ourselves and each other with more creativity.

We need more concepts than our philosophers have furnished us with. We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian, and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality. A simple-minded faith in science, together with the assumption that we are all rational and totally free, engenders a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it. We need to return from the self-centered concept of sincerity to the other-centered concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention and not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention.

Later in the essay she says, “prose must recover its former glory, eloquence and discourse must return.”

And return they should, not only to the page and to our book clubs, but to our minds.

Kristalynn Busskohl is a writer living in Nebraska with her husband, their daughter, and three cats. She is working on her first novel.