Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography Book

In Iris: A Memoir, Iris Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, charted in tender if often terrifying detail the writer and philosopher's final years battling against Alzheimer's Disease. Rather than duplicate Bayley, Peter Conradi's extensive and scholarly biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life, wisely devotes the majority of its attention to exploring Murdoch's formative years. Conradi, a close friend whose dog was immortalised in one of Murdoch's novels, occasionally gets bogged down in minutia. (At one point he expends considerable energy and several footnotes discussing whether her prep school headmistress presented prizes with a wooden sword or a rolled-up piece of cardboard.) On the whole though his painstaking attention to detail pays immense dividends; reminding us of the sheer inventiveness of Murdoch's work revealing that her life was if anything "more improbably packed with strange coincidences than her plots". Born into an unorthodox Irish Protestant family, she never lost her sense of being an outsider in England--a theme meditated upon in several of her finest novels. At Oxford University just before the Second World War she was a dedicated member of the Communist Party and an avowed bohemian. Stalin and a wartime spell in the civil service dimmed her commitment to Communism (in the 1980s she even voted Conservative) but she always remained a "free spirit". One former lover described her as being "monumentally unfaithful" and throughout her adult life she conducted numerous affairs with men and women. If her fictions sometimes presented interrelations of almost Shakespearean complexity, Murdoch's own trysts with Nobel Prizewinner Elias Canetti, the novelist Brigid Brophy and the philosopher Philippa Foot were no less dramatic. Later she praised monogamy, attacking the very promiscuity of her youth. Conradi acknowledges rather than condemns Murdoch's contradictions, presenting us with a fallible, mercurial human being--the inspiring college lecturer who was sometimes too wrapped up in her own problems to teach; the advocate of tolerance who could be censorious; the existentialist who questioned freedom as a value in morals and the novelist who sought critical approval and yet was nauseated by praise. --Travis ElboroughRead More