YESTERDAY, the thick philosophical tome by Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a
Guide to Morals, with her name on the cover in huge letters. I,
unfortunately, sat down with it for a few hours. My antipathy against her
has grown so strong that I must say something about her here.
I don’t think there is anything that leaves me quite so cold as that woman’s
intellect. She is a passionate schoolgirl, of the kind that likes nothing
better than studying systems. And then she’s the schoolmarm who likes to
explain these systems. Of course, she’s desperate to avoid any
misrepresentations. So she faithfully reproduces everything. She’s over 70,
so she has a wonderful collection of systems. The whole thing is topped off
with morality; she is passionate in the way she sticks up for traditional
morality.
She also has something quite different to stick up for: and those are her 24
novels. These contain all the Oxford gossip she has heard in half a century.
All her characters are Oxford born and bred. In her time she has been in
love with innumerable men (not to mention many women). There really were all
sorts: a theologian, an economist, an ancient historian, a literary critic,
an anthropologist, and also a philosopher and a writer. But all these men
she has taken into her, they’re all metamorphoses of herself. Her characters
spring from the discussions she’s had with all these men.
She keeps everything she hears, and, provided it didn’t have prior expression
as philosophy, it becomes her anonymous booty. She listens to everything,
again and again, as long as people can stand to repeat it, she offers
herself in exchange for more, calmly listens to stories, confessions, ideas,
despair. She strikes me as being like a housewife on a shopping expedition.
She forgets nothing.
You could call Iris Murdoch the bubbling Oxford stewpot. Everything I despise
about English life is in her. You could imagine her speaking incessantly, as
a tutor, and incessantly listening: in the pub, in bed, in conversation with
her male or female lovers. I can’t take her seriously any more. That’s to do
with the fact that I’ve known her so well. I know how she came about, she
assembled herself practically before my eyes, a kind of all-in-one parasite
from Oxford, itself an — attractive — excrescence of humanity. Iris never
got Oxford out of her system. I will now do for once what she always does: I
will describe her, describe Iris.
I WAS STRUCK by her way of listening, the very first time I saw her with
Franz Steiner. She was listening like a deaf person, who, to hear at all,
tries to soak up everything. After Steiner’s death, for which she felt
partly responsible, she would often come to me, to rail at herself. She was
mourning Steiner, but she kept a sharp eye on me, to see whether, in
offering her comfort, I would try to make an approach.
She was supposed to go back to Oxford, it was getting late, it was foggy, I
asked her if she wanted to stay the night. She could lock herself into the
room where we were presently sitting, I would sleep somewhere else. I said
this out of respect for her grief; she wasn’t to suppose for a moment that I
was trying to make an approach to her, not when she’d spent hour after hour
talking about Steiner. She looked at me with a doubtful expression, I
thought it might be uncertainty, but actually it was surprise and
disappointment. She didn’t take up my offer, and went back to Oxford, I
walked her as far as the Finchley Road Tube station, went down the steps
with her, and left her sitting on a bench with the book in her hand I had
just given her: The Lyrebird, an account of a woman’s friendship with
one such bird in the Australian desert, it danced and sang for her.
This magical book, which I had only recently discovered myself, I gave her,
she understood the significance of it, it was a sort of baptism, which
indicated that she was accepted among the writers. At that time, early 1953,
there were no books by her. I left her in the fog, waiting for her train. I
vanished up the steps, the fog was very thick, I looked back and couldn’t
see anything, the fog had swallowed her up, I thought of her pain-filled
face, and felt concerned for her, I stopped and went back down the stairs,
and suddenly stood in front of her; she was sitting on the bench, happily
leafing through the book I had given her. Her face of sorrow had become a
beam of happiness, touched with light amazement at this book.
The train came, she got up, and in a trice she had disappeared into the fog,
doubly disappeared. I walked back to my flat in a state of some confusion,
and was happy, happy at the thought of her happy face looking at the book.
She visited again in the course of that winter, she was always talking about
Steiner, and we kissed.
The extraordinary thing happened as soon as we had kissed. The couch I always
slept on was to hand. Quickly, very quickly, Iris undressed, without me
laying a finger on her, she had things on that didn’t have anything remotely
to do with love, it was all woollen and ungainly, but in no time it was in a
heap on the floor, and she was under the blanket on the couch. There wasn’t
time to look at her things or herself. She lay unmoving and unchanged, I
barely felt myself enter her, I didn’t sense that she felt anything, perhaps
I might have felt something if she had resisted in some form. But that was
as much out of the question as any pleasure.
No sooner was it finished, she was still lying flat on her back, than she
became animated and started to talk. She was caught in a peculiar dream: she
was in a cave with me, I was a pirate, I had snatched her away and dragged
her back to my cave, where I had flung her down and ravished her. I sensed
how happy she was with this pretty commonplace story, she got a little
redder still, and felt hot to the touch. She wanted to see me as a brigand,
who brutally forced her.
I didn’t show her how amused I was. Any way to loving her was blocked off by
this dream. It would be impossible to imagine anything further from my mind
than this ravishing. Perhaps, if things had happened very differently, I
might have been able to love her.
As it was, though, it remained an embarrassingly one-sided story, which I
accepted against my better judgment, and observed dispassionately. Her
inevitable dreams did not have the least distinctiveness, she was only
telling me — something I didn’t understand till much later — that she wanted
to see herself as the pirate. She had a — buried — robber’s nature, and her
aim was to rob each one of her lovers not of his heart, but more of his
mind.
This went on — with lengthening intervals — for a couple of years. She invited
me to Oxford, and met me at the station. She was wearing grotesque sandals,
which showed off her large flat feet to terrible disadvantage. I could not
ignore the ugliness of her feet. She had a bear-like walk, but it was a
repulsive bear, crooked and purposeful at once. Her upper body was delicate
and well-proportioned, and the face at moments — including some sexual
moments — as beautiful as that of a Memling Madonna. She walked with me from
the station into town, pushing a bicycle with one hand, stopped at a dingy
shop to buy some wretched provisions — ends of cheese, bread — for lunch,
and set it in front of me in the little flat where she was staying. Anything
less hospitable, more dismally puritanical, more tasteless than such a meal
is impossible to imagine. What was supposed to be the frugal ways of a young
scholar was in reality mean and petty bourgeois; the seductiveness of a
woman asking one to take a meal was beyond her.
Afterwards she made it clear that there was a couch handy, and she laid
herself down on it promptly. While her lack of hospitality may have chilled
me, her love never did, for the simple reason that it wasn’t love, it was an
indifferent act, endowed with a baffling significance for her.
Extracted from Party in the Blitz by Elias Canetti (Harvill,
£17.99) £16.19 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst © Elias Canetti Estate 2003; © Carl
Hanser Verlag 2003; English translation © Michael Hofmann 2005
Brief lives
Elias Canetti was born in Bulgaria in 1905. When he was 30, he wrote a
remarkable novel about the slow destruction by the outside world of a
reclusive scholar, Die Blendung, later translated into English as Auto-da-Fé.
He came to Britain in 1939, and in 1962 published a social and psychological
study, Crowds and Power. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1981, and died in
1994.
Iris Murdoch was born in 1919, and met Canetti in 1952. Two years
later, her first novel, Under the Net, brought her instant fame,
and she went on to write many other novels that explored the morals of
personal relationships in richly romantic settings. The Sea, The Sea
(1978) won the Booker Prize. She married the literary critic John Bayley,
who wrote a moving book, Iris, about their marriage and her decline
into Alzheimer’s. She died in 1999.
