IRIS MURDOCH: As I Knew Her
by A N Wilson
Hutchinson £18.99 pp275

I don’t have quite as firm a grasp on logical positivism as A N Wilson, who includes a mildly embarrassing potted history of 20th-century philosophy in his memoir of the novelist Iris Murdoch, but I remain reasonably sure that two wrongs don’t make a right. In his furious, spiteful and, ultimately, self-serving mission to rescue Murdoch from becoming merely the “Alzheimer’s Lady” (a tag thrust upon her, he contends, by her husband, John Bayley), he delivers to us instead the Religious Maniac Lady, the Sadistic Lesbian Lady, the Dipsomaniac Lady and the Fake Irish Lady. Worse still, he reveals that she didn’t get the joke behind the radio quiz game Mornington Crescent. It must be scant consolation to those aghast at Murdoch’s further exploitation (because Wilson is right, on many counts, about the unease one feels at Bayley’s behaviour) that this new arrival to the Iris industry was so upset by the celluloid version of his friend’s life that he was reduced to muttering lines from Samson Agonistes as he left the cinema.

He is very much a muttering sort of person, or at least it suits him to regard himself that way. Thinking that Murdoch was too was probably what attracted him when Bayley, his tutor at Oxford, introduced them. Not that he was instantly sure, because, as he confides in tones reminiscent of Cedric, Nancy Mitford’s monstrously egotistical fop, “she was highly intelligent, obviously — but one has met other highly intelligent people”.

Thereafter, though, it’s clear that a fairly serious case of identification took place. On numerous occasions in these pages, Wilson hints that he and Murdoch were kindred spirits: “she was remarkably free of ‘hang-ups’, too. Plenty of metaphysical angst, as I have. Plenty of staring into the abyss of life’s meaninglessness and wondering, if God does not exist, whether anything is permitted”. Like, presumably, fashioning your memories into a posthumous and utterly unverifiable kiss-and-tell story.

Hang-ups, obviously, are for the less intelligent among us: serious writers and thinkers (“those of us who live inside our heads”) have more important fish to fry. Bayley, to whom Wilson refers throughout by his initials, JOB — the better, perhaps, to underline what a hatchet JOB this book is — here emerges as one of the little people, despite, or because of, his academic credentials. According to Wilson, he pretty much put the kibosh on Murdoch ever having children, a fact that caused her great distress. “Like a small child,” Wilson tells us, “JOB reacts petulantly to the presence of other, real children invading his space or claiming the attention of his Protrectress or Playmate.” In an anecdote that suggests that one of the things that bonded him to his “role model” was humourlessness, Wilson cites the incident when his infant daughter, tiptoeing down to a dinner party, was told by JOB to go and take a Mogadon.

Branded a child-hater, if not an outright misanthropist, JOB is later portrayed as manipulative, jealous and a rather rarefied type of social climber, who “glowed with pride at the prospect of his wife being, as he often used to say in her decrepitude, the ‘most intelligent woman in England’”. This, one feels, is a bit rich coming from Wilson, who is never backward in coming forward with a piece of High Table tittle-tattle. The idea that one might not be faint with excitement at hearing what Michael Gearin-Tosh said to Alan Bullock over lunch at St Catz, or driven to a frenzy by Wilson’s teasing asterisks (which of Murdoch’s mystery lovers, for example, might G*** R*** be?), appears not to have occurred to him.

Then again, maybe it has, because a little over halfway through this magisterially vulgar and endlessly name-dropping book comes the following piece of ethical sleight of hand. Talking about people behind their backs is to be encouraged rather than censured, because “Out of such ‘gossip’ comes an idea of human nature, comes art, come plays, come novels, comes — which is more important than any, though necessary to them all — sympathy.” One might equally well retort that out of such “gossip” can come real distress, and that Wilson’s particular brand of “sympathy” might be somewhat lost on good old JOB.

Too late, though. There is now probably no possible account of Murdoch’s life (and this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, Wilson’s sole responsibility) that could persuade us that she was anything other than a mad, mystical, bluestockinged nymphomaniac. Which, when compared to being a sneak and a prig, is not the worst fate in life, or death.





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