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A disappointing life of Iris Murdoch
Contemporary Review, July, 2004 by Stephen Wade
Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her. A. N. Wilson. Hutchinson. [pounds sterling]18.99. x + 275 pages. ISBN 0-09-174246-3.
This is a deeply unsatisfactory work of life-writing. It takes A. N. Wilson almost fifty pages to explain the basis of the book, and in that space he is irritatingly self-indulgent, digressing to explain trivial minutiae. Mr. Wilson wants to reinforce the view that he is dealing with the life of a talented writer and thinker. But as the reader presses on, the focus turns more to her drinking habits and moods than to anything substantial. There is a feeling while reading this book that it should have been a long essay, smaller in scale but concise.
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The author tries to explain his wandering, self-centred approach by pretending that a conventional biography is unacceptable: 'Wasn't it all a bit too neat, the notion that you could 'explain' a human life simply by telling the story of it in chronological order, plundering the letters and diaries of the individual concerned'? One found oneself longing for some chronological sense, or indeed any feeling that the work had a structure, a clear purpose, or indeed any actual biographical material at all. Surely something could have been 'explained' about Iris Murdoch without giving in to mere anecdote and digression? The result is fragmentary, anecdotal, and the kind of biography that dwells on the author's importance, both to the subject and to others. For example, one has a pointless excursion into an evening with Philip Larkin, driving in search of cheap whisky. Why? One has words about Mr. Wilson's own 'hopes and aspirations' and the kind of intrusive remarks about why an undergraduate such as he should be asking questions about the private lives of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley.
But the worst flaw is the small talk. Broad generalisations build up a viewpoint, and then one witnesses the writer indulging himself in easy judgements about the characters who appear, almost as if to fill the requisite pages, as in his treatment of Elias Canetti: 'Canetti, however, had the highest possible view of himself and it was a view he expected his many acolytes to share. IM happily complied'. One needs to know more: one wants a biography complementing existing knowledge, allowing a fuller picture to emerge. Mr. Wilson disappoints and offers gossip, censure and critical summary. The same lightness and incompleteness blights the attempt to relate Iris Murdoch's thinking to mainline Existentialism and other philosophical positions.
The comments on the novels will prove useful to students of the fiction; yet, one keeps returning to bland statements about her private life. Surely readers know, for example: 'I have come to the view that no-one is able to tell "the truth" about marriage. There are many truths, and most of them are invisible to the closest family and friends of the marital pair'. This betrays a paucity of material and a need to expand what little he has by desperate means.
Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her is disappointing. It is written by a man who cannot resist the temptation to extend an anecdote into an epic, or a literary reference into a mini-essay. What does the reader of a biography like this expect then? A perspective on Iris Murdoch as a creative artist or possibly a close account of a friendship which throws light on the deeper impulses of such a humane, committed and learned novelist. What one has instead is a biography that one might expect the club bore of the literary circle to tell if he ever put pen to paper.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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