Iris Murdoch

[Mirabell]

I love and cherish the two novels of hers I read (The Sea, The Sea and The Book and The Brotherhood)

Here's some biographical stuff

British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.

"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bailey in Elegy for Iris, 1998)

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin - the name 'Murdoch' is essentially Scots Gaelic. Her mother, the former Irene Alice Richardson, was an Irishwoman who had trained as an opera singer. Wills John Hughes Murdoch, Iris's father, was an English civil servant who had been a cavalry officer in World War I. Following the war, he worked as a government clerk. The family moved to London, where Murdoch grew up in the western suburbs of Hammersmith and Chiswich.
Murdoch studied classics, ancient history and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford. During World War II she was an active member of the Communist Party, but eventually became disappointed with its ideology and resigned. From 1938 to 1942 she worked at the Treasury as an assistant principal, and then for the United Nations relief organization UNNRA (1944-46) in Austria and Belgium. After a year without employment in London, Murdoch took up a postgraduate studentship in philosophy under Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she worked as a tutor until 1963. Following that time, Murdoch devoted herself entirely to writing. Between the years 1963 and 1967 she also lectured at the Royal College of Art.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/imurdoch.htm

[nnyhav]

While not a favorite, The Sea, the Sea impressed me a year ago:
http://nnyhav.blogspot.com/2007/06/f...rson-sing.html
There is something missing, it seems, not by design, that keeps it from coming fully together.

[Mirabell]

I think it's perfect
really
It was my first Murdoch and I immediately fell for her.

But it's true that melodrama is an important aspect of her novels, in The Book and the Brotherhood, which in many respects is very different from The Sea, the Sea, the melodrama and the soap-ish elements are so foregrounded that it's almost a guilty pleasure

if it weren't all so complex, deep etc.

[nnyhav]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

I think it's perfect
[...]if it weren't all so complex, deep etc.

Ambitious is what I'd say in this instance. And it accomplishes much of what it sets out to. If I could better get at what it is I thought was missing, I would (and I don't mean lacking so much as slightly off-target).

There was a bookchat at the NYTimes on The Sea, the Sea 5 years back (free registration required) that first brought it to my attention. (NB: bookchat intralinks no longer work in their archived version.)

Have you read John Bayley's Elegy?

[Mirabell]

I will not even touch his books. They stink of desecration. A famous man of letters in his own right I suspect he wanted to have a piece of her almost-nobelized uber-fame. I have heard it compared to Alison Lurie's memoir of Merrill and Jackson, which is a disgusting pile of crap.

I may be wrong though.

Maybe yr problem is that the Sea the sea is slightly imbalanced, but that is part of the structure of the novel. It's meant to be off and if much in the coda rings false, that's necessary as well. The narrator is clearly not the most trustworthy of narrators and when he, in the coda, takes the reins again , he just seems more honest. He isn't, which shows the sulphur injected below the calm surface of the last pages.

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...=2789#post2789

[nnyhav]

No, sorry, that's not it, I got that much. A real epiphany at the end would have struck a false note. In any case, it's impressive (that I can still recall much detail at a year's distance attests to that).

[Mirabell]

sorry.

I pondered the matter and couldn't come up with a solution.

[Mirabell]

Iris Murdoch: The Book And The Brotherhood

[Sybarite]

I picked up The Sea, the Sea around four years ago when the film biography came out. I'd never read any of Iris Murdoch's work before and couldn't get any further than 50 pages in. I don't know why: I'll have to try again.

[Mirabell]

yeah you'll have to
it's worth it
can't understand that tho
was drawn right in

[Sybarite]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

yeah you'll have to
it's worth it
can't understand that tho
was drawn right in

To be honest, I was rather shocked when I picked it up from the shelf the other day and realised that I'd only got 50 pages in (the bookmark remains in place). I had a memory of little more than putting it down after struggling for a long time with it.

[spooooool]

Iris is essentially doing the same thing in every book, to that extent they are overdetermined by a preoccupation to lay bare, delineate, whatever you choose to call it, the aesthetic "stocks" imagined lives, that we build up around other people. These liberate just as much as they make things cloudy or free us up for action, and those who act are oftentimes the ones that suffer. Her books, her "project" if yoou will, aren't all perfect. But "the sea, the sea" is. So to the "philosopher's pupil" wherein the pantheist Adam lifts a fly from a swimming pool. or the parrot Grey in "the bok and the brotherhood" she can destroy you. Insofar as i feel the least bit patriotic about anything, Iris is very dear to me

[Mirabell]

do oyu understand that the person in "the book.." I love most is Crimond?

[spooooool]

Crimond is the most loveable character in the book, we don't live up to him in the same way that we don't live up to Adam - or indeed Zed - in the philosopher's pupil. It's only that with Crimond we're given a more unforgiving lesson - and yet i still maintain that Iris isn't cruel to be kind

[Mirabell]

haven't read "...pupil" yet.

and he is, isn't he?

and I agree

[spooooool]

*i have names the wrong way round, no, i don't believe Crimond to be loveable. He's easy enough to fathom, to appeal, and to work in respect of Iris working of a great love - but i don't see him that way at all. It's Jenkin we don't live up to