Before she was a novelist

‘It’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest and sounding damn silly’ — as Iris Murdoch admits on page 205 of this book.

‘It’s hard in letters quite to hit the mean between being earnest and sounding damn silly’ — as Iris Murdoch admits on page 205 of this book. It is extraordinary to read these journals and letters written by Murdoch in her very early twenties. Her tone of voice, and the preoccupations, and the turns of phrase are exactly as they were when I, a shy teenager, first met her in her late forties. Even her handwriting — reproduced in the end papers — is the same as it was then. So the first thing to say is — hoorah for Iris, whose novels delighted a whole generation of readers and which have now rather sunk. I’m sure her shares will rise in value again.

She was a most extraordinary being — like many extremely loveable people, slightly bogus, and that strangely English combination of serious-frivolous, which she passed off as Irish. She admits that her letters are exhibitionistic, and the expositions in this volume of the existentialist novel in France and Belgium are pretty dire. Nevertheless, these letters have her authentic loveable voice. Writing to her lover, and sometime fiancé David Hicks (an unheard-of British Council lecturer, not the David Hicks) she spoke of Dostoevsky as a better guide to philosophy than the sort of boring drivel given her to peruse when she was reading Greats at Somerville:

She was destined to become an inspiring but wholly eccentric philosophy tutor at St Anne’s College, Oxford — and this is evidently just what her tutorials were like. (One of her pupils told me that when he arrived for his first tutorial, she was sitting topless, bolt upright in bed, and immediately began to talk of Dostoevsky.