No laughing matter

Iris Murdoch: A Life.

By Peter J. Conradi.

Norton; 706 pages; $35. HarperCollins; £24.99

ANY biography of Iris Murdoch is likely to be a weighty affair. She was a many-sided personality as well as a prolific novelist, and the philosophical commentary which attends both—for she was also a moral philosopher—makes it a daunting project. Besides which, Peter Conradi is much in awe of his subject.

He is not alone. He quotes many testimonies to her extraordinary effect on people, and to the saintly status she achieved. Her husband John Bayley, in his memoir of her, remarks on her selflessness: “nobody less narcissistic than Iris can well be imagined”. The difficulty, however, is that although selflessness may constitute an ultimate good (Murdoch had an almost Platonist conviction in the fixity of moral values and strove to live the philosophy she admired) it doesn't by itself offer much by way of story or argument.

The best parts of the biography are where she has not yet dissolved, so to speak, into one of her own mage-like characters. In “A Memoir: People and Places”, another Oxford philosopher, Mary Warnock, remembers her not as a saint but as “a figure of enormous glamour and romance”. In post-war Oxford she was an exotic: both men and women (notably the fellows of her college, St Anne's) found her attractive; she had been in love with a Communist, Frank Thompson, killed in the war; she had worked in a UN refugee camp; and she had actually met Jean-Paul Sartre. Oxford philosophy at that time was extremely dry, characterised by Murdoch in “Sartre: Romantic Rationalist” (1953) as concerned with a world “in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus, not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party.”

Hers was emphatically this latter world, filled with Jewish refugees, Communists, mystics, power-freaks (notably Elias Canetti); in short, with the monsters and idealists that people her fiction. She threw herself at their feet and into their arms, promiscuous and self-examining, in effect making herself the testbed for the moral quests of her novels.

Mr Conradi labours at her quasi-religious thoughts and the philosophies that influenced her, but his allusive, referential style too often assumes his readers to be in the know. Sartre gets fuller treatment; and yet the few lucid pages on him and Murdoch in Ms Warnock's memoir are intellectually exhilarating in a way that Mr Conradi misses. There is at times in this biography a feeling of crowdedness, of burden. He follows Murdoch's journey from complexity to simplicity with sympathy and understanding; but by the same token he has pondered to the point where everything is significant—almost in the spirit of Murdoch herself, who could make a diary note about her husband singing in the kitchen, and then add with a moralist's emphasis, “he is a good man”. It was said that he calmed her down and cheered her up: a lighter, clearer touch in Mr Conradi would have cheered this book up.