Iris Murdoch, informally

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This interview with Iris Murdoch was originally published in the June 1968 edition of The London Magazine. At the time of the interview, initially made on behalf of the American magazine Shenandoah, she was commuting to Bristol for rehearsals of the play based on her novel The Italian Girl.

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How is the play going?

I hope it will be all right. I’m doing it with a young playwright called James Saunders. I’m quite involved in this one, as I was in A Severed Head. I enjoy it, but theatre people like to work in a rush, and it’s been rather a rushed job.

Have you ever done anything in the theatre on your own?

No. I think I might some time. It’s not a medium that’s very natural to me. I like writing prose and I don’t feel I could explore the things I want to explore very easily in the theatre. If I could do it without terrible difficulty, I would like rather to write some propaganda plays, plays which were really pamphlets. People used to do that in the 1930s much more than they do now. But if I thought of a good plot, I think I should want to write it as a novel.

The dramatisation of A Severed Head had a much lighter effect than the novel. Was it your intention to play up the comic side?

No. It was just that the dialogue is fairly comic, and in so far as the novel has other aspects, they’re not really carried by the dialogue. The same thing has happened with The Italian Girl. It’s turned into a kind of funny object; the novel is a half-funny object anyway. It’s very interesting seeing the two dramatisations now and comparing them. In both cases the main burden of the narrative is borne in the play by the person who is the narrator in the novel. The new one, too, turns out to be a kind of funny play, in the form of a poor, rather gullible, confused man stumbling on from one awful blow to another. This is a comic form which is quite familiar.

How does the collaboration work?

Unfortunately, the time-table has been so rushed on this occasion that James Saunders and I haven’t been able to collaborate as much as I would have wished, because I had hoped to learn a lot from this operation. I learnt a lot from working with Priestley, whom I knew before; and James Saunders, whom I had not met before, is a very good dramatist, and I would like to have had more time to discuss the text with him.

A novelist working well and honestly, and only saying what he knows and what he understands, will in fact tell a lot of important truths about his society.

What would you write a propaganda play about?

Well, I would like to write one about Vietnam, of course.

In your book on Sartre you discuss his views on the novel of commitment. What is your own feeling about the novel and society? I know you don’t stand where he does.

No, I don’t, and I think less and less. I mean I don’t think that an artist should worry about looking after society in his art. That’s why I said ‘propaganda plays’. I wouldn’t regard this quite as being my job as an artist, but as an alternative to another method of making people pay attention. I think as an artist, one’s first duty is to the art that you practise, and to produce the best kind of work that you know how. I think every artist knows roughly how this should be done. A novelist working well and honestly, and only saying what he knows and what he understands, will in fact tell a lot of important truths about his society. This is why tyrannical societies are often frightened of novelists. I think it’s a novelist’s job to be a good artist, and this will involve telling the truth, and not worrying about social commitment. I think social commitment, in so far as it interferes with art, is very often a mistake. It can make the novelist nervous and anxious and not able to open himself to the whole of reality as he understands it.

But you do feel that the artist ought to speak out on social questions?

Yes. But I don’t suppose I will ever actually do a propaganda play. I don’t think I probably could do it; art might get in the way, and one would simply hate the result. But I certainly think that one ought to write pamphlets. I feel strongly about a number of things and don’t say enough. I think, after all, it’s the job of any intellectual in society to make comments.

Would you favour a complete withdrawal in Vietnam, if America had the opportunity of saying simply, ‘We get out now, with no strings attached’?

Yes, but that’s non-feasible politically. I think it’s a very great pity that this business began at all. I think that nothing very serious would have happened if the whole situation had been left alone. Now, what will happen afterwards may be very much worse. This notion of containing Communism is wrongly thought out anyway. These national groups need to be left alone, to work out their own destiny. The fact that some label like Communist is attached doesn’t alter the fact that these people are very separatist and want to run their own show. The notion that there’s going to be some great big kind of world conspiracy is very out-dated. It would be much better to let these people work things out for themselves as they will have to in the end. For a country like Vietnam, although a Communist régime is not what I would choose to live under myself, it may be a necessary stepping-stone to some kind of rational form of government. And the Vietnamese, one may be sure, would have their own brand of Communism, just as the Yugoslavs do.

Let’s talk about you. You were born in Ireland and educated here?

Yes, I was born in Dublin and educated in England.

Do you feel you have a nationality?

Well, I feel Anglo-Irish. I went to Ireland a great deal as a child for holidays, but I never really lived there; I grew up entirely in London. But I feel a very emotional attachment to Ireland, of a rather obscure, half-annoyed kind. I also feel a tremendous attachment to England.

You’ve no Celtic blood then?

No. It’s all settlers’ blood, but both sides of my family have been in Ireland for several centuries – at least for two or three centuries – so that they regard themselves as Irish. They regard themselves as the Irish, in fact.

I was thinking of your delight in the fantastic as having, possibly, Celtic roots?

About this fantasticalness of Irish writers, when you look and see who’s doing it, it’s very often an Anglo-Irish writer. Perhaps it’s the climate.

Was writing an early impulse with you?

Yes. It was very early. I knew as a child that I wanted to be a writer. I always knew that I would do something else as well. But I started writing stories when I was about 9 or 10, and I always knew that this was what I wanted to do – though I was never certain that I would get anywhere. And I went on writing; I wrote a lot of stuff before I ever published anything.

I suppose the ‘something else’ turned out to be your career as a philosopher.

Yes. But that was pretty unforeseen actually. I grew up into the war, and I saw the war coming, as most of us did. This thinking about the future had a very odd feeling in the 193os. I was a very left-wing Socialist, and I joined the Communist Party at Oxford. I thought I might do politics or social work or international work of some kind. I certainly wanted to get a good education, and I enjoyed my academic work very much. I did classics, philosophy and ancient history at Oxford; but I didn’t really think of being a philosopher until rather later. During the war I was a civil servant and then I went into UNNRA, doing relief work after the war. I was in Belgium for a short time; after that I was in some displaced persons’ camps in Austria. But when I was in Belgium immediately after the war, everyone was in a state of frenzy about existentialism. It was the first moment of being able to get hold of books by Sartre and people. In fact I met Sartre at that time. It was during this strange period that I became so excited about this world of ideas that I decided to go back to philosophy.

How does it work as a double career? Would you say it’s complementary or conflicting, or both?

It’s conflicting in a purely time sense, that one is leading a sort of double life. One doesn’t have enough time, and it’s the philosophy side that I give up, and increasingly give up. I have stopped teaching philosophy at Oxford, though I teach a little bit in London and enjoy that very much. I write philosophy quite regularly – lectures and so on – but it’s a game that needs an immense amount of time. It really needs a lifetime of thinking about nothing else, and I do, if I’ve got to choose, choose the other game. I think in other ways they are, for me, perhaps increasingly complementary. I felt a little worried about this for a while, but I think that I am not now so worried. More philosophy seems to be getting into the novels. The reason, I think, is that I have now got a philosophical viewpoint, a more organised position than I had earlier.

Is this more organised position explained in your recently published Leslie Stephen lecture?

Yes, I suppose that is the most up-to-date expression of what I think. It’s very short and condensed, however, and by no means as clear as I would wish.

How would you relate yourself to the Oxford analytical school?

I am certainly connected with it. In so far as I had a professional training, that’s it. And I think that as a basis for looking at any other philosophy whatever, it’s ideal. It’s tremendously critical and exacting, anti-woolliness and anti-emotion. I think this is necessary in philosophy, where one can so easily lose one’s grip. But I am not a linguistic analyst in the sense of thinking that there isn’t any positive content to philosophy, that it’s all critical in this particular way. I think there is positive content, at least in moral and political philosophy, the area which I am interested in. But one has to state it with very great care and without jargon. I think that philosophy should – in the tradition of Hume and Locke – be written in ordinary language.

In the book on Sartre you say: ‘He brings to the novel, together with a remarkable literary gift, his typically philosophical self-consciousness. Whether this awareness helps or hinders him as an artist will have to be considered.’ In your own case, I gather, you think that there is now more help than hindrance?

I am a little worried about how far one should let the philosophy come in. I think that sometimes it comes into the very centre of the plot, as it did in The Time of the Angels. But more often, I think, it comes in through a character wanting to talk in a kind of metaphysical way. This might have a chorus-like effect, or some sort of dimension-changing effect, in relation to the activities of the non-philosophical characters.

Would ‘The Silencer’ in Under the Net be an example?

Yes. Only that was more sharply separated from the rest of the book than in some later things. In The Nice and the Good there’s a certain amount of metaphysical conversation, of a non-technical but definitely philosophical kind, between two of the characters from time to time throughout the book. This may be seen as a kind of interpretation of the activities of the other characters.

Once I heard William Golding make a division between two kinds of novelists. One starts with experience and lets the meaning come with the characters and situations as they develop in his imagination: Dickens was Golding’s example. The other sort, of which he said he was one, has an idea and then discovers a myth to embody it; then in the writing the myth takes over, acting as a guide and a spark to the writer’s imagination. The end product might not be vastly different, but the differing origins will mark the two kinds of novels. Does this interest you as a distinction?

I think it’s an interesting contrast, but trying to relate it to my own work, I don’t feel it quite fits. I don’t think I am either kind, exclusively, though I would like to be like Dickens. In a way one is just a slave of one’s unconscious mind; but in so far as one can push one’s work one way or another, I am always pushing myself towards a starting-point in experience. The other stuff is pretty automatic with me; I don’t have to look for myths or philosophical ideas. What I feel my work needs, what makes it less good is that I’m not able to present characters with enough depth and ordinariness, and accidentalness. This has always been a problem for me – my characters get cramped by my story. I certainly always attempt to start with experience. That is, I start with two or three people in some kind of situation – except, as I say, in one or two cases, in The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels, for instance, where there was a kind of religious or metaphysical conception at the very root of the idea. I would much rather start with something very much more ordinary – that is, experience in some quite ordinary sense – and people, without thinking of them as playing any special role. I sometimes think that if I could have a novel which was made up entirely of peripheral characters, accidental people like Dickens’ people, this would be a very much better novel. One might even go so far as starting to invent the novel and then abolishing the central characters.

Being a symbol-maker is not a kind of odd thing which artists are; it’s something which everyone is.

In your novels there seems to be a division between the Sandcastle sort, which is written in the traditional mode of realistic fiction, and the Severed Head sort, where one is more in a world of patterns and of artifice, of coincidence and arrangement. Is this a difference you have in mind as you are planning the novel, or is it something that happens after you’ve started composing?

I see there’s a kind of alternation between a sort of closed novel, where my own obsessional feeling about the novel is very strong and draws it closely together, and an open novel, where there are more accidental and separate and free characters. I would like to write the second kind. The Nice and the Good is a pretty open one, I think – perhaps the most open one I’ve done yet. But the one I’m writing now turns out to be the other kind, unfortunately.

What about symbolism? In an open novel, like The Bell, one recognises that the bell is more than a bell; yet it seems to be quite different as a symbol from some in the more closed novels, like the slicing of the napkins in A Severed Head. Is that a fair distinction?

This business of symbols is rather confusing. I am not, I think, a symbolic writer in any allegorical or complete sense. Symbols come in, perhaps more in some novels than in others. I would want them to come in in a completely natural way, just as the philosophy would come in in a natural way, through the characters. That is, being a symbol-maker is not a kind of odd thing which artists are; it’s something which everyone is. One notices in any kind of family situation or love affair, people invent symbols, all sorts of things become symbolic. This kind of pattern-making, although it may be connected with art in some genetic way, is not just an effect of art; it is something one spots if one looks around at human beings. I think my symbolism is of this kind – in The Bell, for instance, people with different temperaments take the bell differently as a symbol. And in The Unicorn the characters take the plight of the imprisoned woman in different ways. I would feel nervous of having too much symbolism if it became part of the structure of the work. If it comes in in a natural, subordinate way, it is absolutely o.k. and perfectly realistic. This is different, of course, from the way in which symbolism comes in when it’s connected with a dominating myth – which has happened in some of my novels.

For example?

Well, The Unicorn. The symbolism is rather fundamental there, I suppose. In the case of The Italian Girl, the myth is so familiar that it hardly seems to us like a myth. But the Oedipus myth is fairly fundamental in that book, and that again is what I feel nervous of.

I take it that the Oedipal theme extends through two generations in The Italian Girl. Could one consider David Levkin and his sister children-by-adoption, as it were?

One could look on them as sort of demon children. The notion of the demon child is one that interests me – the sort of changeling that suddenly appears and alters the destiny of people round about. But I don’t think there’s anything quite as close-knit there. I needed some kind of outsiders, and these two presented themselves. I was thinking about, well, I’m always thinking about Russia but I mean something to do with the homeless emigré Russian, the counterforce to the very deep-rooted hominess of the rest of the scene. It is a story about home and mother, coming back to mother and settling down with mother and so on, and these homeless people passing through, and then something tragic happening: they are not really children and this is not really their home, and they are banished. And the notion of returning to the truth was also involved. In the end it’s quite right for David to go back to Russia; he has to live in his own place, as he puts it. But this sounds rather artificial in relation to the book, and I think it’s not a very successful book. I think the idea of the substitute mother was a good one; I think Otto and Edmund and Isabel are quite real, but Maggie and the Russians are not real enough to carry the plot.

Are the two Poles in The Flight from the Enchanter as comparable figures to the two Russians?

Yes. They’re very much more sinister, of course, and I suppose mysterious, in a sense which means that they’re not quite complete characters. They are demons. The notion of the intrusion of demons – well, I feel this is something that happens in life. Not necessarily that people really are demons but that they play the role of demons for other people. This is one of the themes of The Flight from the Enchanter, the way in which people make other people play the role for them of gods and demons.

Would this apply to Honor Klein?

Yes. Mischa Fox and Honor Klein are both power characters. They are gods who are deified by their surrounding followers.

Do you mean that people can assign, as it were, demonic energy to their chosen masters, or do you see certain persons as being endowed with it anyway?

I think there is in some sense, which I don’t mean to be religious or metaphysical, demonic energy and that there is a great deal of spare energy racing around, which very often suddenly focuses a situation and makes a person play a commanding role. People are often looking for a god or ready to cast somebody in the role of a demon.

Then the demon must wait for his victims to choose him, or at least for his time?

No. I think people possessed of this kind of energy do come in and generate situations. One’s seen it happen in life. But then too there are always victims ready to come forward. Rosa is so placed vis-à-vis the Poles and Mischa in The Flight from the Enchanter.

Would you say that freedom is your main subject?

No, not now. I think it might have been in the past. No, I think love is my main subject. I have very mixed feelings about the concept of freedom now. This is partly a philosophical development. I once was a kind of existentialist and now I am a kind of platonist. What I am concerned about really is love, but this sounds very grandiose. One is also telling a story, making jokes, and so on. I think the novel is a comic form. I think tragedy is a highly specialised and separate form. Doubtless it’s the highest of all art forms, but it depends on certain limitations which a novel can’t have. The novel is always comic.

How do you see love, or more specifically, sex, as relating to demonic energy in your novels?

Everybody, I imagine, agrees that sexual energy is something so enormously diffused and so various in form that it covers all kinds and aspects of human life. Certainly it is connected with this sort of worshipping and extension of power, with the way in which we make other people play roles in our lives – dominating roles or slave roles. So this sort of drama is a fundamental expression of sex, though it has other aspects connected with power in what seems to be a much more primitive sense. Very often this appears as a kind of animal situation, so fundamental that even sex in any recognisable sense is not present.

Often in your closed novels the characters all link up via sexual encounters that seem almost mechanistic, or like steps in a ritual. Is your concern here for larger meanings or formal effects, or do you see sex as working this way in life?

I think sex does these things in life. Part of the drama in those closed-up, rather obsessional novels is the struggle between love and sex. Love obviously in its genesis belongs with sex, but it’s able to transcend sex – I don’t mean in any sense of moving away from carnal expressions of sex but simply that sex is a very great mystifier, it’s a very great dark force. It makes us do all kinds of things we don’t understand and very often don’t want to do. The kind of opening out of love as a world where we really can see other people and are not simply dominated by our own slavish impulses and obsessions, this is something which I would want very much to explore and which I think is very difficult. All these demons and so on are connected with the obsessional side of one’s life, which in a sense has got to be overcome. In The Flight from the Enchanter, Rosa is enslaved; the outsider, Peter – not a particularly real character, I’m afraid – represents an open world, a world which is not a world of slavery. This would be a theme too in one or two of the other novels.

Would you say that most of the characters in A Severed Head are slaves?

Yes. In A Severed Head there’s no resolution. Martin is just lucky – or is he lucky? – in his relationship to one of his enslavers. Equally there isn’t really any resolution in The Unicorn.

Would you say then that the mechanical love-making in some of these closed novels is an effect of compulsion?

Yes. I think in some of these relationships, in A Severed Head, say, that the mechanicalness of it is an aspect of the dreariness of this unenlightened world. But I think The Unicorn is a much better novel than either The Flight from the Enchanter or A Severed Head or The Italian Girl. It’s about the ambiguity of such relationships when they get mixed up with notions of redemption and other religious notions. In a way it is about the ambiguity of the spiritual world itself, the curious connections there are between spirituality and sex.

One gets this in The Bell too.

Yes – how people get lost in this sort of labyrinth; and how in a quite genuine way the motive power for our activity is sexual. This doesn’t mean that great saints are in any way discredited. It’s just that it is very difficult to become a great saint.

You don’t follow Freud on religion then?

No. I’m not Freudian. I think Freud discovered a lot of things, but I think this whole business of sexuality and spirituality is very much more ambiguous and hard to understand.

What has been your own experience with regard to religion?

I was brought up as a Protestant Christian and I am still very much connected with Christianity, though I’m not a believer in any conceivable sense. I am very interested in religion.

I would like to be thought of as a realistic writer.

Can we talk about writing habits and the way you compose a novel? Do you begin writing soon after a subject forms itself in your mind, or is there a period of gestation?

I am not neurotic about working. I don’t wait for inspiration; I just go ahead and work office hours, as it were. But I spend a great deal of time planning what I am going to do. I need a very long time to brood on the subject and the plot and the characters, and to let them sort themselves out in a kind of automatic way, without actually starting to write anything except notes. The longer one can prolong this stage of creation, I find, the better. By the time I start to write, the thing is practically finished; there’s nothing to do except write it. Then, of course, one modifies it a great deal in the writing.

How does that go?

I always write at least two drafts. I write a first draft, which is often a bit muddled in places. Then I write an entire second draft, and very often for a particular part, I might write it ten times.

And after the second draft is completed?

I take as much care as I can, but then I want to get rid of the damned thing – because the next one is already sort of around.

Do you do a daily stint when you are working on a novel?

Yes. I am not a nocturnal worker. I start at nine o’clock in the morning, when I feel most intelligent, and I go on till one or so. In the afternoon I do some sort of manual work; I’ve got a house to run as well as other jobs one does. I wash up in the afternoon, and so on. Then about four o’clock I start again and go on to about half-past-seven. That’s a day’s work.

Do you read much contemporary fiction or poetry?

No. It’s partly a matter of time, partly that I don’t think we’re as good as people of the past. One is so rewarded by going on and on reading nineteenth-century fiction, particularly English and Russian writers – and Proust I read a lot – that really I’d rather read them.

Which of the earlier novelists do you go to most?

I read Dickens and Jane Austen. I’m very attached to Wuthering Heights. And I read Tolstoy and Dostoievski. And Henry James I feel a good deal of affinity with. I just re-read the big things at intervals.

Do you think any of these writers has had a formative influence on you?

The only person I’m certain has influenced me is Henry James, though I think he’s less good than some of the people I’ve mentioned just now.

Have you ever been interested in Jacobean or Restoration drama?

Yes, I have had this interest. But speaking of contemporary writers, I have in fact been influenced, at least in my earlier work by two contemporary writers whom I’m very fond of – Raymond Queneau and Samuel Beckett. I knew about Beckett long before anybody’d ever heard of him. I’m an old, old Beckett fan.

Of the novels or the plays or both?

Of the novels, particularly those in English. I think it was a great tragedy that Beckett stopped writing in English. He’s a marvellous master of English, and it’s slightly different in French. It’s marvellous but doesn’t seem to me quite so good.

Was it Beckett’s language or the whole thing that attracted you?

The whole thing really. Murphy and Watt – particularly Murphy. It’s a kind of ancestor of Under the Net.

What about Queneau?

Well, he’s a sort of post-surrealist novelist. I don’t think Zazie dans le métro is his best work. Again I like his earlier novels better. He writes in a kind of argot about characters wandering round Paris. It’s wild stuff, but also very poetic. He is in fact also a poet. I find his novels very poetic as well as being extremely funny and delightful.

Do you admire Genêt?

I think he is a marvellous writer, full of beauty and poetry. But I think his work can’t help being hurt by its subject matter. I haven’t ever settled down to thinking about Genêt; but the author’s attitude towards the subject does pull the thing apart in a way.

It’s a kind of miracle of self-indulgence, isn’t it?

Yes. I don’t think one can get away with something as extreme as that, with such extremes of self-indulgence, however beautiful the object is which you’re making. But I think this is a very difficult point.

Do you have any feeling about experiment in fiction?

I have thought a lot about this. I don’t feel drawn to any extremes of experiment.

You are not going to write a Pale Fire or a Naked Lunch?

No. God forbid – at least in the case of the latter. No, I don’t think so. One can’t see very far ahead really. I feel that I want to drive my writing in the other direction, that I would like to drive it back towards a much simpler kind of realism. I would like to be thought of as a realistic writer, in the sense in which good English novelists have been realists in the past. I want to talk about ordinary life and what things are like and people are like, and to create characters who are real, free characters. Whether one could use experiment in the interests of this is something I have wondered about. But I don’t at the moment see any big break with the way in which I have been writing.

So you are not one of those who find the novel a restrictive form?

No. I think it’s a great big form. The only restrictions are my restrictions, or my limitations. I feel like somebody who’s living in a great big house and just occupies a tiny corner of it.

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Iris Murdoch was a novelist and philosopher, whose novel The Sea, The Sea won the Booker Prize.

W. K. Rose lectured at Vassar. He edited Wyndham Lewis’s letters for Methuen.

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