Remembering Iris Murdoch: Letters and Interviews, Jeffrey Meyers, Palgrave Macmillan 2013, 124pp, £30 (hardback)
Jeffrey Meyers met Iris Murdoch and John Bayley in 1978, when he was teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder and they were invited to give some lectures and seminars at the University of Denver. For about twenty years he corresponded with them. They met again eight times in Oxford and London when he was in England. This book consists mainly of Murdoch’s letters to Meyers and finally some brief letters from Bayley breaking the sad news of Iris’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease. There is an introductory section, ‘Remembering Iris’, which gives a brief biographical account of the novelist and her love affairs, recalls their meetings and describes his personal impressions of her. The book also includes two interviews with Murdoch and a discussion of the memoirs by her friend A. N. Wilson and her husband John Bayley.
Iris Murdoch was a very generous correspondent with friends, acquaintances and writers of fan mail. By 1964 she was answering ten letters a day. She later told Meyers that she received about twenty every day and, although she produced so much fiction and philosophical work and had no secretary, replied to them all. She thought that some writers of fan mail were lonely and deserved attention. During and after the move from Steeple Aston to Oxford in 1986 Murdoch destroyed a great many letters and presumably few or none of Meyers’s to her have survived. Her letters to him are friendly but much less interesting than those collected by Peter J. Conradi for Iris Murdoch A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939-1945 (Short Books, 2010). Perhaps most people’s lives in their twenties are more interesting than their lives after fifty. Murdoch’s certainly was and she wrote colourfully and candidly to her dear friend Frank Thompson and her fiancé David Hicks about war-time Oxford and London, her job in the Civil Service and her work with refugees in Austria. During the period of her correspondence with Meyers most of Murdoch’s time was spent, very valuably, at her desk writing, though there was social life with friends and travels for holidays or for lectures and interviews. Iris sometimes felt she would be better off at her desk. In 1987 she writes: ‘I have been to India, France, Italy and am shortly going to Sweden and then Italy again. Why does[n’]t one just stay in one’s room and think?’ And, in 1990, ‘I’ve been away (in Spain) and am about to go away again – why does one do it … ? Staying at home and working quietly is much jollier!’ She does not tell Meyers much about her thoughts, though she expresses some predictable opinions: she is glad that the Church of England is ordaining women, sorry that Somerville College, where she was an undergraduate, is admitting men, critical of Islam’s misogyny and horrified by the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. She is characteristically uncommunicative about her novels. She did not discuss them with anyone, not even Bayley, until they were finished and was very resistant to any suggestions of revision. She continued to read and reread widely and thought War and Peace the greatest of novels.
Until we have a Collected Letters, which will not be soon, any of Murdoch’s available correspondence should be published. But this book adds little to our knowledge of her. Some of it has been published before. The interviews do appear in Gillian Dooley’s collection, From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), though slightly abridged, and Meyers, who relates in rather obsessive detail here and elsewhere his editorial problems with their first publisher Paris Review, prints them in full and adds (ethically?) some passages which Iris deleted. The content is familiar from Murdoch’s other interviews and non-fiction. She speaks of her Irish ancestry, her happy childhood, her early faith, later scepticism and respect for religion, her brief membership of the Communist party, her working methods, the delicate relationship between philosophy and fiction and the moral influence of literature. Meyers’s lively Introduction recycles some of the material from his earlier book Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), such as his entertaining accounts of a characteristically unappetizing dinner at Murdoch’s London flat and a party at Steeple Aston. One of the guests at the party, a female ex-colleague with whom Murdoch had an intimate friendship, was Peter (not, as according to Meyers, ‘Peta’) Ady. The closing section provides a summary of the two memoirs, points out some errors in Bayley’s but contrasts Wilson’s ‘misguided missiles’ with ‘the healing power of John’s fine memoir.’ Meyers’s own book is clearly a record of a valued relationship with a major writer but does not contribute much that is new to Murdoch studies.