Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe - book review

Although Iris Murdoch is no longer here, she is experiencing a multimedia revival

Iris Murdoch 1999 (Geoff Wilkinson/Rex)

“Words are so damned important now that we’re living on paper again,” wrote Iris Murdoch to her friend and erstwhile lover, David Hicks in 1946. This phrase provides the title for a new treasure trove of Murdoch letters compiled by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner. It is a heady time for Murdoch fans. Although the opportunity to correspond with her has sadly not existed for some time, she is experiencing a multimedia revival: there are more ways than ever to engage with her lively literary and philosophical canon.

Her Twitter account, artfully manned by Pamela Osborn, has thousands of followers. Her Facebook page, run by Frances White, is buzzing. BBC Radio 4’s recent Iris Murdoch season featured dramatisations of Murdoch novels plus a Saturday play Iris Murdoch: Dream Girl. An exhibition, “Cartography for Girls”, by the artist Carol Sommer, opens this month in the Crown Street Gallery, Darlington. Sommer has created an installation based on feminist re-imaginings of Plato’s cave, a myth which fuelled Murdoch’s thought and makes many appearances in her letters.

Iris Murdoch’s private correspondence has been trickling in to the public domain over recent years. This began with the publication of Peter Conradi’s A Writer at War in 2010, which included letters and diaries from 1939-45 and was swiftly followed by David Morgan’s With Love and Rage, a “kiss-and-tell” memoir of his relationship with Iris Murdoch who was his teacher at the Royal College of Art. Remembering Iris Murdoch, Jeffrey Meyer’s 2013 account of his friendship with her, included many pages of letters, and 2014 saw the publication of the delightfully entitled Never Mind About the Bourgeoisie by Gillian Dooley and Graham Nerlich, charting Murdoch’s long correspondence with a characterful Australian academic, Brian Medlin. This book has the distinction of sharing both sides of the conversation since Medlin was an early adopter of word-processing, keeping copies of his letters.

Living on Paper is presented in chronological sections, each helpfully introduced by Rowe and Horner, who set the scene for Murdoch’s life at that time; her writing, her passions, her whereabouts. The letters are fervent, philosophical, frenetic and witty; they suggest sources, from her own life, for the varied portraits of obsessive desire in her novels.

If there is an overarching message in this volume it is how far ahead of her time Murdoch was in her ideas about gender fluidity. My teenage neighbour’s summer camp application requires kids to mark their genders on a continuum between male and female. Iris Murdoch might have enjoyed contemplating this exercise.

“I think I am sexually rather odd, which is a male homosexual in female guise.” This example of her many label-defying comments on the subject comes from a letter to the mathematician/ philosopher Georg Kreisel in the late Sixties. Her correspondence with Brigid Brophy, a novelist with whom she had a long and fraught relationship, is also laden with rich pickings including the ambiguity of wearing a “divided skirt”.

“The great moment however, is when, standing talking to someone who does not know what one is wearing, one casually puts one foot on a chair. (This needs to be demonstrated.)” Brophy’s letters were added to this collection at the eleventh hour after being acquired from her estate and heroically transcribed at speed by a selfless group of volunteers. I can barely imagine the book without them, as they provide some of the most intense and also humorous comments. Though a lifelong Labour supporter, in a 1980 discussion of Arthur Scargill’s “Yorkshire propaganda” Murdoch quips, “When Scarborough is the capital city, they won’t even have to change the name.”

The last included letter, to her spiritual inspiration and old friend Lucy Klatschko, a nun at Stanbrook from 1954-2001, is sensitively chosen and ends with the poignant lines:

“I think of the past, and you and me in the past. So much love, I

Please forgive all this stumbling – ”

More than two thirds of the letters included in Living on Paper are held in the Kingston University Archives. I have spent time there myself, trying to find evidence of Murdoch’s opinions on science. While there is an unparalleled joy in touching the paper she held, her penmanship is nigh on impossible to decipher and it is a relief to have now, in my possession, a mammoth collection of her best letters neatly typed out in Dante MT Std Reg, a fitting typeface for such a fan of the medieval poet. Kingston University’s commitment to the Iris Murdoch Archive Project is to be applauded – it has backed Anne Rowe’s fundraising in order to secure these letters and keep them in the UK, hosted biennial international conferences on Murdoch’s work, and also publishes the acclaimed Iris Murdoch Review. Long may it continue.

Rivka Isaacson is Lecturer in Chemical Biology at King’s College London