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       1 ‘Existentialist and Mystic’

      Iris Murdoch was the author of some twenty-six novels, a handful of plays and poems, a number of influential articles, a book on Sartre, two books of her own moral philosophy, and a book on Plato’s theory of art. She is a writer of international reputation. Apart from monographs there has been no full-length study of her work by a British critic since A.S. Byatt’s valuable, pioneering study Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965). Despite the honours that the later work won – The Black Prince won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1973, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine won the Whitbread Prize in 1974, The Sea, The Sea the Booker Prize in 1978 – it has not been properly celebrated. I believe that the early theory, and also the real but limited success of the early apprentice fiction, have obscured the enormous, disorderly merits of the later work, which in its turn must alter the way we view the earlier.

      Few writers divide their audiences as radically. Between Murdoch’s advocates and her detractors there is a gulf fixed. Elizabeth Dipple’s useful missionary Work for the Spirit (1982) sought to bridge this gap and to convert the latter into the former. This study is not, by contrast, a proselytising one. It seeks to persuade no one who does not already enjoy her work, but to describe some of the pleasures which an excessively narrow critical focus has neglected. This is a celebratory study whose aim is to try to illuminate her best work and to give some account of why she is found both entertaining, and also serious and important.

      ‘Most artists understand their own weaknesses far better than the critics do,’ says Arnold Baffin in The Black Prince, a writer unflatteringly parodied, as his creator has been, for emptying himself in his books over the world ‘like scented bath-water’, and as living ‘in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea’ (BP 137). Iris Murdoch is her own best critic and best defendant. She gives the prolific Baffin an eloquent self-defence too – ‘The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on trying to do it better. And one aspect of this is that any artist has to decide how fast to work. I do not believe that I would improve if I wrote less. The only result of that would be that there would be less of whatever there is’ (172).

      Murdoch’s frailties are by now well chronicled. Borrowing her own lofty criteria and sometimes drawing on her Peccavis, reviewers have sometimes been content to issue bulletins of high-minded reproof and adopt a tone of puritanical strictness. In what follows I do not seek to whisk her away into academic irreproachability. It is in some sense her human quality that seems to me engaging – her quality of, in the best sense, ‘stubborn imperfection’.¹ She can be uneven, over-intellectual or romantic. There is some unfinished and repetitive writing. The books can seem contrived or over-plotted, the characters sometimes insufficiently imagined. Her social range is not huge; she says little about work and often appears to take money for granted. She can seem to be playing a complex game with the reader. There is, as early reviewers noted, ‘too much’ in the books.

      The objections are by now well canvassed. Her virtues need cataloguing too. She writes spellbinding stories in beautiful prose. She knows how to master paragraphs and sentences and at her best achieves an extraordinary, luminous, lyrical accuracy. She has an intensely visual imagination and can use it to evoke things, people, the activity of thinking, feeling, places, cars and dogs too. In each novel are things that no other British writer has the power to describe. Her empirical curiosity and moral energy seem endless. Few other writers are as full of the naked pleasures of looking and describing. She can tackle happiness, ‘that deep, confiding

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