Peter J. Conradi. Iris Murdoch: a Life.

Henry, Richard

New York, Norton. 2001. xxix + 706 pages + 32 plates. $35. ISDN 0-393-04875-6

IRIS MURDOCH: A LIFE is the first full biography of philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who passed away in 1999 at the age of eighty. Peter Conradi, who edited Murdoch's Existentialists and Mystics (1997), has drawn upon his friendship with Murdoch, conversations with her friends, and her letters and journals to "start the job of setting her work in the context of the cultural/intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century, of the generation who struggled to come to terms philosophically and emotionally and artistically with Stalin and Hitler, with existentialism, and with the slow collapse of religion." He divides the study into thirds, covering her life from birth to the age of twenty-five, from twenty-five to thirty-seven, and from there to her death at eighty. Given his avowed purpose and the focus he gives to twelve years of her life, the volume might better have been titled Iris Murdoch: An Intellectual Life. Despite this overall concern with the intellectual life, Cortradi's biography almost seems to be three books, for each section has its own emphasis.

Conradi begins by establishing Murdoch's family history and its roots in the aristocracy and in Ireland. Early family relationships give way to her schooling at Badminton and her political development, leading to her joining the Communist Party and her work at the Treasury in London during World War II. This first section is clearly not a literary biography, though Conradi does comment upon some of her early experiences in light of her later work--"It could be said that all her fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth," for example, or "[n]ovel after Iris novel depends upon the convention that a court of characters have been friends since college days." Part 1 traces this evolution through to her attraction to the Communist Party and her later abandonment of it. There is a decided undercurrent that emerges in full force: her personal relationships with friends and lovers are hardly rationalistic, even if her underlying moral politics allow their manifestation. These build to what is perhaps the most important relationship of these early years, that with her friend and lover, Frank Thompson, who is killed toward the end of the war. She mourns his loss for the rest of her life. So ends Murdoch's "youth."

Part 2 pays most attention to Conradi's avowed purpose: he considers her intellectual engagements; her deep interests in philosophy; her reading of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre; and her friendships with any number of intellectual and literary giants (Raymond Queneau, G. E. M. Anscombe, Elias Canetti). Conradi skips from one person to the next, developing Murdoch's relationships with first one, then another. Unlike the underlying organizational principle of the first part, here time almost disappears. He develops relationships, often giving an extended background on people before introducing Murdoch to them. The section is marked by philosophy, even as she is beginning to write novels, publishing Under the Net in 1954.

The third part shifts again, mixing time and relationships as general organizational principles. Oftentimes this becomes a literary history (though clearly not so much so as Conradi's earlier The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch), identifying persons and ideas as they reappear in her novels. John Bayley makes what seem to be guest appearances. Their life is not the focus, despite Conradi's acknowledgment that Murdoch and Bayley were highly devoted to each other. Here is where Conradi complements Bayley's two memoirs (Elegy for Iris [U.S. title: Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch] and Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire), for Conradi offers a broader perspective on these forty-four years than Bayley does in his more intimate presentation. In the end, Conradi achieves precisely what he set out to do: to provide a first foray into the intellectual life of Iris Murdoch.

Richard Henry

SUNY, Potsdam