Iris Murdoch

It wasn't a shot in the dark.  Coming to read Iris was sort of Murdochian.  Her characters just have things come at them, fatefully, and she lets you know what they are thinking while it's happening, and you don't think of it as too coincidental because you are drawn in, partly by the nakedness of her situations. You see through everyone's masks and defenses to their odd irrelevant, selfish often perverse thoughts and of course you understand that each person has his private anxiety and that all together they create, to kill two metaphors with one stone, a cluster-fuck that inevitably drives itself off a cliff.

I picked up her The Book and the Brotherhood because someone mentioned it and I took it as a cue; and of course now I can't remember where or whom; it was perhaps a blog, but anyway I let the mention direct me to send off for a used copy on Amazon.  I'm sort of addicted to doing that. The book "Hums with energy and implications."  Time Magazine said.  It came out in 1987.

Before it came in the mail I was aware that I was going to use the book as medicine for my fragile state caused by the political war between Trump and Hillary. I have over-personalized the whole thing and of course I think that Hillary is part of a Communist conspiracy but don't you dare snigger you swine.

The plot goes like this; a group of Oxford friends have established a fund, a stipend to support a friend who's a Marxist and is writing a book, a long book that's taking forever. The friends have grown paranoid and resentful over the years and at last they confront the Commie bastard. Of course the sentimentality here is mine; I'm not an Oxford type.

But I love being in Murdoch world and that's why I've read all her books now, including this one, at least once.  (The Black Prince three times.)  I was given a copy of Prince when it was new, by someone who read it and loved it and she and I were both also swayed by the knowledge that someone of great social import, (a cultural ikon) loved Iris. Was I suggestible? Sure.  And all of that and more. Or you could say I had willfully cast myself adrift in this sea of influences all of my own making and was floating in the middle of a large collection of flotsam that had once been stinking in my very own garbage can.   

I should say by way of some sort of explanation that in 1963, [I was twenty], just a couple of weeks after JFK's assassination, I had sailed through a hurricane on the old Queen Mary to London with my mother and sister, to be with my father who was lonely and depressed there due to the assassination and also due to his being swindled by a couple of sharks.  I was twenty years old and waiting to be drafted into the Army, and my family including me had agreed that my impending military service was a fearful enough specter that I needed a sabbatical. And that's what I got. Living with my family in Hampstead, taking Miltown on the National Health, washed down with Watney's Pale Ale in gallon cans kept handy in the refrigerator, with a spigot so you didn't have to remove the can; taking trips to the Tate and the British Museum with my father, smoking English Ovals, eating chops and chips, drinking tea, walking up to Hampstead High Street and stopping at Kay Kendall's grave to admire the flowers that Rex Harrison left there every day, drinking at the Bull and Bush, and reading; Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, lots of Huxley, the London Times, and whatever was trendy in London that fall and winter.

Ad. 12/17/16   Reading Iris, by John Bayley..., (her husband).