I suppose I need to say that I loved Peter J. Conradi's book, Iris Murdoch, A Life. Conradi is not completely uncritical, but he loved Iris as I do, and was her good friend for many years, and he observed her closely. He has much to say about who and what she put into her books. For instance; he mentioned that she liked those books of her youth called boy's books or young men's books, particularly those by Robert Lewis Stevenson. He points out, that in The Black Prince, Bradley says at one point well along in the story that he wishes he had written Treasure Island.* I finished re-reading it, (T.I.), yesterday.....and, for some odd reason, I've started re-reading W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions. Now, I would say that Green Mansions is a boy's book. If I'm wrong I'm wrong. The original came out in 1916 but the edition I have, published in 1944, was illustrated by E. McKnight Kauffer, and amounts to a great collection of period book illustration. Kauffer, an American who lived and worked for many years in London, [and was a friend of my father's] is more well known for his posters, a fact I just learned through Google.
I was jogged into re-reading Hudson's book for the unlikely reason that it had some resonance for me with the Pearson character in Black Prince, in the fanciful take the two characters in each book have on young womanhood.
I've also been working my way through A History of Structuralism, by Francois Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman. I've mentioned that Iris gives a nod here and there to her structuralist neighbors; she was a frequent visitor of Paris. One such nod, I thought, was when Bradley's mistress's mother refers to him as cold, more in a historical way, ie Levi Strauss, then in an emotional way. TKTK Does she mean literally relating to L.-S. ?}
*Treasure Island was a favorite book of mine too. My father gave me a copy that had been illustrated by his friend and mentor, N.C. Wyeth.
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