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). 

   

A Ship of Fools

This morning I woke up feeling like a passenger on The Ship of Fools.  This trip's passenger list is made up of people who have written self-published memoirs. No, no romance novels, no porn, no BDSM, no theories on various conspiracies, just memoirs, and just those that the New York publishing world wouldn't touch.

O.K., up here on deck, what are we supposed to do? I suppose mingle. I suppose be civil. I suppose in some cases we could take ourselves seriously, perhaps engage in seminars, round table discussions, or in my case, hide in a corner and cringe, or engage in compulsive eating.

What brought on this conniption fit is that I started reading on Kindle one of Those memoirs, by a former girlfriend, someone who was reluctant to buy my book, wanting a free copy, and who I just don't feel that close to anymore, that I would want to be that generous, seeing as how my goal with my book has been to pay for it's printing.   

Her book is fine. She has had a successful career as model, actress, photographer, and she had remained beautiful, which puts her in a special category of its own. I hesitate, well, more than hesitate, to critique her fine book, only because I would feel too deeply my own embarrassment about being self-published, which is of course, my problem.   

That's not what this is about. It's about having to actually live in, and with, the feeling of failure. Which is as uncomfortable now as it was getting fired from a job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by the head librarian, Bernard Karpel, in 1967, after a year of putting books back on the shelves and inserting Kurt Valentine's paper-work into cellophane binders for his archive. I was fired for being "hung-over and stinking of booze all the time."  It was a bad feeling, and one I couldn't digest. I felt it for a day or so, and then drank and rationalized it away with Beatnik attitude. Mr. Karpel had been so kind about it; he reiterated that he'd never had to do anything like it, that it hadn't ever occurred to him that he would be faced with such an agonizing chore, and that I was a nice guy and all that, but that it was not possible for me to continue; the dignity of the institution being at stake.

Some of that hollow, low self-esteem empty feeling lurks in my soul, a soul that is for the most part healed, and happy and grateful for a life that allows me to read, and ride horseback, and stroll the countryside like a Lord of the Manor in my old age. It lurks in my soul in the sense that I'm allowed to feel that old feeling of hollowness, helplessness, for what it was, real.

 Because reading, (perusing), her book, I was faced with the character that I was when I was 27 years old, as seen by a healthy, sane young woman, seven years my junior, that I was involved with, in fact lived with on and off for a year or more, while I was a dry drunk, on the wagon and using the Marijuana Maintenance Program.

   For those in Rio Linda, the M.M. isn't an actual institution but a common hipster "cure" for alcoholism, which makes an alcoholic less prone to dangerous, noisy, and disagreeable behavior, while at the same time allowing him to avoid real, homeostatic reaction to stimuli.   

I don't come off too badly in the book, that is up to as far as I've read, but I'm not the main character, after all; she is. The character I play is close enough to the real me to be quite recognizable. He has a cover-story. He doesn't wear his feeling of failure on his sleeve, in fact he has those feelings tucked away somewhat, but he hasn't much strength of character. He is an artist manque with all of the sad clown appeal of that term.

And I'm not the love interest; it's understood that the real love of her life is out there, always just out of reach, because he is an International Playboy who doesn't have to worry about reaching some measurable degree of socio-economic equanimity, because he has a trust-fund. 

My life hasn't been heroic, and it hasn't been a mystery solved, it's been struggle and small successes. The struggles mostly have had to do with self-acceptance. So in some sense, her story as it relates to me really is the story of my life.