OK, let's unpack this. I want you to imagine
a person who somehow manages to inhabit two completely
contradictory worlds at the exact same time.
And I don't mean they have a day job and a hobby.
I mean, they are a titan in one world and a legend
in the other. And the rules of those two worlds.
Oh, they usually do not mix. We are talking about
the oil and water of the intellectual life, aren't
we? It's that gap between rigorous, logic -driven
moral philosophy and the messy, chaotic, emotional
world of fiction writing. Right. Exactly. Usually
you get one or the other. You get the philosopher
who sits in a quiet room and thinks about truth
with a capital T. And their writing is, let's
be honest, it's dry, it's precise, and frankly,
often pretty boring. It can be, yeah. Or you
get the novelist, the person who lives in the
muck of human relationships, dealing with affairs,
jealousy, the smell of the sea, the taste of
bad wine. Yeah. All the sensory stuff. But today
we are talking about the woman who did both.
At the highest possible level, she was a double
threat in a way that almost no one else in the
20th century was. We're talking about Dame Jean
Iris Murdoch. And... Honestly, the more I read
about her for this deep dive, the more I felt
like I was reading about a fictional character.
I mean, try this on for size. Imagine a friend
who writes these incredibly dense, serious, philosophical
tracks about the importance of goodness, about
suppressing your ego, about basically being a
saint. Okay. But then the same friend lives a
bohemian life that would make a rock star blush.
It's a life full of wild affairs, turbulent relationships,
and a marriage that just... It defies any modern
categorization. And then she turns around and
writes 26 novels. Yeah. Bestsellers, Booker Prize
winners that are basically about the absolute
chaos she sees around her and lives inside of.
That is the hook. She's the saint and the artist.
She's the moralist and the bohemian. And our
mission today isn't just to list her achievements.
We want to figure out how she saw the world.
We want to get inside her head. And we have a
great stack of sources to help us do that. We're
looking at her biography, obviously, but we're
also diving into her major philosophical work,
The Sovereignty of Good, which is a tough read.
It's dense, but we're going to break it down.
Yeah, we'll make it make sense. We're looking
at her fiction, specifically The Sea, The Sea,
and her first novel, Under the Net. And perhaps
most interestingly, we're looking at the memoirs
written by the people who knew her, specifically
her husband, John Bailey. We are going to try
to answer the question, how do you live a life
of attention, and that's a key word for her,
in a world that is constantly trying to distract
you? Because if there is one thing Murdoch hated...
It was a distraction. She wanted to see the truth
of things. And that really is the why for everyone
listening. We live in the age of distraction.
We live in the age of the fat, relentless ego,
as she so brilliantly called it. What a phrase.
Isn't it? Murdoch's philosophy is almost an antidote
to the 21st century, even though she died just
before it really kicked off. We're going to decode
her concept of unselfing, which sounds painful,
but is actually incredibly liberating. We are
definitely going to talk about that marriage.
43 years. 43 years of complexity, yeah. So let's
start at the very beginning. To understand the
dual mind, we have to look at the dual origin.
Where does a brain like Iris Murdoch's even come
from? Well, she was born in Finsborough, Dublin
on July 15th, 1919. And we can't just gloss over
that date or that place. It's hugely important.
No, 1919 in Dublin is not a quiet time. Not at
all. It's the middle of the Irish War of Independence.
The city is a powder keg. There's violence in
the streets. There's a massive cultural upheaval
happening. She is born right into the thick.
of this identity crisis for the entire nation.
And her own family seems to embody a bit of a
contradiction too, right? Her father, Wills John
Hughes Murdoch, comes from this very grounded
background. Right. He was a civil servant, but
his roots were in County Down from a line of
Presbyterian sheep farmers. So you have this
very practical, earthbound, stoic lineage on
one side. Salt of the earth. Very much. And he
had served as an officer in the Royal Dublin
Fusiliers during the First World War, so he'd
seen the reality of conflict up close. He's not
an abstract thinker. And then the mother. Completely
different. Irene Ellis. She was a trained singer.
She came from a middle -class Church of Ireland
family in Dublin. So you have the sheep farmer's
son and the singer. The pragmatic and the artistic
right there in the household. It feels like her
entire personality was set up right there in
the DNA. The grounding of the father and the
soaring artistic temperament of the mother. But
she didn't grow up in Dublin, did she? They moved.
No, and this is crucial for her identity. When
she was just a few weeks old, the family moved
to London because her father joined the Ministry
of Health. So she grows up in Chiswick. She's
an only child educated at these very proper progressive
private schools like the Frobel Demonstration
School and then Badminton School in Bristol.
So she's Anglo -Irish. She's living in England.
She sounds English. She's educated in the English
system. But she has this shadow identity, this
Irish birthright that she carries with her. And
she felt that duality intensely. Later in life,
she talked about feeling like an exile in both
places. You know, too English for the Irish and
too Irish. for the English. That sense of being
an outsider looking in is really, really important
for a novelist. You need that distance to observe
people properly. She eventually heads to Oxford
in 1938, Somerville College, and she decides
to study greats. Now, I know we throw that term
around when we talk about British intellectuals,
but I think we need to explain what that actually
means. It's not just introduction to philosophy
101. Oh, absolutely not. Greats, or... Literae
Humanioris is the intellectual equivalent of
Navy SEAL training for the mind. It is a grueling
four -year course that combines Latin and Greek
language and literature, ancient history, and
both ancient and modern philosophy. So you're
not just reading translations. No, no. You are
translating Thucydides and Plato from the original
Greek and Tacitus from the Latin while simultaneously
critiquing their logic and historical accuracy.
It is designed to be punishing. It sounds exhausting.
It is. It trains you to think with incredible
precision. And Iris didn't just survive it, she
crushed it. She took first class honors in 1942.
But again, look at the year, 1942. She is sitting
her final exams, translating Greek philosophy,
while the Luftwaffe is bombing London. The world
is burning down around her. That contrast is
the key to her entire life. It's always there.
She's in this ivory tower, engaging with the
highest forms of human thought, while the basest
forms of human destruction are happening just
a few hundred miles away. And she doesn't stay
in the tower. That's the important part. This
is the part of her resume that I think surprises
people who only know her as a novelist. She didn't
go straight into a Ph .D. or a teaching gig.
She went into the wreckage of the war. She did.
Initially, she worked for the U .K. Treasury
as an assistant principal, which was essential
war work, but fairly bureaucratic. But then in
June 1944, she joined the U .N .R .A. The United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
Exactly. This is the organization tasked with
putting Europe back together. And putting back
together is a very polite way of saying trying
to keep millions of displaced, starving, traumatized
people alive. And where did they send her? She
was stationed in London, then Brussels, then
Innsbruck, and finally Graz, Austria, working
with refugees. I want to pause on Graz because
we're talking about 1945, 1946. The war has just
ended. Austria was a part of the Third Reich.
The infrastructure is gone. There are refugees
flooding in from the east. What is a young woman
from Oxford seeing when she steps off the train
in Graz? She's seeing total moral and physical
collapse. She's seen displaced persons, camps,
VP camps. These are people who have lost their
homes, their families, their citizenship. They're
stateless. And the conditions must have been?
Appalling. It's hunger. It's cold. It's mud.
It's disease. It's the sheer logistical nightmare
of human suffering on a mass scale. In the outline,
it mentions she called this the thinginess of
life. I love that. Yes. That's a very Murdochian
phrase. Yeah. When you were in a classroom in
Oxford, you can talk about the good or justice
as these beautiful abstract concepts. Yeah. But
when you were in a refugee camp in Graz looking
at a family that has walked a thousand miles
with nothing but the clothes on their backs,
life becomes very thingy. Right. It's about bread.
It's about blankets. It's about a visa stamp
that can mean the difference between life and
death. Goodness is not an idea. It's a bowl of
soup. It strikes me that this experience must
be where her philosophy actually starts to form.
You can't be a moral relativist when you're standing
in a refugee camp. You can't look at that suffering
and say well morality is just a matter of opinion.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. That
experience lightly inoculated her against the
kind of dry academic philosophy that was becoming
popular at the time. She saw that human beings
aren't just rational agents making choices in
a vacuum. No, they're vulnerable. They are vulnerable,
fleshy creatures who can be destroyed. And she
saw that the act of helping someone, of seeing
them as human amidst the rubble, was a real tangible
force in the world. It wasn't just a word. It
was an action. It's interesting. She also briefly
met Ludwig Wittgenstein during this post -war
period, right? Sure. At Cambridge. Yes. After
UNRA, she won a scholarship to Vassar in the
U .S., but was denied a visa, which we'll get
to. So instead, she went to Newnham College,
Cambridge, as a postgraduate from 1947 to 1948.
And Wittgenstein is there. Wittgenstein is the,
I mean, the heavyweight champion of 20th century
philosophy. She didn't hear him lecture formally
because he had resigned his professorship, but
she was in his orbit. She met him. Talk about
intimidating. Incredibly. Wittgenstein was known
for his intensity, his almost religious devotion
to the precision of language. He would trowel
around the room demanding absolute clarity, even
though Murdoch would eventually rebel against
a lot of the analytic tradition he spawned. That
exposure to his rigor, that demand for absolute
honesty and thought definitely shaped her. So
we have the foundation. She has the classical
education from Oxford, the real -world trauma
of the war relief work, and the exposure to the
greatest philosophical minds of the era. She
becomes a fellow at St. Anne's College, Oxford,
in 1948. She is set up to be a brilliant academic.
She is. Her path seems set. But then we have
to talk about the other side of the coin, the
personal life, the part that wasn't so neat and
tidy. The life that fueled the novels. Exactly.
Enter John Bailey. They met in Oxford in 1954.
He was a literary critic, a professor at St.
Anthony's College, and a novelist himself, though
not as famous as she would become. They married
in 1956. Now, if you look at the photos of them
or read the basic bio, it looks like the perfect
match. Two Dons, two intellectuals, a life of
books and tea and quiet conversation in a dusty
house full of papers. And in many ways, that
was their life. It was a partnership of the mind.
They had this incredible intellectual connection,
but the romantic and sexual dynamic. That is
where it gets incredibly complicated. This is
the part that feels like a Rorschach test for
relationships. Some people look at it and see
a disaster. Others see something evolved and
complex. John Bailey has this famous quote, and
I still can't believe he said this. He thought
that sex was quote, inescapably ridiculous. Chuckles
lightly. It's a very distinct perspective. And
if that is your baseline for intimacy, that it's
inherently silly and ridiculous, you're going
to have a very specific kind of marriage. Especially
when your wife is Iris Murdoch. Because everything
I've read suggests she did not find it ridiculous.
She found it essential, powerful, maybe even
dangerous. She was a person of immense passion.
The sources are clear on this. She had multiple
serious affairs throughout her marriage, and
these weren't just flings. These were intense,
emotional, sometimes turbulent relationships
with both men and women. We have to name names
here to understand the scope. She had a long,
very complex relationship with the writer Brigid
Brophy. Which was a very intellectual, very intense
connection. Lots of letters, lots of arguments,
a real meeting of minds as well as everything
else. And then there's Elias Kennedy. He was
a Nobel Prize winner, a writer, and by all accounts,
a massive, overpowering personality. Kennedy
is crucial. He was a dominant, almost demonic
figure. He was charismatic, controlling, and
sexually demanding. He is the archetype for what
Murdoch called the enchanter. The enchanter.
Let's define that. This is a figure that shows
up in her books over and over again. It's the
charismatic, powerful male who walks into a room
and just bends reality to his will. He sucks
the oxygen out of the room and makes everyone,
men and women, fall in love with him or fear
him. even if he's destroying them in the process.
A kind of psychological vampire. In a way, yes.
And she experienced that dynamic firsthand with
Kennedy. She knew what it felt like to be under
the spell of a powerful, ego -driven personality.
And instead of letting it destroy her marriage,
she seemingly compartmentalized it, or maybe
integrated it. It's hard to say. But Bailey knew,
right? He wasn't the clueless husband sitting
at home while she was out having these intense
relationships. He knew, absolutely. You referred
to them as discomposing occasions. Discomposing
occasions? That is the most British understatement
I have ever heard in my entire life. My wife
is with her Nobel Prize winning lover. How discomposing.
It is remarkably understated. But I think this
speaks to why the marriage lasted 43 years until
her death. Bailey offered her something the Enchantress
couldn't. Which was what? He offered her a safe
harbor. He offered her a childlike, undemanding
acceptance. With Kennedy, she had to be on. She
had to be the intellectual equal, the lover,
the combatant. It was exhausting. With Bailey,
she could just be Iris. She could be messy and
difficult, and he would still be there. It's
that contrast again. The storm and the harbor.
And she needed both. If she only had Bailey,
maybe she would have been bored to death. If
she only had Kennedy, she might have burned out
completely. And this tension is exactly what
fuels her fiction. It's the raw material. When
you read her novels, they are populated by these
exact types of people. You have the quiet, observant
characters, often like Bailey, and you have the
dangerous, charismatic wrecking balls like Kennedy.
She wasn't inventing these dynamics. She was
reporting from the front lines of her own life.
Which brings us to the engine room. We've talked
about the life, but we need to talk about the
thinking. Because Murdoch wasn't just writing
novels about affairs. She was trying to build
a philosophical system that explained why we
behave the way we do, why we fall under these
spells. This is the aha moment. This is where
we dive into her philosophy, specifically her
collection of essays, The Sovereignty of Good.
To understand why her philosophy was so radical,
so rebellious, we have to understand what she
was fighting against. You mentioned earlier that
she hated the dominant philosophy of her time.
What was going on in Oxford in the 50s and 60s
that made her so angry? It was the heyday of
analytic philosophy, specifically a branch of
moral philosophy that included emotivism and
later prescriptivism. The big names were people
like A .J. Ayer and R .M. Hare. Okay, lay it
out for us. What did they believe? What was the
core idea? In simple terms, they believed that
facts and values were completely separate things.
A fact is something you can prove scientifically,
like water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. That's
a real verifiable statement about the world.
Right. But a value, a statement like stealing
is wrong or kindness is good, isn't a fact in
the same way. It's just an expression of a feeling
or a command. So if I say murder is wrong, I'm
not stating a truth about the universe. According
to the emotivist, no. You are basically just
saying boo to murder. You are expressing a personal
distaste. Or for the prescriptivist, you're saying
don't murder, like a command. But you are describing
a reality. There's no property of wrongness floating
in the universe that you're pointing to. That
feels empty. It makes morality feel like it's
just about my personal preference, like choosing
vanilla ice cream over chocolate. I prefer not
being murdered. That is exactly why Murdoch hated
it. She called it an uncriticized conception
of science, dominating all of thought. She felt
it reduced human beings to these isolated, lonely
wills. In that worldview, we are just standing
in a featureless void, pointing at things and
saying, I like this or I command that. There's
no connection to a deeper reality, no sense of
discovery. So what was her alternative? She called
herself a moral realist. What does that mean?
It means she went back to Plato. She argued that
good is a real thing. It's not just a word we
use to express our feelings. It is a reality,
almost like the sun. It exists outside of us,
independent of our will. So it's something to
be discovered, not invented. Precisely. And our
job as human beings isn't to create our own values
based on what we happen to want. Our job is to
try to see the good. to perceive it accurately.
This is where we get to her most famous concept,
attention. Yes. She borrowed this from the French
philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, who she had
admired greatly. The idea is that morality isn't
primarily about the moment you make a choice.
It's not about standing at a crossroads and saying,
I choose the virtuous path on the left. Okay.
Morality is about what you were doing for the
10 years leading up to that crossroads. It's
about the quality of your consciousness. It's
about how you habitually see the world. It's
about the seeing, not the choosing. Exactly.
The moral work happens before the choice. If
you see the world clearly, if you pay just and
loving attention to reality, you will naturally
do the right thing when the time comes. If you
are blinded by your own ego, by your own selfish
fantasies, you will naturally do the wrong thing.
The real work of morality happens in the scene.
Okay, this is beautiful, but it's still a bit
abstract. And Murdoch knew that, which is why
she gave us the parable of M and D in her essays.
I love this story because it is so mundane, so
domestic, yet it explains everything. It is the
perfect example. It brings it right down to earth.
So let's set the scene. You have a mother -in
-law, M, and you have a daughter -in -law, D.
A tale as old as time. The classic setup for
drama. Chuckles, indeed. Now, M is a bit of a
snob. She's educated. She's refined. She looks
at D, her son's wife, and she is not impressed.
What does she see when she looks at D? She sees
a girl who is common. She thinks D is cheap,
undignified, maybe a bit noisy and vulgar. Her
internal monologue is just full of judgment.
She thinks, my son has married beneath him. But
here's the catch, and this is so important. M
is very well behaved on the outside. She's a
proper English lady. Right. If you were watching
M on a hidden camera, you wouldn't know she felt
this way. She treats D perfectly well. She is
polite. She smiles. She helps out with the dishes.
She never says a single mean word. So, according
to the analytic philosophers, the Buhare guys
is a perfectly moral person in this situation.
She is performing all the right actions. Her
outward behavior is flawless. Exactly. If morality
is just about public choices and observable actions,
M is a saint. But Murdoch says no, absolutely
not. Murdoch says that M's internal state matters.
The fact that she is secretly despising D matters
morally. Her consciousness is full of ugliness
and illusion. So what happens in the parable?
Does M just stay a secret hater forever? No.
M decides to do the work. Maybe she realizes
she's being unfair, or maybe she just wants to
be a better person. She decides to look again.
She applies attention. She tries to suspend her
own prejudices, her own jealousy, her own snobbery.
She tries to, in Murdoch's term, unself. She
takes off the ego glasses. She tries to see what's
actually there. She cleans the lens. And gradually
over time, her vision shifts. She looks at D
doing the exact same things as before. D is still
the same person. But where M used to see vulgarity
and noise, she now sees spontaneity and joy.
Where she used to see commonness, she now sees
freshness. a naive simplicity. She has re -described
Dee in a more just, more loving way. And the
crucial point is that Dee hasn't changed. Dee
is exactly the same person she was at the beginning.
The only thing that has changed is what is happening
inside Em's head. And for Murdoch, that internal
shift is a moral act. It might be the most important
moral act Em has ever performed. She has moved
from illusion seeing Dee through the fog of her
own selfish ego to reality seeing Dee justly.
as she truly is. That is such a heavy idea if
you really apply it to your own life. It means
that what I think about the guy who cuts me off
in traffic matters, even if I don't honk at him
or flip him off. It means my internal monologue
is a moral battleground. That's it. That's the
whole game for her. Murdoch believed that the
fat, relentless ego, that's her phrase, and it's
just brilliant, is constantly creating illusions
to protect itself. The fat, relentless ego. It's
such a visceral image. It sounds like a monster
living in your chest. In a way, it is. And it's
constantly weaving stories. We tell ourselves
stories where we are the hero and everyone else
is an idiot or a villain or an obstacle. Morality
is the painful, difficult work of popping that
bubble and seeing other people as real, separate
entities with their own centers of being. Great
art was one of the few things that could help
us kill that ego, or at least quiet it down.
Yes. When you look at a truly great painting,
or read a great novel, or even just look at a
kestrel hovering in the sky, you forget yourself
for a moment. You are pulled out of your own
head and forced to pay attention to something
else, something real and detailed, and not you.
That moment of selfless awe is a moral training
ground. Which is the perfect transition to her
other career. Because if art is the tool we use
to learn how to see, then writing novels is basically
building a gymnasium for the soul. Exactly. She
published 26 of them. And she didn't view them
as separate from her philosophy at all. They
were the laboratory where she tested these ideas
with fictional human beings. She started with
Under the Net in 1954, which is actually really
funny. It's a picaresque, it's a comedy about
a... Charming but feckless writer in London.
It is. It's light. It's fast -paced. It was selected
by Modern Library as one of the 100 best English
language novels of the 20th century. But as she
got older, her books got denser, darker, and
philosophically more complex. And we have to
talk about the big one, the one that won the
Booker Prize, The Sea. The Sea, published in
1978. This book is a masterpiece of psychological
horror in a way, but it is also a terrifying
look at what happens when you fail the M &D test
on a grand dramatic scale. Let's break it down.
Who is the main character? Charles Araby. He
is a famous, successful, celebrated London theater
director who has just retired. He is wealthy,
he is cultured, and he is an absolute monster
of ego. The fat, relentless ego with a name and
a bank account? 100%. He moves to this isolated,
ugly house by the sea he calls Shruff End. He
wants to write his memoirs. He wants to be alone
with the waves and his own brilliant thoughts.
The book is his diary, and he describes his meals
in excruciating detail. Anchovy paste, boiled
eggs. Cheap wine. He is utterly obsessed with
his own sensory experience. It's all about him.
Everything. Yeah. But then, one day, he sees
a ghost from his past in the village. Hartley?
Mary Hartley Fitch. She was his childhood sweetheart,
the one who got away. He hasn't seen her in decades.
She is now an elderly woman, frumpy, with a difficult
adopted son, married to someone else, living
this quiet, unassuming life in the same village.
And most people would say, oh wow, small world,
and maybe have an awkward cup of tea. But not
Charles. Charles decides that this is destiny.
It's fate. He decides that Hartley is miserable,
that her husband is abusive, and that he, Charles,
is her savior. He convinces himself that she
is secretly, tragically still in love with him.
He starts writing this narrative in his head,
the same way he would direct a play. I am the
night, she is the damsel in distress. And he
acts on it. He stalks her. He engineers encounters.
He eventually, essentially kidnaps her. Or at
least... holds her prisoner in his house under
the guise of rescuing her from her life. It becomes
a claustrophobic horror story of obsession. And
the tragedy is the reader can see what Charles
can't see. Because we're reading his diary, we
see his delusions, but we also see through them.
We can see that Hartley is just... Tired. She's
confused. She's old. She doesn't want to be rescued.
She just wants to go home. Exactly. Charles refuses
to see her. He refuses to pay attention to the
real woman in front of him. He looks at her and
sees his own fantasy, his own lost youth, a character
in his psychodrama. He imposes his will on her
reality. It is the ultimate failure of love.
He is the enchanter gone wrong. He is trying
to force the world to follow his script because
he's a director. But real people aren't actors
you can just give lines to. And the novel absolutely
destroys him for it. By the end, his illusions
are shattered in the most violent and humiliating
ways. It is a brutal demonstration of Murdoch's
philosophy. If you do not see people justly,
if you do not unself, you will destroy them and
you will destroy yourself. It makes you wonder
how much of herself she put into Charles. She
knew she had a big ego. She's a famous writer.
Was she afraid of becoming him? I think every
creative person has a bit of Charles Aroby in
them. the desire to control the narrative to
make the world conform to your vision i think
she wrote him as a warning to herself and to
us There is a critique, though, isn't there?
The literary critic James Wood pointed this out.
He said that for all her talk about creating
free characters like Tolstoy did, for all her
praise of seeing others as real, Murdoch's own
characters often feel trapped by her. It's the
puppet master critique, yeah. Wood argued that
because she had such a strong philosophical agenda,
her characters sometimes feel like they're just
acting out her theories. They don't always breathe
and surprise you in the way that, say, Tolstoy's
characters do. They feel like chess pieces in
a moral... game she is playing. Sometimes. It's
a fair critique. The plots can be a bit creaky
and melodramatic. But even when her characters
are puppets, they are fascinating, articulate,
messy puppets. And the world she builds are so
immersive and intelligent. Let's zoom out again.
We've covered the philosophy and the fiction,
but we can't ignore the politics, because just
like her love life, her political life went through
some wild swings. She didn't start out as a quiet
Oxford don. Oh, massive swings. If you go back
to 1938, when she started at Oxford, she was
a card -carrying member of the Communist Party
of Great Britain. Which, to be fair, was almost
a fashion statement for intellectuals in the
30s. It was the thing to do. It was. It was the
era of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism
across Europe. If you had a heart and a brain,
And you leaned left. Yeah. But Murdoch didn't
just lean. She joined. She was a committed member.
But it didn't last. No. She left the party in
1942. Yeah. And her disillusionment was profound.
She later said that the experience taught her
how strong and how awful Marxism is in its organized
institutional form. Strong and awful. That is
such a specific and telling phrasing. It acknowledges
the power of the idea. the desire for justice,
the critique of capitalism. But it condemns the
reality, the crushing of the individual, the
dogmatism, the lies. And this haunted her professionally.
For years, she was denied visas to the United
States because of the McCarran Act. She was on
a blacklist. Absolutely. She had to get special
waivers just to visit. Her youthful radicalism
had real -world consequences for a long time.
And then there is the Irish question. We started
with her birth in Dublin. As the troubles escalated
in the later 20th century, how did she relate
to that part of her identity? This is where her
commitment to truth over tribalism really shows
up. Her biographer, Peter Conradi, notes she
had as valid a claim to Irishness as most North
Americans have to American -ness. But she grew
to despise the romantic nationalism that she
felt fueled the IRA. There is a quote in the
source material where she talks about hearing
Irish voices. It's from a private letter, and
it's quite shocking. She wrote, The sounds of
all those Irish voices made me feel privately
sick. A mad, bad world. Privately sick. That
is visceral. That is a rejection of her own tribe,
in a way. Because she saw what that tribalism
was doing. She saw that the narrative of the
cause was being used to justify murder and violence.
For her, it was another form of the fat, relentless
ego, but a collective one. Our side is good.
Your side is bad. Therefore, we can kill you.
She hated anything that blinded people to the
concrete humanity of others. So whether it was
a jealous mother -in -law, a selfish theater
director, or a political movement, the enemy
was always the same. Blindness, self -centered
illusion. Exactly. The enemy is the refusal to
see reality clearly. We have to talk about the
end. Because for a woman who lived entirely in
her mind, who prized consciousness and attention
and nuance above everything else, the end of
her life was a particularly cruel irony. It is
the most heartbreaking chapter of the story.
In 1997, after a couple of years of what she
called a writer's block that was clearly something
more, Iris Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's
disease. The fading of the light. The great mind
unraveling. She described it to her husband as
being in a very bad, quiet place. She lost her
words. She lost her ability to write, to read.
The woman who had translated Plato and written
The Sea, The Sea eventually sat in front of the
Teletubbies on TV, pointing at the screen, unable
to articulate what she saw. And her husband,
John Daly, the man who found sex ridiculous,
the man who stayed in the harbor all those years,
he became her primary caretaker. He did. And
he did something very public and very controversial.
He wrote a memoir, Iris. A memoir later retitled
Elegy for Iris. He published the first part of
it while she was still alive, and the full book
came out shortly before she died in 1999. And
people had strong feelings about this. Very strong
feelings. The book was a sensation. It was adapted
into that famous movie with Judi Dench and Kate
Winslet. But in the literary world, it caused
a scandal. Some people felt Bailey was exploiting
her. They felt he was revealing her indignity,
the incontinence, the confusion, her vulnerability
for his own fame and profit. Wow. One critic
called it mischievously revelatory. Like he was
finally taking control of the narrative after
all those years of being the quiet one. The enchanter
is gone. Now I'm the writer. There is that interpretation.
Yeah. That he was settling some kind of score,
but there is a kinder one, and I think it's the
more accurate one, which is that in those final
years, Bailey was finally passing the ultimate
M &D test. How so? Explain that. He was looking
at her. Not as the famous genius, not as the
wandering unfaithful wife, not as the intimidating
intellect, but as a vulnerable, broken human
being in front of him who needed care. And he
loved her. He fed her, he dressed her, he sat
with her. The memoir is a record of him paying
attention to her when she could no longer pay
attention to anything at all. That is beautiful.
It turns the controversy into a final act of
love, a final moral act in her own terms. It
does. It shows that in the end, the simple, ridiculous
husband was the one who could see her justly,
who could love the reality of her, not the idea.
So what does this all mean? We've looked at the
war, the affairs, the philosophy, the books,
the disease. When we put it all together, what
is the legacy of Iris Murdoch? I think her legacy
is that she built a bridge. She built a bridge
between the inner life. The secret thoughts we
have in the shower, the jealousies, the fears,
our private mental landscape, and the real world
of moral action. She didn't let us off the hook.
She didn't let us say, well, my actions were
fine, so I'm a good person. No, she demanded
more from us. She demanded that we purify our
vision. She taught us that we are all pilgrims
trying to see through the fog of our own selfishness.
And she gave us the tools. art, beauty, nature,
love, to help clear that fog even for a moment.
I want to leave the listener with a final thought.
It's a quote of hers, and I think it sums up
everything we've talked about today. She said,
love is the extremely difficult realization that
something other than oneself is real. It sounds
so simple, like something on a greeting card.
But try doing it. Try really, truly believing
and acting on that for a whole day. It's the
hardest work in the world. So here is the challenge
for you listening right now. Next time you feel
that flash of irritation or judgment or jealousy
towards someone, maybe it's your own version
of the daughter -in -law D or a rival at work
or just a stranger on the Internet, ask yourself
a question. Ask yourself, is the problem with
them or is my lens dirty? Is it a failure of
my own vision? Can I look again? Can I unself
just for a second and try to see them justly?
That's the Murdoch challenge. And it's a lifelong
project. You never really finish. It certainly
is. Thanks for taking this deep dive with us
into the mind of Iris Murdoch. It's been a pleasure.
See you next time.