Think On It

A Book that Might Change You

January 29th, 2007

It has changed me. Or perhaps I should say it has made me want to change. I finished reading Iris Murdoch, a Life a couple of days ago. I knew even before finishing it that I couldn’t be the same any more. This British book is big and heavy and not a walk in the park to read. It took me a month of nights to read it. There were times when I said “Ugh! She’s horrid! I don’t like her!” and almost put it down, but I couldn’t. Yes, she had done things I thought unethical, immoral and cruel, but I knew that in the end she was one of the most respected intellectuals in the world. Not to say that someone couldn’t be an intellectual and all those terrible things as well, but she was in the end considered the embodiment of good. She had helped define what is good through her lifelong study of philosophy. She had helped dispose of earlier philosophies which placed mankind at a level of hunger– for subsistence, for power, for victory for its own sake. So I read on.

Since I am an American, Iris Murdoch was not a name that came before the face very often. I remember that I had read one of her novels, but I cannot remember which or why I read it, not to mention what I thought of it at the time. I have a sneaking suspicion I mixed her name up with another British writer I knew and liked and was surprised to find what I did.

So I trudged on through this book, checking every once in a while the photograph on the cover, as if she might tell me something helpful, checking the photographs inside to see what the other people in her life looked like, what her house was like, what had been chosen to reveal her to us. Relief, in fact, was sought from the intensity one finds in her journals and the accounts others give of her actions and relationships. I wanted quite often to snatch her back from situations she continued and then for which she suffered and eventually from which she learned. I was saddened by the last parts of her life. I believe that no one who knew her regretted it, but how can we know?

In the end I felt a failure in some ways. I was never courageous enough to enter relationships with mage and stay in them for years. It never occurred to me to want to experiment with every possible kind of relationship one could cultivate. And so, I didn’t grow to be her. I never learned enough Latin and I learned no classical Greek at all. I did not learn German and French and Russian so that I could speak with intellectuals of those countries without barriers. In fact, compared to Iris Murdoch I am an ignoramus.

And yet, like Iris Murdoch I can change. I was left after reading this book more hopeful than ever. Iris Murdoch said that the central power in human life is Good. You can seek to be good and to do good and to reward good. She lived that life and did those things because she was open to every kind of learning that there is, and Good is what she learned. She kept journals that explored “what is it that I seek,” and as she discovered it, she wrote in them what it meant. When she understood better what Good might be, she went back to old journals and annotated them to reflect the map she was making of her path and she struck out unfair things that she had said about other people in her ignorance.

The one fault I find in this book is that a woman who was extremely influential in Murdoch’s life is not named. I presume it is because she is still living and has refused to be named if the influences are described, but since this person is of a great age by now, it seems frivolous not to admit the relationship as well as the influence.

The links in this post will take you to Amazon in the US and the UK where you can look at this book and some of the novels she wrote. I ordered a number of them today, based on the critical parts of the biography. You can buy them from Amazon, or write down the information and seek them out in local shops. I urge you, though, to try to read this book.

It’s probably too late for me to learn classical Greek, but I may go for French.

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized, Books, Brains, Heroes