The tormented heart: Iris Murdoch as a poet
Though not as great a discovery as Hemingway’s trunk found in 1956 in the Ritz Hotel in Paris that contained A Moveable Feast, Iris Murdoch’s poems, discovered in the attic of her Oxford home in 2016, are a significant find. Collected as Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems,1936-1995, they have been edited by Anne Rowe and three others (Chatto & Windus, 167pp, £17).
Iris Murdoch’s poetry has intelligence, wit, technical skill and passionate intensity. They combine the emotional longing of the Romantics with the harsh lines of T. S. Eliot. Her poems both express and relieve the pain of love. She gives her body when her lovers are close, her love offerings and laments when they’re apart. Her vertiginous sexual relations are often damaged by infidelity, betrayal, oppression, power, masochism, fears, tears and “the frenzied embrace of the lash”. The enchantress flees from the agonies of love to the soothing harmony of nature.
Murdoch had an expert knowledge of English poetry and—like her master TS Eliot— echoed many great works to enhance her own poems. The great intellectual interest and aesthetic pleasure of her poetry, which the four editors of this book ignore, is to see how she creates her own ideas, moods, allusions, echoes and rhythms within “the formal pattern of the poetic thought”.
Here are the echoes that the editors missed:
Murdoch: “No eye forgave”; source: Exodus 21:24: “An eye for an eye.”
“Look into my heart”; Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella: “Look in thy heart.”
“Heart, sudden heart, don’t beat me to my knees”; John Donne, “Holy Sonnet 14”: Batter my heart three-personed God.”
“ ‘I cannot lift,’ said Love, ‘from so far down’ ”; George Herbert, “Love (III )”: “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back.”
“Why these things are I cannot tell”; Tom Brown (1680): “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell, / The reason why—I cannot tell.”
“And in the forest lost we shall rove”; Byron, “We’ll go no more a-roving.”
“For B, who tried to persuade me” uses the ottava rima stanzas and amusing tri-syllable rhymes of Byron’s Don Juan.
“I choke. I strain toward life”; Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”: “I fall upon the thorns of life!”
“White thoughts of spring that only winter know”; Shelley,” Ode to the West Wind”: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
“Beauty and Truth and Good were obviously one”; Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”
“the murmur of the south”; Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”: “the warm South.”
“Tears come then, tears”; Tennyson, “Tears, Idle Tears.”
“I am lapped in the green arms of the island / And all about me is Ireland”; Browning has the same yearning for one’s native place in “Home Thoughts from Abroad”: “Oh, to be in England, / Now that April’s there.”
“All art aspires to music”; Pater, The Renaissance: “all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.”
“Beating of lost wings in darkness”; Yeats, “Blood and the Moon”: “Swift beating at his breast in sibylline frenzy blind.”
“While in a woodland space a sudden fox / Peers with his brilliant face”; D. H. Lawrence, “The Fox”: “Time after time she took the full fur of that thick tail between her hand, and passed her hand slowly downwards.”
“coldly the light falls”; Edith Sitwell, “Still Falls the Rain.”
“The little ship is crushed and all its crew”; Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and The Endurance crushed by Antarctic ice in 1915.
“Afternoon Tea with a Lady”; Eliot, “Portrait of a Lady.”
“instead / Study my fingernails and cut the bread”; Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “ I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
“Behind my right shoulder death / Stands and leans upon me”; “Prufrock”: “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.”
“While they are burning each to each”; Eliot, “Prufrock”: “I hear the mermaids singing each to each.”
“I clutch his body laughing and I drown”; Eliot, “Prufrock”: “till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
“The people are constantly coming over the bridge”; Eliot, The Waste Land: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge.”
“I had not thought such pain were possible”; Eliot, The Waste Land: “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
“I reached the frontier at dead of night”; Auden and Isherwood, On the Frontier.
“Deep in the wood I lie apart”; Auden, “A Summer Night”: “Out on the lawn I lie in bed.”
“In this darkness of our fears”; Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “In the silence and the dark.”
Murdoch’s poems allude to the titles of her own books: nets, severed heads and sovereignty. Her diction shifts from Plato and Kant to “pointed breasts” and “lovely cunt.” Tragic images recur in enormous wings, beating wings, lost wings, broken wings and in “Motorist and Dead Bird.” She was inspired by settings that range from Bristol, Oxford, Winchester, London and Belfast, through Switzerland, to Zamora (Spain), Chartres, Ravenna, Athens and Cairo. The best lines in her poems, mostly with strict rhyme and meter, are quite brilliant. In “The Fallen Tree,” “the undiscriminating earth” suggests both bountiful harvests and burial of the dead. Another symbolic “Fallen Tree in the [Oxford] University Parks” offers intimations of mortality: “We shivered, and returning through the park /We heard the dead leaves rustling in the dark.”
The daring apocalyptic imagery in : “To P. O’R.” connects cosmic to human pain:
The sky descends in turning spokes of steel—
The stars spin jangling to a final peal—
The earth’s wild shrieking at the roots of trees
Dissolves into the crying of a child.
This stanza echoes John Donne’s “First Anniversary”:
And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
Murdoch’s husband John Bayley, a novelist, distinguished critic and Oxford professor (whom I knew), was self-effacing and willing to walk in the shadow of the wife he adored. She calls Bayley a “gentle sage. . . tender and questioning.” In “Oxford to Paddington” she expresses guilt for hurting him by her promiscuous affairs: “If many others in my life have place / How can I bear to look into your face / Who make such total warfare of your love?”
With the literary critic Wallace Robson, and most notably with the physically and morally repulsive writer Elias Canetti, Murdoch had brutal masochistic sex while his wife waited patiently in the next room. In “Tu es mon mal” she describes the torments of love:
Dazzling and electrical, a tension of the nerves,
Fear, and even hatred, turn to steel.
Is this the true tenderness I hoped to feel?
Or is violence itself a power that saves?”
The torture continues in the desperate and ironic “I Overcome Love,” where Canetti tries to justify his cruelty: “But still he held me down. The ground was cold. . . . ‘Those who are weak are those who come to harm.’ / At this point he began to twist my arm.” In “Love Visits his Traps,” “Pain wakened me at noon, / Horribly wounded but again released.”
Iris Murdoch deserves better treatment than she has received from the incompetent quartet of editors who got hold of her manuscripts. They do not identify the English novelist Susan Hall, whose perceptive introduction describes the discovery of the attic treasure chest amid “architectural-grade cobwebs.” She notes Murdoch’s “intriguing, somewhat mysterious” character, and her remarkable range of tones: “strident, self-effacing, humorous, deadly serious, god-stung, entreating, ironic.”
Hall’s lively style contrasts with the heavy hand of the editors’ essay, which paraphrases the poems, states the obvious and often misses the point. They say, for example, that “Word Watcher” “captures the nature of her evolving relationship with John Bayley.” They offer no evidence for the dubious claim that “Tintoretto’s Annunciation was clearly in her mind when she wrote ‘Child Prays.’ ”
They make an embarrassing attempt to revive their leaden prose by stating “such taboo-fuelled episodes . . . fizzle with unspoken sexual frisson.”
Their brief biographies of the poems’ dedicatees do not list their essential birth and death dates, which would show that Elias Canetti and Arnaldo Momigliano were much older (and uglier) than her youthful Oxford lovers. The Greek surname of her woman friend, Julian Chrysotomides, appropriately means “golden mouth.” They don’t explain why Murdoch didn’t dedicate a poem to her great love Franz Steiner, who died young.
The self-advertisements in the quite useless bibliography list only nine titles, including four derivative, introductory and simple-minded books by Anne Rowe, and two others by her co-editors. They do not list the three essential books by John Bayley, by Murdoch’s close friends A. N. Wilson and A. S. Byatt, and by the scholar Elizabeth Dipple. They don’t even list Murdoch’s relevant poems in A Year of Birds, which has a short avian poem for each calendar month and engravings by her friend Reynolds Stone. It was published in a handsome edition, with quarter brown buckram and marbled paper boards, by the Compton Press (1978) in a limited printing of 350 copies. The “December” poem, “When the dark hawberries hang down and drip like blood ” echoes Shakespeare’s “When icicles hang by the wall” in Love’s Labour’s Lost.
The eight brief endnotes are nugatory. The editors say “The identity of ‘Sally’ is unknown.” In Murdoch’s novel The Bell (1958) a character “wondered if she should try telephoning Sally again; but she no longer wanted to see Sally.” The four editors, pooling their meagre knowledge, also state, “The identity of ‘M.S.’ is unknown.” In fact, the poem “To M.S.” was dedicated to Mary Scrutton (1919-2018), Murdoch’s exact contemporary at Somerville College, Oxford. A lifelong friend, she also gained a First in 1942, worked in the wartime civil service and became a distinguished philosopher. She was one of the four women philosophers, including Murdoch, in Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals (2022).
At least 25 references, often from the Classics, need annotations. “Cathleen ni Houlihan, for example, ” refers to the 1922 play by Yeats and Lady Gregory, in which an old woman seeks young men to free Ireland from English rule. In Yeats’ poem “Man and the Echo,” on the disastrous Easter Rising of 1916, he guiltily asks, “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” In “Cathleen” “Deirdre’s grief” refers to J. M. Synge’s play Deirdre of the Sorrows (1909). The Acknowledgements list an additional 28 helpers, whose efforts failed to improve the editing. It’s unfortunate that Murdoch should have suffered from such tedious exponents of the obvious.
The editors also miss the crucial point of Murdoch’s impressive poem “The Diver,” which appeared in her Badminton school magazine when she was 17:
He tries to open with his dusky hands
The silvery oyster shell; tears it apart
With trembling, bleeding fingers, till the heart
In pearly treasure trove reluctant yields.
This quatrain subtly suggests the defloration of a virgin.
Jeffrey Meyers interviewed Murdoch for the Paris Review (Summer 1990) and published Remembering Iris Murdoch: 100 Letters and Interviews (2013).
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