A long time ago, I ran into Iris Murdoch at a party where the host had unleashed a lethal cocktail on his guests in order to retire to his study and write his book undisturbed. Being somewhat the worse for wear, I subjected the startled author to a garbled, spectacularly ill-informed critique of her fiction. She took it in surprisingly good part, perhaps because on the few occasions we had met before she mistakenly assumed that I was from Dublin. It’s often forgotten that she was from Dublin herself. It’s also often forgotten how ferociously right wing she became in middle age. Some of her political views would have brought a blush to Liz Truss’s cheek, if such an event were physiologically possible. There’s a poem in this volume of her newly discovered verse written during the Troubles which speaks darkly of murder. One can be fairly sure that it’s not the paratroopers on Bloody Sunday that the author has in mind.
Murdoch’s husband, the literary critic John Bayley, once claimed that the point of the British class system was to protect human privacy. Perhaps he meant that you could cower behind the sofa while a valet answered the door for you. He also once told me that Murdoch’s people weren’t middle class at all; on the contrary, they were mostly “fisher folk”. It’s hard to know what kind of Irish fisher folk could send the young Iris to an English public school. The CEO of Bird’s Eye, perhaps.
Murdoch was an exquisitely talented novelist, with a psychological acuity and imaginative audacity well in excess of her contemporaries. Her fictional world is a striking blend of Gothic strangeness and drawing-room civility, hauntingly symbolic yet intimately realist. In fact, realism for her was a moral as well as literary affair. She believed that to know what was good demanded a disciplined openness to what was actually the case, and that this selfless attention was not far removed from love. Lucid vision was inseparable from virtue.
Murdoch wrote poetry all her life, and a cache of it has recently been discovered in the attic of her Oxford home. Some of, it must be said, would have been better off staying there, such as these flat-footed lines:
I remember going to Avonmouth docks with my father
When I was a schoolgirl for a summer outing.
I was at a boarding school in Bristol
And we took the train to Avonmouth to see the ships there.
It’s hard to believe that the author of The Bell and The Sea, the Sea could perpetrate such an onslaught on the poetic, or could begin a piece like this:
Murmuring to my dear with telephonic assistance
How like a top my heart circles in wild gyration!
The volume is flawed by clumsy rhythms, verbal infelicities and embarrassing bits of whimsy. We even have the line “So don’t be took in”, shamelessly sacrificing grammar to a lame attempt at rhyme.
On the other hand, there is the poignant humility of this small cry, addressed to John Bayley:
The little that I have is poor indeed,
I am made wealthy only by your need.
If anything redeems this wildly uneven volume, it is Murdoch’s deep tenderness for her husband, which is the subject of several of the poems, while others are addressed to various lovers, both male and female. It’s true that connubial affection doesn’t always guarantee poetic value, as is evident enough here:
Abrupted at this point by John
I had to set aside this task,
Explain my sad depression
And all his consolation ask.
It’s doubtful that “abrupted” means “interrupted”, and happy depressions are pretty hard to come by. Even so, Bayley stands at the positive pole of the volume’s preoccupation with sexual love, while his counterpart is a demonic, haughtily overbearing yet charismatic figure known here as Love (in real life, one suspects, the novelist Elias Canetti, with whom Murdoch had a tormented sadomasochistic relationship). This lethal erotic combat lends some powerfully dramatic touches to an otherwise fairly sedate set of reflections:
… His strong embrace
Was loosened suddenly, and terrified
The god and I were kneeling face to face.
Like animals for slaughter in one tether
Huddled and shivering we clung together.
The poet spots this menacing figure in a group of “leering ruffians” hanging around on the street corner, and it’s he who whistles after her:
… Without surprise
I see him now in evil company.
A wicked face – but oh those eyes could charm –
Heart, sudden heart, don’t beat me to my knees.
Elsewhere in the book, Love circles her indifferently in the air as she is drowning helplessly in the ocean, crying to him to lift her out:
“I cannot lift”, said Love, “from so far down”’.
I catch his foot and drag him fluttering in.
Wide scattered on the surge his broken plumage.
I clutch his body laughing and I drown.
In another poem, a figure sweeping leaves at a crossroads becomes suddenly, frighteningly familiar:
… It was Love,
My former Master, in a ragged guise.
I spoke to him most courteously – but he
Seemed not to hear. The rising tempest drove
Torrents of leaves into his crazy eyes.
The past rears up like the undead wherever she looks, mad, hungry with desire and achingly unappeased. If it incites longing, it also provokes some corrosive bouts of guilt: Love isn’t dead, she confides to a companion, “but maimed and maddened through my fault”. Another piece has Love sitting high on a ladder in the centre of a maze, watching the poet stumbling blindly about and “holding back the shout that could direct me”. This is a malevolent character as well as a seductive one, beguiling and repulsive in equal measure. In a wonderfully potent image which ought to carry a warning to the reader,
Love raised his whip and cleft me at a blow,
Then jerked me upright spitted to the core,
And forced me to go downward. Down each track
Maimed and divided now I weeping go.
In a rather effusive introduction to the collection, Sarah Hall speaks of it as displaying “an astonishing talent”. She also adds rather coyly that “when you finish reading and close this book, you might feel a little closer to Iris”. Feeling closer to TS Eliot, however, isn’t the point of reading The Waste Land. Poetry is an art, not a record of one’s emotional life. Shakespeare was probably never out of his wits in a howling storm, but King Lear has an authentic ring to it all the same. The Murdoch industry, however, is now at full throttle, with the author and her sexually turbulent life reverently enshrined at its centre, and a sizeable crowd of people seem anxious to get in on the act. This volume has no less than four editors, while eight other individuals are acknowledged as transcribers of the poems, along with various editors, copy-editors, archivists, advisers, translators, proofreaders, researchers and administrative supporters. It’s surprising there isn’t a list of runners, chefs, chauffeurs and make-up artists.
Chatto & Windus are clearly hoping to make something of a splash with this volume. They write of it as a “thrilling new literary discovery” and “the stuff of literary historians’ dreams”. There’s already a film about the author, which might now be followed by one about this collection, with Judi Dench as Murdoch, Toby Jones as John Bayley and Johnny Depp as Love. Sarah Hall breathlessly describes the process of discovering the chest in Murdoch’s attic in which the notebooks were found: “And there it is. The chest, once half-hidden by life’s archived detritus, is now revealed: it’s waiting for you, squat as a prophet in a clearing.” Prophets are not commonly seen as squat, but you get the general point. Chests in attics suggest hidden treasure, even if they turn out to contain a few gems and a pile of acorns.
Murdoch’s poems are certainly a discovery, but there’s nothing particularly thrilling about them. There’s no astonishing talent on display, rather a mix of movingly vulnerable verses, occasional passages that leap off the page and a number of embarrassingly ham-fisted efforts. The author is by no means as accomplished a poet as she is a writer of fiction, and there’s no reason why one should expect her to be. Those who can waltz can’t necessarily tango. But the general tenor of the Murdoch industry seems to be one of unqualified acclaim, which doesn’t exactly suggest a selfless openness to what is the case, and thus wouldn’t in Murdoch’s view count as an example of virtue.
Terry Eagleton’s books include “How to Read Literature” (Yale University Press)
Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems 1936-1995
Iris Murdoch
Chatto & Windus, 192pp, £16.99
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[Further reading: Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid politics]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes