Murdoch, an unlikely liberal icon

Iris was an authoritarian yearning for the certainties of religion

Hywel Williams

Guardian

Friday January 18, 2002

Nuns And Soldiers is the only important English novel whose first word ("Wittgenstein...") is a philosopher's name. Its author, Iris Murdoch, was always clear that philosophy came first and art limped behind. The one clarified while the other entertained - a secondary, and sometimes wicked, activity. Most art, even the very greatest, was just "self-consoling fantasy". This was a high English moralist - and one with a puritan message.

Now, Kate Winslet and Judi Dench pretend to be that dead, fastidious soul. But the person they imitate thought acting was lying. Plato was leader of Murdoch's philosophical pack - with his ideal structures of clear, philosophic knowledge that fall away once the human arrives on the scene. What - she always wanted us to think - could be less like herself than an actor, someone paid to be someone else before moving easily on to the next gig? But give over, Iris.

Murdoch said she hated the ego in all its selfish, sentimental mess and its craving for dominion. Art - especially romantic art - fed the self. But, being human, Murdoch was inconsistent. Her divide between art and philosophy was always breaking down. For philosophy, too, gave the ego space to parade. Enter, stage left, the anti-hero - the villainous other man (after Plato) in her life.

This person she described as free, independent, lonely, powerful and rational. The product of science, and an ideal citizen, he was modern philosophy's pin-up boy. Paradise Lost had already described his appeal: "His proper name is Lucifer."

The English liberal thinking classes have always loved their Iris. But she was an odd kind of patron saint for them. For mature Murdoch came to hate modernity, seeing its subjectivities as being the fruit of old Adam's loins. This did not stop her from writing novels which enjoy a good old plunge in the messy self - as Hugo and Cassandra, Jasper and Francesca, bed-hop with unsated vigour in that Murdochian territory which forever lies between Chelsea and Oxford. And perhaps there was an insincerity in so enjoyable a literary dip which always left her (and us) gagging for more.

She preached order, transcendence and objectivity with all the intensity of one whose life showed little of these qualities. This is not just a question of mouldy pork pies going walkies in the kitchen and only being sighted some years later. She was a fashionable philosopher - with a celeb's gift for the au courant (as one of her characters might put it). In her youth there had been communist activism, followed by the existentialism which duly preceded flirtation with God-less religion. She was an agnostic Graham Greene, sharing his attraction to commitment and an aversion to keeping the powder dry.

A philosophy which might be good politically, she concluded, was not always good morally. And this was what had happened to liberalism. It had been corrupted into thinking that obedience to an institution was always a bad thing. As English liberal left-ism ran into political trouble in the 1970s Murdoch was on hand, ready to moralise with a don's easy conviction.

Now, she thought that the black polo-neck by the Left Bank had covered a sick soul. From being a Sartrean in the 50s she had leap-frogged to 70s neo-conservatism, pausing only to demonise the 60s. And the sermons that followed became familiar. There were fogeyish defences of the Book of Common Prayer. She defended the right of the Protestant Irish (from whom she sprang) to political autonomy, while in education she lamented a comprehensive sea of anarchy.

Those luminous eyes were as big as George Eliot's. Like Eliot she could never let go of God - wishing He was around while knowing He wouldn't turn up for her. Art was only unsatisfying because she wanted it to be religion, to speak to her unsatisfied instinct for transcendent values. But it was only found wanting because she had - as the philosophers might say - "confused the categories".

"Un-selfing" was her game - and perhaps her creed - but she couldn't escape the clutches of the self. She created various Murdochs. Sometimes they ran in parallel - as in her earlier affairs of the heart. And the later clothing of the self saw her as a Tolstoyan bag-lady arriving at her publishers with ever more undisciplined (and reverentially unedited) manuscripts.

She seems a period piece now - from a time when the universities were central to British culture, when dons had dominion, and appeared on the Brains Trust. Like others at school and university in the 70s I devoured the novels. Their dramas of uncertainty speak to the adolescent mind - as does their author's longing for certainty. But the continued taste for their passion shows that adolescence is not always a question of dates.