San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday, February 24, 2002

San Francisco Chronicle

Oscar Villalon, Chronicle Book Editor

Early on in the Oscar-nominated movie about her, big circles and exclamation points are drawn around the idea that Iris Murdoch is -- was -- brilliant. Murdoch, played by Judi Dench, is shown carefully, thoughtfully addressing a dinner audience on the importance of education. In another scene, her husband, John Bayley (Jim Broadbent), gazes upon Murdoch in utter rapture, his hands held to his throat, as she lectures to a class. Then there are the people in the film whose deference to Murdoch should signal that Dame Iris is well-respected, if not revered. The BBC does not have you come to its offices, as Dench does in the movie, to talk at length on camera because you are common, and it certainly would not keep black-and-white file footage of you talking about your work (Kate Winslet as the young Murdoch). There is no doubting the intellectual prowess of Murdoch, a prowess stripped by Alzheimer's disease, a fate that "Iris" portrays grimly but tenderly. But as well as we can imagine the horror of literally losing our mind, and as sorrowful as the film's portrayal of her descent into that darkness is, true shock and grief comes with reading one of Murdoch's 26 novels, or her five works of philosophy, or one of her plays or poems. In that light, her life is that much more brilliant, making the extinguishment of such a fine mind that much more bitter. Born in Dublin in 1919 into a Protestant Anglo-Irish family, Murdoch was sent off to England for her education, eventually landing at Oxford, first as a student and then as a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College. The year she met Bayley, 1954, her first novel, "Under the Net," was published and a constellation of men kept her company, in bed and out. "Iris" points out that Murdoch had many lovers, but makes it seem that in comparison to the stammering, sugar-hearted Bayley, these men were shallow if more sophisticated. Actually, among Murdoch's many lovers at Oxford, according to Peter Conradi's recent biography "Iris Murdoch: A Life," were a historian of the Roman empire, a mathematical logician and Nobel laureate Elias Canetti - - hardly the sort of people who could be dismissed as insubstantial, at least in terms of intellect. (Oddly, in the press material for "Iris," the short bio on Murdoch says "she was fully bisexual," though the film only hints at this.) Murdoch was in love with ideas, what they meant for the way we live -- how particularizing them through words could intensify the quality of thinking, which in turn would intensify our pleasure in being alive. That she had lovers who could share in that passion with her is no surprise. She did, after all, in the late '50s marry Bayley, a writer and scholar, whom she remained with until her death in 1999. Especially in her novels (which include the Booker Prize-winning "The Sea, the Sea"), that joy of the life of the mind plumps every sentence. Her characters rationalize with themselves and each other, trying to figure out how to go about the best way of living, all the while aware of their pained souls. But even this is something grand in Murdoch's view because they have the ability -- the intellect -- to plumb their hearts, from which both pain and peace can result. In works of fiction such as "The Good Apprentice" and "The Bell," those things large and small that make up life -- love, sex, death, thought, food, work -- are rendered in sensuous, articulate exchanges and passages. It could -- even be said that the crises her characters get tangled up in are never truly bleak because they give them a reason to think and make sense of themselves. And always -- always -- the mind turning over and over, delighting in and delineating life. Reading several hundred pages of Murdoch's fiction, or any of her philosophical works ("Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals," "Existentialists and Mystics"), is the only way to appreciate the mental pyrotechnics for which "Iris" serves as a requiem. (Bayley's book on which the movie is based is titled "An Elegy for Iris.") Watching the film, the viewer is moved, mostly because of the emotion stirred by watching two charming people very much in love with each other laid low by a horrific disease. What the viewer should be feeling is something closer to witnessing the end of a supreme mortal felled by the gods.

Thanks to Anita S. and Lorraine V.