Virtuous Dogs & a Unicorn: An Interview with Iris Murdoch

From the Archives is a column that looks back on the highlights across the magazine’s history. In this edition Wilson McBee discusses an interview with Iris Murdoch.

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Last Monday, July 15, marked the centennial of the birthday of the prolific English novelist Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999. Although Murdoch remains criminally under-read stateside, one sees hopes for a revival given recent shout-outs in various high-profile publications—as well as the release of a handsome new line of paperbacks from Vintage.

Perhaps what discourages American readers from Murdoch is a suspicion that she’s another English fuddy-duddy whose novels of manners will be opaque to anyone but the most committed Anglophile. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. You hardly need a semester in Cambridge or a black-tea fetish to get something out of Murdoch’s novels. She’s a master at twisting characters into knots over sex and morals. She has an unmatched gift for writing about dogs. Her books manage to move quickly, never too ponderous or obtuse, yet are hardly frivolous and always bolstered by a keen interest in ideas.

SwR published the following conversation between SMU professor Jo Brans and Murdoch back in 1985. In many ways it reads like one of Murdoch’s novels. It begins casually—with a question about dogs in a Thomas Gainsborough painting—and quickly gets serious. At this point in her career, Murdoch was unafraid of discussing such topics as morality and religion, and Brans probes past the point where plenty of other interviewers would have turned away. Murdoch’s candor on topics such as spiritual grace, virtue, and labor economics is refreshing. And the discussion of various personages from across her oeuvre underscores her deep understanding of the nuances of character.

—WM

Virtuous Dogs and a Unicorn

An Interview with Iris Murdoch

by Jo Brans

JO BRANS: I went to the Tate yesterday, and saw the Gainesborough portrait of the Pomeranian bitch and puppy, I suppose you’re familiar with it. Seeing it made me think of Zed, the little Pomeranian in The Philosopher’s Pupil, and the goodness that he exhibits in the book. His tact, for example. He pretends to like water, pretends to like swimming. I began to think of all the other dogs in your books—Mingo, for example, and the big Alsatian in Under the Net. I wondered why these dogs often seem to be a lot better than some of your people.

IRIS MURDOCH: Yes, they’re virtuous dogs. There’s a very virtuous dog in An Accidental Man, that black Labrador which Charlotte acquires. I think dogs are often figures of virtue. Of course, there are bad dogs too. There are bad dogs in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, you remember, who pursue and attack—they’re like the hounds of Acteon. Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.

JB: Is there any significance to the fact that Zed is so tiny?

IM: I do not normally portray my characters from life, but in the case of Zed, he is actually copied from an individual dog I know. But his being very small is of course part of the drama. The dog is a character in the book and interacts with the other characters, he is a very important figure.

JB: So that he’s much more vulnerable because he’s small, and you’re much more frightened for him?

IM: Yes, indeed. He is fragile.

JB: His size doesn’t have anything to do with the shrinking of virtue?

IM: Nothing like that!

JB: Good. I thought I might be overreading. Do you think Americans react differently to your work from the British, or read you differently?

IM: I don’t know enough to say. What do you think?

JB: An American friend told me recently that he thinks a lot of Americans read you for a certification of what they consider to be the social and intellectual superiority of the British, and that in a way it’s satisfying to them to find this superiority in book after book that you write.

IM: I think some people—but this wouldn’t be only Americans by any means—might read my books because there is a kind of assertion of old-fashioned values, of the reality of virtue. Of course this also annoys other people who regard it as something not proper to be said.

JB: Not proper for aesthetics’ sake, I suppose.

IM: There’s positive critical warfare on this subject between, as it were, the “old-fashioned” critics and writers, and those who want fiction to deny the traditional idea of character and the traditional notion of absolute guilt or of the reality of virtue, which they regard as “bourgeois” or “religious” in some unacceptable sense. These are partly very deep matters and partly things to do with immediate style and what attracts people to a book.

JB: For some people, if a writer doesn’t espouse the highest morality he knows, doesn’t attempt to write morally, he’s writing badly. I guess that’s the kind of position that Tolstoy took when he wanted to destroy Anna Karenina, for example. Where do you stand?

IM: A writer cannot avoid having some sort of moral position, and attempting to be nonmoral is in a way a moral position, an artifical one. I think that a novelist, a storyteller, naturally portrays his own moral judgments. But these very judgments are not just a small area of human discourse; they’re almost the whole of it. We are always making value judgments, or exhibiting by what we say some sort of evaluation, and storytellers dealing with persons must constantly be doing this. It’s Tolstoy’s great apprehension of the whole moral scheme which makes his novels great, not his artificial, censorious feeling that he had to bum Anna Karenina; that’s an incidental thing. But the moral perception and depth of the writer is something very important. It’s a kind of realism—seeing what the world really is, and not making it into a fantasy.

JB: In The Sovereignty of Good, you say that the ordinary person does not, “unless corrupted by philosophy,” believe that he creates values by his choices. He thinks that some things are really better than others and that he may get it wrong—make the wrong choices. I wanted to ask you about this phrase, “unless corrupted by philosophy.” How do you think philosophy can corrupt? I think you might be thinking of pragmatism and “whatever works is good”—a very American attitude, I suppose.

IM: That would be one example certainly, but I was talking more of various kinds of existentialist philosophy and Oxford philosophy, which attempted to explain value judgments as emotive statements or arbitrary acts of will. This has distorted moral philosophy in recent years by suggesting that one has got to make a sharp decision between fact and value; and if something isn’t factual, in the sense of scientific fact, and so presentable in some way, it belongs to a shadowy world, of private will or emotion, so that moral attitudes would simply be private emotional attitudes of one sort or another. There are refined versions of this which suggest that moral statements are really commands—that through moral language we attempt to influence people and alter the world.

JB: So philosophy corrupts by making moral decisions simply a matter of preference or taste?

IM: Yes, you can just choose. You just choose your attitude, and there’s nothing behind it. Now it’s perfectly true that one cannot prove that moral statements are right in the sense that one can prove ordinary matters of fact or science. But this is true of a whole world of value, of art for instance. And the fact that you can’t “prove” a painting or a book doesn’t mean that it isn’t in some sense true or significantly connected with reality. It seems to me obvious that morality is connected with truth, with rejection of egoistic fantasy, and with apprehension of what’s real; that the ability and the wish to tell the truth are a very fundamental part of morals. Morality is connected with the real world in innumerable ways, and is something that goes on all the time. It isn’t a kind of special activity that you suddenly take up.

JB: To follow your idea that ordinary persons and even dogs can readily be exemplars of virtue, let me ask this: Do you think, as Tolstoy seemed to imply with his peasants and children, that behaving rightly, behaving correctly, is easier for simple characters? Are there levels of sophistication, let’s say, that make behaving correctly, doing good, more difficult for some than for others?

IM: Well, I think that some people are blessed with happy friendly temperaments. I think that what Freud says about these things is roughly true, one is influenced by one’s history, one’s own early life, so that some people are calm, some people are excitable or easy to anger, by temperament. The question of sophistication is another one, a complicated one, and I don’t think I hold any special view on that. A simple person can be either good or bad, and obviously a sophisticated person could be either good or bad. I think that goodness at every level of sophistication demands the ability to face life and be truthful, and the ability to be honest and faithful and loving, and the ability to give help. Facing life honestly is important at every level of sophistication.

JB: Without illusions or fantasies.

IM: Yes, I think “fantasies” is the name of a very important tendency to protect oneself by imagining that things are other than they are.

JB: But aren’t we all damaged too by others’ fantasies about us?

IM: That could be the case too. People often like to build up other people through fantasy or destroy them through giving them pictures of themselves which are false.

JB: I once had a good friend who kept telling me what I was like.

IM: Yes, this can be very damaging. I mean, people sometimes, as it were, damage the being of other people, as if they were actually scratching it away.

JB: I felt myself stripped of the freedom to change, to try to be better. Suppose I were to come to you as a child would come to a parent or a disciple to a guru, and say to you, I want above all things to be good. What would you say? What would be your instinctive response to that?

IM: I’d want to find out something about the question. It would matter whether or not you were in some kind of tangle. I mean, if this was an immediate thing, then one might want to talk about that, particularly about truthfulness.

JB: Suppose I just wanted a beautiful life—“I want my life to be good.”

IM: There are many aspects. I think getting hold of work, which is good, which you want to do, which you think you can do well, and which you feel does something for yourself and perhaps for other people is important. But then of course everyone is the victim of circumstances. That’s what’s so tragic in our country and even in your country—people can’t find work. Why isn’t some statesman brave enough to grasp this problem and say, “Well, look, there isn’t going to be work for everyone in the future. We’ve got to try and see how we live in a society where people can’t all work”? But I think work is good and if you can find work which connects you with the world and allows you to use your talents, I think this is quite a large part of the good life. But there are all sorts of ways whereby our natural selfishness can be checked. I mean, if one has a religious belief—do you have one?

JB: My beliefs are vague and undefined.

IM: How were you brought up?

JB: In a fundamentalist religion, scared of hell for years, nightmares about hell.

IM: You must have felt you’d gotten out of something when you broke free. It’s an awful thing to bring up young people like this. But if one has some religion, if one is in any sense at home there even as a lapsed believer, this probably can help, because one has the idea of how to pray. Not in the sense of asking God to do things, but in the sense of retiring from the world into a different dimension. Actually anyone can do this. I think meditation is important. I would like meditation to be taught in schools, the ability just to be quiet, and to see what is worthless, to distinguish between what’s important and what isn’t important.

JB: You’ve written a lot about selflessness, about getting rid of the self in order to love the world, in order even to see the world. You define humility as getting rid of the self. All of this makes me think that you might intend a specifically Christian vision in your work. Let me turn the tables. Do you have a religion?

IM: Oh, yes, I believe in religion, in the sense in which a Buddhist believes in religion. My background, as it happens, is Christian. But I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in the supernatural aspect of religion, I don’t believe in life after death, or heaven.

JB: How can it be religion if you strip it of the supernatural?

IM: Ah, but religion is everywhere, religion is breathing. It’s connected with the deep aspect of one’s life at every moment, how one lives it all the time, and with truth and love and all these things we’ve been talking about. I mean, this is what any sophisticated Buddhist or Hindu would say; he doesn’t believe in God, or heaven. Though obviously in any religion there’s imagery which is understood by different people in different ways. Some hold very literalistic beliefs about God, but many people can’t hold such beliefs now. It’s too contrary to their own perceptions of truth and reality. But this doesn’t mean they can’t be religious. I became a Marxist when I was young, and I thought I had given up religion. Then I gave up Marxism, though it’s very enlightening to have been a Marxist. But I thought when I gave up believing in God that religion was gone out of my life. Then I realized that this wasn’t so after all. Religion is still there, even if one holds no supernatural or dogmatic belief.

JB: You said you prayed. To whom do you pray?

IM: I don’t exactly pray to anyone. I retire into myself, perhaps have a conversation between the higher self and the lower self or something of that sort. It sounds rather pompous. But all I mean is an ability to withdraw from immediate concerns and to be quiet and to experience the reality of what’s good in some way. But one is doing this all the time, through beautiful things, through art, through music, and of course very much through other people, apprehending their reality and their goodness or wanting to help them and so on.

JB: Yes, you’ve written about these stairsteps to the good, art, relationships with people—

IM: Intellectual studies also. We can learn about truth through any sort of craft or study or work—

JB: Which imposes a discipline on the life, is that the idea?

IM: Yes, if you don’t have ordinary work, try to learn something, learn another language for instance. Of course it’s all very well to say this to people, people have such terrible troubles. But at least one can picture a society where people don’t have ordinary work but are always learning something.

JB: I almost instinctively reject that; maybe it’s the American in me. I feel terribly sorry for people without work.

IM: Well, exactly, yes, if one assumes that we can come back to full employment in Western society. But I don’t think we can. We’ve never had full employment here in England, and everything to do with modem technology suggests that computers will take over all sorts of jobs which they can do more efficiently than we can. People feel very concerned with this. I’m not an expert, but it looks to me as if it is all going to be very difficult.

JB: So we’ll have all these energies that aren’t being used unless we think up a way to use them.

IM: Yes, people get demoralized. I think education helps enormously, and so one must spend more money on education. People can be taught how to learn, and can learn to enjoy things which are worthy, like art, and creation, and helping other people, and can use their energy in this way.

JB: In a number of your books you have women who are more or less imprisoned by the expectations of the men in their lives. I’m thinking of Hannah in The Unicorn who’s both idolized and imprisoned, of Dorina in The Accidental Man, with Austin’s adoration of her which really serves to keep her separate from him and to keep her enclosed, and of Crystal in The Word Child, whose brother’s definitions of her entrap her or imprison her. There do seem to be a number of them, and I wondered if it were deliberate on your part for some reason.

IM: I don’t think it’s deliberate. The three women you mention are very different from each other. Crystal seems to be a sort of redemptive sufferer, who gives herself over to love for her brother, and I don’t think she feels trapped.

JB: But the reader feels that she is trapped, and that this man is not really worth her attention and her love.

IM: All the same, she is right to love him and that love makes her happy. Dorina is more of a victim, more of a wispy figure without much strength. And Hannah is entirely different because the whole story has an allegorical aspect, and it’s much more mythical and less logical. Hannah is a figure who is either spiritual or demonic. The spiritual and the demonic are very close together. She’s seen either as a kind of noble victim or as a sort of belle dame sans merci, a femme fatale. She doesn’t know herself really, and it’s not clear which she is. She’s a power figure as well, with a great deal of effect on all these people, and they in turn build her up. It’s like a case you mentioned earlier of somebody’s fantasy building somebody else up into something which perhaps they are or are not.

JB: But she is trapped, because Effingham realizes that he could have sprung her, but he chooses not to.

IM: Yes, partly because he’s afraid of the consequences, partly because he likes her to be there shut up and sort of kept a prisoner for him.

JB: There, you see. And in The Sea, the Sea, remember, Charles kidnaps Hartley and shuts her up.

IM: That’s a much more realistic situation. Charles is suffering from a delusion that the first love is the great one and that people don’t change.

JB: You said you think there’s something to what Freud said about early experiences. Does that mean you’re somewhat in agreement with Charles?

IM: Oh, no, I think Charles is making a mistake, but it’s a natural mistake. I mean it’s not totally absurd. He feels so sure that this thing meant so much to both of them at the time that it must retain its meaning for her as well as for him. But then, he fails to do what a more sensible person would do, having looked at the situation to drop it.

JB: And this is what you mean by not facing reality, his inability to imagine that she feels differently.

IM: And his arrogance too, because he’s so grand, he can’t help feeling, How much she must regret that she didn’t marry Grand Me, and that she married this absolute nonentity.

JB: And it would have been such a good thing—

IM: She would have had such a happy life!

JB: But actually, as she tells him quite frankly, he would have been too grand for her. She would have been hopelessly out of things.

IM: She might have had some regrets sometimes, but on the whole I think not.

JB: Do you think people can ever serve as solutions for other people? Often in the books I’ve mentioned men will offer themselves as solutions for these women, and of course the reverse is true. Several women in various books, like Hilda in The Nice and the Good, think of themselves as solutions for these muddled males who clearly need to have their socks washed and their sitting rooms tidied.

IM: Yes, I think people do solve each other’s problems. In happy marriages people do that and in long friendships one’s supported by other people all the time. I mean this can go wrong, but it can go right as well. That’s quite often what one’s looking for, someone to love one and be with one in some permanent way.

JB: So that’s a way of coming to a sense of reality about the world?

IM: I think so, though of course any love relationship can be full of delusions. You may wish a person to be what he really is not, but a long relationship then becomes more truthful.

JB: We were talking about the discipline of art and work. What’s the connection, do you think, between discipline and visions? I’m thinking of that glorious vision that Effingham has when he is sinking in the swamp in The Unicorn. He imagines himself dead, and he says that if he were to die, what was left was everything else, and this vision shakes him and enlightens him. Do ordinary people get visions like this, and how do these visions relate to life as it has to be lived in the discipline of the day?

IM: In the case of Effingham, he has a truthful vision of the world without the self, but of course he cannot sustain it, it disappears from him.

JB: And the same thing happens to Cato in Henry and Cato. He’s had these visions of goodness and he’s gotten increasingly separated from them.

IM: Yes, though with Cato, it’s more connected with religion and with a sort of orderly life. But it’s something very odd for Effie. I don’t know how often people have such visions, but I think they do come in one way or another, through art or other people, sometimes rather suddenly or remarkably and at other times more gradually. And then one drifts away from the vision, but it can also remain as something that you remember, like having a good dream. Sometimes in a dream something extraordinarily real can happen.

JB: Your books are full of dreams. I once heard a psychiatrist remark that a criminal who doesn’t dream can be regarded as beyond redemption.

IM: What we invent in dreams is astonishing. Sometimes there are very beautiful symbols in dreams. Religion is a kind of formalization of such matters. We have all sorts of ways of experiencing things which are pure and sort of out of the world. But then anything can become like that; in certain states of mind we see all sorts of things as full of grace.

JB: Do you believe that grace touches your life?

IM: Oh, yes, though again not in the dogmatic, supernatural sense. But I think that there are forces of good that you suddenly can find, streams flowing toward you, whatever the metaphor would be. Yes. And I think sometimes people try for a long time in a rather dull way to do what they think is right, and then they’re suddenly rewarded or cheered up. Some sort of vision holds the world together, and this is part of the subject matter of literature.

JB: There’s Lisa, that wonderful girl in Bruno’s Dream, who’s going to give herself over to the starving millions in India. Then all of a sudden at the end of the book you see her in a sports car and she’s married and she’s cut her hair and she’s bought clothes. Was this a kind of grace? I was surprised that Lisa didn’t have to live the rest of her life in suffering poverty to be good. No one reading that book could have predicted what would happen to Lisa.

IM: I dare say she might have chosen a much nobler life if she’d gone off to India, and in some sense a better life. But I think happiness is important too. That’s part of this thing about finding work and finding the right place for yourself in the world. One has a right, even a duty, to be happy. For some people, happiness is part of organizing a good life. Making other people happy is part of that, but very often making other people happy is a happiness of one’s own. Lisa’s end has something to do with Danby. Danby is the happy hedonist. He makes happiness for other people too.

JB: Is she reciprocating when she marries him and lives in a way that will make him happy?

IM: I think she is infected by his particular kind of life energy, which he’s been lucky in.

JB: I was terribly thrilled that you allowed them to have this happy ending.

IM: Yes, I’m glad you felt that. I liked it too. I was fond of Danby and I think it was probably a good thing.

JB: Another one of your characters with a shocking contradiction for me was Tallis Brown. Here is this supremely good man, and I was horrified when I read the description of his house. It’s so dirty! Julius King comes in and cleans up for him, and he has to scrape the kitchen floor because there’s this sticky substance all over it, and the dirty milk bottles in which various things are growing, and really just this sort of horrifying filth.

IM: I must say, I don’t mind filth as much as you do.

JB: But his was an exaggeration of filth. Why, for such a good man?

IM: That book too has an allegorical background. Tallis is not only a good man, he should be seen as a high incarnation, a holy man, something like Christ, arriving in the world. And it’s symbolic of the situation that nowadays the holy man is sort of shaky, hopeless, muddled, he hasn’t got a place. Somebody else has to clean up his kitchen and so on. And the person who cleans it is Julius, the prince of darkness. Julius should be thought of as the devil. The conflict between the two is really what the book is about. They recognize each other as two spiritual beings, of opposing kinds, though Julius doesn’t recognize Tallis at once. And Julius has been in a concentration camp, so perhaps the devil suffers too. But, then, all this is part of the struggle between good and evil that lies behind ordinary life. Because of course at the same time they are ordinary characters. One doesn’t have to know these things to read the book and understand the drama.

JB: Your books are so full of meaning. Would you be disappointed if people only read them for the stories they tell?

IM: I would like the reader to see everything in the book. But I’m glad if people like those stories, it gives me pleasure, because stories are a very good way, you know, of getting away from one’s troubles. Now let’s have a drink.