Iris Murdoch and London
Blog post by Miles Leeson
Post-war London is Iris Murdoch’s domain; perhaps only Dickens and Woolf charted the city to the same extent. ‘I know the city well’ says Jake Donoghue, the flâneur protagonist of her first novel Under the Net (1954). Murdoch, who grew up in Chiswick and later returned to London in 1942 after graduating from Oxford, had as good a knowledge of the streets, pubs, landmarks and history as any London cabbie. Following the Second World War she kept a succession of flats in London, even after she had given up teaching at the Royal College of Art in 1967, and her final residence in Cornwall Gardens remained in her possession until her death. London becomes ‘Murdochland’ in her novels, a distinct territory that serves her unique form of adventurous realism.
As she walked the streets as a child, as a civil servant at the Treasury, or later as an acclaimed novelist, she constantly observed her surroundings, taking notes on the characters she observed in pubs, capturing the ambience in art galleries, and listening to conversations on the tube. All her novels draw from life to a great or lesser extent, but it is her London novels that define her literary legacy. Eighteen of her novels are either set in, or have strong ties to, the capital.
And it is not just her descriptive writing of London that we return to time and again but the way in which the psychology of her characters is affected by the urban landscape: Bradley Pearson, of course, with his obsession with the Post Office Tower in The Black Prince; the relationship between Jake’s mental health and the pubs of the City (to say nothing of his midnight swim in the Thames); or the flight of Anax in The Green Knight as he dashes through the streets to be reunited with his master, Bellamy James. The urban landscape is not only a stage on which the novels act out the drama, it is itself a living organism, concealing the occult activities of Radeechy in The Nice and the Good, or awash with the rising Thames at the conclusion of Bruno’s Dream as his beloved stamp collection is washed away. London is a ‘sort of main character’ as she would claim later, although one that ‘appears differently in different contexts’.
Murdoch’s London stretches from Richmond in the West, where we find Tim Reede in The Orange Tree pub in Nuns and Soldiers, to the docklands of The Time of the Angels in the East, although she is most at home around Victoria (where she lived with her friend, the philosopher Philippa Foot, during the war), Whitehall, and central London up to the edge of Camden Town. Of course, it is not just street scenes that preoccupy our characters, but the insides of buildings as well: Jake standing in The Wallace Collection, preoccupied by Hal’s ‘The Laughing Cavalier’, or Dora adoring the image of Gainsborough’s daughters in The National Gallery. These are both moments of power and reflection in secular spaces. A favourite of mine in a religious setting is the scene in St Stephen’s, Gloucester Road, where Hilary Burde, our the narrator of A Word Child, goes to reflect on the death of his friend Clifford Larr. Drawn to the Church for means of expressing remorse, he exits exhausted yet filled by T.S. Eliot’s words of consolation:
I got up to leave the Church. I felt exhausted by grieving and the thought that Clifford was now dead came freshly again to my heart … there was also, I saw, a memorial tablet which asked me to pray for the repose of the soul of Thomas Sterns Eliot. How is it with you, old friend, the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings being over? Alas, I could not pray for your soul any more than Clifford’s. You had both vanished from the catalogue of being. But I could feel a lively gratitude for words, even for words whose sense I could scarcely understand. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.
This closes the chapter, and we then find ourselves opening up to Christmas Eve, and a wedding that unites Arthur with Crystal. Joy follows pain here, as it often does in Murdoch’s work. The most joyful of all Murdoch’s London novels is her first, Under the Net. Not only do we have Jake immersing himself in ‘the whole expanse of water … running with light … like swimming in quicksilver’, but the round of singing in the Post Office during the pub crawl is a moment of freedom and delight:
It is characteristic of central London that the only thing you can buy at any hour of the day or night is a stamp … We set off in the direction of the General Post Office, and as we turned into King Edward Street I took a swig from my bottle. As I did so I realised I was already very drunk indeed.
The GPO was spacious, cavernous, bureaucratic, sober and dim. We entered hilariously, disturbing the meditation of a few clerks and of the people who are always to be found there at late hours penning anonymous letters and suicide notes. While Lefty bought stamps and despatched cables I organised the singing in round of ‘Great Tom is Cast’ which continued, since I never have the presence of mind necessary to stop a round once it is started, until an official turned us out.
Murdoch’s London is no longer our own – you can certainly buy more than a stamp in the middle of the night – indeed her novels capture a mid-century city that has now, at least in part, disappeared through redevelopment and the shifting East of the financial and newspaper districts. Yet although the novels are now partly historical, the joy of immersing yourself in London and in her singular characters lives on. As Freddie Arkwright says in her Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea; ‘London’s still the best city in the world’.
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Miles Leeson is Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre and Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester. He has published many works on Murdoch. His next publication is the edited collection Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination which will be published in 2022 as part of his co-curated ‘Iris Murdoch Today’ Series with Palgrave Macmillan.
Iris Murdoch and London: Live online course, April-May 2022
We study four novels in sequence: Under the Net (1954), The Nice and The Good (1968), The Black Prince (1973) and The Green Knight (1993). Taught by Dr Miles Leeson.
Starts 6 April 2022 with four x fortnightly live lectures and seminars on Zoom.
You can discover Murdoch’s London via this wonderful interactive map: https://irismurdoch.info/
