Imaginary interview with Iris Murdoch
by Charactorium · Iris Murdoch (1919 — 1999) · Philosophy · Literature · 6 min read
It is in the cheerfully chaotic kitchen of their house in Steeple Aston, one autumn afternoon, that John Bayley sits across from his wife, an open notebook on the table cluttered with books and manuscripts. The oblique light falls on the annotated dialogues of Plato that she always keeps within reach. They have known each other since their meeting at Oxford, married for so many years that he sometimes thinks he knows her better than she knows herself — and that is precisely what he has come to check. For once, he asks the questions instead of proofreading her pages.
—Iris, even before I knew you, you were already reading Sartre in the original. How did you dare to write about him in 1953, when no one here was reading him?
You know how much I love languages, John — French, German, Russian have always been open windows for me. When I read Sartre and Beauvoir in the original, I realized something was happening in Paris that England had no idea about. Our Oxford philosophers analyzed language as one dissects an insect, while two hours away by boat people were questioning freedom and anguish. I wanted to let that air in. But don't be mistaken: from Sartre, Romantic Rationalist onward, I admired as much as I criticized. His vision of the self seemed too heroic, too solitary. Existentialism made man free, yes, but it isolated him from reality and from others. It is that solitude I could never accept.
Our Oxford philosophers analyzed language as one dissects an insect; I wanted to let the air of Paris in.
—You always keep that annotated Plato near you. For you, what does the Good have to do with simply seeing the world clearly?
Everything, my dear, absolutely everything. You see, I believe the foundation of morality is the same as that of realism: the ability to perceive what is truly before one, instead of a consoling fiction. We spend our lives wrapped in the thick fog of our own ego, rewriting others to suit us. The moral work, the real work, is to dispel that fog — to pay just, selfless attention to a person, a leaf, a work of art. Plato knew this: the Good is not an invention of our mood, it exists as the sun exists. All the moral philosophy of my time wanted to reduce it to a choice, a feeling. I wanted to restore its sovereignty, its cold and luminous reality outside ourselves.
We spend our lives in the fog of our ego, rewriting others to suit us.
—You once spoke to me about the refugee camps. That journey through ruined Europe with UNRRA — what did it teach you about evil?
It is something I speak little of, even to you. In 1945, when I joined UNRRA, I saw thousands of displaced people, stripped of everything, in Austria and Belgium. In Vienna, among the ruins, I understood that evil is not a seminar abstraction. It has a face, a smell, a hunger. Those people had done nothing to deserve it. My professors debated the value of moral propositions while all of Europe was a vast field of suffering. It vaccinated me forever against philosophy that is too clean, too comfortable. If my novels are populated with characters who do evil without meaning to, who hurt through blindness, that is where it comes from. One does not see the other — and that is already the beginning of cruelty.
In Vienna, among the ruins, I understood that evil is not a seminar abstraction.
—People always press you to choose: philosopher or novelist? You who hate labels, why do you still refuse to be pigeonholed?
Because it would cut me in two, John, and I refuse that amputation. I once wrote to Raymond Queneau that philosophy and literature are not two separate paths to truth, but two ways of seeing the same thing — the irreducible complexity of the human being. Philosophy seeks clarity, it wants to solve, classify, conclude. The novel, on the other hand, tolerates contradiction, disorder, the opacity of beings. But real people are opaque, my dear, infinitely more than arguments. When The Sea, the Sea received the Booker Prize this year, people wanted to see it as the consecration of the novelist, as if the other half of me should disappear. But it is the philosopher who knows why my narrator never sees others as they are. The two vocations nourish each other or die together.
Real people are opaque, infinitely more than arguments.
—When you taught at St Anne's, your students said you were demanding. What did you expect from them in those tutorials, week after week?
I expected them to learn to look, which is much harder than reasoning. Any sharp mind can construct an argument and demolish it the next day. But truly seeing a text by Plato or Kant, without bending it in advance to one's thesis, requires a humility that few possess at twenty. I received them alone or in pairs in my office, and I let them read their essay aloud. Often I remained silent for a long time. Silence teaches as much as speech. I did not want to train debate champions, but attentive minds, capable of patience before difficulty. It is the same gesture, you see, as that of the writer or the good person: to be silent long enough for reality to show itself. Fifteen years of this work never tired me.
I expected them to learn to look, which is much harder than reasoning.
—I see you filling your notebooks by hand, day after day. Why this stubborn refusal of the typewriter I keep offering you?
Because the machine puts a distance between thought and the page, and that distance kills me. My pen, my ink, the grain of the paper — that is how sentences come to me, a natural extension of hand and mind. You gently mock my piles of notebooks, but that is where every novel lives before it exists. And I will confess something I would not say in public: I immerse myself so deeply in my characters that I weep when one of them dies under my pen. It is not sentimental, it is the price of truth. For a reader to believe in a being, I must first have loved them to the point of pain. The machine does not weep. That is why I do not want one, despite all your patience.
I immerse myself so deeply in my characters that I weep when one of them dies under my pen.
—You who introduced existentialism here, would you say that English philosophy has finally listened to you, or are you preaching in the wilderness?
A bit of both, I fear. I opened a window, yes, but the Oxford house clings to its walls. Analytical philosophy remains queen, and I dialogue with it constantly — you know how much I read Mind and Philosophy, how much I respect their rigor. But their world is without metaphysical depth, without tragedy, without the Good. They are right about precision and wrong about what matters. As for the French existentialism I imported, I immediately corrected it: Sartre makes freedom an absolute, and I believe true freedom begins when one stops contemplating oneself and sees others. So no, I am not preaching in the wilderness — but I walk somewhat against the current of both shores at once. It is a solitary position, and I have grown used to it.
They are right about precision and wrong about what matters.
—Your days always begin the same way: the walk, the notebook, before the world wakes up. What do you seek in those morning hours?
Inner silence, before the noise of the day blurs everything. I get up early, I walk or cycle in the countryside, and something untangles. You are still asleep when I come back to sit with my notebook, and those first hours are the purest: the mind has not yet put on its social mask. That is when characters speak to me most freely, when sentences arrive almost effortlessly. Then come tutorials, obligations, faces — and I love that too, I am not a hermit. But the morning belongs to writing alone. I believe all serious work, philosophical or novelistic, requires that initial stripping away, that empty attention where one waits for reality to come to one. Without those hours, I would be neither philosopher nor novelist — nothing at all.
In the morning, the mind has not yet put on its social mask.
—In The Sea, the Sea, your protagonist never sees others as they are. Admit it: did you put something of the two of us in that obsession?
What a dreadful question, coming from you! There is a bit of everyone in Charles Arrowby, and therefore a bit of us, yes — but above all of that universal evil I have been tracking forever. That man, retired by the sea, thinks he loves a woman from his youth; in truth, he loves the image he has made of her, and he destroys her to defend that image. It is the supreme illusion, that of all lovers and all egoists: to mistake the other for the ghost one carries within. You and I know how rare it is to truly see the one you love, without covering them with our fears and desires. The Booker Prize crowned a story of obsession, but at bottom it is the same book as my philosophy: a treatise on blindness and on the price of true attention.
He loves the image he has made of her, and he destroys her to defend that image.
—After all you saw in Europe, do you still have faith in humanity? You who call yourself a humanist without God?
Yes, and that is perhaps my most stubborn part. I do not believe in a personal God, you know, but I believe in the reality of the Good as firmly as a believer believes in prayer. What I saw in Vienna could have made me cynical; it made me the opposite. For in the midst of the ruins, I also saw acts of absolute goodness, gratuitous, without witness or reward. That is the humanism I defend: without heaven or punishment, man can still choose attention over egoism, reality over the fiction that consoles him. It is more demanding than religion, because nothing compels us. I spend my life, in my novels as in my essays, showing how much we fail — precisely because I believe we could succeed. Without that faith, I would not write a line.
I believe in the reality of the Good as firmly as a believer believes in prayer.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Iris Murdoch's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.