(The Enthusiast)
I grew up in a family in which reading wasn’t simply a regular activity, it was a public one. Books were everywhere, lying broken-spined on kitchen counters and bathroom radiators, in unmade beds, splayed on chair arms. They were passed from one of us to another — volumes by Agatha Christie, C.S. Lewis, Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens — and discussed at the dinner table, in the car, on walks. Keeping tabs on other people’s reading was a form of check-in, a way of showing love.
“I’ve got nothing to read,” one of my sisters might complain and one of our parents would say, “Here,” and hand her something, and off she would go, into her room, into a corner, for hours.
Visiting other homes was also a way to discover people’s books, what they liked, what we shared. But one summer when I was 10, I found myself in a bookless house in southern Sicily, Italy, for a month with my academic father, my writer mother and my two older sisters, accompanied only by the Agatha Christie I’d taken for the plane, and which I’d finished before we landed. “What was I thinking? Why hadn’t I brought anything else? I suddenly had Nothing to Read.
I scoured the airy, cliff side house until, finally, up high in a closet, I found a small box of books in English. All by a contemporary British writer I had never heard of: Iris Murdoch. The first one I opened was called “The Severed Head,” and it — like much of Murdoch’s work — combined a kind of dark mythological bent with a cerebral, talkative, psychologically misguided set of characters. Oh, and lots of discreetly mentioned sex — hetero- and homo-, extramarital, even incestuous, all charged with violence, betrayal and yearning — utterly thrilling to an overly protected kid like me.
If you’re not familiar with the works of Iris Murdoch, “The Severed Head” is an excellent place to start. Married man with mistress discovers wife is leaving him for their psychoanalyst. Everyone is so concerned for everyone else — husband and wife help each other move, the analyst’s sister (also his lover, it turns out) sticks her nose in everywhere, and by the end, each character has a new partner and it seems that the world has reshuffled into better order, at least for the moment. Madcap as it sounds, it’s calm on the page. Murdoch’s prose is elegant, validating itself by its own certainty.
“I loved to give Georgie outrageous things, absurd garments and gewgaws which I could not possibly have given Antonia, barbarous necklaces and velvet pants and purple underwear and black openwork tights which drove me mad. I rose now and wandered about the room, watching her possessively as with a tense demure consciousness of my gaze she adjusted the lurid stockings.” Reading this passage alone in my room, I began to see why my sisters found the adult world so fascinating.
I went on to read the rest of the books in that box, which included “The Bell,” “The Red and the Green,” “The Italian Girl” and “The Nice and the Good.” This was the summer of 1969, and so Murdoch had only published 12 of what would turn out to be 26 novels. She was 50 years old, and had not yet been named to the order of the British Empire or won the Booker Prize, nor exhibited symptoms of the Alzheimer’s disease that would end her life in 1999. The sexually open-minded Murdoch had only a few years earlier married the largely asexual literary critic John Bayley, but I knew nothing of her past, or her present and, of course, nothing of her future. (I would learn more later by reading A.N. Wilson’s “Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her” and John Bayley’s own memoir, “Elegy for Iris.”) I only knew at the time that I responded to — no, loved — her books.
I read “my” Murdochs in my tiny bedroom that summer, acutely aware of the noises of my family going about its vacation life on the other side of the door. I did not share her with them. If someone had asked me, “What’s your book?” I might have lied, even going so far as to say I was reading “Murder on the Orient Express” yet again.
After all these years, I have to ask myself why did I need to keep Iris Murdoch’s novels to myself? Was it simply because the books were “dirty”? They weren’t really, at least not in the way of dirty books, which I would find my way to later on. They were frank about the omnipresence of sex, of longing, the wish to be taken seriously, of grown-ups with sudden childish passions that seemed, at least to me, to be true. Her people voiced prejudice, held misguided notions, and Murdoch took them down, but with understanding and affection. Marriages ended, things were said, there was way too much drinking and even some fighting, and life went on. Yes, in Murdoch’s world, characters behaved badly and were not always punished for it. And even if they were, they found their way to reasonable fates.
In my “Read this” and “I have a book for you” family, no one had ever mentioned Murdoch. Her novels weren’t part of our approved canon. And yet I adored her and her belief that love could come from any direction and in any guise, that there were different kinds and each of them was good. Men were sometimes superior to women, and sometimes women were in charge. Children were wise and adults idiotic, and everyone was attempting some humanly self-interested version of their best. Dame Iris Murdoch had been a philosophy don at Oxford before she became a novelist, and as far as I was concerned, her philosophy of life was spot on, as someone in a British novel might say.
I had, I think, finally been introduced to the private world of reading that many people inhabit, a dream state I now regard as a portal to the act of breathing life into fictional worlds of one’s own. That first Murdoch novel seemed like a belief system transformed into story, given to me to make of it what I wanted, on my own. Her novels were, that summer, an introduction to the acceptability of strangeness, to the beauty found outside shared experience, and most of all, an introduction to the glorious privacy of reading.
Beyond ‘A Severed Head’: An Iris Murdoch Starter Kit
Go for the books Murdoch is best known for, particularly the Booker Prize-winning, “The Sea, The Sea,” about a retired theater director who learns that his adolescent love, Hartley, has retired with her husband to the same coastal town and decides that they should, decades later, renew their relationship. Stay tuned for kidnapping, attempted murder, a roundelay of appearances from past lovers and their lovers, plus wonderful descriptive passages about the sea in all phases of weather.
“The Unicorn,” in which a young governess comes to live with a wealthy woman who is being held prisoner in a remote seaside house by the employees of her absent husband.
“A Fairly Honorable Defeat.” One of its strands a terrific fictional portrait of enduring gay love, here tested when the devilish Julius King bets another friend that he can break up the long partnership of Axel and Simon.
The Whitbread-winning “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine” for more adultery and much ado about whether “pure” love or erotic love matters most.
“The Green Knight,” loosely based on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and featuring a possible murder, a mother and her rivalrous daughters, and a monk and his dog.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.