The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. The novel featured on today's show is The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch, first published in 1974 by Chasso and Windus in the UK, and The Viking Press in the USA. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously and Inventory, an unreliable guide to my record collection. I'm Dr Una McCormack, award-winning science fiction author and Associate Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. And I'm Nicky Birch, the producer and editor of Backlisted. Backlisted has been running for 10 years now, and over that time we've built up a loyal community of listeners, patrons and guests, plus of course a library of some 250 shows containing everything from A Christmas Carol to The Ice Palace. We have and we've been making backlisted shows now every two weeks for all of that time. That's a lot of reading in Andy, Una and John's case or in my case buying a lot of books and attempting to read some of them. However, soon we are about to take a well-earned break from backlisted focusing on our solo albums before we reform again for more stadium shows later in the year. yes uh long time listeners uh will recall even if long time means just last year 2025 we kept banging on about how we've been here for 10 years well that was partly to prepare you for the fact that um we're tired now and we need it's been a long it's been a long time 250 plus shows so we're going to take a break just to recharge our batteries for a little while so we're really grateful for for your support thus far we'll be back but we need a rest yeah so this episode is the penultimate show before we take a break but during that break we'll be replaying some of our archive with lots of new updated introductions and for those lovely souls who would still like to hear from us and want some brand new bookish content we will continue to be publishing our subscriber only shows via patreon.com forward slash backlisted including actually a brand new read-along Booker Prize Winners Book Club. And that's where you can keep up with Andy's music writing, inventory and one or two other exciting treats which we'll tell you about in the next show. All the details can be found at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. I would like to distance myself from the phrase brand new bookish content. I wrote that and I'm going to own that. Yeah, you had the chance to nix it when the drafts went round. bookish content does not reflect the views of backlisted and is the individual nicky as i said solo albums will be working on for the rest of the year i tell you what everybody we all came to this show in separate buses and we'll all we'll all be leaving immediately after in different directions that's how things are anyway thank you so much for that introduction nicky now joining us on today's show to discuss the sacred and profane love machine by iris burdock is a guest making a return appearance on backlisted welcome back ian patterson ian hello hello great to be back even into this extraordinary mix of hostilities and mistaken drafts You've joined Kiss at the wrong moment. Or is there, I'm not sure there is a good moment to join Kiss, but anyway. Ian, you, I think you should know that so confident were we of delivering an absolutely tip-top show on the subject of Iris Murdoch, that on social media I teased that this episode was coming, but I didn't reveal which book we were going to do and who our guest was going to be. People are beside themselves with excitement trying to work out which book we're going to talk about. I don't want you to talk about it yet, but I do want you to know this is one of the most anticipated recordings that we've done for a long time, that the Iris Murdoch readership is out there and is thrilled that this conversation is going to take place. Isn't that nice? Isn't that a nice thing to know? Mostly, yes. Yeah. No pressure. I don't think anyone guessed the book as well. No, they did not. Shall we do the introductions? We should do the introductions, yes. Please do. Ian Patterson taught in further education for almost 15 years, then was a second-hand bookseller for 10 years, specialising in modernism, left-wingery and the Spanish Civil War. Translated books from French, then did a PhD at King's College, Cambridge on cultural critique and canon formation, 1910 to 1939. And finally, after four years as a research fellow at King's, became a fellow of Queen's College, Cambridge, where he taught English for 20 years. He retired in 2018. Apart from his academic writing, he has published Guernica and Total War 2007, an account of cultural reactions to the fear of death from the air from the first bomb dropped from a plane in 1911 to the advent of nuclear weapons. And this year he published Books, a Manifesto or How to Build a Library. A widely published and award-winning poet, his collected poems was published by Broken Sleep in 2024. He's also the editor of the very long-running and very difficult literary quotation quiz Nemo's Almanac, which started in 1892. I thought I'd misread that then. You've been working a long time, Ian. I'm getting tired too, yes. You're about to announce a century off now. Ian is married to the writer Olivia Lang and lives in Suffolk, and he was last on Backlisted in 2019, episode 84, discussing Jilly Cooper's novel Imogen. The lovely late Jilly Cooper who died last year. Do you know, Ian, if Jilly Cooper and Iris Murdoch ever met? Well, no, I don't. It seems on the face of it improbable that they knew each other as friends. It's improbable, too, that they never ran into each other somewhere, but I wouldn't have thought they ran closely or quickly towards each other. Now, Nemo's Almanac is horribly difficult, by your own admission. Yes, it is. I mean, some years it's more difficult than other years because I forget whether it's difficult or not. and of course it's always easy for the person who sets the quiz and sometimes I remember that not everybody has read The Hole of Trollope or knows about the minor poems of Mervyn Smelt. Well, our listeners barely speak of anything else Ian. Do you have a question from the most recent instalment that you were particularly pleased with? Let's see if there was one I was pleased with. There was one or two, actually. Come on, Luna, here you go. Oh, dear. I don't like books anymore, Andy. I don't read them anymore. Can't, of course, tell you the answer. That's true. Hit me with the Star Trek novels. This is not, oddly enough, from a Star Trek novel. this is the third quotation from January and it's verse the year goes, the woods decay and after many a summer dies the swan on Bingham's pond a ghost comes and goes it goes and ice appears it holds bears gulls that stand around surprised right everybody that's uh that's certainly from the autobiography of spock i think it might be yes it was one of the um so one of the poems that he wrote when he was um having his first divorce isn't it i thought this one for a lot of listeners i thought there was a slightly betjeman cadence there, though it wasn't Betjeman at all, I know that. Come on, Una, let's play along. Take a stab, go on. Oh, goodness. Well, I was going to say Betjeman, actually, but you got me there. I'm going to say Stevie Smith and Nicky is going to say Help. Ian, do you even know the answer? Not without looking it up at this point, no. Well, that's reassuring, isn't it? Anyway, I couldn't say the answer because that'd be giving it away that's good so we can we can buy that can we now yeah from me good good um a quiz so difficult even the person setting the questions doesn't know the answers good this is excellent and thank you so much and um more to the point of uh our meeting today um you've written a wonderful book called um books a manifesto or How to Build a Library, which I enjoyed tremendously. I like books about books, but as you can imagine, I've read quite a few now. So have I. And I always think, yes, right? And I always think, okay, impress me. And of course, you did impress me and entertained me wildly at the same time. So thank you so much for that pleasure that you gave me. It did occur to me that listeners to backlisted would enjoy this book terribly so um can i ask you before you just read a little bit you call it books a manifesto um why partly because i didn't want to call it other things that the publisher might have been suggesting um partly because I like the title and partly because it's not really a manifesto but it's got a manifestish undercurrent to it that comes up sometimes and anyway if it were a manifesto it would be saying what it does say so it probably is a manifesto just not a very manifest manifesto I'm glad I'm not working in your marketing department that's what that's all that's all i'll say well i think it's what well it does what it does what you need it to which is it it distinguishes it from other books of this type uh and then when you get into it i think it's a uh it's a pleasing bit of misdirection a manifesto i think that's which is what one would hope for from you. It would be terribly dull if it was an actual manifesto, wouldn't it? Dear, oh, dear. Well, it might not. Depends what it said. But probably it would be duller than what you get from the pleasing misdirection once you open the book. Would you please us with a brief excerpt from the introduction? Yeah. Even for ordinary readers, there are advantages to having actual books. I know e-books are convenient for travel and storage, but you can't so easily lend one to a friend or remember the particular feel of it in your hand. When I've read a book, if it isn't a library book, I like to have it around on a shelf, fully present, separate but available, ready to be consulted again, shown to other people or borrowed, and returned. I've accumulated books all my life. In a sense, books have been my life, or at least they've usually been somewhere near the heart of it. I've been a teacher, an academic, a translator, a political activist, a second-hand bookseller, an editor, a writer and a poet. The constant theme linking them all is books. I'm a reader and an accumulator and collector of books. Since I was very young I've wanted to read books and have them around me. I believe books and reading are important, all kinds of books and all kinds of reading. It seems natural to me to want to create a library of my books wherever I'm living, even if I'm only to be there for a short time. I used to feel guilty about it sometimes, pray to the accusation that absorption in books is an avoidance of the outside world, a feeble substitute for real life. But that notion of real life is dubious at best. At worst, it's just bogus ideology used by right-wing politicians and demagogues to belittle the whole array of creative thinking by accusing artists, writers, academics and intellectuals of retreating into ivory towers when the rarefied world of parliamentary politics is itself much more of an ivory tower than universities, publishing or the media. Reality is complex. It's not just social reality, the things that actually happen in the world, practical matters, action. There's also the life, the mind, the imagination, the arts, history, memory, everything we think, remember, hope for, forget, everything that isn't the reality that politicians are mostly concerned with, but which belongs in another kind of reality, psychic reality, no less real for being imaginative, subjective or invisible or confined in books. reading is a necessary part of reality and an unavoidable part of everyday life we'll keep going i want to i want to hear it i want to hear the rest of the paragraph please we live within language and using it is as natural to us and as unconscious as breathing when we think it's what we think with exercising our use of language both our receptivity to it and our control over it is how we develop individual personhood, self-knowledge, knowledge of others and of the world. And although we live in language, the language we live in from day to day is like the sea, constantly shifting in permanent restlessness. It's only still when it's written down. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Anyway, it's called Books and Manifesto or How to Build a Library. It's published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. It's by our guest today, Ian Paston, and it's out now. Terrific read. Cannot recommend that highly enough. I agree. Una, over to you. Right. Well, we should turn to the book that Ian has brought with him today. Now, rather than attempt a synopsis of the plot of the sacred and profane love machine, Andy went rummaging around the Debenhams website, which I didn't even know existed. Yeah, that domain name is still whatever's still in that warehouse. Taking us all the way back to the 1970s. Andy went back to Debenhams' website and he found the five at-a-glance features on the page devoted to this novel. Here's what you can expect. Gripping romantic drama. Examines love's complexities. Ambiguous female friendship. Vengeful Love Story Modern Literary Fiction Now, Debenhams have two copies of the book in stock and you will find it under home forward slash hobbies and crafts forward slash books It's terribly pleasing to think they've had those since 1974 Before the website, easily, I think Yeah. Now, there might be a reason why that's still in stock. And it might be related to this. I was teasing Ian then about when once worked in his marketing department Pity then the blurb writer tasked with producing jacket copy for the Sacred and Profane Love Machine Here is the inside flap copy from the hardback first edition of the Sacred and Profane Love Machine published in 1974 This will give you an insight into the glories and challenges of reading Iris Murdoch. Here we go. montague small an obsessive writer of detective thrillers mourns his lately dead wife who may or may not have been unfaithful to him his attempts at meditation are a failure he detests his fictional detective his interest in his neighbor's difficulties and his neighbor's wife appear to be his only consolations after all. The neighbour, Blaise Gavinder, is an amateur psychotherapist who is seen through himself. Has Blaise the courage to change his life and become an honest man? What is honesty in any case? Blaise's wife Harriet lives for love, love of her husband, love of her son. She is fond of Monty too. Emily McHugh is quite another matter. She too lives for love, for love and justice and revenge aided and incited by her ambiguous friend Constance Pinn. Emily's son, Luca, a very disturbed child, becomes the subject of a tug of war between two possessive women. Edgar de Mornay, a distinguished scholar, also blunders into the fray. He adores Monty and falls in love with Monty's women. A deed of violence finally solves many problems. This is a story of different loves And of how a man may need two women in such a way That he can be happy with neither Sacred and profane love are related opposites The one enjoyed renders the other necessary So that the ever unsatisfied heart Swings constantly to and fro Good lord Ian, do you think Dame Iris wrote that? No, I should imagine Nora Small did It might have been anybody. And Nora Small was her editor at the publisher, right? Very interesting. Una, will you tell us a little bit about Iris Murdoch's life? Certainly can. Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919, and grew up in London. She studied classics at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1938 until 1942, receiving first-class honours. By 1950, she was a fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford, and a university lecturer in philosophy. She published her first book, Sarch Romantic Rationalist, in 1953. Murdoch's career as a novelist began the next year with Under the Net. Her early successes include The Bell in 1958 and A Severed Head in 1961, subsequently adapted into a film starring Ian Holm and Lee Remick of which more anon. In 1974 the sacred and profane Love Machine won the Whitbread Award for Fiction and four years later she was awarded the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. She was named a Companion of the British Empire in 1976 and a Dame of the British Empire in 1987. In total, she published 26 novels, plus a volume of short stories, two poetry collections, several original plays and five works of philosophy, including The Sovereignty of Good in 1970 and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals in 1992. And she died in 1999 at the age of 79. Iris Murdoch was considered one of the most significant novelists of her time, i.e. the 20th century. But where does her reputation stand today, a quarter of the way through the 21st? Should we think of her as a philosopher who wrote novels, a novelist who wrote philosophy, a pioneer of wild swimming, or some combination of the three? Portrayed on screen famously by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench Is Iris Murdoch's still a household name? And what on earth is this novel about? When we come back Ian Patterson will help us answer these questions or perish in the attempt but first a friendly word from our sponsors Before we start a big thank you to serious readers for supporting Backlisted Yes, people always ask how we keep up with the reading. I usually say 1.5 speed audiobooks and mild panic. And I say, well, I keep up with it with the help of my serious readers' lights. It's the one thing that can make hours of reading feel easy. Because it's not just a lamp, it's a precision tool that replicates natural daylight to stop squinting and eye strain. These lights are recommended by over 500 opticians and I can see why. The good news is listeners can get £150 off any HD essential reading light with free UK delivery at seriousreaders.com forward slash back. Just use the code back at the checkout. That's B-A-C-K. And it comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. That's seriousreaders.com forward slash back with the code B-A-C-K. And now, on with the show. Ian, it's traditional on Backlister to ask this question. And so let me be traditional and say, when did you first read The Sacred and Profane Love Machine or become aware of the writing of Iris Murdoch? Well, the latter first. I suppose anybody growing up in the time that I was growing up in a fairly literate culture was aware of Iris Murdoch as a name, at least. that is in the 1960s and I became aware of her as a reader I guess probably when I was at university when I know that I had a copy of Under the Net our first novel and I know that I didn't read very much of it I read about I suppose about 50 pages and gave up I thought I'm not interested in this it wasn't until some probably until i was in my early 30s that i picked her up again and read the nice and the good and thought oh my god this is extraordinary and then i started to read more and more and among the more that i read was the sacred and profane love machine so I guess about probably 40 years ago I read it for the first time. Una, do you want to ask the question or shall I? You could ask. Una is very polite. So, Ian, Iris Murdoch was famous for her intellectualism and her mischief and when Una and I met unfortunately you were poorly before Christmas but when Una and I had our first meeting to discuss the book in preparation for the show we spent a lot of the time going why has Ian chosen the sacred and profane love machine and concluded that it must be a Murdoch-like practical prank is that correct? Justify yourself Ian Well not entirely It was more that I thought it was another one. I just got the titles modelled up. Is that true? Up to a point that is true, yes. Amazing. That's fantastic. No further questions. The defence rests, Your Honour. Which one I thought it was may emerge in the course of our discussion. That's good to know. Oh, that's hilarious. Yes, you know, I feel much better disposed towards this book now. OK, that's good. I hope no worse disposed towards me. I think it raises a perfectly valid point, which Nicky brought to our attention just before we came on air, which is that it is quite easy to get one Iris Murdoch novel muddled up with another, even if you've made a film of them. I thought there was only one cinema adaptation of an Iris Murder novel, the aforementioned Severed Head. But it turns out there's another one called The Sins of Ilsa, also known as the Iris movie, which was made in the mid-1980s and it's an American adult erotic film that was shown on the Playboy channel in 1987. under the title Love Standing Up, and even the Iris Murdoch Society can't work out which novel it's alleged to be based on. It may well be the sacred and propane love machine. We may well decide that The Sins of Ilsa, a.k.a. Love Standing Up, is based on this one that you chose accidentally. Well, time will tell. That's well said. Suitably no-mixed style. Thank you, Ian. I think we should hear then from the woman herself. Now, we have an amazing clip here. This is from 1962. The period Ian was talking about there when Iris Murdoch was not at her most famous. She was certainly extremely well-known, a regular feature of newspaper comment, radio and television. And here we have an excerpt from an interview Iris Murdoch gave to Frank Kermode in a BBC programme. This was for sixth formers. What you're about to hear was intended to be played in the classroom. So here we go. Miss Murdoch, it's not altogether common for the same person to be philosopher and novelist. Are the two tasks fully compatible? Well, they're compatible except in the sense that one has a limited amount of time, and they're both potentially very full-time jobs. Yes, they're compatible. In fact, to some extent, they possibly help each other. Does being a philosopher give you a special kind of angle on the business of writing fiction? Are you more interested in certain aspects of the problem of writing fiction than non-philosophers might be? No, I don't think so. I think as a novelist, one is just the pupil of great novelists of the past in a quite straightforward way. I don't think being a philosopher alters or certainly doesn't help one's job as an artist when writing a novel. I suppose my interests in philosophy are chiefly in moral philosophy and in political philosophy, and possibly, to some extent, thinking about situations in moral philosophy, thinking about problems of freedom and problems of moral decision and so on. This may affect sometimes the way one portrays a character. There's a real difference, is there, between the way you think about a moral decision as a moral philosopher and the way in which you think about it as novelist? Well, philosophy is very different stuff from fiction. Writing philosophy is a very different job. One's aiming at different results. One's not aiming at producing work of art, which is a quite special kind of thing. One's aiming at producing a . But the subject matter is the same, that is, human nature operating. In your first novel, you included a philosopher, in fact two, who discussed problems relating both to the forms of fiction and to the use of language in general together, isn't this an indication, as it were, that even in fiction you tend to provide patterns which could be loosely described as philosophical? Well, that was rather exceptional. The introduction of an actual piece of philosophy into a novel, I think, is a very dangerous thing to do. go on frank ask her about wild swimming the reason i wanted to listen to that um ian is this idea of in her lifetime iris murdough was most famous for her fiction and now posthumously she's becoming more famous for her philosophy and I wondered whether you, however lightly, could say, do you read her as a philosopher writing fiction or primarily a novelist with philosophical ideas or some combination of the two? Well, I guess, I mean, as Iris Murdoch would point out very quickly, I'm not what she would call a philosopher. far. I'm a reader, and I think she's a combination of the two all the time, actually. She said she's interested in the ethical problems of humans interrelating. And I'd rather read her novels on the whole than her philosophy, because they're more fun. The philosophy is, although, as philosophy goes very readable if taken fairly slowly and in small doses it's not well it's not particularly dramatic and it doesn't have much in the way of illustration and landscape and description and stuff the reason she's more thought about or written about at the moment as a philosopher than as a novelist is partly because she's just fallen out of fashion a bit, partly because there are plenty of women novelists, but not so many women philosophers. At least there didn't used to be. And so she's part of the business of reclaiming, the feminist business of reclaiming her as a philosopher and not another accomplished but to a penny novelist. Una, let me ask you a serious question. This novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, did you find this challenging to read um in isolation that's not what i mean but imagine you knew nothing about iris murdoch yeah did you find it challenging from that point of view as opposed to an example of her fiction so i i haven't read much murdoch uh and maybe that's i i don't know if that's a function of uh you know when i was first reading or starting to read maturely which is what the mid 90s late 90s were maybe uh the fashion is just starting to change i had read one murdoch before this i i i won a box of books i accidentally entered a prize being a competition run by penguin in round about 1993 and i ended up with you accidentally i accidentally won it we kind of we sort of did it for a joke and then shoved it in the post and And the next thing I knew, 50 novels arrived. Oh, OK. Wow. Well, that was a well-spent half hour, you know, in the mitre. What did you have to do? We had to say which five books we thought they should have published, which five books should have been on their list. And so me and my other half got our head together and went, oh, they should have done this, they should have done that. Oh, let's put a stamp on that. Shoved it in the post and 50 novels arrived. It was brilliant. and one of those was The Severed Head which I read and was, well I was like Ian said earlier, I was 21 and I went well what the bloody hell is that all about? kind of put it on the shelf and unlike Ian I hadn't come back to Murdoch just because life is short and there's so many Rachel Kosk novels and I That's a throwback for long time listeners, well done A serious point because I think there are interesting connections to draw I think but you know might just be me But yeah I yeah i hadn read another iris murdoch until i read this uh prank novel that was perpetrated on me so uh so to come to murdoch completely cold and coming to this one i think is a an interesting route to murdoch i've subsequently started the bell uh which i he immediately went, oh, this is completely brilliant. Yeah, I see what's going on here. But I struggled with this one. I did struggle with this one. And partly the reason I think I struggled with it was that I think that the pull of the philosophical exercise maybe affects the working of the novel, that it doesn't breathe sufficiently as a novel for me. And I think that's partly that there's an architecture literature perhaps in her mind the novel doesn't quite come to life for me certainly one of the reviews of the sacred and profane love machine said at the time iris murdoch is a frustrating writer or can be a frustrating writer to read regularly because if she just put a little more effort in she could write a different kind and more artfully complete novel but she doesn't she writes them then she goes on to the next one and she keeps going i will say i've thought about this book a lot since i read it and i was just walking down the stairs maybe about three or four days ago and I went oh that's funny isn't it so you're saying there's a two-month lag on the jokes it's been a difficult two months it has yeah it has Ian what what do you what do you think is is is she I've made this joke many times but is she one of those writers where when you've read all of her books you've read one of them no i don't think she is though i see what you mean uh there is a um there is a similarity but the same is true isn't it of um most detective story writers um and i think uh despite the um the kind of literary fiction guise her books are really ethical detective stories. They're looking to find out what happened and why. Each time, I think, she sets herself a series of questions and the novels are there to explore them. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. And sometimes it's a real effort to bring the characters and the situations to life because they smack too heavily of really overthought philosophical problems. And sometimes things just take wing and fly. This particular novel, despite its intriguing and seductive title and the clash between love and machine and the opposition between sacred and profane and all the rest of it. And it's the thought that it might be the sort of description of some kind of bastard painting in the National Gallery, somewhere between Bronzino and Marcel Duchamp. Despite all that, I think it isn't entirely successful. So I'd agree with Una about the unsatisfactory nature of it. on the other hand I don't think it's bad I think it's interesting and I think some of it is terrific but I do think it is I think towards the end certainly she's thinking oh my god I've only got three days before term starts and I've got to write I've got to get back to writing philosophy That's relatable Do you know Ian when you just said think of them as detective novels that has just unlocked the whole thing in my head actually it's uh it makes complete sense it's uh it's about the apportioning of of guilt and what who is guilty who is not guilty which how we complicit how we not complicit where are we complicit in ways that we don't realize that's that's absolutely unlocked something in my head for me so thank you ian could you read us a little bit from the sacred and profane love machine. So we can hear a bit of the prose. Harriet had told David. That's a very Iris Murdoch sentence. Straight in. Go on. Harriet had told David. Harriet had told David. He listened to her in silence only after the start, turning his face away. It was evening. The shorn grass of the lawn golden as stubble in the parallels of the rich light. Harriet had eaten nothing. She and Blaze had talked till three. Then she had taken aspirins and gone to lie down. Blaze had gone out for a walk. After that, he said he would go and tell Monty. Perhaps he was telling Monty now. Harriet felt that she had heard the whole truth and Blaze's obvious sincerity and relief in telling it had brought a kind of comfort. The weird wrecked feeling of the world persisted, as if a tornado had knocked everything over onto its side, letting in a sort of white glare. Harriet had fed the dogs, her tears falling into their food. All precious domestic rituals were alienated now. amidst all this wreckage, she was upheld by an intense loving pity for her husband, and by a stiffness of her own, the absolute need for courage. After all, as she had firmly told herself, she was a soldier's daughter, and a soldier's sister. She recalled Adrian saying when some incident was being bemoaned, But soldiers are supposed to be shot at, it's their job. Harriet was determined to stay up right now in the gunfire, She summoned up a sort of fierce bravery which she'd never had to use before. The pain was very great, however, and she could feel obscure things in the depths of her mind shifting about in order to endure it. Thank you. I think there's an opening for you as the Iris Murdoch audiobook reader. I think that was what was very interesting about that for me, I don't know what you felt Una she's so good at creating psychological reality in characters who seem superficially to just be flat on the page so when I think of an Iris Murdoch novel I tend to think of these slightly exotically posh named Dons getting into and out of bed with one another and the sort of, the kind of comic existential farce of the thing. But the portion you've just read there is compassionate and... It's a devastated woman. Yes, yeah. Life has just been ruined, has just been wrecked. Through no fault and through no sin and through maybe the weakness of somebody that she loves. Yeah. And still, despite all that, we can see from the way that, or as it developed, we can see from the way in which Iris Murdoch does allow us into the minds of each of these characters that they all don't know everything and that they can be feeling something entirely genuine or life-destroying by mistake or to some extent through their failure to comprehend the other person, by their failure to love the other person in the right way or to understand them. So you have all these kind of indirect free speech kind of passages where you feel very inward to a character's mind, while at the same time with another part of your reading mind, knowing that they're mistaken, what Coleridge calls dupes of a deep delusion. Is that Harriet's sin then, if we sort of call it that, is that she loves him in the wrong way, that she loves something that isn't actually him. Is that the failure? Well, yes, I think to some extent that's true. She loves what she thinks she's got or what she thought she was getting. The evidence in front of her eyes is actually pointing to something completely different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and there are little bits of behaviour like her fondness for picking up dogs at Battersea Dogs Home that suggests that she has some unconscious consciousness of this and needs to find love somewhere else. And that plays out later in the book with the other child. And that's almost the, that sort of escalating from dogs to children on which to kind of put your love on is almost the inciting incident, isn't it? I can hear my colleague, Dr McCormack, warming to this novel in real time. Right. I like looking at how they function. Yeah. So, yeah, absolutely. And if they have functioned, to work out how they function or how they're intended to function is interesting whether I think I enjoyed the book or not. But OK, look, we're going to take a little break. And when we come back, we're going to hear an excerpt from the trailer for one of the two Iris Murdoch film adaptations. Not, I'm afraid, Love Standing Up, but a severed head. So we'll see you in just a minute. Time? Time to choose partners for a severed head. It's rather complicated, so please pay attention. Keep score if you like. Martin and Antonia are an ideal couple. Devoted. But not to each other. Georgie loves Martin. Palmer loves Antonia. And all's well. Until Alexander grabs Georgie. And honor snags Palmer. Poor Martin. Poor Antonia. Inconsolable. But Antonia wins Alexander. Martin graduates with honor. Palmer consoles Georgie. a severed head is a contemporary version of musical chairs a grown-up game for six players that was an excerpt from the trailer for late 1960s film adaptation of severed head which Iris Murnett was A, terribly pleased with. She was on set quite a lot for that. B, it was directed by Dick Clement of the comedy writing team, Dick Clement and Ian Lafrenet, responsible for porridge and our feeders' own pets. That is currently available on DVD, A Severed Head. And there's a director's commentary from Dick Clement where he says, they ask him, what's it like watching this again after you make it? He said, well, I'm asking myself the same question I asked the producer when he requested I direct the film. Who is going to watch this? And yet, and yet, it's a very faithful, enjoyable adaptation of A Severed Head, of an Iris Murdoch novel. Have you seen it ever, that version? No, I haven't. I shall rush to get it now. Debenhams. Debenhams, my name. Debenhams, I will go to the Debenhams website at once and order it. Well, it's a very starry thing, that. It is. You heard there, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, Ian Holm, Claire Bloom. And yet, I wonder, Ian, is there something very appealing about the literariness of Iris Murdoch? You know, the attributes you're crediting her with seem to me very bookish attributes. I think they are. I think that's right. And I think it's, I mean, you might think because several of her novels, including The Severed Head, have been adapted for the stage because the novels have on the whole an enormous amount of dialogue in them, that nothing much would be lost from a film or a stage adaptation, but I don't think that's true. I think an awful lot is lost, partly because the relation between the authorial voice and the internal voices of the characters is sufficiently close for a kind of omnipresent irony. sometimes which sometimes the irony is sort of smashed through in honor of the power of love but often it's there and the irony is on the whole verging towards kind of practical use of tragic irony that doesn't quite rise to the heights of tragedy but isn't just there for comic purposes i think that the other sorts of things are the way in which she uses letters the way in which she uses recurrent framings or allusions or symbols as the novel goes through so in the novel that we're partly talking about today the sacred and profane whatever it is there's an awful lot of looking out of windows people stand and look out of windows or they sit and look out of windows and what they see is is a way that only they can see and if you have that done by a camera you can't give it the personal construction that iris murdoch manages to do well it's worth pointing out that that the play of a severed head this is another thing about iris murdoch's popularity um she was famous she was she was a a you know a celebrated that rare thing a celebrated british public intellectual and the film is an adaptation of the play the play do you know who who adapted the play with her yeah jb priestly and you know who wrote the screenplay no frederick rafael oh did he yes so what an incredible what's an incredible bank of talent from different from different disciplines to have murdoch priestly and frederick rafael and as you said um near the start of this conversation everyone knew who iris murdoch was um is it true to say do you think that by the time um the sacred and profane love machine comes out in the early 1970s has her style changed sufficiently that she's leaving behind those early readers no i don't think not by then i think that's something that happens after the sea of the sea or round about that time a little bit later on at the end of that decade um and i think that between that and um her last in my view her last readable novel the book and the brotherhood um she sort of gets cloggier and cloggier and after that nothing the last few novels I think are not not worth bothering with really okay that interesting well it may I may be wrong it just that I I conceived that feeling at the time having started one of them and after that I thought no I'll stop here so I haven't read the last three or four at I'm going to say that the event that she came to do at the shop I worked at at the time so this would have been about 92, 93 the Green Knight, does that sound about right? and all I can really remember about it is that there was a bigger and more enthusiastic crowd than we had anticipated so she was still a draw in the early 90s and that she came in her slippers. She was delightful, I have to add. I remember her being charming and doing that great thing of seeming terribly pleased to be in a bookshop on a Wednesday night. And she was tiny, that's the other thing. Did you ever meet her, Ian? You must have done. No, I never met her. You never met her? Okay. Yes, she was smaller than you, Una. Oh, goodness, that is small. Yeah. that's below five foot for people counting at home yeah yeah yeah so i i recall the green night having um and it might just be that perhaps it was the first iris merdock novel that sort of imposed itself on my consciousness as it was being published but i recall it being quite a big uh hoo-ha about it coming out that it was it was an event uh you know so i don't know if that was a kind of because it was an iris made up novel because there was an upswing happening in uh her being read so um but i recall i don't but she was i suppose what i would my it's merely an impression i think that i have but that she was still writing was in the 1990s a big deal and the reason it was a big deal is partly because of how prolific she had been from the 1950s through the 1960s. I mean, to all intents and purposes, she publishes a novel a year, doesn't she, for 15 years or something. So what's the best one then? What should, if you're going to read one, Iris Murdoch, perhaps me, who hasn't read one, what should I read? Very good question. I mean, a lot of people think The Bell is the best. I think the nice and the good is the most absurd and therefore the best and I'm also quite keen on Flight from the Enchanter but I wouldn't say it was the best it makes it onto the list it does yes and and and here we are with the sacred and profane love machine you have a high chance of getting to read the sea the sea because that's the booker isn't it so you've got your That's the booker, but I think that was a booker decision more for her. Is that a lifetime achievement rather than that kind of book? Yeah. Well, do you think, Ian, that's true as well of this winning the Whitbread then, the sacred and profane love machine? I mean... I think people were really quite taken with it at the time, probably, because it deals with things that are, well, it doesn't actually deal with things, but it dramatizes situations that were much thought about at the time. It's sort of, you know, what if you're in love with two people at once? What if you want to? Can you be, she wouldn't have said polyamorous, but I mean, can you be polymarried? and what about this and who's this and why? All these people are very early 70s figures. You can imagine exactly the kind of slight failure in the Technicolor, too much light, slightly overexposed elderly Don figures, too much meadow. The brownness of the furnishings, yeah. Yeah, and the greenness of the fields. I've got Penelope Keith's agent on speed dial. So I've read The Sea, The Sea, which was four years later. And that doesn't feel, that's interesting, doesn't feel dated. No, not to me anyway. No. Well, now listen, I've got a little thing I'd like to read, if you will indulge me. Because I dug this up when I was preparing. it's a speech that Iris Murdoch gave in 1972 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and I just want to read you three brief paragraphs from it this is 54 years old and I will read three quick paragraphs and then I'll say what I think each is about which strikes me as incredibly contemporary. So here's the first paragraph of Arts and Tyrants. We are told that art is now under attack. Of course, it has often been under attack. Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify. The good artist is a vehicle of truth. he formulates ideas which would otherwise remain vague and focuses attentions upon facts which can then no longer be ignored. The tyrant persecutes the artist by silencing him or by attempting to degrade or buy him. This has always been so, however it may be admitted that in this age art seems to have rather more enemies than usual. The tyrants of course are still here and we know what they do, but now science, philosophy and forces arising within art itself threaten this traditional activity, an activity which we are so used to, which we take so much for granted and which is perhaps more frail and unstable than it might seem. Well what's that about if it's not about populism? you know the idea that there aren't if she thought it was bad in 1972 it was going to get worse this second one made me think about AI this second paragraph it's very short the romantics felt instinctively that science was an enemy of art and of course in certain simple and obvious ways they were right a technological society quite automatically and without any malign intent, upsets the artist by taking over and transforming the idea of craft and by endlessly reproducing objects which are not art objects, but sometimes resemble them. Technology steals the artist's public by inventing sub-artistic forms of entertainment and by offering a great counter-interest and a rival way of grasping the world. you know that's pretty that's pretty on the that's very good on the button and then finally i i i well i'm gonna i'm gonna use the w word una forgive me um but only as shorthand um that there's a kind of woke um element to this final paragraph this final bit of thinking which i which is terribly striking, I think. There is also, and has been, only now it is stronger than ever, a decent and comprehensible kind of utilitarian reaction against art. Philistines, of course, we have always with us, but I am thinking here not of Mr Gradgrind, but of sincere people who feel that in a world reeling from misery, it is frivolous to enjoy art, which is, after all, a kind of play. There is a familiar puritanical and Protestant ancestry to this thinking, which expresses itself in the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, who refused to allow poetry a dignity which was higher than that of Pushpin. Today, technology further disturbs the artist and his client, not only by actually threatening the world, but by making its wretchedness apparent upon the television screen. The desire to attack art, to neglect it or to harness it or to transform it out of recognition is a natural and in a way respectable reaction to this display. And on she goes. It's really... That's really interesting, isn't it? Really remarkable piece of writing, which you can find online quite easily. Art and Tyrants by Iris Murdoch. but Ian what I was struck there the similarity with her fiction is the clarity of expression but also the extent to which ideas have been condensed into sentences and paragraphs they're incredibly rich we could spend the rest of our time unpicking just one of those paragraphs Yeah. They're so full of, sorry, Nicky, content. And they're like something you drop in water and watch expand. Not bookish content in this instance. No, you mustn't drop bookish content in water. No, it ruins the pages. It ruins it. Yeah. And I got that similar sense from the fiction, just from the little extract you read earlier. you know you're being asked to take the condensed sentence and slightly pull it apart for yourself and she does that also as a structuring device i think in a lot of her novels that is she she takes a a dream or a figure that somebody has and then somebody else has a similar dream or a figure or the same person has a developed version of that and it keeps coming back through the novel in the same way as people use symbols and other kind of visual representations of complicated thoughts but also with these Japanese paper flower sentences or phrases that you need to watch unfurl and spread their little petally wings and fly across the pages. Should we hear from Iris again? Yes, why not? I think we should. Here's a clip from Icelandic TV. in 1985, probably on just before the Icelandic... Generation came. ..or something. This is Iris talking about courage in art. I think one of the most important things in being an artist, perhaps in a human being, but I think in relation to art, is courage, that you've got to have nerve. You've got to have the courage to destroy what you think is no good. rejected. And the courage to hold on at a certain moment, this is rather hard to explain perhaps, but there's some, I think, tendency, this is a general moral thing I think, but it's thinking of it in terms of creation of art, that there's a very strong temptation, if one can do something moderately well, to move very quickly from the moment when you think, well, this is all provisional, this is a sketch, this is not really the finished thing, to then thinking, oh, well, now it's too late. Actually, it is the finished thing. I'll jump from saying it's too soon to saying it's too late. And it's the middle, it's in between these two things. This is the area that you've got to enlarge, this is where the courage comes in, where you've got to say, well, I'm not going to finish this now. I'm going to, I don't regard it as finished, and I'm not going to say it's too late. I'm not going to say it's all run on too far and gone too long. I'm going to hold on to it very, very closely and make it better and think in a way that really hurts. You know, when doing philosophy, thinking often hurts. Isn't that glorious? what you were saying before, Andy, about having to unfold the writing and dig into it and find out what's going on to it. She's describing the creative process that's happening behind that, that the temptation to stop or to move on. No, stay here and work with it, because probably you can go deeper there. And that's where the unfurling of the reading happens when you receive it. yes I see what you mean actually that's really interesting what I like about Iris Murdoch's fiction is it treats the reader as a real collaborator in the in the process some kinds of novel will be written to to carry you along and that's fine and do the do the work but she's saying here you know we're in this together now and I'm gonna I'm gonna give you some things to think about and hold in your brain at the same time i'm going to pay you the compliment that you might want to think as hard as i have the novel that illustrates that as well as any of them is the black prince um which is her as it were lolita novel unusually it's a first person narrative and the first person is writing the novel of what's happened and talking about it but he is unreliable and also he's not a very good writer um so there is a an irony in the authorial style because the authorial style is a fictional character and he's making all sorts of pronouncements about what you do when you're writing but it's also the most powerful novel about love um and one that i was absolutely captivated about in the days when i used to go around falling in love a bit having read it again more recently i'm i see it in a slightly different light but it is um it is extremely interesting uh in terms of i mean it's probably the best novel to think about her writing either that or what's it called sacred and profane love machine is another one i think well it seems like an appropriate point as we haven't worked out what what love standing up is we haven't worked out which book it was that ian meant to bring us but we have talked a lot about iris murder and uh we have benefited from uh ian's wisdom and enthusiasm Yeah, terrifically. So thank you, Ian. Anyway, let me wrap things up. Many thanks to Ian for helping us map the philosophical terrain of Iris Murdoch's fiction and the fictional terrain of Iris Murdoch's philosophy. And to our producer, Nicky Birch, a wild swimmer who faces profound moral choices every time she edits one of these recordings but plunges in regardless. Solo album coming your way. if you want show notes with clips links and suggestions for further reading for this episode and the previous 253 please visit our website at backlisted.fm if you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop. And remember, there's loads of fantastic book chat, bookish content and book writing, even writing on our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. We really value your support and we couldn't do it without you. Thank you for sticking with us and thank you for letting us take a break so we can rest and read all Iris Murdoch's novels in publishing order. That's my attention. We're not taking a break just yet. We'll be back in two weeks. So we'll see you then. And in the meantime, everybody, thank you so much. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Okay. Thank you.