Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger: Imaginations and Images 3031179447, 9783031179440

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IRIS MURDOCH TODAY

Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger Imaginations and Images Rebecca Moden

Iris Murdoch Today Series Editors

Miles Leeson Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK Frances White Iris Murdoch Research Centre University of Chichester Chichester, West Sussex, UK

The aim of this series is to publish the best scholarly work in Murdoch studies by bringing together those working at the forefront of the field. Authors and editors of volumes in the series are internationally-recognised scholars in philosophy, literature, theology, and related humanities and interdisciplinary subjects. Including both monographs and contributed volumes, the series is scholarly rigorous and opens up new ways of reading Murdoch, and new ways to read the work of others with Murdoch in mind. The series is designed to appeal not only to Murdoch experts, but also to scholars with a more general interest in the subjects under discussion.

Rebecca Moden

Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger Imaginations and Images

Rebecca Moden University of Chichester Chichester, UK

ISSN 2731-331X     ISSN 2731-3328 (electronic) Iris Murdoch Today ISBN 978-3-031-17944-0    ISBN 978-3-031-17945-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17945-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

‘You are full of imaginations and images.’ Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, 18 September 1986

For John and Blossom, with love

Foreword

When my monograph The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch was published in 2002, I hoped it would form the foundation for further research into Murdoch’s engagement with paintings and painters. I was convinced there was more to say about how she exploited painterly devices to expand meaning and, in particular, how her loving regard for her many painter friends may have influenced her writing. Some twenty years on, Rebecca Moden’s masterly study of the dialogue between Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger uncovers a network of painterly preoccupations that adds fresh shading and colour to the woman Iris Murdoch was and her methodology as a writer. Moden’s ambitious and carefully detailed research draws on fresh biographical information, unpublished volumes of Murdoch’s poetry, and twenty years of Murdoch’s personal correspondence with Weinberger to investigate how their impassioned views on the theory and practice of art informed their work and the philosophies and methodologies that lie behind it. Their shared determination to produce aesthetically beautiful and morally meaningful works of art, alongside their passionate belief in the importance of art to the well-being of society, provides the bedrock for Moden’s deft close readings of the group of novels that most significantly illustrate the influence of Weinberger on Murdoch’s work. However, this study enlarges scholarship in two directions as these intriguing insights simultaneously offer a keener appreciation and understanding of Weinberger’s art itself.

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FOREWORD

Most movingly, this is the story of true friendship. Murdoch’s relationship with Weinberger, though affectionate and close, never fell into the kind of emotional and sexual mêlée that complicated her relationships with other brilliant and talented men such as Raymond Queneau and Elias Canetti. This emotional distance leaves their friendship unencumbered by the troubling sado-masochistic entanglements that intruded into those often tortuous intellectual rapports. Weinberger’s influence manifests itself in more sanguine and benign ways, as Murdoch discerned in his work the practical embodiment of many of her own theoretical ideas that chimed wholeheartedly with his views on modern art and contemporary artistic practice. This mutually respectful like-mindedness, working freely within the clear emotional distance between them, allows space for Moden to explore the dialogues that inform the practice of both artists without the distraction of emotional complexities. The scholarly attention that Moden pays to these dialogues confirms Weinberger’s central role in Murdoch’s idea-play with the sister arts. Her work encompasses both artists’ pioneering use of colour; the relation of their work to portraiture; and their shared fascination with images of angels, masks, and icons, which they studied devoutly as in an act of prayer. These meditations were the means by which they wrestled with the problem of how form in art can be harnessed into a truthful representation of reality and not be a distortion of it, even though absolute reality always lies beyond its grasp. These ideas, Moden argues, are the kernel of what Murdoch and Weinberger explore in their respective art forms. In the face of Weinberger’s gift Murdoch was humble, understanding that her own knowledge and creativity could always be enriched by learning from, and respecting, the work of others. As such, Moden’s careful sifting of the many issues Murdoch explores, hand in hand with Weinberger, provides Murdoch scholarship with a fresh, idiosyncratic portrait of Murdoch’s intellectual landscape and her creative practice. We encounter a more nuanced Iris Murdoch than we have known and recognise her as an imagist, art historian, and painter manquée. Murdoch’s experimentation with the sister arts is refreshed and energised in this detailed and accomplished book which represents literary scholarship at its finest. University of Chichester Chichester, UK

Anne Rowe

Acknowledgements

All works of art by Harry Weinberger are reproduced with permission of Joanna Garber. Iris Murdoch’s paintings are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group on behalf of the Estate of Iris Murdoch, with thanks to Kingston University. Iris Murdoch’s woodcut and linocut are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group on behalf of the Estate of Iris Murdoch, with thanks to Badminton School. Drawings by Harry Weinberger and paintings by Iris Murdoch housed in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections were photographed by Dayna Miller, Frances White, and Charles White. Harry Weinberger’s untitled painting of a harbour was photographed by Anne Rowe. Photographs of Harry Weinberger were taken by members of the Weinberger family and are reproduced with permission of Joanna Garber. Photographs of Iris Murdoch were taken by members of the Weinberger family and are reproduced with permission of Joanna Garber. Iris Murdoch’s letter to Harry Weinberger postmarked 2 May 1978 was photographed by Dayna Miller, Frances White, and Charles White and is reproduced with permission of Kingston University. Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas was photographed by Zdeněk Sodoma and is reproduced with permission of Olomouc Museum of Art, Archdiocesan Museum Kroměr ̌íž. xi

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Reynolds Stone’s illustration for ‘Tribute to Benjamin Britten on his 50th birthday’ is reproduced with permission of the Estate of Reynolds and Janet Stone. Jean Jones’s paintings are reproduced with permission of the Jean Jones Estate. Icons owned by Iris Murdoch were photographed by Chris Thomas and are reproduced with permission of Kingston University. Iris Murdoch’s remarks in interviews are reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group on behalf of the Estate of Iris Murdoch. Iris Murdoch’s letters, journals, essays for exhibition catalogues, and application for a Cambridge studentship are quoted with permission of Kingston University. Iris Murdoch’s poems ‘Chartres Angel’ and ‘Colour Patches’ and her untitled poems with the first lines ‘Where are you, angel of my outer stars’, ‘Angels sit’, ‘An angel walked through the garden’, and ‘LOVE oh buzz off The Great Tree’ are quoted with permission of Kingston University. Harry Weinberger’s private writings, letters, and remarks in interviews and exhibition catalogues are quoted with permission of Joanna Garber. Harry Weinberger’s interview with Cathy Courtney for Artists’ Lives (C466/37) is quoted with permission of the British Library and of Joanna Garber. Catalogues for exhibitions of Harry Weinberger’s art are quoted with permission of the following organisations and individuals: Monica Bohm-­ Duchen, Camden Arts Centre, Curtis Brown Group on behalf of the Estate of Iris Murdoch, David Fraser Jenkins, Joanna Garber, Julian Gardner, The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Kingston University, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Ines Schlenker, and Nicholas Watkins. Colin Slater’s remarks to the author are reproduced with permission of Colin Slater. Julian Gardner’s remarks to the author are reproduced with permission of Julian Gardner. David Morgan’s remarks to the author are reproduced with permission of David Morgan. John Bayley’s word sketch of Reynolds and Janet Stone and letter to Harry Weinberger are quoted with permission of Curtis Brown Group on behalf of the Estate of Iris Murdoch.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

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‘Jean Jones and the Love of Painting’, a talk given by Michael Kurtz at Brownston Gallery, Modbury, Devon, 19 May 2021, is quoted with permission of Michael Kurtz. The exhibition catalogue Jean Jones: Paintings and Drawings 1970–1980 (Ashmolean Museum, 5–26 October 1980) is quoted with permission of the Ashmolean Museum. Every effort has been made to trace and contact all copyright holders. If there are any inadvertent omissions or errors I will be pleased to correct them at the earliest opportunity. I am grateful to Joanna Garber, Harry Weinberger’s daughter, for her goodwill towards this project and for making available a range of archive material relating to her father’s life and work. I have also greatly appreciated the expertise and guidance of Miles Leeson and Frances White, and of Anne Rowe, whose The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch has been an inspiration for, and influence on, this study. Julian Gardner and Colin Slater generously made time to discuss their recollections of Harry Weinberger with me, and David Morgan did likewise with regard to Iris Murdoch. Thanks are also due to Dayna Miller for assistance regarding materials held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections. Most of all, I thank my parents Peter and Marion, my brother Will, my husband John, and my daughter Blossom for their encouragement, patience, practical help, support, and love.

Contents

1 Writer Meets Painter  1 2 Murdoch and Visual Art 19 3 Murdoch and Visual Artists 83 4 Kindred Spirits125 5 ‘ All Your Colours Are So Triumphant’: The Rhetoric of Colour161 6 ‘Shadow-Bound Consciousness’: The Mask as Icon211 7 ‘More than a Likeness’: The Ethics of Portraiture257 8 ‘Something in a Dark Picture’: Reconceptualising Angels309 Epilogue357 Bibliography359 Index381 xv

About the Author

Rebecca Moden  is a Research Associate at the University of Chichester’s Iris Murdoch Research Centre. She holds a PhD from the University of Chichester. Her other publications include ‘Blurred Lines: Iris Murdoch’s Pedagogical Relationships’ (Iris Murdoch Review 13, 2022) and ‘“Liberation Through Art”: Form and Transformation in Murdoch’s Fiction’ (Murdoch on Truth and Love, ed. by Gary Browning, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is Co-Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review.

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List of Abbreviations

Novels by Iris Murdoch AM ASH AWC BP FE FHD GA GK HC IG JD NG NS PP SPLM TA TB TS TSTS TU UN UR

An Accidental Man A Severed Head A Word Child The Black Prince The Flight from the Enchanter A Fairly Honourable Defeat The Good Apprentice The Green Knight Henry and Cato The Italian Girl Jackson’s Dilemma The Nice and the Good Nuns and Soldiers The Philosopher’s Pupil The Sacred and Profane Love Machine The Time of the Angels The Bell The Sandcastle The Sea, the Sea The Unicorn Under the Net An Unofficial Rose

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Philosophy by Iris Murdoch EM MGM SRR

Existentialists and Mystics Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Sartre, Romantic Rationalist

Other Works by Iris Murdoch Journal 3 Journal 4 Journal 5 Journal 6 Journal 7 Journal 8 Journal 9 Journal 10 Journal 11 Journal 12 Journal 13 Journal 14 Journal 15 Memorial Address

‘Journal, 4 June 1945–12 May 1947’ ‘Journal, 10 June–16 November 1947’ ‘Journal, 16 November 1947–13 February 1948’ ‘Journal, 13 February 1948–17 December 1948’ ‘Journal, January 1949–1 January 1953’ ‘Journal, 10 January 1953–December 1954’ ‘Journal, 30 March 1954–24 February 1964’ ‘Journal, February 1964–18 March 1970’ ‘Journal, 18 March 1970–16 May 1972’ ‘Journal, 1 April 1975–23 May 1978’ ‘Journal, 23 May 1978–28 December 1980’ ‘Journal, 1 January 1981–8 August 1992’ ‘Journal, 17 August 1992–1996’ Reynolds Stone: An Address Given by Iris Murdoch in St James’s Church Piccadilly, London on 20th July 1979

Catalogues for Exhibitions by Harry Weinberger 1976CI Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings, Camden Arts Centre, 3–28 November 1976 1983CI Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, 26 March–24 April 1983 1992CI Harry Weinberger: Recent Paintings, Irish Watercolours and other Works, Duncan Campbell Gallery, 9 March–3 April 1992 1994CI Harry Weinberger: Recent Work, Duncan Campbell Gallery, 29 March–22 April 1994

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 

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1996CI Harry Weinberger, Duncan Campbell Gallery, 4–28 June 1996 2002CI Harry Weinberger: Recent Paintings, Duncan Campbell Gallery, 6–29 November 2002 2003CI Harry Weinberger, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Royal Pump Rooms, 15 November 2003–5 January 2004

Writing by Harry Weinberger ‘Art Education’ ‘Finding One’s Way’ ‘Memoir 1’ ‘Memoir 2’ ‘Subversive Activity’

‘Art Education and Modern Art’ ‘On Finding One’s Way in Painting’ ‘My Writing’ ‘I was born on April 7th, 1924’ ‘Art as a Subversive Activity’

Interviews with Iris Murdoch Bellamy, Michael O., ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’ Blow, Simon, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’ Chevalier, Jean-Louis, ed., ‘Closing Debate: Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch’ Coles Coles, Joanna, ‘The Joanna Coles Interview: Duet in Perfect Harmony’ Haffenden Haffenden, John, ‘John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch’ Hill Hill, Susan, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch’ Kermode Kermode, Frank, ‘Interview from The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists’ Lesser Lesser, Wendy, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch’ Magee Magee, Bryan, ‘Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee’ Miller Miller, Jonathan, ‘My God: Iris Murdoch Interviewed by Jonathan Miller’ Robson Robson, Eric, ‘Iris Murdoch Talks with Eric Robson’ Rose Rose, W. K., ‘Iris Murdoch, Informally’ Slaymaker Slaymaker, William, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’ TCHF Dooley, Gillian, ed., From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch Bellamy Blow Chevalier

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Interview with Harry Weinberger Artists’ Lives

Courtney, Cathy, ‘Interview with Harry Weinberger’, British Library, National Life Story Collection: Artists’ Lives

Archives Iris Murdoch Collections Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections

Critical Works Ageing in Irish Writing Ingman, Heather, Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves ‘Agency and influence’  Browning, Gary, ‘Agency and Influence in the History of Political Thought: The Agency of Influence and the Influence of Agency’ Art of Alex Colville Dow, Helen J., The Art of Alex Colville As I Knew Her Wilson, A.  N., Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her ‘Beautiful and Good’ Gayford, Martin, ‘The Beautiful and the Good: Iris Murdoch on the Value of Art’ Becoming White, Frances, Becoming Iris Murdoch Chronology Purton, Valerie, An Iris Murdoch Chronology Colour Vision Thompson, Evan, Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception Ecological  Gibson, James J., The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception English Garden Spender, Natasha, An English Garden in Provence ‘Evolving a Style’ Read, Daniel, ‘“Evolving a Style”: Iris Murdoch and the Surrealist Moral Vision of Paul Nash’

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 

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‘Flâneur’ Wrigley, Richard, ‘Unreliable Witness: The Flâneur as Artist and Spectator of Art in Nineteenth-­Century Paris’ IMAR  Rowe, Anne, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment IMCC  Leeson, Miles, ed., Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration ‘Independent obituary’  Gardner, Julian, ‘Harry Weinberger: Émigré painter whose work was partly inspired by his love of masks and icons’ ‘Inscribing’  Rowe, Anne, ‘Inscribing a Spiritual Space: Iris Murdoch’s Rhetoric of Colour’ Iris Bayley, John, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch ‘Iris in Provence’ Spender, Natasha, ‘Nuns and Soldiers: Iris in Provence ‘Jackson’s Dilemma as Interlude’ Dipple, Elizabeth, ‘Fragments of Iris Murdoch’s Vision: Jackson’s Dilemma as Interlude’ Janet Stone: Portraits Beck, Ian Archie, Through the Lens of Janet Stone: Portraits 1953–1979 ‘Letters to Alex Colville’  Meyers, Jeffrey, ‘Letters from Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville’ Life Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: A Life Living on Paper Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds, Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 ‘Love of Painting’ Kurtz, Michael, ‘Jean Jones and the Love of Painting’ ‘Metaphors of Vision’  Steiner, Karin G., ‘Metaphors of Vision: A Fellowship of the Arts in the Novels of Iris Murdoch’ MMI  Roberts, M.F.  Simone and Alison Scott-­Baumann, eds, Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays MM Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds, Iris Murdoch and Morality MTL  Browning, Gary, ed., Murdoch on Truth and Love

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

‘Murdoch’s Letters’  Nakanishi, Wendy Jones, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Letters’ Mystery of the Real Meyers, Jeffrey, The Mystery of the Real ‘Near the Gods’ Rowe, Anne, ‘“Near the Gods”: Iris Murdoch and the Painter, Harry Weinberger’ ‘Pictorialism’ Winner, Viola Hopkins, ‘Pictorialism in Henry James’s Theory’ ‘Postcards, Paintings Kurtz, Michael, ‘Postcards, Paintings and Stone Circles’ and Stone Circles: Jean Jones’s Friendship with Iris Murdoch’ ‘Pursuit of Imperfection’  Sage, Lorna, ‘The Pursuit of Imperfection: Henry and Cato’ Retrospective Fiction Nicol, Bran, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction Reynolds Stone Stone, Humphrey, Reynolds Stone: A Memoir ‘Rowe Bolton’ Bolton, Lucy, ‘Anne Rowe, author of The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2002), in interview with Lucy Bolton’ Saint and Artist Conradi, Peter J., Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist SSBC Bove, Cheryl, and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London VAIM Rowe, Anne, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch ‘Wilson Leeson’  ‘Iris Murdoch as I didn’t know her: A.  N. Wilson in conversation with Miles Leeson’ With Love and Rage Morgan, David, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch Work for the Spirit Dipple, Elizabeth, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit Writer at War Conradi, Peter J., ed., Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939–45 Writer’s Brush Friedman, Donald, The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures by Writers

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. 1.7 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Harry Weinberger, Figure in Tuscany II, [early 1970s], private collection7 Harry Weinberger, Masks I, [mid-1970s], private collection 8 Harry Weinberger, Inside/Outside IV, 1975, private collection 10 Harry Weinberger, Harlingen, [mid-1970s], private collection 11 Harry Weinberger, untitled drawing, undated, private collection 12 Iris Murdoch at Harry Weinberger’s house in Leamington, [late 1970s/early 1980s], estate of Harry Weinberger 12 Harry Weinberger with his paintings, [early 1980s], estate of Harry Weinberger 13 Iris Murdoch, The Piper, 1938, Badminton School Archives 21 Iris Murdoch, The Prisoner, 1936, Badminton School Archives 22 Iris Murdoch, untitled, 1941, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections 24 Iris Murdoch, untitled, 1941, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections 25 Iris Murdoch, untitled, [early 1940s], Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections 26 Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, [1570–1576], Olomouc Museum of Art, Archdiocesan Museum Kroměříž46 Reynolds Stone, Illustration for ‘Tribute to Benjamin Britten on his 50th birthday’, ed. by Anthony Gishford (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), [early 1960s], estate of Reynolds and Janet Stone 95 Black and white photograph of From Ringmoor to Eddiston by Jean Jones (1974), painting previously owned by Iris Murdoch, Jean Jones Estate 102 xxv

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7

Jean Jones, Ringmoor above Leemor, 1976, Jean Jones Estate 103 Harry Weinberger, The Sea, The Sea, [1995], private collection 120 Harry Weinberger, When we went to the V&A, [November 1984], Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections 130 Iris Murdoch, letter to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 May 1978, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections 132 Harry Weinberger, Fishing Boat, Crete, [1979], Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections, previously owned by Iris Murdoch 134 Harry Weinberger, Harbour in Rethymnon, [late 1970s/early 1980s], private collection, previously owned by Iris Murdoch 134 Harry Weinberger, Achdorf II, [late 1970s/early 1980s], private collection, previously owned by Iris Murdoch 135 Harry Weinberger, At the Spaniards, [1946–51], private collection164 Harry Weinberger, In Berlin (Bundesratufer), [1994], Government Art Collection 167 Harry Weinberger, Adam and Eve, undated, private collection 178 Harry Weinberger, In Berlin, 1990, private collection 179 Harry Weinberger, Positano Triptych, [1993], private collection 182 Harry Weinberger, untitled painting of harbour, undated, private collection, previously owned by Iris Murdoch 184 Weinberger’s painting on display over Murdoch’s desk in her study at 30 Charlbury Road, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections 185 Harry Weinberger, Provence I, [1979], private collection 193 Provence I on display at Weinberger’s home, undated, estate of Harry Weinberger 194 Harry Weinberger, Provence (study for Provence I), 1979, private collection 195 Harry Weinberger with two of his paintings, [1981], estate of Harry Weinberger 222 Harry Weinberger, Masks I, [early 1990s], private collection 223 Harry Weinberger, Masks II, [early 1990s], private collection 224 Harry Weinberger, Me Wearing the Venetian Mask, [1990], Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum 230 Harry Weinberger, Flying Punch, [1981], private collection 244 Harry Weinberger, Falling Punch, [1980s/1990s], private collection249 Harry Weinberger, Striding Punch, [1990s], private collection 250

  List of Figures 

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6

Fig. 7.7 Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6 Fig. 8.7 Fig. A.1

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Harry Weinberger, Portrait of Iris Murdoch, [1991], Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum 259 Harry Weinberger, Portrait of Iris Murdoch, [1993], Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum 260 Harry Weinberger, Barbara, [1945–1954], private collection 285 Harry Weinberger, Study for Portrait, 1954, private collection 286 Harry Weinberger, Barbara, [1945–1954], private collection 287 Reproduction of icon depicting Saint George, displayed by Iris Murdoch in her study at 30 Charlbury Road, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections295 Harry Weinberger, Icon, [1981–1982], private collection, previously owned by Iris Murdoch 296 Reproduction of Andrei Rublev’s Trinity, displayed by Iris Murdoch in her study at 30 Charlbury Road, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections329 Harry Weinberger, The Field, 1991, private collection 340 Harry Weinberger, Colour Field, [2002], private collection 340 Harry Weinberger, Black Snow, 2000, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum 341 Harry Weinberger, Triptych: Rider and Angels, 1989, private collection344 Harry Weinberger, untitled (study for Triptych: Rider and Angels), [1989], private collection 347 Harry Weinberger, Jacob’s Dream, [1994–1995], private collection351 Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger at an exhibition of Weinberger’s art at the Duncan Campbell Gallery, London, [early 1990s], estate of Harry Weinberger 358

CHAPTER 1

Writer Meets Painter

On a summer evening in 1975, in Provence, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch met the painter Harry Weinberger. It was a chance encounter. Murdoch and her husband John Bayley were making a protracted stay at the home of their close friends the poet Stephen Spender and his wife Natasha, a concert pianist, as they had done for several consecutive summers. The Spenders’ farmhouse, Mas Saint-Jerôme, was situated near Maussane in a valley of the Alpilles. This was a sparsely inhabited area composed of vineyards and olive orchards, rapidly flowing canals, pine trees, glassy pools, and sun-bleached limestone rocks, in which Natasha Spender was lovingly creating a large, elaborate garden. Mas Saint-Jerôme offered a warm welcome, lively conversation, and peace to think and write. The Spenders frequently entertained guests, amongst them the philosopher A.  J. Ayer; the academic and university leader Noel Annan and his wife Gabriele, writer and literary critic; the painters David Hockney and Francis Bacon; and the physician Basil Amulree. Their neighbours, with whom they also socialised, included the art historian and critic Douglas Cooper, travel writer Rory Cameron, diplomat and philanthropist Anne Cox Chambers, and the painters Anne Dunn and Rodrigo Moynihan. Enfolded in this rugged, majestic landscape, life became serenely rhythmical, the day’s pace being set by the pattern of the sun: periods of intense work alternated with gardening,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Moden, Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17945-7_1

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walking, swimming, conversation, and laughter. Murdoch sometimes assisted Natasha Spender in the garden; Spender recalls her ‘taking up without a word whichever tool was available and setting to with a calm pace and evident pleasure in the scents and sounds of early morning in the gradually warming opalescent light’.1 Murdoch would sporadically discuss Plato whilst she gardened, then retreat to a small spare room to write. Murdoch and Stephen Spender engaged in intense discussions about their current work, then indulged in riotous games of Scrabble, the Bayleys bemused and entertained by the Spenders’ competitiveness. The Bayleys swam daily in serene natural pools, in the capricious Durance river, and in the often-tumultuous sixteenth-century canal de Craponne. Murdoch had, by the summer of 1975, seventeen novels to her name. Her novels spanned a striking range of subjects and styles, as is shown by a brief survey of some of the most well-known amongst them. Under the Net (1954) is a picaresque comic novel on the theme of individual freedom, much influenced by the novels of Raymond Queneau. The Bell (1958), the first of her novels to bring her fame and commercial success, is an exploration of spirituality, sexuality, and the relation between the two. The Unicorn (1963) and The Time of the Angels (1966) both draw heavily on the Gothic genre: the former scrutinises power relations, erotic love, the nature of suffering, imprisonment, and freedom; the latter deals with similar themes whilst confronting more directly questions of faith, morality, and what it means to live in a world without God. The Nice and the Good (1968) is simultaneously a Shakespearean-inspired romance, comedy, and thriller, with supernatural elements. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) is both comedy of errors and allegory of good and evil. The Black Prince (1973) is a tale of erotic obsession and also a meditation on art. A Word Child (1975) investigates the will to take possession of other lives and the power of the past to haunt the present. The novels became, over time, increasingly complex, but are connected by recurrent elements: David Bromwich, the New York Times reviewer of A Word Child, noting this patterning, describes Murdoch’s writing as ‘variations on a theme, where each instalment contributes to a whole structure that is not yet known. You are seeing a gem turned ever so slightly in the sun to collect

1  Natasha Spender, ‘Nuns and Soldiers: Iris in Provence’, in Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. by Miles Leeson (Devizes: Sabrestorm, 2019), pp. 65–72, hereafter ‘Iris in Provence’ (p. 66).

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each new refraction’.2 Murdoch’s large casts of recognisable characters, including the deluded egotistical male, the enchanter, the philosopher, the wise child, the confused young woman, and the saint; scenes of religious anguish, trial by water, real or implied incest, discussions of works of art, and typically convoluted plots in which characters fall in and out of love with bewildering speed, had by this time all become characteristic of Murdochland. Murdoch’s novels had been, in the main, well received by critics; she had won several prizes for them, and they also had great popular appeal.3 Writing in The Spectator in 1976, Simon Blow describes her as ‘a serious novelist whose readability has made her a household name’.4 Reviewing The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974)—which takes as its major themes love, sexual desire, adultery, and moral failure—David Holloway, Literary Editor of the Daily Telegraph, terms Murdoch ‘the best British woman novelist writing today’.5 Murdoch had also adapted several of her novels for the stage, her most commercial success being her adaptation of A Severed Head, a Freudian dance of love, both farcical and chilling, created in collaboration with J. B. Priestley in 1963. She was also writing poetry, though it was, at this stage, unpublished. Though most well-known as a novelist, Murdoch had published two significant philosophical works: these are her monograph Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), the first book about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English, which took Sartre’s novels as the starting point for investigating his ideas, and The Sovereignty of Good (1970), comprising three previously published papers, in which Murdoch’s Platonism, much influenced by her reading of Simone Weil, presents a radical challenge to the prevailing schools of existentialism and analytic philosophy. Murdoch’s academic career had given her much experience in teaching: she had taught philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford, between 1948 and 1963 (resigning in order to dedicate more time to writing, and also because her relationship with a female 2  David Bromwich, ‘Iris Murdoch’s new novel and old themes’, New York Times (24 August 1975), [accessed 15 December 2021]. 3  Murdoch won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). The Nice and the Good (1968), Bruno’s Dream (1969), and The Black Prince had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. 4  Simon Blow, ‘An interview with Iris Murdoch’, The Spectator (25 September 1976), 24–25, hereafter Blow (24). 5  David Holloway, ‘With Glee and Tears’, Daily Telegraph (21 March 1974), 647.

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colleague was in danger of causing scandal) and then taught General Studies at the Royal College of Art from 1963 until 1967. In summer 1975, Murdoch was working on the final version of her novel Henry and Cato, a study of the intertwining lives of two friends which is founded on the metaphor of Plato’s cave: she would complete Henry and Cato in November of that year. Her journal reveals that Plato was much in her thoughts as she began preparing for the Romanes Lecture she was to give in February 1976. Furthermore, her ideas were beginning to evolve for The Sea, The Sea (1978), a tale of love, power, and obsession which would win her the Booker Prize. Harry Weinberger had long been fascinated by the Provence landscape and spent many hours drawing and painting it, in emulation of his great inspiration Vincent van Gogh, whose letters he knew by heart. The Weinbergers were acquainted with Stephen and Natasha Spender, having met them through their mutual friends, the literary critic Frank Kermode and his wife Maureen. Weinberger’s memoir records that whilst on holiday near Menerbes, the Weinbergers met with the Spenders and their two companions, who were introduced as ‘Mr and Mrs Bayley’. The Weinbergers invited all the party to dinner with them that same evening, but then went for a long walk, returned later than expected, and found that they had just missed their guests, who had given up waiting for them. Having borrowed a bicycle and a torch, Weinberger cycled after them, eventually finding Mas Saint-Jerôme ‘by pure luck and desperation’.6 Harry and Barbara Weinberger were invited to Mas Saint-Jerôme the next day. The first conversation between Weinberger and Murdoch took place on the following evening, amid an atmosphere of pleasurable bewilderment and wonder, as rigorous rationality was confronted by the triumph of the inexplicable. Natasha Spender’s memoir provides a detailed description of the occasion. As the Spenders and their guests sat on the terrace, a water diviner arrived, claiming the discovery of a vein of water in the Spenders’ olive orchard at a depth of about seventeen metres. The party drifted one by one from the terrace to the orchard to watch the diviner at work. ‘At a certain point in his slow, absorbed walk across the terrain the willow wand stretched taut between his hands would suddenly fly off into the air. Iris and I were impressed, although the rest of the party greeted this 6  Harry Weinberger, ‘My Writing’ (unpublished memoir, undated (c.2000)) hereafter ‘Memoir 1’, p. 14.

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happening with lofty scepticism’. Others attempted dowsing, and some were rewarded. Stephen Spender and the Bayleys were ‘mysteriously and powerfully gifted’. Natasha Spender further recounts: The final surprise, however, was in seeing arch-sceptic Harry being prevailed upon reluctantly to grasp the willow wand. It was clear that he consented to join the experiment only to humour us credulous creatures, and possibly assumed that his rational approach would bring us to our senses. But from his hands the divining rod made its as yet most spectacular leap. Good scientists say that only the real test of a theory is a genuine attempt to refute it, and I see Harry as a good scientist as well as a good artist. His attitude remained detached and circumspect, for a singular positive outcome gives but little support for an hypothesis, and I hesitated to ask him if his rigorous attitude had been affected, however slightly, by his experience. But subsequently a moderately decent vein of water was found at a depth of exactly seventeen metres.7

Weinberger briefly records the water divining incident in his memoir, then adds: ‘I liked Mrs Bayley particularly, but as I had forgotten her name, I asked her to repeat it. Instead of saying Bayley, she told me she was Iris Murdoch. Then she asked me what I did as well as water divining. I told her I was a painter. We exchanged addresses’.8 On her return to England, Murdoch sought Weinberger out. His memoir states: I was really surprised when Iris rang a few weeks later to ask if she could come to Leamington to see some of my work. I had not read any of her books, only really knew that she was well-known. When she came she sat in my workroom and I showed her my paintings. We did not talk. At the end she asked to see five of the pictures again. She then said she would like to buy them. I thought she was patronising me and became shy and said they were not for sale. Iris did not argue. Barbara had prepared a meal, we talked easily and then Iris left.9

7  Natasha Spender, An English Garden in Provence (London: Harvill Press, 1999), hereafter English Garden, p. 98. 8  Harry Weinberger, ‘Memoir 1’, p. 15. 9  Harry Weinberger, ‘Memoir 1’, p. 15.

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Murdoch visited Weinberger at his home, a large, high-ceilinged Victorian house in Church Hill, Leamington Spa, in which he and his wife had been living since 1969. She would soon become a regular visitor there (see Fig. 1.6). The house had become the backdrop for Weinberger’s extensive collection of curios: Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, and African masks and carved figures, Eastern and Christian religious icons, model boats, and puppets crowded the shelves and tabletops and found their way into many of his paintings. Weinberger called them his ‘toys’, obtained them on his travels and from sales, and often traded them when new objects attracted his interest.10 A selection of his paintings hung on the muted brown walls of the living rooms. A maze of interconnecting rooms, many of which were filled with carefully stacked painted canvases, led to the studio, at the back of the house, which had large windows looking over the tree-­ filled garden. Here, Murdoch viewed the work of a deeply committed and erudite painter, who strove to express in his art his personal and emotional reality, mediated through imagination and memory yet always retaining at least a hint of the observed image, fractured into blocks and patterns of vivid colour. Exhibition catalogues of the 1970s describe Weinberger’s paintings as ‘tense, dramatic statements, in which composition, colour and imaginative energy combine into a single artistic unity’ and observe that his vision is of ‘a highly decorative, emotionally charged world where the action takes place suspended in space and time’.11 Weinberger often reinterpreted the same subject many times, sometimes taking as his subject a piece from his collection, and creating a series of paintings as he obsessively strove to portray its essential meaning. In the mid-1970s he was creating many renditions of Indian dancers and winged beings, powerful, vibrant, and enigmatic. An Indian carving became the basis of a series titled Figure in Tuscany, the figure greatly magnified, and merging with the Italian countryside seen through a window. An example is Fig. 1.1, Figure in Tuscany II. This series featured prominently in two major exhibitions of Weinberger’s work, at the Kunstamt Neukölln Rathaus-Galerie as part of the October 1973 Berlin Festival and at the Camden Arts Centre  Vinny Lee, ‘Painter and Decorator’, The Times, 27 March 1999, pp. 46–51, 48.  Charles S.  Spencer, Harry Weinberger, 23 October-20 November 1965 (Coventry: Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, 1965), np; Nicholas Watkins, Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings, 3–28 November 1976 (London: Camden Arts Centre, 1976), hereafter 1976CI, np. 10 11

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Fig. 1.1  Harry Weinberger, Figure in Tuscany II, [early 1970s], private collection

in November 1976. So, too, did another series, titled The Wrestlers, which, according to Nicholas Watkins, author of the introduction to his 1976 exhibition catalogue, ‘does not so much present us with an image of conflict as of two benign figures who are irrevocably joined together and obliged to dance out a recorded tune’.12 Weinberger’s attention to these images seems to have been at its most concentrated during the 1970s, though he continued to meditate on and reinterpret them in later years. One of the most significant images in Weinberger’s oeuvre is that of the mask, which had profound personal meaning for him, being intricately connected to his endeavours to probe the nature of reality and to understand the relation between the self and external world. He had over thirty masks in his collection, and he painted masks repeatedly.13 One such ­painting, included in his 1976 exhibition, is noted by Watkins for ‘The  Nicholas Watkins, 1976CI, np.  Transcription of ‘Harry Weinberger interviewed by Cathy Courtney’ (British Library, National Life Story Collection: Artists’ Lives, 1995, ref. C466/37), KUAS300, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections, hereafter Artists’ Lives, p. 92. 12 13

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Fig. 1.2  Harry Weinberger, Masks I, [mid-1970s], private collection

serenity of the Javanese mask on the right … [which] is confronted by the aggression of the Balinese mask on the left’; this description suggests that the painting is Fig. 1.2, likely to have been in progress or recently completed at the date of Murdoch’s first visit to Weinberger’s studio.14 Murdoch had long been intrigued by masks, and she engaged enthusiastically with Weinberger’s ideas and imagery. Their dialogue on masks quickened her thinking, which would reach fruition in The Green Knight (1993): in this novel Murdoch, tormented by the ambiguous powers of her art, confronts her semi-conscious fear that perhaps individuals are nothing more than masks, sunk in totalising form. Murdoch would almost certainly have seen paintings from Weinberger’s Inside/Outside series, on which he had recently been working. This series seems to have been inspired by the iconography which Weinberger viewed in monasteries and art galleries in Russia and the Sinai Desert whilst on a Goldsmiths Travel Fellowship in 1974, having been granted a sabbatical by Lanchester Polytechnic (later Coventry University) where he taught painting  Nicholas Watkins, 1976CI, np.

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from 1963 until 1985. An icon is often understood as ‘a window to heaven’ (as the art historian Robin Cormack describes it), occupying a boundary between internal and external realities, which, when opened, allows them to merge.15 On returning from his travels, Weinberger created numerous representations of the view from his studio window, in a sustained interrogation of his relationship to external reality. Figure 1.3 is one example. Its blocks of bold, flat, interacting colour cause the boundary between inner and outer to become less distinct, though still identifiable; on it, a carved figure from Weinberger’s collection is placed. ‘The single, sentinel figure in the Inside/ Outside series not surprisingly begins to take on the appearance of the artist himself’, Watkins states. ‘In the Inside/Outside series the dividing line between the exterior and interior is nowhere clear. The garden enters the studio which becomes, in effect, a metaphor for the artist’s mind’.16 Murdoch would later write, in her introduction to Weinberger’s 1983 exhibition which featured four Inside/Outside paintings, including Fig. 1.3: The outer is the inner, the abstract is the concrete, the ordinary is the symbolical or mythical or holy (and vice versa and so on) as the painters are always telling us. The garden enters the house through the window and makes the vase upon the window ledge recede. We live among infinite mysteries of space and colour.17

Murdoch’s remarks reveal that Weinberger’s Inside/Outside series had evidently made an impression on her thinking about the relationship between internal and external realities. In The Good Apprentice (1985), which she was planning at the time of writing this catalogue introduction, the image of the window proliferates, and a richly coloured seascape, mediated by the presence of the window, becomes a private icon of goodness for the protagonist Edward Baltram. On her first visit to his studio, Murdoch may also have seen Weinberger’s earlier work, including his many tender, melancholy portraits of his wife Barbara, whom he had married in 1951; he painted Barbara often in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Furthermore, she may have seen his series of brooding self-portraits, Strange Heads, created in the 1960s, inspired by the drawings and sculptures of Alberto Giacometti. Born in Berlin in  Robin Cormack, Painting the Soul: Icons, Death Masks and Shrouds (London: Reaktion, 1997), p. 19. This book is known to have been in Weinberger’s possession (Julian Gardner, in conversation with the author, 15 July 2015). 16  Nicholas Watkins, 1976CI, np. 17  Iris Murdoch, Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings, 26 March–24 April 1983 (Coventry: Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, 1983), hereafter 1983CI, np. 15

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Fig. 1.3  Harry Weinberger, Inside/Outside IV, 1975, private collection

1924, Weinberger had lived for the first nine years of his life in his family’s luxurious flat on the banks of the River Spree, until Hitler came to power and the family fled to Czechoslovakia, Weinberger eventually being sent to England under the Kindertransport scheme. Riverscapes and seascapes were enduring subjects for him, intimately connected with the vision of boats on the Spree, his earliest memory from his Berlin childhood. Images of boats on water also find their way into The Good Apprentice. Murdoch is likely to have viewed Fig. 1.4, Harlingen, which Weinberger painted in

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Fig. 1.4  Harry Weinberger, Harlingen, [mid-1970s], private collection

the mid-1970s. (A version of this subject is also in the background of Fig.  1.7.) And Murdoch would, of course, have seen Weinberger’s pictures of Provence, the setting for their first encounter, in which he strove to capture the vitality of the colour-soaked landscape, finding in it a means of intensely personal emotional expression. Many of these pictures would, at this stage, have been in the form of drawings, some felt by Weinberger to be complete in themselves, others to be worked up into paintings. Figure 1.5 is an example of one of his numerous sketches of the region. In

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Fig. 1.5  Harry Weinberger, untitled drawing, undated, private collection

Fig. 1.6  Iris Murdoch at Harry Weinberger’s house in Leamington, [late 1970s/ early 1980s], estate of Harry Weinberger

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Fig. 1.7  Harry Weinberger with his paintings, [early 1980s], estate of Harry Weinberger

his 1976 catalogue introduction, Watkins remarks that Weinberger’s recent landscape painting has ‘brought a broader response to reality in his work’ and quotes Weinberger on this subject: ‘“I can now,” [Weinberger] says, “use a landscape and endow it with the properties a painting can have”’.18 Weinberger’s attempts to render the Provence landscape in his art were to have a significant impact on Murdoch’s perception of the region and her representations of it in Nuns and Soldiers (1980). The Alpilles region, and indeed Mas Saint-Jerôme itself, are the novel’s setting for the blossoming love between the recently widowed Gertrude Openshaw and Tim Reede, a painter whose characterisation is inspired by elements of Weinberger’s identity and experiences. Murdoch was evidently undeterred by Weinberger’s reticence, and his unwillingness to sell his paintings to her. She continued her pursuit of him, inviting the Weinbergers to lunch three weeks later at Cedar Lodge,  Nicholas Watkins, 1976CI, np.

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the Bayleys’ home in Steeple Aston, and attending one of his exhibitions, where she bought some pictures.19 They began to correspond. The meeting, marked by an apparently miraculous event, of Murdoch and Weinberger in Provence was the beginning of over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching, and morality of art. This study presents a reappraisal of Murdoch’s novels, perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. Close critical readings of three mature novels and two enigmatic late novels form the foundation of the study. These novels are The Sea, The Sea (1978), which scrutinises delusion and obsession, the difficulties of renouncing power and accepting the passage of time; Nuns and Soldiers (1980), an exploration of the nature of love, friendship, and spiritual pursuit; The Good Apprentice (1985), which meditates on remorse and the possibility of redemption; The Green Knight (1993), a reflection on revenge, justice, and mercy, in which the entry of a mystical figure transforms the troubled lives of a diverse assembly of characters; and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), a skeletal, stripped-back work in which Murdoch’s enduring preoccupations are laid bare. These five, all written during the course of Murdoch’s friendship with Weinberger, are the novels in which Murdoch’s thoughts on art and artists are most fully explored, and in which Weinberger’s imagery, techniques, ideas, and identity can be most clearly detected. Additional material is also drawn from Murdoch’s other novels to enhance the analysis of the novels chiefly considered and widen the scope of this study. The close textual readings foreground what might sometimes appear to be marginal details, imbuing these details with new significance in the light of Murdoch’s dialogue with Weinberger. This study’s principal source is a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, unmatched, in its scale and in its sustained focus on art, by her correspondence with any other artist.20 It also draws on Murdoch’s philosophy from across the range of her career, giving primary consideration to the philosophical texts in which Murdoch most fully expounds her thoughts on visual imagery and the visual arts: key essays collected by Peter J. Conradi in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and 19  Weinberger recalled that in the early stages of his friendship with Murdoch, ‘I had an exhibition, I don’t remember, it could have been in the Temple Gallery of Greek drawings and she went and bought some’. Artists’ Lives, p. 115. 20  Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger are now held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections (KUAS80), hereafter Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Literature, chiefly, ‘Thinking and Language’ (1951), ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959), ‘Against Dryness’ (1961), ‘Salvation by Words’ (1972), ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists’ (1977), and ‘Art Is the Imitation of Nature’ (1978); the three essays ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1964), ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ (1967), and ‘On “God” and “Good”’ (1969) which were originally published together as The Sovereignty of Good (1970); and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), Murdoch’s philosophical testament, the culmination of years of work and thought.21 Furthermore, this study encompasses Murdoch’s newly available journals, Weinberger’s private writings and exhibition catalogues, Murdoch’s unpublished poetry, the remarks of both artists in numerous interviews (including Weinberger’s extended interview with Cathy Courtney for the British Library’s National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives series in 1995), and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. This is the first in-depth study of a discourse between Murdoch and an artist who was her contemporary. Chapter 2 seeks to place this discourse in context, by means of a survey of Murdoch’s engagement with the visual arts in the years preceding her first meeting with Weinberger: these years prepared the ground for their long friendship. The origins of Murdoch’s fascination with the visual arts are traced, and Murdoch’s early attempts at painting appraised. Murdoch’s developing ideas about the relationship between words and images, the role of visual images in thought, the act of viewing art, art criticism, the sister arts, and synaesthesia are also explored. Chapter 3 turns from analysis of Murdoch’s engagement with the great art of past masters to consideration of the impact on her oeuvre of practising visual artists who were her contemporaries and friends. Murdoch can be situated not only within a distinguished lineage of writers who construct dialogues with the visual arts, from Jane Austen to Zadie Smith, but also within a succession of fruitful relationships between writers and painters. She courted the company and friendship of visual artists throughout her life. Analysis of Murdoch’s friendships with the wood engraver, designer, and typographer Reynolds Stone and the painters Jean Jones and 21  Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J. Conradi (London: Penguin, 1999); Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970); Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1993).

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Alex Colville reveals that Murdoch habitually sought inspiration for her novels in the techniques, imagery, and experiences of her artist friends. Significant precedents are thus presented for Murdoch’s friendship with Weinberger, although the latter friendship far exceeds them in terms of scale and impact. Chapter 4 focuses on the early years of friendship between Murdoch and Weinberger, in the mid to late 1970s, and identifies important ways in which their discourse was beginning to influence Murdoch’s thought and work. Although Murdoch and Weinberger met regularly, their discourse was conducted primarily through letters. Accordingly, this chapter considers the impact on scholarship of Murdoch’s correspondence with Weinberger and also encompasses discussion of the importance of letters and letter-writing in Murdoch’s life, in the construction of her identity and relationships, and in her novels. This study’s prevailing focus on Murdoch’s dialogue with a single artist enables detailed investigation, in Chapters 5 to 8, of the myriad ways in which Weinberger’s thoughts about art and artists; his aesthetic techniques (notably, his dazzling colour-play); his imagery of rivers, seas, boats and ships, wild landscapes, masks, and religious iconography; his experimentations with portraiture; and elements of his life, including his early years devastated by the rise of Hitler and his eventual career as an art teacher, shape Murdoch’s perception of reality and her representations of it in her novels. Murdoch’s experimentation with colour gathers momentum in The Sea, The Sea, Nuns and Soldiers, and The Good Apprentice, and Chapter 5 scrutinises the colour-play in these novels in the context of Murdoch’s discourse with Weinberger. Both artists were drawn to the image of the mask, symbolic of the essence of form; Chapter 6 contends that Weinberger’s sustained thinking about, and many paintings of, masks energised Murdoch’s ideas about them, which are most fully expressed in The Green Knight. In Chapter 7, analysis of Weinberger’s portraits of Murdoch casts fresh light on ways in which her identity has been constructed, and on her view of imaginative attention. His portrait of Saint George animated her thinking about this equivocal figure and assisted her quest for visual representations of ideal concepts. Chapter 8 explores Murdoch’s reconceptualisations of the image of the angel, which are interwoven with, and energised by, her dialogue with Weinberger, most notably in Jackson’s Dilemma. Scrutiny of these artists’ shared values, methods, and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch’s creativity and new ways of understanding her innovations with

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the visual arts. Although Murdoch’s discourse with Weinberger deepens understanding of many of the allusions in her novels to great works of art which they loved and viewed together, this study’s primary focus is on investigating how the presence of Weinberger’s own pictures and imagery in Murdoch’s novels opens up new interpretations of her work. By integrating Weinberger’s ideas, imagery and painterly devices into her novels, Murdoch finds ways to communicate meaning more directly and viscerally, render consciousness with greater accuracy, expand the psychology of characters, and increase the moral impact of her writing. This study also draws out subtle differences in aspects of their thinking which complicated and enriched their discourse, stimulating Murdoch to re-evaluate her ideas. Though Weinberger was a minor artist, and Murdoch a major writer, they were kindred spirits, engaged on the same quest. They shared a common identity in their construction of reality and in their highly innovative attempts to attend to and depict reality by means of aesthetic form. Weinberger’s attempts to realise the images in his mind’s eye did not always satisfy him, and his output was somewhat uneven. ‘I want my work to exist in the timeless tradition of painting. But because I see that, when a particular picture is finished, it never quite matches my original intention, I start the next one immediately’, he said.22 His statement resembles Murdoch’s observation, in a 1977 interview with Jack Biles, that ‘all the time, one is terribly conscious of one’s limitations as an artist. […] One’s always hoping to do better next time’.23 Like Murdoch, Weinberger was continually reflective and self-critical about his practice, had comprehensive intellectual and theoretical knowledge and understanding of what he wanted to achieve, and was unwavering in his pursuit of perfection. Murdoch recognised in Weinberger the practical embodiment of her theoretical ideas. His outward-directed, prayerful attention to the details of external reality beyond the self is an essential aspect of her neo-­theology. Her conception, described in ‘Thinking and Language’ (1951), of thoughts occurring in ‘imaging, semi-sensible mode’ is illuminated by his attempts to represent the elusive images, colours, and forms in his mind’s eye.24 The 22  Harry Weinberger, Harry Weinberger: Recent Work, 29 March–22 April 1994 (London: Duncan Campbell Gallery, 1994), hereafter 1994CI, np. 23  Iris Murdoch, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’ by Jack I. Biles, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 56–69 (p. 65). 24  Iris Murdoch, ‘Thinking and Language’, in EM, pp. 33–42, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 40).

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dialogue between Murdoch and Weinberger goes some way towards realising the ideal which Murdoch envisages in ‘The Idea of Perfection’, being centred on the practice of joint attention to art which enables aesthetic and moral progress, and the clearer perception of the other which Murdoch believes to be the true sublime. Weinberger exemplifies Murdoch’s vision of the truth-seeking artist, probing the nature of reality by means of aesthetic form, and validating her refutation, in ‘The Fire and the Sun’, of Plato’s denigration of the artist as creator and perpetuator of illusion.

References Biles, Jack I. 2003 (1977). An Interview with Iris Murdoch. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 56-69. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Blow, Simon. 1976. An interview with Iris Murdoch. The Spectator, 25 September, 24-25. Bromwich, David. 1975. Iris Murdoch’s new novel and old themes. New  York Times. https://nytimes.com/1975/08/24/archives/iris-­murdochs-­new-­ novel-­and-­old-­themes.html. Accessed 15 December 2021. Conradi, Peter J., ed. 1999. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Penguin. Cormack, Robin. 1997. Painting the Soul: Icons, Death Masks and Shrouds. London: Reaktion. Courtney, Cathy. 1995. Harry Weinberger interviewed by Cathy Courtney. British Library: Artists’ Lives. Holloway, David. 1974. With Glee and Tears. Daily Telegraph, 21 March, 647. Lee, Vinny. 1999. Painter and Decorator. The Times, 27 March, 46-51. Murdoch, Iris. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Murdoch, Iris. 1993 (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris, and Nicholas Watkins. 1983. Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings. Coventry: Herbert Art Gallery & Museum. Spencer, Charles S. 1965. Harry Weinberger. Coventry: Herbert Art Gallery & Museum. Spender, Natasha. 1999. An English Garden in Provence. London: Harvill Press. Spender, Natasha. 2019. Nuns and Soldiers: Iris in Provence. In Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Miles Leeson, 65-72. Devizes: Sabrestorm. Watkins, Nicholas. 1976. Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings. London: Camden Arts Centre. Weinberger, Harry, and Iris Murdoch. 1994. Harry Weinberger: Recent Work. London: Duncan Campbell Gallery.

CHAPTER 2

Murdoch and Visual Art

‘Pictures Are About Everything That Human Beings do’1 The years preceding Murdoch’s first meeting with Weinberger in 1975 prepared the ground for their fruitful friendship. Murdoch’s enduring fascination with the visual arts originated in her schooldays. In her early adulthood she considered pursuing a career in painting. Realising eventually that she would not become a painter, Murdoch channelled her experimentation with the visual arts into her novels, weaving into them imagery and techniques drawn from the visual arts in her quest to intensify readers’ emotional, intellectual, visual, and linguistic engagement with text and image and so to enhance their moral perception. Murdoch’s journals document her evolving ideas about the relationship between words and images, and the role of visual images in thought, subsequently explicated in ‘Thinking and Language’ (1951). Furthermore, the journals record Murdoch’s reflections on viewing works of art, art criticism, and the interconnectedness of the visual arts and literature. Early journal entries provide valuable insights into ways in which techniques and images drawn from the visual arts inspired her novels. Her journal entries of late 1947, for instance, which identify the potential of images to be ‘concrete’ and 1  Martin Gayford, ‘The Beautiful and  the  Good: Iris Murdoch on  the  Value of  Art’, Modern Painters (Autumn 1993), 50–54, hereafter ‘Beautiful and Good’, 52.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Moden, Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17945-7_2

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‘particular’, clarify her use, in The Bell (1958), of the image with which the novel originated: that of Toby Gashe walking towards the headlights of Michael Meade’s car. Her journal entries of late 1947 and early 1948 illuminate her efforts to depict multisensory experiences such as the vision of the negative sublime given to Morgan Browne in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). Murdoch’s later journals, whilst having a less detailed focus on matters visual, continue to document ideas about specific painters, paintings, and images and cast fresh light on their presence in her novels. Her 1969 journal entry on the difficulty of representing Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom in art forms part of her larger concern about Christian iconography’s susceptibility to misappropriation, and her quest to seek out alternative secular icons; it accords increased significance to mentions of Saint Sebastian in several novels. Her journal further reveals that in 1969 she viewed Tiepolo’s The Rage of Achilles. She continued to think of this fresco during the years that followed, and her own version of Tiepolo’s subject became one of the defining images of Henry and Cato (1976). Henry and Cato—which Murdoch was in the final stages of drafting when she met Weinberger—is, as Lorna Sage observes, ‘visually conceived’; in contrast the wealth of visual imagery in A Word Child (1975) has been somewhat overlooked.2 A Word Child’s visual elements—in particular, its imagery of birds and its instances of Impressionist imagery and techniques—enable Murdoch to expose Hilary Burde’s perception of reality as dangerously inadequate and to guide readers into the development of a more discerning vision.

‘My Own Dream Life as a Painter’ Murdoch’s acute interest in the visual arts can be traced back to her schooldays. Art and self-expression would have been important at the Froebel Demonstration School, which Murdoch attended from the age of five until thirteen. The school, founded by the Romantic idealist educator Friedrich Froebel, was centred on the concept of learning through creative play. Froebel’s ‘gifts’ were a key element of his teaching; these were sets of toys in primary colours designed to encourage children’s creative instincts.  Lorna Sage, ‘The Pursuit of Imperfection: Henry and Cato’, in Modern Critical Views: Iris Murdoch, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), pp. 111–119, hereafter ‘Pursuit of Imperfection’ (p. 116). 2

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Fig. 2.1  Iris Murdoch, The Piper, 1938, Badminton School Archives

The colourful ‘gifts’ had a lifelong impact on some artists, such as the Modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1869–1959) who in later life recalled the ‘soft brilliant’ Froebel colours which ‘are in my fingers to this day’.3 Murdoch is likely to have received these toys and would have been encouraged to explore and appreciate colours. Murdoch progressed to Badminton School, where she would have been introduced to the great masters of Western art, and taken on visits to galleries, museums, and stately homes. A letter to a school friend, Ann Leech, in July 1938, records a school trip to Montacute House, near Yeovil, ‘full of the most exquisite carving’.4 Murdoch experimented with the visual arts during her time at Badminton, creating, for example, a woodcut titled The Piper, presumably based on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (Fig. 2.1). The leaping piper who leads a line of children to their fate might be understood as an early version of the enchanter archetype which would appear in many of her novels. Whilst at Badminton Murdoch also produced a linocut titled The Prisoner, which was printed in the 1936 school magazine and is an 3  Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 359). 4  Iris Murdoch to Ann Leech, 17 July 1938, Box 18/11, Leech Family Archive, Chetham’s Library, Manchester.

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early example of her persistent fascination with the theme of imprisonment (Fig. 2.2). In the same July 1938 letter, Murdoch told Ann Leech that she had been reading a novel about Van Gogh titled Lust for Life by Irving Stone and was thinking of purchasing Herbert Read’s Art Now, which praises modern British artists such as Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, and Barbara Hepworth. Lust for Life, she said, ‘just knocked me off my feet—I had no idea Van Gogh was such a wonderful, passionate, dramatic sort of person. […] I am now, consequently, consumed with the desire to paint all day and all night—and am making a start this morning with an oil painting […]. If only I were about six times as good as I am, I’d chuck up Oxford and go to an art school. I’d sell every faculty I have to paint one good picture’. In a postscript she added ‘Finished the painting—it’s

Fig. 2.2  Iris Murdoch, The Prisoner, 1936, Badminton School Archives

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frightful!’5 This letter suggests that Van Gogh’s intense personality and troubled life, at least as much as his painting, seem to have inspired Murdoch to paint. This propensity to idealise painters was to remain with her, and she became more aware of it in later years; on 7 January 1965 she wrote in her journal: ‘I am probably too romantic about painters—I want to project my own dream life as a painter’.6 Writing in April 1939 to Ann Leech, Murdoch imagined herself one day doing ‘some sort of research or archaeological job’ where she can ‘spend the rest of my life in a museum’; she said ‘that would be—paradise’. However, she seemed uncertain about her future. At this point, swept up in left-wing political idealism, she was convinced that she had ‘got to be a political worker’ and added, ‘My faith in my intellectual ability has been shaken in the last few months. I can feel, I can appreciate art and understand symbolism perhaps better than average, but I haven’t a clear mind’.7 In 1940, Murdoch’s special subject in Mods (the study of classical Greek and Latin literature) was Greek vase painting. After her exams she was found sobbing in her room by friends, sure she had failed, though in fact she achieved a second.8 She progressed from Mods to Greats, for which she focused on ancient history, ancient, and some modern philosophy. Art nevertheless continued to draw her attention; Murdoch’s biographer Peter J. Conradi states that ‘had the war not intervened, Iris might have continued her studies as a Renaissance art historian’.9 Instead, she was conscripted, ten days after her final exams in 1942, and became an Assistant Principal at the Treasury. She enjoyed the bohemianism of wartime London and mixed with writers and artists in Soho pubs. Murdoch continued her attempts at painting during the late 1930s and early 1940s.10 ‘I never write anything these days—I paint a lot instead, and 5  Iris Murdoch to Ann Leech, 17 July 1938, Box 18/11, Leech Family Archive, Chetham’s Library, Manchester. 6   Iris Murdoch, 3 January 1965, ‘Journal, February 1964–18 March 1970’, KUAS202/1/10, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 10, p. 9. 7  Iris Murdoch to Ann Leech, undated [April 1939], Box 18/11, Leech Family Archive, Chetham’s Library, Manchester. 8  See Valerie Purton, An Iris Murdoch Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) hereafter Chronology, p. 17. 9  Peter J.  Conradi, ‘A witness to good and evil’, Guardian, 9 February 1999 https:// www.theguardian.com/news/1999/feb/09/guardianobituaries-peterconradi [accessed 10 August 2019]. 10  The two dated paintings in the Iris Murdoch Collections were created in 1941 (the third known painting being undated). Conradi notes that during the early years of the war ‘Iris was painting a lot’. Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 2001), hereafter Life, p. 112.

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Fig. 2.3  Iris Murdoch, untitled, 1941, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections

am evolving a style which I hope does not owe too much to Paul Nash— grey stony inorganic’, she wrote to her lover David Hicks in March 1941. Her letter is addressed from the house in Blackpool inhabited by Murdoch’s parents during the war years, her father’s government department having temporarily relocated there.11 Two untitled paintings of 1941 are currently known. The first (Fig.  2.3) is a rather self-consciously staged still life in 11  Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, 21 March 1941, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. Eng. c. 7964.

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Fig. 2.4  Iris Murdoch, untitled, 1941, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections

shades of greys relieved by touches of blue and yellow. The copy of Ulysses (which had recently become more widely available, the first unlimited edition having been published in England in 1937) proclaims Murdoch’s intellectual credentials and her interest in literary experimentalism, and also implies a somewhat liberated attitude to sex and sexuality. The presence of Ulysses furthermore points to Murdoch’s fascination with reworking ancient myths, and with finding the extraordinary in everyday life; both were to become important tropes in her novels. The everyday domestic items of rolled napkin and teapot, and the pottery jug of coltsfoot, which grew near the Blackpool house, serve as symbols of family and home. The second painting (Fig. 2.4), which is dated 17 January 1941, depicts a stark urban scene in winter. Its monochrome colour scheme is disturbed by the sickly yellow of a row of houses, which induces a gloomy,

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Fig. 2.5  Iris Murdoch, untitled, [early 1940s], Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections

claustrophobic mood. A further painting (Fig. 2.5), undated but thought by its style, colour scheme, and subject to have been produced in the 1940s, depicts a group of houses clustered on a hillside. The scene has a picturesque postcard quality bordering on cliché, but it is also poignant in its depiction of a seemingly peaceful way of life in the shadow of war. The palette of muted greys, browns, pinks, and greens is disrupted by the presence of a single yellow house, which strikes a jarring note. Yellow came to have a particular resonance in Murdoch’s novels, being associated with negative states of mind, even evil. In the early 1940s she was prone to low moods; in a letter written from Blackpool to Frank Thompson (her peer at Oxford, with whom she had a romantic friendship), in December 1941, for example, she says she is ‘approaching the state of aporia’ and is ‘looking

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forward into a blank’.12 The harsh yellow tones in these early paintings may in some sense be indicative of Murdoch’s depressed state. Painting may have offered her an emotional outlet, as well as the spiritual refreshment occasioned by directing attention towards the external world. Although Murdoch names Paul Nash, the British Surrealist painter and war artist, as an influence in her letter to Hicks, these three paintings appear to only superficially echo Nash’s art, most evidently in the limited colour range which she attributes to him, and in her similar predilection for landscapes. Nash could imbue a scene with a mood of emptiness, mystery, and menace; there is, perhaps, a faint hint of this Nashian atmosphere in the second painting in particular. In the first painting, Murdoch might have been striving to emulate Nash’s still lifes, which grant peculiar, defamiliarising significance to apparently commonplace objects. She produced many more paintings in the late 1930s and early 1940s; Conradi notes that ‘many of her paintings of the time had ladders in them’.13 The image of the ladder is sometimes found in Nash’s paintings, for example, in After the Battle (1918) and Month of March (1929), and it seems probable that Murdoch was borrowing his imagery. The whereabouts of these paintings is currently unknown; Murdoch may have destroyed them. Murdoch’s attempts to engage with Nash in her early paintings were later developed in her novels, as Daniel Read has argued. Read contends that several of the novels ‘both implicitly and explicitly engage with [Nash’s] paintings’. He explores the ‘consolidated allusions’ to Nash in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983)—the story of a philosopher who is worshipped by various characters, including his wayward, desperate ex-pupil, which explores the themes of obsession, salvation, madness, and sanity—which he considers ‘her most Nashian novel’.14 Murdoch’s rather self-conscious identification with Nash seems sanguine and may in part have been an attempt to impress Hicks. Nonetheless, it is also evidence of her continuing search for role models. Although they are uncertain, amateurish, and derivative, her early paintings demonstrate her desire to hone her perceptions of the external world and to achieve a sensory, physical 12  Iris Murdoch to Frank Thompson, 24 December 1941, quoted in Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939–45 ed. by Peter J. Conradi (London: Short Books, 2010), hereafter Writer at War, p. 101, 103. 13  Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 112. 14  Daniel Read, ‘“Evolving a Style”: Iris Murdoch and the Surrealist Moral Vision of Paul Nash’, Iris Murdoch Review, 8 (2017), 29–37, hereafter ‘Evolving a Style’, 29, 31.

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connection with external reality. That these three paintings were kept by Murdoch until her death suggests that they continued to have meaning for her, though they may have held primarily sentimental value. Murdoch’s early adulthood was, as Frances White observes, characterised by uncertainty and ‘[t]he field of potential was still wide open’.15 She had many talents and explored various avenues, painting amongst them. John Bayley remarks: ‘While working at the Treasury […] she had made herself an expert […] Had she concentrated on any of those careers she could have been a doctor, an archaeologist, a motor mechanic. […] A really great artist can concentrate and succeed at almost anything, and Iris would have been no exception’.16 Murdoch herself commented, in a 1983 interview with John Haffenden, that I always wanted to be a novelist, but there was a time when I thought I wanted to be an archaeologist and art historian […] I would very much like to have been a Renaissance art historian, and at one time I wanted to be a painter. I think I would have been a moderate painter if I had given my life to it, but that is an absolute hypothesis, without any basis to it!17

She may have been right: given her characteristic concentration, energy, and application, she might well have evolved into a ‘moderate painter’. A career in painting became one of the many roads not taken. Murdoch’s desire to write fiction was, in the 1940s, becoming increasingly dominant; literature vied with philosophy in her ambitions, and both would eventually eclipse her early wish to be a painter. In January 1943 she wrote to Frank Thompson: ‘Jesus God how I want to write’, and in July ‘My chief thought will probably be, “Whether or not I am a writer”— a thought which has obsessed me all the year, and grows in proportion daily, like an angel I am wrestling with’.18 She drafted several early novels before the publication of Under the Net in 1954; the exact number is not 15  Frances White, Becoming Iris Murdoch (London: Kingston University Press, 2014), hereafter Becoming, p. 31. 16  John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Duckworth, 1998), hereafter Iris, p. 102. 17  John Haffenden, ‘John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 124–138, hereafter Haffenden (p. 128). 18  Iris Murdoch to Frank Thompson, 22 January [1943], quoted in Writer at War, p. 126; Iris Murdoch to Frank Thompson, 29 July 1943, quoted in Writer at War, pp. 150–151.

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known, Murdoch having given it as four and six on different occasions.19 She submitted her second novel to Faber & Faber in autumn 1944, but it was rejected by T. S. Eliot. Her April 1946 application for a Cambridge studentship (written from the UNRRA camp where she was then working) states: ‘I have written a good deal during the last four years—never anything which could be called a philosophical treatise, but novels rather and dialogues, dealing […] with definite moral problems’.20 Letters of 1947 to the novelist, poet, and critic Raymond Queneau (Murdoch’s friend and object of her unrequited love, whose fiction had a notable influence on her early writing) reveal that she was at that time working on ‘the novel about the Bogus Scholar and the Archaic Goddess’, and a novel ‘based on an idea cribbed from Carrington’.21 In October 1949 she abandoned a novel titled Our Lady of the Bosky Gates. In November 1951 she noted in her journal some thoughts on a kidnapping scene in her current novel; also, the idea of titling a novel In Solemn Silence.22 She was, by this time, also pursuing an academic career, having followed her year at Newnham by a move to St Anne’s, Oxford in October 1948, where she taught philosophy, becoming a fellow in 1952. Her meeting with Sartre in November 1945 and her excitement at discovering continental existentialism increased her wish to become a philosopher: in 1953 her monograph Sartre, Romantic Rationalist was published.23 At St Anne’s, her demanding teaching schedule and her own work on philosophy allowed little time for novel writing. In the early 1950s her publications included two reviews in the journal Mind and an article for Socratic Digest; she gave two broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme and presented two papers at meetings of the Aristotelian Society which were subsequently published as ‘Thinking 19  Some of this early fiction was destroyed by Murdoch on the Bayleys’ departure from Cedar Lodge. Her journal entry of 21 December 1988 states: ‘I have torn up some early diaries (about 1943) and also what looks like a novel. Looking at the fragments they seem rather interesting. There is a kind of intensity, even rage, about that time, when I had no notion what the future held’. Iris Murdoch, ‘Journal, 1 January 1981–8 August 1992′, KUAS202/1/14, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 14, p. 101. 20  Iris Murdoch, 9 April 1946, quoted in Becoming, p. 93. 21  Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau, 17 July 1947, KUAS70/1/42; Murdoch to Raymond Queneau, 25 November 1947, KUAS70/1/58; Iris Murdoch Collections. 22  Iris Murdoch, November 1951, ‘Journal, January 1949–1 January 1953’, KU202/1/7, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 7. 23  Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1953), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as SRR.

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and Language’ (1951) and ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’ (1952).24 White states that Murdoch ‘was keeping company with the leading philosophers of the time and holding her own […] Chiefly by her own efforts, Iris Murdoch was becoming a philosophical force to be reckoned with’.25 Nevertheless, Murdoch still always had a novel in progress. She wrote to Queneau in March 1950: ‘I think nothing is really worth anything except (a) being happily married, (b) being a saint, (c) writing a good novel. My chances of (a) diminish yearly, (b) is far too difficult—there remains (c) which still inspires hope’.26 At last, in May 1954, she published Under the Net, which was well received; from then on she would publish one novel approximately every eighteen months until 1995. In early 1954 she met and quickly fell in love with the academic, literary critic, and writer John Bayley, recording in her journal an ‘extraordinary need’ for him, though their relationship was initially complicated by her prior involvement with the ‘angel–demon’ writer and linguist Elias Canetti.27 Her marriage to Bayley in 1956 gave her stability and opened up space to write. She achieved major success with The Bell (1958), but this success did not diminish her efforts to improve her writing; in her journal she deplored the ‘imbecile praise’ which The Bell received and remarked somewhat

24  Iris Murdoch, ‘Sartre’s The Emotions: Outline of a Theory’, Mind, 59 (April 1950), 268–71; ‘De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity’, Mind, 59 (April 1950), 127–8; ‘The Existentialist Political Myth’, Socratic Digest, no.5 (1952) 52–63; ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’, BBC Third Programme, March 1950, published in The Listener (16 March 1950), 473–476; ‘The Existentialist Hero’, BBC Third Programme, March 1950, published in The Listener (23 March 1950), 523–4; ‘Thinking and Language’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J. Conradi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp.  33–42 (from a symposium entitled ‘Thinking and Language’, between Iris Murdoch, Gilbert Ryle and A. C. Lloyd; first publ. in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 25 (1951), 25–34); ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J.  Conradi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp.  43–58 (paper read at a meeting of the Aristotelian Society, 9 June 1952; first publ. in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 52 (1952), 243–260). 25  Frances White, Becoming, pp. 88–89. 26  Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau, 16 March 1950, KUAS70/1/98, Iris Murdoch Collections. 27  Iris Murdoch, 28 May 1954, 24 March 1953, ‘Journal, 10 January 1953–December 1954’, KUAS202/1/8, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 8.

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despairingly, ‘If I could only see how to get, in my writing, out of the second class & into the first’.28 Murdoch channelled her fascination with all things visual, and with painting and painterly techniques in particular, into her novels. Anne Rowe—whose comprehensive analysis of a wealth of painterly references employed by Murdoch, The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2002), has been an inspiration for, and influence on, this study—contends that by emulating the process of painting in her writing, Murdoch develops ‘a completely synaesthetic art form that uses shape, colour, form, sound, visual imagery and symbolism to facilitate the representation of […] truth’.29 Bran Nicol, reviewing Rowe’s Iris Murdoch (2018), is a little more cautious: he suggests that ‘Murdoch’s continued and restless fascination with other arts’ does not result in an entirely new fictional form, but concedes that it nevertheless creates ‘a rich and evocative symbolic texture for her fiction’.30 Whether or not it can be considered to constitute a new form, Murdoch’s radical experimentation with the visual arts merits far more attention than it has yet received, and reorientation of attention to it changes the way her novels are understood. Murdoch’s love of the visual arts manifests itself in the novels in a wide range of ways. The inspiration for certain novels emanated directly from visual images. The governing image for Under the Net is taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (6.341). Wittgenstein imagines a net of square mesh, laid over a white surface with irregular black dots on it; the net imposes unified form on the description of the surface, creating a system whereby the colours in each square can be observed. A net with a different mesh would generate a different description. The net simultaneously separates and connects the observer from the surface and cannot be dispensed with. Under the Net, an early expression of Murdoch’s enduring desire to interrogate the relationship between the artificial form of language and the reality which it seeks to convey is a celebration of the world’s contingency   Iris Murdoch, 26 November 1958, ‘Journal, March 1954–February 1964’, KUAS202/1/9, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 9, pp. 28–29. 29  Lucy Bolton, ‘Anne Rowe, author of The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2002), in interview with Lucy Bolton’, Iris Murdoch Review 8 (2017), 21–28, hereafter ‘Rowe Bolton’, 23. 30  Bran Nicol, ‘Review of Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019)’, Iris Murdoch Review 10 (2019), 89–92, 91. 28

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and particularity which forever eludes the imposition of form. Speaking of The Unicorn, Murdoch has remarked, ‘I think the germ for this book came a very long time before I wrote it, when I first saw the Cluny tapestries’.31 These late fourteenth-century tapestries of ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ enrich and complicate the symbolism of the novel and encourage allegorical readings of it. Sometimes the atmosphere of an entire novel evokes the visual arts. Jonathan Raban, reviewing The Sacred and Profane Love Machine for Encounter in 1974, says that this novel ‘moves in a series of stately tableaux’ that resemble ‘allegorical scenes on a painted frieze’.32 Pamela Osborn suggests that reading The Italian Girl—a darkly comical, claustrophobic study of family relations whose narrator Edmund Narraway is an engraver, and his brother a sculptor—generates ‘the experience of walking through an art gallery, where some scenes are sinister and others are almost too picturesque, for example when Edmund frames Flora [his niece] within a Pre-Raphaelite painting or recasts her as a simple country girl painted at the turn of a century’.33 Unusually, in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) (in which most characters have the power to enchant others, and all are fleeing in one way or another) the visual art form explored is photography, a mechanical art which, lacking the transformative powers of the artist’s imagination, can merely duplicate and is a metaphor for failure of vision.34 In Bruno’s Dream (1969), which recounts the story of the dying Bruno Greensleave and his family, printing plays a similar, though minor, role; the family printing work has been a lifelong source of dread to Bruno, who was ‘born to it, for it, practically in it with the clack of monotype machines in his ears’, though his pragmatic son-in-law Danby Odell, its inheritor, takes a more businesslike view.35 The Red and the Green (1965) is a carefully researched historical account of the Easter Rising and also a tale of romance, incest, and bedroom farce: though it is less overtly concerned with the visual arts, it demonstrates 31  Cheryl Bove, Understanding Iris Murdoch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993) p. 189. 32  Jonathan Raban, ‘Lullabies for a Sleeping Giant’, Encounter, July 1974, 74. 33  Anne Rowe describes Osborn’s view of The Italian Girl in ‘Rowe Bolton’, 22. 34  The role of photography in The Flight from the Enchanter is discussed more fully by Karin G.  Steiner in ‘Metaphors of Vision: A Fellowship of the Arts in the Novels of Iris Murdoch’ (Master’s dissertation, McMaster University, 1984) [accessed 12 April 2022]. Hereafter ‘Metaphors of Vision’, pp. 26–36. 35  Iris Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream (London: World Books, 1970), p. 11.

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Murdoch’s enduring interest in colour words and oppositions, which represent not only the conflict in Ireland but the conflict which Murdoch sensed in her own nature.36 Painterly techniques such as light, form, space, and, above all, colour feature in the novels as part of Murdoch’s quest for a more fully synaesthetic form of communication which can transcend the boundaries of language. The stark monochrome colour scheme of The Time of the Angels (1966) is irradiated by the golden icon at its heart, which passes through the action and onward, untouched. In The Sandcastle (1957), which is both love story and meditation on art, a profusion of vivid colour illuminates the inner life of the schoolteacher Bill Mor and young artist Rain Carter: the blossoming of their affair correlates with the progress of the portrait which Rain is painting. Though Murdoch’s aesthetic innovations were largely ignored or misunderstood by her contemporaries, Ronald Bryden, in his 1957 review of The Sandcastle for The Listener, perceptively declares Murdoch’s vision to be ‘the vision of modern art’: She imports, at last, into fiction the techniques and sensibility of the great French moderns, bridging a gap in taste which has kept the novel, in this country at least, a generation or more behind the visual arts. She writes as everyone since the Post-Impressionists has painted, to create form: joyously pulling reality about to yield the most brilliant surprising patterns of colour and relation.37

Bryden’s interpretation, unique at a time when Murdoch was associated by most other critics with ‘angry’ social realism, invites readers to respond to a Murdoch novel as if it were a painting by giving attention to its aesthetic qualities as well as its content. As Rowe has shown in The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch, numerous references to great works of art expand the psychology of

36  Benedict Kiely observes that Murdoch ‘tried to tell about a certain duality in her own nature and about a unity in the two islands linked indissolubly by contiguity and the history it produced […] Miss Murdoch thinks about the interlocked destinies of two peoples, and states her own loyalties to the loyal red skies and the recalcitrant green counties’. ‘England and Ireland’, New York Times Book Review, 5 June 1966, p. 5. 37  Ronald Bryden ‘New Novels’, Listener, 16 May 1957, 88.

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characters and enhance the novels’ moral impact.38 These include Franz Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier in Under the Net; Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly in The Bell; a set of prints by John James Audubon in A Severed Head (1961); a fictional study of Tintoretto’s Susannah Bathing in An Unofficial Rose (1962); Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity in The Time of the Angels; and Giorgione’s The Sunset in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. The Nice and the Good, which is underpinned by Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, is the first of Murdoch’s novels to include a painting which functions on a sustained and complex symbolic level, its allegory being patterned many times in the novel.39 The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is the only one of her novels to take its title directly from a painting, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, meaning that from the outset readers are directed to the painting as a means of interpretation of the novel. The painting reveals the superficially straightforward contrast of sacred and profane to be more complex: it depicts a progression between two loves, not an opposition, and their

38  In The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch by Anne Rowe (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), hereafter VAIM, Rowe identifies and analyses five aspects of Murdoch’s use of paintings. Firstly, she investigates ways that Murdoch, influenced by the aesthetic strategies of Henry James and by the colour theories of Kandinsky and Kokoschka, uses painterly devices such as colour, form, light, and space expressionistically in an attempt to progress beyond the boundaries of what is expressible in language. Rowe goes on to analyse how a painting can operate as an extended metaphor for a character’s consciousness, or as a device to explain and sustain the idea-play of a novel. Her study of Murdoch’s recurring use of paintings which depict soldiers and warriors expands debate regarding Murdoch’s thoughts on the nature of courage and goodness. Finally, Rowe considers how a character’s experience of a moment of sublime ecstasis in response to a painting may induce a similar spiritual experience in readers, who are guided into realisation of the otherness of a separate consciousness and the sacredness of great art. Writing in 2014, Rowe comments: ‘while my assessment of this web of painterly allusions seemed exhaustive when I analysed the novels a decade ago, the much larger range of painterly references offered in the Weinberger letters identifies it now as merely provisional’. Anne Rowe, ‘“Near the Gods”: Iris Murdoch and the Painter, Harry Weinberger’, in Iris Murdoch Connected: Critical Essays on her Fiction and Philosophy, ed. by Mark Luprecht (Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), pp. 57–72, hereafter ‘Near the Gods’, p. 62. 39  The National Gallery gives Bronzino’s painting the title of An Allegory with Venus and Cupid.

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similarities are marked.40 Paintings by Beckmann and Titian and a late seventeenth-century Flemish tapestry are key to Henry and Cato (1976). As well as these direct references to paintings, the novels abound in more subtle allusions to paintings, for example, when in Under the Net Jake Donaghue, who is beginning to develop a more accurate vision of reality, momentarily perceives his mentor Hugo Belfounder as a late Rembrandt self-portrait.41 Murdoch’s intense interest in visual images and the visual arts is evident in her philosophy as well as in her novels. She was, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing her own unique philosophical position which remained at odds with contemporary British philosophical thinking and also moved beyond continental existentialism. ‘Thinking and Language’ (1951) is an investigation of the nature of visual images, the relation of visual images to words, and the role of visual images in thought: her belief that consciousness is pictorial, and that visual images could therefore enable more direct access with reality, underpins her experimentation with images and techniques drawn from the visual arts in her novels. In ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) Murdoch laments the inadequacy of ‘our current picture of freedom’. The visual images with which she strives to provide a more accurate picture of the relation of inner life to outer reality form part of the ‘new vocabulary of attention’ demanded in this essay.42 In ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ (1967) she describes such visual images as ‘fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition’.43 She deems art 40  Murdoch’s journal entries of early 1972, written shortly before she began to draft The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, reveal that she was then musing on Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. ‘It seems somehow appropriate that the same picture could represent Mary and Martha or Sacred and Profane Love!’ she wrote on 25 January, and on 11 March: ‘The same picture can represent Mary and Martha on Sacred and Profane Love. (Only of course the girls play different roles.)’ Iris Murdoch, ‘Journal, 18 March 1970–16 May 1972’, KUAS202/1/11, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 11, p. 188, 198. Karin G. Steiner notes in ‘Metaphors of Vision’ that Murdoch was undoubtedly familiar with Edgar Wind’s interpretation of the painting in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1967 (1958)), as Wind’s interpretation seems to correlate with Murdoch’s use of the painting in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (p. 81). 41  Anne Rowe, VAIM, pp. 35–36. 42  Iris Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J. Conradi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 287–295, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 293). 43  Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, in EM, pp. 363–385, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 363).

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‘the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen […] Art pierces the veil and gives sense of the notion of a reality which lies beyond appearance; it exhibits virtue in its true guise in the context of death and chance’ (EM, p.  372). The parable of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, explained in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1964), presents learning to perceive as an infinitely perfectible process. In this work Murdoch also discusses the moral benefits of episodes of joint attention to art. Her certainty that great art will endure is expressed in ‘Salvation by Words’ (1972) although she notes the contemporary trend in the visual arts for deconstruction. ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists’ (1977) is a detailed consideration of Plato’s suspicions of art and artists and an impassioned refutation of his argument in which Murdoch draws a distinction between good and bad art: ‘Bad art is a lie about the world, and what is by contrast seen as good is in some important evident sense seen as ipso facto true and as expressive of reality: the sense in which Seurat is better than Burne-Jones, Keats than Swinburne, Dickens than Wilkie Collins, etc.’44 In ‘Art Is the Imitation of Nature’ (1978) Murdoch acknowledges the ambiguity and danger of art but also points to great art’s ‘moral pleasures’.45 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), the apex of Murdoch’s philosophical achievement, is not only a rich storehouse of highly original thought in which she engages in dialogue with writers, philosophers, and theologians, but also a paean to the truth-telling powers of great art. Although she consistently celebrates great art, this celebration is, as Rowe points out, ‘only one aspect of Murdoch’s perspective on it; art must work, too, by being difficult, deliberately incomplete and imperfect; it must defy any consolatory function and present an unflinching picture of evil’.46 Murdoch’s philosophical oeuvre is permeated by visual images, by analogies between painting and writing, and by references to specific paintings and painters, invoked to illuminate and strengthen her meaning, and blended skilfully into her arguments. They are fundamental to her philosophy, as her declaration in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ makes clear: ‘One of the great merits of the moral

44  Iris Murdoch, ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists’, in EM, pp. 386–463, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 459). 45  Iris Murdoch, ‘Art Is the Imitation of Nature’, in EM, pp. 243–257, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 245). 46  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 19.

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psychology which I am proposing is that it does not contrast art and morals, but shows them to be two aspects of a single struggle’.47 With literature and philosophy competing for her attention, it is unsurprising that Murdoch’s own attempts at painting were quietly sidelined. In 1977, she noted in her journal, ‘I can only explain one thing by explaining everything—and this has perhaps made me philosopher and novelist. [The] [n]ovel is [the] only art form where one can (try to) express everything!’48 However, whether she ever abandoned painting completely is unclear. It seems that beyond the early 1940s she no longer seriously entertained any thoughts of painting as a career. Nevertheless, some of her remarks to David Morgan—a painting student with whom Murdoch became emotionally entangled in 1963 when she left St Anne’s to teach General Studies at the Royal College of Art—hint that she may have been painting as late as the 1960s and 1970s. Her comments to Morgan reveal that her own painting was still in her thoughts. On one occasion she told him, ‘If I could paint properly I would, for example, take a still life but show it in a strange light’.49 Morgan’s interpretation is that: ‘She didn’t mean a surrealist light—she would have found that shallow like her condemnation of fantasy as a weakness we need to resist. I think she just meant lit in the same way her novels are lit—by the normal illumination of the Murdoch world which is a strange light’. Morgan also remembered Murdoch saying that she had been painting purple still lifes, and he dated this remark tentatively to the mid-60s. He speculated that these ­paintings might have been ‘a weird attempt to be contemporary’.50 Possibly the RCA atmosphere was rekindling her desire to paint. The RCA certainly broadened her artistic tastes. Conradi notes that she bought ‘an abstract by Christopher Cornford, four Op Art Bridget Rileys and a Roger Hilton’.51 Murdoch’s praise, in a January 1966 journal entry, of the ‘impressive’ work of sculpture student Rachel Fenner and her peers demonstrates that she could be well-disposed towards contemporary 47  Iris Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection’, in EM, pp. 299–336, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 332). 48  Iris Murdoch, 17 April 1977, ‘Journal, 1 April 1975–23 May 1978’, KUAS202/1/12, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 12, p. 114. 49  David Morgan, With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (London: Kingston University Press, 2010), hereafter With Love and Rage, p. 87. 50  David Morgan, in conversation with the author, 4 July 2021. 51  Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 474.

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developments in the visual arts (Journal 10, p. 24). Murdoch left the RCA in 1967, her somewhat romantic vision of visual artists having modified a little—yet thoughts of being a painter lingered in her mind for years after. On 1 March 1980, writing in her journal, Murdoch mused: ‘I wish I could have given another life to philosophy. (A second one, a spare one.) (And one to painting.)’52 In 1982, speaking to Susan Hill about the central significance of novel-writing to her life, she said, I am absolutely a novelist – I mean, well, and other art forms which I also practise – painting, I would like to have been a painter in fact – I thought when I was young that I might be one and I very much wish I had managed to be a painter as well and I keep thinking perhaps I shall start painting again but I don’t think I should get anywhere if I did, but I mean I’m best known as a novelist and that’s probably what I’m best at doing.53

Her ambition to paint was hesitantly revealed, and seems to have been quickly, though rather wistfully, dismissed. It resurfaced in a 1984 interview when Murdoch stated to Wendy Lesser, ‘I’m very interested in painting and the visual arts. I wanted to be a painter, still want to be a painter’.54 Murdoch’s vision of an alternative existence as a painter evidently never completely departed from her. Murdoch’s novels provided her with a space in which to imaginatively inhabit the role of painter. The young, grieving artist Rain Carter in The Sandcastle has been identified by A. S. Byatt as Murdoch’s self-portrait.55 Rain is succeeded by Dora Greenfield, a flighty, warm-hearted former art student, in The Bell; the seedy, impecunious Tim Reede in Nuns and Soldiers, who is gifted with the ability ‘simply to perceive’, and his lover Daisy Barrett who renounces painting in favour of writing, declaring, ‘You can say something that matters in a book’; Jesse Baltram in The Good Apprentice, a once-godlike figure now trapped at the centre of a web of illusion, and his tortured ex-lover Max Point; the supremely egotistical Jack Sheerwater in The Message to the Planet (1989), and the blocked, tormented Owen Silbury in Jackson’s Dilemma: all of these characters in 52  Iris Murdoch, ‘Journal, 23 May 1978–28 December 1980’, KUAS202/1/13, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 13, p. 148. 53  Susan Hill, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch’ (BBC, 27 April 1982), hereafter Hill, np. 54  Wendy Lesser, ‘Interview with Iris Murdoch’, The Threepenny Review, 19 (Autumn 1984), 13–15, hereafter Lesser, 13. 55  A. S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), p. 82.

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one way or another reflect elements of Murdoch.56 Other characters, such as Hugh Peronett in An Unofficial Rose and Harriet Gavender in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, had, like Murdoch, attempted painting in their youth. Hugh, who enters the Civil Service ‘after he had decided, or rather discovered, that he was not a painter’, longs to possess great art so much that he marries a woman whose family has an art collection.57 The (fictional) sketch for Susannah Bathing by Tintoretto which is the collection’s final remaining piece becomes for him a ‘golden dream of another world’ (UR, p. 91) before which he weaves comforting illusions, though he finally acquiesces to his son’s demand that he sell the sketch, and can henceforth only visit it in the National Gallery. Harriet, before marriage and motherhood, had been an art student and feels ‘the aching sense of a tiny lost talent’—perhaps an echo of the disappointment Murdoch surely felt at the realisation that she lacked the talent to become a painter.58 Though she no longer paints, Harriet, like Murdoch, frequents art galleries. Ironically, she does so while her psychoanalyst husband Blaise visits a fictional patient, invented as a cover for his affair and allegedly likewise a frustrated painter. At the National Gallery, Harriet finds ‘pure “experience” […] it’s like being let out into a huge space and not being myself anymore’ (SPLM, pp. 42–43). She fails, nonetheless, to attend sufficiently to the paintings. ‘Hypnotised’ by the tree in the centre of Giorgione’s The Sunset, she is dimly conscious that it has a ‘vital message’ for her, but does not recognise that the tree symbolises the reality of her own situation (SPLM, p.  42). She has recently dreamed of, and seen, her husband’s secret illegitimate child, ‘merged almost into the dark trunk’ of a tree in her garden, of which Giorgione’s tree is an echo (SPLM, p. 3). By means of these sharply differing representations of painters and would-be painters, Murdoch reveals the moral ambiguity of the role: it can engender duplicity, self-deception, and the abuse of power as well as the refined vision which is a hallmark of goodness. Nevertheless even her failed or failing painters recognise the validity of great art, which points beyond itself towards a higher truth. 56  Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980) hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as NS, p. 124, 130. 57  Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as UR, p. 13. 58  Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as SPLM, p. 9.

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‘Any Serious Pursuit and Expression of Truth Moves Towards Fundamental Questions’: Ideas in Evolution Fifteen volumes of Murdoch’s journals, covering the period 1939–1996, became publicly available in 2017 when they were gifted to the Kingston University Archives and Special Collections by John Bayley’s second wife Audi.59 These journals provide invaluable insights into Murdoch’s thought processes, the subjects which compelled her attention, and her evolving ideas for fictional and philosophical works. This study will concentrate principally on Murdoch’s journals of the later 1940s because it is during this period that she records most fully her thoughts on visual images, the visual arts, and in particular painting.60 In summer 1946 Murdoch returned from working for UNRRA in Europe and, being without funds or employment, spent a year at her parents’ house in Chiswick. She later described this as her ‘nadir’ year.61 Her journals document the rigorous programme of solitary study which she undertook, as she strove to teach herself and to work out her philosophical position, in constant debate with herself. Her move to Cambridge in autumn 1948 lifted her spirits, though she still felt intellectually isolated. Although these journals are largely composed of extensive notes on the philosophy and philosophers Murdoch was then absorbed in studying, they also reveal that she continued to think deeply about visual images and the visual arts during the later 1940s and also point to her increasing realisation that her knowledge and understanding of them could enable her to develop her comprehension of philosophical concepts and find her way forward as a writer. Murdoch returned several times in her journals of this period to the idea of viewing a work of art. In November 1947, within a lengthy consideration of Wittgenstein’s claims about the power of sketched human faces to express more than language can, she noted ‘looking at a work of art’, and again a few lines later, ‘how I look at a picture’.62 These  Iris Murdoch’s journals, KUAS202, Iris Murdoch Collections.  Murdoch’s journal for the period 1939–1945 is missing, believed to have been destroyed by Murdoch later in life. 61  Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 247. 62   Iris Murdoch, 7–8 November 1947, ‘Journal, 4 June-16 November 1947’, KUAS202/1/4, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 4, p. 167. 59 60

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references seem to have been offered as examples of a uniquely private and personal experience which is difficult or impossible to express verbally, much like the experience of looking at a sketched face. The experience can only be communicated by pointing to the sketched face itself, or—as Murdoch demonstrates repeatedly in her novels—by pointing to a painting which can articulate meaning more eloquently than words. She went on, within the same extended discussion, to set herself the task: ‘Compare thinking of an absent person with thinking of an absent work of art’. She wondered whether her experience of a work of art familiar to her would be affected by whether or not she is in its presence, because, as she adds in parentheses, ‘I don’t perceive it’. She asked herself what ‘I have fully understood’ means in relation to a work of art, and what role imagination plays in the process of understanding.63 The next day she again observed, ‘We don’t “perceive” [a] work of art, so in a way it doesn’t matter if it’s “there” or not’ and comments on the ‘feeling of inexhaustibility’ which a work of art occasions, which may be ‘perceptual’ or ‘aesthetic’ inexhaustibility (Journal 5, p.  17). The repeated references to perceiving indicate that Murdoch was thinking specifically of visual works of art. The experience of looking at a work of art—almost always a painting— appears in almost every one of Murdoch’s novels, with widely varying moral impacts on each viewer. She commented in a 1993 interview with Martin Gayford for Modern Painters: Really attending to great pictures, I think, is like enlightenment in Buddhism. It does really make one feel that the reality of the world appears as something one has not seen before. That suddenly you’re confronted with colour and form, a kind of vital reality. […] This matter of the veil being removed is something which is done by painting in a very immediate way. One may say, well music and poetry do it also. But what we’re doing mainly in life is looking, seeing. It’s the visual world which is with us all the time.64

Art engenders clarity of vision most unequivocally in the case of Dora Greenfield’s momentary unselfing, in The Bell, before Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly. ‘I think this is a marvellous picture … it has a kind of simplicity about it which is moving’, Murdoch 63  Iris Murdoch, 16 November 1947, ‘Journal, 16 November 1947–13 February 1948’, KUAS202/1/5, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 5, p. 2. 64  Martin Gayford, ‘Beautiful and Good’, 53.

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remarked in a 1984 discussion of the novel with Eric Robson.65 Dora, who is wandering through the National Gallery in an unsettled state of mind having just run away from her lover Noel Spens, recognises that the pictures are ‘something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood’.66 When she arrives at the Gainsborough she feels an impulse to ‘go down on her knees before it, embracing it, shedding tears’ (TB, p. 191). Her experience in the gallery engenders her realisation that she must try to repair her marriage: ‘since somewhere, something good existed, it might be that her problems would be solved after all’ (TB, p. 190).67 Though she does describe it to a friend (Michael Meade) ‘in a half amused manner’ (TB, p. 306), Dora does not reflect on her spontaneous response to the Gainsborough. Conversely, in The Nice and the Good Paula Biranne’s attempts to refine her vision of Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time take place over an extended period, both in the painting’s presence and in its absence. Richard, Paula’s husband, had long ago ‘first made her really look at it, and it had become the symbol of their courtship’.68 As Rowe has observed, Paula’s sustained attention to the painting helps her to perceive her relationship with Richard more accurately, and to set it on a more truthful footing. She comes to see Richard more objectively and to recognise that she loves him unconditionally, despite his moral failings. Their reunion takes place before the Bronzino. That the painting’s meaning is inexhaustible, despite Paula’s increased understanding of it, is shown by the way that Murdoch provides the reader with additional details which Paula remains unaware of, such as the reversed hands on the figure of Deceit which hint at Richard’s role in his colleague Joseph Radeechy’s suicide (Richard having replaced Radeechy’s gun by his right hand instead of his left whilst trying to cover up his involvement). Rowe contends: ‘The link between text and image is being used by Murdoch to test the reader, who is reminded of Richard’s 65  Eric Robson, ‘Iris Murdoch talks with Eric Robson’, Revelations, Border TV, Channel Four Television, 22 September 1984, hereafter Robson, np. 66  Iris Murdoch, The Bell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as TB, p. 190. 67  For detailed analysis of Dora’s experience of the Gainsborough, see Anne Rowe, VAIM, pp.  162–173, and ‘A Secular Iconography: Art Galleries and Museums’ in Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London by Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), hereafter SSBC, pp. 39–40. 68  Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as NG, p. 129.

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even greater capacity for deceit, but is also being required to view him with similar compassion’.69 The quality of attention which Paula brings to bear on the Bronzino—her concentrated intellectual and emotional efforts to perceive it carefully and objectively—contrasts markedly with the quality of attention which Hugh Peronett gives to Tintoretto’s sketch for Susanna Bathing in An Unofficial Rose. Hugh, like Paula, reflects on a work of art over a long period, when it is both present and absent. Paula’s imaginative attention, working on the Bronzino, allows her to reach a greater understanding of both the painting and her own situation, but Hugh’s attention to the Tintoretto lapses into an egoistic, romantic fantasy of it as a ‘shrine of refuge’ (UR, p. 54). Other characters likewise fail to perceive works of art with sufficient attention. In Under the Net, Jake Donaghue’s meditation before Franz Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier merely reinforces his self-delusion. Rowe notes that The Laughing Cavalier ‘functions as an extended metaphor for Jake’s existential wish-fulfilment and informs the reader more than the character, who is so self-engrossed he remains oblivious to any significance it may have outside what he himself ascribes to it’.70 Jake seats himself before the painting to think over a problem and hubristically imagines that the Cavalier endorses his eventual decision about it. Irony is inherent in Jake’s remark that ‘I begin to see the whole picture’ because he has failed to attend to the painting and to recognise its separate existence from himself and has instead subsumed it into his illusions.71 Jake does at least look at the painting, though his attention to it is cursory; some of Murdoch’s characters are still more blind to great works of art. In An Accidental Man (1971), for example, young, beautiful Gracie Tisbourne, ‘who constantly mixed Van Gogh up with Cézanne’, views art galleries simply as convenient settings in which to meet with her fiancé Ludwig Leferrier: ‘they kissed each other in the National Gallery and the Courtauld Institute and the Victoria and Albert Museum’ and to smooth over a quarrel Gracie suggests that they go to the Hayward Gallery where ‘there’s that exhibish of what’s-his-name we haven’t seen yet’.72 The truth emanating from the great masters by which they are surrounded is juxtaposed with the superficiality of Gracie’s love. Matthew Gibson-Grey, a diplomat, and Mavis  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 138.  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 63. 71  Iris Murdoch, Under the Net (London: Reprint Society, 1955), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as UN, p. 136. 72  Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man (London: Book Club Associates, 1973), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as AM, p. 11, 88, 341. 69 70

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Argyll, who are similarly seeking private places to conduct their affair, mirror the younger couple’s behaviour: Matthew writes to Mavis to suggest, ‘National Gallery tomorrow, British Museum on Tuesday and Wallace Collection on Wednesday!’ (AM, p. 241). When Mavis, now living with Matthew’s brother Austin, writes to Matthew, ‘We live from day to day in a denuded world the atmosphere of which I cannot quite convey to you, but some great Renaissance Italian could have painted it’ (AM, p. 389) she touches on truth, but there is humour in her cursory, self-romanticising description and her evident failure to attend to her situation. When Murdoch makes her character suggest that a painting might convey her reality more eloquently than words, there is also surely a degree of self-­ parody. Other characters in An Accidental Man are aware of the power of art to point to truth, but can no longer access it: Austin Gibson-Grey (who terms himself the ‘accidental man’ of the title), jobless and directionless, wonders, ‘Suppose he were to go to the National Gallery, would Titian or Rembrandt or Piero work a wonder for him as they had once done? No. All books, even the greatest, become exhausted if read often enough, and all pictures lose their power to charm’ (AM, pp. 24–25). His suffering wife Dorina has also, by implication, become impervious to great art. Experiencing a desperate longing to ‘stay out in the open now, do simple and ordinary things’, Dorina fills her days with nightmarish wanderings around London: ‘She walked in St James’s Park. She went to the National Gallery. In the afternoon she went to the cinema and cried for two hours in the dark’ (AM, p. 347, 350). Murdoch also demonstrates how works of art can become objects of power play, as with the set of prints depicting American birds by John James Audubon, owned by Martin and Antonia Lynch-Gibbon in A Severed Head. The details of the prints themselves are no longer viewed with any attention; instead, they shuttle between Martin’s old and new residences as the couple reunite and then part again. Martin eventually discovers that his wife has been involved in a relationship with his brother Alexander and half-humorously offers to give his half of the set to Antonia and Alexander ‘as a wedding present’.73 The Audubon prints are skilfully and beautifully made, but cannot be considered masterpieces.74 73  Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as ASH, p. 232. 74  Although John James Audubon’s vast collection, Birds of America (1827–1838) is a remarkable feat, there are variances in quality and detail across the collection. Audubon’s attempts to place birds in ‘action poses’ sometimes resulted in unconvincing compositions.

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Nevertheless, the attempt to attend to their careful representation of details of external reality would have been morally beneficial to Martin and might have helped him to develop the clarity of vision required to comprehend his own situation, to perceive the deceptions practised by those around him, and his own complicity in them. Similarly, had Martin paid greater attention to the sculptures created by Alexander—in particular, a bronze head of Antonia, infused with eroticism—he might have perceived far sooner the truth of his brother’s long-standing affair with his wife. Martin’s remark to Alexander that his art is ‘a technique for discovering more about what is real’ (ASH, p. 51) is ironic: the sculpture of Antonia presents Martin with the truth but he fails to attend to it. Failure to perceive art with attention is encapsulated most dramatically in Morgan Browne in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, whose romantic self-absorption means that she is easily convinced by the deeply cynical Julius King, her ex-lover, to view the Tate’s exhibition of late works by J. M. W. Turner as ‘limited and amateurish’.75 Morgan’s blindness to the beauty and truth of the Turners functions as an ironic comment on her blindness to the deceptions which Julius, a Satanic figure, practises on her family and friends and on her, and which culminate in the death of Morgan’s brotherin-law Rupert. In ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’ Murdoch declares that great art ‘affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession’. She suggests that ‘even a shallow experience of what is great can have its effect’. Nonetheless, the experience of art is ‘easily degraded […] A great deal of art, perhaps most art, actually is self-consoling fantasy, and even great art cannot guarantee the quality of its consumer’s consciousness’ (EM, p. 370). Through her characters, she scrutinises ways in which art may be consumed, and the moral consequences of perceiving and of failing to perceive the truths to which art points. Murdoch’s note on the ‘feeling of inexhaustibility’ occasioned by great art sheds light on the way that certain paintings worked on Murdoch’s consciousness over long periods of time, regardless of whether she was able to view them in person. ‘I think it [painting] is fearfully complex’, she told Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage in a 1976 interview. ‘These great paintings are marvellously ambiguous. One’s analysis of them is quite different from one’s analysis of a novel in obvious ways. No, I think a great 75  Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (London: Penguin, 1972), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as FHD, p. 234.

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Fig. 2.6  Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, [1570–1576], Olomouc Museum of Art, Archdiocesan Museum Kroměr í̌ ž

painting is something fearfully complex which one can go on and on learning about. And this gives me enormous pleasure’.76 Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (Fig. 2.6) is a case in point. This painting, which depicts the satyr Marsyas being flayed alive as punishment for his hubris in daring to compete with the god Apollo, became, for Murdoch, a sublime image of the human condition. She described it to Martin Gayford in 1993 as ‘a 76  Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage, Transcript of ‘Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage interview Iris Murdoch’, University of East Anglia Interviews (AVC1043), 20 October 1976, KUAS6/6/2/8, Iris Murdoch Collections, p. 6.

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wonderful, spiritual, religious picture: the removal of the selfish ego’.77 Rowe observes that ‘although the myth of Marsyas and Apollo has been identified as a consistent influence on Murdoch’s thinking, when she refers to it, it is always as a picture’.78 Bayley describes it as ‘the painting which had the deepest and at the same time the most visible effect on [Murdoch’s] work’.79 Murdoch meditated on the painting for many years, finding in it vast inspiration; she had woven it into her novels long before she actually saw the original at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1983–1984. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat it is spoken of by Simon Foster, who sees the painting as emblematic of his relationship with his lover Axel Nilssen, and it permeates The Black Prince (1973), whose protagonist, the aspiring writer Bradley Pearson, having been granted what he deems ‘a sizeable ordeal labelled with my name’ is flayed and goes through a process of redemptive suffering.80 Later, it would be referenced in The Good Apprentice (1985) when the psychiatrist Thomas McCaskerville, studying his patient Edward, thinks, ‘the entranced face of the tortured Marsyas, as Apollo kneels lovingly to tear his skin off, prefigures the death and resurrection of the soul’, and in Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) when the conversation turns to the subject of remorse, and the painter Owen Silbury remarks: ‘Artists know all about it […] How Titian must have felt it, when he was very old, The Flaying of Marsyas—the pain, the pain, the old man must have felt it deeply at the end’.81 Titian’s representation of an apparently barbaric act was, for Murdoch, ‘a sort of icon, a religious icon’, as she said in 1984. She described it as ‘an image of the death of the self—that the god flays you, that you lose your egoism in this sort of agony, which is also ecstasy’.82 In the novels, The Flaying of Marsyas is never described explicitly; the attempt to do so would risk dangerously simplifying its meaning. Instead, a web of allusions permit the painting to retain its complexity and ambiguity, so that it can point beyond itself towards a truth which cannot be articulated except indirectly.  Martin Gayford, ‘Beautiful and Good’, 51.  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 146. 79  John Bayley, Iris, p. 88. 80  Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as BP, p. 331. 81  Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as GA, p. 78; Iris Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as JD, p. 64. 82  Eric Robson, Robson, np. 77 78

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Though Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas was, to Murdoch, the ‘greatest picture in the world’, Murdoch loved and revered a diverse range of paintings and continually strove to interrogate and refine her responses to them.83 Though her artistic tastes were often traditional, and in her later years she became increasingly concerned about modern art which seemed to her to be abandoning any attempt to point to beyond itself to truth, she remained open to new influences. Bayley remarks in his memoir of his wife, ‘Almost any picture could inspire her in […] invisible ways’, and notes that Murdoch was drawn not only to masterpieces of the Western canon such as The Flaying of Marsyas and Piero’s Resurrection, but also to almost unknown works such as, in a Lille gallery, a picture by a minor Dutch painter of a road over a hill, which ‘absorbed [her] silent attention’ and has a ‘ghostly presence’ in her later novels.84 In June 1945 Murdoch was delighted when fifty paintings were returned from storage to the National Gallery, including her particular favourites by Van Eyck, Bellini, Mantegna, Titian, Rubens, El Greco, Rembrandt, Claude, and Vermeer. ‘Oh heavenly bliss! […] I still feel delirious with the first shock. It felt really like peace’, she told David Hicks.85 Her journal records that on 19 March 1947 she attended an ‘excellent’ lecture by René Huyghe, chief curator at the Louvre, titled Tendences de la Peinture Contemporaine, on the subject of ‘painting as a function of our changing conceptions of reality’; Murdoch’s great interest is evidenced by the detailed notes that she made in her journal entry of that date.86 On 23 September 1947 she made several pages of notes (in French) on Impressionist painting: its history, influences, and key movements which arose in reaction to it (Journal 4, pp. 53–56). Impressionism would, in her novels, become associated with a false way of seeing.87 Art criticism requires sustained attention to something which is other than, and transcends, the self; it is therefore, in Murdoch’s philosophy, inherently moral. In her journals of the late 1940s Murdoch reflected on the nature of art criticism and repeatedly connects it with metaphysics, 83  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 20 February 1984, KUAS80/2/50, Iris Murdoch Collections. 84  John Bayley, Iris, pp. 87–88. 85  Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, 1 June 1945, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS.  Eng. c. 7964. 86  Iris Murdoch, ‘Journal, 4 June 1945–12 May 1947’, KUAS202/1/3, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 3, pp. 89–92. 87  Anne Rowe discusses Murdoch’s use of Impressionist techniques in VAIM, pp. 11–12.

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observing on 25 August 1947, ‘Metaphysics is a non-objectivising knowledge. (Like art criticism—?)’ and in an entry made on the following day, ‘Metaphysician like art critic? More like Sir Kenneth Clark then than like Walter Pater’ (Journal 4, p. 49). The parallel repeatedly drawn between metaphysics and art criticism points to the moral quest, fundamental to both disciplines, to comprehend the nature of reality. Clark’s objective, shrewd and scholarly attention to art contrasts markedly with Pater’s subjective, emotional and sensual responses which seem to be more revealing of the author than his subject. Clark’s critical approach was, Murdoch seems to have believed, more capable of revealing the truth to be found in great art. Murdoch strove to develop her critical knowledge and understanding of art, and evidently believed dialogue with others to be a crucial aspect of this process. On 22 March 1947 she defined art criticism as the ‘attempt to make others see what I see’. She noted that ‘conversations about works of art’ bring about ‘a feeling then that the experience is shared’. This is an ‘expansive feeling’, involving the ‘creation of [a] very concept between myself and other’ which moves communication towards that which was initially thought to be ‘incommunicable’ (Journal 3, p. 111). Her views on the moral benefits of joint attention to art are developed at greater length in ‘The Idea of Perfection’. Ironically, Murdoch’s art historian characters, Paul Greenwood and Henry Marshalson, seem unable to give sustained, objective attention to reality beyond the self. The Bell’s Paul Greenwood is authoritarian, quarrelsome, and masochistic. He claims to love his estranged wife Dora but does not attempt to perceive her; rather, he insists that she conforms to his idea of the perfect wife. He is an intellectual, committed to his work, but his research on the Imber Court manuscripts brings him no closer to understanding the Imber community. In contrast, Dora intuitively understands more about the community’s emotions and tensions, and the dozens of watercolour sketches of Imber Court which she eventually produces imply that despite her ‘very meagre’ artistic talent (TB, p.  306) she is learning to look with greater attention. In Henry and Cato, Henry Marshalson plans to write a book on the art of Max Beckmann, but his propensity to appropriate Beckmann’s paintings to bolster his self-image (he compares himself to Beckmann’s self-portraits and compares his fiancée Stephanie to portraits of women by Beckmann) signal his inadequacy for such a task. Henry visits the National Gallery and views, with great pleasure, Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, but ignores the truth which the painting offers to him, as Sage comments: ‘Henry takes it rather smugly as a reminder of the dangerous forces that

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toy with human destinies […] What he should have paid attention to was the eerie mutual ignorance of the figures in the painting’.88 Bove and Rowe draw a parallel between the goddess Diana’s ‘ruthless indifference’ to Actaeon’s death and Henry’s self-centred lack of concern for his friend Cato’s torment: ‘Henry’s own response to Cato’s suffering is in its way as cruel as hers’.89 On 10 January 1947, Murdoch made a lengthy journal entry, extending over 12 pages, which is instigated by her desire to identify what she calls at this stage in her thinking a ‘technical sense of “delight”. A sort of freeing of the self. Joy. Upsurge of one’s own vitality, transcending the given occasion’. She turned to painting in order to refine her ideas, reflecting on the ability of some painters—she names Van Eyck, ‘some Breughel’, and Rousseau—to create ‘a world of separate bodies and objects in a clear light’. She compared their world of ‘Clear detail. Separateness. A sort of hard surface, cleanness, innocence’ with the ‘disintegrated’ worlds of Impressionist painters. She acknowledged Cézanne as ‘a great painter’ (and also inserted the name of Monet, seemingly as an afterthought)’, but her observation that ‘one is somehow painfully inside Van Gogh’s splendid intolerable paintings’ implies that her early veneration of Van Gogh had modulated a little; she now valued coolness and separateness above passion and emotion (Journal 3, p. 24). Murdoch then progressed to literature, musing, ‘What is the parallel in Queneau and Beckett? The same feeling of a separate world and of a certain lucidity […] Many novelists create separate worlds, but without that clarity and hardness’ (Journal 3, pp. 24–25). She noted that this clarity and hardness ‘emanates from the style […] not from any descriptive detail about people and places’ (Journal 3, p.  25). In her extended reflections—which include her attempts to define what is meant by ‘delight’, Coleridge’s discussion of fancy and imagination, consideration of which poets give ‘delight’, and the nature of ‘paradis perdu’—Murdoch aligned painters with writers in a manner which was to become characteristic of her. She observed, for example, that ‘Jane Austen is more of a world-creator in a sense parallel to Rousseau’. She links Dali and de Chirico with Wordsworth, noting, ‘The clear light and the objects. […] Delight in hard separate objects? A paradis perdu of some kind. Innocence’ (Journal 3, pp.  25–6). Murdoch concluded by asking 88  Lorna Sage, ‘Pursuit of Imperfection’, p. 117. In the novel, the painting is called Diana and Actaeon. 89  Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe, SSBC, p. 42.

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herself: ‘Are one’s profound pleasures (in literature or art) of these three kinds then?’ The first kind, labelled in the margin ‘tragic sense of life’, includes Dostoevsky, Rembrandt, and Herbert. The second kind, labelled ‘the most existentialist’, and ‘something to do with body’, includes Van Gogh and Henry Miller; a little later she observed that El Greco also belongs in this category. The third kind, which she called ‘essentialist’, includes Rousseau, Queneau, Beckett—‘and songs’. With reference to the song in Sartre’s La Nausée, she observed, ‘The song, the bird, the Rousseau picture, “Murphy”—things that fly up free and separate out of the tangle of existence’. As well as writers and painters, philosophers are woven into her thinking; she observed the ‘SK [Søren Kierkegaard] subject matter’ of the first category, though she went on to add that ‘SK is in all three categories—the essentialist and the implicitly and explicitly existentialist!’ She named Blanchot, Pascal, and Unamuno within the second category (Journal 3, pp. 30–35). The constant interconnections between literature and painting which Murdoch makes in her journals, the 10 January 1947 entry being a prime example, are evidence of her conviction that the arts are inherently related. For this belief she is indebted to the Renaissance tradition of ut pictura poesis (‘as is painting, so is poetry’), and more specifically to Henry James, whose fiction she was eagerly reading in the 1940s and would return to throughout her life. James had a painterly eye for colour, texture, light, shape, and space. Colin Bailey comments, ‘The visual arts were part of the bedrock on which Henry James built his house of fiction. He composed the most dramatic moments in his work as though they were framed, as though his characters were placed in light and shade as a painter might pose figures on a canvas’.90 James understood that there are infinite ways of perceiving and representing reality and that therefore realism should not be not static. He created visual metaphors as part of his quest to portray consciousness with increased accuracy and thus enhance his realism. Rowe comments, ‘It is in her reliance on the ultimately sensible nature of language for the communication of meaning that Murdoch displays marked affinities to James’.91 The visual (and auditory and tactile) image of the pagoda at the midpoint of James’s The Golden Bowl, discussed by 90  Colin B. Bailey, ‘Henry James and American Painting’, 6 June 2017, [accessed 21 December 2021]. 91  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 32.

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Murdoch in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, provides a representation of his heroine Maggie Verver’s troubled consciousness as she becomes aware of her husband’s affair. By means of such conceits, the intangible becomes tangible; ‘the reader easily, without even noticing, transcribes [the image] into an awareness of an immediately recognisable state of mind’.92 James also integrates numerous well-known paintings into his novels, including Delacroix’s Le 28 Juillet and Morris Hunt’s The Scapegoat, to create analogies for his characters’ states of consciousness, as Viola Hopkins Winner has analysed. Within her extensive study of James’ painterly allusions, Winner observes that James strove in his fiction to emulate his beloved Tintoretto’s style and form; that Decamps’ Three Arab Horsemen Crossing a Stream is present in The Golden Bowl, that Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi hovers behind the characterisation of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, and that the latter novel is pervaded by the art of Veronese.93 When a painting is invoked, directly or indirectly, it casts light on the novel, and the novel directs readers to give attention to the painting, strengthening and perpetuating the fellowship of the arts which underpins James’s aesthetics. In ‘The Art of Fiction’, throughout which James repeatedly turns to the visual arts and draws on their critical vocabulary to strengthen his defence of the novel form, he contends that: The analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of the vehicle), is the same, their success is the same. They may learn from each other, they may explain and sustain each other. Their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of another.94

Winner discerns that ‘James was sceptical of efforts to create purely pictorial effects in literature ungoverned by a larger literary purpose’. James believed that although description could, in the visual arts, be an end in itself, the writer should always strive to convey ‘the essence of literature— the workings of the mind and the emotions verbally comprehended’.95 His 92  Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1993), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as MGM, p. 261. 93  Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1970). 94  Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader, ed. by Stephen Regan (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 68–78 (p. 70). 95  Viola Hopkins Winner, ‘Pictorialism in Henry James’s Theory’, Criticism, 9, 1 (Winter 1967), 1–21, hereafter ‘Pictorialism’, 5–6.

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impact on Murdoch’s radical experimentation with images and techniques drawn from the visual arts as part of her quest to portray reality with truth can hardly be overestimated. In fact, in 1968 she acknowledged to W. K. Rose, ‘Henry James I feel a good deal of affinity with […] The only person I’m certain has influenced me is Henry James’.96 The comparison between James and Murdoch can be extended further because both had initially considered painting as a career. James, like Murdoch, renounced the painterly ambitions of his youth, having experienced, as he said, the somewhat painful realisation that since a particular life model’s ‘perfect gymnastic figure meant living truth, I should certainly best testify to the whole mystery by pocketing my pencil’. He nevertheless gained from his friend the painter John La Farge, ‘the dawning perception that the arts were after all essentially one and that even with canvas and brush whisked out of my grasp I still needn’t feel disinherited’.97 When she was experimenting with painting in the early 1940s, James was surely in Murdoch’s thoughts; she may even have been consciously emulating him. Her early attempts at painting place Murdoch not only in the company of James but more broadly within a distinguished lineage of writers who painted and drew in their early years, some of whom considered a career in the visual arts, including Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henrik Ibsen, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats, J. R. R. Tolkien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Stephen Spender.98 James’s claim that the arts are ‘essentially one’ is often echoed by writer-­ painters. For example, the novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Bowen, who had studied art before deciding that her talents lay in writing, stated, ‘Much (and perhaps the best) of my writing is verbal painting’.99 Such 96  W. K. Rose, ‘Iris Murdoch, Informally’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 16–29, hereafter Rose (p. 28). Rowe analyses The Sandcastle in relation to James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, observing that in this novel ‘Murdoch implicitly acknowledges her debt to James, and reveals the aesthetics of her style’. VAIM, p. 33. 97  Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother (Prince Classics, 2020 (1914)) p. 60, 61. 98  Murdoch engaged avidly with all of these writers. She discussed them in letters and interviews, named Alice in Wonderland and Kim as ‘her earliest absolute favourite books’ (Hill, np), included Wuthering Heights and The Brothers Karamazov among the texts which most influenced her (in a list compiled for the British Council, see Chronology, p. 138), and knew Bowen and Spender well. 99  Donald Friedman, The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures by Writers (Minneapolis: Mid-List Press, 2007), hereafter Writer’s Brush, p. 405.

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remarks seem, however, to avoid acknowledgement of the fundamental differences between writing and painting, and thus to ignore James’s view of the arts: as Winner states, he conceived of them as ‘parallel, not merging, forms’.100 Winner points out that James’s view of painting and writing as analogous is ‘based […] on his assumption that painting is essentially a representational art form’; Murdoch follows him in this belief.101 The arts are indeed ‘essentially one’, in the sense that all art is a pursuit of truth. Good artists are united in their shared quest for the reality beyond any form. Murdoch contends in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that: any serious pursuit and expression of truth moves towards fundamental questions […] ‘Truth’ is something we recognise in good art when we are led to a juster, clearer, more detailed, more refined understanding. Good art ‘explains’ truth itself, by manifesting deep conceptual connections. Truth is clarification, justice, compassion. (MGM, p. 321)

Murdoch understood that the pursuit of truth transcended variations between aesthetic mediums; that concepts, images, and techniques could translate from one medium to another, and that by channelling painterly techniques and images into her writing she could portray reality with greater accuracy. Nevertheless, Murdoch remained acutely aware of the complexity of the relation between images and words. In November 1947 she recorded her conviction that the origins of ‘misunderstandings about language’ are twofold: they arise ‘(a) from not und[erstanding the] nature of words and lang[uage]’ and ‘(b) from not und[erstanding the] relation of images to words and [the] rôle of images in thinking’ (Journal 5, p. 26). Her journals of the late 1940s reveal that these subjects became personal obsessions. Like James who compared ‘the roundabout, faint descriptive tokens of respectable prose’ with ‘the immediate projection of the figure by pencil’, Murdoch believed that images could enable more direct unmediated contact with reality.102 In March 1948 (inspired by her reading of Sartre), she noted: ‘Word and image function differently—Word is sign— by image we “possess” the world. When word becomes image it ceases to be sign’.103  Viola Hopkins Winner, ‘Pictorialism’, 3.  Viola Hopkins Winner, ‘Pictorialism’, 3. 102  Henry James, Picture and Text (Harper and Brothers: New York, 1893), p. 16. 103   Iris Murdoch, 6 March 1948, ‘Journal, 13 February-17 December 1948’, KUAS202/1/6, Iris Murdoch Collections, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Journal 6, p. 44. 100 101

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Thinking and Language: The ‘Spur to Images’ The journals present Murdoch’s thoughts on words and images in their raw, unedited state, providing a valuable record of the difficult process of assembling and articulating them. In August 1947, for example, she was pondering: Use of images in thinking? Image is act. It is all dialogical thinking by images? (Image/concept a true opposition?) What is a concept anyhow? Talk about words not concepts! There are words, and images. Words and images are both acts. Both have emotional associations  – Both may be treated as dead things, or spring up as live. But we conceive of a calculus of words – not of images. Images we think as private – words we think as public. (But words are not public in sense of fixed calculus. Words as well as images may be dialogical symbols). (Journal 4, pp. 51–52)

Murdoch was turning to Nikolai Berdyaev, and to Sartre, to guide her. ‘Consider what Berdyaev says about the importance of images in thinking. Existential thinking is by images not concepts. Concepts are public and general, images private and personal’, she noted in August 1947, and in October 1947, ‘I have not sufficiently thought about [the] part played by images in thinking, apropos language. Read Sartre on “L’Imaginaire”’ (Journal 4, p.  42, 114). In a journal section of November 1947, titled ‘Sartre on images’ she observes, ‘Image is not sign. Interpreting—symbolic movem[en]t—something bet[ween] intuition & thought. […] Word is sign not image. I don’t need my inner language—I create it. But words verge toward image. Sign keeps its exteriority. Image yields to thought. But there is verbal tendency in images, imaging tendency in words’ (Journal 4, p. 191). Sartre was evidently a key influence on her conception of the intricate, fluctuating relationship between words and images. Murdoch’s early journals illustrate her conception of images as existing on a more truthful plane, beneath or beyond words. In November 1947, meditating on the ‘[r]ole of words’, she remarked that words ‘in [a] work of art, description etc. simply spur to images’ (Journal 4, p.  193). She spent much time and thought on trying to articulate the characteristics of images. She conceived of images as animated and in constant flux: the ‘[f]luidity of [an] image is [an] essential part of its function’, she stated, and also that a ‘pure image’ […] is per se fluid—has no fixed structure’ (Journal 5, p.  8, 16). In January 1948 she commented that images are

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‘not “pictures”—but acts, purposes’ (Journal 5, p.  128), and in March 1948 that ‘images bear a charge’ (Journal 6, p. 42). These entries point to her sense that images are dynamic, transformative. She said, ‘[the] world appears to me in images, not in pure intellections […] Images of things are livelier, are involuntary’ (Journal 6, p. 114). Despite the fluidity and dynamism which she detected in images, Murdoch believed they could also be ‘concrete’ and ‘particular’. She asked herself: ‘Is an image less “general” than a word? (yes)’ and, within the same extended journal entry, noted, ‘Image is concrete, partic[ular], mine—my consc[iousness]. Words are often part of such a consc[iousness]—too?’ (Journal 4, p.  189, 193). Murdoch’s fourth novel The Bell (1958) was wrought out of one such concrete, particular visual image which she attempts to catch and fix in verbal form: the young Toby Gashe walking towards Michael Meade, staring directly into the headlights of Michael’s parked car, to discover whether human eyes glow in the dark. ‘I think the first thing I saw was Toby walking into the lights of the car’, Murdoch said to Susan Hill in 1982 of the process of writing The Bell.104 Michael is an ex-schoolmaster who had, years earlier, formed a close relationship with a fourteen-year-old student, Nick Fawley, which would now be considered abusive. At this point in the novel Michael is becoming increasingly conscious of his erotic desire for Toby, though he is also simultaneously developing a dream of protecting and nurturing the boy without ever revealing his attraction to him. Michael is a problematic character, whose moral failure has devastating effects on those around him. Compassion for Michael is, however, generated by a variety of means: by the way that readers are granted access to his inner life, in contrast to the many characters in this novel who remain opaque to the reader; by Michael’s feeling—sincere in that moment, though it cannot be sustained—of a great ‘fund of love and goodwill’ towards Toby, which he believes can be ‘made a power for good’ (TB, p. 157); and also by the way that Michael reflects his creator. Murdoch described herself to Hill as having ‘a very clear visual imagination’, and she grants this facility

 Susan Hill, Hill, np. Conradi speculates that the image of Toby in the headlights may have emanated from Murdoch’s sight, whilst on holiday with friends in France in August 1954, of John Simopoulous running, in the light of a car’s headlights, to rescue a drunken cyclist who then gave him a crucifix. The Bell was dedicated to John Simopoulous. Conradi remarks that although ‘her happy account of the journey is wholly remote from the Imber melodrama’, the echo between them is ‘still of note’ (Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 421). 104

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to Michael, who, feeling himself ‘blessed, or cursed, with a strong power of visualising’, conjures up images of passionate fantasy as he struggles to control his desire (TB, p. 156).105 The image of Toby walking towards the headlights is, perhaps, the strongest influence on the readers’ view of Michael. Michael does not fully recognise the extent of his desire for Toby, but the image vividly conveys it to readers, who are made to experience Toby’s innocence and beauty sensually, from Michael’s perspective. The moment is slowed down and savoured, as Toby’s ‘brightly illuminated figure’ advances with a ‘graceful slow stride’, ‘his eyes steadily fixed’ on Michael (TB. p. 157). ‘We make desire, disgust etc precise by giving them [an] imaged object’, Murdoch had noted in her journal some years previously; this image articulates Toby’s attractions with such eloquence that Michael’s instinctive response to kiss him is made to seem very natural (Journal 6, p. 44). Like Richard Biranne who touches the Bronzino in The Nice and the Good, and Simon Foster who caresses a kouros in the National Museum at Athens in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Michael is irresistibly drawn to embrace that which is good and beautiful. But as Toby is a human being, not a work of art, the consequences of Michael’s action are complex, messy, and damaging. The sudden appearance of Nick, who has walked in Toby’s wake towards the headlights, underlines the moral harm caused by the same action years before and makes its repetition seem inevitable. The ‘concrete, particular’ visual image of Toby walking towards the headlights appears only once in The Bell, providing a moment of clarity which illuminates Michael’s consciousness, guides readers’ interpretations of character and plot, and makes readers evaluate their own moral positions. Elsewhere in her oeuvre, Murdoch employs visual images in a far more sustained and intricate manner. She invokes certain images repeatedly in her efforts to represent the inner lives of her characters with truthfulness and to alert readers to moments of moral failure. One such image is the Post Office Tower in The Black Prince, whose significance Bove and Rowe have analysed in detail. The Tower haunts the consciousness of Bradley Pearson, the novel’s protagonist, who lives in its shadow. Bove and Rowe state, ‘The Tower is a shape-shifter, represented variously as erotic, comforting, menacing and evil—but in whatever guise, its appearance is always intertwined with Bradley’s disastrous moral failures’. They trace the Tower’s evolution ‘from an indicator of sexual/spiritual dualism  Susan Hill, Hill, np.

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into a symbol of the inevitable doom that casts its shadow over all the characters’ and contend: ‘Its presence poses a central moral question: how far are human beings capable of acting morally in the face of intense desire?’106 In her representations of the Post Office Tower Murdoch investigates in detail the capacity of a visual image to become an extended, multi-faceted metaphor. Murdoch sought at times to evoke other senses as well as the visual in her quest to convey experience with still greater realism. ‘Are there factual, olfactory etc images? They seem more like “reliving”. […] [The] imaging consc[iousness] wants to appropriate the essence—’ she wrote in her journal in December 1947 (Journal 5, pp. 73–74). One example of Murdoch’s synaesthetic quest is the image, and also the smell, of dead birds imprisoned in a cupboard, repeatedly invoked by Murdoch as a symbol of evil. In The Time of the Angels Carel Fisher, an Anglican priest who has lost his faith and filled the void with his own demonic mythology, shocks his idealistic brother Marcus by suggesting, ‘Suppose the truth were awful, suppose it was just a black pit, or like birds huddled in the dust in a dark cupboard?’107 In The Nice and the Good, John Ducane discovers that his colleague Radeechy, who has recently taken his own life, had held black masses in the vaults of Whitehall. Investigating the vaults, Ducane becomes aware of a ‘terrible smell’, which is traced to a heap of dead pigeons, captured and caged for ritual killing (NG, p. 193). When Judy McGrath, who had been involved in the masses and to whom Ducane is strongly attracted, attempts to seduce him, he studies her naked body and suddenly pictures, between her shoulder-blades, ‘a grey tumbled heap of dead pigeons’ (NG, p. 228). This vision causes Ducane to realise he cannot transgress his own moral code and is able to subdue his desire and resist temptation. Murdoch’s journal entry for 6 March 1948 records, in intriguing brevity, her own synaesthetic experience in response to a drift of Cambridge crocuses. She wrote: ‘Walking this afternoon toward Kings—I wanted the crocuses (mauve and white) to enter into me—they would not—until the chapel bell began to toll,—then I was penetrated by the colour’ (Journal 6, p. 45). This was, it seems, a sublime moment: the colours briefly pierce her consciousness, instigated by the sound of the bell. The incident seems to be echoed and inverted in the experience which she grants to Morgan  Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe, SSBC, p. 60, 66.  Iris Murdoch, The Time of the Angels (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as TA, p. 184. 106 107

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Browne in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. In this scene Murdoch seems to be imagining what might happen if sensory experience is taken to an extreme and is undergone by an individual who does not have the refined vision to attend to it without the intrusion of the ego. As Rowe remarks, ‘Any induction to the sublime can be double-edged’.108 Conradi comments, ‘The power of our inherited collective view of the world and our own dullness can keep out the world’s beauty, and its horror, and too swift an induction into that beauty or horror can be dangerous. […] In A Fairly Honourable Defeat Morgan experiences both in rapid succession’.109 Morgan, who is self-centred and volatile, and craves emotional drama, is briefly overwhelmed not only by the colours of flowers, but also by textures, sounds, and scents, all of which merge to intensify the vividness of her experience. The countryside is ‘stifling with the drowsy honey smells of flowers and the smell of green’, and the sound of bees buzzing ‘with sheer exhausted joy’ (FHD, p. 185). Morgan begins to perceive the infinite details and differences of the flowers, but the intensity of this multisensory experience of the flowers’ particularity and otherness is too much for her, and she begins to overlay their reality with consoling nostalgic memories of ‘classroom innocence’ and ‘holidays in childhood’, equating the scene with a prelapsarian state which she instinctively wants to regain (FHD, pp. 176–177). The flowers ‘begin to quiver in front of her eyes’ (FHD, p. 186). At the sight and touch of white comfrey, a plant unknown to Morgan since childhood, she is confronted with a terrifying vision of the world’s evil, ‘the loathsomeness at the centre of it all’ (FHD, p. 187), which temporarily blots out its beauty and may be construed as the ‘negative sublime’.110 Directly afterwards, when asked by her troubled nephew Peter Foster to give him an example of something good that humankind has created, Morgan recites ‘Full fathom five’, Ariel’s song from The Tempest: there is an echo of Murdoch’s chapel bells in ‘Hark now I hear them—ding dong bell’ (FHD, p. 189).111 When Morgan begins to recast her real experience of the flowers into an aesthetic experience, she is at once made to perceive the horror of the world. Her temporary unselfing gives her the strength instinctively to  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 156.  Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist (London: Macmillan, 1986), hereafter Saint and Artist, p. 108. 110  See Peter J. Conradi, Saint and Artist, pp. 105–108, for a more detailed discussion of the experience of the negative sublime. 111  This section of A Fairly Honourable Defeat is discussed further in Chapter 5. 108 109

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reject her nephew’s propositioning of her, when she senses ‘the imposition of a veto’ (FHD, p. 191). Yet her desire to aestheticise reality persists. She imagines herself in the Garden of Eden, ‘as if she had passed through a screen into some more primitive and lovely world, as if she were millennia away in the past or in the future in some paradise of undimmed experience and unblurred vision’ (FHD, p.  188). Her aestheticisation of reality is signalled by a sprig of vetch, which is striped ‘as if the colour had been drawn in by repeated strokes of a very fine pen’ (FHD, p. 189). It is surely no coincidence that Murdoch gave her character the name of her wayward, emotionally unstable protégé David Morgan, whom she warned, ‘One can only have an aesthetic experience in one theatre of sense at a time’.112 Though Murdoch herself sought to represent reality by aesthetic means, and invaded the senses in her quest to induce a more fully synaesthetic response in her readers, she understood the moral risk of what she was attempting: her goal was always to hone her art so that it could become progressively more truthful to reality, never to depart from reality into illusion and fantasy. Murdoch’s numerous journal entries in the late 1940s on images, words, and their relationship filter into her paper for the Aristotelian Society in 1951, subsequently published as ‘Thinking and Language’ (1951). In ‘Thinking and Language’ Murdoch contends that experience is ‘riddled with the sensible’: not only visual images, but also ‘sensations, in the sense of obscure bodily feelings’ (EM, p. 39). She states that ‘word experience in thinking may have various kinds of image-like character’ and identifies two extremes, the most private and the more public regions of thought: ‘the vague floating images which are pliant and indescribable, which as it were tell us nothing new, and the fully verbalised thought, ready for exposure’. Between these extremes is ‘the region where words occur but in a more indeterminate imaging manner (indeterminacy is a main characteristic of the mental image) and not at all like inner speech’ (EM, p. 34). Her conception of consciousness as pictorial remains, like the vast majority of her thought, remarkably consistent: almost three decades later, she reiterates in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that ‘the “unconscious mind” is a deep abode of ambiguous images’: in this central region, images of Good which emanate from Plato’s Forms are engaged in perpetual struggle against false images generated by the ego (MGM, p. 307). Deep sensual and emotional inner experiences linger on the borders of 112

 David Morgan, With Love and Rage, p. 72.

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thought, as elusive, partially materialised images, colours, and forms which seem to exist beyond or beneath the limitations of language. Murdoch’s views on the pictorial nature of consciousness are now supported by contemporary neuroscience, which acknowledges that seeing and thinking are ‘one overlapping brain function’.113 Murdoch conceives of the good artist as striving to develop ways to articulate and ‘fix’ the images arising in the central region of inner mental life, so that the barrier separating inner consciousness and external reality may be pierced. Murdoch declares in ‘Thinking and Language’ that when words seem inadequate for this purpose, metaphor is ‘the best possible’ form of expression: Here metaphor is not a peripheral excrescence upon the linguistic structure, it is its living centre. And the metaphors which we encounter, and which illuminate us, in conversation and in poetry, are offered and are found ­illuminating because language also occurs in thinking in the way that it does. We do not “suddenly” have to adopt the figurative mode; we are using it all the time. That is, both the actual occurrence of words in thought and our private conceptual fixing of our states of mind, is experienced in an imaging, semi-sensible mode, particular examples of which we are not unable to discuss successfully with other people. (EM, p. 40)

In ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) Murdoch, having set out the shortcomings of contemporary literature, calls for ‘a new vocabulary of attention’ which will enable literature to create a more truthful picture of reality. ‘We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place’, she declares (EM, p. 193). In ‘Thinking and Language’ she states that ‘our use of language to fix in a semi-sensible picture some aspect of our activities […] is using, or creating, concepts’ (EM, p.  40). Metaphors—and in particular visual metaphors, as Murdoch conceives of consciousness as pictorial—are thus essential to this new vocabulary. Her weaving of paintings, and of numerous other real or fictional works of art including sculptures, statues, tapestries, icons, tableaux, dream images, buildings, landscapes, portraits, and still lifes into her novels, underpin her efforts to tap into the vast indeterminate region of consciousness where thoughts occur in imaging form, and so to access and convey reality more  Donald Friedman, Writer’s Brush, xvi.

113

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directly and viscerally. Her sustained experimentation with this plethora of visual images bears out her conviction, set out in ‘Thinking and Language’, that ‘[n]ot all our new concepts come to us in the context of language, but the attempt to verbalise them may result not in frustration but in a renewal of language’ (EM, p. 36).

‘There Are Visual Images Which Carry Mysterious Charges’ From the early 1950s, Murdoch’s journals became more personal in tone and content. Although she continued to record notes and ideas for novels and philosophy, and descriptions of her dreams, her travels, and of nature, the journals of her middle years are dominated by reflections on relationships and friendships with numerous individuals. These included affairs with the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, ethnologist Franz Steiner, writer Elias Canetti, and writer and activist Brigid Brophy, and her deeply loving, though sometimes strained, friendship with her Oxford contemporary, the philosopher Philippa Foot. Her entry of 17 November 1968—‘How little work figures in this record […] The things which deeply sustain—Puss [John Bayley], the novels—get little mention’— illustrates her recognition that the picture of her life which the journals present is, perhaps, rather misleading (Journal 10, p. 146). Although the later journals do not contain detailed notes on the visual arts and visual images; they continue to reveal Murdoch’s fascination with all things visual. In 1984, responding to Lesser’s question about the process of generating ideas for a novel, Murdoch said: [O]f course one’s mind collects all sorts of debris and details. I keep a journal in which I write down all kinds of things that I think, all sorts of thoughts  – partly about philosophy, but partly just recording things that I’ve seen, like birds and such […] And I think there are visual impressions which one carries with one, or I carry with me, anyway. I’m very interested in painting and the visual arts, I wanted to be a painter, still want to be a painter. There are visual images which carry mysterious charges.114

 Wendy Lesser, Lesser, 13.

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The journals record Murdoch’s many visits to art galleries; her meetings with artist friends; her thoughts on specific painters, paintings, and images; frequent connections between the visual arts and literature, and the generation of numerous visual images of nature: they are manifested in a multitude of ways in her novels and philosophy of this period, including A Word Child, whose visual elements have not yet been sufficiently appreciated by critics. Murdoch’s journals, and also her letters, of this period provide tantalisingly brief comments on the highlights of numerous visits to art galleries in the UK and abroad, including a 1966 Bonnard exhibition which was ‘wonderful, glorious, golden. A revelation’, and the Blake illustrations at the Tate in 1972, ‘so beautiful & witty’ (Journal 10, p. 32; Journal 11, p. 179). She wrote to Phillipa Foot about a ‘super’ Beckmann exhibition, also at the Tate.115 Specific paintings compelled her attention and would become significant to her later novels: for instance, in September 1971 she and John Bayley viewed, at the National Gallery, ‘the Giorgione St George and St Anthony’ (The Sunset) and she was struck by ‘the great tree in the centre’; this tree would, in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine which Murdoch began drafting a few months later, become a symbol of truth only partly comprehended by Harriet Gavender (Journal 11, p.  146). Murdoch was an avid visitor of galleries and museums during several sojourns in Italy. A note to the art historian (and husband of Brigid Brophy) Michael Levey, sent from Rome in August 1965, announced Murdoch’s conversion to Caravaggio and asked Levey to tell her more about Baldassare Peruzzi.116 In a letter to Brophy on her return from another Italian trip in 1965, she remarked, ‘I am rather dazed with art—a lot of thinking and feeling has still got to catch up with experience. One will forget about the motor cars and remember the pictures’.117 The latter remark emphasises that Murdoch continued to contemplate specific visual images in her mind’s eye, long after she had viewed them in person. One such example is Tiepolo’s The Rage of Achilles, which depicts the goddess Athena taking hold of Achilles’ hair to restrain him as he is about to slay Agamemnon, who has dared to try to take a woman from him. Whilst in 115  Iris Murdoch to Phillipa Foot, undated [early Nov 1965], KUAS100/3/57, Iris Murdoch Collections. 116  Iris Murdoch to Michael Levey, 7 August 1965, KUAS142/4/48, Iris Murdoch Collections. 117  Iris Murdoch to Brigid Brophy, 8 August 1965, KU142/5/106, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Italy in August 1969, Murdoch viewed several frescoes by Tiepolo and commented particularly on Tiepolo’s representation of ‘Athena catching Achilles by the hair’: she found Tiepolo’s version of this subject ‘Powerful, though not as I imagine it’ and wondered, ‘Why is this not more often represented in art? This [is the] only case I know’ (Journal 10, p. 215). Five years later, Murdoch started to draft Henry and Cato. Murdoch’s own attempt to render Athena and Achilles in art is realised in the form of the Laxlinden tapestry, which hangs in Henry Marshalson’s ancestral home. The figure of Agamemnon is present in Tiepolo’s fresco, but Murdoch has eliminated him, meaning that the reason for Athena’s restraint of Achilles is no longer clear; the image thus becomes more universal. Murdoch also presents both Athena and Achilles in profile, so that the face of Athena, ‘impassive and stern’, is more visible. The pair are placed in an indeterminate landscape which suggests ‘the plain of windy Troy’ instead of the conventional classical architecture which is Tiepolo’s backdrop.118 Sage discerns that the tapestry symbolises Henry’s inheritance, which he initially wants to renounce but eventually comes to accept, in recognition of ‘the particular object—the particular, provisional vision— that belongs to him’. Sage does not analyse in depth the significance of the tapestry’s subject matter, other than noting that it ‘suggests very uncomfortably Henry’s sexual surprises’.119 Henry, viewing the tapestry, thinks: ‘I wish I had a goddess to grab me by the hair and tell me what to do’ (HC, p. 62). Colette Forbes, the sister of his childhood friend, will shortly propose marriage to him: Rowe discerns that ‘Athena’s assertive claiming of Achilles mirrors Colette’s spirited claiming of Henry’ and remarks on the similarities between Athena and the ‘bold and forthright’ Colette.120 Elizabeth Dipple observes that Gerda, as well as Colette, plays Athena, and furthermore that the novel explores in a wider sense ‘the image of woman aggrandised as goddess and redeemer’.121 The image of Athena taking hold of Achilles, on which Murdoch’s imagination had long been playing, thus becomes one of the defining images of Henry and Cato. When in July 1969 Murdoch noted in her journal: ‘Sense of piercing a human body. S[aint] Sebastian. Why rarely successful in art? (Mantegna?)’, 118  Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato (St Albans: Triad/Panther, 1977), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as HC, p. 62. 119  Lorna Sage, ‘Pursuit of Imperfection’, p. 114. 120  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 99. 121  Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Metheun, 1982), p. 260.

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some of the most famous paintings of Sebastian may have been known to her only as reproductions (Journal 10, p. 190). Nevertheless the image of Sebastian’s martyrdom exerted a profound influence on her consciousness. Sebastian was a Christian who because of his faith was bound to a stake and shot with arrows until he was thought to be dead, yet he miraculously survived. Numerous artists have represented his punishment (choosing to focus on this moment, rather than on Sebastian’s death some years later). The Early Renaissance painter Andreas Mantegna, mentioned by Murdoch, rendered the subject three times, with slight variations. In two versions Sebastian is tied to a classical arch. His suffering is, in one of these, surveyed by the Roman-Greek god of Time, Saturn. In the other version, Sebastian is presented from an unusually low perspective, so that his figure appears still more grandiose and tragic, in striking contrast to the two archers at his feet, who cold-bloodedly disregard their victim. The third, less well-known version is rather different, being markedly more pessimistic. A dark indeterminate background replaces the classical ruins and imposing skies of the earlier paintings. The figure of Sebastian, which fills the composition, is less idealised. The presence of an extinguished candle in the lower corner, and the inscription Nihil nisi divinum stabile est, Caetera fumus (‘Nothing is stable except the divine. The rest is smoke’) explicitly connects Sebastian with the theme of life’s brevity. Sebastian is mentioned in three novels of Murdoch’s mature and late periods. In Nuns and Soldiers, the strident, outspoken painter Daisy Barrett, during an argument with her lover Tim Reede, cites Sebastian as an example of warped Christian imagery: ‘Your Christian friends are the real sadists, with their crucifixions and flagellations and be-headings and frying chaps on gridirons. And Saint Sebastian showing off his figure and smirking at the audience. Well, we all know what that’s about. Never a sign of real pain in the whole galère […] It’s never-never-land art’ (NS, p. 122). Lily Boyne, a chaotic, drifting young woman in The Book and the Brotherhood, remembers being terrified in childhood by her mother’s ‘pious images’ of Saint Sebastian ‘shot full of arrows’.122 And in Jackson’s Dilemma, the collection of photos belonging to the painter Owen Silbury includes ‘a picture of Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian’ (JD, p. 51). The image of Sebastian’s martyrdom embodies Murdoch’s concerns about Christian iconography, which is susceptible to misappropriation so that it lapses into consolation, or masochism, and becomes a barrier rather than a conduit to truth. ‘Why 122

 Iris Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), p. 179.

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have we tolerated the sado-masochistic image of Christ for so many centuries?’ she wrote in her journal in January 1972 (Journal 11, p.  184). Sebastian’s selfless adherence to his faith, which is the truth to be discerned in the original myth, has become obscured by many artists who viewed the subject primarily as an opportunity to depict an idealised male nude. Sebastian’s suffering and his expression of rapturous pain bear similarities to the fate of the satyr Marsyas, whose myth Murdoch was also drawn to in her search for viable secular alternatives to the image of Christ on the cross.123 Yet whereas Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas was for Murdoch a sublime secular icon, in which great suffering engenders an unselfing and pain is transformed into joy, the essential meaning of the image of Sebastian is hampered by its acquisition of erotic and masochistic overtones and is all but lost in aesthetic representations. Murdoch may have had in mind Mantegna’s final version of Sebastian, in which he perhaps comes a little closer to depicting the truth of the image, but even here his depiction is marred by the intrusion of the personal, Mantegna’s sense of his own impending death, as well as his continuing desire to idealise his subject. Her characters’ allusions to Sebastian’s martyrdom point to key reasons why the image of Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom is ‘rarely successful in art’. The journals of Murdoch’s mature years are suffused with vivid, fragmentary descriptions of her large, rambling garden at Cedar Lodge in Steeple Aston, where she lived with John Bayley from 1956 until 1986. When the Bayleys later moved into smaller residences with more manageable gardens, she continued to note the details of nature in these gardens and in the local Oxfordshire countryside. Murdoch found great pleasure and solace in her garden’s wild grandeur. Her journal entry of 5 October 1958, for instance, records that despite difficulties with her current novel and with reading Kant, ‘The garden absorbs & delights me more than I could have believed possible’ (Journal 9, p. 22). She gave sustained attention to its ever-changing elements. ‘The sun goes on and on shining. It blazes into the room. The garden, faintly surprised, summers away into deep autumn. the leaves fall slowly and meditatively. The colours are different from last year—I suppose because there are no frosts. I want to enjoy it intensely and sometimes succeed’, Murdoch wrote in November 123  Also see SSBC, Chapter 2, pp. 35–58. Bove and Rowe contend that the many paintings in Murdoch’s novels ‘comprise a secular iconography that replaces Christian icons as a focus for meditation on moral issues’ (p. 36).

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1963 (Journal 10, p. 4). Here she seemed conscious of her role as viewer of the garden and of the distancing effect of her vantage point inside the house, yet her loving contemplation of the garden drew her ever closer to it. The sounds, textures, and, predominantly, the sights of the garden were described in all seasons and weathers. The turning of the seasons and annual appearances of particular flowers, birds, and animals were eagerly anticipated and joyfully discovered. Murdoch’s descriptions often present striking visual images, as when, in May 1978, she noted: ‘In [the] garden, honesty, bluebells, king cups, wood anemones [are] all in mad flower. The moorhens have hatched, as I came the little ones scuttled off the nest like small black spiders’ (Journal 12, p. 179). In November 1990, recording a walk in nearby Wytham Woods, she wrote: ‘Golden leaves, blazes of colour—trees beyond trees, now some leaves have fallen—pale luminous trunks—clouds scurry in different directions—blue-black sky creeps up— sun shines suddenly (our shadows) high up some seagulls are caught in the sunlight, wildly flying, then a rainbow over Oxford’ (Journal 14, p. 129). These apparently hasty notes seem to be an attempt to capture the immediacy of her visual experience of the natural world. Murdoch’s vision of her garden was enriched by her knowledge of painting, as her letters and journals reveal. ‘The Steeple Aston garden looks like a painting by Cotman’, she wrote to Philippa Foot in November 1963.124 John Sell Cotman’s remote rural scenes, his towering trees and wild undergrowth, are tinged with romanticism, to which Murdoch’s vision of her garden may have been somewhat susceptible. Yet the fine details of his works, carefully and objectively conveyed by means of Cotman’s accomplished draughtsmanship, point to his desire to perceive and render nature with clarity, as did Murdoch herself. The painter most frequently referenced in relation to the garden at Cedar Lodge is Samuel Palmer. ‘A mist here today and the garden very golden suspended in it. Samuel Palmer’, she observed in November 1963, and later, ‘the garden and countryside become bewitchingly beautiful—sun again today, a little mist, golden leaves and apple trees like Samuel Palmer’ (Journal 10, p. 4, Journal 11, pp.  38–39). Palmer and his forebear William Blake were in Murdoch’s thoughts during this period, because she was engaged in an extended dialogue on both artists with her RCA student Rachel Fenner whose dissertation on Blake she was supervising. Palmer’s greatest works 124  Iris Murdoch to Phillipa Foot, 2 November 1963, KUAS100/2/12, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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portray the garden of his Shoreham home, which was for him a demi-­ paradise of peace and beauty. He imbues the garden with visionary intensity, yet its details are nevertheless depicted with precision. Palmer was thus able to negotiate the fine line between realism and dreamlike vision without ever lapsing completely into fantasy, and because of this he served as a model for Murdoch. A. S. Byatt has noted that the repeated adjective ‘golden’ can, in Murdoch’s oeuvre, signal the presence of illusion; in Murdoch’s journal entries it seems to hint at the temptation to aestheticise the natural world, but her references to Palmer’s art also imply that she was conscious of the moral requirement to ground her vision of the garden in truth.125 In Murdoch’s early novel The Flight from the Enchanter, the drifting, hapless civil servant John Rainborough, whose passivity causes him to become increasingly overwhelmed by the machinations of those around him, finds moments of solace in the garden of his childhood home, which he still inhabits. His attention to the garden’s minute, delicately beautiful visual details reorientates his energies, refreshing his consciousness and briefly clarifying his perception: Hyacinths, narcissi, primulas, and daffodils stood before him, rigid with life and crested with stamens, tight in circles, or expanding into stars. He looked down into their black and golden hearts; and as he looked the flowerbed seemed to become very large and close and detailed. He began to see the little hairs upon the stems of the flowers and the yellow grains of pollen, and where a small snail, still almost transparent with extreme youth, was slowly putting out its horns upon a leaf. Near to his foot an army of ants had made a two-way track across the path. He watched the ants. Each one knows what it is doing, he thought. He looked at the snail. Can it see me? he wondered. Then he felt, how little I know, and how little it is possible to know; and with this thought he experienced a moment of joy.126

Contemplation of the garden causes Rainborough to sense his insignificance, so that his troubled consciousness is momentarily brought into a more balanced relation with external reality, though at the unexpected arrival of Annette, to whom he is attracted, his ego begins to weave fresh illusions, and the ants become ‘very tiny and very remote’ (FE, p. 123).  A. S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 130.  Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (London: Vintage, 2000), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as FE, p. 123. 125 126

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The Flight from the Enchanter was written years before Murdoch came to Cedar Lodge, yet Rainborough’s pleasure in his garden in some ways seems to prefigure Murdoch’s own. Rainborough’s experiences also reveal that attention must be sustained and selfless in order for it to be genuinely effective. Despite his claim that ‘self-knowledge, after all, was his ideal’, Rainborough has become lazy and complacent about trying to improve his character (FE, p.  122). His garden represents the dangers of an unhealthy attachment to the past. The news that part of the garden is to be demolished to make way for an extension to a neighbouring hospital causes him to fall into a ‘lethargic melancholy’ (FE, p. 122); he neglects his professional responsibilities, and his moral failure is instrumental in the death of the innocent Nina, who takes her life because she mistakenly believes that she will be deported. Murdoch guides her reader towards recognition that life must go forward, and that change is painful but necessary. In 1986 she relinquished her own beloved garden, when Cedar Lodge was sold. The departure from Cedar Lodge caused her intense grief—she described it in her journal as ‘terrible’ and she notes that walking in the garden with John Bayley, she ‘cried a lot’—but she courageously accepted it (Journal 14, p. 70). Visual images of her garden never left her: even in her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, written when Alzheimer’s disease was beginning seriously to affect her, descriptions of the gardens at Penndean and Hatting Hall contain faint echoes of Cedar Lodge’s garden, translated into dreamlike splendour.

Language and Vision in A Word Child The fundamental importance of visual images to Henry and Cato, the novel which Murdoch was drafting in summer 1975 when she met Harry Weinberger, has been the subject of much critical attention. Henry and Cato is described by Lorna Sage as ‘a visual book, dominated by pictures (Henry is an art historian of sorts) and [it] concentrates on the problem of making people see (a word that often gets italicised with frustration)’.127 Conradi notes that Henry and Cato is centred on the idea of moral change and the theme of iconoclasm.128 As Sage observes, Brendan Craddock, the novel’s figure of good, understands that ‘all images are obsolescent,

 Lorna Sage, ‘Pursuit of Imperfection’, p. 112.  Peter J. Conradi, Saint and Artist, p. 220.

127 128

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provisional, imperfect’.129 The pilgrimage from illusion to reality involves the continual pursuit of images which may obscure or enlighten; ultimately, images must be discarded in order to progress towards the truth beyond them. In ‘The Fire and the Sun’, which was taking shape in Murdoch’s mind as she wrote Henry and Cato, Murdoch states that: ‘Escape from the cave and approach to the Good is a discarding of relative false goods, of hypotheses, images and shadows, eventually seen as such’ (EM, p. 442). Nonetheless, the novel demonstrates that being imperfect creatures, humans need images to function. Sage comments, ‘Moral existence is a matter of detailed images, without those illusory points of reference people die’. In Henry and Cato, ‘not surprisingly for a book so visually conceived’, hell is rendered as ‘sensory deprivation’.130 A Word Child, the novel which precedes Henry and Cato, makes few references to specific works of art. It does not include a character who is an artist or art historian. Nevertheless A Word Child contains a wealth of visual detail which has not yet, despite scholarship by Bove and Rowe, been comprehensively scrutinised by critics: the chapter therefore concludes with a study of this novel.131 The vision of Murdoch’s protagonist, the first-person narrator Hilary Burde, is dangerously obscured by fantasy, but his imperfect attention to the colours and details of the external world, which intrude on the illusions generated by the ego, implies that he may, in time, learn to see a little more clearly. Hilary Burde is the victim of an abusive childhood, whose gift for languages leads him into a university career. In ‘Salvation by Words’, written  Lorna Sage, ‘Pursuit of Imperfection’, p. 116.  Lorna Sage, ‘Pursuit of Imperfection’, p. 116. 131  Bove and Rowe have analysed the significance of some of A Word Child’s most striking visual images. They contend that ‘the shadowy figure of Peter Pan […] supplies psychological explanations for Hilary’s behaviour’ (SSBC, p. 91). They observe that like Peter, Hilary has Oedipal tendencies, weaves fantasies and courts danger, and he ‘exhibits Peter Pan’s horror of the loss of innocence at the same time that he so desperately desires it’ (SSBC, p. 91). Bove and Rowe also note that the recurrent image of Big Ben, visible from Hilary’s office window in Whitehall, illuminates Hilary’s deluded consciousness. Big Ben appeals to Hilary as a metaphor for masculine power and control, but it is ‘impotent against personal desire’ (SSBC, pp. 116–7); ‘Big Ben’s kindly smiling face is perhaps a symbol of the ultimate loving and benign face of the Good itself’ (SSBC, p.  120). Finally, Bove and Rowe note Hilary’s attempt to seek solace in St Stephen’s Church, Gloucester Road, where he studies two sculptures of Christ: ‘obsessed with his own problems and exhibiting little regard for others, Hilary finds no comfort in this setting because Christian icons have no relevance to his life and Murdoch does not associate them with any change in this novel’ (SSBC, p. 38). 129 130

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not long before she commenced drafting A Word Child, Murdoch states that ‘words constitute the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral being’ and that literature can therefore bring about ‘our survival and our salvation’.132 In A Word Child she considers what could happen when an individual’s relation to words is distorted. Hilary loves words for their system and order, but resists using words to interact with and learn about other people: he is a ‘word-watcher’, not a ‘word-user’.133 His distorted view of words distances him from reality instead of bringing him into a more truthful relationship with it. A disastrous love affair with Anne, the wife of Gunnar Jopling, his friend and colleague, which ends in her death and that of her unborn child, causes Hilary to resign his position and take a low-status bureaucratic post. Paralysed by the past, he attempts to block it out and to impose control on his present by compulsively scheduling a cycle of rituals and routines and refuses to commit to his lover, Tommy Uhlmeister. But when Gunnar is appointed to a senior role in his w ­ orkplace, Hilary meets and begins to believe himself in love with Gunnar’s second wife, Kitty, and embarks on a further pattern of deadly repetition, until he is eventually painfully forced to recognise the muddle and contingency of the world. Colours are subtly woven into the narrative, revealing much about Hilary’s psychology. Conradi observes that the Circle Line, on which Hilary compulsively travels, is ‘a Dantesque circle of hell, an image as much of spiritual stasis as of locomotion’, and the numerous appearances of yellow—often a sign of evil in Murdoch’s novels—heighten the impression that Hilary is existing in a personal hell.134 His world is tinted by a faint yellow half-light: the dawn is ‘soiled and yellow’; a ‘yellowish twilight’ persists throughout the day, ‘thickening into a yellowish darkness’; and the colour’s infernal connotations are intensified when ‘yellow darkness’ is combined with ‘the smell of sulphur’ (AWC, p.  83, 137, 225). Other instances of yellow similarly guide readers’ interpretation: for example, when the frivolous, self-dramatising Kitty interrupts a rare moment of communication between Hilary and Gunnar, she is wearing clothes of ‘canary yellow’ which signal the unwitting evil of her role as go-between 132  Iris Murdoch, ‘Salvation by Words’, in EM, pp. 235–242, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 241). 133  Iris Murdoch, A Word Child (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as AWC (p. 28). 134  Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 542.

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(AWC, p. 328). Hilary’s descriptions of people and places are usually confined to the coldly factual and objective; his deliberate focus on the superficial can be construed as a form of escape from reality. But his language begins to alter when he describes the colours of people’s eyes, which continually attract his gaze: ‘I have always attributed a great importance to eyes. How mysteriously expressive those damp orbs can be; the eyeball does not change and yet it is the window of the soul. And colour in eyes is, in its nature and inherence, quite unlike colour in any other substance’ (AWC, p.  35). As eyes compel Hilary’s attention, his language subtly modulates, becoming less constrained and more lyrical, more creative, signalling his potential to become a ‘word-user’. His attention to the colours of eyes reveals details of the inner lives of other characters, though Hilary, who fails to sustain his attention, is only partly conscious of their significance. He mentions, for instance, that the eyes of his former teacher Nevil Osmand were ‘hard and speckled like Aberdeen granite’: the simile hints at Osmand’s psychological barriers and his repressed pain (AWC, p. 35). Tommy’s eyes are ‘clear and empty like light smoke. Their hue was transparent, as the hue of a clear sky. The purity of the pigment, a washed apotheosis of grey, was most unusual, a colour sample straight from God’ (AWC, p. 35). His description points to Tommy’s goodness, which by the end of the novel Hilary has become more willing to acknowledge. Crystal has ‘naked beautiful golden eyes’ which symbolise her vulnerability, the beauty of her nature, and also that, despite her goodness, she is the site of illusions: those that she constructs about Hilary, and those that Hilary, and other characters, project onto her (AWC, p. 102). Although Hilary’s self-centredness persists, and he fails to sustain his contemplation of others, absorbing them into his fantasies and causing them suffering as a result, his attention to the colours of eyes implies that he may eventually develop a more refined vision of the separate reality of others and, as part of this process, himself. A Word Child is saturated with references to birds, some of which may be simply play; however, this complex web of bird imagery also illuminates characters’ states of consciousness and guides readers into exploration of the concepts of imprisonment and freedom. It is a web partly constructed by Hilary, but it also intrudes on his consciousness from outside. Sounds, textures, and, above all, visual images of birds function as symbols of contingent, transcendent external reality which briefly compel Hilary’s attention, and that of the reader, momentarily revitalising perception before the inevitable return to the self.

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The principal women in Hilary’s life are frequently depicted as birds by means of a combination of contingent external factors and Hilary’s own mythologising. Bird imagery is most developed with regard to his sister Crystal and his lover Tommy. His sister, who views her name, Crystal Burde, as ‘a talisman, a sort of strange consoling thing of beauty in her life’ is undoubtedly a caged bird (AWC, p.  65). Initially she and Hilary were trapped by their abusive childhood, and in adult life Hilary imposes an alternative prison: Crystal is trapped by Hilary’s expectations of her, and he constructs a rigid system which restricts their movements and relationships. At a late stage, Hilary acknowledges his cruelty to Crystal: ‘I was determined that our lives should be wrecked and she, poor sparrow, had so readily made her little nest in the wreckage’ (AWC, p. 381). His discovery that Crystal had lost her virginity, and his subsequent interrogation of her, causes her to give a cry ‘like the wild scream of a bird’ (AWC, p. 256). Crystal eventually detaches herself from Hilary by resolving to marry her faithful suitor Arthur Fisch. Her marriage—which occasions the oft-­repeated joke that she has ‘changed from being a crystal bird into a crystal fish’ (AWC, p. 386)—means that Hilary, like Lear, must abandon the consoling fantasy that he and his sister would ever ‘sing like birds in a cage’ (AWC, p. 383, 387). Yet his naming of her as ‘Crystal, my duck’ immediately after her marriage implies that he still desires to maintain control over her (AWC, p.  386). The long-suffering Tommy is termed a ‘poor bird’ by Hilary’s lodger Christopher (AWC, p. 229). Hilary, who is becoming increasingly obsessed with Kitty and neglectful of Tommy, dreams that ‘Tommy, or was it some other woman, in the guise of a waterbird with beautiful eyes was battering battering battering on the glass trying to get in’ (AWC, p. 213). His dream conflates Tommy’s agony—and also Crystal’s, as she is several times described as having ‘beautiful’ eyes (AWC, p. 102)—with the myth of Peter Pan, whose appearance at the Darling children’s nursery window (which Murdoch described in 1978 as ‘one of the greatest of all moments of theatre’) signals the intrusion of fantasy into reality. Murdoch further described Peter Pan as ‘a play about the subconscious mind and one’s relationship to it. […] I connected it in some kind of very general way with Hilary as a lost boy’.135 Bove and Rowe discern that, like Peter Pan, Hilary 135  Jean-Louis Chevalier, ed., ‘Closing Debate: Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp.  70–96, hereafter Chevalier (p. 88).

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‘cannot form a conventional adult relationship’, instead, he childishly seeks to maintain his hold over every woman in his circle whilst resisting genuine commitment to any of them.136 Tommy, who is to play Peter Pan in the office Christmas pantomime, visualises herself entering Hilary’s cage with him and sharing his reality. The lyrics of Christopher’s pop song, Waterbird, which punctuate the narrative preceding Hilary’s dream, voice Tommy’s desires. The song is banal and repetitive, yet touching in its heartfelt simplicity. Although Hilary tries to suppress the song, it filters into his dream, urging him to acknowledge the separate existence and suffering of another individual. Christopher’s song recalls two earlier images of waterbirds: the first at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, visited by Hilary and Tommy; the second at the St James’s Park lake, to which Hilary is instinctively drawn following an unexpected encounter with Gunnar. These are amongst the strongest visual images in the novel. Unusually, Hilary’s movement through London becomes more spontaneous as he and Tommy approach the Round Pond: ‘We had strolled along the vista which belongs to Watts’ Bronze Horseman, and had reached the Round Pond, that centre of intense and innocent diversion, that perhaps mysterious and holy place, the omphalos of London’ (AWC, p. 177). The ‘Bronze Horseman’, more usually titled Physical Energy, by George Frederic Watts is a statue of a man on horseback; the rider surveys the horizon, keenly seeking out a new quest, as his horse paws the ground impatiently. Hilary is only momentarily aware of the statue as he passes it: the statue functions as an ironic comment on his impoverished vision which is rarely directed beyond himself, and on the falsity of his own quest to fulfil Kitty’s desires. Hilary’s stroll through the city, and his casual observations en route to and at the Round Pond, positioned him in the role of flâneur: an anonymous male urban observer, continually moving and looking, interested in external details, yet emotionally detached and alienated from his surroundings. As Hilary approaches the ‘omphalos’ or hub, of London, he resembles Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 description of the flâneur, one who is able ‘to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world’.137 Richard Wrigley notes that ‘flâneurs do not attend particularly to visual art, and when they do it is little more than incidentally, as part of their meandering survey of public  Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe, SSBC, p. 91.  Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed., by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 9. 136 137

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life’: Hilary’s fleeting comment on Watts’ statue is thus typical of the flâneur’s perspective on his surroundings.138 The flâneur became a fashionable nineteenth-century figure of particular significance to the Impressionist movement. Impressionist paintings are frequently composed from the physical and psychological viewpoint of the flâneur, in which spectators are invited to participate. The first-person narrative voice of A Word Child similarly draws readers into sharing Hilary’s viewpoint, yet the reader is subtly guided into recognition of the falsity of his way of perceiving the world. Murdoch stages the scene at the Round Pond as an Impressionist painting, and in so doing she illustrates the limitations of Hilary’s vision and encourages readers into the development of a more discerning view. The scene at the Round Pond depicts the typical Impressionist subject of outdoor leisure activity. The overriding focus on the effects of light is also characteristic of Impressionist painting. So, too, is the attempt to note the colours of the scene immediately as they impinge upon the eye, creating a personal impression rather than an exact representation: The quick-change artist weather had put on another show today. The fog had gone, to be replaced by a vivid russet-yellow light, cloud almost pierced by sun, which lent bright but strange colours to all things visible, the calm dark façade of Kensington Palace, the choppy metallic surface of the pond, the iridescent feathers of the ducks, the white sails of the model yachts, the red jerseys of the children, Tommy’s blue mac, Tommy’s grey eyes. (AWC, p. 177)

Kites, ‘strange bird-like structures’, are being flown by excited children. Dogs romping on the ‘glaringly green grass’ and boats speeding over the pond reinforce the joyous atmosphere: both are symbols of happiness in Murdoch’s oeuvre (AWC, p.  177). Murdoch may have had Camille Pissarro’s Kensington Gardens in mind as she created this description: the fluctuating light, shimmering water and shadowy buildings, the intensely green grass, and the children sketched in with bright daubs of colour are all present in both the visual and verbal versions of the scene. Impressionist painters sought to depict the transient effects of light and movement and to capture the sensations of a fleeting moment, thus they prioritised overall visual effects over precise representation of details. By this method they believed they could render the experience of modernity more vivid and 138  Richard Wrigley, ‘Unreliable Witness: The Flâneur as Artist and Spectator of Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, Oxford Art Journal, 39, 2 (2016), 267–284, hereafter ‘Flâneur’, 267.

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more real. But the Impressionist gaze is, to Murdoch, fundamentally flawed because it fails to penetrate beyond surface details. Rowe, who discusses Murdoch’s use of Impressionist techniques in Under the Net, The Italian Girl, and An Unofficial Rose, comments: Impressionism in art and literature involve the displacement of the attention to detail that Murdoch values so highly and, for this reason, when Murdoch herself becomes an Impressionist as she attempts to transfer actual visual impressions into the text, the technique always implies a dangerous perspective on the real world. […] The real world has a depth and complexity that Impressionism, however aesthetically pleasing, does not express.139

Hilary’s mentions of the ‘façade’ and ‘surface’ indicate that his way of looking at his surroundings is Impressionistic, and is thus, in Murdoch’s view, morally deficient. The pleasure which he takes in looking, and his noticing of certain details, do however suggest that he may have the potential to develop a more refined vision. The birds, above all else, draw his attention: We watched the diving ducks diving, and the swans swanning and the Canadian geese driving in convoy, groaning softly with excitement as they approached some bread-bestowing child. We watched an old man feeding sparrows, the tiny birds hovering like little frenzied helicopters above his fingers. We saw the beautiful feet of coots through green transparent water. (AWC, p. 177)

Hilary becomes, at this point, a ‘word-user’ despite his earlier protestations otherwise: he is playing with and enjoying words, and his invention of the verb ‘swanning’ implicitly acknowledges the inadequacy of language to describe exactly what the swans are doing. The waterbirds are not homogenous; Hilary differentiates between them, which is a sign that his perception is in this moment sharpening. Visual images of birds, described with some tenderness and attention to particulars, point to the existence of reality beyond the self, separate, concrete, and contingent. They are wild birds, free of the cages Hilary attempts to impose on the women in his life. Murdoch elsewhere similarly invokes the visual image of wild birds to symbolise the existence of free and separate reality, most notably in ‘The  Anne Rowe, VAIM, pp. 11–12.

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Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, in which the image of a kestrel helps to clarify the difficult concept of unselfing, a process of moral transformation which is achieved by directing attention outward, away from the egoistic preoccupations of the self, to try to perceive the transcendent reality of the external world. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. (EM, p. 369)

The sight of the kestrel briefly overwhelms Murdoch’s consciousness and blots out egoistic thoughts, and this experience is of moral benefit even after the inevitable return to the self. The viewer must, however, have powers of perception honed by the sustained practice of attention to external reality in order for contemplation of the kestrel to bring about genuine moral progress. Although the attention which Hilary gives to the birds indicates that the external world is starting to penetrate his consciousness, and he is instinctively responsive to their beauty and otherness, his attention is fluid and ephemeral, and he resists direct involvement with his surroundings in a manner characteristic of the flâneur. The quality of his attention is marred by his fundamental dishonesty. As they walk together Tommy imagines she and Hilary are happy and in love, but Hilary, ‘paralysed and waiting’, can think only of his meeting with Kitty, who he has invested with power over his fate (AWC, p. 178). His ‘enchanted Round Pond mood’ does not last beyond that morning (AWC, p. 180). Wrigley notes the flâneur’s essential passivity: ‘the flâneur receives and savours impressions, but does not act on them in any transformative way’.140 Such passivity is a sign of moral failure. Impressionist paintings, which so often invite the spectator to adopt the flâneur’s standpoint, offer, in Murdoch’s view, inadequate perspectives on reality, failing to encourage the deep looking which is vital to moral development. Hilary’s inability to give sufficient attention to external reality causes him to remain locked into a dangerous state of self-centred illusion which will have devastating consequences. Murdoch depicts the Round Pond as a place of truth, the antithesis of the 140

 Richard Wrigley, ‘Flâneur’, 278.

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Peter Pan statue just a short distance away, but she also reveals that its impact on the viewer is dependent on the quality of perception with which it is viewed. Hilary is granted another vision of waterbirds, this time at the lake in St James’s Park. He arrives at the lake having departed from his place of work in a dazed state brought about by a sudden meeting with Gunnar after many years of estrangement, and his instinctive utterance of Gunnar’s name. As he walks towards the park, Hilary reflects: ‘What exactly had happened I was still unsure, but as I walked along I was already beginning to read it off the world, to see it’ (AWC, p. 205). He sees a sequence of concrete things—cars, buses, the Guards memorial—and tacitly acknowledges their existence as separate from his own. His progress culminates at the lake: I looked down onto the nearer surface of the lake, which brightened near to the bridge into a metallic green, and saw there black and white tufted ducks, bobbing bright-eyed upon the choppy wavelets, diving suddenly and popping up again, sleekly beautiful, perfect, new-minted by ingenious nature, enjoying the rain, enjoying their being. I watched the ducks, seeing them with a clarity which seemed like a new mode of vision, as if a cataract had been peeled off my eyes. I breathed slowly and deeply and looked at the ducks. (AWC, p. 206)

Hilary’s direct appeal to Gunnar, which required some courage, appears to have enabled him to make a moral step forward by piercing the illusions with which Hilary and Gunnar have veiled each other. The encounter has temporarily diminished his ego, making him more conscious of the details of external reality. His hyperbolic praise of the ducks implies that he suddenly recognises them—so often passed in his daily rituals, but so rarely attended to—as entirely, splendidly other. Hilary’s response to the St James’s Park ducks is far more emotional than his response to the birds at the Round Pond. It is in fact highly ambiguous. His powers of perception appear to have improved, but his consciousness of this improvement renders it somewhat artificial. It is possible that he is instinctively drawn to the ducks not because they symbolise the existence of truth beyond the self but because the sight of them serves to reinforce his personal mythology. His friend Clifford Larr, who interrupts his contemplation of the ducks, warns Hilary that he is in a ‘trance’ (AWC, p. 208). When Clifford departs, Hilary returns to the ducks, ‘more marvellous than ever’; he ignores

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Clifford’s mention of suicide, indeed he forgets Clifford’s existence altogether (AWC, p.  208). It seems more probable that Hilary is, by now, sinking more deeply into self-deception than that he is experiencing a form of unselfing. Yet by means of visual images of the St James’s Park and Round Pond birds, which point to the existence of the real, contingent world beyond the confines of Hilary’s consciousness and beyond the novel itself, Murdoch guides attentive readers into realisation of the falsity of Hilary’s vision and so enables readers’ moral development. Hilary continues to draw bird imagery into his fantasies, for instance, when, believing himself in love with Kitty, he looks on her face and ‘the universe seemed to circle round quietly like a great bird and come to rest’ (AWC, p. 309). Murdoch’s inclusion of ‘seemed to’ signals his delusion to readers. Near the end of the novel, Hilary is forced to confront the contingency of reality when, as he and Kitty struggle against the rising waters of the Thames which will claim Kitty’s life, he calls desperately for help and hears his cries slipping away ‘like small birds into the thick dark’ (AWC, p. 374). His words escape his attempts to control them. The sound of his cries merges into the visual image of the bird in darkness, the Murdochian image of evil which points to the devastation brought about by Hilary’s distorted vision. Murdoch herself acknowledged that the visual arts underpinned her novels: Bayley relates that ‘[Iris] once said to me when I commented on the importance of the role, visible and invisible that pictures played in her novels, “You’re right. They’re all just pictures really”’.141 By summer 1975 Murdoch had been working her fascination with the visual arts and visual artists into her novels for over two decades. She was ideally placed to engage in a sustained discourse with a like-minded practising visual artist who would provide her with insights into artistic methods, ideas, and imagery and would guide the formation of her artistic tastes. She found such an artist in Harry Weinberger, and their discourse revitalised her thinking and writing. The chapter following will place Murdoch’s discourse with Weinberger in the context of her friendships with other visual artists and will analyse what makes her discourse with Weinberger unique.

 John Bayley, Iris, p. 87.

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References Alofsin, Anthony. 1993. Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Years, 1910–1922. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bailey, Colin B. 2017. Henry James and American Painting. http://arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.com/2017/06/henry-­james-­and-­american-­painting. html. Accessed 21 December 2021. Baudelaire, Charles. 1964 (1860). The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon. Bayley, John. 1998. Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. London: Duckworth. Bolton, Lucy. 2017. Anne Rowe, author of The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2002), in interview with Lucy Bolton. Iris Murdoch Review 8: 21-28. Bove, Cheryl. 1993. Understanding Iris Murdoch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Bove, Cheryl, and Anne Rowe. 2008. Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bryden, Ronald. 1957. New Novels. Listener, 16 May: 88. Byatt, A. S. 1994 (1965). Degrees of Freedom. London: Vintage. Byatt, A. S. 2001. Portraits in Fiction. London: Chatto & Windus. Chevalier, Jean-Louis, ed. 2003 (1978). Closing Debate: Rencontres avec Iris Murdoch. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 70-96. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Conradi, Peter J. 1986. Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist. London: Macmillan. Conradi, Peter J. 1999. A witness to good and evil. Guardian, 9 February. https:// www.theguardian.com/news/1999/feb/09/guardianobituaries-­peterconradi. Accessed 10 August 2019. Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins. Conradi, Peter J., ed. 2010. Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1939-45. London: Short Books. Dipple, Elizabeth. 1982. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. London: Metheun. Friedman, Donald. 2007. The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures by Writers. Minneapolis: Mid-List Press. Gayford, Martin. 1993. The Beautiful and the Good: Iris Murdoch on the Value of Art. Modern Painters, Autumn: 50-54. Haffenden, John. 2003 (1983). John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 124-138. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Hill, Susan. 1982. Interview with Iris Murdoch. BBC, 27 April. James, Henry. 2001 (1884). The Art of Fiction. In The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader, ed. Stephen Regan, 68-78. London: Routledge. James, Henry. 1893. Picture and Text. Harper and Brothers: New York. James, Henry. 2020 (1914). Notes of a Son and Brother. Prince Classics. Kiely, Benedict. 1966. England and Ireland. New York Times Book Review, 5 June.

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Lesser, Wendy. 1984. Interview with Iris Murdoch. The Threepenny Review, 19: 13-15. Morgan, David. 2010. With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch. London: Kingston University Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1950. The Novelist as Metaphysician. The Listener, 16 March: 473-476. Murdoch, Iris. The Existentialist Hero. 1950. The Listener, 23 March: 523-4. Murdoch, Iris. 1950. De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. Mind, 59: 127-8. Murdoch, Iris. 1950. Sartre’s The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. Mind, 59: 268-71. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1951). Thinking and Language. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 33-42. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1952. The Existentialist Political Myth. Socratic Digest, 5: 52-63. Murdoch, Iris. 1953. Sartre, Romantic Rationalist. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes. Murdoch, Iris. 1955 (1954). Under the Net. London: Reprint Society. Murdoch, Iris. 2000 (1956). The Flight from the Enchanter. London: Vintage. Murdoch, Iris. 1958. The Bell. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1961. A Severed Head. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1961). Against Dryness. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J.  Conradi, 287-295. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1962. An Unofficial Rose. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1964). The Idea of Perfection. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J.  Conradi, 299-336. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1966. The Time of the Angels. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1967). The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 363-385. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1968. The Nice and the Good. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1970 (1969). Bruno’s Dream. London: World Books. Murdoch, Iris. 1972 (1970). A Fairly Honourable Defeat. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1973 (1971). An Accidental Man. London: Book Club Associates. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1972). Salvation by Words. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J.  Conradi, 235-252. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1973. The Black Prince. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1974. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1975. A Word Child. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1977 (1976). Henry and Cato. St Albans: Triad/Panther. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1977). The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 386-463. London: Penguin.

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Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1978). Art is the Imitation of Nature. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 243-257. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1980. Nuns and Soldiers. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1985. The Good Apprentice. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1987. The Book and the Brotherhood. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1993 (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1995. Jackson’s Dilemma. London: Chatto & Windus. Nicol, Bran. 2019. Review of Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). Iris Murdoch Review 10: 89-92. Purton, Valerie. 2007. An Iris Murdoch Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Raban, Jonathan. 1974. Lullabies for a Sleeping Giant. Encounter, July. Read, Daniel. 2017. “Evolving a Style”: Iris Murdoch and the Surrealist Moral Vision of Paul Nash. Iris Murdoch Review 8: 29-37. Robson, Eric. 1984. Iris Murdoch talks with Eric Robson. Revelations, Border TV, Channel Four Television, 22 September. Rose, W. K. 2003 (1968). Iris Murdoch, Informally. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 16-29. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Rowe, Anne. 2002. The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Rowe, Anne. 2014. “Near the Gods”: Iris Murdoch and the Painter, Harry Weinberger. In Iris Murdoch Connected: Critical Essays on her Fiction and Philosophy, ed. Mark Luprecht. 57-72. Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press. Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995. London: Chatto & Windus. Sage, Lorna. 1986 (1977). The Pursuit of Imperfection: Henry and Cato. In Modern Critical Views: Iris Murdoch, ed. Harold Bloom. 111-119. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Steiner, Karin G. 1984. Metaphors of Vision: A Fellowship of the Arts in the Novels of Iris Murdoch. Master’s dissertation, McMaster University. http://hdl.handle.net/11375/10882. Accessed 12 Apr 2022. White, Frances. 2014. Becoming Iris Murdoch. London: Kingston University Press. Wind, Edgar. 1967 (1958). Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books. Winner, Viola Hopkins. 1967. Pictorialism in Henry James’s Theory. Criticism 9.1: 1-21. Winner, Viola Hopkins. 1970. Henry James and the Visual Arts. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press. Wrigley, Richard. 2016. Unreliable Witness: The Flâneur as Artist and Spectator of Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Oxford Art Journal 39.2: 267-284.

CHAPTER 3

Murdoch and Visual Artists

‘I Know a Lot of Painters. I Know What Painting Is’1 Throughout her life Murdoch sought the company of visual artists. In so doing, she was, consciously or unconsciously, positioning herself within a well-established tradition. She was emulating Henry James—whose friendship with the painter John La Farge influenced James’s thinking about the relationship of the arts and inspired his novel Roderick Hudson (1875)— and numerous other writers who befriended visual artists, including Émile Zola and Virginia Woolf, whose respective discourses with Paul Cézanne and Vanessa Bell enriched their work and thought. Murdoch’s dialogue with Weinberger (which began relatively late in her life, in 1975) is situated within the context of three notable friendships with the wood engraver, designer, and typographer Reynolds Stone and the painters Jean Jones and Alex Colville, all of whom influenced her to varying degrees. These three visual artists appear to have had particular significance for Murdoch’s work and thought, though other artists amongst Murdoch’s friends and acquaintances undoubtedly enriched her understanding of the visual arts and nourished her desire to learn from them. Other artist friends 1  Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Two Interviews with Iris Murdoch’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of  Fiction: Conversations with  Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 218–234 (p. 229).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Moden, Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17945-7_3

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included Rachel Fenner (née Brown), now a noted environmental sculptor, a student at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s whose dissertation on William Blake was supervised by Murdoch.2 The dialogue between Murdoch and Fenner had a considerable impact on Murdoch’s thinking about Blake: Daniel Read contends that their correspondence concerning the dissertation presents ‘Murdoch’s most significant engagement with Blake and her paradoxical criticisms of his moral vision’ and conjectures that their dialogue may have informed ‘On “God” and “Good”’ (1969).3 Whilst teaching General Studies at the RCA Murdoch developed friendships with numerous artists including the artist and writer Christopher Cornford, Head of the Department of Humanities, and Carel Weight, painter of landscapes, portraits and murals, and RCA Professor of Painting. She was acquainted with Francis Bacon, whose images of ‘high obsession’ she considered ‘both horrifying and somehow marvellous’ though she struggled to comprehend them, and with Margaret Benyon, who later became a leading holographic artist.4 During this period Murdoch also met Barbara Dorf, a painter of architectural subjects, interiors, still lifes, and figures with whom she maintained an affectionate correspondence and occasionally met. Murdoch owned several of Dorf’s

2  Rachel Fenner’s dissertation was titled ‘William Blake and the Problem of Dualism’ (see Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995, ed. by Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), hereafter Living on Paper, p. 608). 3  Daniel Read, ‘The Problem of Evil and the Fiction and Philosophy of Iris Murdoch’ (thesis, Kingston University, 2019) < https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/43948/1/ Read-D-43948.pdf> [accessed 14 April 2022], pp. 249–250. Though Murdoch rejected Fenner’s desire for a more intimate relationship, they remained friends, corresponding until the mid-1970s when Fenner’s work and family began increasingly to preoccupy her, and remaining in intermittent contact thereafter. The Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections hold 314 letters from Murdoch to Fenner (KUAS118). 4  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 26 June 1985, KUAS80/2/21; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 May 1992, KUAS80/1/114, Iris Murdoch Collections. Christopher Cornford created the book jacket design for the first editions of The Unicorn (1963), The Black Prince (1973), and A Word Child (1975). Margaret Benyon did likewise for the first edition of The Red and the Green (1965).

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paintings, which, she wrote to Dorf, ‘radiate joie de vivre’.5 Murdoch and the painter, ­printmaker, and collagist Tom Phillips became friends during the painting of Murdoch’s official portrait in 1984–1986. Their sittings were characterised, as Phillips recalls, by ‘much good conversation and many laughs’, and they kept in contact after the portrait was completed, with Phillips designing the book jackets of some of her later works.6 To date, very little scholarship exists regarding these friendships with visual artists. A more wide-ranging study of these friendships would draw out still more allusions to specific images, aesthetic devices, and connections to art theories and movements in Murdoch’s novels, thus enhancing knowledge and understanding of Murdoch’s complex engagement with the visual arts. Murdoch’s friendship with Reynolds Stone is well known to scholars, though it has not yet been the focus of sustained critical attention. Her friendships with Jean Jones and Alex Colville are far less familiar: neither artist is referenced in Valerie Purton’s Iris Murdoch Chronology and (like Weinberger) they receive only brief mentions in Peter J. Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life.7 Detailed consideration of these three friendships reveals  Iris Murdoch to Barbara Dorf, undated [c.1986], KUAS50/32, Iris Murdoch Collections. Murdoch and Dorf met in the early 1960s and maintained a friendship for many years. Dorf painted Murdoch’s portrait in the late 1960s. Dorf sent Murdoch many gifts, including handmade clothes; they kept in touch by letter and met occasionally. The Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections hold 107 letters from Murdoch to Dorf (KUAS50). 6  Tom Phillips, ‘Painting Iris Murdoch’, in Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. by Miles Leeson (Devises: Sabrestorm, 2019), pp. 83–86 (p. 86). Phillips designed the book jackets for the first editions of The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). 7  Peter J. Conradi states that Jean and John Jones were ‘thought by some to be one model (there were others) for the kindly, hospitable, ambiguous host-and-hostess figures who dominate Iris’s novels of the 1960s and 1970s’; that Murdoch referred to the Joneses as ‘so kind. But they are so young and so happy’; also Murdoch mentions the particular ‘tidiness’ of their home. Life, p. 295, 339, 581. Alex Colville is mentioned by Conradi once, to illustrate the importance of Murdoch’s friendships with painters. Life, p. 557. Conradi names Weinberger as another example of a friendship with a painter and briefly outlines some of the main points of their friendship; another reference is made regarding to his gift to her of a Tibetan dagger, to acknowledge her love of objects, and the third, with his comment that Murdoch, regretting that she did not know more of her family history, wrote to Weinberger in October 1985: ‘how precious the past is, how soon forgotten’. Life, p. 557, 588, xix. 5

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that it was entirely characteristic of Murdoch to mine an artist friend’s methods, imagery, and experiences and to integrate them into her novels, most notably in the case of Reynolds Stone. Stone was a direct inspiration for Murdoch’s portrayal of the engraver Edmund Narraway, the narrator of The Italian Girl (1964), for which Stone also created the cover design and supplied engravings as illustrations. Stone’s imagery permeates this novel, intensifying Murdoch’s depictions of the natural world and underscoring the inadequacies of Edmund’s perception. Murdoch’s discourse with the Expressionist painter Jean Jones energised and enriched Murdoch’s thinking about attention, perception, and transformation. Jones was, like Murdoch, fascinated by ancient stones, and her many vibrant, lyrical paintings of the Ringmoor stone circle near her Dartmoor home, some of which were owned by Murdoch, filtered into Murdoch’s representations of stones and megaliths in several novels, including The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983).8 Jones’s mental suffering is likely to have contributed to Murdoch’s characterisation of Edward Baltram in The Good Apprentice (1985). Alex Colville’s vast representations of moments of everyday experience, meticulously captured in tableaux and rendered mysterious, monumental, and archetypal, resemble Murdoch’s efforts to depict the strangeness and significance of reality. Murdoch and Colville shared a fascination with the relation between order and chaos, and with the themes of power, justice, and love, and she told him that she found in his pictures ‘an immense pleasure & a deep inspiration’.9 The stimulation which the techniques, imagery, and experiences of each of these visual artists provided to Murdoch assisted her quest to develop a new interdisciplinary form which could represent reality with greater truth. Despite these other important friendships, Murdoch’s friendship with Weinberger was exceptional, both in its scale and in its impact on Murdoch.

8  Jean Jones’s images may also have some influence on Murdoch’s portrayals of ancient stones in The Message to the Planet (1989) and The Green Knight (1993). 9  Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, undated [1969], reproduced in ‘Letters from Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville’, Jeffrey Meyers, The London Magazine, February–March 2013, 20–25, hereafter ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, 23.

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‘How Close, How in a Sense Ordinary, are the Marvels of the World’: Reynolds Stone Aside from Weinberger, Reynolds Stone (1909–1979) was, perhaps, the visual artist amongst Murdoch’s friends who had the most significant impact on her. Exceptionally talented and largely self-taught, Stone undertook numerous private and public commissions.10 His designs included the royal coat of arms on the British passport (1959), the Bank of England’s £5 and £10 notes (1962, 1964), a memorial stone commemorating Winston Churchill for Westminster Abbey (1965), and ‘The Old Rectory’ (1976), a set of engravings which is thought to be his magnum opus (1976). His work can be understood, according to Humphrey Stone, his father’s biographer, as ‘part of a revival of wood engraving as an art form that took place in the first half of the twentieth century, along with artists such as Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Gwen Raverat, Gertrude Hermes, John Farleigh, Agnes Miller Parkes and Eric Ravilious’.11 Stone was by nature sensitive, intellectual, unassuming and unworldly, and utterly dedicated to his craft. The writer Emma Smith describes him as ‘wholly unself-regarding […] a profoundly honest person—a man without guile’, and the architectural conservationist and writer James Lees-Milne, on being asked to write Stone’s biography, declined, saying ‘I can’t write about a saint’.12 Reynolds’ wife Janet, a musician and talented amateur photographer, was a very different character: lively, mercurial, highly strung, and highly sociable: her husband was, according to Humphrey Stone, ‘the rock around which she could dance’.13 The Bayleys and the Stones met in March 1961 at a cocktail party, after which Murdoch’s request to visit the Stones instigated what would become

10  After reading History at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1930 Reynolds Stone undertook an apprenticeship at the Cambridge University Press. A chance meeting on a train led to a fortnight working with Eric Gill, who said that after that period ‘there was nothing more he could teach [Stone] – he knew it all’. Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone: A Memoir (Wimborne: Dovecote Press, 2019), hereafter Reynolds Stone, p. 29. Stone worked for the Taunton printing firm Barnicott and Pearce for a short time and then became a full-time freelance engraver and also watercolourist, letter cutter, and designer. Though temporarily interrupted by the Second World War, during which he became an aerial photographic interpreter for the RAF, his work continued until the end of his life. 11  Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone, pp. 8–9. 12  Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone, p. 9. 13  Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone, p. 9.

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a long, close friendship between the two couples. Each couple complemented the other. Janet Stone and John Bayley had the same sense of humour and love of gossip; Reynolds Stone and Murdoch shared similar views on outward-directed attention, and the suppression of the ego, both necessary to the creation of art. He was modest and self-effacing, viewing himself as part of a lineage of craftspeople rather than as an individual talent, and content for his work to remain largely anonymous. Murdoch observed, in the address which she gave for at his memorial service in 1979, that ‘his art proceeded unselfconsciously from an intense personal privacy into a public world where it has set enduring standards and has given a pure aesthetic pleasure to many who never heard his name’.14 Humphrey Stone observes, ‘Iris […] was a huge admirer of Reynolds’ work, and came to love him. She understood his character profoundly and shared an intellectual curiosity as well as enjoying philosophical debates. Both seemed unwilling to find wrong in people and were incapable of personal criticisms’.15 Although she had most in common with Reynolds Stone, Murdoch also got on extremely well with Janet, as did John Bayley with Reynolds. She dedicated A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) to them both. They stayed at each other’s homes, and during the 1970s they went on several holidays together, to Italy, Ireland, and Pembrokeshire. The Bayleys often visited the Stones at their home, the Old Rectory in Lytton Cheney. This was a large eighteenth-century house surrounded by nine acres of garden, much of it deliberately uncultivated, buried deep in the Dorset countryside. Janet Stone invited a constant stream of guests to the Old Rectory, including Kenneth Clark (with whom Janet Stone had a close relationship), Leonard Woolf, John and Myfanwy Piper, Benjamin Britten, Duncan Grant, David and Rachel Cecil, the Day Lewises, Frances Partridge, Stephen Spender, Kathleen Raine, Siegfried Sassoon, L. P. Hartley, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and John Betjeman. In most cases these distinguished members of the literary and artistic elite became known to Reynolds Stone through his work; the friendships were subsequently sustained by Janet. John Bayley remarks, ‘Reynolds loved all these visitors, had a basic innocence and goodness about him, like a monk in the

14  Iris Murdoch, Reynolds Stone: An Address Given by Iris Murdoch in St James’s Church Piccadilly, London on 20th July 1979 (London: Warren Editions, 1981), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as Memorial Address, np. 15  Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone, p. 109.

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midst of worldly goings-on’.16 Janet Stone captured the images of her guests in hundreds of black and white photographs which present a remarkable visual diary of life in what might now be considered a lost Arcadia. The Old Rectory’s post-Bloomsbury scene, its atmosphere of intellectual conversation, entertainment, work, and relaxation, was immensely attractive to the Bayleys. Writing to Philippa Foot in 1988, some years after Reynolds Stone’s death and his widow’s subsequent departure from Lytton Cheney, Murdoch grieved the loss of the Stones’ house, describing it as a place of ‘refuge’.17 In Stone’s later years when his health was suffering, knowing that work was essential to him, she suggested new projects which would help him to continue finding solace in his art. In 1978 she asked Stone to produce engravings to illustrate a series of poems she had written about birds (subsequently published as A Year of Birds); she commissioned a bookplate of ‘a giant hogweed, a dangerous plant that grows to a prodigious height, which was encouraged to seed itself’, and she also conceived the idea of a book of poems and engravings about the River Bride, though this was never realised, as Reynolds Stone died in June 1979.18 The Italian Girl, an early novel which somewhat awkwardly blends elements of Gothicism, Freudianism, melodrama, and farce, depicts the uncovering of various secret relationships within a troubled family group, then eventually moves towards resolution and redemption. On 8 September 1962, during the drafting stage of this novel, Murdoch described it in her journal as ‘ASH [A Severed Head] in reverse, the spell repeated backward (Journal 9, p. 64). The Italian Girl is suffused with references to the visual arts and can be understood as, in part, a meditation on the art of engraving and on the ambiguity of the role of the artist. The monochrome of Stone’s engravings is echoed by the novel, which has such a muted colour scheme that occasional flashes of colour such as the red dress donned by Maria Magistretti (Maggie) near the close are singularly unsettling. In August 1965, whilst staying with the Stones, Murdoch wrote to Brigid Brophy, ‘Some kinds of country affect me deeply, as if I had known these scenes in

 John Bayley, KUAS6/17/5/3, Iris Murdoch Collections.  Iris Murdoch to Phillipa Foot, 19 February 1988, KUAS100/4/54, Iris Murdoch Collections. 18  Iris Murdoch, illus. by Reynolds Stone, A Year of Birds (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984); Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone, pp. 162–3. 16 17

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dreams. And this house and garden have that quality too’.19 The Stones’ house, and in particular the garden, filters into The Italian Girl. The setting of the novel, Edmund’s childhood home, is a rectory: though it is Victorian, not Georgian, and is built of smoke-­stained red brick, it is ‘not unlike the Old Rectory’, as the Stones’ son-in-­law Ian Beck observes.20 The immense, thickly wooded garden of the fictional rectory, complete with wilderness, cascade, and shady pool, bears a striking resemblance to the Old Rectory garden. Stone was profoundly attached to his garden, which he perceived with mystical intensity. Murdoch remarks in her memorial address, ‘Reynolds once said that he would be content to paint for the rest of his life within his own garden. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know the garden, the paintings and the man can well understand that’ (Memorial Address, np). Stone insisted that the garden remained untouched: his daughter Emma recalled, ‘He would suffer if even a branch was lopped from a tree’.21 His intense sensibility regarding the natural world is reflected, and amplified, in the animistic beliefs of two later characters, Adam McCaffrey (The Philosopher’s Pupil, 1983) and Moy Andersen (The Green Knight, 1993). Stone depicted his garden many times in his art, capturing it in all seasons and moods. His visual depictions of the garden— masterpieces in miniature which carefully, lovingly delineate its densely tangled undergrowth, interlacing trees, winding paths and streams, and quivering leaves, and infuse them with mysterious, numinous life—inform Murdoch’s descriptions of the garden in The Italian Girl and point to the inadequacy of Edmund Narraway’s attempts to depict it. The minute scale of Stone’s engravings imbues them with great force. Stone habitually commenced work on a subject by producing a loosely sketched watercolour; he would then reduce the image onto a woodblock three inches wide. Kenneth Clark defines it as ‘micropolitan art’, meaning by this ‘an art which is the reverse of metropolitan and yet is in no way provincial, because it has deep

19  Iris Murdoch to Brigid Brophy, 31 August 1965, KUAS142/5/165, Iris Murdoch Collections. 20  Ian Archie Beck, Through the Lens of Janet Stone: Portraits 1953–1979 (Oxford: Bodleian, 2018), hereafter Janet Stone: Portraits, p. 37. 21  Unknown author, ‘The Legacy of Reynolds Stone’, [accessed 12 January 2022].

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roots and gains intensity by prolonged contemplation’.22 Murdoch sought to recreate this intensity in the descriptions of the garden which stud the narrative of The Italian Girl: much like Stone’s engravings, these descriptions provide small images of concentrated beauty which demand attention. Humphrey Stone remarks that his father’s compositions often reflected his liking for ‘dense undergrowth with hart’s tongue ferns and giant hogweed in the foreground. The eye would be led down a path into seemingly endless greenery’.23 Murdoch’s descriptions of the garden likewise draw readers from the details of foliage framing the foreground, along a path or stream into the far distance, thus creating depth, encouraging deep looking, and immersing readers in the novel’s imaginative space. Edmund, The Italian Girl’s narrator, is an engraver, solitary, introspective, and unambitious by nature, whose return to his childhood home to attend his mother’s funeral comically precipitates him into the midst of scandalous intrigues which his myopic self-absorption ill-equips him to navigate. He is forced into self-scrutiny, and his eventual acknowledgement of his inadequacy—‘I had thought to have passed beyond life, but now it seemed to me that I had simply evaded it. I had not passed beyond anything; I was a false religious, a frightened man’—indicates a degree of moral progress, though the clear vision of himself and others which, at the end of the novel, he assumes he has achieved seems too easily won to be wholly convincing.24 The love which unexpectedly materialises between Edmund and Maggie, last in a succession of Italian girls who have served the family for many years, in the closing pages is too convenient; although it opens up the possibility that Edmund may at last begin to build a more honest and equal relationship, it also implies that truth to reality has been surrendered to the demands of form. Murdoch’s blossoming friendship with Reynolds Stone filtered into her depiction of Edmund’s character and craft. Humphrey Stone records that in December 1962, during the Stones’ first visit to the Bayleys at Cedar Lodge, ‘Iris pumped Reynolds about the life of an engraver. She was considering putting an engraver as a character in her next novel, who duly appeared in The Italian Girl, published a couple of years later. Reynolds 22  Kenneth Clark adds the name of Reynolds Stone to Stubbs, Bewick, and Palmer, his previously cited examples of ‘micropolitan art’. Reynolds Stone: An Exhibition Catalogue of Engravings and Designs (London: Arts Council, 1959). 23  Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone, p. 67. 24  Iris Murdoch, The Italian Girl (London: Vintage, 2000), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as IG, p. 170.

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painted its jacket, and provided an engraving of a camellia on the title page’.25 Janet Stone was, according to Beck, troubled by Murdoch’s depiction of Edmund: ‘Janet was worried about how “seedy” this character was and hoped it was in no way a portrait of Reynolds’.26 In fact, Edmund only superficially resembles Reynolds Stone in character: he is a recognisable type in Murdoch’s oeuvre, the fastidious, neurotic, repressed male first-person narrator, who she would later reprise with variations in Bradley Pearson (The Black Prince, 1973) and Charles Arrowby (The Sea, The Sea, 1978). It is ironic that Edmund is an engraver, because he lacks the essential quality of refined attention to the details of external reality which is exemplified in Stone. Edmund’s inattention to other characters leads him into preposterously erroneous misreadings of their words and actions. But despite his moral shortcomings, Edmund expresses an affection for his art which implies that he is not an entirely lost cause. He and his brother Otto, a stonemason, have both inherited their talents from their father, who had been ‘a sculptor, a painter, an engraver, a stonemason’, though they are ‘lesser men’ (IG, p. 17). In Edmund’s reflections on engraving, Reynolds Stone’s influence is particularly evident: I lived a very simple solitary life, but on the other hand I also earned very little money. The art of the wood-engraver may be deep but it is narrow. I passed my days contentedly with the twenty-six letters of the roman alphabet, whose sober authority my father had taught me to love, combining their sturdy forms with wild fantasies of decoration to produce everything from book-plates and trademarks to bank-notes and soap-coupons. My father had frowned upon any decoration of the letter itself, whose classic familiarity he compared to that of the human form, and as a letterer I too counted as a puritan. I did occasional book illustrations, and for my own pleasure, with the names of Bewick and Calvert prayerfully upon my lips, transferred to the precious small surface of the wooden block many scenes, figures, objects that I saw or imagined. (IG, pp. 23–24)

Edmund’s love for engraving is one of his few endearing qualities. Notwithstanding, savage criticisms are levelled at engravings and engravers in The Italian Girl. Otto’s estranged and embittered wife Isabel declares to Edmund: ‘We are all prisoners here. We are like people in an engraving. God, how I hate engravings! Sorry, Edmund, but there’s something about those black cramped things—it’s a Gothic art, a northern art. And why do  Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone, pp. 111–112.  Ian Archie Beck, Janet Stone: Portraits, p. 37.

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engravers always choose such gloomy subjects? Hanged men, wailing women. You can’t be gay in an engraving’ (IG, p. 33). Otto tells Edmund that Isabel has stopped him from engraving: ‘She said engravers made everything tiny, like looking through the wrong end of binoculars’ (IG, p. 44). Flora, Edmund’s niece, failed by Edmund when in desperate need of his help to deal with her unwanted pregnancy, contemptuously tells him to ‘Leave real living to people who are able for it. [...] Go home and play with your little bits of wood’ (IG, p. 100). Such comments present the engraver’s vision as warped and claustrophobic, the engraver as essentially childish, unable to confront reality. Isabel and Flora are hardly reliable voices in the novel, their perceptions having been distorted by their painful experiences of abusive relationships. Nevertheless, their words expose the flaws in Edmund’s view of his art and imply that despite her admiration of Stone’s work Murdoch had slight reservations as to whether engraving could be the most suitable medium for accurate representation of reality. For Edmund, engraving has become a retreat from the world: a space of nostalgic fantasy, the ‘narrow way’, as his surname emphasises. He has developed a dangerous propensity to aestheticise his surroundings, invoking painting as well as engraving at moments when he should be attending to the reality of those around him and thus demonstrating how an aesthetic vision can occlude perception as well as clarifying it. Edmund is so absorbed in the rectory garden, ‘a luscious miniature jungle scene such as would have delighted the eye of Henri Rousseau’ which he deems ‘a fine subject for an engraving’, that he is oblivious to the agony of his companion Flora (IG, p. 47). Edmund’s inattention to Flora leads him to deem her ‘some gracious sprite from an Italian painting’ and as ‘a country girl painted in a truthful unassuming moment by some honest unassuming painter at the turn of the century’ (IG, pp. 46–47). Elsewhere he regards Flora in Impressionistic terms, the colour, light, and rapid brushwork which characterise Impressionism creating a striking contrast with the precise technique and monochrome colour schemes of engraving and signalling Edmund’s psychological weakness. From the frame of a doorway he pictures Flora standing on the lawn in ‘a haze of gold’ (IG, p.  44); on seeing her in a white summer dress with hair undone, he thinks, ‘It was indeed not an engraver’s task. It was a subject for Manet’ (IG, p.  35). Rowe observes that Edmund’s ‘falsely innocent perception is questioned by its soaking in impressionistic hues and ultimately destroyed by Flora’s request for money for an abortion’.27 Impressionism is, for Murdoch,  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 12.

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morally dubious because of its romanticised images of femininity and its failure to probe beyond the surface of its subject matter, and Edmund carelessly overlays Flora’s reality with it to reinforce his erotic fantasy of her innocence. Flora leads Edmund through the wilderness to a cascade which falls into a dark pool. Like Stone, who engraved this subject many times, Edmund is sensitive to the untamed beauty of the scene—but Edmund’s response to it also reveals the moral differences between the two artists. The description of the cascade and pool closely resembles Stone’s engravings, not only in its physical details and other-worldly atmosphere but also in its limited colour range and his sense of it as a work of art, indicating that Murdoch surely had Stone’s engravings—including Fig. 3.1, measuring just 105 mm × 83 mm, believed to have been produced shortly before she began drafting The Italian Girl—in her thoughts as she wrote. The cascade was not large, but it was so well proportioned to the pool that it seemed to escape the vulgar dimensions of real size and partake rather of the measureless nature of art. It fell from a shelf of rock straight into the round black pool and seemed to disappear through a foamy brown ring into the deep water so little was the glossy black surface elsewhere disturbed. Above the rock the course of the stream receded up a green gulley overgrown with bog myrtle and willow herb towards a birch-ringed glade at the summit. The sun shone on the pool, but coldly, out of a bright pale northern sky. (IG, pp. 49–50)

The colours of this scene—and of the novel as a whole—consist of subtle modulations within a dark, restricted palette which recall the fine gradations of tone in Stone’s engravings. Stone’s objective attention to his subject and mastery of his art enabled him to produce far more than stark black and white oppositions: Myfanwy Piper notes that Stone achieves ‘“colour” […] by sensitive, intelligent variation in the thickness of parallel lines’.28 By means of these variations he was able to represent his subject with greater precision and truth and could create the effect of light and space even in the most densely crowded compositions. The novel’s secondary palette of greens, echoes the watercolours from which Stone’s engravings were derived. 28  Myfanwy Piper, The Wood Engravings of Reynolds Stone (London: Art & Technics, 1951); quoted in Reynolds Stone, p. 49. Myfanwy Piper and her husband the painter, printmaker, and designer John Piper were close friends of Reynolds Stone.

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Fig. 3.1  Reynolds Stone, Illustration for ‘Tribute to Benjamin Britten on his 50th birthday’, ed. by Anthony Gishford (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), [early 1960s], estate of Reynolds and Janet Stone

Edmund admits that this scene is ‘one I had many times painted and engraved without ever producing more than an eighteenth-century pastiche’ (IG, p. 48). Edmund is unable to depict the scene because he does not sustain his attention to it; he tritely terms it ‘a fine sight’ and ‘prettier than ever’ and seeks to turn away from it (IG, p. 48). In pronounced contrast, Stone’s patient and prayerful outward-directed attention enabled him to subdue his neuroses in order to represent the cascade and pool with meticulous objectivity whilst lovingly shaping it into a beautiful and highly distinctive form. Richard Luckett comments that in Stone’s work

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‘there is not the slightest whiff […] of pastiche’.29 Describing Stone’s love of painting his garden, Murdoch observes, ‘The patterns of leaves, the live solidity of trees, the atmosphere of green light, the flash of water: his paintings have the charm and strength of truthful art which opens the eyes of the beholder and changes and clarifies his vision’ (Memorial Address, np). Edmund, conversely, states that the ‘extreme beauty’ of the garden has put him in a ‘trance’, which he mistakes for a genuine unselfing (IG, p. 47). His claim that ‘I saw Flora clearly’ is deeply ironic, as he recoils at the revelation of her pregnancy and her plea for his aid which follow almost immediately (IG, p. 47). He continues to aestheticise her image, and this false ­ perception becomes particularly disturbing when his repressed erotic desire for Flora is later manifested in the form of a sexual advance, at the moment when he sees her arms ‘with the clarity of a beloved detail from a picture’ (IG, p.  99). Edmund’s pursuit of Flora eventually leads him directly into the pool and cascade, which are presented as hostile and violent towards him. In what constitutes an early example of the ‘ordeal by water’ which would become a characteristic element of Murdoch’s novels, Edmund is implicitly forced to acknowledge the separate and unknowable reality of the pool and cascade, and their resistance to his attempts to draw them into aesthetic fantasy. Murdoch seems to have been conscious that Reynolds Stone’s hypersensitive nature, his perfectionism, his reclusive way of life, and his near-­ total absorption in his art and his garden positioned him somewhat precariously on the borderline separating reality and illusion. Myfanwy Piper deems Stone ‘dangerously fastidious’; Kenneth Clark comments: In order to realise a compulsive dream a certain degree of withdrawal is necessary. Perfection is best achieved in solitude. The perfection achieved in Reynolds Stone’s lettering, decorative emblems and microcosms of nature is dependent on a stillness and concentration which daily contact with the world would not have allowed.30

In The Italian Girl Murdoch imagines what could happen if a character is placed in a similar situation but, crucially, without the moral framework 29  Richard Luckett, ‘Reynolds Stone, Engraver’, Magdalen College Cambridge Magazine 2008–2009, (Sudbury: Lavenham Press, 2009); quoted in Reynolds Stone, p. 37. 30  Myfanwy Piper, The Wood Engravings of Reynolds Stone (London: Art & Technics) quoted by Humphrey Stone in Reynolds Stone, p. 30; Kenneth Clark, ‘An Appreciation’, Reynolds Stone Engravings (London: John Murray, 1977), quoted by Humphrey Stone in Reynolds Stone, p. 92.

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which enables the clarity of vision necessary for the truthful perception and representation of reality. Edmund’s numerous failures of perception, which are moral failures, are far removed from Stone’s patient, sustained, and loving attention to the external world, reverently described by Murdoch: Good art shows us reality, which we too rarely see because it is veiled by our selfish cares, anxiety, vanity, pretension. Reynolds as artist, and as man, was a totally unpretentious being. His work, seemingly simple, gives to us that shock of beauty which shows how close, how in a sense ordinary, are the marvels of the world. (Memorial Address, np)

‘A World of Becoming’: Jean Jones Murdoch’s long friendship with the Expressionist painter Jean Jones (1927–2012) and its implications for Murdoch’s work and thought have until now been somewhat overlooked. Murdoch plainly influenced Jones—in particular, Murdoch’s views on the moral benefits of attention, expounded in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), were absorbed by Jones who strove, by means of sustained attention, to evolve a truthful vision of her surroundings and represent it in her art—but Jones’s reciprocal influence on Murdoch is more difficult to identify with certainty.31 Notwithstanding, Murdoch and Jones were strikingly like-minded, and their dialogue, wrought out of a shared love of art and art history, nourished Murdoch’s thinking on a whole range of ideas. Both firmly believed in the moral value of representational art. Both were fascinated by the concept of attention, the nature of perception, and theories of colour, and Jones provided Murdoch with a model of how these ideas could be worked out in a visual artist’s practice. The presence of Jones’s sensitive, brilliantly coloured landscapes, deeply rooted in a sense of place, and the devastating mental suffering which she exposes in her self-portraits can be traced in Murdoch’s novels in several subtle yet notable ways, most evidently in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) and The Good Apprentice (1985). 31  Michael Kurtz comments, ‘Jones particularly admired The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and there are several passages in a short novel she wrote in 1971–72 that closely align her ideas on painting with the moral approach to vision propounded in Murdoch’s book’. ‘Postcards, Paintings and Stone Circles: Jean Jones’s Friendship with Iris Murdoch’, Iris Murdoch Review, 12 (2021), 142–143, hereafter ‘Postcards, Paintings and Stone Circles’, 143. Jones’s novel, which is unpublished, is an art school romance titled The Competition.

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Jean Jones (née Robinson) studied art at St Martin’s School of Art for a year on leaving school then, under pressure from her father, relinquished painting in 1947 to read English at Cambridge. There she met Murdoch. After graduating she married John Jones, an Oxford don, who would become Professor of Poetry in 1978. The couple settled in Oxford and became part of a literary circle which included J. R. R. Tolkien and William Golding. Jones did not resume painting until the early 1960s, inspired by reading the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. She trained at Oxford Polytechnic and Ruskin College, and her work soon began to attract notice; she sold many paintings in Oxford and London galleries during the 1970s, and her success resulted in a solo exhibition at the Ashmolean in 1980. Those who purchased Jones’s work included Tolkien, Golding, the literary critic and academic John Carey, the philosopher Anthony Quinton, and the writer and critic Diana Trilling. From the early 1980s, Jones’s mental health deteriorated. She suffered with severe bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety, had breakdowns which caused her to be sectioned in 1983 and in 1995, and spent much time in hospitals and clinics. Jones’s ill health curtailed her commercial artistic career. Nevertheless, she continued to paint almost every day until very near the end of her life. Scrutiny of Jones’s images, her painterly methods and ideas reveals several significant points of contact with Murdoch. Jones was, foremost, a painter of landscapes. Her art is strongly connected with her immediate surroundings, for which she felt a great affinity: Oxford; Dartmoor, where the Joneses owned a cottage from 1958; and Primrose Hill, where she lived during her later years. Jones’s environment became the focus of her sustained attention as she recorded her highly distinctive vision of it. The noted art historian, dealer, and critic David Carritt, in his catalogue introduction for Jones’s exhibition at the Ashmolean, comments that ‘what she sees constantly she paints again and again, noting every change wrought by light and season but recording, too, the emotion which these changes awaken in her’. Jones’s close observation of minute changes in her surroundings caused Carritt to identify change as the overriding theme of her oeuvre, and to declare, ‘Hers is a world of becoming, not being’.32 Jones’s understanding of the world as engaged in a process of continual transformation aligns her with Murdoch, though Murdoch envisaged transformation as necessary to the gradual moral progress of humanity, and Jones’s 32  David Carritt, Jean Jones: Paintings and Drawings 1970–1980, Ashmolean Museum, 5–26 October 1980 (Oxford: Oxonian Rewley Press, 1980), p. 2, 3.

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vision was somewhat bleaker by contrast, despite her perception and rendition of beauty in the natural world. Michael Kurtz, curator of Jones’s estate, observes that ‘alongside many of the major figures of British painting at that time […] Jones grappled with the legacies of Post Impressionism and Expressionism’.33 Jones was fascinated by nineteenth-century theories of colour and was particularly influenced by Van Gogh, who followed the colour theories of the art critic Charles Blanc. Blanc contends that a ­painter’s palette should be restricted to the three primary colours red, blue, and yellow, and to colours obtained by mixing them, rather than utilising ready-made colours. Kurtz notes Jones’s commitment to Blanc’s approach, which intensified the luminosity of her paintings and encouraged sustained, unprejudiced attention to her subject in order to recreate its colours with true accuracy.34 The painter’s revelation of the colours which are actually present in the landscape, rather than the colours assumed to be there, prompts viewers into more careful looking at their surroundings. This attentive looking beyond the self at the details of the external world underpins Murdoch’s philosophy. Jones’s landscape painting can be understood in the context of a larger movement, often known as the ‘return to order’, which came about in response to the horror of the First World War. The pre-war avant-garde was rejected, and more traditional artistic approaches revived. A number of artists, including Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash, were painting familiar local landscapes as part of the process of recovery from the trauma of war. Kurtz notes that the Devon landscape early became a place of refuge for Jones, Devon being the location of her father’s recovery from psychological damage occasioned by the First World War and of the family’s residence on being evacuated from London in the Blitz; in later years she found further solace there during periods of mental suffering.35 Jones’s paintings of Devon helped her to alleviate the effects of trauma by reconnecting with the physical world. Kurtz observes this process of recovery and reconnection underway in Jones’s paintings of a world experienced as

33  Verity Babbs, ‘Jean Jones: Reclaiming Her Place’, Interview with Michael Kurtz, ArtPlugged, 11 March 2021 [accessed 20 January 2022]. 34  Michael Kurtz, ‘Jean Jones and the Love of Painting’, transcript of talk given at Brownston Gallery, Modbury, Devon, 19 May 2021, unpublished, hereafter ‘Love of Painting’, pp. 6–12. 35  See Michael Kurtz, ‘Love of Painting’, pp. 1–2.

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‘a strange place—both irreversibly torn apart by war and inexplicably beautiful’: The gradient of clarity in her images on the one hand pulls the viewer close to the subject – celebrating it under scrutiny in all its detail. But on the other hand, the blurred edges give the sense of a world dissolving before our eyes, pieced together by a painter desperate to find some coherence or unity in a confusing and inhuman landscape.36

Like Murdoch, Jones was operating within the realist tradition, but radically experimenting from her place within it. Kurtz has analysed how, inspired by J. J. Gibson’s theory of perception, Jones often gave her compositions the effect of falling away at the edges, or orientated her canvases diagonally, in her ongoing efforts to replicate human perception in her art.37 Murdoch and Jones moved from Cambridge to Oxford at almost the same time: Murdoch to teach philosophy at St Anne’s, in 1948; Jones on the occasion of her marriage in 1949. A. N. Wilson states: The Joneses were among [Murdoch]’s closest and most constant friends and she deeply admired them both – John as a talker of Coleridgean brilliance, and as a mind whose books ranged on subjects as various as Aristotle and Dostoevsky, Keats and Shakespeare, and Jean, whose expressionist paintings would, [Murdoch] believed, one day be spoken of in the same breath as those of Van Gogh. She often said this to me.38

At the Joneses’ home in February 1954, Murdoch was formally introduced to John Bayley. Kurtz observes, ‘The two couples saw each other remarkably frequently in this period, several times each week and sometimes multiple times in a single day, and their relationships appear to have been intellectual, competitive and passionate in equal parts. Murdoch was even godmother to Jean and John Jones’s daughter’. Kurtz notes that the friendship was ‘a little strained on the part of John Bayley’; Wilson (perhaps affected by his difficult relationship with Bayley) goes further, contending that Bayley was jealous of Murdoch’s intimacy with John Jones  Michael Kurtz, ‘Love of Painting’, p. 22.  Michael Kurtz, ‘Love of Painting’, pp. 12–19. 38  A. N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her (London: Arrow, 2004), hereafter As I Knew Her, p. 57. 36 37

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and put a stop to her habit of meeting with Jones post-lectures.39 John Jones was somewhat disappointed in his career, and so Bayley’s appointment as Warton Professor in 1974 is likely to have put the couples’ friendship under further pressure. The Joneses never visited Cedar Lodge. But Murdoch, who invariably compartmentalised her relationships, remained in contact with both Jean and John Jones until her late years. Murdoch warmly supported Jones’s return to painting in the early 1960s. It was typical of Murdoch to encourage her friends in their artistic pursuits. Her comment to Wilson that Jones would one day be ranked alongside Van Gogh is, however, particularly ardent, and indicates that she discerned a touch of genius in Jones’s art. When Jones was hospitalised for three weeks during this period, Murdoch sent her a Van Gogh postcard every day, suggesting that she strongly associated Jones’s paintings with Van Gogh’s. In June 1976, Murdoch and Bayley purchased three landscapes by Jones.40 Unfortunately, only black and white reproductions of these three paintings are currently known. The first of these, A Sheep in the Meadow Grass (1975), is a small painting which depicts a solitary sheep grazing in a field, against a backdrop of wooded hills and open sky. The scene appears tranquil, though the isolation of the sheep, emphasised by its position at the centre of the composition, is a little disquieting. The other two paintings depict scenes at Ringmoor, a prehistoric stone row and cairn circle on Ringmoor Down in Devon, a short walk from the Joneses’ Dartmoor cottage and a subject of enduring appeal to Jones. In both, Jones appears to have placed herself within the stone circle in order to paint. From Ringmoor (1970) leads the eye along the stone row to the distant hills beyond and the expanse of clouded sky above. From Ringmoor to Eddiston (1974) (Fig.  3.2) includes some of the circle stones in the lower part of the composition. The stones’ position encourages the attribution of sentience to them; they appear to gaze with the artist and viewer into the distance. The image is dominated by a sky filled with billowing clouds, which takes up two-thirds of the composition, creating a sense of space and distance. Figure 3.3, Ringmoor Above Leemor (1976), another of Jones’s numerous paintings of this subject, provides some indication of the colours she may have used in the painting owned by Murdoch.

 Michael Kurtz, ‘Postcards, Paintings and Stone Circles’, p. 142.  The location of these three paintings is currently unknown, though black and white copies are stored in the Jones family’s archive. 39 40

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Fig. 3.2  Black and white photograph of From Ringmoor to Eddiston by Jean Jones (1974), painting previously owned by Iris Murdoch, Jean Jones Estate

It is unsurprising that Murdoch was drawn to Jones’s images of ancient stones. Murdoch already had a long-standing interest in them, as evidenced by her 1938 essay ‘Millionaires and Megaliths’, written at the age of 17 for the Badminton School magazine.41 This essay details a visit to the Neolithic stone circles at Avebury, Wiltshire, which was at that time under the process of reconstruction. It is arguable that Jones’s paintings of Ringmoor rekindled this interest. Their presence can be felt in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983).42 The former novel contains a stone circle, the Ennistone Ring, which seems to represent the existence of something beyond human comprehension. Ineffectual attempts are made to order  ‘Millionaires and Megaliths’ is reproduced in Iris Murdoch Review 10 (2019), 1–3.  I am indebted to Michael Kurtz for the initial suggestion of a connection between Jones’s paintings of Ringmoor and The Philosopher’s Pupil. 41 42

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Fig. 3.3  Jean Jones, Ringmoor above Leemor, 1976, Jean Jones Estate

the stones, to clean them, and to theorise about them. Learned visitors can ‘make nothing of them’.43 They are the site of miraculous events. Rozanov, the tormented philosopher of the title, describes them as ‘the nearest things to gods that our contemptible citizens will ever see’ (PP, p. 195). Murdoch’s depiction of the Ennistone Ring combines elements of Avebury and Ringmoor. She integrates the Avebury theory of male and female stones. The Ennistone Ring is formed of nine stones, a similar size to the circle of ten stones at Ringmoor (the Avebury stone circles being far larger). The Ringmoor stone circle was restored in 1909, with five missing stones being replaced, rather dubiously, by stones introduced from elsewhere on the moor; similarly, five stones missing from the Ennistone Ring ‘were uncovered and collected and erected in their present still-disputed 43  Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as PP, p. 17.

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positions by a nineteenth-century archaeologist’ (PP, p. 194). And about Ringmoor, as with the Ennistone Ring, there is very little definite knowledge. Jones captured Ringmoor in all weathers and seasons. She was particularly interested in representing shifts of light and atmosphere at moments of transition. Murdoch’s description of the Ennistone Ring’s sentient stones, the mutable light, and far-reaching view, echoes Jones’s Ringmoor paintings: They stood there in the pale sad damp light, occupying a temporal moment, wet with rain, transcending history, oblivious of art, resisting understanding, monstrous with unfathomable thought, and dense with mysterious authoritative impacted being. The wind blew the long grasses at their feet, while beyond and between there could be seen rounded hills and woods where here and there grey church towers were successfully illumined by the shifting cloudy light. (PP, p. 194)

The final appearance of the Ennistone Ring takes place near the end of The Philosopher’s Pupil, when George McCaffrey, Rozanov’s demonic pupil, there experiences a mysterious vision of the eclipse of the sun. This vision engenders a form of unselfing in George which brings about his moral transformation. Daniel Read, analysing the impact of Paul Nash’s art on The Philosopher’s Pupil, contends that George’s vision ‘alludes to Nash’s late explorations of mortality and moral renewal’.44 Megaliths were an important aspect of Nash’s personal mythology and feature frequently in his late work. Nash’s imagery seems likely to have influenced Murdoch’s conception of the Ennistone Ring—but Jones’s paintings of Ringmoor, and Murdoch’s intimate knowledge of Jones’s complex relation with this ancient site, surely also hover behind her fictional megalith. Jones had her first major breakdown in summer 1983, at the point when Murdoch was beginning to draft The Good Apprentice. Murdoch visited Jones in hospital on 8 June 1983 and subsequently noted in her journal: ‘Yesterday […] I saw Jean at the Warneford. Pure suffering: what really smashes the identity, the ego. Loss of concentration, inability to remember, inability to read or draw. A face of such suffering’ (Journal 14, p.  34). Jones’s numerous self-portraits, produced during the winter months when poor weather prevented her from painting outside, unflinchingly document her shifting moods: at times defeated, confrontational,  Daniel Read, ‘Evolving a Style’, p. 31.

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disdainful, with an ever-present undercurrent of her pain. Harry Langham observes that whereas Jones’s landscapes are ‘artful balancing acts, which carefully combine metaphysical meditation with an intensely lyrical sensibility’, her self-portraits function differently: These […] survive as an archive of self-reflection; relics of the artist as she saw herself through times of increasing psychological difficulty. Her diagnosis was something Jean would seldom discuss – and if compelled to, only with the utmost circumspection – but throughout her self-portraiture she provides fleeting glimpses of the struggle within: a downturned gaze, a drooped expression, two bloodshot eyes.45

Murdoch had long been meditating on the nature of suffering and its impact on the ego. Her fascination with Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, which she interpreted as a sublime image of the human condition, points to her desire to understand how suffering can engender a form of unselfing which annihilates the ego and transforms pain into ecstasy. Her witnessing of Jones’s suffering merges into her representation of Edward Baltram, protagonist of The Good Apprentice, who has had a mental breakdown after having accidentally caused the death of his best friend Mark Wilsden. Thomas McCaskerville, Edward’s psychiatrist, tells him, ‘Your picture of yourself, your self-illusion, is in process of being broken. This places you in an unusual position, very close to the truth, and that proximity is part of your pain’ (GA, p. 71). Edward’s suffering is not yet ‘pure’ because Edward compulsively generates fantasies which, Thomas advises him, are the ego’s instinctive self-defence system; Thomas tells Edward that he must cease fantasising and confront the reality of his situation in order to reorientate himself towards truth, allow the old self to die and a new self to replace it. Murdoch’s journal entry of 8 June 1983 reveals her recognition of the difficulty of existing in a state of ‘pure suffering’ in which the ego is truly destroyed: it continues: ‘Smashing of ego—yet you carry the broken thing on, on your back, trailing behind you, stinking. Smell of Warneford’ (Journal 14, p. 35). The final sentence explicitly connects her ruminations on suffering with Jones’s plight. At the novel’s close, Edward comes to recognise that he will not fully recover, that the horror is likely to resurface and also that he is, 45  Harry Langham, ‘Jean Jones’, Port, 19 August 2020, [accessed 20 January 2022].

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nonetheless, capable of turning his attention outwards to good things in the world. His favoured art form is prose: his plans to comprehend the co-existence of joy and pain in Proust, and to write a novel which will deal with something other than himself, suggest that he will be able to sustain and hone the outward-directed attention which will assist his progress. Jones’s unremitting attention, refined by years of disciplined practice, to the places she loved enabled her to channel her pain into her own art, and to find real, if temporary, solace by transfiguring that pain into images of colour-­drenched beauty.

‘That Particular Serenity and Presence of Being’: Alex Colville Murdoch’s friendship with Alex Colville (1920–2013) is an underexplored area of Murdoch scholarship, despite each having acknowledged the influence of the other, and John Bayley having drawn attention to Murdoch’s love and sustained study of Colville’s art. The Bayleys met Colville at a conference in Ontario in 1963. Bayley recalls: ‘the real revelation of our Canadian visit was the pictures of Alex Colville […] Iris was spellbound by them. She and Colville took to each other at once, and he showed her all the portfolios he had brought with him’.46 Both Murdoch and Bayley became great admirers of Colville’s work. Murdoch praised his paintings for their ‘calmness and truth’, their ‘particular serenity and presence of being’, their ‘absolute thereness’.47 She was also struck by the eroticism which she discerned in them, writing to him: ‘I think your pictures express the ubiquity of sex in the highest spiritual (Plato’s) sense of EROS. Probably all great painting does this’.48 Discussing a list of the greatest living painters with her friend Borys Villers, she observed, ‘Alex Colville would be on [the] list—I think he’s a very erotic painter actually’.49 Colville and Murdoch met only twice, but they kept in contact intermittently by

 John Bayley, Iris, p. 122.  Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, undated, KUAS6/3/27/2, Iris Murdoch Collections; Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, undated, KUAS6/3/27/6, Iris Murdoch Collections; Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, 26 November [no year stated], reproduced in ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, 25. 48  Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, 26 November [no year stated], reproduced in ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, 25. 49  5 May [no year stated], KUAS191/1/75, Iris Murdoch Collections. 46 47

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letter.50 Bayley states that Murdoch would ‘sit and study her volume of Colville reproductions by the hour’.51 ‘Thank you for all your pictures which stay so calmly as icons’, she wrote to Colville, and ‘I really do find in your pictures an immense pleasure & a deep inspiration’.52 She told him she was delighted and ‘very flattered’ when a fan from Montreal wrote that Murdoch’s novels reminded her of Colville’s pictures.53 There are many points of convergence between Murdoch and Colville, and her contemplation of his paintings, in which everyday life is rendered extraordinary and the particular becomes universally significant, energised her thinking on the subject of how best to represent individual human experience. Consideration of Colville’s approach to painting, his style and subject matter reveals several marked similarities between Colville and Murdoch. When they met in 1963, Colville had just resigned from university teaching in order to concentrate on painting full-time (Murdoch having similarly recently resigned from St Anne’s). He was to become one of Canada’s most eminent painters. Colville was a realist painter, who rejected contemporary developments in abstraction and post-modernism. ‘No other modern painter is so unconscious of the fashion, and so indifferent to what’s new in the art world’, Bayley remarks.54 He maintained his highly distinctive signature style, developed in the 1950s, until his death. In his adherence to the realist tradition, and resistance to contemporary trends, he resembles Murdoch. Andrew Hunter describes Colville’s paintings as ‘still images that compress and compact powerful ideas’.55 His paintings function as tableaux in which moments are arrested for contemplation. Murdoch had likewise, since the beginning of her career, repeatedly integrated tableaux into her novels. Rowe contends that Murdoch’s tableaux are intended to ‘force a […] conscious moral evaluation’: 50  Ten letters from Murdoch to Colville have been made publicly available: five are reproduced in ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, and five are held in the Iris Murdoch Collections (KUAS6/3/27). 51  John Bayley, Iris, p. 123. 52  Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, undated, KUAS6/3/27/6, Iris Murdoch Collections; undated [1969], reproduced in ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, 23. 53  Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, 5 August [no year stated], reproduced in ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, 24. 54  John Bayley, Iris, p. 124. 55  Andrew Hunter, Alex Colville, Art Gallery of Ontario, 20 August 2014 [accessed 29 January 2022].

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Murdoch’s tableaux initially force a moment of felt experience from which the reader is required to provide a detached, objective consideration, disassociated from the subjectivity of the point of view of the character and from the subjectivity of the reader’s own preconceived ideas. Murdoch uses them to force the reader, along with the character, to search for what is irrefutably ‘there.’56

Like Jones, Colville took much inspiration from his surroundings, repeatedly painting the landscapes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, where he lived for most of his life, though Colville’s subdued, often bleak colour schemes contrast sharply with Jones’s riotous palette. Tempera and acrylic emulsions, his preferred mediums, cause his colours to emanate soft light and are also suited to the creation of sharp geometric edges. Colville adopted an understated Pointillist approach, painstakingly layering tiny marks on his paintings which were then glazed so that his brushstrokes became imperceptible. This approach seems to intensify reality, an effect which is heightened further by Colville’s idiosyncratic use of form. His paintings are governed by his highly disciplined use of Renaissance perspective, which imposes form on contingency so harmoniously that it appears natural. Murdoch’s background in Renaissance art history, and her ongoing struggle to prevent form from dominating in her novels, would have led her to perceive and admire Colville’s technique. She understood him as the successor of Piero and Seurat, who also constructed their paintings with geometric precision. Existentialist philosophy attracted both Colville and Murdoch during the post-war period, though it had a longer-lasting impact on Colville: his desire to impose order on chaos has been associated with this orientation towards existentialism.57 Colville observes, ‘my painting occurs when I think of a way to combine two disparate elements’.58 These oppositions—nature and machinery, animals and humans, order and chaos—are often represented in a moment of tension, or about to collide. Murdoch likewise had an interest in exploring  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 41.  Ray Cronin suggests, ‘Colville, in his insistence on order, on making sense, echoes Camus’s definition of a “metaphysical rebel” as one who “attacks a shattered world in order to demand unity from it”’. Alex Colville: Life & Work (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2017) [accessed 29 January 2022]. 58  Alex Colville, quoted by Jeffrey Meyers, The Mystery of the Real (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2016), hereafter Mystery of the Real, p. 11. 56 57

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the relationship between two contrasting elements, as is indicated by the titles of some of her novels: The Red and the Green, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, The Nice and the Good, Nuns and Soldiers. Colville’s imagery includes indoor domestic scenes, seascapes, riverscapes, animals, vehicles, and guns. ‘[A] lot of your images have travelled with us for a long time’, Murdoch wrote to him.59 Throughout his oeuvre he repeatedly portrayed the members of his family in numerous different settings, moods, and stages of life, somewhat like Murdoch who ­manoeuvred a range of recognisable characters into different situations and relationships as she sought to interrogate her concerns from different angles. Murdoch named Colville’s pictures of animals as particular favourites of hers. Ray Cronin states, ‘The animal is Other, present, seemingly ubiquitous in Colville’s imagery, but essentially unknowable’ and quotes the remark of Colville’s daughter, Ann Kitz: ‘He wasn’t sentimental about animals, but he thought that they were essentially good, and he didn’t think that people were inherently good’.60 It is possible that Colville’s conception of animals as noble, good, and beyond human comprehension had some impact on Murdoch’s numerous portrayals of wise and allknowing animals, including the cat Montrose (The Nice and the Good, 1968), the parrot Grey (The Book and the Brotherhood, 1987), and the dogs Zed and Anax (The Philosopher’s Pupil, 1983; The Green Knight, 1993). The image of the gun, and its potential for exploration of related themes of power and morality, appealed to both Colville and Murdoch. ‘The use of power is a key moral and philosophical problem, and that’s what my paintings featuring pistols are all about. Power is a condition of life: a thing that must be handled’, Colville remarked.61 A colour slide of his major work Pacific (1967) was in Murdoch’s possession. This painting depicts a male figure standing on a verandah, his back turned on the viewer to gaze at a tranquil blue sky and gently breaking sea. Colville has, characteristically, truncated the figure so that only his legs, arms, and torso are visible. In the foreground, lying on a table marked with a ruler is a gun. The painting seems to present a moral dilemma. Helen J. Dow interprets the gun and ruler as a representation of justice: a version of the sword and 59  Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, 26 November [no year stated], reproduced in ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, 25. 60  Ray Cronin, Alex Colville: Life & Work (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2017). https:// www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/alex-colville/significance-­and-­critical-issues/#Depicting-theEveryday [accessed 29 January 2022]. 61  Alex Colville, quoted in Mystery of the Real, p. 16.

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scales.62 The painting’s title, meaning ‘peaceful’, reminds viewers of the presence of the sea—but the composition is nevertheless dominated by the gun, to which attention is compelled. Colville stated that the painting is ‘an image of the dichotomies of life, “purity and eternity” in the ocean versus “the nasty business of actual life” represented by the gun’.63 He also said: ‘I don’t think the painting is about suicide, I guess I think of the gun and the table as necessary parts of human life, upon which it is possible sometimes to turn one’s back’.64 The painting resists a superficial interpretation; the viewer is made responsible for deciding its meaning and thus has to interrogate it, searching for clues which will elucidate its mystery. It is conceivable that Murdoch had Pacific in mind when she created her own tableaux featuring guns: the priest Cato Forbes kneeling in misty darkness at the midpoint of Hungerford Bridge, about to throw a gun into the Thames (HC, pp. 1–2), and Joseph Radeechy, sprawled over his desk in Whitehall, a gun close to his hand (NG, pp. 8–9). Colville is most renowned for his paintings of human figures, which reveal the unique significance of common human experiences and imbue simple, everyday acts with mythical value. His ‘great Piero-Seurat forms’, stately, imposing, and sensual, have what Murdoch termed in a letter to him ‘great thereness’.65 An example is Stop for Cows (1967) described by Murdoch, who retained a copy of it in her possession, as her ‘earliest favourite’.66 In this painting, a girl turns and raises her hand to prevent vehicles from advancing, so that a herd of cattle can continue its slow progress along a road. The simple gesture seems to take on vast meaning, perhaps signifying female authority, or the supremacy of nature over civilisation. The statuesque girl coolly gazes beyond those whom she has halted. The viewer is placed in a subordinate position, with the arrested vehicles; the girl’s action, expressed in a universal language, commands the viewer to stop and attend to the painting. ‘In one way the picture is reassuringly Dutch, robustly, even humorously physical. But it also contrives to be full of a magic strangeness in complete contrast with appearances’, 62  Helen J. Dow, The Art of Alex Colville (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), hereafter Art of Alex Colville, p. 142. 63  Alex Colville, quoted in Mystery of the Real, p. 17. 64  Alex Colville, quoted in Art of Alex Colville, p. 140. 65   Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, undated [1969], reproduced in ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, 23. 66  Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, 26 November [no year stated], reproduced in ‘Letters to Alex Colville’, 25.

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Bayley observes of Stop for Cows, adding that Murdoch found Colville’s ‘mystery’ both ‘familiar and friendly with her own. With her own outlook on art, too’.67 Murdoch meditated at length on Stop for Cows and named it as one of many ‘icons’ created by Colville, implying that it provided her with spiritual sustenance and pointed to truth.68 ‘Our lives are momentous: all of [Murdoch’s] tremendous novelistic energy is bent to sustaining that faith’, John Updike observes.69 Stop for Cows makes visual Murdoch’s belief in the immense power of an individual act, however trivial it might appear. Blocked faces and truncated figures recur throughout Colville’s oeuvre. Jeffrey Meyers comments: ‘The hidden features and vivid insubstantiality of his subjects, which suggest people’s concealed character and the difficulty of penetrating their inner thoughts, heightens the mystery of the real in his paintings’.70 Colville has said that he conceals the faces of his subjects to ‘make you look harder’.71 He and Murdoch are alike in their shared awareness of the inexhaustible mystery of other people, and in their desire to make the viewer or reader seek to penetrate this otherness. Murdoch’s novels reveal that failing to attend to the inner life of others can have devastating consequences—for example, when Bradley Pearson’s inattention to his tormented sister Priscilla is a contributing factor to her suicide in The Black Prince. Bradley’s obsessive feelings for Julian Baffin blind him to Priscilla’s suffering. At the novel’s close he recognises that Priscilla need not have died and also that despite having loved Julian she will forever remain mysterious to him: ‘Eternally you escape my embrace. Art cannot assimilate you nor thought digest you’, he writes to her (BP, p. 339). In The Sea, The Sea, Charles Arrowby is haunted by the image of a ghostly, indistinct face which operates as a silent comment on his failure to attend to the reality of his childhood love Mary Hartley Smith. Murdoch develops her exploration of the hidden face by means of a plethora of mask imagery, which reaches its peak in The Green Knight (1993). Colville’s concealed faces and missing heads emphasise the unsettling isolation in which his people exist; often, they seem alienated from each other and from themselves. Murdoch felt the lure of this existentialist worldview, but  John Bayley, Iris, p. 123.  Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville, undated, KUAS6/3/27/6, Iris Murdoch Collections. 69  John Updike, ‘Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard’, New Yorker, 62 (1986), 126. 70  Jeffrey Meyers, Mystery of the Real, p. 10. 71  Alex Colville, quoted by Jeffrey Meyers in Mystery of the Real, p. 11. 67 68

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ultimately rejected it. Though she accepted the mask’s potential for deception and distancing, she also recognised that the creation, assumption, and relinquishing of masks can bring people into more truthful and loving relationships, and her art portrays the mask’s capacity to reveal as well as to conceal.

‘There Is in a Rare Sense so Little Barrier’: Harry Weinberger Analysis of Murdoch’s relationships with Stone, Jones, and Colville strengthens the case for Weinberger as an influence on her thought and work, by demonstrating that Murdoch was well-accustomed to drawing on the lives, experiences, imagery, and aesthetic techniques of the visual artists amongst her friends and imaginatively reconstructing them in her novels. This practice is most evident in the case of Reynolds Stone: Murdoch’s creative transformation of Stone’s life and art for The Italian Girl can be understood as the most fully developed precedent for her extended exploration of Weinberger’s identity, experiences, methods, imagery, and ideas about art and artists, all of which are diffused throughout her oeuvre and which most strongly influence Nuns and Soldiers and The Green Knight. Though her other friendships with visual artists meant much to Murdoch, and their presence can be traced in her novels to varying degrees, the scale and impact on her work and thought of her friendship with Weinberger are unparalleled. Reynolds Stone and Alex Colville, and to a lesser extent Jean Jones, were friends not only with Murdoch but also with John Bayley, making the dynamics of these friendships markedly different from Murdoch’s far more personal, private relations with Harry Weinberger. Murdoch’s discourse with Stone was mainly conducted during visits to the Old Rectory, with Bayley often also present, as well as other guests and members of the Stone family. The Joneses and the Bayleys were close friends in the 1950s, seeing each other frequently, although Bayley did not maintain the friendship in later years. Bayley and Murdoch paid joint homage to Alex Colville’s art: Murdoch’s letters to him invariably speak for them both. Conradi notes that Murdoch’s novels ‘show much indirect influence’ of Bayley, and her enthusiasm for Colville’s paintings is likely to have been heightened by Bayley’s good opinion of them.72 In contrast, Murdoch’s perceptions of  Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 405.

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both Weinberger and his art remained her own, uncoloured by Bayley’s views. After their first meeting in Provence, at which Bayley and Barbara Weinberger were also present, Murdoch pursued Weinberger separately and then went to great lengths to nurture their friendship on an individual basis over the next twenty years. Though he met Bayley again, Weinberger’s acquaintance with him did not develop much further; similarly, Murdoch met Weinberger’s wife Barbara several times, and her letters sometimes mention her, but she did not know Barbara well. Murdoch’s discourse with Weinberger provided her with a liberating space to reflect on art at length, to interrogate her personal responses, and to refine her critical judgements. Though Weinberger occasionally went to see her in Oxford, and she came to see him in Leamington, their friendship was, primarily, part of Murdoch’s London life, about which Bayley knew little. Weinberger’s paintings were displayed not only at Cedar Lodge but at Murdoch’s flat in Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington. Murdoch’s many visits to art exhibitions and discussions of art with Weinberger enhanced the psychological space and stimulation which London offered. Although her friendship with Weinberger was characterised by numerous gallery and museum visits, Murdoch was not in the habit of making such visits with Stone, Jones, or Colville. In fact, only one such visit is known: Murdoch’s journal entry of 6 September 1968 records a visit with Stone to a Matisse exhibition in London (Journal 10, p. 132). This would have been a rare occasion, as Stone hardly ever left the Old Rectory, being, as Humphrey Stone notes, ‘so totally absorbed in his own surroundings and his work, that he could only function at home where most of his inspiration came from’.73 It seems unlikely that Jones and Murdoch visited exhibitions together, particularly as Murdoch appears to have become somewhat distanced from Jones in later years. Murdoch and Colville were hardly ever able to meet, as he was almost always in Canada. Conversely, her discourse with Weinberger provided Murdoch with the many episodes of joint attention to art which she had long craved. Their discussions in person overflowed into their letters. Murdoch rarely wrote to Jones or Stone. The few postcards she sent to Jones in the early 1960s are gestures of support during Jones’s period of hospitalisation. Just ten letters from Murdoch to Colville are known: in these, she predominantly writes as the admiring fan of a renowned artist. In contrast, Murdoch’s discourse with  Humphrey Stone, Reynolds Stone, p. 137.

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Weinberger ranged freely over many areas and resulted in almost 400 letters from her in addition to their meetings in person. Though Murdoch positioned Weinberger as her tutor in matters of art, she frequently advised him with regard to his personal life, thus redressing the balance somewhat. In November 1977, after a recent visit to Weinberger’s workroom in Leamington, Murdoch wrote to him: ‘I did very much like seeing the pictures at your house. I greatly enjoyed and valued seeing you, and, as you said, there is in a rare sense so little barrier. I feel entirely at home with you. Do please write to me’.74 There was no other artist with whom she could communicate in this way. Weinberger was a German-Jewish émigré: his heritage is likely to have increased his appeal for Murdoch. Having arrived in England in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme, he attended boarding school, became an apprentice toolmaker and art student, then enlisted in the army, marrying and resuming his art studies after the war ended. Weinberger had lost relatives in concentration camps. His father’s factory was taken over by the Nazis and his family home was later destroyed by bombs. His parents never recovered from the devastating impact of the war, and Weinberger himself was indelibly marked by it. Murdoch knew and loved many émigrés, including Franz Baermann Steiner, Jože Jančar, Arnoldo Momigliano, and Miklós Vető.75 Their lives 74  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 November 1977, KUAS80/8/8, Iris Murdoch Collections. 75  Franz Baermann Steiner (1909–1952), an Austrian Jew born in Prague, was an academic and poet. In 1950 he was appointed Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Anthropological Institute in Oxford. He began an affair with Murdoch in 1951 which continued until his early death. Jože Jančar (1920–2000) was born in Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia, became a medical student, but was interned during the war. Jančar met Murdoch while in a displaced persons’ camp run by UNRRA. He and his wife made their way to England in 1948. He resumed his medical studies, partly funded by Murdoch. He became a leading figure in the field of psychiatry in learning difficulty. Arnoldo Momigliano (1908–1987) came to England from Nazi Germany in 1939. In 1951 he became Professor of Ancient History at University College London. He and Murdoch became close in the early 1950s. There was a rift following her marriage in 1956, but they were reconciled in 1977 and she dedicated The Philosopher’s Pupil to him in 1983. Miklós Vető (1936–2020) was forced to flee Hungary because he had participated in the 1956 Revolution and came to France as a refugee. He studied philosophy at Oxford, where Murdoch acted as his doctoral supervisor. He became a philosopher and a historian of German idealism. See ‘Obituary of Miklós Vető’, Dávid Szőke, Iris Murdoch Review 11 (2020), 107–109.

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made a deep impression on her thought and became an important aspect of her fiction. At the time of Murdoch’s first meeting with Weinberger she had already begun to probe the effects of the atrocities of the Second World War on human consciousness through the creation of characters such as Willy Kost in The Nice and the Good (1968). Willy is a Holocaust survivor who struggles to contain his suffering and to divert it into his work, and he bears some resemblance to Weinberger in this respect. Weinberger’s recollections of his harrowing formative experiences are likely to have influenced her portrayal of certain characters in her later novels, such as Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planet (1989) who is obsessed with the suffering of the Jews, and Tuan Abelson, who struggles in Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) with the guilt intrinsic to existence in a post-­ Holocaust world. Weinberger’s longing to capture in art the prelapsarian innocence of childhood vision also identifies him as both model and foil for Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea (1978). Weinberger might be positioned amongst the many German-Jewish émigré artists who enriched British culture from the 1930s onwards, alongside the painters Martin Bloch and Heinz Koppel—his tutor and his cousin, respectively, and both key influences on his art—and also Frank Auerbach (whose early life has striking parallels with Weinberger’s).76 To a degree, he was willing to be grouped with these artists. His 1976 exhibition at Camden Arts Centre was part of a larger show with the painters Jankel Adler and Hilde Goldschmidt, both of whom were persecuted by the Nazis and came to the UK during the Second World War.77 76  Martin Bloch (1883–1954) was a German-Jewish artist who came to Britain in 1934. He became known as an influential colourist and teacher. His teaching included a period at Camberwell School of Art (1949–1954). He gave private tuition in art to Weinberger during the late 1940s. Weinberger observed (Artists’ Lives, p. 41): ‘I learned more with Martin in the year that he was my teacher than in the years that I spent at art school’. Heinz Koppel (1919–1980) was a German-Jewish artist who came to Britain in 1936 and eventually settled in Wales. He was, like Weinberger, a student of Martin Bloch. He and Weinberger were close friends. Frank Auerbach (1931–) was born in Berlin and arrived in Britain under the Kindertransport scheme in 1939. He became a naturalised British citizen in 1947. 77  Roots and Influences: Jankel Adler, Hilde Goldschmidt, Harry Weinberger, Camden Art Centre, November 1976. Jankel Adler (1895–1949) was a Polish painter and printmaker. Being a Jewish left-wing intellectual, many of his works were seized by the Nazis and included in the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition. He joined the Polish army, then came to Britain in 1941. Hilde Goldschmidt was a German Expressionist painter and printmaker taught by Oskar Kokoschka. Persecuted by Nazis, she became an Austrian citizen in 1936, came to England between 1939 and 1949, and then settled in Austria in the 1950s.

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Although Weinberger was an entirely secular Jew, his Jewish heritage would have attracted Murdoch’s interest. Throughout her life she sought out Jewish teachers; her journal entry of January 1966 records that ‘the first was [Eduard] Fraenkel and the most beloved Franz [Steiner]’, and Weinberger can be placed within this lineage (Journal 10, p.  29). Weinberger’s acknowledgement of his Jewish heritage is indicated by his gift of a painting to the Ben Uri Gallery, a collection of work by artists of Jewish descent, the majority of whom are émigrés.78 However, he had mixed feelings about his work being precisely categorised in any way. His resistance to the label of German Expressionist was familiar to Murdoch, and she strove to be responsive to his wishes. Having commented, in her draft introduction to his 1983 exhibition catalogue, that Weinberger ‘may be claimed as a descendant of German Expressionism, and some of his subject matter suggests the painful concentration and anguished ‘trapped’ vision of this line’, she asked him: ‘Have I made you sound too “expressionist”? (German/Central European Expressionist?) Your work is not easy to describe, it is so remarkable!’79 Weinberger’s simplified forms, and heightened colours reverberating with emotion, are indeed reminiscent of German Expressionism, although critics have been cautious about placing him within this context. Nicholas Watkins, for example, states, ‘[t]he obsessive concern with emotions, feelings and moods would place his work in the sensitive, self-analytical tradition of the Middle-European Expressionism or his origins but a more precise placement within that context would not I feel be particularly helpful. His work is obstinately personal.’80 In her 1994 catalogue introduction Murdoch connects Weinberger with a range of early twentieth-century artistic movements, and ranks him alongside a succession of great artists: His works relate us to the deep emotions and profound joys of the early periods of the [twentieth] century when painting was a great universal exploration: impressionism, post-impressionism, fauvism, symbolism,  Weinberger donated In Winter, Manchester to the Ben Uri Gallery in 1990.   Iris Murdoch, 1983CI, np; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 20 December 1982, KUAS80/7/1, Iris Murdoch Collections. 80  Nicholas Watkins, 1983CI, np. 78 79

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expressionism, when painters adored paint and worshipped colour, inspired by passion and controlled imagination and courageous faith in art. Van Gogh, Matisse, Nolde, Munch, Beckmann, Picasso: a search for the world.81

By this means, Murdoch emphasises the eclecticism of Weinberger’s art and situates him firmly within the canon. As this study contends that Weinberger’s imagery, his ideas about art and artists, his painterly techniques, and aspects of his identity and experiences influenced Murdoch’s novels, it is necessary to clarify how the nature of this influence will be demonstrated. Murdoch did not explicitly acknowledge Weinberger’s influence on her. She appears, however, to have been in general reluctant to acknowledge artistic influences, despite the multitude of artists, from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky and John Cowper Powys, whose influence can be traced in her work. In a 1968 interview with W. K. Rose, she stated: ‘The only person I’m certain has influenced me is Henry James’.82 Murdoch’s reluctance may have stemmed from her consciousness of the difficulties of identifying influences. She observes in her catalogue introduction to Weinberger’s 1983 exhibition catalogue: ‘It is always dangerous, though irresistible, to look for influences and connections. Artists are often modest, also irritable, about such speculations’.83 Furthermore she may have been unaware of how others had influenced her, or unwilling to cite influences in fear of being considered derivative. Gary Browning observes that Derrida’s claim, ‘“There is nothing outside the text” […] does not entail the redundancy of authorial intentions but it does signify that an author’s conception of the influences upon and the meaning of a text are not decisive’.84 Murdoch certainly seems to have actively sought to be influenced by Weinberger. She positioned herself in the role of his pupil and urged him to teach her about the visual arts. She engaged avidly and closely with his work and thought during the course of their long friendship: her sustained questioning of him about his subject  Iris Murdoch, 1994CI, np.  W. K. Rose, Rose, p. 28. 83  Iris Murdoch, 1983CI, np. 84  Gary Browning, ‘Agency and influence in the history of political thought: The agency of influence and the influence of agency’, History of Political Thought 31, 2 (2010), 345–366, hereafter ‘Agency and influence’, 360. 81 82

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matter and his methods, her many requests to see, discuss, and purchase his paintings and drawings, and her frequent comments that she found them ‘inspiring’ and that they gave her ‘light’ all imply Weinberger’s influence on her.85 Browning contends that: There is certainly no incontrovertible way of establishing influence, but the bar for establishing a relationship of influence should not be set too high. Relations of influence can be attributed legitimately by historians, if they conform to the rubric of all historical explanations in being supported by evidence and argumentation.86

This study endeavours to fulfil Browning’s criteria for establishing a relationship of influence, by setting out a carefully argued case, based on a wealth of evidence, for Weinberger’s position as a minor yet significant influence on Murdoch. Conal Condren’s views, expressed in The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts (1985), help to clarify the nature of this relationship of influence.87 Condren criticises the language of influence for commonly representing the individual being influenced as the passive recipient of another’s ideas. Browning observes that for Condren: ‘To conceive of a thinker’s relationship to preceding ideas as a passive admission of influences is to ignore how they are transformed by their creative assimilation into new patterns of thinking, even when they are not subject to concentrated criticism and modification’.88 Condren’s conception of one individual actively reframing and modifying the thoughts of another illuminates critical understanding of Murdoch’s relationship to Weinberger. As this study reveals, Murdoch does not passively replicate Weinberger’s ideas and images in her novels but transforms them by drawing them into her vast imagination and 85  See, for example, Murdoch’s comment on Weinberger’s painting Flying Punch: ‘how bewitching and strange and inspiring and happy’; her description of his ‘butterfly sage’ as an ‘inspiring image’, and her statements that his painting of a harbour ‘exudes light at all times of day’ and ‘inspires me’. Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 3 November 1981, KUAS80/7/22; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 19 February 1981, KUAS80/10/5; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 17 April 1990, KUAS80/1/69; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 29 Mar 199[0?], KUAS80/5/15, Iris Murdoch Collections. 86  Gary Browning, ‘Agency and influence’, 364. 87  Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance and the History of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 88  Gary Browning, ‘Agency and influence’, 351.

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regenerating them in a new medium, perceived in the light of her personal vision. The transcendent vision of boats on the sea experienced by Edward Baltram in The Good Apprentice can be understood as a composite image of Weinberger’s numerous colour-soaked seascapes and riverscapes, for instance. Furthermore, Murdoch’s evolving thoughts on angels were complexly bound up with her dialogue with Weinberger and his late paintings of angels filter into her conception of Jackson in Jackson’s Dilemma. Whereas influence is often considered in terms of an earlier thinker influencing a later one, the relationship of influence between Murdoch and Weinberger was synchronic, dynamic, and in continual evolution. A study of Weinberger’s influence on Murdoch invites the question of whether Murdoch influenced Weinberger. Murdoch’s positioning of Weinberger as her tutor and expert guide perhaps creates the impression that influence was one-way, but in fact it is difficult to imagine that it was not reciprocal to some degree. Weinberger was rather vague about this possibility. He stated to Cathy Courtney in 1995 that when he met Murdoch, he had ‘known of her, and of her work, for years, but [he had] never read any of her books’. He later did read some of them: ‘[Murdoch] expressed some surprise when I told her about reading some of her work, but she gave me most of her books and, yes, I’ve read quite a few now’.89 Murdoch is known to have given Weinberger copies of Nuns and Soldiers (1980), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), and The Green Knight (1993). Her comment ‘I’m glad to hear you’ve read my little Plato book’ in a March 1979 letter reveals that Weinberger also read The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (1977).90 Despite his knowledge of her novels and philosophy, Murdoch did not discuss them in detail in her correspondence with Weinberger, her attention being characteristically outward-directed. Her reticence was also typical, as Bayley observes: She went on […] secretly and quietly doing her work, never wishing to talk about it, never needing to compare or discuss or contrast, never reading reviews or wanting to hear about them, never needing the continual reassurance from friends or public or the media which most writers require, in order to go on being sure that they are writers.91  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 116.  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 12 March 1979, KUAS80/7/12, Iris Murdoch Collections. 91  John Bayley, Iris, p. 115. 89 90

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Fig. 3.4  Harry Weinberger, The Sea, The Sea, [1995], private collection

Weinberger’s painting The Sea, The Sea (Fig. 3.4) is perhaps the most overt example of Murdoch’s influence on him. In early 1995 Weinberger stated that he had just finished ‘a very large painting’ of an imaginary scene: ‘It’s just the sea and a ship’. He said that he painted it ‘because Iris Murdoch wrote a book called The Sea, The Sea. She won the Booker Prize and she spent quite a lot of it on some of my paintings and I felt I wanted to do another sea picture and I told her I’d called it The Sea, The Sea’.92 Weinberger had long been fascinated by the sea: he wrote in 1992 that ‘the subjects I come back to again and again are to do with the sea, seascapes, harbours and ships’.93 The painting depicts a sea alive with hues of green, blue, purple, grey, and ochre, across which a single ship is passing. The high angle of vision positions the viewer to look down on and  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 97.  Harry Weinberger, Harry Weinberger: Recent Paintings, Irish Watercolours and other Works, 9 March–3 April 1992 (London: Duncan Campbell Gallery, 1992), hereafter 1992CI, np. 92 93

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contemplate the subject which so engrossed the attention of both painter and writer. The painting was produced many years after Murdoch’s novel, during the period when Murdoch’s powers were beginning to fail her. Nevertheless, her letters written during this time and the key role which she took in organising and promoting his exhibition of June 1995 attest to her enduring fascination with and admiration for Weinberger’s art. The process of painting The Sea, The Sea provided Weinberger with the means to engage once again with Murdoch’s thought, at the point she was beginning to recede from him. The painting perhaps only partially captures the image in his mind’s eye. Its title seems to be only loosely linked to Murdoch’s novel, the sea bearing more complex and wide-ranging significance to them both. There is no ship in the novel: the ship in the painting is Weinberger’s imagery, which he intertwines with Murdoch’s, retrospectively acknowledging their deep affinity and reciprocal influence, and revealing influence to be an active, transformative process. Murdoch’s high regard for Weinberger’s art remained undiminished to the end of her life. Her late letters are as enthusiastic and sincere in her praise as the first. ‘I love the pictures—your present picture is magnificent—your work is noble and beautiful’, she told him in March 1993.94 Valerie Purton observes that Weinberger was Murdoch’s ‘favourite painter’; Purton’s claim requires qualification, given Murdoch’s great admiration of past masters such as Titian and Rembrandt, but Murdoch’s enduring love of, and fascination with, Weinberger’s work reveal that he was nevertheless unquestionably her favourite living painter.95

References Babbs, Verity. 2021. Jean Jones: Reclaiming Her Place. Interview with Michael Kurtz. ArtPlugged, 11 March. Accessed 20 January 2022. Bayley, John. 1998. Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. London: Duckworth. Beck, Ian Archie. 2018. Through the Lens of Janet Stone: Portraits 1953-1979. Oxford: Bodleian. Browning, Gary. 2010. Agency and influence in the history of political thought: The agency of influence and the influence of agency. History of Political Thought 31.2: 345-366.  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked March 1993, KUAS80/1/2, Iris Murdoch Collections. 95  Chronology, p. 211. 94

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Carritt, David. 1980. Jean Jones: Paintings and Drawings 1970-1980, Ashmolean Museum. Oxford: Oxonian Rewley Press. Clark, Kenneth. 1959. Reynolds Stone: An Exhibition Catalogue of Engravings and Designs. London: Arts Council. Clark, Kenneth. 1977. An Appreciation, Reynolds Stone Engravings. London: John Murray. Condren, Conal. 1985. The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance and the History of Ideas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins. Courtney, Cathy. 1995. Harry Weinberger interviewed by Cathy Courtney. British Library: Artists’ Lives. Cronin, Ray. 2017. Alex Colville: Life & Work. Toronto: Art Canada Institute. Accessed 29 January 2022. Dow, Helen J. 1972. The Art of Alex Colville. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Hunter, Andrew. 2014. Alex Colville. Art Gallery of Ontario, 20 August. Accessed 29 January 2022. Kurtz, Michael. 2021. Postcards, Paintings and Stone Circles: Jean Jones’s Friendship with Iris Murdoch. Iris Murdoch Review, 12: 142-143. Langham, Harry. 2020. Jean Jones. Port, 19 August. Accessed 20 January 2022. Luckett, Richard. 2009. Reynolds Stone, Engraver. Magdalen College Cambridge Magazine 2008-09. Sudbury: Lavenham Press. Meyers, Jeffrey. 2013. Letters from Iris Murdoch to Alex Colville. The London Magazine. Feb-Mar: 20-25. Meyers, Jeffrey. 2016. The Mystery of the Real. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press. Murdoch, Iris. 2019 (1938). Millionaires and Megaliths. Iris Murdoch Review 10: 1-3. Murdoch, Iris. 2000 (1964). The Italian Girl. London: Vintage. Murdoch, Iris. 1973. The Black Prince. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1981. Reynolds Stone: An Address Given by Iris Murdoch in St James’s Church Piccadilly, London on 20th July 1979. London: Warren Editions. Murdoch, Iris. 1983. The Philosopher’s Pupil. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. illus. Reynolds Stone. 1984. A Year of Birds. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1985. The Good Apprentice. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris, and Nicholas Watkins. 1983. Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings. Coventry: Herbert Art Gallery. Murdoch, Iris, and Harry Weinberger. 1994. Harry Weinberger: Recent Work. London: Duncan Campbell Gallery.

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Phillips, Tom. 2019. Painting Iris Murdoch. In Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Miles Leeson, 83-86. Devizes: Sabrestorm. Piper, Myfanwy. 1951. The Wood Engravings of Reynolds Stone. London: Art & Technics. Purton, Valerie. 2007. An Iris Murdoch Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Read, Daniel. 2017. “Evolving a Style”: Iris Murdoch and the Surrealist Moral Vision of Paul Nash. Iris Murdoch Review, 8: 29-37. Rose, W. K. 2003 (1968). Iris Murdoch, Informally. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 16-29. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Rowe, Anne. 2002. The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner, eds. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995. London: Chatto & Windus. Stone, Humphrey. 2019. Reynolds Stone: A Memoir. Wimborne: Dovecote Press. Szőke, Dávid. 2020. Obituary of Miklós Vető. Iris Murdoch Review 11: 107-109. Unknown author. The Legacy of Reynolds Stone. Accessed 12 January 2022. Updike, John.1986. Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard. New Yorker, 62: 126. Weinberger, Harry, and David Fraser Jenkins. 1992. Harry Weinberger: Recent Paintings, Irish Watercolours and other works. London: Duncan Campbell Gallery. Wilson, A. N. 2004. Iris Murdoch: As I Knew Her. London: Arrow.

CHAPTER 4

Kindred Spirits

‘I Feel I have Been in a Huge World’: The Developing Friendship During the mid to late 1970s, Murdoch’s evolving discourse with Weinberger began to invigorate her work and thought in a number of important ways. Its impact on her is apparent in her novels, her remarks in interviews, and her philosophical works of this period. Although Murdoch and Weinberger met regularly, their discourse was conducted primarily by means of letters. Their correspondence requires consideration in the context of the increasing availability of Murdoch’s letters, which are making a significant impact on Murdoch scholarship. Letters and letter-writing played important roles in Murdoch’s daily life, in the construction of her identity and her relationships, and they filter into Murdoch’s novels, revealing her enjoyment of the versatility of the letter form and also her awareness of its hazards. The earliest known letter from Murdoch to Weinberger is postmarked 1976 and can be tentatively placed in November of that year by its reference to one of Weinberger’s exhibitions, probably his show at Camden Arts Centre.1 This letter is followed by a 1976 Christmas card from the Bayleys  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated [November 1976], KUAS80/2/15, Iris Murdoch Collections. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Moden, Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17945-7_4

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to the Weinbergers.2 These 1976 letters are brief and relatively formal, suggesting that the friendship was in its early stages. His memoir (as quoted in the Prologue) reveals that Weinberger was somewhat reticent in response to Murdoch’s initial overtures. Both were much occupied during this period: in 1975–1976 Weinberger was much engaged on a major project, the Inside/Outside series, and was also preparing work for the Camden Arts Centre exhibition. During late 1975 Murdoch was working extremely hard on the draft of her Romanes Lecture (a prestigious event, given annually at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford), which subsequently became ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists’, completed in July 1976, and she was simultaneously struggling with various personal issues including her mother’s deteriorating health. It is therefore unsurprising that the friendship took a little time to gather momentum. From mid-1977 onwards, the friendship blossomed, this time apparently at Weinberger’s instigation. In a letter of 3 June 1977, Murdoch wrote: ‘Dear Harry, I feel I must answer your letter at once, though I don’t really understand it or know what it was you wanted to talk about. But I trust we will talk, and have not really lost touch! […] I retain a most vivid memory of your paintings’. She told him she would write again to invite the Weinbergers to Cedar Lodge, confiding ‘crises in the health and affairs of both our mothers’ and ‘general inefficiency’ as reasons for not having not yet done so.3 The Weinbergers were subsequently invited to Cedar Lodge for lunch on 18 June 1977.4 Murdoch recorded the occasion in her journal, naming the Weinbergers at the head of a list of ten attendees (Journal 12, p.  111). Being a large lunch party, there was unlikely to have been much opportunity for Murdoch and Weinberger to talk privately. In a letter apparently written a few weeks later, she told him she had ‘been thinking and worrying’ about him and had hoped to see him in France, apologised that she ‘did not understand [his] letter well

2  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated [December 1976], KUAS80/13/3, Iris Murdoch Collections. 3  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, dated 3 June [1977?], KUAS80/12/5, Iris Murdoch Collections. 4  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 17 June 1977, KUAS80/8/13, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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enough to reply properly’ and requested that he write her a letter, ‘not necessarily about anything’.5 Murdoch’s multiple letters to Weinberger in autumn 1977 were centred on two subjects which were to become characteristic of their discourse, and which were closely intertwined: Weinberger’s identity and experiences and the visual arts. Murdoch quickly established herself as Weinberger’s confidante. Her letters, though circumspect, gently encourage further details of personal difficulties about which he had evidently been writing to her. In one letter of September 1977, for example, she wrote: I was very glad to hear from you – and I do understand how difficult it is to write at length about painful things, and especially when such things are in process of change. I do hope that the scene is better, clearer. I feel the greatest sympathy but cannot yet see, which is not surprising! I would love to talk to you….6

Murdoch went on in this letter to arrange a London meeting, at which matters could be talked over more openly and at greater length. Although the details of Weinberger’s confidences are not known, it seems probable that at this point he was beginning to discuss problems in his personal relationships, and also in his career, with Murdoch. Weinberger’s marriage to Barbara was, at times, under strain. Furthermore, he was becoming increasingly demoralised by current artistic trends, somewhat isolated amongst his art school colleagues, and liable to bouts of self-doubt. His work was, at this time, relatively unknown, though he was exhibiting it regularly in both the UK and Germany and by 1975 had some ten individual exhibitions and at least fifteen mixed exhibitions to his credit. Murdoch’s concerns about contemporary art and art teaching, which echoed Weinberger’s own; her instant recognition of his talents, and her sustained encouragement, all renewed his self-belief. Weinberger’s personal life and experiences were undoubtedly part of his attraction for Murdoch. She coaxed him into disclosing not only the personal matters currently preoccupying him, but also his often-­harrowing memories of his formative years. Weinberger was sometimes reluctant to 5  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated [August 1977?], KUAS80/8/10, Iris Murdoch Collections. 6  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked September 1977, KUAS80/8/9, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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discuss his early life. Murdoch’s own reserve, as Conradi observes, was ‘legendary’; though she would willingly give unremitting attention to her friends’ tales, her ‘genius for relationship—like a therapist—did not always involve mutual exchange’.7 Yet her strong desire to probe Weinberger’s life, and the emotional release which he found in his confidences to her, caused them to come to an arrangement: Conradi describes, in his memoir Family Business, how Weinberger ‘struck a bargain whereby he required her to divulge one story about herself before exchanging one about himself’.8 Murdoch was unwavering in her assertion that she did not draw her characters from life. Nevertheless, as Rowe observes, Murdoch’s letters to her friends ‘keenly illustrate the tension between her respect for the privacy of those whose lives she so closely observed, and the need for authentic human experience as fodder for her art’.9 Murdoch’s correspondence with Weinberger indicates that she did in fact integrate elements of his identity into several of her characters. Charles Arrowby’s nostalgia for childhood innocence, and struggle to comprehend and portray the reality of his childhood love Mary Hartley Fitch in The Sea, The Sea (1978); Tim Reede’s attempts to convey the dynamism of the Provence landscape in Nuns and Soldiers (1980); Jesse Baltram’s workroom, crowded with puppets, masks, religious iconography, and his radiant artworks, and Max Point’s destruction of his painting, in The Good Apprentice (1985); the actor Clement Graffe’s disenchantment with the role of entertainer and his struggle to discern the truth inherent in myth, the student Harvey Blacket’s lameness, and young Moy Anderson’s sense of failure when her artwork is considered inadequate by an art school, in The Green Knight (1993): all of these owe something to Weinberger, and are discussed at greater length in subsequent chapters. Tracing Weinberger’s presence behind these characters helps to enlarge their psychology and also enriches critical understanding of Murdoch’s working practice. Furthermore, and most importantly for Murdoch scholarship, Murdoch’s early letters to Weinberger present the origins of an intellectual discourse centred on art and artists which was to be sustained over the course of twenty years, the impact of which is palpable not only in her novels but also in her poetry and philosophy. She began to engage enthusiastically in discussions of art with Weinberger, asking to see more of his paintings, and arranging the first of many joint visits to art galleries. The  Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 514, 517.  Peter J. Conradi, Family Business (Bridgend: Seren Books, 2019) p. 92. 9  Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), p. 116. 7 8

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London meeting suggested by Murdoch in September 1977, which took place on 27 October, involved not only discussion of Weinberger’s personal issues but also a visit to the Temple Gallery in Knightsbridge, a prestigious specialist icon gallery at which Weinberger was well-known as an icon enthusiast and collector; he visited the gallery frequently, often purchasing icons to add to his extensive collection. Weinberger had recently returned from a protracted visit, undertaken for a Goldsmiths Travelling Fellowship, to Russia and the Sinai Desert, during which he had viewed and studied many rare icons. He brought with him to their meeting an icon which he had obtained for Murdoch; her letters of this period reveal that she had been anticipating the icon’s delivery with much pleasure. Murdoch and Weinberger subsequently made several further visits to the Temple Gallery and visited numerous other galleries and museums together. Among their favourite meeting-places were the National Gallery, ‘beside the Piero della Francescas’;10 the Victoria and Albert Museum, their visit preserved by Weinberger in a ‘charming picture’ (Fig. 4.1);11 the Wallace Collection (meeting, at Murdoch’s request, ‘in the large […] room which contains Titian Perseus, Rembrandt Titus, Poussin Music of Time and Frans Hals’s Laughing Cavalier’, the setting for a pivotal scene in The Sea, The Sea),12 the Tate, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy. Weinberger’s recollection of a typical meeting with Murdoch, described to Ginny Dougary (his model for a portrait in 1999) reveals that their discussions of art and life became inseparable. He told Dougary of: a five-bottle-of-wine lunch with Iris Murdoch, her greedy thirst to know every detail about what it was like, but, no, what it was really like for him being a Jewish refugee, as a teenager in one of the last Kindertransport journeys to make it to England from Nazi Germany; what he remembered of his feelings when he was beating up a Nazi youth; and what it was exactly that made this or that painting a good one as they walked around the National Gallery.13

10  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 12 March 1979, KUAS80/7/12, Iris Murdoch Collections. 11  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 20 November 1984, KUAS80/2/40, Iris Murdoch Collections. 12  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 26 November 1979, KUAS80/2/31, Iris Murdoch Collections. 13  Ginny Dougary, ‘Confessions of an Artist’s Model’, The Times, 5 September 2000, pp. 6–7 (p. 7).

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Fig. 4.1  Harry Weinberger, When we went to the V&A, [November 1984], Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections

That life and art intermingled from an early stage in their discourse is also evident in Murdoch’s letters. A letter dated 7 November 1977 refers to Murdoch’s recent visit to Weinberger at his home in Leamington, just a few days after they had met in London on 27 October. At Weinberger’s home, Murdoch had viewed and discussed his paintings with him at length; they had also discussed his early life and his personal relationships. The letter includes Murdoch’s thanks to Weinberger for a ‘splendid Giacometti catalogue’ which he sent to her, and for photographs of his paintings, which she kept—she urged him to write to her, telling him she felt ‘entirely at home’ with him’.14 Her letters of early 1978 demonstrate her eagerness to arrange further meetings and gallery visits with him. In a letter of January 1978, for instance, she suggests a London meeting in 14  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 November 1977, KUAS80/8/8, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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February and reiterates: ‘You couldn’t possibly lose my friendship & interest. Such things become established forever in some very mysterious way’.15 As Weinberger’s close friend and confidante, she gained exceptional insights into the process of creation of his works. A letter of 2 May 1978 reveals that Weinberger and his paintings had been much in her thoughts: ‘Harry dear, I was so glad to get your letter. Your writing looks like your pictures. I am imagining your ship picture, and what you used to see in the river when you were a child. (Have you been back to that place I wonder.) I loved the ship pictures you showed me when I was in your studio. I connect you with great blue spaces. Yes, you are lucky to be a painter. I feel tired and cannot write. But a painter could always do something—or just look’. In the margin, apparently as an afterthought, she noted ‘Like a diary—yes’. Though she was burdened, as she told him, by concerns about her mother’s ill health, and with various work commitments, she added: ‘I will see you and talk, the time will come. And meanwhile I certainly believe in you. Work well’.16 (This letter is reproduced in full in Fig. 4.2.) Less than a week later, she wrote again, to thank him for sending her a drawing of Portugal—‘so absolutely you, your signature, your being is there, and so beautiful, and so Portuguese, and carries one, as art does, away and away’. She placed the drawing by her desk where it ‘radiates light’. She told him she wanted to see his painting too, ‘and many others, ships, and blue seas, and white clouds and space and space’, and encouraged him to write her a letter ‘on the nature of creativity’.17 In October 1978, on winning the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, she spent much of her £10,000 prize money on Weinberger’s paintings. Amongst her purchases in the early years of their friendship were a series of three Cretan drawings—Fishing Boat, Crete (Fig. 4.3), Early Morning, Crete, and Evening Light, Crete—which gave her, she told him, ‘great joy’; a drawing of the Alpilles, ‘so expressive’; a painting of Saint George titled Icon (Fig. 7.7); the paintings Provence II and Harbour in Rethymnon (Fig. 4.4); and the drawings Early Morning, Rethymnon III, and Achdorf

15  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 10 January 1978, KUAS80/8/1, Iris Murdoch Collections. 16  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 May 1978, KUAS80/2/88, Iris Murdoch Collections. 17  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 8 May 1978, KUAS80/12/4, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Fig. 4.2  Iris Murdoch, letter to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 May 1978, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections

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Fig. 4.3  Harry Weinberger, Fishing Boat, Crete, [1979], Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections, previously owned by Iris Murdoch

Fig. 4.4  Harry Weinberger, Harbour in Rethymnon, [late 1970s/early 1980s], private collection, previously owned by Iris Murdoch

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Fig. 4.5  Harry Weinberger, Achdorf II, [late 1970s/early 1980s], private collection, previously owned by Iris Murdoch

II (Fig.  4.5).18 Over the ensuing years Murdoch would acquire many more of his paintings and drawings and would display them in her Oxford and London homes, where she could contemplate them constantly and allow them to work on her consciousness. The mid to late 1970s were a time of particular professional and personal strain for Murdoch, although she was also receiving increasing recognition and acclaim for her novels. In autumn and winter 1975, she was preoccupied by her work on the Romanes Lecture; on 1 November she noted in her journal that she was ‘[b]eing driven mad’ by it (Journal 12, p. 35). The lecture took place in February 1976 and did not go well.19 It was the basis of Murdoch’s monograph The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, which she became ‘absorbed’ in writing during spring 18  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 9 May 1979, KUAS80/2/82; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 13 February 1979, KUAS80/10/2, Iris Murdoch Collections. 19  Peter J. Conradi observes that ‘the lecture, which lacked animation and pace, ran well over the statutory hour, tried too hard and got tangled, the audience becoming restless’. Life, p. 547.

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1976.20 Murdoch’s novel Henry and Cato, in which visual art and Platonism are both of great importance, was published in September 1976. It received generally favourable reviews, though Murdoch herself was rather critical of it.21 In October 1976 she began grappling with her first draft of The Sea, The Sea.22 Her journal indicates that ideas for this novel had been evolving since at least as early as summer 1975.23 This novel—a tale of power and obsession which transforms a painting by Titian into a complex metaphor for the consciousness of its protagonist—is widely considered to be amongst Murdoch’s best.24 Nevertheless, she lacked faith in it and recorded in her journal more general insecurities about her writing: ‘Cannot get on with [the] novel, and hate it just now. I wish I felt more confidence in my ability to write plays, poetry. And I wish I could rest’, she stated in her journal entry of 27 November 1976 (Journal 12, pp.  61–62). ‘Horribly stuck with beastly novel and feel very depressed about it’, she wrote a few weeks later, on 4 January 1977, and on 18 February ‘Novel inert’ (Journal 12, p. 65, 77). Murdoch was awarded a CBE on 15 December 1976, but her insistence that only her mother Rene accompany her to Buckingham Palace and her journal entry which merely records ‘lunch at Buckingham Palace. Corgis’, suggest that the event had little significance for her and did not lift her 20  Valerie Purton notes that on 28 April 1976, Murdoch wrote to Norah Smallwood at Chatto & Windus, ‘saying that she is absorbed in preparing her essay on Plato for the Oxford University Press’. Chronology, p. 137. The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists was published on 28 July 1977. It was reasonably well-received by critics. Conradi observes that ‘the book went down better than the lecture’ (Life, pp. 546–547). 21  For example, in 1976, Murdoch said of the character of Joe in Henry and Cato: ‘I don’t really think he is quite alive enough; there isn’t enough to him in a sense. […] I feel if I could have made him a more sympathetic character without being in any way sentimental about him, it might have been a better book’. ‘Iris Murdoch Talks to Stephen Glover’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 33–43 (p. 42). 22  Valerie Purton, Chronology, p. 139. 23  See, for example, Murdoch’s journal entry of 6 August 1975, which notes ‘Hartley as girl’s name’ (Journal 12, p. 28). 24  Rachel Billington states that ‘The Sea, The Sea shows Miss Murdoch’s skill as a writer as strong as ever, and “the game” played at an even fiercer heat’, ‘Peering into the Murdoch Mist’, The Financial Times, 25 August 1978; Malcolm Bradbury describes it as ‘one of [Murdoch’s] “mature” books – one of her longest, her richest, her most carefully paced’, ‘merciless and painful’, ‘poetic and truthful’. ‘The Semi-Isle’, New Statesman, 25 August 1978, 246–7.

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spirits (Journal 12, p.  63). On 31 December 1976 she made the bleak observation: ‘I feel I have achieved little this year. Well, the Plato stuff, but what’s that worth?’ (Journal 12, p.  64). Meanwhile, the health of Murdoch’s beloved Rene began in summer 1975 to decline steadily until her death ten years later. Rene’s frequent visits to Cedar Lodge were interspersed with episodes in hospitals and nursing homes. Brief entries in Murdoch’s journal record the inescapable weight of worry and grief regarding Rene which burdened her throughout this period.25 Her sadness and depression were compounded by her discovery, in November 1976, of the death of her friend and formative influence the writer and philosopher Raymond Queneau, and by the illness and death of another friend, the Labour Party politician Tony Crosland, in February 1977.26 In January 1977 both Bayleys were considerably distressed by malicious gossip at a dinner party, with which they felt they had been made unintentionally complicit.27 Moreover, in early 1977 Murdoch began to suffer the onset of painful arthritis, which continued to afflict her throughout her life.28 During this difficult time, and throughout the ensuing years, in which Murdoch frequently experienced mental strain, exhaustion, and personal suffering, her friendship with Weinberger was a source of pleasure and 25  See, for example, Murdoch’s journal entry for 17 August 1975 which noted, ‘Rene back in London. So sad’. On 17 April 1977 she wrote: ‘Rene here. Her presence tires me deeply & I feel sad. The complacent slowness and helplessness of old age is terribly wearing and it is hard to be absolutely patient. Yet she is so good’ and on 4 February 1978: ‘Rene fell down stairs and is [in] Charing Cross Hospital. She is vague and helpless & seems to get no better. […] The burden of worry and incurable sadness about Rene is with me all the time’. Journal 12, p. 29, 100, 156. 26  Murdoch met Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) in 1946 and they became friends. His novel Pierrot Mon Ami (1943) was a key influence on Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954). Murdoch’s journal entry for 13 November 1976 stated: ‘At a party chez Hal Lidderdale, heard Queneau had died. I felt as if it was impossible. I still had many things to say to him which I had delayed saying (since Gard du Nord – 1949 – ?) I wish I had said more. Fault of French language?’ Journal 12, p. 59, KUAS202/1/12, Iris Murdoch Collections. Murdoch had become friends with Tony Crosland (1918–1977) during her student years. On 18 February 1976 Murdoch wrote in her journal: ‘Feel depressed and sad about Tony Crosland’s illness’, and on 19 February 1976: ‘Tony died last night. […] Sad sad feelings’. Journal 12, p. 77, KUAS202/1/12, Iris Murdoch Collections. 27  Valerie Purton, Chronology, p. 140. 28  On 17 April 1977 Murdoch noted: ‘I am having awful arthritis pains at night. This is new. Exhausted, after two very disturbed nights’. Journal 12, p. 100, KUAS202/1/12, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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inspiration. Murdoch’s letters reveal the delight occasioned by further visits to Weinberger’s studio. In February 1979, following one such visit, she wrote: ‘Harry, it was marvellous to see you. And I was so impressed and pleased by the drawings. And as I said they give a kind of key to your other work somehow. […] It was altogether a happy time. And I am very glad that we are friends and can talk so directly to each other’; in July 1979, she described another visit as a ‘joy’ and his pictures as ‘so good & getting better every day’; in December 1980 she again remarked on the ‘pure joy’ of viewing his paintings and described her visit as ‘a very special experience, happy-making and a revelation’, and in December 1982 she stated, ‘It was marvellous to visit you and to walk among your pictures—I feel I have been in a huge world’.29 She found respite, and imaginative release, in Weinberger’s letters and in her discussions with him in person. ‘I am so sunk in these lectures at the moment I cannot think or plan, or in effect get away’, she wrote to him in October 1981, in reference to her preparation for the Gifford Lectures; ‘I would love to see the Indian Goddess and St George and all your open world of art, so unlike horrid philosophy!’30 She repeatedly expressed appreciation for his letters, as in a letter of March 1988: ‘I am tired, and snowed under with letters, business and tasks—thank heavens for your letters. You are a very good letterwriter—it’s all real’.31 Over the years Weinberger gave Murdoch many gifts, which she kept near her to inspire her writing. These gifts included a Tibetan dagger—‘always magically near me, full of enlightening rays!’; a silver pendant, ‘such a marvellous complex thing’ and ‘very alive’; a ‘beautiful Ethiopian cross’; and a ‘mysterious Indian picture-gem’.32 ‘All the things you have given me, and especially this, remind me not only of you but of your work! God bless it all’, she wrote to him in January

29  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 February 1979, KUAS80/4/6; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 18 July 1979, KUAS80/14/KUAS80/3/3; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 10 December 1980, KUAS80/7/2; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 20 December 1982, KUAS80/7/1, Iris Murdoch Collections. 30  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 16 October 1981, KUAS80/2/79, Iris Murdoch Collections. 31  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 10 March 1988, KUAS80/1/6, Iris Murdoch Collections. 32  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked April 1982, KUAS80/7/19; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 23 December 1982, KUAS80/2/72; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked February 1983, KUAS80/2/67, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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1983.33 The experience of accessing another consciousness, which had such affinities to her own, and which was working out similar issues in a different medium, was exhilarating and uplifting for Murdoch and continually expanded her ideas and her vision. That her developing discourse with Weinberger was, in the late 1970s, providing Murdoch with creative and intellectual stimulation and directing her thoughts into new channels is evidenced by remarks in certain interviews of this period, in her journal, and in letters to him, by her January 1978 paper ‘Art Is the Imitation of Nature’, and by her novel Nuns and Soldiers. For example, though the main focus of her interview with Bryan Magee in October 1977 was the relationship between philosophy and literature, Murdoch at times shifted between literature and visual art as if she perceived them to be interchangeable. Though this interlinking of the arts was already characteristic of Murdoch, a new train of thought, likely to have been inspired by discussions with Weinberger, is suggested by her particular interest in discussing abstract painting. In an extended response to Magee’s question about imaginative writing’s relation to reality, she began to reflect on the point at which abstract painting might become ‘bad art’ or ‘not art at all’: Abstract painting is not just wilful fantasy or provocation, it is connected with the nature of space and colour. The abstract painter lives, and his pictures are seen, in a world where colours are taken to be surfaces of objects, and his consciousness of this is a part of his problem. Such tensions between aesthetic vision and “ordinary” reality may give rise to very refined and difficult judgements.34

Weinberger’s strong views on abstract painting formed part of his dialogue with Murdoch. Although he contends (in his notes for a seminar) that ‘we have to accept that all painting is abstraction’ in the general sense that ‘a discrepancy, an enormous discrepancy […] exists between the medium we use and that which is painted’, he also insisted that his own art was firmly rooted in reality.35 He stated to Cathy Courtney that painting was, for 33  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 5 January 1983, KUAS80/7/9, Iris Murdoch Collections. 34  Bryan Magee, ‘Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J.  Conradi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 3–30, hereafter Magee, p. 29. 35  Harry Weinberger, ‘On Finding One’s Way in Painting’ (unpublished seminar notes, undated), hereafter ‘Finding One’s Way’, p. 2.

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him, ‘like counterpoint in music, when one colour goes on to the picture and another colour that imposes itself comes on, and deviates from the reality and becomes the reality in itself, but never, it never changes into abstraction. There’s always a hint of the observed reality’.36 In ‘Art Is the Imitation of Nature’, Murdoch spoke at greater length about abstract art, emphasising, as Weinberger did, that the ‘abstract’ painter is not detached from reality, but continually conscious of his relation to it: Good abstract paintings are not just idle daubs or scrawls, forms wandering round at random in spaces, they are somehow about light and colour and space, and I think that this is something that the abstract painter is very conscious of, he is not in a state of total freedom, he is relating himself to something else and his paintings exist for us in a world where we normally take colours to be parts of objects. The painter and the writer confront these curious problems about a reality which is alien and at the same time something which they are bestowing meaning upon, which they are related to in this curious internal relation. (EM, pp. 256–257)

These remarks form part of Murdoch’s extended discussion of the relation of art to truth; she observes that ‘one might think in this connection about abstract painting which is so often taken as a paradigm of what is happening to literature now’ and is evidently invigorated by her awareness of the correlation between painting and writing (EM, p.  256). She describes painting as ‘a sort of explanatory metaphor for the other arts’, and when she presents the ‘profound idea’ of ‘the image of the painter who sits there at his easel and looks at the landscape […] which we carry with us as we think of different forms of art’, she surely has in mind the image of Weinberger striving to represent the landscape of Provence (EM, p.  243). Murdoch’s letters of the late 1970s reveal that Weinberger’s images of Provence were much in her thoughts as she composed Nuns and Soldiers. The Alpilles, which had been the setting for her first meeting with Weinberger, became important to the novel, and she was eager for one of Weinberger’s drawings of them to be used on the dust jacket. Weinberger’s portrayals of the Provence landscape are inextricably blended with Murdoch’s imaginative reconstructions of it in the novel. Murdoch’s journal entries of the late 1970s indicate other ways in which her discourse with Weinberger was affecting her thought. Her  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 31.

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lengthy journal entry of 23 October 1977 was surely stimulated by the prospect of her forthcoming gallery visit with Weinberger, and of many more such visits in the future. She wrote of her aversion for abstract criticism and theorising about art, which seemed to her to lead to dangerous generalisations and to the imposition of artificial categories of different forms of discourse. ‘The relation of literature to truth & morality confounds these categories’, she stated. She expressed her desire to ground criticism in ordinary language and in reality and observed that this grounding can be best achieved when discussion of a work of art takes place in its presence: Formalism, & abstract theory in general precludes & discourages a very careful use of ordinary language – & may indeed damage [the] rich flexibility of ordinary language – so important to defend now. Proliferation of technical terms in ‘structuralism’, obscurantist. […] Literary criticism should be informed discourse in ordinary language, not theory […] Literary criticism (of painting criticism etcetera): informed discourse in the presence of the object. (Journal 12, pp. 123–124)

These reflections recall ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1964) in which Murdoch had developed at greater length her argument that communal attention to a work of art can not only increase aesthetic understanding but can also enable moral progress: Words […] have both spatio-temporal and conceptual contexts. We learn through attending to contexts, vocabulary develops through close attention to objects, and we can only understand others if we can to some extent share their contexts […] Uses of words by persons grouped round a common object is a central and vital human activity. The art critic can help us if we are in the presence of the same object and if we know something about his scheme of concepts. Both contexts are relevant to our ability to move towards “seeing more”, towards “seeing what he sees”. […] Progress in understanding of a scheme of concepts often takes place as we listen to normative-descriptive talk in the presence of a common object. […] If a critic tells us that a picture has “functional colour” or “significant form” we need to know not only the picture but also something about his general theory in order to understand the remark. […] Human beings are obscure to each other, in certain respects which are particularly relevant to morality, unless they are mutual objects of attention or have common objects of attention…. (EM, pp. 325–326)

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Throughout her oeuvre Murdoch emphasises that the contemplation of good art is morally beneficial. In ‘The Sovereignty of Good’, for example, she states that: ‘Art […] affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and […] inspires love in the highest part of the soul’ (EM, p. 370). This claim derives from Murdoch’s belief, expressed in ‘The Idea of Perfection’, that ‘art and morals […] [are] two aspects of a single struggle’ towards the Good (EM, p. 332). Anil Gomes observes that Murdoch’s urge towards monism underlies this belief, and that the value which she places on communal attention is an extension of it: ‘it is this interweaving [of the ethical and aesthetical domains] which supports the thought that joint attention to great art can play a role in our coming to understand the ethical framework of another person’.37 Murdoch’s October 1977 journal entry reveals that the notion of ‘informed discourse in the presence of the object’ was, at that time, greatly occupying her thoughts. In the late 1970s, Murdoch’s developing friendship with Weinberger was enabling her to put into practice the ideal which she had envisaged when she was formulating ‘The Idea of Perfection’ in the early 1960s. She discovered in Weinberger a highly intelligent and knowledgeable individual who could help her to interrogate and expand her views on art. By entering into his aesthetic conceptual scheme she could also come to understand his ethical conceptual scheme, and the beliefs, concerns, and values on which both schemes were founded. Their participation in many episodes of joint attention to works of art caused them to become finely attuned to each other’s aesthetic and ethical sensibilities. The many conversations about art which they conducted in person expanded into their correspondence: it was, however, direct conversation in the presence of great works of art that Murdoch most craved. In the same journal entry of 23 October 1977, following her criticism of attempts at categorising discourses, she remarks on ‘[t]he judgement of tone, irony, moral attitude, personality […], truthfulness, atmosphere etcetera too subtle to allow of a certain kind of generalisation’ (Journal 12, p. 124). Joint attention provided her with a situation in which her developing knowledge and understanding of a work of art were inextricably connected to the nuances of Weinberger’s thought, his mode of articulation, his beliefs, concerns, and 37  Anil Gomes, ‘Iris Murdoch on Art, Ethics and Attention’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 53, 3 (2013), 321–337 .

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values. These subtleties, which demanded her close attention, led away from the morally hazardous generalisation which she associated with abstract theorising, and towards the clearer perception of the consciousness of another being which is for Murdoch the true sublime. Murdoch, striving to formulate her position regarding the direction that visual art and art teaching appeared to be taking, found that Weinberger’s views legitimated and strengthened her own. Weinberger taught art at Lanchester Polytechnic (later Coventry University) from 1964 until 1983, eventually becoming Principal Lecturer in Painting. Katherine Cockshaw, curator of Weinberger’s 2003–2004 retrospective at Leamington Art Gallery, notes that ‘the 1960s and 70s [were] perhaps the most tumultuous period for art education this country has ever seen’.38 The Lanchester developed into the centre of the British conceptual art movement during Weinberger’s time there, although he set himself apart by his staunch defence of traditional approaches to drawing and painting. The conceptual art collective Art & Language, founded in Coventry in 1968, believing that visual images had become inadequate to convey their ideas, prioritised the use of language and borrowed ideas from linguistic philosophy. Colin Slater, an artist who was taught by Weinberger at the Lanchester during 1975–1978, recalled: My memory of the art department at the Lanch in the late seventies was that Harry was outnumbered by younger staff with a very different outlook to his. The Art & Language approach was in vogue and conceptual art very much at the forefront of creative thinking at that time, traditional painting was considered very ‘old world’. He may have been out of step with many staff and I remember there would be differences of opinion expressed fairly regularly between them, it was healthy and lively discussion, something that would also have been the case in many art schools. However the Lanch was particularly rife with conceptual thinking among the tutors so Harry was definitely a bit of an odd one out.39

Weinberger observes in Russian Icons (1974) that ‘for the simple visual response to a visual statement, our age has substituted a complex form of philosophical questioning, which often demands a clean break with the

38  Katherine Cockshaw, Harry Weinberger, 15 November 2003–5 January 2004 (Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, 2003), hereafter 2003CI, np. 39  Colin Slater, in conversation with the author, 16 October 2019.

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past’.40 He was concerned that the impulse to reject tradition was creating a vacuum in which artists were becoming ‘hard-put to find a suitable framework for their art’.41 Instead, artists seemed preoccupied with generating intellectual doubt, and with raising questions despite having little or no expectation of discovering answers; engrossed by its own processes, modern art seemed to be becoming increasingly self-reflexive. One criticism levelled at Weinberger by members of Art & Language was that his art did not appear to progress beyond what they considered to be a formulaic and repetitive semi-abstract style. Art historian and Tate curator David Fraser Jenkins, writing for the Arts Review in 1990, offers a more perceptive, nuanced interpretation of Weinberger’s art: An infection caught by British artists of the mid-century was to be ‘semi-­ abstract’, so as to say to make a still life distorted or an expressionist mix that became a landscape. Weinberger’s art has never seemed at all abstract, yet his delay before gaining his language was in part the force of his training in the studio of Martin Bloch, and in part that it was not until the late 1960s, with the abstract art of the New Generation that he found his way of painting that was both narrative and freely coloured within the same canvas. It is as much a matter of drawing as of colour. He uses an eccentric, looped line, which undermines the material reality of his subjects and yet makes almost organic the coloured staging. The two parts rhyme, and the same shape almost repeats in different scales. The colours are flat and applied evenly. The scale is adjusted as perfectly as a late Kandinsky. The figure, or the boat, or whatever is the ‘figure’ of the painting, is perfectly balanced and yet so exactly pressured from all around that it denies its own gravity, and floats, and in this released state can enter the imagination like a character on the stage.42

Colin Slater’s remarks shed further light on Weinberger’s approach to painting: Harry was someone very prepared to push his own limits and was very critical of his own work […] [H]e was aware he was of an older generation of artists, of working within a tradition of painting which was thought of as outmoded and of there being new waves of thought with which he could never relate nor have any desire to become a part, and he wasn't afraid to express his opinion about it. […] Throughout his career it could be said 40  Harry Weinberger, Russian Icons (unpublished record produced for Goldsmiths’ College, 1974), p. 60. 41  Harry Weinberger, Russian Icons, p. 1. 42  David Fraser Jenkins, ‘Harry Weinberger’, Arts Review, 7 September 1990. Also reproduced in 1992CI, np.

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there was a similarity in his approach and that he had a recognisable style, but I don't believe it possessed a ‘sameness’ or ‘formula’. I feel his painting matured. […] In my opinion [Harry] never made pleasant comfortable paintings, or pretty collectable pictures. Each painting was a new adventure without a pre-determined destination. He repeatedly took risks and chances […] I believe he painted as though he was driving a tank. I always felt his intention was to create bold, powerful, meaningful and thought-provoking statements, using colour, scale and imagination as his ammunition.43

Weinberger’s faith in tradition and in the truth-telling properties of art caused him to become somewhat isolated within an increasingly antagonistic department, though his considered, thoughtful, and sympathetic teaching approach was appreciated by some of his students.44 Murdoch’s journal entry of 8 November 1979 observes: ‘Harry W., complaining of Art School hostility to him and his work, says students and staff prefer “politically aware social realism” and “non-representational mark-­ making”!’ (Journal 13, p.  129). Several days prior, she had written to Weinberger, telling him: ‘I was very glad to have your letters. What a scene though. I feel so angry with those people who harass you, damn them! Non-representational mark making etc—what a poor mucky dilution of the human spirit! Real art consoles, I know’.45 Her emotional response, and subsequent record in her journal, indicates that their discussion had made a considerable impression on her. A few months earlier, in July 1979, she had written to him in similarly emotional vein, implicitly referring to the conceptual art so much in vogue: ‘Damn the “cool” approach. People turn to it who have no FIRE, no especial emotion in their work. Your paintings transcend these difficulties’.46  Colin Slater, in conversation with the author, 16 October 2019.  Colin Slater observed that ‘[Weinberger] was different as a tutor in so much as he was always encouraging and didn’t destroy students with his opinions like other members of staff might. Some staff could be quite brutal with their comments when questioning the line of work being pursued. Harry’s approach was generally quiet and conversational, but always forthright and direct. He was one that wouldn’t shout at you, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t make demands’. In conversation with the author, 16 October 2019. Michael Wolfers, writer, journalist, and political activist, who knew both Murdoch and Weinberger, and who was taught by Weinberger when a pupil at Reading School, stated that: ‘He was the most influential of all my teachers, remaining a valued mentor for the rest of his life+’. ‘Letter: Harry Weinberger, obituary 25 September 2009’, Guardian, 5 October 2009. 45  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 30 October 1979, KUAS80/2/34, Iris Murdoch Collections. 46   Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 18 July 1979, KUAS80/14/ KUAS80/3/3, Iris Murdoch Collections. 43 44

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Murdoch’s experiences of teaching General Studies to art students at the RCA in the mid-1960s had given her some insight into the dramas and conflicts which were often part of art school life. ‘But what about those Art School snakes? How can anybody attack you, I feel very indignant! (I know a little about the art school atmosphere from [the] RCA. Yes!)’, she wrote to him in November 1978.47 She encouraged Weinberger’s confidences, which enabled her to update her knowledge of a world which she had left behind. On the same date that she made the journal entry, she wrote to Weinberger, telling him that she had been to a show at the Temple Gallery, suggesting a London meeting, and adding: ‘As for complaints, you must complain. To me, why not? And write what you momently think and feel. I do look forward to our talk’.48 Murdoch’s descriptions of art school students and teachers in Nuns and Soldiers were surely influenced by Weinberger’s experiences. Tim Reede and Daisy Barrett both attend the Slade, Tim having ‘scrambled’ into it, and Daisy going there to ‘escape’ from her family; without being interested in teaching, they become part-time art teachers in order to survive financially—Daisy teaching art history ‘about which she knew little (but little was required)’—and they follow various contemporary trends in painting without improving or developing an individual style or depth (NS, p. 74, 76, 80). Weinberger had long been concerned about the content of art school courses and observed, in an unpublished article titled ‘Art Education and Modern Art’, at Art School students are not encouraged to learn from the past. They are either required to learn about the past, or far more often, they are allowed to fend for themselves, after being confronted with a selection of conflicting styles from the past. Yet the really creative students can learn as much from the past as from the present, and if we are too conscious of producing work that reflects in a self-conscious way the attitude of the 1960s, we will raise a generation of artists and teachers who will never develop beyond this period. We ought to give students a firm platform from which they can branch out on their own, we ought to start a chain-reaction of search and discovery.49 47  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 15 November 1978, KUAS80/2/94, Iris Murdoch Collections. 48  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 8 November 1979, KUAS80/2/35, Iris Murdoch Collections. 49  Harry Weinberger, ‘Art Education and Modern Art’ (unpublished article, undated), hereafter ‘Art Education’, pp. 3–4.

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Murdoch’s views on art and art teaching were eventually expressed at greater length in the Gifford Lectures, which she was working on from 1977 to 1982 and which formed the basis of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992): in the latter text she expresses her certainty that ‘[t]eaching art is teaching morals’, and her concern that contemporary artists seemed no longer to seek to articulate truth: ‘The subject matter of art is […] the nature of the process itself. The old conception of mimesis as reference to a transcendent reality, transformed and presented by an individual artist, is superseded’ (MGM, pp. 5–6, p. 322). The generally tolerant attitude expressed in ‘Salvation by Words’ (1972) towards contemporary trends in the visual arts, and the certainty that great art will endure, has been replaced by a more intense anxiety about the future of art. This anxiety was partly fuelled by Murdoch’s fears about Derridean poststructuralism; however, Weinberger’s influence is also perceptible.

‘Write What You Momently Think and Feel’: The Correspondence This study is positioned at the intersection of two important areas of Murdoch studies: her enduring fascination with the visual arts and her letters. Letters consumed much of Murdoch’s time and attention; she would assiduously answer every letter that she received. Her correspondents were numerous: they included writers, artists, and philosophers; some, like Weinberger, were intimate friends, others were lovers, casual acquaintances, fans, or students. Wendy Jones Nakanishi observes that ‘letters proved a congenial medium for self-expression, a means of gratifying Murdoch’s almost obsessive need to keep in touch with family, friends and lovers, past and present as well as a means of engaging in her favourite activity [of writing]’; letters also served ‘the valuable function of allowing Murdoch to keep the separate parts of her life separate’.50 Furthermore, letters gave Murdoch access to the raw material of other people’s lives, which filtered into her novels. Letters and letter-writing so preoccupied Murdoch that it is unsurprising that they pervade her novels. The novels demonstrate Murdoch’s comprehension of the great versatility of the letter form. The protagonist of The Black Prince, the ageing would-be writer Bradley Pearson, whose 50  Wendy Jones Nakanishi, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Letters’, English Studies, 100:3 (2019), 301–313, , hereafter ‘Murdoch’s Letters’, 307, 306.

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voice at times seems closely to echo Murdoch’s own, states: ‘I invest letters with magical power […] A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. (And, it must be admitted, of passing the buck.) It is a way of bidding time to stop’ (BP, p. 38). In the novels, letters are sometimes, as Bradley observes, ‘dangerous machines’: they are frequently used to test, to beguile, to deceive, to tempt, or mislead other characters. Martin Lynch-Gibbon, the misguided narrator of A Severed Head, composes a series of increasingly mendacious letters to Honor Klein, the eventual object of his desire, in his efforts to apologise for his assault on her. In The Sea, The Sea Charles Arrowby, a retired theatre director who claims to have renounced his powers, sends a letter to his former lover Lizzie Scherer which he describes as ‘a test or game or gamble’ designed to tempt her back to him.51 In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, the satanic Julius King uses letters stolen from his ex-lover Morgan Browne and Morgan’s brother-in-law Rupert Foster to trick them into believing each is the other’s love object. Often, several versions of a letter exist, as in Martin’s letters to Honor, the married schoolmaster Bill Mor’s letters to his lover Rain Carter in A Sandcastle, and Barney Drumm’s letters to Frances Bellman in The Red and the Green; these letters exist in a state of flux as their writers strive to refine them into satisfactory reflections or distortions of truth. Letters in the novels are rarely written without an element of deception. Some, like Tim Reede’s letters to his girlfriend Daisy Barrett in Nuns and Soldiers, lie by omission. Often letters which might be considered more honest remain unsent or unread, as in the case of Franca Sheerwater’s letter to her husband Jack. Nonetheless, some letters containing truth do reach their intended recipients, such as the letters written by Damian Butler, an Anglican priest, to Bellamy James, an aspiring monk, in The Green Knight. Damian is increasingly alarmed by Bellamy’s emotional dependence on his letters and the power Bellamy has invested in him. In his final letter, Damian reveals that he has lost his faith (his postscript implies that Bellamy’s letters have played some part in this) and tells Bellamy that he must not write to him again; he must seek his own path, as master of himself. Some truth is also to be  found in the brief, objective leave-taking letter from Finn to Jake Donaghue, the only letter he has ever written to Jake, which ‘upset [Jake] extremely’ (UN, p.  278). Earlier in the novel, Jake, baffled by 51  Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as TSTS, p. 41.

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the  attempt to write a letter to his estranged friend Hugo Belfounder, resorts to ‘a curving line across the page’ and his signature: a wordless acknowledgement of the seeming impossibility of making language reflect his thoughts and emotions (UN, p. 271). Despite her knowledge of the hazards of letter-writing, Murdoch retained throughout her life a compulsion to write letters, and she constantly exploited the potential of the letter form. Though it was at times exhausting, she found letter-writing to be a joyous activity; she wrote to one of her oldest and best friends and correspondents Philippa Foot, ‘I can live in letters’.52 As Nakanishi notes with ­reference to letters to Raymond Queneau, Murdoch’s letters were at times ‘carefully crafted’.53 Although no letter can be entirely innocent, Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger appear to be relatively spontaneous and unedited, as a result of their striking like-mindedness, mutual empathy, and the lack of erotic undercurrent in their relationship. Letter runs from Murdoch are becoming increasingly accessible: as well as revealing many of the real-life sources for her characters and plots, they complicate and enrich critical understanding of her identity, revealing marked differences from her public image. To date, approximately 1000 of Murdoch’s letters have been published. Peter J. Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War, Letters and Diaries 1939–1945 (2010) includes letters to her lovers Frank Thompson and David Hicks; With Love and Rage (2010) contains her letters to David Morgan, a student at the RCA; her letters to the American academic Jeffrey Meyers appear in his Remembering Iris Murdoch: Letters and Interviews (2013), some of her letters to Alex Colville are reproduced in an article by Meyers for The London Magazine (2013), and Never Mind about the Bourgeoisie (2014), edited by Gillian Dooley and Graham Nerlich, presents her correspondence with the Australian philosopher Brian Medlin. The vast majority of Murdoch’s published letters are contained in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995, edited by Rowe and Horner (2015). Living on Paper is a substantial collection of Murdoch’s letters, most previously unpublished, to an extensive range of correspondents, and it has made a significant contribution to the continual process of uncovering Murdoch’s elusive reality. Murdoch’s letters create a kaleidoscopic self-portrait; Malcolm Forbes describes Living on Paper as ‘a kind of surrogate autobiography, the nearest to one we will ever get […] revealing as it does a fuller portrait of Murdoch at work and  Iris Murdoch to Phillipa Foot, [June 1968], KUAS100/2/35, Iris Murdoch Collections.  Wendy Jones Nakanishi, ‘Murdoch’s Letters’, 303.

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at play, as a writer, thinker, friend and companion’.54 Although Murdoch may not have desired her own voice to emerge so directly, her letters enable readers to reach a more truthful understanding of the complex individual she was, rather than the distorted, polarised popular versions of her, promulgated in Richard Eyre’s 2002 film Iris. As Jonathan Gibbs, reviewing Living on Paper, remarks, ‘Now, finally, when we think of Iris Murdoch, we may no longer see Judi Dench’.55 Rowe and Horner read over 5000 of Murdoch’s letters and selected over 760 of these for publication. Inevitably, some letter runs had to be omitted from, or minimally represented in, Living in Paper due to constraints of space. Although just eighteen letters from Murdoch to Weinberger are included in Living on Paper, this small selection succeeds in providing some sense of the warmth and longevity of their friendship, Murdoch’s fascination with Weinberger’s paintings and drawings, and their extended discussion of art and artists, and thus reveals this letter run to be important and deserving of further attention. This study now seeks to range over the entire letter run from Murdoch to Weinberger in order to provide as detailed, objective, and accurate picture of their discourse as possible. Although Living on Paper was an extraordinary achievement which justly received much praise, its publication also provoked sensationalised, misogynistic reviews, which fixated on Murdoch’s sexuality and sex life.56 Such responses chose to neglect the diversity and richness of Murdoch’s letters, their intelligence, insight, wit, charm, lyricism, and poignancy, in favour of a salacious and reductive approach which has a dangerously distorting effect on how Murdoch’s life and work are understood—perhaps  Malcolm Forbes, ‘Book Review: Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 reveals the writer’s secret life’, The National, 3 December 2015 [accessed 3 December 2015]. 55  Jonathan Gibbs, ‘Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, book review’, The Independent, 20 November 2015 [accessed 31 August 2021]. 56  As Pamela Osborn notes, critics’ tendency to focus on Murdoch’s sexuality and sex life is not a new phenomenon: ‘Almost every biography and memoir of Murdoch published to date has been met with the same indignation about Murdoch’s supposed promiscuity and pointed references to her childlessness’. ‘Turning the Kaleidoscope: Critics’ Responses to Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe’, Iris Murdoch Review, 7 (2016), 50–53 (51). 54

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because, as Alex Ramon notes, ‘Murdoch’s status as a moral philosopher makes such commentaries particularly irresistible’.57 A particularly vicious review of Living on Paper by Roger Lewis for The Times, which terms Murdoch a ‘nymphomaniac’ and claims that ‘had she been from the ­working class […] she’d have been a candidate for compulsory sterilisation’, provoked a response in the Guardian from Rowe and Horner, in which they questioned the double standards of readers who judged Murdoch’s personal life yet found Ted Hughes’s far more extreme behaviour acceptable.58 Murdoch’s letters reveal that her life and her art are indivisible, and in so doing they create a new direction for scholarship. Rowe and Horner contend that the letters ‘constitute a distinct aspect of her writing persona: they are not merely an addition to her oeuvre, but an integral part of it, both illuminating and complicating our understanding of her philosophy and her fiction’.59 Recent analysis of Murdoch’s correspondence has been driving scholarship forward, enabling fresh perspectives on her novels and philosophy. For example, Miles Leeson has discovered that Murdoch’s twelve-year relationship with the writer, critic, and campaigner Brigid Brophy is encoded in their novels.60 Pamela Osborn, taking a specific focus on works of the 1960s by Murdoch and Brophy, references their correspondence to scrutinise their conflicting attitudes towards nonmonogamy.61 Daniel Read draws on Murdoch’s letters to her RCA student Rachel Fenner (née Brown) to illuminate his analysis of Murdoch’s engagement 57  Alex Ramon, ‘Living on Paper illuminates the intricacies that influenced Iris Murdoch’s work’, PopMatters, 7 April 2016, [accessed 11 July 2021]. 58  Roger Lewis, ‘Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe’, The Times, 14 November 2015 [accessed 11 July 2021]; Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, ‘Iris Murdoch is “promiscuous” while Ted Hughes is “nomadic”: why the double standards?’ Guardian, 27 November 2015, [accessed 11 July 2021]. 59  Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, Living on Paper, xiii. 60  Miles Leeson, ‘Encoding Love: Hidden Correspondence in the Fiction of Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch’, in Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist, ed. by Richard Canning and Gerri Kimber (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 143–161. 61  Pamela Osborn, ‘“Stop. That’s Wicked”: Sexual Freedom in Brigid Brophy’s The Burglar, and Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 12, 2 (2018), 222–232.

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with Blake’s moral vision.62 It therefore seems timely to turn to a hitherto unexamined aspect of Murdoch’s correspondence. The extensive letter run from Murdoch to Weinberger is the cornerstone of this study. By means of comprehensive analysis of these letters, this study redirects attention to Murdoch’s aesthetics—still an underexplored area, though her life is perennially dissected in search of scandal. Those who eagerly and somewhat voyeuristically sought out salacious details in the letters included in Living on Paper would perhaps be disappointed by Murdoch’s correspondence with Weinberger. As this letter run discloses, the relationship between Murdoch and Weinberger was affectionate, yet platonic. Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger, in making a valuable contribution to critical understanding of Murdoch’s work, thought, and identity, fill a gap perceived by some critics of Living on Paper, who expressed displeasure that the letters included in that collection seemingly fail to provide insights into Murdoch’s novels and philosophy; Murdoch rarely referred to either directly, leading John Sutherland to conclude that her central subject was her ‘sexual career’.63 The letters selected for Living on Paper were furthermore considered, by certain critics, to be rather dull. Nakanishi concedes that although ‘occasional gems appear, […] giving us an intimate look at the woman and the author’, Murdoch cannot be considered a ‘great’ letter-writer in the sense that Virginia Woolf was.64 Murdoch’s perceived shortcomings as a letter-writer may be explained, at least in part, by the fact that she was not writing for posterity. Gibbs observes that ‘she was writing for her friends, or rather as a way of maintaining her friendships, whether intellectual, passionate or both, and there’s nothing wrong with that’.65 Conradi, similarly, notes the high value which Murdoch placed on her friendships and deems the ‘energetic expenditure of sympathetic warmth, intelligence and encouragement’ in her letters to be ‘quite 62  Daniel Read, ‘Evil and Violence: Murdoch’s Ambiguous Moral Vision and her engagement with the Writings of William Blake in The Philosopher’s Pupil’, Iris Murdoch Review, 11 (2020), 5–22. 63  John Sutherland, ‘Living on Paper: Letters From Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995’, New  York Times, 22 January 2016 [accessed 31 August 2021]. 64  Wendy Jones Nakanishi, ‘Murdoch’s Letters’, 312. 65  Jonathan Gibbs, ‘Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, book review’, The Independent, 20 November 2015 [accessed 31 August 2021].

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remarkable’.66 Whilst mindful of the inconsistent quality of the letters in Living on Paper, Nakanishi points sympathetically to the ‘touching vulnerability’ displayed in them, finds the story of Murdoch’s life, presented in her own words, impressive, and concludes that ‘Murdoch’s ­letters present a monologue which vividly depicts an individual self living on paper while Woolf, in her skilful evocation of her correspondent, in letters that always represent a dialogue, is talking on paper’.67 Other critics of Living on Paper were less perceptive, however; Rachel Cooke, for example, alleges: ‘What Murdoch does mostly in these letters is emote, loudly and repetitively and self-centredly—and the more she does this, the less you believe in her’.68 Cooke’s view is simplistic; nevertheless, Murdoch’s characteristically extravagant, emotional style in the letters of Living on Paper does make her vulnerable to such criticism. In marked contrast, the sustained and loving outward-directed attention to visual art and artists which Murdoch continually articulated in her letters to Weinberger foregrounds a very different, less familiar aspect of her identity and compels readers to re-evaluate their views of her and of her work. The warm encouragement and affection noted by Conradi are certainly present. So too is emotion, but it is not self-indulgent; the overriding emotion expressed in these letters is the joy which Weinberger’s art induces in Murdoch. Murdoch is continually interested, questioning, attentive, and discerning as she brings her vast intellect to bear on a subject which persistently fascinated her. The letters contain a plethora of painterly references which reveal Weinberger’s lasting impact on Murdoch’s vision of reality and her efforts to represent reality in her novels. They reveal details of Weinberger’s imagery—masks, boats, the sea, the Provence landscape, Saint George, religious iconography—his aesthetic techniques, particularly his innovations with colour, and his ideas about art and artists; of specific paintings and drawings by Weinberger which particularly drew Murdoch’s attention, and the great works of art which they both revered, and discussed together on numerous gallery visits. By means of detailed analysis of the letters, cross-referenced with a range of other sources including Murdoch’s newly available journals and Weinberger’s  Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 569.  Wendy Jones Nakanishi, ‘Murdoch’s Letters’, 312. 68  Rachel Cooke, ‘Living On Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 review – ruthless in affairs of the heart’, The Guardian, 8 November 2015 [accessed 31 August 2021]. 66 67

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unpublished memoirs and personal writing, this study reveals how Weinberger’s imagery, aesthetic techniques, and ideas are woven into the fabric of Murdoch’s novels. It presents original interpretations of the novels, perceived through the prism of this discourse. It offers new ways of understanding Murdoch’s experimentation with the visual arts and contends that the visual arts are far more important to Murdoch’s work and thought than has yet been understood, thus changing the way the novels are read. Two further aspects of the correspondence require further comment: its chronology, and its one-sidedness. Murdoch’s letters were stored by Weinberger in the thirteen drawers of his desk, in non-chronological, apparently haphazard order. The correspondence held at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections includes 375 letters to Weinberger and also a small quantity of letters from John Bayley and from Murdoch to Weinberger’s wife Barbara.69 When the letters were gifted to the Archives their original order was retained and they were catalogued in thirteen bundles. For the purposes of this study, it was essential to establish the chronology of the dialogue between Murdoch and Weinberger, and the letters were therefore ordered and dated as accurately as possible. Murdoch did not always include complete dates in her letters (Conradi speculates that this practice was ‘doubtless […] in order to conduce to invisibility’).70 Some 315 of the 375 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger do, however, include partial or full dates, at least the month and year, and usually also the day; either a handwritten date on the letter, or a postmark on the envelope, or both. The dates of thirty-five further letters were deduced by comparing their contents with other letters and sources; these dates are shown in square brackets. (A similar procedure has been followed as regards Weinberger’s paintings, which he rarely dated: the dates of paintings have been deduced by reference to exhibition catalogues, Weinberger’s comments in interviews, and his personal records.) Only twenty-five letters remain undated, and these letters were not considered crucial to this study, because they mainly contain details of personal matters, travel, and meeting plans rather than being significant aspects of the ongoing discussion of art between Murdoch and Weinberger.  A very small number of letters from Murdoch to Weinberger were retained by Weinberger’s family, because they contained personal information; with regard to these the family’s wish for privacy has been respected, and in any case it was felt that these letters would not be essential to this study. 70  Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 537. 69

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Murdoch’s correspondence with Weinberger was remarkably regular, despite the many demands on her time; she wrote to him, on average, once every three weeks throughout their twenty-year friendship. At certain times, her desire to communicate with him, and moreover to see and discuss his work and to visit galleries in his company, seems to have been particularly marked: for example, in 1979, the year in which she completed the final draft of Nuns and Soldiers, Murdoch wrote at least twenty-eight letters to Weinberger and had at least five meetings with him: she visited him at his home in Leamington, where she viewed his work, and they also went to the National Gallery, the Tate, the Wallace Collection, Royal Academy, and the Francis Kyle Gallery where some of Weinberger’s drawings were being shown. The number of letters and meetings waned slightly in 1984–1985, mainly because, as Murdoch told Weinberger, she was much occupied with caring for her mother. Nevertheless, she still arranged during that period to visit Weinberger in Leamington, to go with him to the V & A and to an exhibition of his work; she continued to question him about his paintings, drawings, and opinions about art and maintained her efforts to find him a London agent, eventually placing him with Duncan Campbell in 1988. Even in her later years, when Alzheimer’s was beginning to affect her, she was determined to maintain contact with Weinberger: her letters of the mid1990s reveal her longing to meet with him, her enduring love of his paintings (‘all so beautiful. All colours, light’, she wrote in a letter of October 1994), her eagerness to receive his views on art, and her repeatedly expressed desire for his paintings to be exhibited.71 For his exhibition at the Duncan Campbell Gallery in March–April 1994 she wrote the catalogue introduction, observing that his work is driven by ‘deep intelligence and pure love’.72 She also took a significant part in the organisation and promotion of two further exhibitions, at the Swinton Gallery in April–May 1995 and at the Duncan Campbell Gallery in June 1996.73 Some of Murdoch’s relationships were almost entirely in letter form: perhaps most notably, her relationship with Roly Cochrane, an American fan and scholar living in Amsterdam with whom she corresponded at 71  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 October 1994, KUAS80/1/94, Iris Murdoch Collections. 72  Iris Murdoch, Harry Weinberger: Recent Work, 29 March-22 April 1994 (London: Duncan Campbell Gallery), np. 73  Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings, 4 April–? May 1995 (London: Swinton Gallery); Harry Weinberger, 4–28 June 1996 (London: Duncan Campbell Gallery).

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length during the 1980s and 1990s, though she met him only once.74 Nakanishi suggests, ‘It may be that verbal constructs of people […] were sometimes more satisfying than actual encounters with flesh and blood individuals, who could be unreliable and disappointing’.75 Sutherland notes also that ‘Ménière’s disease and its attendant deafness’ as well as Murdoch’s ‘sphinx-like demeanour’ may have influenced her preference for letters over face-to-face meetings; in letters she could more effectively bridge the gap between herself and others.76 Unusually, with Weinberger she made considerable, sustained efforts throughout their twenty-year friendship not only to write but also to meet him in person. Only Murdoch’s side of the correspondence between Murdoch and Weinberger exists. Murdoch destroyed letters routinely, and a vast quantity of other letters, papers, and journals were thrown away or destroyed when the Bayleys departed from Cedar Lodge in 1986, Murdoch evidently fearing that they might come under public scrutiny at a later date. The one-­ sidedness of the correspondence is not, therefore, unusual; every large letter run held in the Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives and Special Collections contains only the letters which Murdoch sent and not those that she received. No complete correspondence between Murdoch and an artist is currently available. This one-sidedness places some constraints on this study, but they are not insurmountable. Ian d’Alton, reviewing Living on Paper for The Irish Times, observes, ‘Imagine we have to, for this collection of letters is all one-way […] Despite the silence from the other side, though, the editors’ careful contextualisation rarely leaves the reader puzzled. These one-sided conversations work’.77 This study similarly strives to consider Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger in their wider context in order to arrive at a more complete understanding of their discourse and its implications for Murdoch’s work and thought. The content of Weinberger’s letters can sometimes be inferred by studying the details of Murdoch’s letters to him and by cross-referencing the letter run with other sources. To take one example: Murdoch stated in 74  Approximately 200 of Murdoch’s letters to Roly Cochrane are held in the Kingston University Archives and Special Collections (KUAS7). 75  Wendy Jones Nakanishi, ‘Murdoch’s Letters’, 307. 76  John Sutherland, Living on Paper: Letters From Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995, New  York Times, 22 January 2016 [accessed 31 August 2021]. 77  Ian d’Alton, ‘Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 review: lady of letters’, Irish Times, 1 February 2016 [accessed 1 September 2021].

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a letter of 23 August 1994 that she ‘would very much like to hear his views on ghastliness of modern art, yes please’.78 The content of the letter which Weinberger subsequently wrote to Murdoch can be inferred from his critical comments about modern art in his interview for the British Library in early 1995: he lamented that modern art is ‘no longer a visual statement which demands a visual response […] [M]y taste is for the visual statement rather than the verbal or non-visual statement’. He attacked the ‘totally meaningless scribble’ of Jackson Pollock and observed that although Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock had been claimed as the most important artists of the century, ‘if that’s the case then poor century’.79 On 30 August 1994 Murdoch thanked him for his letter which, she said, ‘expresses so explicitly my own feelings about the situation of art. Sometimes one may feel quite dazed—is one moving into a new era? It makes one sick’.80 Scrutiny of Murdoch’s letters and other archival material thus enables more nuanced understanding of Weinberger’s part in their dialogue. Very occasionally, Weinberger retained copies of his letters to Murdoch. One such letter, dated 17 April 1996, provides evidence of his strong desire to show his pictures to her and implies the high value he placed on her good opinion of his work. Responding immediately to a letter just received from her, he wrote: ‘Today I had the new catalogue, and although it is much too soon I want you to be the first person to see it, so I’m sending it to you now’.81 The catalogue referred to was for his exhibition at the Duncan Campbell Gallery in June 1996, which Murdoch resolutely helped to organise and promote, despite her increasing ill health. ‘[T]here is in a rare sense so little barrier. I feel entirely at home with you’, Murdoch told Weinberger in a letter of November 1977.82 Her remark is particularly telling because their shared quest to hone aesthetic form into representations of truth was founded on the moral requirement to dissolve the barrier between internal consciousness and reality beyond the self. Murdoch’s discourse with Weinberger undoubtedly helped her to make progress on this quest.

78  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 23 August 1994, KUAS80/1/87, Iris Murdoch Collections. 79  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 28, 95. 80  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 30 August 1994, KUAS80/10/1, Iris Murdoch Collections. 81  Harry Weinberger to Iris Murdoch, KUAS6/17/1/49/1, Iris Murdoch Collections. 82  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 November 1977, KUAS80/8/8, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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References Billington, Rachel. 1978. Peering into the Murdoch Mist. Financial Times, 25 August. Bradbury, Malcolm. 1978. The Semi-Isle. New Statesman, 25 August, 246-7. Cockshaw, Katherine, Iris Murdoch, and David Phillips. 2003. Harry Weinberger. Leamington Spa: Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum. Conradi, Peter J. 2019. Family Business. Bridgend: Seren Books. Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins. Cooke, Rachel. 2015. Living On Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 review – ruthless in affairs of the heart. The Guardian, 8 November. Accessed 31 August 2021. Courtney, Cathy. 1995. Harry Weinberger interviewed by Cathy Courtney. British Library: Artists' Lives. d’Alton, Ian. 2016. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 review: lady of letters. Irish Times, 1 February. Accessed 1 September 2021. Dougary, Ginny. 2000. Confessions of an Artist’s Model. The Times, 5 September, 6–7. Forbes, Malcolm. 2015. Book Review: Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 reveals the writer's secret life. The National. Accessed 3 December 2015. Fraser Jenkins, David. 1990. Harry Weinberger. Arts Review, 7 September. Gibbs, Jonathan. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, book review. The Independent, 20 November. Accessed 31 August 2021. Glover, Stephen. 2003 (1976). Iris Murdoch Talks to Stephen Glover. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 33-43. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Gomes, Anil. 2013. Iris Murdoch on Art, Ethics and Attention. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 53, 3: 321–337 Leeson, Miles. 2020. Encoding Love: Hidden Correspondence in the Fiction of Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch. In Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist, ed. Richard Canning and Gerri Kimber, 143-161. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Lewis, Roger. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934–1995 edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe. The Times, 14 November. Accessed 11 July 2021. Magee, Bryan. 1999 (1977). Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 3-30. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1955 (1954). Under the Net. London: Reprint Society. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1964). The Idea of Perfection. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J.  Conradi, 299-336. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1967). The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 363-385. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1973. The Black Prince. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1978). Art is the Imitation of Nature. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 243-257. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1978. The Sea, The Sea. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1993 (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris, and Harry Weinberger. 1994. Harry Weinberger: Recent Work. London: Duncan Campbell Gallery. Nakanishi, Wendy Jones. 2019. Iris Murdoch’s Letters. English Studies, 100.3: 301-313. Osborn, Pamela. 2016. Turning the Kaleidoscope: Critics’ Responses to Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe. Iris Murdoch Review 7: 50-53. Osborn, Pamela. 2018. “Stop. That’s Wicked”: Sexual Freedom in Brigid Brophy's The Burglar and Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. Contemporary Women’s Writing, 12.2: 222-232. Purton, Valerie. 2007. An Iris Murdoch Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ramon, Alex. 2016. Living on Paper illuminates the intricacies that influenced Iris Murdoch’s work. PopMatters, 7 April. Accessed 11 July 2021. Read, Daniel. 2020. Evil and Violence: Murdoch’s Ambiguous Moral Vision and her engagement with the Writings of William Blake in The Philosopher’s Pupil. Iris Murdoch Review 11: 5-22. Rowe, Anne. 2019. Iris Murdoch. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner. 2015. Living on Paper: Letters From Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995. London: Chatto & Windus. Rowe, Anne, and Avril Horner. 2015. Iris Murdoch is “promiscuous” while Ted Hughes is “nomadic”: why the double standards? Guardian, 27 November. Accessed 11 July 2021. Sutherland, John. 2016. Living on Paper: Letters From Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995. New  York Times, 22 January. Accessed 31 August 2021. Wolfers, Michael. 2009. Letter: Harry Weinberger, obituary 25 September 2009. Guardian, 5 October.

CHAPTER 5

‘All Your Colours Are So Triumphant’: The Rhetoric of Colour

Colours of Consciousness Iris Murdoch was fascinated by colour, and throughout her career she interrogated colour’s potential as part of her complex search for a synaesthetic form of communication which would more accurately render consciousness and intensify the moral impact of her fiction. ‘There’s extraordinary electrical power, joy, variety and difference one can have simply by thinking about colour’, she said in a 1993 interview for Modern Painters.1 Murdoch’s ideas about colour were derived from a diverse range of sources. These included Plato’s understanding of colour in Timaeus and Critias as ‘a kind of flame that streams off bodies of various kinds and is composed of particles so proportioned to our sight as to yield sensation’; Rainer Maria Rilke’s thoughts regarding the colours of Paul Cézanne, which, Rilke claims, have a favourable moral and spiritual effect on the perceiver, and her intellectual discourse with the colour theorist Denis Paul, with whom she corresponded from the 1950s until near the

1

 Martin Gayford, ‘Beautiful and Good’, 50.

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end of her life.2 Harry Weinberger should now be counted as another significant influence on Murdoch’s thought regarding colour. Weinberger embraced the freedom that colour offered to simplify shapes and move away from mimesis, and Murdoch was intrigued by his highly distinctive colour rhetoric. Her letters to Weinberger, and the two catalogue introductions she wrote for exhibitions of his work, continually return to his glowing, exuberant colours. ‘Flat tongues of uniform colour, which may seem like surface decoration or even collage, suddenly reveal great depths and spaces, seas and skies, or the controlled extent of an intense interior […] We live among infinite mysteries of space and colour’, she wrote in 1983, and in 1994: ‘His pictures are uniquely his own, his colours are his own. Light, water, distance, darkness, space, the mystery of colour, the absolute mystery of art, driven by deep intelligence and pure love’.3 Murdoch and Weinberger both persistently strove towards the same end: to overcome the stasis of their chosen mediums in order to represent the continually fluctuating relationship between mind and environment with greater truth. They shared a common identity in their perception of colour as a means of comprehending and depicting the continuous dynamic interaction of individual experience with transcendent external reality. Both artists employ colour realistically and expressionistically to attempt to communicate the essence of memory, to articulate sensations hovering on the edge of consciousness, in the face of deep formative experiences where language fails. Murdoch’s sustained engagement, both implicit and explicit, with Weinberger’s colour-play invigorates her efforts to convey meaning subliminally through colour in order to clarify experience and produce a truthful rendition of reality. Murdoch and Weinberger followed a similar trajectory, progressing from the muted palette which characterises their early paintings to an eruption of colours which functions in Murdoch’s mature novels, and 2  For a discussion of the influence of Plato on Murdoch’s colour rhetoric, see Anne Rowe, ‘Inscribing a Spiritual Space: Iris Murdoch’s Rhetoric of Colour’ (unpublished paper, Kingston University, 2010), hereafter ‘Inscribing’, p.  6. Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters are quoted and discussed in Chap. 8 of MGM, pp. 246–256. A run of 180 letters written by Murdoch to Denis Paul between 1950 and 1999 is held in the Iris Murdoch Collections (KUAS58/1). Paul (1925–2006) was Murdoch’s contemporary at Oxford and became a teacher, philosopher, and author. His unpublished book Colour (1977) is also in the Iris Murdoch Collections (KUAS58). 3  Iris Murdoch, 1983CI, np; Iris Murdoch, 1994CI, np.

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Weinberger’s mature paintings, as a powerful moral force operating on inner consciousness. Murdoch’s early attempts at painting during the late 1930s and early 1940s are discussed in Chap. 2; the colours of her paintings are essentially imitative of the prevailing colours of the war years. Like Murdoch, Weinberger felt the pervasive influences of fashionable developments in the visual arts. His early paintings such as At the Spaniards [1946–51] (Fig. 5.1), which depicts in subdued tones of brown and grey the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath which Weinberger and his girlfriend (later his wife) Barbara frequented as art students in the late 1940s, emulate the style of the then much-admired Euston Road School. The School emphasised realism and what Michael Podro describes as ‘a dominant interest in tonal relations with little thought of colour’.4 By the late 1940s it had largely degenerated into the production of rather narrow, provincial and mechanical paintings. Weinberger remarked to Cathy Courtney in a 1995 interview that: At the art school, what was on offer was really the Euston Road type of art, that is grey on grey, delicate illustrative sort of work. I wasn't considered a good student because I used rather strong colour which was considered vulgar [….] [I]t was a means to an end. I […] needed the qualifications, so I did the things that we were asked to do [….] They were not done with the conviction with which I normally paint.5

Weinberger’s devotion to colour led him into what he described as ‘fairly violent arguments’ with his tutors when he went to Chelsea in 1946.6 He eventually sought out private tuition from the German Expressionist painter Martin Bloch and transferred to Goldsmiths, whose tutors were slightly more sympathetic to his views. The strain of being obliged to adapt to popular taste in order to pass his art school examinations haunted him for many years. ‘I’m so glad you escaped from the Euston Road!’ 4  The Euston Road School is the name given to a group of English painters based at the School of Drawing and Painting in London between 1937 and 1939. Founded by William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, and Claude Rogers, the School emphasised naturalism and realism. Michael Podro, Martin Bloch: A Painter’s Painter, ed. by Nichola Johnson, Amanda Geitner and Sarah Bacon, (Norwich, Colchester Print Group, 2007), p. 13. 5  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 62, 73. 6  Kate Brindley and Alison Plumridge, ‘Interview with Harry Weinberger’ (unpublished, Royal Pump Rooms Archive, Leamington Spa, 5 July 1996), p. 1.

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Fig. 5.1  Harry Weinberger, At the Spaniards, [1946–51], private collection

Murdoch wrote to him in 1990, in response to a letter describing an unpleasant dream of it which had lingered in his mind.7 His realisation, when a student, that the art schools were ‘conditioning students in a way to make them function within the art idiom of the day’ gave him the

7  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 10 April 1990, KUAS80/1/70, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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conviction in later life to encourage his own students’ individuality.8 Guided by those of his tutors who were more supportive, amongst them Ceri Richards, Weinberger determinedly broke away from convention, and his colours became still more vivid as he strove to find ways of using colour to communicate the essence of experience.9 Julian Freeman, then Visual Arts Manager at the Barbican Centre, notes Weinberger’s ‘formidable skills as a colourist’ in Weinberger’s 1990 exhibition catalogue, and further observes: [Weinberger’s] palette is surely unique among those used by any contemporary British painter. Together with his methods of composition, those colours have undergone a steady refinement since [his] intense 1950s half-­ tones, which were dependent on heavy impasto or line-in-paint for the suggestion of volume and mass. In time, his pigments have increased in brilliance to their present, bright ochre state, in which the colours themselves confer form and contour at the boundaries between strong contrasting or complementary tones.10

Weinberger was perhaps in Murdoch’s thoughts when in The Green Knight (1993) she partly attributes Moy Anderson’s recovery from near-mental breakdown to the therapeutic effects of colour. A sympathetic art teacher tells Moy ‘do not fear the colours’ and she begins to produce wild, highly individual canvases suffused with colour, instead of the unadventurous pieces which she had been turning out to try to please the art school.11 Murdoch’s early explorations of colour are most fully realised in The Sandcastle (1957)—her third novel and the first to characterise a painter— in which an array of blazing colours is invoked to render the inner  Weinberger remarked in 1995: ‘I promised myself that if ever I were in a position of being a teacher I would never knock the individuality out of people, that I would build on what talent they had [….] [L]ater I became a teacher myself, and I thought back to the times when I thought people criticised something, not for what they thought was wrong, but because it was in the wrong idiom, or it was something they were not used to’. Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 60, 65. 9  Ceri Richards (1903–1971) was a British painter, printmaker, and art tutor. Music, the Welsh landscape, and the natural world were important themes in his painting. Influenced by the work of Picasso and Kandinsky, he moved towards surrealism. Richards encouraged Weinberger to study at Chelsea School of Art, where he was himself working. Weinberger described Richards as ‘one of the best teachers that I’ve ever come across’. Artists’ Lives, p. 57. 10  Julian Freeman, Harry Weinberger, 4–22 September, 25 September-12 October 1990 (London: Duncan Campbell Gallery, 1990), np. 11  Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as GK, p. 428. 8

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psychology of characters. Anne Rowe observes that the first meeting of the schoolmaster Bill Mor and the artist Rain Carter, soon to fall in love, is ‘accompanied by a riotous fusion of seductive colours’ which ‘evokes each character’s primitive sexual attraction for the other, replicates the shock of new emotions, and evokes the dangerous energy being released that will have devastating consequences for Mor, his wife and children, and Rain herself’.12 Rowe notes, ‘The colour metaphor includes a moral dimension—if readers can be induced to experience Mor’s attraction for Rain vicariously, they empathise with him and are more likely to understand and not judge’.13 Murdoch’s experimentation with colour does not progress consistently throughout her oeuvre; it is less evident in Bruno’s Dream (1969), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), and A Word Child (1975), for example. Nonetheless, it gathers significant momentum in the novels of her mature period, notably in The Sea, The Sea (1978) and Nuns and Soldiers (1980), both written during the intense early days of her friendship with Weinberger, and in The Good Apprentice (1985) produced after eight years of close engagement with his work and thought. Murdoch’s colour-play in the latter three novels must therefore be considered in the light of her discourse with Weinberger. Weinberger’s yearning for the unsullied vision of childhood filtered into Murdoch’s portrayal of the protagonist of The Sea, The Sea, Charles Arrowby. Two paintings of Weinberger’s first home by the River Spree, In Berlin (Bundesratufer) [1994] (Fig. 5.2), and In Berlin (1990) (Fig. 5.4) are significant examples of his quest to retrieve an innocent vision, each being, like The Sea, The Sea, centred on the idea of recapturing time through art. In these two paintings, Weinberger revisits the scene of his childhood, mediating it through imagination, memory, the transformative powers of art and above all colour in order to find a practical way of contemplating the past and expressing grief for its loss whilst resisting retreat into fantasy. The imposition of aesthetic form on the formless past inevitably involves an element of falsification, but can also help to clarify perception of it. Weinberger created numerous paintings and drawings of boats on water in bright sensuous colours, many of which were well-known to Murdoch. Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger reveal that these images were much in her thoughts as she wrote The Good Apprentice, and they coalesced in her  Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch, pp. 86–87.  Anne Rowe, ‘Near the Gods’, p. 69.

12 13

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Fig. 5.2  Harry Weinberger, In Berlin (Bundesratufer), [1994], Government Art Collection

thoughts to become the colour-drenched, transcendent vision of boats on water perceived by Edward Baltram. The discourse between Murdoch and Weinberger is intimately associated with the landscape of the Alpilles in Provence where they first met. Weinberger repeatedly drew and painted this landscape, striving to render the dynamism of its elusive, ever-changing colours. Many of his vibrant

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images of the region were produced, and shown to Murdoch, in the late 1970s when Murdoch was writing Nuns and Soldiers, and they had a substantial impact on her descriptions of Provence in this novel. Weinberger’s painting Provence I (Fig.  5.8) and a preparatory study for this painting produced in 1979 (Fig. 5.10) closely resemble a scene sketched by Tim Reede, a character behind whom Weinberger’s identity can be sensed. The enduring impact of Weinberger’s art on Murdoch’s vision of the Alpilles is also palpable in her late untitled poem known as ‘But—Jackdaw’. In the context of Murdoch’s discourse with Weinberger, the colour-play of Nuns and Soldiers invites an ecocritical interpretation. Both artists intuit the presence of a realm beyond the scope of colour. Although Weinberger was, in general, content to make a sustained investigation of colour’s potential his life’s work, Murdoch reached beyond his colour-saturated vision to interrogate the concept of the negative sublime in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) and The Sea, The Sea.

Prelapsarian, Prelinguistic: Seeking Childhood Vision Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger reveal her fascination with the ways that the past and present intermingled in his art. This is a particular preoccupation of hers in the early years of their friendship. Murdoch tells Weinberger in a letter of May 1978 that she imagines ‘what you used to see in the river when you were a child. (Have you been back to that place I wonder)’. The desire to recover the innocent clarity of childhood vision, which may not exist except in imagination is, for both artists, intricately linked with colour, as implied by Murdoch’s further observation in the same letter: ‘I connect you with great blue spaces’.14 Research into child development pioneered by Friedrich Froebel and supported by later twentieth-­century researchers suggests that infants at a prelinguistic stage can discriminate between colours before they can discriminate between forms. Primary colours, which had particular significance for Weinberger and for Murdoch (being, in her novels, connected with renewal of vision) can be distinguished by babies long before they have developed the language skills to be able to name them. An infant’s experiences of colour are perhaps as close as humans can get to pure colour sensation. The clarity of childhood 14  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 May 1978, KUAS80/2/88, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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perception can only be rendered indirectly, in words, in images, or by means of any other constructed, artificial form, and such an endeavour is inevitably postlapsarian.15 Both artists occupy an ambivalent position in relation to the idea, deeply inscribed in their work, of recovery of the past. Murdoch’s novels seem intellectually to reject, yet emotionally to yearn for, the possibility of recapturing past experience. Her characters are haunted by events which have indelibly marked them, which they obsessively relive and try to make sense of, the past continually evading their grasp. Although Murdoch exposes the illusory nature of such a quest to recapture lost time, she also seems nostalgically drawn to it, and her characters’ sense of loss is also her own. Her journals reveal that the relation between present and past compelled her attention from an early stage. In November 1947 she noted that an individual has the ‘right to interpret’ the past, that ‘a part of one’s present is reinterpreting one’s past’, whereas ‘Irresponsibility is rejection of [the] past’ (Journal 4, pp. 174–176). She went on to consider how one might take ‘imaginative control’ of the past, draws distinctions between ‘the real (remembered) past, the historical past (data & supplement) and the imaginary past’ and reflected on how one’s past might be ‘ours “in image”—our imagination works on exp[erience] from the start—& we continually reinterpret it’ (Journal 5, p.  3, 9, 14). The ‘peculiar role of images in remembering’ was of particular interest to Murdoch (Journal 5, p. 66). She observed, ‘Our imagination is immediately & continuously at work on our experience. There are no “brute data”’, and, a few days later, ‘no memory is pure’ (Journal 5, p. 13, 41). Bran Nicol refers to the ‘double movement’ in Murdoch’s fiction, in which characters are trying to live forwards whilst making sense of the past: ‘we continually and involuntarily return to moments of past trauma (or lost happiness), all the while looking forwards to a point where we might be able to understand what has gone before’.16 Weinberger enacted this double movement, being compelled to employ his art to attempt to come to terms with the harrowing events of his childhood. His art functions as a net cast over the raw material of his  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose work was well-known to Murdoch defines the silent or ‘tacit’ cogito: the infant’s pre-reflective, prelinguistic grasp on the world which, when the infant learns to communicate, becomes more definite and unequivocal, being inevitably limited by the artificiality of the means by which it is expressed. Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 16  Bran Nicol, Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), hereafter Retrospective Fiction, xvii. 15

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life, creating form from the formless and inaccessible past. The creation of art is a dangerous act, inevitably falsifying, with potential to offer a retreat into consoling fantasy. Both Murdoch and Weinberger were caught in tension between the desire to grasp and rediscover the past and the desire to impose aesthetic form upon it. Charles Arrowby allows himself to become dominated by the fall-myth which he constructs from real and imagined aspects of his past. Charles tells his cousin James that he is going to write his memoirs, which he intends to be ‘the deep thing, real analysis, real autobiography’. James warns him: ‘[w]e cannot just walk into the cavern and look around […] What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you thought or felt or did?’ (TSTS, p. 175). By this point in the novel, the inattentive Charles has convinced himself that his relationship with his childhood sweetheart Hartley, which took place over forty years ago, was the one truthful episode in a life of theatrical power play. He perceives Hartley as the means by which he will regain the lost innocence of his youth, reconnect his past and present selves, and become whole. ‘Perhaps I would indeed, through her and through our old childish love, now irremediably chaste, be enabled to become what I had hoped to become when I came away to the sea, pure in heart’ (TSTS, p. 122). Ironically, Charles’s rediscovery of Hartley in fact hastens the resurfacing of his jealous desire for power and control. Charles’s quest for an untainted prelapsarian state is also, in some sense, Weinberger’s. They both long to recover past innocence by means of the magic of art. In 1995 Weinberger stated that: ‘what interests me very often is, when I travel to see things, as a child I’d see them for the first time, with an innocent eye and I feel I want to paint that’.17 John Ruskin, a believer in the controversial concept of the ‘innocent eye’, contended in 1856 that ‘the whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify’.18 Weinberger’s distinctive compositions of blocks of flat colour bear some resemblance to Ruskin’s ‘flat stains  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 13.  John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, 2nd edn, rev. by Bernard Dunstan (London: Herbert Press: 1991), p. 27. 17 18

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of colour’, suggesting that Weinberger was by means of this mode of representation reaching after a state of innocent passivity, in which solid objects could fragment into pure colour sensation. The ‘innocent eye’ has been denounced by E. H. Gombrich as a ‘myth’, because all living organisms organise and classify visual impressions: ‘seeing is never just registering’ but unavoidably involves an element of interpretation.19 Entirely unbiased vision is therefore impossible. The process of trying to expel meaning from an object in order to see it ‘for what it is’ is in itself far from innocent and passive. The sustained scrutiny of the relationship between the self and the world which the artist must undertake in order to strive towards a more ‘innocent’ and therefore more truthful perception can nonetheless be morally beneficial, as Murdoch implies in her unpublished poem ‘Colour Patches’ (1976).20 ‘Colour Patches’ was written shortly after Murdoch’s first encounter with Weinberger. Its title strongly evokes Weinberger’s vivid patchwork canvases. Furthermore, it recalls Ruskin’s ‘flat stains of colour’, which suggests that Murdoch, stimulated by her contemplation of Weinberger’s paintings, was trying to erase conceptual knowledge of colour and form in order to convey the experience of direct, unmediated contact with colour as precisely as the innately classifying, interpreting eye could allow her to do. The poem records the colours of a garden, almost certainly the garden of Murdoch’s home Cedar Lodge: the ‘pale mauve’ of crocuses, the ‘glow’ of orange roses, and ‘great chasms of gold leaves’. Murdoch blends colour and light with a cacophony of birdsong, invading the senses in an effort to capture the synaesthetic experience of her environment. The stanzas are lengthy and irregularly patterned, heightening the impression of spontaneity. The colours, lights, and sounds of the external world, imperfectly secured in language as a ‘world intelligible, dim’, seep into Murdoch’s consciousness, creating a ‘[b]rilliantly coloured inward garden’, and renewing her capacity to ‘feel’ and to ‘think’. She reflects: ‘We feel we understand because we see,/Wisdom is vision and a sense of light’. Colour is integral to this quest for accurate perception. The Sea, The Sea was written in 1976–1977, during which time Murdoch was eagerly questioning Weinberger about his youthful experiences, indulging her overriding interest in what Nicol describes as ‘a localised,  E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1960), pp. 251–252.  Iris Murdoch, 23 October 1976, Verses IV 1972–77, np, KUAS202/3/10, Iris Murdoch Collections. 19 20

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personal past, the implications of which extend little further than the effect of a particular past experience on a particular character’.21 The letters hint at the many extended conversations which they conducted in person. ‘I was so very interested to talk of your past life & the adventures which brought you to England and I hope you didn’t mind that’, she wrote in a letter of November 1977.22 Weinberger’s childhood in Berlin was blighted by the rise of Hitler, then abruptly curtailed when, at the age of nine, he was forced to flee from Germany. Although he found these painful memories difficult to articulate, Murdoch coaxed them from him, and they found their way into the art of both.23 ‘Having childhood roots for one’s art is surely not a lack of purpose!’ Murdoch wrote to Weinberger. ‘The unconscious mind is unaware of time (one is told)—it continually works however’.24 Writing in 1998, Weinberger recalled how, just before his departure from Berlin in autumn 1933, he took a solitary walk through ‘the streets that had been my world’ by himself for the final time. We were about to emigrate, everything was packed and ready, and I thought I might never see all these familiar sights again. […] First I went alongside the Spree, on the embankment where I had played so many times and where not so long ago I had seen scenes from a Nazi film being shot. […] I tried to take in all the sights that would stay in my mind and console me in the years ahead. I was frightened and angry and felt very alone.25

The vivid, painful images embedded themselves into Weinberger’s psyche and filtered through his imagination and memory to resurface years later  Bran Nicol, Retrospective Fiction, p. 36.  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 November 1977, KUAS80/8/8, Iris Murdoch Collections. 23  Weinberger’s struggle to confront his traumatic past is implied by the way that he wrote and then destroyed at least one memoir of his early life (initially intended as a gift for his grandson), as a letter from Murdoch makes clear: ‘I’m sorry to hear that you destroyed that life story which was for Jakey. […] It would be good if he could have some glimpse back into that past – the past vanishes so quickly’. Postmarked 15 October 1985, KUAS80/3/1, Iris Murdoch Collections. He also destroyed many of his war paintings, which he described as ‘all memories of things I had actually seen, and of prisoners of war and of people on guard’. Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 72. 24  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked November 1983, KUAS80/2/53, Iris Murdoch Collections. 25  Harry Weinberger, ‘I was born on April 7th, 1924’ (unpublished memoirs, 3 October 1998), hereafter ‘Memoir 2’, np. 21 22

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in the two Berlin paintings, blended with his impressions of the scene from his visits to Berlin as an old man. In Berlin (Bundesratufer) (Fig.  5.2) is dominated by the turbulent blues of the river and sky, which imbue the scene with tension. The sky is, according to Weinberger, ‘a translation into colour of what I imagine the sky to be, so that there are colours in the sky that I paint, which are much stronger and quite different from the colours in the real sky’.26 Restless grey storm clouds, sketched in with broad brushwork, create an ominous mood and are perhaps suggestive of the menacing Nazi presence which would eventually cause the devastation of Weinberger’s home. Weinberger recalled in 1995 that ‘the war went right through that street, and the house where we lived then had disappeared. It’s now a big block of flats’. The Berlin paintings depict buildings which were ‘in the same street but not exactly where we used to live. They are at the end of the road, which was untouched by bombs’.27 The clouds gather above the houses, which are rendered as simple blocks of pink, brown, cream, pale green, and royal blue, curving alongside the water’s edge. A wedge of ochre cuts across the foreground, demarcating a grassy parkland. ‘[T]hat’s where I played as a child. That’s where I stood when I drew’, he stated.28 A bridge, rebuilt after destruction by Nazi forces, is partially visible, as is a little of the embankment. Skeletal, leafless trees, which he described as ‘very thin, very lonely’, jut upwards, bisecting the arc of the river.29 Discussing the Berlin paintings, Weinberger made it clear that he did not aim to reproduce the colours of the exterior world. Instead, he sought to liberate his imagination from mimesis, fusing past memories with present imagination and invoking from the depths of his consciousness a multitude of vivid colours which merge with the colours of remembered reality: They are my colours […] it’s freely invented really. […] That’s the way I paint. I never predict. I don’t have a clear idea in my mind what the painting will look like, but it’s like, I suppose, a musical fugue where one colour acts on another and there are certain demands made by the picture itself, and it turns into something unpredictable really. It always amazes me how things turn out. It’s a bit mysterious, it's like a bit of magic.30  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 11.  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 10. 28  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 11. 29  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 11. 30  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, pp. 10–11. 26 27

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Weinberger’s emphasis on the semi-autonomous nature of his colour-play implicitly connects his artistic practice with his ideal state, the near-­ spontaneous receptivity of childhood vision. He endeavoured to capture the sensation of colours as they resurface in the mind, provoking an involuntary visceral response. Murdoch’s novels strive to create a similar impression, by showing how memories from the distant past can feel more real than the present. Charles Arrowby’s sudden recollections of his childish love for Hartley are so vivid that they momentarily blot out his surroundings and cause a physical reaction: ‘[e]ven now I shake and tremble as I write. Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation’ (TSTS, p. 86). Both Weinberger and Murdoch construct the effect of spontaneity by artificial means. Weinberger’s rather implausible claim that his colour choices are entirely ‘instinctive and intuitive’ is perhaps in part an attempt to mystify his art; an element of conscious control on the part of the artist is surely unavoidable.31 Nevertheless, the pulsating blocks of colour in In Berlin (Bundesratufer) heighten the painting’s instantaneous force and thereby intensify the viewer’s experience of Weinberger’s vision. By means of colour, Weinberger tried to articulate what is indescribable in words: to convey the agony of lost innocence and to try to induce a state of pure, unmediated sensation, before or beyond trauma. In response to a request by Cathy Courtney for a ‘fairly literal description’ of In Berlin (Bundesratufer), Weinberger stated that it is ‘[s]omething that I find very difficult to put into words, maybe if I could put it into words I wouldn’t even want to paint it’.32 He attempted to describe the scene in both English and German, concluding that both languages were inadequate to communicate its meaning, although German, the language of his childhood, came perhaps a little nearer to the truth: ‘Well, in the foreground there’s a bit of the, of the, I don’t know how you would describe it, not the edge, it’s the—when I try and describe a picture that is of Germany, the words that come to mind are German rather than English. It’s the, no, I can’t. […] It’s also difficult in German’.33 Weinberger mistrusted verbalising about art, believing instead that ‘the picture is the visual image that one has a visual response to, not a verbal one’ and citing Matisse, ‘who said that what you can put into words about art isn’t worth saying’.34  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 97.  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 11. 33  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 11. 34  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 94, 40. 31 32

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Murdoch’s observations in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals reveal her similar awareness of the power of the visual to go beyond the boundaries of language: ‘At the borderlines of thought and language we can often “see” what we cannot say: and have to wait and attempt to formulate for ourselves and to convey to others our experience of what is initially beyond and hidden’ (MGM, p.  283). Whereas Weinberger privileges the visual over the verbal, Murdoch does not perceive them as antagonistic. She continually strives to create a visual–verbal fusion which can depict experience with greater accuracy, enriching the unfolding linguistic temporal sequences of her novels with the direct intensity of colour-soaked visual images. Energised by her meditations on Weinberger’s colour rhetoric, Murdoch imagines in The Sea, The Sea what happens when another artist, Charles Arrowby, is presented with a transcendent image of the sea saturated in colour. In sharp contrast to Weinberger, Charles lacks the moral capacity to attend to the scene and allow it to penetrate and refine the mind. The limitations of language are made particularly evident in Charles’s attempts to capture the sea’s colours in elegant ‘word pictures’ (TSTS, p. 2) which are inevitably insufficient to convey their reality. The opening paragraph of The Sea, The Sea is a case in point: The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold. (TSTS, p. 1)

Charles is intuitively aware that he should turn his attention outwards to try to see the infinitely coloured beauty of nature, but his painstakingly considered vocabulary choices (the sea ‘glows rather than sparkles’, it is ‘opaque however, not transparent’) and his carefully constructed sentences, balanced for rhetorical effect (‘the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold’) produce a rather ostentatious, cerebral description. He makes

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a telling reference to the ‘surface skin of colour’ on the sea, which implies that his impoverished consciousness has interposed a barrier between himself and his surroundings. In contrast, Weinberger, in seeming endorsement of Cézanne’s observation that ‘colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet’, strives to galvanise the dynamic interplay between inner and outer realities which brings him into a more truthful relationship with the external world.35 Charles’s egoism leads him to try to appropriate the sea as an extension of himself. He states that this description of the sea is in fact ‘destined to be the opening paragraph of my memoirs’ (TSTS, p. 1) showing that he is unable to perceive or write about anything beyond himself. Ironically it is at this moment that Charles is disrupted by the first appearance of the sea-monster which seems to signify some repressed trauma buried deep within Charles’s psyche. The presence of the sea-monster is a sign that Charles will not be permitted to enjoy his delusions without dangerous consequences, but his solipsism means that he still perseveres in trying to create the fall-myth in which he plays a starring role. Because Murdoch presents both an internal and external view of Charles, the reader is disturbed by his appalling egoism but can also feel some empathy for and understanding of his behaviour. The first-person retrospective narrative voice creates the impression of connecting past and present, and is therefore unsettling for the reader who is subtly led to collude with Charles’s distorted worldview and at times to almost accept his fantasy of repossessing and reconstructing the past. Murdoch guides the reader into the realisation that aspects of Charles’s character are to be found in everyone: his egoism, his delusions, and his nostalgic longing for a time and place which may have never really existed except in his mind. The young Charles and Hartley are fashioned by Charles into Adam and Eve. ‘We experienced our innocence and we did not think it would be difficult to be good’ he recollects. ‘I think we had little curiosity about sex. We were one, and only that mattered. We lived in paradise. […] Ours was already a suburban countryside, but it was as lovely and significant to us as the Garden of Eden’ (TSTS, p. 80). A little later, remembering Hartley’s rejection of him, and his subsequent idealisation of his time with her, 35  Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne, a Memoir with Conversations, trans. by Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p.  153. The work of the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was revered and much discussed by Murdoch and Weinberger.

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Charles muses: ‘The past can recover. I saw again, far away like a dulled yet glowing painting of Adam and Eve upon an old fresco, two innocent beings bathed in a clear light’ (TSTS, pp. 84–85). This description may be a tantalising reference to a real image, or a composite picture of many such images, among which might figure paintings of Adam and Eve viewed and discussed by Weinberger and Murdoch.36 The image of Adam and Eve formed part of their dialogue: in a letter of May 1984, Murdoch thanked Weinberger for sending her a reproduction of ‘Christ hauling up Adam and Eve’ from the Kariye Museum (formerly the Church of St Saviour in Chora) in Istanbul, and told him: ‘I have been twice to that church and worshipped that fresco’.37 It is also possible that Murdoch had Weinberger’s painting Adam and Eve (Fig. 5.3) in her thoughts. The fleeting presentation of Charles and Hartley as figures stilled in a fresco encourages a moment of disciplined attention, guiding the reader to draw out the implications of their roles as Adam and Eve. Judeo-Christian mythology claims that Eve was created from Adam’s body while he slept, and this strengthens the impression that Charles has constructed a dream-version of Hartley and failed to perceive that she has a real and separate existence from him. Like Adam, Charles names his Eve, calling her ‘Hartley’ instead of her given name Mary, which is a sign of his desire to exert authority over her. By casting Hartley as Eve, Charles seems to covertly blame her for their fall from a state of innocence whilst vindicating himself. However, Murdoch may be directing the reader into awareness of a still deeper level of meaning, as the exile from Eden was actually brought about by a serpent resembling the ‘coiling monstrosity’ which causes Charles such horror and which seems to represent the heart of darkness within Charles himself (TSTS, p. 20). Other textual details imply that Charles’s prelapsarian fantasy was never a reality. For instance, Charles’s passionate advances were unreciprocated and undesired by Hartley, who seems to have resorted to physical retaliation to try to prevent them. He recalls that ‘[h]er body was passive to my embraces […] She never hugged me, but sometimes, rigidly, she held my arms, leaving great bruises’ (TSTS, p.  80). Hartley seems to have left Charles because of his controlling behaviour, expressed 36  Weinberger and Murdoch often visited the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum together, where many images of Adam and Eve are exhibited, including versions by Jan Gossaert, c.1520 (National Gallery), Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1613 (National Gallery) and Albrecht Durer, 1504 (Victoria and Albert Museum). 37  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 21 May 1984, KUAS80/1/58, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Fig. 5.3  Harry Weinberger, Adam and Eve, undated, private collection

by her as being ‘so sort of bossy’ (TSTS, p. 216). By the end of the novel Charles has made enough moral progress to realise, fleetingly, the falsity of his vision: ‘I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all’ (TSTS, p. 498). He briefly considers the possibility that, like Adam and Eve, ‘perhaps the fundamental bond was not love at all, but guilt?’ (TSTS, p. 497), but he struggles to retain and contemplate this new knowledge, concluding only that ‘these speculations are too nightmarish. Better to feel “I shall never know”’ (TSTS, p. 498).

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Fig. 5.4  Harry Weinberger, In Berlin, 1990, private collection

In Weinberger’s other rendition of his childhood home, In Berlin (Fig. 5.4), his imagination has distilled and transformed his memories into a nostalgic romantic scene: a lost Eden. Murdoch is highly likely to have viewed and discussed this painting with Weinberger; in a letter of November 1989, in which she thanked him for his letter about his recent visit to Berlin, she stated, ‘I can imagine too how you felt at home, where your innocent childhood was—and—not just that. […] I’d like to see the Spree picture. […] I would be so glad to see you (and the pictures which are part of you)’.38 In Berlin appears to form part of Weinberger’s means of coming to terms with his childhood suffering, but it also verges dangerously close on a consolatory fantasy: as such, it accentuates the similarities between him and Charles. The painting includes some of the same details as In Berlin (Bundesratufer): the curve of houses, the bridge, and the 38  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 4 November 1989, KUAS80/1/62, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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river. However, this version is alive with rhythmic, harmonious colours which create a dreamlike, lyrical atmosphere. The lighter palette is springlike and joyful. The trees, previously stark and bare, are bursting into many-coloured leaves. The blue water ripples and sparkles, and the storm clouds have been replaced by delicate hues of pink and turquoise. The desolate ochre stretch in the foreground has become verdant grass, on which a couple is embracing. The female figure, dressed in blazing red, appears to be seducing the supine male, and this recalls Charles’s self-­ identification with a blameless Adam, tempted into loss of innocence by Hartley/Eve. Weinberger does not appear to portray himself or anyone else specific in this painting, however; the couple are anonymous, and could be intended to represent a generalised image of paradisiacal love. Weinberger and Charles are markedly similar in their creation of prelapsarian visions which mediate agonising memories of early suffering. In each vision, some truth exists, but their art can never be free of fantasy, meaning that these can only be imperfect ways of trying to deal with the past. Charles causes more pain to himself and passes this pain on to others, by his hubristic attempts to revive and re-enact past events, whereas Weinberger wisely consigns his pain to the realm of art. Charles half-­ knowingly diminishes Hartley at the end of the novel and abandons any efforts to give further attention to the colours of the sea, without reflecting sufficiently on his reasons for doing so: these matters require more moral effort than he is capable of. Weinberger’s more insightful, self-­ analytical approach indicates his moral advancement, engendered by unremitting outward-directed attention to the details of the world around him. He meditated at length on his childhood experiences, observing in his memoir that ‘those nine years made me into the person I still am’.39 He found a way of processing his trauma by permitting his present consciousness to merge with his past, then he placed it aside, implicitly accepting that his best endeavours to render the intense colours of his childhood memories must still inevitably be inadequate. He stated in 1995 that he would not attempt any further paintings of his childhood home, but these two paintings remained as icons for him, continually regenerating meaning, in a perpetual dialogue between internal and external realities.40 In Berlin (Bundesratufer) now hangs in the office of the British Ambassador in Berlin, its location representing a kind of homecoming for its creator.  Harry Weinberger, ‘Memoir 2’, np.  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 12.

39 40

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Weinberger’s Berlin perhaps never truly existed except in his imagination and memory, but is now captured in art, pointing beyond itself to the truth inherent in his deeply personal vision. Murdoch often remarked on the joy of his painting, and above all of his colours, calling them ‘triumphant’.41 Weinberger’s shimmering palette of colour grants him a form of triumph, by transforming into joy the pain inherent in his forced departure from his own Eden.

Learning to See: Personal Icons and Purified Attention The Good Apprentice was written after several years of friendship, by which time Murdoch had purchased many paintings from Weinberger and had written a detailed catalogue introduction to a major exhibition of his work in 1983, as well as having engaged with him in sustained discussion about the practice, teaching, and morality of art. Murdoch’s depictions of boats on water in this novel take on new significance in the light of her dialogue with Weinberger. The motif of the boat on water recurs in his paintings, in sensuous, pulsating colours, and was for Weinberger inextricably connected with childhood. He recollected in 1995 that although a psychoanalyst had told him that ‘the reason why I paint so many boats and harbour pictures has to do with escape for freedom and so on’, his own view was that ‘it’s because my earliest memories are of ships coming up the river’.42 The correspondence between Weinberger and Murdoch provides details of numerous representations of boats on water by Weinberger which were acting on Murdoch at the time of writing The Good Apprentice. One particular painting—a harbour scene rendered in glowing reds and blues—became an icon of beauty and truth for her. When Murdoch’s images of boats on water are cross-referenced with those found in Weinberger’s art, they become imbued with such meaning that they can be elevated to the status of icons. Whereas traditional Christian icons are usually understood as drawing the individual from the material to the spiritual realm, the icons created by Murdoch and Weinberger draw the individual from the internal world into more accurate perception of external life so that a renewed vision becomes more possible in the inevitable return to the self. 41   Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated [July 1990?], KUAS80/1/76, Iris Murdoch Collections. 42  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 1.

Fig. 5.5  Harry Weinberger, Positano Triptych, [1993], private collection

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Murdoch purchased many seascapes and riverscapes from Weinberger. These included Aberystwyth, a boldly executed painting of moored boats, dominated by blues and browns, and a delicate drawing titled Fishing Boat, Crete (Fig. 4.3). ‘Your Crete drawings give great joy’, she wrote to Weinberger in May 1979.43 Murdoch would have been familiar with numerous other seascapes and riverscapes by Weinberger because they featured in the exhibitions in 1983 and 1994 for which she wrote catalogue introductions, extolling their ‘brilliant colour and mercurial light’.44 The 1983 exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry featured the seascapes Harlingen (Fig. 1.4), a melancholy scene dominated by an overcast grey sky and sea, the bold strokes of yellow and orange which demarcate a boat and buildings heightening the painting’s tense, brooding mood, and Harbour in Rethymnon (Fig. 4.4), another of Murdoch’s purchases, a large, striking composition which juxtaposes a many-coloured sea and ship against a mountainous skyline. She encourages visitors to the exhibition to ‘enjoy and appreciate Weinberger’s artistry in the big landscape paintings where ships (a favourite subject) toss upon a flashing sea’.45 A highlight of the 1994 exhibition at the Duncan Campbell Gallery, London was Positano Triptych (Fig.  5.5). ‘The Positano triptych—it sounds wonderful’, Murdoch wrote to Weinberger in July 1993.46 Two fishing boats set out across a vast expanse of iridescent sea, which mirrors and merges with the mottled purple and blue hues of the overarching sky. Radiant golden trees quiver at the water’s edge, infusing the scene with movement. Figure 5.6, a ‘blue and red picture of two small boats in a harbour’, had special significance for Murdoch.47 ‘I have a new desk and one of your big sea (harbour) pictures hangs above it and inspires me’, she wrote to him in March 1990, reiterating in two other letters of this period that the painting ‘puts light in a rather dark room’ and ‘exudes light at all times of day’.48 The light which Murdoch perceived emanating from the painting was spiritual as well as physical. Murdoch’s familiar references to the 43  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 9 May 1979, KUAS80/2/82, Iris Murdoch Collections. 44  Iris Murdoch, 1994CI, np. 45  Iris Murdoch, 1983CI, np. 46  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 8 July 1993, KUAS80/1/96, Iris Murdoch Collections. 47  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, dated on envelope February 1990, KUAS80/1/66, Iris Murdoch Collections. 48  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 29 March 199[0?], KUAS80/5/15; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 17 April 1990, KUAS80/1/69, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Fig. 5.6  Harry Weinberger, untitled painting of harbour, undated, private collection, previously owned by Iris Murdoch

painting in her letters imply that she had owned it for some time. Although its location at Cedar Lodge cannot be identified with certainty, it is known that the painting was situated in her downstairs study in her last home, 30 Charlbury Road, over the desk at which (having spent the morning working in her upstairs study) she would spend up to four hours each afternoon on letter-writing to a multitude of correspondents (see Fig. 5.7). Letter-­ writing, combined with the daily discipline of Murdoch’s philosophical and fictional writing, often proved exhausting. However, communication with close friends such as Weinberger was always pleasurable. ‘I am still run over by work & also by piles of letters (about 50 unanswered) very glad to get YOURS, always a pleasant moment when I see your writing!’ she told Weinberger in July 1986.49 When writing letters to friends, Murdoch could access a liberating contemplative space for which the harbour scene acted as a constant creative stimulus. In this painting, two small white boats with furled sails drift luxuriously in a sunlit turquoise harbour. A row of pastel-coloured houses overlooks the water. Rocks rise in the background, silhouetted against a striking red and yellow sunset. The image radiates with mystical intensity, conveying a 49  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 22 July 1986, KUAS80/2/10, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Fig. 5.7  Weinberger’s painting on display over Murdoch’s desk in her study at 30 Charlbury Road, Iris Murdoch Collections, Kingston University Archives and Special Collections

unique, idyllic moment of absolute serenity and joy. Although the dominant colour in this painting is blue, Murdoch also saw much red in it; she may have had Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of the paintings of Cézanne in her thoughts when she placed it above her desk. She quotes Rilke’s words in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: It is as if these colours took away all your indecisions forever and ever. The good conscience of these reds, these blues – their simple truthfulness teaches you; and if you place yourself among them as receptively as you can they seem to be doing something for you. (MGM, p. 246)

Murdoch suggests that Rilke’s sustained attention to Cézanne’s colours generates a moment of true cognition in which ‘[l]ove becomes invisible […] its activity and its being are inward’ (MGM, p. 247). The colours of the paintings enter the prison of the self and work on the meaning which the mind instinctively attempts to impose on them. The attempt to

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subdue the mind in order that external reality may work on it is intrinsically moral. By choosing to keep Weinberger’s painting close by her, Murdoch was making a conscious effort to connect herself to his art, to absorb its mood, and to learn from it. The painting continually regenerated meaning as her attention to it sharpened and its colours worked on her consciousness. Weinberger’s red and blue harbour painting merges in Murdoch’s mind with the many other seascapes and riverscapes created by him which she knew and loved, transforming into a revelatory image which is granted to Edward Baltram in The Good Apprentice. This novel teaches the reader the value of attempting to give attention to the reality of the abundantly coloured world, of resisting the deformation of it by fantasy, and of recognising that all individuals are, as Murdoch states in ‘Against Dryness’ (1961), ‘free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he [sic] has much to learn’ (EM, p. 290). In this essay, Murdoch quotes Simone Weil’s observation that ‘morality […] [is] a matter of attention, not of will’ and calls for ‘a new vocabulary of attention’ (EM, p. 294). The Good Apprentice provides an example of how attention to the colours of external reality facilitates a moral step forward, as colour pierces and resonates in Edward’s thoughts, drawing him closer to the Good. Murdoch’s observations of Weinberger’s loving attention to colour undoubtedly influenced her presentation of Edward. The instinctive attraction of Edward and The Sea, The Sea’s Charles Arrowby to such richly coloured imagery suggests that they are both artists, of markedly different sorts. For Charles, who cannot relinquish the role of theatre director despite his professed wish for a life of quiet contemplation, art is a means of gaining and wielding power and control. Edward’s strong creative impulse helps him to survive: he generates images from his inner consciousness (his analyst Thomas McCaskerville tells him, ‘“You are full of interesting images”’) as well as being highly sensitive to the images in his environment (GA, p. 67). For Edward, as for Weinberger, art is a way of discovering the world and relating himself more truthfully to it. The process of gradually honing attention, and the diminution of the ego necessarily involved, is a painful experience which Murdoch’s characters often try to resist; notably Edward, whose extreme suffering has brought about psychological arrest and mechanical self-laceration. Edward’s consuming desire to obliterate the reality of his best friend’s death, for which he was accidentally responsible, has distorted his perception, so that his compulsive masochistic fantasies seem vividly real. He longs for the sight of a momentous sign which will convince him that life

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has meaning. Compelled by what is apparently a summons from his estranged father Jesse during a séance, Edward enters the twilit, fog-­ enshrouded world of Seegard, imbued with pale, watery colours, floods, mud, and mist. Seegard is a beautiful mirage, a fantasy of escape constructed by Jesse and perpetuated by his wife and daughters, in which Edward wants to believe. Yet Seegard eventually loses its power to enchant him. As Edward gradually heals, his senses awaken to the infinitely varied colours of the external world, constantly edging into the margins of his awareness, reminders of the magnetic pull of the Good. Edward instinctively spends much time searching for the sea. When he finally perceives the sea from Seegard’s tower window, his description of it evokes Weinberger’s riverscapes and seascapes, with their characteristic blocks of vivid colours and strong outlines: Edward leapt up and went to the window. He saw the sea with the sun shining on it. “What do you see?” “I see the sea,” cried Edward, “with the sun shining on it, and it’s dark blue and all glowing like stained glass, and it looks so close, and there’s a beautiful sailing boat with a white sail and – oh I am so glad – ” (GA, p. 194)

The sunlit sea and white sailing boat which Edward perceives are also found in the harbour painting owned by Murdoch. The lavishly coloured sight starts to act on Edward immediately, inducing a powerful emotional response which Murdoch conveys by means of fragmented sentences, mimicking a sudden rush of feeling and a direct, visceral experience which contrasts markedly with Charles Arrowby’s carefully constructed ‘word-­picture’ in The Sea, The Sea. Edward’s words replicate what the narrator tells the reader he sees: ‘the sea with the sun shining on it’. The repeated use of the conjunction ‘and’ as he eagerly attempts to list the colours of the scene implies that their combined impact is overwhelming his consciousness, momentarily unselfing him. Edward’s later view of the sea, from the same window at the now almost-deserted Seegard, shows how his attention to reality has sharpened so that the colours can now penetrate his consciousness more deeply: Edward went straight to the window. Yes, there was the sea, a dark glowing blue spotted with emerald. And oh, upon the sea there were crowds and crowds of sailing boats with huge-bellied spinnaker sails, striped in all colours, reds and blues and yellows and greens and blacks, moving slowing in different directions, crossing and passing each other with the elegance of

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a slow dance in the bright evening light. He thought, it’s a sailing club, there’s going to be a race, or rather the race must be over now. And ­suddenly he thought, there are people out there in a totally other world. (GA, p. 481)

The visionary quality of this description, the evening light and blue-green water, evokes Weinberger’s harbour scene. Weinberger’s two small white boats are transformed by Murdoch’s imagination into an infinite number of boats resplendent with many-coloured sails which, perhaps, hint at Edward’s new capacity to let the colours of the world enter into him. In this vision of the sea populated by a multitude of other human beings, each one separate yet connected to each other and to Edward, Murdoch creates an image of the sublime. She fuses Kant’s belief that the sublime is a spiritual experience of ‘what is vast and formless in nature, or vast and powerful and terrifying’, as she describes it in ‘The Sublime and the Good’ (1959), with her own reformulation of the sublime which, she contends in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959), is to be found in ‘the spectacle of human life’.50 The colours of the scene work actively on Edward, guiding him into his sublime realisation of the existence of other people, in a world far more vivid than fantasies conjured up by the mind. Edward’s transcendent vision is subtly shadowed by a similar image of a boat on water. Edward’s stepfather Harry Cuno is haunted by an ‘image which travelled with [him]’: this is the ‘imagined scene’ of his father Casimir’s boat, which mysteriously capsized, causing his death, a possible suicide although Harry is determined to believe that it was an accident (GA, p. 43). Harry’s egoistic nature prevents him from steady contemplation of the significance of the image, but it keeps edging into the margins of his consciousness, demanding attention, and making peace of mind impossible for him. It appears at painful moments, such as when Harry realises that his mistress Midge McCaskerville may leave him: ‘[h]e saw the quiet empty boat, sailing itself, slowly yet too fast’ (GA, p.  399). Casimir Cuno’s solitary, colourless, tragic boat is placed in opposition to the joyous image of a plethora of colourful boats which provides Edward with spiritual energy.

50  Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sublime and the Good’, in EM, pp. 205–220, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 208); ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, in EM, pp. 261–286, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 282).

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Edward’s view resembles Weinberger’s painting still more closely because it is framed by the window. The metaphor of painting as window is a conventional trope dating from Renaissance times: the Italian humanist and artist Leon Battista Alberti, writing in 1435, told artists to envisage the edges of a painting as ‘an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen’.51 In The Good Apprentice, the boundary between art and life is blurred further because Edward’s vision of reality, perceived through the frame of a window, is presented in fictional form and resembles a painting. Weinberger was ever-conscious of the significance of the picture frame as transition point between illusion and reality. Julian Gardner, art historian and Weinberger’s friend, recalls that Weinberger paid great attention to the framing of his paintings, perceiving the frame as part of the overall composition and scrupulously striving to align the colours of the frame and image to produce an integrated whole.52 He obsessively reworked the image of the window throughout his career, always aware of how his view on the world was being framed. At times, he interpreted Alberti’s metaphor literally by making the frame of a window into the frame of a painting, as in Ilfracombe, in which a cluster of cottages huddle under a blustery sky beside a slate-grey sea, and in the lyrical Positano Tug and Positano Fishing Boats (perhaps inspired by Matisse’s seminal painting Open Window, Collioure), in which small boats set off across peaceful turquoise waters towards skylines tinged with pink and gold.53 His exploration of the window metaphor reached a high point in his Inside/Outside paintings of the mid-1970s (see Fig. 1.3), which he described in 1995 as ‘a series of pictures that were partly part of the workroom or studio and partly the outside world, and the outside world had as much validity as inside’.54 The Inside/Outside paintings assumed the significance of icons for Weinberger, who said that they were ‘among the best paintings I’ve ever done’.55 The image of the window has been associated with the experience of trauma. For instance, Ruth Miller notes that in the fiction of Virginia 51  Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. by Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 54. 52  Julian Gardner, in conversation with the author, 28 January 2021. 53  Open Window, Collioure (1905), by Henri Matisse (1869–1954), is a view of boats on water, composed of a series of frames within frames. The window became a key motif in Matisse’s oeuvre. 54  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 112. 55  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 112.

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Woolf, ‘[c]haracters who suffer from more exacerbated forms of alienation’, such as Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, are imprisoned behind windows.56 Gardner’s catalogue introduction to Weinberger’s 1996 exhibition offers a similar interpretation: ‘An enduring motif for Harry Weinberger is the view from a window, perhaps the deeply interiorized perception of an émigré. The window-frame confers a formal concentration to the image, but it impresses on artist and spectator alike the sense either of belonging or alienation’.57 The window might therefore be perceived as a barrier, as well as a conduit, to external reality. Although the barrier cannot be completely dissolved, Weinberger’s paintings of windows reveal his attempts to let the colours of external reality enter the prison of the self. Edward, whose vision of the sea is always mediated by the presence of the window, has, like Weinberger, suffered trauma, and similarly, Edward’s outward-directed attention to the colours of the sea beyond the window allows him to heal, and to make moral progress, as the colours filter into and work on his consciousness. Near the end of The Good Apprentice the colour-drenched seascape resurfaces spontaneously in Edward’s consciousness. Reflecting on recent events and realising that ‘there are all kinds of other people’ and many things ahead of him to learn and experience, Edward suddenly visualises ‘a picture of ordinary happiness [which] came to him suddenly as a blue sea and a jostle of boats with huge coloured stripy sails’ (GA, p. 517). The image refocuses his attention outwards and enables moral progress, prompting his vow to ‘do some good in the world’ (GA, pp. 516–17). It has embedded itself in Edward’s consciousness to become a private icon for him, providing spiritual sustenance and continually regenerating meaning. In her 1983 catalogue introduction Murdoch observes that ‘joy is everywhere evident’ in Weinberger’s work.58 This observation, and her numerous remarks in her letters about the pleasure-giving properties of his painting,59 suggests that she had Weinberger’s images in her mind when she said to Martin Gayford in 1993, ‘Many of the great paintings of the world are religious paintings. And there are also paintings—not patently religious—which carry this  C.  Ruth Miller, Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), p. 102. 57  Julian Gardner, Harry Weinberger, 4–28 June 1996 (London: Duncan Campbell Gallery, 1996), hereafter 1996CI, np. 58  Iris Murdoch, 1983CI, np. 59  See, for example, KUAS80/1/85: ‘your paintings are great and happy-making!’ Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 11 September 1990, Iris Murdoch Collections. 56

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exalted pleasure and purity as if it were something lifted up above ordinary life. Yet at the same time it is about ordinary life’.60 Weinberger’s paintings were for her, as for Edward, ‘picture[s] of ordinary happiness’ which point the way beyond themselves to truth.

‘Those Absolute Rocks’: Colour in Landscape Nuns and Soldiers, written during the early years of Murdoch’s friendship with Weinberger, is full of Weinberger’s presence. It is partly set in the remote Provençal landscape where their first encounters took place. Natasha Spender recalls that ‘after many annual visits […] Iris felt so intimately in command of this landscape as to gather its many qualities into the powerful part it plays in Nuns and Soldiers’, creating ‘a kind of collage of several far-flung points of her daily wanderings, concentrating them into a small area whereby their role is apparently to force the main characters to face their true selves and the turmoil through which they have to pass’.61 Murdoch’s imaginative reconstructions of the Alpilles region in Nuns and Soldiers are inextricably blended with her knowledge of Weinberger’s art. A letter of summer 1977, written when her thoughts were turning towards Nuns and Soldiers, expresses her desire to meet with Weinberger in Provence and to continue their discourse there.62 Murdoch was intrigued by Weinberger’s ability to manipulate colour to create the illusion of movement on a two-dimensional plane, and the novel’s descriptions of vividly coloured landscapes strive to render the vitality of Weinberger’s vibrant paintings. Weinberger’s identity hovers behind the character Tim Reede, a painter who like Weinberger is captivated by the enigmatic Alpilles mountain range, its colours constantly fluctuating, resisting interpretation. In recent years, philosophers, neuroscientists, linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists have joined forces in their quest to understand the nature of colour vision, recognising, as the philosopher and colour theorist Evan Thompson states, that ‘colour lies at the intersection of mind and matter, perception and the world, metaphysics and epistemology’.63 When considered in the light of Murdoch’s  Martin Gayford, ‘Beautiful and Good’, p. 54.  Natasha Spender, ‘Iris in Provence’, p. 66, 69. 62   Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated [Aug 1977?], KUAS80/8/10, Iris Murdoch Collections. 63  Evan Thompson, Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (London: Routledge, 1995), hereafter Colour Vision, p. 2. 60 61

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discourse with Weinberger, Nuns and Soldiers invites an ecocritical interpretation which reinforces its relevance to contemporary philosophical debate regarding colour. In the late 1970s Weinberger was producing many sketches and paintings of the area surrounding Mas Saint-Jerôme. He sent Murdoch photographs of his paintings of the Alpilles in February 1979, which she ‘like[d] very much’, describing them as ‘so expressive’. She continued in this letter: ‘As I think I told you, the Alpilles have got into the novel I am writing—(not the house or surroundings otherwise, just those absolute rocks)’.64 The extent to which Weinberger’s art was preoccupying Murdoch’s thoughts as she worked on Nuns and Soldiers is evident in her proposal to him in March 1979 that ‘it would be nice to have one of your Alpilles drawings on the cover of my next book which is partly about those amazing rocks. (An imaginary place, but the rocks are there)’.65 In May 1979 she asked Weinberger to send her a selection of Alpilles drawings, particularly requesting ‘one with a serrated top & light behind it’.66 Weinberger exhibited a series of Alpilles landscapes—two paintings and one drawing—in 1983 at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry. Murdoch purchased the second painting in the Alpilles series to display at her London flat.67 Its current location is, unfortunately, unknown. However, the first painting in the series, which Murdoch is likely to have seen on show at Weinberger’s home (Figs. 5.8 and 5.9), and the 1979 preparatory drawing for the painting (Fig. 5.10) are valuable examples of Weinberger’s efforts to blend the colours of the exterior world with the colours of his own personal vision, creating emotionally charged, animated zones which seem to overcome the stasis of paint on canvas. Weinberger’s images of the Alpilles fired Murdoch’s imagination, galvanising her attempts to portray in Nuns and Soldiers the ceaseless 64  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 13 February 1979, KUAS80/10/2, Iris Murdoch Collections. Murdoch’s claim that the Spenders’ house and surroundings do not figure in Nuns and Soldiers contradicts Natasha Spender’s account (‘Iris in Provence’), and the evidence of the novel itself; it may have been an attempt to protect the Spenders’ privacy, or alternatively it might indicate that the novel altered as it progressed. 65  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 12 March 1979, KUAS80/7/12, Iris Murdoch Collections. 66  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 9 May 1979, KUAS80/2/82, Iris Murdoch Collections. 67  In a letter postmarked 15 April 1983, shortly after visiting Weinberger’s 1983 exhibition, Murdoch wrote to him: ‘Just keep [the] pictures for me. I’d like them in London in due course I think’. KUAS80/2/61, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Fig. 5.8  Harry Weinberger, Provence I, [1979], private collection

dynamism of the landscape’s complex, indistinct colours. The example of Weinberger’s concentrated attention, wholly engrossed by the landscape as he endeavoured to realise its vitality in a painting, made a strong and lasting impression on her. ‘[Y]ou are lucky to be a painter. I feel tired and cannot write. But a painter could always do something—or just look’, she wrote to him in May 1978.68 Several months earlier, in her symposium paper ‘Art Is the Imitation of Nature’ (1978), she had stated: I think that painting often serves as an explanatory metaphor for the other arts. We look at something which interests us and we reproduce it in another medium; and the image of the painter who sits at his easel and looks at the landscape is a profound idea which we carry with us as we think of different forms of art. (EM, p. 243)

Her description of Tim Reede, who gazed down on ‘grassy terraces, olives, a pink painted farmhouse, fields’—the scene portrayed in the drawing and 68  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 May 1978, KUAS80/2/88, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Fig. 5.9  Provence I on display at Weinberger’s home, undated, estate of Harry Weinberger

painting of Provence I—and then ‘settled his stool upon the plateau and tried to render in wax crayon the effect of the frilly grey-blue rock crests against the intensely brilliant sky’ is surely her attempt to adopt Weinberger’s vision as he strove to capture the landscape in art. (NS, p. 167). In Provence I the energy of colour is harnessed in an endeavour to depict the continuous flow of light in which the viewer and the viewed landscape are caught up and held in tension. Peaks in dappled hues of grey, green, purple, and blue, outlined with greenish-golden light against a violet sky, rise up majestically behind a stone farmhouse surrounded by dense vegetation. Weinberger’s preparatory study for the painting portrays the ‘simple magisterial lines and sparse clear colour’ praised by

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Fig. 5.10  Harry Weinberger, Provence (study for Provence I), 1979, private collection

Murdoch in her 1983 catalogue introduction and might well be the drawing with ‘a serrated top and light behind it’ which she desired in May 1979.69 Comparison of the drawing and painting reveals that the colours were considerably intensified by Weinberger for the final painting, with some additions to the colour range, although the composition itself has scarcely altered. Complementary colours, such as the heightened golds which dramatically offset the purple hues of the sky and rocks, induce a sense of harmonious, rhythmic movement. The painting also contains many accents of bright blue not found in the drawing, which create the effect of pulsing, dancing light. These alterations were characteristic of Weinberger’s mature style. His sketches would usually be created on location, then stored and revisited at a later date, to result in a painting in which the original subject was partially transformed by the colours and

69   1983CI, np; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 9 May 1979, KUAS80/2/82, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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forms resonating in the artist’s mind. With reference to the practice of producing an initial sketch which evolves into a painting, he stated: I use coloured pencil just to roughly indicate the sort of colour that it is in reality, but when I come to paint it, it's like I suppose, counterpoint in music, when one colour goes on to the picture and another colour that imposes itself comes on, and deviates from the reality and becomes the reality in itself, but never, it never changes into abstraction. There's always a hint of the observed reality.70

The original image has fused with Weinberger’s creative vision, resulting in a highly personal version of the scene which is partly representation, partly imagination. ‘[Weinberger] is after the essence of a scene which he recreates through the modulations of colour that seem to have a life of their own’, David Phillips observes in the introduction to his 2004 exhibition catalogue.71 His idiosyncratic colour-play retains the vitality of the Provence landscape as it impinges on the eye and merges with the viewer’s consciousness, being poised on the ceaselessly shifting borderline between inner and outer realities. His notes for a seminar titled ‘On Finding One’s Way in Painting’ indicate his awareness of the difficulty of this task: [T]he medium we use means that we translate a vague (or often we are unaware of it altogether) image or idea (not listening, but pictorial) into a static and two or three dimensional object. (The idea, as you will imagine, is not static). A discrepancy, an enormous discrepancy, therefore, exists between the medium we use and that which is painted. […] Our object is to invent – create, if you like – within the limitation of the medium (whatever…) an equivalent for the images in our mind’s eye.72

The dynamism of Weinberger’s colours appears to intensify in his paintings as the mimetic bond is loosened, leading him towards abstraction, although he always retains ‘a hint of the observed reality’.73 This dynamism is at the heart of the mutual and perpetual interaction between inner and outer realities, which Murdoch also intuited and strove to represent in her fiction.  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 31.  David Phillips, 2003CI, np. 72  Harry Weinberger, ‘Finding One’s Way’, p. 2. 73  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 31. 70 71

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In Nuns and Soldiers Murdoch seeks to convey the difficulty of articulating the colours of the Alpilles rocks, which continually fluctuate with the passage of the sun. The rocks seem to ‘jump and shift’; they are ‘a hard brilliant whitish yellow in the last of the sunlight, with darkening blue-­ grey shadows marking their folds and lines of ascent, and all hazed over with a vision-defeating fuzziness’ (NS, p. 407). This description resembles the stippled, indistinct rocks outlined by sunlight in Weinberger’s Provence I. Tim Reede, when making his way over the rocks in order to return to the house where his estranged lover, Gertrude Openshaw, is staying, cannot focus his sight on them, and has to ‘keep pausing and blinking his eyes as if to expel some foreign matter’ (NS, p. 407), continually readjusting his relationship to his environment. In an earlier passage, Gertrude and her two friends Anne Cavidge and Peter Szczepanski debate the exact colour of the rocks; Anne muses that they are, ‘“Pink? No. Grey? No. They’re certainly not white, yet they’re whitish”’ and Gertrude responds that they are, ‘“Spotty. […] Well, spotty isn’t a colour. Now I can scarcely see them at all, they’re dancing”’ (NS, p. 374). The characters’ difficulties when trying to verbalise their perceptions of the colours echo Murdoch’s observation in ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’ (1952) that the concept of a colour is not always the same as the experience of it. Familiar colour words can become a barrier, overlaying with language the viewer’s effort to attend to the experience of a colour. Murdoch contends that in such a situation the struggle to perceive and articulate reality must be renewed: ‘when we set aside the problems which arise from the attempt to bind language and experience rigidly together […] we can refine our experience, making it more and more specific, seeing more and more deeply into the sense which is before us’.74 The key to more accurate vision is sustained, patient contemplation. Anne, having given more attention than Gertrude and Peter to the colours of the ‘enigmatic spotty unfocusable rocks’ (NS, p. 377), is more aware of their dynamism. She responds eagerly to Peter’s remark, ‘“In Polish […] colour words are verbs too […] One doesn’t just say ‘it is red’, one can say ‘it reds’”’, with the observation, ‘“That’s good […] So one feels the colour as sort of radiating actively from the thing, not just sitting passively in it”’ (NS, p. 374). Anne’s words (which recall the vibrant light which Murdoch detected exuding from Weinberger’s blue and red picture 74  Iris Murdoch, ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, in EM, pp. 43–58, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 54).

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of boats in a harbour) imply that colours exude from the rocks like rays of light, working upon the meaning which the mind instinctively attempts to impose upon them. Colour, understood in this way, unites aesthetics and morality. Tim, who devotes most time to studying the rocks—to the point that ‘[i]t seemed to him that he had been looking at these rocks for years, that he had seen them long ago in his childhood’ (NS, p. 204)—begins to conceive of them as sentient. They are ‘faintly steaming’ (NS, p. 154) and an ‘undulating glow’ rises from them (NS, p. 155); he pictures them as ‘a face, or a head wearing a crown. Sometimes the whole large formation looked like an indecipherable awful countenance’ (NS, p. 152). The translucent pool at the foot of the rocks, one touch of which temporarily elevates Tim to a state of elation, is ‘very very faintly, throughout its entire extent, shuddering or quivering but with so small a vibration that the transparency of the medium was unaffected, while being as it were shot through by swift invisible almost motionless lines’ (NS, p. 154). His animistic vision of the colour-drenched landscape suggests that it is actively soliciting his attention, cajoling him into interaction with it. When viewed in the context of Murdoch’s discourse with Weinberger, the significance of Nuns and Soldiers to contemporary philosophical debate on colour becomes more evident. The colour-infused dynamism in Murdoch’s verbal descriptions and Weinberger’s visual images of Provence reveals the mutual and continuous interaction of individual experience of colour and colour as it appears in external reality. It thereby opens up their art to an ecocritical interpretation. Ecocriticism, which emerged in the 1960s and became established as a genre in the late 1980s, analyses works of art in relation to the physical environment and foregrounds the moral questions which they raise about human interactions with the natural world. The ecological view of colour has been inspired by James Gibson’s experimental work on the psychology of perception in the 1950s and 1960s.75 Gibson defines perception as an active process involving constant movement and readjustment by both the perceiver and the object being perceived. He rejects the traditional idea that an object is meaningless until a perceiver imposes meaning upon it. What 75  The major works of James J.  Gibson (1904–1979), Perception of the Visual World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), hereafter Ecological, reformed the way psychology understands perception.

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Gibson terms ‘affordances’, or offerings, reside, latent, in the environment, existing independently whether or not they are recognised.76 Action may occur when there is an interaction between the perceiver and the object under scrutiny, but it is dependent on the quality of attention which the perceiver gives to the object. Later colour theorists such as Thompson, influenced by Gibson’s research, take an ecological stance which places emphasis on the environmental context of colour vision, exploring ways that inner and outer worlds collaborate in creating consciousness of colours.77 The artist’s recognition that not only is he transforming the world, through imagination and memory, but also that the world is simultaneously transforming him, is what briefly pierces the veil of illusion. There are marked similarities in thought between Gibson and Murdoch which analysis of her dialogue with Weinberger helps to draw out: their focus on the value of attention; their recognition of the difficulties inherent in using the artificial form of language to convey truth; their conception of the ego as clouding vision, and of art as a way of improving vision. Critical attention has recently begun to focus on Murdoch’s relation to Gibson’s thought.78 Murdoch’s keen interest in Weinberger’s views on art, her study of his artistic practices, and his subsequent impact on her thinking add a new dimension to this area of scholarship and further contribute to the synthesis of disciplines which is fundamental to the approach of ecocriticism. Although Murdoch and Weinberger may not have been familiar with ecological theories of colour perception, they are closely aligned to them by their instinctive recognition of this synergetic relationship between the colours of internal and external realities. Murdoch portrays this relationship elsewhere in her oeuvre, notably in The Green Knight. The characters’ various struggles, in Nuns and Soldiers, to hold the perpetually transforming colours of the rocks in focused contemplation recall Bellamy James’ response, in The Green Knight, to a 76  In Ecological (p. 127), Gibson states that ‘[t]he affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. […] [The term “affordance”] implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment’. 77  Thompson states that he is inspired by, among others, ‘the ecological approach in perceptual psychology pioneered by J.  J. Gibson (1979)’, Colour Vision, xi. See ‘Inscribing’, pp. 8–10, for Rowe’s discussion of how Murdoch’s innovations with colour invite ecocritical interpretations of her novels, including consideration of Thompson’s views. 78  See, for example, Katherine Tallent, ‘Reading Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy in the light of James Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception’, conference paper: Iris Murdoch Centenary Conference, St Anne’s College, Oxford, 15 July 2019.

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painting resonating with animated blues and greens which refuse to cohere into a stable structure: Above the table there was a distinctly modern expensive-looking green and blue picture. Bellamy could not assemble the picture which seemed to be jumping about, the greens now receding while the blues were protruding, the blues receding and the greens palpably protruding. (GK, p. 285)

Bellamy is denied the consolation of a static, reductive image. The painting illustrates the moral requirement to try to develop the breadth of moral vision to retain a multiple perspective, which proves to be a gradual, painful process for him. Rowe identifies this painting as ‘a metaphor for the nature of human perception itself—a call to acknowledge that ongoing active dialogue between the emotionally and spiritually rapacious inner life and the equally dynamic outer world’.79 The exuberant, oscillating primary colours of the carpet in Sefton Anderson’s bedroom provide a further example of this dynamic interaction. The carpet’s colours seem to be emotionally charged, their increasing intensity corresponding with the love igniting between Sefton and Harvey Blacket. The colours of his surroundings seem, to Harvey’s wondering perception, unstable, increasing in force, strangely pulsating with energy, and they demand that he turn his attention outwards, beyond his mental turmoil and physical pain. As he maintains a desultory conversation with Sefton, his mind initially preoccupied by his own suffering, he becomes aware that ‘[t]he red and blue of the carpet […] [are] leaping to and fro before […] his eyes’ (GK, p. 379). Harvey becomes increasingly aware of Sefton’s presence, and as he covertly observes the details of her appearance, the colours of her hair and eyes seem subtly to alter: ‘She drew her fingers through her roughly cut brown hair in which, it occurred to him, the strands of red were increasingly visible. [….] He thought, are her eyes green, or are they brown? A sort of greenish brown’ (GK, p.  380, 381). As his attention becomes increasingly focused on Sefton, his change of consciousness is reflected and enhanced by the light which floods the room, and the still more vibrant colours of the carpet: ‘At that moment the room suddenly became bright. The sun was shining. He said, “The sun is shining!” He looked down. The Turkey carpet had become even brighter and more lively’. As the dynamism of the colours intensifies, Harvey senses ‘a curious electrical force’ and declares his love  Anne Rowe, ‘Inscribing’, p. 10.

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(GK, p. 381). The reader becomes aware of the love emerging between Harvey and Sefton before these characters realise it themselves, because the radiant colours communicate love’s presence with far more eloquence than the couple’s own stilted conversation. Murdoch’s employment of red and blue in The Green Knight acquires additional significance when considered in the context of Weinberger’s wide knowledge and visual experience of iconography, and his discussions of it with Murdoch. Byzantine iconography, a number of examples of which figured in Weinberger’s icon collection and were thus familiar to Murdoch, reserved these colours for depictions of Christ and of the Virgin Mary. Mary usually wears red outer garments and blue inner garments, the red signifying her original human nature and blue her heavenly nature, whereas Christ wears blue outer garments and red inner garments, the reversal of colours indicating both his humanity and his true divinity. The combination of red and blue therefore represents a coalescence of two realms, traditionally understood as the human and divine, and transposed, in Murdochian terms, into the realms of internal and external realities. Despite Murdoch’s enthusiasm, Weinberger’s Alpilles drawings did not appear on the cover of Nuns and Soldiers, having been rejected by Murdoch’s publisher on the grounds that landscape covers were not sufficiently commercial.80 ‘I’m very sorry not to have this link with your work’, Murdoch told Weinberger.81 She did, however, keep one of the Alpilles drawings he had put forward for the book jacket, ‘the one with the house and the rocks’, which became a memento of their shared experiences of colour-soaked Provence.82 Murdoch politely denies any connection between Weinberger and Tim Reede, perhaps because she did not wish to encourage biographical interpretations of her novels which would detract from their complex issues and also because of the marked difference in quality of their artistic achievements. She told Weinberger that at the publisher’s rejection of his drawings she ‘felt a kind of relief’ because ‘the artist hero (who does drawings of the Alpilles that are mentioned in the book) is clearly delineated as being rather a mediocre artist! So that has worried me from the start—and now offers another reason why I really 80  See Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 3 September 1979, KUAS80/4/13, Iris Murdoch Collections. 81  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 3 September 1979, KUAS80/4/13, Iris Murdoch Collections. 82  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 12 September 1979, KUAS80/2/98, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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would not want your drawings to seem to “pose” as his’.83 Nevertheless, there is a multiplicity of correspondences between Tim and Weinberger, ranging from marginal details such as their mutual habit of cycling in the Provençal countryside, and their propensity to get lost while so doing, to their practice of continual attention to the rich, complex details of the exterior world, which guides them both into greater awareness of an essential reality. She provides Tim with Weinberger’s quality of attention: ‘a gift yearned for by sages, he was able simply to perceive!’ (NS, p. 124). The process of learning to give attention to the world is an act of reverence, an endless moral effort to see with clarity, which Weinberger and Murdoch discussed together at length.84 Both Tim Reede and Weinberger experience the moral benefits ensuing from their shared quest to achieve a more accurate vision by means of sustained outward-directed attention, not least in their instinctive humility with regard to their art. Weinberger courageously recognised that ‘a painting […] must fall short of that which is at the back of one’s mind, because of the way in which we ourselves are limited’.85 He expressed his feelings of uncertainty to Murdoch, whose letters frequently offer encouragement and reassurance: ‘I will see you and talk, the time will come. And meanwhile I certainly believe in you. Work well’ she writes in May 1978, and in July 1979, ‘I think your paintings are so good and getting better every day’.86 She shows how Tim’s attention to the Alpilles, although it is imperfect, diminishes his sense of self so that the landscape enters into him, leading to the creation of some of his best work: He had done a number of drawings of the rock face. The circular area with the strange straight lines above it was so odd, that he feared it would not, on paper, look like anything. However, the subject somehow took charge of him and conveyed some of its grandeur into his vision. (NS, p. 155)

Murdoch gives Weinberger’s characteristic self-doubt to Tim, and also lovingly, briefly, grants Tim the touch of genius which she could perceive in Weinberger’s art, though Weinberger could not perceive it for himself.

83  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 3 September 1979, KUAS80/4/13, Iris Murdoch Collections. 84  Weinberger commented in 1995, ‘Iris Murdoch sometimes says to me that really painting is like prayer. That makes sense to me’. Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 27. 85  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 95. 86  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 May 1978, KUAS80/2/88; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 18 July 1979, KUAS80/3/3, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Murdoch surely had Weinberger’s images in mind when she made Anne Cavidge remark that the hazy Alpilles landscape, radiating colour in the evening light, is ‘like a painting’ (NS, p.  374). Gombrich, citing the art historian Heinrich Wolfflin’s view that ‘all paintings […] owe more to other paintings than they owe to direct observation’, contends that one artist inevitably sees through the eyes of another, in an infinite regress.87 Weinberger’s vision of the Alpilles is unmistakably present in a late poem by Murdoch, untitled but usually known as ‘But—Jackdaw’.88 The poem’s references to a ‘valley’, ‘white jagged mountains’, and ‘cicadas’ indicate that its subject is Mas Saint-Jerôme, which the Bayleys continued to visit on a regular basis up until Murdoch’s death in 1999. Natasha Spender recalls that despite the memory loss caused by Alzheimer’s disease, Murdoch recognised and found much enjoyment in her surroundings, saying, when she arrived on what was to be her last visit in 1998, ‘with dawning pleasure, “Oh, this is my place!”’89 The poem is a lengthy outpouring of sensory impressions: ‘white rocks’, ‘great green trees’, ‘slow moving clouds’ in a blue sunlit sky; a climbing cat and a trembling white butterfly; the sound of an insistent ‘buzzing’; a ‘cooler breeze’ which is ‘moving up the valley’. It is flooded with colour—predominantly blue, white, and pink. The word blue, Weinberger’s signature colour, is twice capitalised and once underlined, indicating Murdoch’s sense of its importance. ‘Blue’ is often preceded by strings of adjectives, suggesting that Murdoch was determined to articulate its colour as accurately as possible: ‘pale delicious blue’; ‘thick slow on blue thick blue’; ‘huge slow, deep rich blue’. Murdoch’s attempts to describe colours with precision create the impression that the colours are continually shifting and thus undefinable. The poem’s dynamic, abruptly juxtaposed patches of colour and its strong, simple forms heighten its resemblance to a Weinberger painting, revealing Weinberger’s long-­lasting influence on Murdoch’s perception of the natural world.

Beyond Colour Weinberger’s art was perpetually fired by his obsession with colour, and he seems to have found enduring fulfilment in persistently probing colour’s potential to convey the continuous dynamic interplay of inner and outer  E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 268.  Iris Murdoch, untitled poem (first line ‘LOVE oh buzz off The Great Tree’), [1996?], Notebook 6, np, KUAS202/4/4, Iris Murdoch Collections. 89  Natasha Spender, ‘Iris in Provence’, p. 72. 87

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realities. David Phillips states in the catalogue introduction to Weinberger’s 2003–2004 exhibition: It is colour that this artist has been wrestling with all his life and its magnetism has filled his mind to the extent that nothing else matters much. He draws with colour, he creates pictorial space with colour, he separates out mass with colour: the sky, the sea, the earth are no more than notations of colour.90

The gradual refinement of his loving attention to the modulations of colour became for Weinberger a lifelong task; at times, however, he seems to have intuited the presence of a realm existing beyond colour’s scope. For instance, he spoke to Cathy Courtney of his practice of leaving ‘empty space’ as ‘part of the picture’ and expressed his admiration of Cézanne’s ability to do so: ‘I know paintings of Cézanne where a lesser artist would easily have been able to fill in an area, but with Cézanne I felt there is nothing superfluous, nothing that isn’t controlled, and when he left something white, it’s all intentional, he could do it’.91 Weinberger’s painting Black Snow (2000) (Fig. 8.4) is an anomaly in his oeuvre, being dominated by swathes of black and white. Whereas Weinberger was largely satisfied by the ceaseless challenges inherent in the development of his distinctive colour vision, Murdoch strove to scrutinise more fully the concept of a realm beyond colour. Murdoch began to explore this concept as early as A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) and develops it more fully in The Sea, The Sea. In the former novel, Morgan Browne walks along an abandoned railway line and enters a sensual realm sated with colour, light, scents, and sound. She is momentarily pierced by a vision of the world stripped of colour, reduced to white and dark light, which pins her down and forces a change of consciousness, taking her out of herself so that she briefly is aware of the horror of the world as well as its beauty: The blazing light was rhythmically changing into luminous flashes of black, tugging the visible world away from her, tugging her out of consciousness. Was it giddiness she was feeling now, a dazzled sensation of spinning drunkenness, or was it something else, disgust, fear, horror as at some dreadfulness, some unspeakable filth of the universe? (FHD, pp. 177–178)

 David Phillips, 2004CI, np.  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 98.

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Pinned down by ‘a great ray from afar’, Morgan cannot turn to face the sun, but she has received ‘a touch of the sun’: an intimation of truth, which forces her to confront ‘[t]he loathsomeness at the centre of it all’ (FHD, p. 178). As Morgan recovers, she sees the colours of nature more vividly and reveres their magnificence. Her short-lived vision, which can be understood as a vision of the negative sublime, has caused a ‘sea-­ change’ in her which she struggles to communicate to her nephew Peter Foster.92 Morgan’s briefly clarified vision is soon clouded by a consoling fantasy of rediscovering innocence.93 In The Sea, The Sea, whilst lying under the stars close by the sea on a warm night, his mind drifting amidst confused memories of childhood, Charles is overwhelmed by a plethora of colour and light which points beyond itself to a monochrome world which can also be construed as the negative sublime. I opened my eyes with wonder and the sky had utterly changed again and was no longer dark but bright, golden, gold-dust golden, as if curtain after curtain had been removed behind the stars I had seen before, and now I was looking into the vast interior of the universe, as if the universe were quietly turning itself inside out. [….] And I was no longer I but something pinned down as an atom, an atom of an atom, a necessary captive spectator, a tiny mirror into which it was all indifferently beamed, as it motionlessly seethed and boiled, gold behind gold behind gold. (TSTS, pp. 145-6)

This sublime vision of nature counters Charles’s obsessions and briefly dislocates his sense of self. The inversion of reality and fantasy caused by his power play is redressed by the universe ‘quietly turning itself inside out’. Nevertheless, the repeated references to ‘gold’ seem to warn the reader that Charles remains ensnared in fantasy, despite the momentary moral impact which this experience has on him.94 Unable to sustain his attention to external reality, he drifts into sleep, but on waking he is pierced by the sight of an environment apparently almost entirely stripped of colour which forces a still more intense experience of unselfing. The chilling silence and utter

92  See Peter J. Conradi, Saint and Artist, pp. 105–108, for a more detailed discussion of the experience of the negative sublime. 93  This section of A Fairly Honourable Defeat is discussed further in Chap. 2. 94  A. S. Byatt observes that: ‘Anything golden […] in Miss Murdoch’s novels is liable to be dangerous and fantastic’. Degrees of Freedom (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 130.

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emptiness of the monochrome world perceived by Charles make it perhaps still more horrifying than that glimpsed by Morgan. The early dawn light hung over the rocks and over the sea, with an awful intent gripping silence, as if it had seized these faintly visible shapes and were very slowly drawing them out of a darkness in which they wanted to remain. Even the water was now totally silent, not a tap, not a vibration. The sky was a faintly lucid grey and the sea was a lightless grey, and the rocks were a dark fuzzy greyish brown. The sense of loneliness was far more intense than it had been under the stars. Then I had felt no fear. Now I felt fear. [….] And I saw myself as a dark figure in the midst of this empty awfully silent dawn, where light was scarcely yet light, and I was afraid of myself. (TSTS, p. 146)

This experience of the negative sublime compels Charles to recognise and fear the potential for evil within himself. This reality is too much for him to contemplate, and he soon relapses into sleep and consolatory dreams of being young with Hartley. Yet on waking, despite the restoration of ‘bright sunlight’ and ‘blue muttering sea’ (TSTS, p. 147), he suffers emotions of horror and foreboding which imply that this appalling knowledge, usually buried in his consciousness and inaccessible to him, is resurfacing. Later in The Sea, The Sea, Murdoch again shows how the negative sublime can be ambiguous and open to misinterpretation. Charles witnesses an ‘ocean of gold, [in which] stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among those billions and billions of merging golden lights’ (TSTS, p. 475). He sleeps, then wakes to a pallid seascape which provokes the momentary insight that perhaps James, not Hartley, was his ‘first love’: The billion billion stars had gone and the sky was a bland misty very light blue, a huge uniform over-arching cool yet muted brightness, the sun not yet risen. The rocks were clearly revealed, still indefinably colourless. The sea as utterly calm, glossy grey, without even ripples, marked only by the thinnest palest line at the horizon. There was a complete yet somehow conscious silence, as if the travelling planet were noiselessly breathing. I remembered that James was dead. Who is one’s first love? Who indeed. (TSTS, pp. 475–6)

Charles’s need to be adored contaminates his briefly clarified vision, and he rapidly concocts a consoling fantasy around the seals which unexpectedly appear close by. Although the seals are interpreted by David J. Gordon as a suggestion of ‘new innocence’, it seems likely that Charles’s certainty that ‘I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me

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and bless me’ is a sign of his egoism reasserting itself (TSTS, p. 476).95 The reader is guided to see further than Charles and to attempt to retain the vision of the negative sublime at the heart of reality. Although Charles’s attention to the negative sublime is fragile and discontinuous, it forces him to perceive the horror of the world as well as its beauty, and the momentary losses of self which it occasions in him continue to work imperceptibly on his consciousness, enabling him to make gradual moral advancement. Paradoxically, the apparently almost colourless realm of the negative sublime may, in fact, be infused with a vast spectrum of colours. White light, though often thought of as an absence of colour, is composed of all colours of that part of the electromagnetic spectrum which is visible to the human eye. Murdoch remarks in The Fire and the Sun (1977) that Plato’s Philebus compares philosophical truth to ‘a small piece of pure white colour’ (EM, p. 396). White light is sunlight, and the sun is understood by Plato and by Murdoch as ‘the Form of the Good in whose light the truth is seen; it reveals the world, hitherto invisible, and is also a source of life’ (EM, p. 389). Human beings cannot look directly at the sun, but can give attention to the colours of external reality which the sun generates. ‘All so beautiful. All colours, light’, Murdoch wrote to Weinberger, sensing the truth radiating from his richly coloured paintings.96 As the art of Murdoch and Weinberger suggests, the healing, refining, and stimulating impact of colours may facilitate a moral step forward, as they point the way beyond themselves to reality.

References Alberti, Leon Battista. 1972 (1435). On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson. London: Penguin. Byatt, A. S. 1994. Degrees of Freedom. London: Vintage. Cockshaw, Katherine, Iris Murdoch, and David Phillips. 2003. Harry Weinberger. Leamington Spa: Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum. Courtney, Cathy. 1995. Harry Weinberger interviewed by Cathy Courtney. British Library: Artists' Lives. Gardner, Julian. 1996. Harry Weinberger. London: Duncan Campbell Gallery. Gasquet, Joachim. 1991. Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne, a Memoir with Conver­ sations, trans. by Christopher Pemberton. London: Thames and Hudson.  David J. Gordon, Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), p. 45. 96  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 October 1994, KUAS80/1/94, Iris Murdoch Collections. 95

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Gayford, Martin. 1993. The Beautiful and the Good: Iris Murdoch on the Value of Art. Modern Painters, Autumn: 50-54. Gibson, James J. 1950. Perception of the Visual World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Gibson, James J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gombrich, E. H. 1960. Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon. Gordon, David J. 1995. Iris Murdoch’s Fables of Unselfing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1978. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Miller, C. Ruth. 1988. Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1952). Nostalgia for the Particular. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 43-58. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1959). The Sublime and the Good. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 205-220. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1959). The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 261-286. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1961). Against Dryness. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J.  Conradi, 287-295. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1972 (1970). A Fairly Honourable Defeat. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1977). The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 386-463. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1978). Art Is the Imitation of Nature. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 243-257. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1978. The Sea, The Sea. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1980. Nuns and Soldiers. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1985. The Good Apprentice. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1993 (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1993. The Green Knight. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris, and Nicholas Watkins. 1983. Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings. Coventry: Herbert Art Gallery. Murdoch, Iris, and Harry Weinberger. 1994. Harry Weinberger: Recent Work. London: Duncan Campbell Gallery.

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Nicol, Bran. 2004. Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Podro, Michael. 2007. Martin Bloch: A Painter’s Painter, ed. Nichola Johnson, Amanda Geitner and Sarah Bacon. Norwich: Colchester Print Group. Rowe, Anne. 2014. “Near the Gods”: Iris Murdoch and the Painter, Harry Weinberger. In Iris Murdoch Connected: Critical Essays on her Fiction and Philosophy, ed. Mark Luprecht. 57-72. Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press. Rowe, Anne. 2019. Iris Murdoch. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Ruskin, John. 1991 (1856). The Elements of Drawing, rev. Bernard Dunstan. London: Herbert Press. Spender, Natasha. 2019. Nuns and Soldiers: Iris in Provence. In Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Miles Leeson, 65-72. Devizes: Sabrestorm. Thompson, Evan. 1995. Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

‘Shadow-Bound Consciousness’: The Mask as Icon

Form and Transformation Iris Murdoch’s attempts to reconceptualise the individual’s mutable, volatile relationship with the external world are intricately connected with her belief that form can both veil and expose truth, both in art and in life. Although Murdoch acknowledges that reality, which she calls ‘brute and nameless’, is too complex to be contained by any form, she recognises also that a degree of mediation of reality by form—an artificial structure, shape, or pattern cast over reality in the attempt to articulate it—is unavoidable (SRR, p. 14). In ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ (1970) she states that: ‘In order to tell the truth, especially about anything complicated, we need a conceptual apparatus which partly has the effect of concealing what it attempts to reveal’.1 Both Murdoch and Weinberger understood that all human beings are artists, inventing and imposing forms which can enlighten or obscure perceptions of the self’s relation to the world, and they were conscious of the moral implications of the artist’s role. ‘Morality has to do with not imposing form except appropriately and cautiously and

1  Iris Murdoch, ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, in EM, pp. 221-234, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 221).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Moden, Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17945-7_6

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carefully and with attention to appropriate detail, and I think truth is very fundamental here’, Murdoch observed to Michael Bellamy in 1976.2 The shared quest of Murdoch and Weinberger for a new form with which to picture the relation of inner consciousness and outer reality, simultaneously connected and separate, constantly interacting, shifting, and refocusing, was inseparable from their shared concerns about modern art, whose relationship to form appeared to have become distorted. Murdoch and Weinberger were each working simultaneously with and against form, trying to create a beautiful shape and also to expand against it and to prevent it from rigidifying. They were wary of the reductive powers of form, yet tempted by the possibilities of liberation which form can seem to offer. The attention of both artists became concentrated on the image of the mask, emblematic of the essence of form. The mask is part of the ‘new vocabulary of attention’ which Murdoch calls for in ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) because it offers a new way of trying to articulate the continual interaction of external reality and individual experience, located on a perpetually transforming borderline (EM, p. 293). The mask can provide a vital mediating function: the ceaseless process of creating, refining, and discarding masks is an integral part of the Platonic pilgrimage, in which ‘shadow-bound consciousness’ gradually progresses from appearance to reality (EM, p.  390). Masks may, conversely, crystallise into a barrier, resulting in a morally dangerous distortion of the individual’s relationship to the world. Perceiving Murdoch’s mask imagery through the prism of Weinberger’s art brings this mask imagery into the foreground and increases critical understanding of it. In particular, it sheds new light on Murdoch’s ideaplay surrounding masks in The Green Knight (1993). The mask in The Green Knight may be aligned with the images of the sea and the box in The Sea, The Sea (1978) which Peter J. Conradi describes as having ‘so huge a force—both “literal” and “metaphoric”—that to call them symbols is to demean them. They seem more like concrete metaphors’.3 The mask in 2  Michael O. Bellamy, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 44-55, hereafter Bellamy (p. 50). 3  Peter J.  Conradi interprets the box image as ‘both the extremely dark, entirely empty enclosed inner room without outside windows, and also the cavern of his [Charles Arrowby’s] own mind’, whereas the sea represents ‘[t]he world which lies beyond the realm of images, from which all form comes and returns […] a symbol for the uncoerced unconscious, source of all symbols’. Saint and Artist, p. 245.

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The Green Knight can now be identified as a third concrete metaphor. When she met Weinberger, Murdoch had already long been intrigued by masks and they had become a recurring motif in her novels. For example, a masked performance in the Hammersmith mime theatre mesmerises and bewilders Jake Donaghue in Under the Net (1954), and masks lie in the foreground of Bronzino’s painting Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, key to the exploration of human frailty, sexual desire, and intrigue in The Nice and the Good (1968). Murdoch’s correspondence with Weinberger in the early 1990s, when she was writing The Green Knight, indicates that her thoughts often turned during this time to his ideas about masks. In July 1990, seemingly with reference to Weinberger’s self-portrait Me Wearing the Venetian Mask [1990] (Fig. 6.4), she wrote, ‘what lovely pictures you have sent! The Venetian mask is beautifully sinister’. She also made plans to visit a mask shop with him.4 In October 1990 she wrote, ‘thanks so much for the mask pictures which interest me a lot’.5 Striking connections between The Green Knight and Weinberger’s paintings of masks invite this novel’s critical reassessment. Weinberger’s enduring fascination with masks, his sustained discussions of them with Murdoch, and his numerous paintings of them, particularly those paintings created in the early 1990s, galvanised her thinking and functioned as catalysts for her idea-play surrounding masks to reach fruition in The Green Knight. In this novel, a profusion of literal and metaphorical masks reveals how easily imagination can lapse into fantasy and illuminates Murdoch’s concerns about Derridean poststructuralism (which she terms ‘structuralism’) and her fear that form may be mistaken as the only reality.6 In two depictions in The Green Knight of a passeggiata—a circular walk taken on a summer’s evening by a crowd of people in an Italian square—participants are portrayed as a swarm of masks rotating in perpetual flux, immersed in totalising form. The passeggiata scenes can be understood as the anguished expression of Murdoch’s fear that there may be nothing real beneath or beyond form or 4  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated [July 1990], KUAS80/1/76, Iris Murdoch Collections. 5  Postmarked 6 October 1990, KUAS80/1/137, Iris Murdoch Collections. 6  Murdoch defines ‘structuralism’ as ‘the movement promoted by Jacques Derrida, also called “deconstruction”, “modernism”, “post-modernism”, etc.’ She says that she uses ‘the old original term as it is informative and less ephemeral. (After all, what comes after post-­ modernism?) Strictly perhaps it should be called “Derrida’s structuralism”, to distinguish it from other post-Saussure theories in semiotics and semiology which use the idea of structure’. MGM, p. 5.

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that, if there is, it may not be possible to hone the purified vision required to access it. Weinberger’s self-portrait Me Wearing the Venetian Mask, which stills a single mask for contemplation, offers an alternative response to the ambiguous powers of form. This self-portrait filters into Murdoch’s portrayal of the actor Clement Graffe, another wearer of a Venetian mask who is, like Weinberger, conscious of himself as a performer, and scrutinises a mythological mask in his quest for truth. Weinberger, unlike Murdoch, always retained his firm belief in art’s validity.7 Whereas The Green Knight at times expresses despair at the seeming impossibility of breaking through form to reality and implies that perhaps all that can be sought is form’s consolatory function, many of Weinberger’s paintings joyously reveal the freedom which can be attained through form and thus seem to posit a practical alternative to Murdoch’s anguish. Weinberger was attracted to myth, as Murdoch was, and he frequently depicted the mythological character Punch, as an alter ego for the artist. Weinberger’s many renditions of Punch in the 1980s and 1990s, including Flying Punch, Falling Punch, and Striding Punch (Figs. 6.5, 6.6 and 6.7) provided Murdoch with a model and an inspiration by revealing how a mythological mask, foregrounded and exaggerated, may offer a partially concealed space for liberating imaginative play which assists the artist’s comprehension and expression of reality. Both artists reinterpret myths centred on the theme of transformation, mask-like in their ability to disguise or reveal truth. Weinberger’s Punch is a subversive, shape-shifting character, a manifestation of the trickster archetype and a metaphor for the evolution of consciousness. Murdoch’s characters undergo continual metamorphoses as their identities splinter amongst mythological masks imposed by external or internal forces which may, like the Punch mask, reveal aspects of truth. The Green Knight is a meditation on the medieval myth of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its message that imperfection must be accepted as a necessary element of the human condition. Murdoch’s interrogations of form in The Green Knight result ultimately in renewed belief in unchanging standards 7  Weinberger valued the art of Russian icon painters most highly and strove to emulate their artistic practice. He writes approvingly of his favourite Russian icon painters’ ‘absolute, unquestioning belief in the validity of their work. This faith, this sense of purpose, permeated all the work I have seen. It gave it strength and conviction. If any doubts had existed in the minds of these artists, these must have been doubts as to their individual ability, never intrinsic doubts in their art as such. How different from the climate of today, where intellectual doubt is a dominant aspect of the visual arts’. Russian Icons, p. 60.

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of perfection, coupled with a somewhat resigned acceptance of her own imperfection which is also granted to her characters. Form can be fashioned in new ways which permit it to intimate the truth beyond its reach, but it cannot ultimately be dispensed with. Murdoch’s acceptance, in The Green Knight, of the second-best is validated by Weinberger’s ability to combine his attraction to the magic of the mask with sustained attention to the complexity of its meanings, so that the mask becomes a rich imaginative resource without distorting reality or lapsing into fantasy.

‘The Attempt to Impose Order, to Organise and to Choose, Which Produces Art’: Finding a Truthful Form Murdoch and Weinberger were both disturbed by their awareness that a general disintegration of certainties about the capacity of aesthetic form to convey truth was encouraging the production of art that was exclusively self-reflexive, entranced by its own processes. Moral failure appeared to be inherent in the tendency of modern art to recede from the world instead of trying to connect with it. Weinberger resisted this trend, convinced that the artist’s attention should be outward-directed: ‘I think that in most cases art has to do with something other than itself. It isn’t just decoration. For most of recorded history art always had a special meaning, only I don’t know what the meaning of modern art is’.8 Weinberger and Murdoch voiced their closely aligned concerns regarding modern art in their correspondence, Murdoch seeking Weinberger’s guidance as she strove to formulate her stance. Their like-mindedness is made clear by her comments in a letter of August 1994: ‘Dearest Harry, thank you very much for your letter which expresses so explicitly my own feelings about the situation of art. Sometimes one may feel quite dazed—is one moving into a new era? It makes one sick’.9 The novel, more than any other aesthetic form, Murdoch believed, is morally bound to attempt to make language reflect the world and to

 Harry Weinberger, Artists’ Lives, p. 7.  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 30 August 1994, KUAS80/10/1, Iris Murdoch Collections. 8 9

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reconnect the individual with reality.10 However, the novelist must struggle with the challenge of creating a complex, dynamic form which will bring language closer to truth, without allowing the form to dominate, and this struggle is why Murdoch defines the novelist in ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ as ‘potentially the greatest truth-teller of them all, but […] also an expert fantasy-monger’ (EM, p. 233). Her unease regarding the modern novel is articulated at length in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959). In this essay, she explicitly connects the decline of the novel with the increasing dominance of form, claiming that: art has got to have form, whereas life need not. And any artist both dreads and longs for the approach of necessity, the moment at which form irrevocably crystallises. There is a temptation for any novelist, and one to which if I am right modern novelists yield too readily, to imagine that the problem of a novel is solved and the difficulties overcome as soon as a form in the sense of a satisfactory myth has been evolved. But that is only the beginning. There is then the much more difficult battle to prevent that form from becoming rigid, by the free expansion against it of the individual characters. […] A novel must be a house fit for free characters to live in; and to combine form with a respect for reality with all its odd contingent ways is the highest art of prose. (EM, pp. 285–286)

The difficulty is that some form must be present in order for art to be created, but too much form has a distorting effect, closing the artwork off from the reality which it seeks to emulate. Whereas Murdoch observed the way that form seemed to be overpowering and rigidifying contemporary novels, Weinberger felt that visual art was suffering from a deficiency of form. He was, like Murdoch, conscious that attention to form was an essential aspect of the struggle to create great art which can express truth, as his observation in ‘Art Education and Modern Art’ confirms: ‘The starting point for a work of art may be anywhere, but it is the attempt to impose order, to organise and to choose, which produces art’.11 He resisted what he perceived as a contemporary tendency to destroy forms and to make no effort to probe 10  Murdoch frequently emphasises the moral purpose of the novel, for example, in ‘Art Is the Imitation of Nature’ (1978): ‘in a novel the reader rightly expects, however odd the work may be, some kind of moral aesthetic sense of direction, some indication of how to read the relation, or apparent lack of relation, to the ordinary world’ (EM, p. 257). 11  Harry Weinberger, ‘Art Education’, p. 2.

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further: ‘modern art […] asks questions without answering them. It splits up and dissolves forms. […] The dissolution of boundaries and forms in modern art is characteristic not only of modern art, but of modern society as a whole, and in a sense modern art reflects the spirit of today’.12 Murdoch, in ‘Salvation by Words’ (1972), also notes the trend in the visual arts towards deconstruction of form: ‘Much visual art exhibits a consciousness of […] false unity by an attack on unity as such. Pictures fall out of frames, objects are made too large or senselessly complex to be grasped by a unified vision’ (EM, p. 239). She sees this trend as an attack on the supposed insincerity of art objects which purport to make finished statements. Murdoch accepts that perception of art as a ‘conjuring trick’ may in some ways be ‘wise and healthy’ but also asserts that our discovery of the trick need not discredit the trickster […] I myself very much believe in the importance of the work of art as an attempted formal unity and completed statement. There is no substitute for the discipline of this sort of attempt to tell truth succinctly and clearly. This particular effort is uniquely world-revealing. […] Great art, especially literature, but the other arts too, carries a built-in self-critical recognition of its own incompleteness. […] [A]ll good art is its own intimate critic, celebrating in simple and truthful utterance the broken nature of its formal complexity. (EM, pp. 239–240)

Although the artist’s struggle to create ‘an attempted formal unity and completed statement’ will be an inevitable failure, the art object incomplete and imperfect, Murdoch emphasises that ‘it is important to try to make such statements because they challenge our ability to discern and express truth and often constitute the only form in which certain truths can be expressed at all’ (EM, p. 242). She seems, in ‘Salvation by Words’, confident that great art will endure, absorbing and transcending contemporary fashions. By the time of writing Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch seems to have become more distressed by modern art because she now perceives it as having been influenced by her bête noire, structuralism: she described structuralism to Michael Kustow in 1992 as ‘an attractive, amusing doctrine, but it’s so unlike what human life is really like, and it entirely

 Harry Weinberger, ‘Art Education’, p. 3.

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abolishes the idea of truth in some of its basic senses’.13 Murdoch feared that revelation of ‘the trick’ was increasingly becoming the sole aim of artists: Structuralism may […] be seen in its more popular manifestations as a new sensibility in art, an attack on traditional art forms, where it operates both as an exercise in, and an image of, demythologisation, the removal of the transcendent: a removal which analyses (deconstructs) the familiar concepts of individual object, individual person, individual meaning, those old and cherished “limited wholes”. […] Art’s old natural tendency to “point beyond” is variously and ingeniously challenged by artists more conscious of their prophetic role. […] Structuralism (as deconstruction) is a radical form of present-day demythologisation, in which the nature of the process itself is to be clarified. It seems like traditional metaphysics, a search for hidden a priori determining forms, constituting an ultimate reality. Here again the prophetic artist provides symptoms which are analysed and reinforced by the “philosopher” as critic. […] The subject matter of art is then the nature of the process itself. The old conception of mimesis as reference to a transcendent reality, transformed and presented by an individual artist, is superseded. (MGM, pp. 5–6)

Weinberger reacts instinctively against what he sees as modern art’s propensity to dissolve forms. Murdoch, who situates modern art within a broader philosophical framework, realises that although Weinberger criticises it for its apparent formlessness, modern art is actually enslaved to form because it repeatedly deconstructs itself in an attempt to reveal the underlying form which has become its sole subject matter. Modern ‘structuralist’ art has some affinities with the crystalline novel, in its submission to form which meant that it could only tell one apparent ‘truth’ about the human condition. The challenge of constructing a form which was both beautiful and broken was a lifelong preoccupation for both Murdoch and Weinberger. Their shared sense that contemporary art and indeed contemporary society were morally declining—a decline embodied, for Murdoch, by the tenets of structuralism as she understood them—galvanised their efforts to hone form into more accurate representations of the truth lying always beyond it.

13   Michael Kustow, ‘Boundary Breaker and Moral Maker’, Guardian, 8 October 1992, p. 23.

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Visual Metaphor: ‘We Can Often “See” What We Cannot Say’ The concept of attention, borrowed from Simone Weil and exemplified by Weinberger, is central to Murdoch’s neo-theology. In ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’ (1952) Murdoch contends that ‘the attempt to bind language and experience rigidly together’ must be relinquished in order to try to understand an experience in all its detail. Steady, sustained attention to an experience is necessary in order to refine it and thereby to ‘discover (or create)’ within it infinitely complex meanings which give the experience intrinsic form (EM, pp. 54–55). Murdoch’s ambiguously worded phrase ‘discover (or create)’ implies that the form of an experience hovers on the boundary between inner consciousness and the outer world: form may be already present within the experience, as part of the rich detail of external reality, or it may emerge from the internal reality of the perceiver’s consciousness, or perhaps materialise from an amalgamation of both. Her conception of experience as visual rather than verbal, described early in her career in ‘Thinking and Language’ (1951), was often reiterated in her later work. For example, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she states: ‘at the border-lines of thought and language we can often “see” what we cannot say and have to wait and attempt to formulate for ourselves and to convey to others our experience of what is initially beyond and hidden’ (MGM, p. 283). The artist’s task, therefore, is to try to create visual metaphors which have sufficiently complex forms to depict this experience: It is a matter of what we “see things as”, what we let, or make, ourselves think about, how by innumerable movements, we train our instincts and develop our habits and test our methods of verification. Imagery, metaphor, has its deep roots and origins in this self-being, and an important part of human learning is an ability both to generate and to judge and understand the imagery which helps us to interpret the world. (MGM, p. 215)

Weinberger’s seminar notes reveal his acute awareness of the difficulty of representing experience by means of aesthetic form, which inevitably distorts the original image or idea: You imagine? An image, or you start a picture hoping that some sort of image will result, but as the picture develops you move away from the original image…

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Then you come back to starting point, and that – usually – is the conclusion of the statement we call a picture. But the medium we use means that we translate a vague (or often we are unaware of it altogether) image or idea (not listening, but pictorial) into a static and two or three dimensional object. (The idea, as you will imagine, is not static). A discrepancy, an enormous discrepancy, therefore, exists between the medium we use and that which is painted. Thus we have to accept that all painting is abstraction. There is of course a difference in whether the image we are forming within ourselves is just a shape that can also be identified as a known object. In both cases we are dealing with images, and the difference is not as great as we are often led to believe. Our object is to invent – create, if you like – within the limitation of the medium (whatever…) an equivalent for the images in our mind’s eye. … Of course actual things seen, as these also become images. … Always an equivalent, not a reproduction, as we can’t reproduce time and space in painting! In painting we are constantly faced with the task of making such equivalents.14

The frequent use of parentheses, ellipses and the ambiguous, fragmented phrasing of Weinberger’s sentences indicate his sense of the sheer difficulty of articulating the abstract concepts with which he is grappling. His cautious assertion that we imagine ‘vague’ images or ‘pictorial’ ideas ‘in our mind’s eye’ seems to correspond with the way that Murdoch envisages thoughts occurring in an individual consciousness: she states in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that ‘our deepest not yet explicit thinking is alive with movement already grasped in a pictorial manner’ (MGM, p. 328). Murdoch’s quest to articulate experience led her, like Weinberger, to make expressionistic use of colour and form and to move, at times, towards abstraction without ever relinquishing her faith in traditional realist techniques. Weinberger’s struggle to replicate in a painting the vision of his ‘mind’s eye’ seems to mirror, and perhaps inspired, in her later novels, Murdoch’s own efforts to refine and reconceptualise visual metaphors which strive to connect internal consciousness and external reality. Murdoch knew that an image which could provide a truthful representation of the human condition as a process of constantly evolving, renewing, and re-evaluating meaning must have a form which is dynamic, pierced, 14  Harry Weinberger, ‘Finding One’s Way’, pp.  1-2. Here reproduced exactly as in the original.

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and endlessly transforming. Weinberger’s awareness that the idea or image with which the artist is inspired is ‘not static’ drew him to the same images as Murdoch. The mask became for Weinberger and Murdoch a fluid, multi-faceted, protean symbol, simultaneously separating and connecting inner life and outer reality, as they constantly interact, shift, and refocus. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch opposes structuralism’s ‘severance of meaning from truth, and language from the world’ by articulating her vision of the relationship between humanity and ‘a reality which is beyond us’: This is the transcendental network, the border, wherein the interests and passions which unite us to the world are progressively woven into illusion or reality, a continuous working of consciousness. […] The world […] is given to us as a creative task. It is impossible to banish morality from this picture. We work, using or failing to use our honesty, our courage, our truthful imagination, at the interpretation of what is present to us, as we of necessity shape it and “make something of it”. We help it to be. We work at the meeting point where we deal with a world which is other than ourselves. This transcendental barrier is more like a band than a line. (MGM, pp. 214–215)

This ‘transcendental barrier’ is made manifest by the visual metaphor of the mask.

‘Surely Art Transforms’: Multiple Perspectives in Masks I and Masks II Weinberger created many paintings of masks which probe the nature of reality and attempt to articulate his sense of self against its transcendent background.15 Julian Gardner, in his obituary for Weinberger in the Independent, observes that:

15  The locations of some of Weinberger’s paintings of masks are not currently known; they may have been destroyed by him, or lost. Weinberger said, ‘I did a lot of pictures based on similar themes, where there was a very dark background and just one head or one mask and many of these pictures have disappeared […] I remember doing some pictures that we had in Manchester when we had a flood in the house, and I lost, quite literally lost about thirty canvases, and I never replaced them, I never repainted them’. Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 113.

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Fig. 6.1  Harry Weinberger with two of his paintings, [1981], estate of Harry Weinberger [Masks] recur constantly in his painting, […] often with daemonic force. The masks in his paintings were more than a visual metaphor or a fetish. Masks conceal, and yet allow surreptitious scrutiny without betraying the observer's real expression. This appealed deeply to Weinberger's inquisitive mind.16

A photograph portraying Weinberger positioned between two paintings based on masks in his extensive collection (Fig. 6.1) emphasises that his identity was complexly bound up with the image of the mask. He relished the protection from scrutiny, and the energising space for imaginative experimentation, with which masks provided him. He sent this photograph to Murdoch, who responded warmly: ‘Dear Harry, thank you very 16  Julian Gardner, ‘Harry Weinberger: Émigré painter whose work was partly inspired by his love of masks and icons’, Independent, 2 December 2009 [accessed 1 December 2015], hereafter ‘Independent obituary’.

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Fig. 6.2  Harry Weinberger, Masks I, [early 1990s], private collection

much for […] charming pictures of pictures and of you appearing between two canvases with your special look’.17 Weinberger’s collection of masks, well-known to Murdoch, filled his home. Gardner comments, in Weinberger’s 1996 exhibition catalogue, Masks, models and marionettes accost the visitor from every corner, every shelf and wall-surface. The visitor is watched by the masks as much as they themselves are observed. [Masks], whether an elegant remembrance of Venetian Carnival or the atrophied ferocity of tribal ritual, have deeply embedded themselves in the artist’s imagination. So much so that they are in fact part of him, and he of them.18

Two paintings of the early 1990s, Masks I and Masks II (Figs. 6.2 and 6.3), which depict a Balinese mask from Weinberger’s collection, disclose his 17  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 4 December 1981, KUAS80/7/23, Iris Murdoch Collections. 18  Julian Gardner, 1996CI, np.

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Fig. 6.3  Harry Weinberger, Masks II, [early 1990s], private collection

understanding of how the mask’s meaning continually fluctuates as it pivots in a liminal space between inner life and outer reality. Weinberger’s sustained, searching attention to the Balinese mask helped him to perceive and portray its mutable, protean qualities. He remarked to Cathy Courtney in 1995 that he spent much time contemplating it: ‘that is […] a beautiful mask and I usually have it hanging in my room, and I look at it often. […] I always looked at it and liked it, and looked at it very intently’.19 The Balinese mask is a light-coloured mask which covers the entire face, and its style and shape indicate that it was designed for a noble character in a Topeng dance, who would not have spoken during performances but would have communicated entirely through movement. The elimination of spoken words in favour of a silent yet deeply eloquent and expressive dynamic image seems to accord with Murdoch’s and Weinberger’s sense that the visual could communicate more viscerally than the verbal.  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 92.

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In each of Weinberger’s two known versions of this subject, three images of the Balinese dancing mask float apparently weightlessly on a background of flat blocks of colour. The mask’s striking features are strongly marked, enigmatically smiling. The two paintings are similar, except that in the second painting the mask is more firmly delineated and the colours of the background are darker so that the mask emerges from it with greater force. By means of these variations, Weinberger may have been attempting to depict the mask’s continually modifying relationship to its surroundings and to prevent his representation of it from becoming static. ‘I wanted to do justice to the mask, and in order to do that I can’t just pose it as if it were someone sitting for a portrait, but I want to show it from different points of view’, Weinberger said.20 The mask is presented from three different angles in each painting, prompting viewers to shift and refocus between them, guiding viewers into awareness of its complexity, and making them partially complicit in its power to deceive. In The Fire and the Sun (1977), a text well-known to Weinberger, Murdoch contests Plato’s claim that artists are three times removed from reality.21 Plato, she states, claims that the artist, who merely renders an imitation of a manufactured object perceived from a single perspective, ‘naively or wilfully accepts appearances instead of questioning them’ and ‘evades the conflict between the apparent and the real’ (EM, p.  390). Weinberger in fact confronts this conflict and centres his interrogation of the mask upon it. His depictions of the mask from a variety of angles in Masks I and Masks II epitomise Murdoch’s belief that: ‘Surely art transforms, is creation rather than imitation […] the painter can reveal far more than the “one viewpoint” of the ordinary observer’ (EM, p. 392). They resemble Murdoch’s refusal to offer her readers the easy consolation of a single overriding perspective in The Green Knight: her quest to understand and depict the human condition leads to the point at which ‘the situation is, in fact, almost infinitely complex, visible in all its aspects only to the eye of God’ (GK, p. 264). Anne Rowe contends that in The Green Knight, ‘[Murdoch’s] quest for tolerance and understanding makes it appear that she has relinquished any attempt at a governing vision; there is no incontestable argument for the sovereignty of any position, and compassion  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 91.  Weinberger had read The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists, evidenced by Murdoch’s comment to him in a letter: ‘I’m glad you’ve read my little Plato book, thank you’. Postmarked 12 March 1979, KUAS80/7/12, Iris Murdoch Collections. 20 21

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assuages any real sense of evil’.22 Both Murdoch and Weinberger emphasise the moral necessity of simultaneously maintaining multiple perspectives, and creative energy is generated as the recipients of their artworks strain to reconcile apparent discrepancies of perception and thereby develop a greater breadth of moral vision. In Masks I and Masks II, Weinberger exposes the mask’s potential for deception. The mask is depicted facing forward and in profile, inscrutably watching its viewer. It has also been reversed so that it is shown from the back, positioned so that the viewer has the impression of putting his or her own face inside it and thus participating in the creation of its illusion, as well as being outside it as a passive spectator, seeing its hollowness and two-dimensionality. This interpretation of the paintings is complicated and enhanced by Weinberger’s intimation that they have some connection with the court painter Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I; whilst discussing how he was inspired to create these paintings, he remarked: ‘I always thought it rather funny that Van Dyck did three images of Charles I looking left profile, the right profile and full face’.23 Van Dyck’s painting was produced as a reference work for the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who had been commissioned to create a marble bust of Charles I.  The king was depicted by Van Dyck from three different points of view to guide Bernini’s efforts to create an accurate three-dimensional likeness. Although this struggle to create a truthful representation of reality accords with Weinberger’s own quest, Van Dyck’s meticulous naturalism, as he attempts to render three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional medium, is not straightforwardly emulated by Weinberger. Instead, the spatial depth of Weinberger’s mask is reduced, which foregrounds its artifice, destroying the illusion that art can accurately represent life. Unlike the ‘structuralist’ art which he and Murdoch so mistrusted, Weinberger did not end his quest at this moment of discovery but continued to scrutinise the mask from all angles, instinctively conscious that if perceived with attention it could point beyond itself to truth. The Balinese mask’s mesmerising, unnervingly lifelike stare, and the heady, sensuous colours with which Masks I and Masks II are painted, imply that Weinberger, like Murdoch, felt the allure of the mask’s dangerous magic in spite of his simultaneous revelation of its falsity. Ironically, his awareness of and attraction to the duplicity of form increased his ability to make it into a morally  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 108.  Cathy Courtney, Artists‘ Lives, p. 91.

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enlightening image communicating truth about the human condition. ‘[A]lthough aesthetic form has essential elements of trickery and magic, yet form in art, as form in philosophy, is designed to communicate and reveal’, Murdoch contends in ‘The Fire and the Sun’ (EM, p. 454). The power of form to both conceal and reveal truth is embodied in the paradoxical qualities of the Balinese mask, traditionally thought to induce by magic a trance-like state in the wearer and also, conversely, to become a mediating vehicle, enabling the wearer to communicate with the gods.

‘Faces like Masks’: Giving Form to the Void Murdoch’s philosophy is underpinned by her assertion that form has the capacity to point towards truth, but her novels complicate this stance. As a professional weaver of artifice, she was drawn to the seductive power of form, and throughout her career she acknowledged the difficulty of preventing form from dominating her novels. In 1962 she described form to Frank Kermode as ‘not altogether the enemy’ but ‘the thing which […] one should guard against giving in to’, and in 1983 she said to John Haffenden: ‘The determined form I’m frightened of is certainly not anybody else’s form. […] it has to do with being dominated by myself and by my own mythology, which is very strong’.24 She was tormented by a sense that her fiction was inadequate and second-rate, its characters less real because they were subjected to the distortions of its form, instead of being free. In the latter stages of her career, Murdoch vigorously argued against the prevailing ‘structuralist’ view of language, which she took to mean an all-encompassing, all-powerful form which dominates the individuals submerged within it, a self-referential system in which meaning is endlessly deferred and the concept of truth outside the network of language is eradicated. That Murdoch only partly understood the intricacies of contemporary ‘post’ philosophy, and specifically of Derridean thinking, is now generally accepted. Nevertheless, Murdoch’s concerns about structuralism remain significant because they energised her quest to connect language and truth, and her related desire to extend the possibilities of the realist novel, which she perceived as being under attack. Valerie Purton remarks 24  Frank Kermode, Interview from ‘The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 9-13, hereafter Kermode (p. 11); John Haffenden, Haffenden, p. 127.

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on Murdoch’s ‘running (if one-sided) battle with Jacques Derrida in the final decade’, observing that ‘[Derrida] begins to appear in almost every public utterance of Murdoch’s, from speeches to undergraduates to casual asides in interviews’.25 Murdoch’s antagonism to structuralism is most fully articulated in Chap. 7 of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), ‘Derrida and Structuralism’, in which she defines structuralism as ‘“linguistic idealism” or “linguistic monism”’, in which ‘truism, half-truth, and shameless metaphysics join to deceive us’ (MGM, p.  197, 188). Structuralism has failed, she argues, to attend to the complexity of the relationship which is the keystone of her moral philosophy: the continually transforming relationship of the transcendent external world and the inner consciousness of the individual, who progresses by degrees towards a clearer vision of it. Structuralism seemed to Murdoch to have eradicated the concept of reality outside language: ‘Derrida […] concludes that […] [there is] only a network of meanings (the infinitely great net of language itself) under which there is nothing’. This incites her to denounce structuralism as false and immoral: ‘The fundamental value which is lost, obscured, made not to be, by structuralist theory, is truth, language as truthful, where “truthful” means faithful to, engaging intelligently and responsibly with, a reality which is beyond us’ (MGM, pp. 214–215). Murdoch’s hostility towards structuralism may have been partly due to her deep-seated, only half-acknowledged anxiety that perhaps the structuralist ideology could be, after all, valid. Bran Nicol observes, the poststructuralist approach to language insists that […] truth is never more than an effect of language, and even if it is ‘out there’ it eludes the grasp of signifying practices. […] Though devoid of explicitly post-Saussurian rhetoric, a similar recognition is never far from Murdoch’s philosophy. The result is that a contradiction opens up in her work between the realist faith in referentiality and a counter-conviction about the fundamental inaccessibility of reality through language.

Nicol observes that although this contradiction ‘never quite engulfs’ the novels, it sometimes ‘threatens to do so’.26 It threatens The Green Knight, in which Murdoch’s anxieties about the apparent impossibility of breaking through form to reality escalate to a crisis point. Metaphysics as a  Valerie Purton, Chronology, xv.  Bran Nicol, Retrospective Fiction, p. 18.

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Guide to Morals and The Green Knight are, as Nicholas Spice contends, complexly interwoven and should be read in conjunction.27 As part of her scrutiny of the continually modulating relationships within The Green Knight’s frieze of characters, and the complex permutations of their situation, Murdoch confronts her anxiety that perhaps individuals can ultimately be no more than masks, sunk in totalising form. Her fears escalate to a crisis point in two depictions of a passeggiata, which suggest that the attempt to see the particularity of others seems to have been all but relinquished. Participants in the passeggiata are experienced only as a whirling mass of innumerable faces, wearing fixed mask-like expressions, materialising then disappearing from view. These scenes express Murdoch’s anguished response to the structuralist assertion, as she understood it, that humanity is locked into all-encompassing form. However, Weinberger’s late self-portrait Me Wearing the Venetian Mask (Fig. 6.4), understood to have been painted in 1990 when Murdoch was writing The Green Knight, provides an alternative to the bleak vision of humanity which Murdoch seems to depict in the two versions of the passeggiata. While Murdoch presents masks which have hardened into permanence due to inattention to the individuality of their wearers, Weinberger’s mask forces the viewer to attempt the construction of the self hidden behind it and implies that such constructions, although inevitably imperfect, are a necessary part of moral development. The Green Knight’s action is centred on a circle of friends in London: Louise Anderson and her three daughters, Aleph, Sefton, and Moy; Lucas Graffe, an academic, and his brother, Clement, who is an actor; Bellamy James, who desires to become a monk; Louise’s childhood friend Joan Blacket, and Joan’s student son, Harvey. The lives of all of these characters are disrupted by the appearance of an enigmatic stranger, Peter Mir, previously believed dead, who demands retribution for the violence he suffered at the hands of Lucas when he prevented Lucas from murdering Clement. Masks proliferate, as Murdoch employs the imagery of the theatre which had so fascinated her throughout her career to question the moral 27  Nicholas Spice remarks that: ‘Scarcely a page of The Green Knight could not aptly be footnoted with quotations from [Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals], and anyone wishing to encounter the plenitude of Murdoch’s ideas on justice and mercy, the blessings of compassion, the role of asceticism in the moral life, the ambiguity of sex as a destructive and creative force, goodness as a proper attention to the world, the healing power of “good ordinary life” and so on, should read both books together’. ‘I hear, I see, I learn’, review of The Green Knight, London Review of Books (4 November 1993), 25-26 (p. 25).

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Fig. 6.4  Harry Weinberger, Me Wearing the Venetian Mask, [1990], Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

implications of playing roles. Hilda Spear notes that in Murdoch’s late novels, theatre becomes, ‘less spontaneous and more of a structural device […] discussions of the role of acting, the conscious or subconscious substitution of—or perhaps interplay between—imagination and reality have become dominant’.28 Murdoch blends genres by interweaving theatrical elements and thereby extending the parameters of the traditional realist  Hilda D. Spear, Iris Murdoch (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 119.

28

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novel. Suspension of disbelief cannot long be sustained because the reader’s attention is constantly drawn to the text’s status as an object of ­constructed reality. Some characters seem conscious of their fictionality: Aleph remarks that ‘[i]t’s like being always on the stage […] we are players, actors’ (GK, p. 38) and Clement perceives the unfolding of the plot as ‘the slow enactment of an awful pantomime’ (GK, p. 329). Aleph, who deceives her family and friends for much of the novel, contemplates her reflected face and thinks: ‘it’s a mask—and sometimes the mask is so heavy, and it is pulling me to the ground where I shall lie face downward’ (GK, p. 20). At this moment she seems to half-recognise the moral harm which she is causing to herself and others. The novel is suffused with the sense that illusion must be stripped away whilst simultaneously casting doubt on whether this is possible. Moy, who has crafted numerous grotesque masks in preparation for a costume party, shuts them away in a cupboard, thinking, ‘The masks were evil […] Why were they evil, because deception is evil? Even the happy masks were bad’ (GK, p. 147). Moy, who ‘would have destroyed’ the masks she had created for previous parties, is further troubled by the way that party guests have begun to resume old masks, or buy masks in shops, and resolves, ‘I shall make no more masks, something is over forever’ (GK, p. 202). An unmasking takes place at the party, when Moy, seeing that Peter Mir is ‘in trouble with his head-dress’, tears off her mask to demand that he is freed, and ‘[t]hose who were still masked took off their masks respectfully’ (GK, p. 213). However, this unmasking is only temporary, as the attractions of disguise and role-play continually revive amongst the characters. The amoral Lucas knows that the seductive power of masks is ever-present: ‘men will love a monster if he has bella figura’ (GK, p.  273). Refined attention is required to pierce the mask which camouflages or even transforms into illusion the truth lying beneath or beyond it. The characters’ continual construction and modification of masks foreground the moral damage caused when such attention is lacking. Clement and Louise, who might be counted amongst the ‘good’ characters of the novel, make a declaration of mutual love which seems sincere, but it is undermined by continual references to theatre and acting. Louise, visiting a derelict theatre in search of Clement, is filled with dread: ‘She feared the emptiness of the theatre, its coldness, the brooding dead exhausted air, the little puny empty stage, with its mean space and its wordless futility. Supposing all the lights were to go out. All she desired now was to get away safely’ (GK, p. 436). Louise realises that: ‘The stage was no longer empty. A man was

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standing on it, the man was Clement’. She senses, ‘a curious obsessive impulse to reach the stage and touch it’, and as she speaks to Clement, she feels ‘almost as if she were acting’ (GK, p. 436, 437). Clement acknowledges that his love for Louise is his ‘drama’ (GK, p. 67). He reveals his desire to rescue the theatre and make it his own, and he tells Louise that her visit to the theatre ‘means everything. It means you need me, it means you love me’ (GK, p. 439). It seems that even this apparently genuine love may be another form of performance. Two scenes in The Green Knight present the evils of inattention by means of the visual metaphor of the mask. These scenes were inspired by Murdoch’s experiences of participating in a passeggiata whilst on holiday with John Bayley, Borys Villers, and Audi Bayley (then Villers) in Ascoli Piceno in September 1988. Audi Bayley recalls: Iris and I spent what seemed like an eternity walking arm-in-arm round and round the square among a dense crowd of good-natured Italians of all ages, surrendering ourselves, and becoming one with the mass of people. Meanwhile, we were being watched by John and Borys who, having found it all too claustrophobic, had retired to an open-air café.29

The passeggiata seems to have seeped into Murdoch’s consciousness and become, for her, a metaphor for the nature of most human existence. The continual rotation of the passeggiata implies that no progress is made, and its presence at both the beginning and end of the novel creates repetition within repetition. Conradi notes that for Murdoch, ‘[r]epetition and substitution are features of the machine […] the machine is inside us and a feature of the least conscious part of ourselves […] the characters’ delusion that they are autonomous is held up as a mirror to us’.30 The passeggiata offers a visual representation of this inescapable repetition and substitution, as one grimacing face is continually replaced by another. Audi Bayley has spoken of Murdoch’s terror at briefly losing sight of John Bayley in the crowd at Ascoli Piceno and of her relief when he was located.31 Murdoch’s extreme reaction may have stemmed from her desire to perceive, in the sea of faces, the sole face which for her was not masked. Murdoch and Bayley, who enjoyed a long and legendarily loving and 29  Audi Bayley, ‘Relaxing with Iris and John’, in Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. by Miles Leeson (Devizes: Sabrestorm, 2019), pp. 93–97 (p. 94). 30  Peter J. Conradi, Saint and Artist, pp. 77–78. 31  Anne Rowe, in conversation with the author, 22 June 2019.

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happy marriage, ‘separate but never separated’ as Bayley remarked, perceived and accepted each other as they were, with little illusion.32 The first passeggiata takes place during a visit by Harvey, Clement, and Bellamy to a small town ‘somewhere in the Apennines’ (GK, p. 21) on the evening prior to the injury to Harvey’s foot, occasioned by a triumphant leap from the parapet of the bridge which he has just successfully negotiated, which causes the trio to return home. The passeggiata is presented as a ‘show’ in which actors are ‘taking part’ whilst being ‘viewed’ by an audience. Harvey feels a compulsion to participate, while Clement and Bellamy both take the role of onlooker. Harvey had been taking part in the evening passeggiata in the square of the little town. The square, in warm waning light, was crammed with people walking, mostly young or youngish, mostly walking in a clockwise direction, though there were many older people too and many who chose to stumble into confrontations by walking anti-clockwise. In fact with so many people in the small square, it was impossible to avoid stumbling and confrontations. Harvey, who had experienced this phenomenon elsewhere in Italy, had never seen such a lively crush. It was like being inside a shoal of fishes who were confined by a net into a huge compact ball. His bare arms, since he had rolled up his shirt-sleeves, were being liberally caressed by the bare arms of passing girls. Faces, smiling faces, sad faces, young faces, ancient faces, grotesque faces, appeared close to his and vanished. People hastening diagonally through the throng thrust him gently or brusquely aside. Good temper reigned, even a luxurious sensual surrender to some benign herd instinct. Girls walked arm-in-arm, boys walked arm-in-arm, less often girls linked with boys, frequent married couples, including elderly ones, walked smiling, now at least in harmony with the swarming adolescents. Predatory solitaries pushed past, surveying the other sex, or their own, but well under the control of the general decorum. Eccentrics with unseeing eyes glided through, savouring amid so much society their own particular loneliness and private sins and sorrows. Clement and Bellamy, briefly amused by the show, had soon retired to sit in the big open-air café whence they viewed the intermittent appearance of Harvey, who with parted lips and shining eyes, in a trance of happiness, was blundering round and round the square. (GK, pp. 21–22)

This description embodies Murdoch’s observation, made in a 1983 interview with John Haffenden, that ‘ordinary life is a kind of dreamy drifting,

 John Bayley, Iris, p. 183.

32

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defending yourself all the time, pushing other people out of the way’.33 Such ‘dreamy drifting’ is an unreal, morally dangerous state of mind. The portrayal of so many people bathed in light and mingling in continuous rhythmic movement might initially appear to be joyful, even utopian. However, the narrative voice subtly emphasises that all of these individuals are in fact detached, disconnected, and focused solely on their own paths, forming at most a pair bond, but failing to relate to each other or to their surroundings in any more meaningful way. Various kinds of false perceptions of external reality are depicted: the rapacious ‘surveying’ of ‘predatory solitaries’ who assess the surface exteriors of passers-by; the ‘unseeing eyes’ of lonely ‘eccentrics’ who cannot perceive other people because they are immersed in their own troubles, and the ‘shining eyes’ of Harvey who, although apparently happy, is ‘blundering’ in a ‘trance’, his elation rendering him oblivious to the particularity of those around him. In every case, the individual has accepted appearances and has failed in this moment to give sufficient attention to the reality of others. Inattention has caused the form of the mask to harden into a barrier between inner consciousness and outer reality, meaning that other people are experienced only as disembodied faces, performing immobile, artificial expressions. The simile ‘it was like being inside a shoal of fishes who were confined by a net into a huge compact ball’ implicitly connects the passeggiata to Murdoch’s unease about structuralism. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she claims that according to the structuralist picture: ‘Our ordinary “consciousness” of a separately existent external world of extra-linguistic entities is shown, in this light, to be an illusion […] Indeed nothing “really” (deeply) exists except a sea or play of language of whose profound or sole reality “we” may be more or less aware as we follow unconscious codes or join in the lively playful creative movement of the linguistic totality which transcends us’ (MGM, p.  202). Structuralism, as Murdoch understood it, believes humanity to be trapped within all-encompassing linguistic form, like the cramped passeggiata which transcends its participants, confining them to the shape of its continually circling pattern. The passeggiata is represented again towards the end of the novel when Harvey and Sefton have returned to Italy. It takes place one evening when Harvey has made his second attempt at crossing the parapet of the bridge, which has been, this time, successful:

 John Haffenden, Haffenden, p. 135.

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The people of the little town were walking together, round and round the square. Quickly, his arm round Sefton’s waist, he pulled her into the slow crowd. They moved slowly, as in a march, as if in a great demonstration or religious procession, carried along by the flow of people, by their physical pressure, pushed, brushed, gently jostled. There was a soft murmur of voices, like distant birds, like the sound of silence. Some resolute stalwarts walking in the opposite direction stared, smiled, sleeves brushed sleeves, hands brushed hands. Beautiful faces appeared, joyful faces, inquisitive faces, friendly faces, dejected bitter faces, faces like masks with round empty mouths and eyes. Harvey held Sefton closely to him […] They felt that they resembled each other, they were twins as, crushed together, they turned and gazed into each other’s faces, their lips parted in a dazed smile of joy. (GK, p. 460)

Once again, the passeggiata has an air of theatricality: the use of ‘as in’ and ‘as if’ to describe the participants’ movement implies that they are consciously performing their roles: ‘carried along’, swept up into an all-­ consuming deterministic system from which they cannot break free. Murdoch’s heightened, theatrical language emphasises the unreality of such a vision of humanity. References to vision are again significant: participants stare but then pass on, failing to sustain their attention; faces are ‘like masks with round empty mouths and eyes’, the adjective ‘empty’ suggesting that inner reality has been suppressed, sealed off behind the masks which have become the only reality. Harvey and Sefton gaze, but only at each other. Their mutual love means that they are learning to see each other more clearly, but their intense focus on each other narrows their vision so that they are insensible of the reality of those around them and are therefore in a sense complicit in the falsity of the scene. The passeggiata of human beings enclosed in masks of fantasy can be taken as a troubling image of the impoverished quality of human consciousness in the late twentieth century. It is not until purified attention diminishes the self that the mask of illusion can be pierced and the individual reality of others becomes visible. In her depictions of the passeggiata, Murdoch seems deeply pessimistic about whether this vision of reality can ever be attained. Nevertheless, she continued to make the moral demand that we turn attention outwards to the formless particularity of others, as expressed in her revision, in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, of Kant’s sublime:

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It is indeed the realisation of a vast and varied reality outside ourselves which brings about a sense initially of terror, and when properly understood of exhilaration and spiritual power. But what brings this experience to us, in its most important form, is the sight, not of physical nature, but of our surroundings as consisting of other individual men. (EM, p. 282)

The individual must struggle with the forces of good and evil within him or herself in order to try to develop the capacity for true attention which can illuminate reality. In ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, Murdoch quotes Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of what it is like to see a face in the street: ‘Looking is such a marvellous thing, of which we know but little; through it we are turned absolutely to the outside […] Suddenly, in the shadow of a street, a face is held out to you, and you see […] its essence with such clarity… that the momentary impression involuntarily assumes the proportions of a symbol’ (EM, p. 56). The clarity of vision with which the face is perceived by Rilke’s refined outward-directed attention brings about a moment of unselfing which is sublime, in contrast to the dreamlike, detached state of unreality generated by lack of attention to others in the passeggiata. Murdoch’s unsettling depictions of the passeggiata not only reveal her fear of the moral consequences of inattention but also imply her determination to use her art to direct the reader’s attention to the inner reality of other people. The Green Knight casts doubt on, but finally refutes by its loving attention to inner life, the idea that reality beyond form does not exist. Murdoch provides an illustration of the struggle towards reality through her deeply compassionate portrayal of the imperfect moral progress of Bellamy James in The Green Knight. Bellamy’s fantasy of romanticised religious experience becomes a barrier which prevents him from confronting the complexity of reality. His construction of a Christian mask is part of his effort to achieve an accurate vision, but the mask is too hastily and inattentively created and assumed, resulting in an artificial renunciation. His transformation of the ‘man standing holding an axe’ seen in a dream, who is surely the Green Knight of the Gawain myth, into ‘the Archangel Michael leaning on his sword’, is an example of his delusion (GK, p. 153). Although it is painful and dangerous, the process of constructing and discarding a false mask helps Bellamy to become more aware of the dangers of attempting to shape reality by the imposition of a mythical form, and to accept his limitations. When Bellamy starts to turn his attention outwards to his neighbours the mask of illusion is pierced, the real becomes more

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visible, and his clearer vision prompts him to take action by caring for the troubled Moy. The failure to perceive the individuality of others in the passeggiatas may be, on some level, a manifestation of Murdoch’s anxieties about her role as novelist, whose duties are, she says in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, to create ‘a house fit for free characters to live in’ and ‘to combine form with a respect for reality with all its odd contingent ways’ (EM, p. 286). Murdoch often criticised herself for failing to perceive her characters sufficiently clearly to make them free and separate from herself. She stated to Frank Kermode in a 1962 interview that: one isn’t good enough at creating character. One starts off – at least I start off – hoping every time that this is going to happen and that a lot of people who are not me are going to come into existence in some wonderful way. Yet often it turns out in the end that something about the structure of the work itself, the myth as it were of the work, has drawn all these people into a sort of spiral, or into a kind of form which ultimately is the form of one’s own mind.34

Murdoch was haunted by her sense of inadequacy in this respect. In a 1986 discussion of A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), for example, she reflects that maybe Morgan Browne is ‘just not a very successful character […] a great novelist would have animated all these people’.35 The hostility expressed towards theatre and masks in The Green Knight can be understood as one aspect of Murdoch’s struggle to abjure her power over her characters. In his self-portrait Me Wearing the Venetian Mask, Weinberger, like Murdoch, interrogates the artist’s role. He resists its power and forces the viewer to attempt to construct his reality, thereby showing how all individuals are artists, involved in a cycle of creation and destruction of masks which enables gradual moral progress. Through its direction of the viewer’s attention to the reality of other people beyond the surface of the mask, this painting epitomises Murdoch’s humanist reformulation of the sublime in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, and her conviction that: ‘To understand other people is a task which does not come to an end’ (EM, p.  283). Unremitting obedience to the moral demand to keep  Frank Kermode, Kermode, p. 11.  Richard Todd, ‘Discussions from Encounters with Iris Murdoch’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 167–193 (p. 184). 34 35

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attempting this task brings individuals as close to goodness as is perhaps possible. Whereas the passeggiatas present multiple masks as hardened, crystallised surfaces caught up in constant flux, Weinberger’s Me Wearing the Venetian Mask isolates and stills one mask for focused contemplation whilst preserving its inherent dynamism. The artist’s head, emerging from inky blue-black shadows which cover much of the canvas, is almost entirely obscured by a plain white mask and dark, three-cornered hat. The mask is an item from Weinberger’s icon collection. He described its presence in this self-portrait as, ‘rather ominous, rather frightening really. It’s a Venetian mask, it’s a copy of a Venetian mask, it’s not an original mask, and very dark background’.36 Its simple, stylised, stark features, its concealment of the entire face, and its combination with the tricorn hat all indicate that it is the kind of mask known as a volto (meaning ‘face’) or larva (meaning ‘ghost’). It is the most anonymous type of carnival mask, which may have increased its appeal for Weinberger; because it hides the wearer’s identity almost entirely, it provides freedom to transgress social conventions. ‘The mask, which produces a carefully composed face to the world, may or may not represent the painter who scrutinizes with quizzical humour behind the security of his disguise’, remarks Gardner in his catalogue introduction to Weinberger’s 1996 exhibition.37 Weinberger has not included the mouth which would have been delineated on the original volto mask, as if silencing himself in a refusal to interact which fortifies the barrier between himself and the world. His emphasis on the mask being ‘a copy […] not an original’ serves as a reminder that layers of artifice separate inner consciousness and outer reality. A mask is a copy of a face, and this mask is a copy of a copy. Weinberger’s face hovers, ghost-­ like, behind the Venetian mask, and his face is itself yet another mask, mediating the inner reality beneath or beyond it. The refinement of perception required to penetrate these layers is, as in The Green Knight, a slow, laborious process. Weinberger’s steady outward gaze acknowledges an audience and ironically implies spatial continuity between the portrait and the external world, although the mask simultaneously and overtly limits communication between them. The artist stares through the mask’s apertures with a direct, questioning expression, as if defying the viewer to penetrate its mystery.  Cathy Courtney, Artists‘ Lives, p. 113.  Julian Gardner, 1996CI, np.

36 37

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Weinberger’s mask foregrounds the theatricality of any attempt to represent the self. Regardless of whether an artist intends to project a social persona or to lay bare the inner self in confessional style, all representations of the self inevitably involve performance. Weinberger’s audience is also, of course, himself. By imposing a mask on the reflected image at which he gazed as he painted himself, Weinberger is, perhaps, acknowledging that he would not be able to see himself entirely objectively any more than any other viewer; whether creating a portrait of the self or of another, the clarity of the artist’s vision is inevitably marred to some extent by his own fantasies. The mask is, inexorably, a part of him and of every human being. Although Murdoch’s troubling depictions of the passeggiata cast doubt on whether reality exists beyond form, and on whether, if so, it can ever be accessed, Weinberger’s self-portrait points to his conviction that a transcendent reality does eternally await discovery. The form of the mask can only partially enclose him; his reality escapes from behind its confines, in the barely visible details of his appearance, and most of all in his characteristic painting technique. The self-portrait is painted in Weinberger’s distinctive style: large areas of contrasting, vivid colours are loosely yet smoothly sketched in to create shapes and separate forms. The artist is thus palpably present in the painting, despite the mask which seems to signal his absence. Intimations of the continually evolving reality behind the mask are there, for the viewer who is sufficiently attentive to perceive them, although any interpretation can only be provisional. Me Wearing the Venetian Mask and The Green Knight interrogate ways in which all individuals participate in the construction of reality, as we create versions of ourselves and each other. The viewer’s attempts to give shape to the reality behind the blank mask in the painting prevent the mask from rigidifying; instead, the viewer’s consciousness interacts with external reality on the mask’s continually modulating borderline, and moral development takes place as the viewer examines the painting’s details and perception is refined. Likewise, some moral progress is inherent in the efforts of the characters in The Green Knight, as they engage in continual, mutual scrutiny, although they remain opaque to each other and to themselves. Peter Mir’s true identity cannot be, finally, unmasked by the other characters. They make various attempts to define him by labelling him with the names of literary figures, although each label relates to an aspect of his multi-faceted being, it may reveal more about the character who assigns the label than about Peter himself. Louise defines Peter

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as ‘Mr Pickwick’, which suggests that her own Pickwickian simplicity, innocence, and loyalty have led her to recognise these qualities in Peter. Sefton’s wisdom, coupled with her awareness of the power which is gained through knowledge, has led her to perceive Peter as ‘Prospero’. Moy’s description of Peter as ‘the Minotaur’ suggests that she senses his power, and the danger he poses to the circle of friends, as well as perhaps being sensitive to his position which is, like her own, close to the truth, making him vulnerable. Clement labels Peter ‘Mephistopheles’ which indicates his fear of Peter, and his guilty sense that he himself is in danger of damnation. Aleph sees him as ‘the Green Knight’ (GK, p. 195). The meaning of Aleph’s name, Alethea, or truth, might seem to hint that Aleph has come closest to identifying Peter’s true identity, although ironically she spends much of the novel in a state of falsehood. Peter does resemble the Green Knight in his capacity as ‘a sort of instrument of justice, a kind of errant ambiguous moral force, like some unofficial wandering angel’ (GK, p. 432), but the approximations in this description by Clement show how Peter remains almost unfathomable to the characters who try to comprehend him by imposing masks which conceal and reveal his inner reality and also their own. Paradoxically, Murdoch may have experienced a sense of relief, as well as fear, at the idea that human shortcomings would inevitably prevent unmediated access to reality. In her personal life, she was an accomplished weaver of forms who assumed and discarded numerous masks, exploiting their seductive powers while often subjecting herself to masochistic self-­ criticism for doing so, as she oscillated between complex, compartmentalised relationships with her friends and lovers. Murdoch vehemently denied putting herself into her work (she stated, in a 1990 discussion of her novelistic practice with Jeffrey Meyers, ‘I don’t think I have any autobiographical tendencies’) perhaps because she felt that an overtly psychoanalytic approach to her novels would detract readers from engaging with their intricate moral debates.38 Nevertheless, many aspects of Murdoch’s fragmented self can be detected half-concealed behind her characters, conveying partial, ambiguous truths about her which resist assimilation into a coherent whole. Murdoch creates a fragmented self-portrait in The Green Knight because, as Rowe observes, ‘the three Anderson sisters are a 38  Jeffrey Meyers, ‘Two Interviews with Iris Murdoch’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 218–234 (p. 222).

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c­ omposite picture of Murdoch herself’.39 The masks of these characters— beautiful, admired Aleph, academically brilliant, courageous Sefton, and fey, sensitive, suffering Moy—provide her with liminal spaces in which to explore her psyche and test her philosophical positions whilst never being permitted either to stabilise or to disintegrate. Murdoch further collapses the distinction between life and art by appropriating facets of Weinberger’s identity and dissolving them amongst her characters. A version of Weinberger’s Venetian mask appears in The Green Knight when Clement wears, to a masked party, ‘his own black elegant, bought in Venice, Venetian mask, which had a long thin tailpiece sweeping down his back’ (GK, p. 209). This detail opens up fresh readings of Murdoch’s characterisation of Clement. Frances White draws out the connections between Murdoch and Clement and contends that ‘Clement’s role in The Green Knight offers a self-reflexive commentary on Murdoch’s view of her own role as novelist’.40 It can be argued that Weinberger’s identity also filters into Clement. Like Weinberger, Clement is conscious of himself as an entertainer and knows the charm of performance but is somewhat disenchanted with his role. He accepts the nickname Harlequin, but feels that he has ‘been on a high wire long enough’ (GK, p. 63).41 Clement further resembles Weinberger in his desire to understand his relationship to myth, and his efforts to access the truth. His attention to the myth of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is both similar and different to the events he has endured, helps him to comprehend, finally, that some form is necessary in order to access truth indirectly. Clement is not the only form in which Weinberger’s masked identity inhabits The Green Knight. Murdoch’s letters suggest that Weinberger affected her portrayal of Harvey Blacket; in July 1993 she wrote to tell him, ‘I have a lame boy in my forthcoming novel—I have had him in my mind for a long time— nothing to do with you of course. He is lucky, he is inside the world of

39  Anne Rowe, ‘“The Best Moralists are the Most Satanic”: Iris Murdoch – On Art and Life’, in Murdoch on Truth and Love, ed. by Gary Browning (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 21–42 (p. 27). 40  Frances White, ‘“This rough magic I here abjure”: Theatricality in The Green Knight’, Iris Murdoch Review, 10 (2019), 31-41, 31. 41  The term ‘harlequin’ is also applied to Martin Lynch-Gibbon, who moves ‘like a mysterious and lonely harlequin in a painting’ (ASH, p. 154). The harlequin references provide further examples of Murdoch’s interest in Commedia dell’Arte characters, strengthening the likelihood that her imagination was fired by Weinberger’s Punch paintings.

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imagination (His name is Harvey). I hope you won’t mind him!’42 Despite her protestations otherwise, it seems likely that her depiction of Harvey’s lameness has been influenced by Weinberger’s long-term foot injury, which Murdoch frequently enquires after in her letters of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Furthermore, the art student Moy’s sense of crushing failure when her work is rejected by her prospective teacher echoes Weinberger’s own pain when, as a student, his work was patronised and rejected by an art critic.43 The psychology of these characters is complicated and enriched by the discovery of Weinberger’s partially concealed presence.

‘We Can Picture Liberation Through Art’: Mythical Masks and Moral Development Both Weinberger and Murdoch conjured up webs of powerful personal mythology which they invoked in their attempts to make aesthetic form express truth. Japanese demons, mysterious winged figures, Akhenaten, the Buddha, and Punch are repeatedly found in Weinberger’s paintings. The Green Knight is saturated with allusions to the myths of the Minotaur, Odysseus, and Saint George, with Arthurian legends, and with Biblical imagery of the story of Cain and Abel and the resurrection of Jesus. Murdoch and Weinberger were part of a larger impulse in the late twentieth century to revive and reinterpret myths of death, rebirth, and transformation, at a time when dominant myths—most notably, Christianity—were loosening their hold on society. Ever-conscious of the dangers of permitting form to dominate, myths are constantly dismantled and recreated by both artists in an attempt to reveal their underlying truth. ‘The idea of the myth and the form have got to be present, but one has brutally to stop the form determining the emotion of the book by working in the opposite direction, by making something happen which doesn’t belong to the

42  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 8 July 1993, KUAS80/1/96, Iris Murdoch Collections. 43  Weinberger recalled, in 1995, that when he was planning to study art after leaving school: ‘There was a man called Eric Newton, who was […] an eminent critic, and the headmaster, Mr Holland, knew him, and sent me to Eric Newton to show him my work and I took a folder with my work to Newton and he was so condescending and patronising that I decided not to visit him again, but I took his criticism to heart and I destroyed the pictures’. Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 36.

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world of the magic’, Murdoch stated to John Haffenden in 1983.44 For Murdoch, who reflected more fully and deliberately on the use of myth than Weinberger did, this process of dismantling and recreating myths may have been a reaction against the modernist practice of using myth to control the chaos and futility of modern life.45 The myths of Punch, a grotesque, anti-authoritarian, and controversial figure rooted in the seventeenth-­century Commedia dell’Arte character Pulcinella, and of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late fourteenth-century chivalric romance, are of central significance to the work of Weinberger and Murdoch, respectively. Weinberger’s delight in the mythological form of Punch bears out Murdoch’s claim to William Slaymaker in 1985 that although ‘art is a great place of illusion and magic’ it can also be ‘a place of liberation’.46 His imperfect attraction to and dependence on form echoes Gawain’s message that human fallibility is a necessary part of moral growth, which Murdoch seems to come to accept in The Green Knight. The roguish, rebellious figure of Punch pervades Weinberger’s oeuvre: springing energetically skywards, launching boldly into free-fall, or dreamily drifting in more pensive mood. A model of Punch was ever-present in Weinberger’s studio, and images of Punch proliferated still more frequently in the paintings of Weinberger’s later years. Weinberger utilised this continually transforming mythological form to interrogate and mediate his connection to his sometimes antagonistic surroundings. Punch is part of Weinberger, his alter ego, presenting a visual statement of his consciousness of the theatricality of the role of artist, and also of his anarchic streak which caused him to be often at odds with orthodox artistic practices of his time. Flying Punch [1981] (Fig. 6.5) was the keystone of Weinberger’s 1983 exhibition and adorns the cover of the exhibition catalogue which

 John Haffenden, Haffenden, p. 134.  The mythical structure which James Joyce gave to Ulysses, for example, is described by T.S. Eliot as, ‘simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history […] It is […] a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward […] order and form’. Ulysses, Order, and Myth, in Selected Prose of T.  S. Eliot, ed. by Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). 46  William Slaymaker, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of  Fiction: Conversations with  Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 139–147, hereafter Slaymaker, p. 142. 44 45

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Fig. 6.5  Harry Weinberger, Flying Punch, [1981], private collection

contains an introduction written by Murdoch.47 She knew this painting well, and her letters reveal that she was intrigued and stimulated by his 47  Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings, 26 March–24 April 1983, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry.

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interpretations of the Punch myth. ‘I hope the Flying Punch flies well’, she wrote to him in March 1981, and, a few months later: ‘The Flying Punch— how bewitching and strange and inspiring and happy’.48 In February 1983, she described the poster of Flying Punch which advertised the 1983 exhibition as ‘wonderful’ and reiterated, ‘I love that picture’.49 Murdoch’s musings on Weinberger’s Punch imagery appear to filter into The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), when Pearl Scotney, reflecting on her employer, the philosopher John Robert Rozanov, thinks: ‘His big head and big hooked nose made him look like a vast puppet in a carnival. His movements were graceless and clumsy’ (PP, p. 257). Rozanov is in some ways an alter ego for Murdoch, and this description of him may indicate Murdoch’s awareness of herself as a performer. The loosely jointed, flailing limbs of the Flying Punch propel him swiftly forwards and upwards. The bold, flat colours make Punch’s shape seem insubstantial and two-dimensional, but a strong impression of lively, spontaneous movement is nevertheless created. Nicholas Watkins, in his introduction to Weinberger’s exhibition catalogue, comments: The impudent puppet looks as though he was caught sitting in the artist’s studio armchair and left swinging slightly malevolently above it. The semi-­ autonomous colour areas function, to a remarkable degree, as constructional elements, creating the ambiguous, yet wholly convincing, illusion of pictorial depth and movement, as well as the decorative effect, and mood.50

The unusual perspective gives the viewer the impression of being positioned on the same level with Punch, looking down on what appear to be a domestic wooden armchair, fireplace, and multi-coloured tiled floor below. But Punch does not look down; he is leaving the scene behind, intent on his forward progress. In this, as in most of the paintings of him, Punch does not make eye contact with the viewer. He is wholly engrossed by something beyond the confines of the painting, on which his gaze is set. A contrast is therefore created with Weinberger’s other paintings of

48  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 13 March 1981, KUAS80/10/4; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 3 November 1981, KUAS80/7/22, Iris Murdoch Collections. 49  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 26 February 1983, KUAS80/2/65, Iris Murdoch Collections. 50  Nicholas Watkins, 1983CI, np.

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masks which gaze provocatively forwards, challenging all observers, including the artist himself, to pierce the mask’s veil. The Punch paintings are amongst Weinberger’s most secretive, private, and personal imaginings. He kept some of them on display in his home where he could contemplate them constantly and allow their meaning to work on his consciousness, assisting his ongoing process of self-definition. As well as revealing facets of Weinberger’s identity, the Punch mask also acts as a shield, concealing him behind its foregrounded illusion in an imaginative experimental space where he can enjoy and embellish his disguise, indulge in his attraction to the magic of form and toy with fantasies of escape and invincibility. Murdoch empathised with Weinberger’s desire to seek imaginative release in myth. She wrote to him in June 1988, ‘I understand about “reality” too I think & how taking leave of it gives you strength!’51 Punch’s glassy stare is, however, a discomforting reminder of form’s power to entrance those who fall under its spell. In The Green Knight Murdoch provides an example of how a mythological form can distort reality. The dream which Moy Anderson weaves around her beloved painting of the Polish Rider increasingly obscures her vision and locks her into a single, dangerously reductive interpretation of the painting which also falsifies her perception of her own reality: her worship of the Rider increases in accordance with her vilification of herself. Moy thinks: He is courage, he is love, he loves what is good, and will die for it, and his body will be trampled by horses’ hooves, and no-one will know his grave. […] he is so beautiful, he has the beauty of goodness. I am a freak, a crippled animal, something which will be put down and out of its misery, I am a hump-backed dwarf. (GK, p. 386)

It is ironic that Moy lapses into such distorted, masochistic thinking, given her earlier determination to ‘make no more masks’ (GK, p. 202). Moy’s mythological construct is crystallising and causing her harm, but by contrast Weinberger continually reinvents the Punch myth, never permitting its form to dominate and overwhelm his underlying grasp of reality. His many imaginative reinterpretations of Punch disclose that his complex inner reality behind the mask remains fluid, in mutual interaction with the world beyond, mediated by the mask which both conceals and reveals 51  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 June 1988, KUAS80/1/35, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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him. Unlike the inert masks of Murdoch’s passeggiata, and the crystallising layers of myth with which Moy veils the Polish Rider, the mythological Punch mask is persistently evolving in Weinberger’s mind and seeping back into life, and therefore form is in continual dynamic process. Weinberger’s profound empathy with Punch is illuminated by two quotations from Picasso which he includes in his notes for a lecture titled ‘Art as a Subversive Activity’. The first is Picasso’s observation: Today, as you know I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself as an artist, in the great and ancient sense of the term  – Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were great painters – I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and has exhausted as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear but it has the merit of being sincere.52

Picasso’s admission that by comparison with the accomplishments of artistic geniuses of the past, his own art merely exploits fashionable tastes to please his audience, evidently struck a chord with Weinberger, who suggests in Russian Icons (1974) that: ‘In our highly sophisticated, industrial society the role of the artist has frequently been reduced to that of an entertainer’.53 However, Weinberger’s numerous dynamic, exuberant images of Punch, the mask in action, imply that he was himself able to embrace the role of ‘entertainer’ and to delight in the freedom and consolation with which this constructed character provided him. Weinberger also quotes in ‘Art as a Subversive Activity’ Picasso’s claim, ‘Art is subversive. It should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order’. Weinberger acknowledges: ‘I cannot better his statement’.54 ‘Art as a Subversive Activity’ contends that genuinely subversive art is created when the artist strives to ensure fidelity to the original idea arising in the mind, rather than yielding to the expectations of contemporary trends. Weinberger often expressed his concerns about students who were being conditioned to function within the fashionable idioms of conceptual art, and he continued to emphasise the importance of teaching painting and drawing skills, 52  Harry Weinberger, ‘Art as a Subversive Activity’ (unpublished lecture notes, undated), hereafter ‘Subversive Activity’, np. 53  Harry Weinberger, Russian Icons, p. 1. 54  Harry Weinberger, ‘Subversive Activity’, np.

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of learning from the great art of the past, and of valuing substance over style. Sharp debates ensued at Weinberger’s place of work, Lanchester Polytechnic. ‘[S]ome of my colleagues became very agitated and hostile to my ideas, but I believed in arguing them through’, he recollected.55 In this heated environment, Weinberger’s Punch-like traits of combativeness and recklessness came to the fore, as survival strategies, and manifest themselves in his paintings. In Falling Punch (Fig. 6.6), Punch flings himself from a cliff, about to plunge head-first into a murky sea, with storm clouds gathering overhead. In Striding Punch (Fig. 6.7) he leaps vigorously forwards through darkness into what appear to be flames. Weinberger’s strong views legitimated Murdoch’s concerns about the contemporary art scene. Her letters to him show that he confided in her and that she leapt warmly and sympathetically to his defence. The energetic dissident Punch enacts Weinberger’s sense of himself as the rebel who courted controversy by his determination, at a time when the avant-­ garde was becoming mainstream, to prevent art students’ visions from being restricted by allegiance to a single school of thought. ‘The biggest danger […] is conformity’, he stated.56 Despite Murdoch’s enduring support, Weinberger’s numerous images of Punch may also be, in part, his rueful acknowledgement that others perceived him as a figure of fun, out of step with the times. The Punch mask had, to some extent, been imposed upon Weinberger, although exaggerating the performance of this mask allowed him to break free of stereotyping and redefine himself on his own terms. Murdoch, too, was aware that she seemed at odds with the experimentation of her contemporaries, even archaic in her championing of the realism of nineteenth-century authors.57 Nevertheless, both artists’ testing of the boundaries of aesthetic form makes their work immensely relevant to ongoing critical debate about representation of reality and so encourages revision and reconstruction of their customary masks. Punch is a version of the trickster archetype, and the trickster is a metaphor for the gradual, painful progression of humanity’s movement from  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 106.  Harry Weinberger, ‘Subversive Activity’, np. 57  Harold Bloom, reviewing The Good Apprentice (1985), states that this novel is written in ‘the incongruous form of the 19th-century realistic novel’ and that Murdoch’s ‘archaic stance as an authorial will’ is in the ‘explicitly moral tradition’ of George Eliot, though he considers it to be less effective. ‘A Comedy of Worldly Salvation’, New York Times, 12 January 1986 [accessed 23 June 2020]. 55 56

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Fig. 6.6  Harry Weinberger, Falling Punch, [1980s/1990s], private collection

unconscious to conscious self-knowledge. This progression is, inevitably, imperfect and incomplete. Weinberger’s assumption of the Punch mask, imbued with magic and fantasy, is an implicit recognition of his fallibility. He is necessarily dependent on the mask, obsessively reconstructed,

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Fig. 6.7  Harry Weinberger, Striding Punch, [1990s], private collection

refined, and regenerated by him. This imperfect dependence on form does not cause Weinberger to despair, as it did, at times, Murdoch; instead, it is willingly accepted, as a vital component of his unending quest to achieve a lucid vision of himself and his relation to the world. Weinberger’s paradoxical awareness of the need to accept imperfection coupled with the moral obligation to continue simultaneously to strive for perfection also imbues the medieval myth which hovers under the surface of The Green Knight. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as Priscilla Martin has noted, ‘conducts through the dangerous world of magic a sensitive moral enquiry’.58 Murdoch finds inspiration in the mythic form of Gawain, much as Weinberger does with the mythic form of Punch. In July 1976 Murdoch was asked by the British Council to list the literary works which had influenced her. She selected twelve works, including

58  Priscilla Martin, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Iris Murdoch Newsletter 9 (1995), 11-12 (11).

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Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.59 Murdoch had pondered the Gawain myth since the age of 16, struggling to find a way to integrate it into a novel and finally achieved her aim in The Green Knight which freely draws on its characters, colours, plot, and structure.60 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian legend by an unknown author, tells the story of a mysterious Knight who challenges Sir Gawain to cut off his head, on condition that Sir Gawain meet him in a year’s time for a return match. Sir Gawain cuts off the Knight’s head but the Knight picks up the head and departs. A year later, Sir Gawain embarks on his quest to meet the Knight and on his way to their meeting-place is tempted by the Lady Bertilak who gives him a green girdle to wear. Sir Gawain kneels in front of the knight, assuming that he will be killed, but receives only a small wound. The Knight sheds his disguise to reveal himself as the Lady Bertilak’s husband. Sir Gawain is called courageous, yet morally deficient because he allowed himself to be tempted by the Lady, and he initially wears the green girdle as a sign of his shame at having given way. The Knights of the Round Table, however, absolve him from blame and adopt the green girdle themselves as a sign of solidarity with him. In Peter’s quest to seek out Lucas, the re-enactment of the attack, the slight wound which Lucas receives and the adversaries’ apparent reconciliation, there are evident parallels to the myth, but Murdoch does not permit a straightforward mapping of one text onto the other. Instead, as Clement realises, ‘Pieces of the story are there, but aren’t they somehow jumbled up and all the wrong way round? […] It isn’t really like the poem, yet it is too, and it is something much more terrible’ (GK, p. 431). When Clement attempts to mask the events of the novel with the form of the Gawain myth, he begins to perceive a little more of the truth to which the myth is directing his attention. Nevertheless, he realises that he cannot rely upon the myth to provide a single unified interpretation of what has taken place and must instead undertake the never-ending task of scrutinising details of both the myth 59  Valerie Purton, Chronology, p.  138. Murdoch’s draft list reads: ‘Iliad, Symposium, Tempest, Gawain, Mansfield Park, Wuthering Heights, Our Mutual Friend, The Golden Bowl, Fear and Trembling, L’Attente de Dieu, Brothers Karamazov. Proust?’ 60  Murdoch wrote to Denis Paul, a colour theorist, philosopher, and teacher, regarding The Green Knight: ‘I’m glad you like the Celtic end of the novel. Actually I didn’t need John [Bayley] to tell me about Sir Gawain – I knew all about that poem when I was about 16 at school. I’d been brooding on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ever since, but never somehow found a way of “setting them up” in my own story’. Undated [1993], KUAS58/1/4/30, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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and his situation in order to try to refine his perception. With each fresh refocusing of attention, the mythic form regenerates; its life and dynamism are never stilled. The colours which underpin Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also shape the form of The Green Knight and thereby enhance its moral impact. In Murdoch’s novels, primary colours are integral to renewal of vision. An example is to be found in The Unicorn (1963), when Effingham Cooper, having just escaped death by drowning in a bog, experiences a momentary unselfing which revitalises his perception of his surroundings. He tells his rescuer, Denis Nolan, ‘“How beautiful the bog looks in the sun. So many colours, reds and blues and yellows. I never knew it had so many colours”’.61 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is structured by the patterning of the primary colour red and secondary colour green. The green girdle of the Gawain myth, which supercedes Gawain’s earlier symbol of perfection, his red shield emblazoned with a red-gold pentangle, is converted by the loving gaze of the Knights of the Round Table into a symbol of imperfection and joyously accepted by them as a necessary part of the human condition. The poem ends with all of the knights volunteering to wear the green girdle, thus becoming Green Knights themselves. Likewise, no single character in the novel can conclusively be identified as the Green Knight; he is dissolved amongst every character, as everyone is shown to be imperfect. The colour green can be found everywhere: not only in Peter Mir’s green suit and umbrella, but also in the clothes of other characters, in furnishings, in parks, in the décor of pubs. The novel’s exuberant profusion of greens implies that Murdoch is finally coming to terms with her own imperfection. Although red, the colour of Gawain’s pentangle, is barely present in The Green Knight, it has not vanished completely. Flashes of red provide intuitions of transcendence and imply that Murdoch’s faith in an unchanging absolute standard of perfection remained intact, despite being severely tested. Red and green are hardly ever paired, either by Murdoch or by the unknown Gawain-poet. Just occasionally, these two colours are brought together, though the pairing is only momentary. For example, near the close of the novel, when Sefton and Harvey announce their intention to marry, the reader’s attention is directed to the colours of their clothes. Harvey wears ‘a red and green tie’, and Sefton wears ‘a dark green dress […] pulled in at her waist by a red belt’ and has ‘abundant 61  Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as TU, p. 201.

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reddish brown hair’ and ‘green hazel eyes’ (GK, p.  444). This fleeting connection of red and green may signal to the reader that human love, necessarily imperfect, points the way beyond itself to perfection. On 10 October 1988, as she started to plan The Green Knight, Murdoch had written in her journal: ‘“Everything deep loves a mask”. Novel, my next novel, must fight back against philosophy’ (Journal 14, p. 98).62 In The Green Knight she fights back against what she perceives as the moral dangers of structuralism. In doing so, she revives her faith in a perfect standard, and to some extent comes to accept her attraction to form, recognising it as an intrinsic part of human imperfection, in part due to Weinberger’s example. Her courageous interrogation of her notion of absolute reality beyond form results in renewed acceptance of the inevitable failings of all humanity engaged on the lifelong quest to perceive this reality. This acceptance is echoed in Clement’s late realisation, as he struggles to connect the myth with his own reality, ‘I shall go on blindly and secretly jumbling these things together and making no sense of them as long as I live. Maybe every human creature carries some such inescapable burden. That is being human. A very weird affair’ (GK, p.  456). The mythic form of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight provides Murdoch with a mask which mediates truths about the human condition—imperfect, yet magnetically impelled towards a perfect standard—which cannot be expressed except indirectly. By so doing, the myth renews her faith (described to Slaymaker in 1985) in the possibility of ‘liberation through art’, which Weinberger’s Punch paintings illustrate.63 Murdoch’s remarks in two letters of 1993, regarding a mask which Weinberger had sent her, suggest that his gift was helping her to embrace the potential for truth inherent in the image of the mask: ‘And the mask—we love it, John loves it, it is full of mystery and of a good mysticism. Thank you’, she wrote in March, and a few weeks later: ‘Your wonderful wise strange mask looks at me, and I revere him! Thank you so much’.64 Form, embodied in the image of the mask, proves to be an imaginative, truth-revealing resource, not merely a constraint, for both Murdoch and for Weinberger.

 The quotation is from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.  William Slaymaker, Slaymaker, p. 142. 64  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked March 1993, KUAS80/1/2; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, dated 7 June, postmarked 1993, KUAS80/1/97, Iris Murdoch Collections. 62 63

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References Bayley, Audi. 2019. Relaxing with Iris and John. In Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Miles Leeson, 93-97. Devizes: Sabrestorm. Bayley, John. 1998. Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. London: Duckworth. Bellamy, Michael O. 2003 (1977). An Interview with Iris Murdoch. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 44-55. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Bloom, Harold. 1986. A Comedy of Worldly Salvation. New York Times, 12 January. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/ 20/specials/murdoch-­apprentice.html. Accessed 23 June 2020. Conradi, Peter J. 1986. Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist. London: Macmillan. Courtney, Cathy. 1995. Harry Weinberger interviewed by Cathy Courtney. British Library: Artists' Lives. Eliot, T. S. 1975 (1923). Ulysses, Order, and Myth. In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber & Faber. Gardner, Julian. 1996. Harry Weinberger. London: Duncan Campbell Gallery. Gardner, Julian. 2009. Harry Weinberger: Émigré painter whose work was partly inspired by his love of masks and icons. Independent, 2 December. . Accessed 1 December 2015. Haffenden, John. 2003 (1983). John Haffenden Talks to Iris Murdoch. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 124-138. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Kermode, Frank. 2003 (1962). Interview from The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 9-13. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Kustow, Michael. 1992. Boundary Breaker and Moral Maker. Guardian, 8 October. Martin, Priscilla. 1995. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Iris Murdoch Newsletter, 9: 11-12. Meyers, Jeffrey. 2003 (1990). Two Interviews with Iris Murdoch. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 218-234. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1952). Nostalgia for the Particular. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 43-58. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1953. Sartre, Romantic Rationalist. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1959). The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 261-286. London: Penguin.

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Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1961). Against Dryness. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J.  Conradi, 287-295. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1963. The Unicorn. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1970). Existentialists and Mystics. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 221-234. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1972). Salvation by Words. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J.  Conradi, 235-252. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1977). The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 386-463. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1999 (1978). Art is the Imitation of Nature. In Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi, 243-257. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1983. The Philosopher’s Pupil. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, Iris. 1993 (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Penguin. Murdoch, Iris. 1993. The Green Knight. London: Chatto & Windus. Nicol, Bran. 2004. Iris Murdoch: The Retrospective Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Purton, Valerie. 2007. An Iris Murdoch Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rowe, Anne. 2002. The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Rowe, Anne. 2018. “The Best Moralists are the Most Satanic”: Iris Murdoch – On Art and Life. In Murdoch on Truth and Love, ed. Gary Browning, 21-42. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Slaymaker, William. 2003 (1985). An Interview with Iris Murdoch. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 139-147. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Spear, Hilda D. 2006. Iris Murdoch. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spice, Nicholas. 1993. I hear, I see, I learn. London Review of Books, 4 November: 25-26. Todd, Richard. 2003 (1988). Discussions from Encounters with Iris Murdoch. In From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 167-193. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Watkins, Nicholas, and Iris Murdoch. 1983. Harry Weinberger: Paintings and Drawings. Coventry: Herbert Art Gallery. White, Frances. 2019. “This rough magic I here abjure”: Theatricality in The Green Knight. Iris Murdoch Review, 10: 31-41.

CHAPTER 7

‘More than a Likeness’: The Ethics of Portraiture

Portraying Otherness Iris Murdoch’s endeavours to contemplate and convey the uniqueness of individual lives were energised by her engagement with Harry Weinberger’s thoughts on the subject of portraiture. Weinberger was adamant that a portrait should be ‘more than a likeness’.1 Though he found portraiture challenging, the act of painting a portrait was for him a way of seeking out the inner life of another being and of enhancing his understanding of his relationship to an existence separate from yet connected to himself. Like Weinberger’s portraits, Murdoch’s novels attempt to cross the boundary separating artist and subject, striving to perceive and portray the other truthfully whilst simultaneously accepting the ultimate impossibility of this quest. In The Sandcastle (1957) and A Severed Head (1961) Murdoch explores the ethics of portraiture most directly, testing its potential to sustain the concepts which she sets out in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959) and ‘Against Dryness’ (1961). Although these novels were written years before Murdoch and Weinberger met, her interrogations of portraiture in them closely connect with the ideas which Weinberger

1

 Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 116.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. Moden, Iris Murdoch and Harry Weinberger, Iris Murdoch Today, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17945-7_7

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works out in his artistic practice. Weinberger can be understood as enacting the views of the artist Rain Carter and the art teacher Bledyard in The Sandcastle. Their respect for the essential difference of individuals and their resulting acceptance of the inevitable imperfection of any portrait contrast sharply with the rapacious headhunting of the sculptor Alexander Lynch-Gibbon in A Severed Head. The Sea, The Sea (1978) reflects on the question of how to perceive and render with accuracy the separate identity of another person. Murdoch’s incorporation into The Sea, The Sea of the image of a disembodied head, lingering on the edge of articulated thought, indicates her sense of the inadequacy of verbal and even visual forms to convey another person’s reality and is intricately connected with her meditations on portraiture and her conversations about it with Weinberger. In particular, Weinberger’s numerous attempts to portray his wife Barbara seem to have filtered into Murdoch’s consciousness and blended into her construction of this obscure image. Its meaning can now be expanded in the light of their discourse. Weinberger’s hitherto little-known portraits of Murdoch, thought to date from the early 1990s (Figs. 7.1 and 7.2), illuminate ways in which her identity has been constructed by herself and others. Analysis of these portraits, and Murdoch’s equivocal attitude to them, enlarges critical understanding of her belief, shared with Weinberger, that imaginative attention can create a more realistic and truthful likeness than mimesis. When juxtaposed with the most celebrated image of her—the near-contemporary portrait by Tom Phillips, warmly praised by Murdoch—Weinberger’s visual representations of Murdoch are cast into relief, enlarging understanding of how Weinberger captured a less familiar aspect of Murdoch’s being. In the later stages of their careers, both Weinberger and Murdoch moved beyond exploration of representation of individuals towards the representation of ideal concepts and, in so doing, they enlarged the capabilities of portraiture. Saint George, who is traditionally perceived as an epitome of courage and of the triumph of good over evil, was a source of mutual fascination for both artists. Weinberger gave Murdoch his portrait of Saint George, Icon (1981–1982) (Fig. 7.7). The Green Knight (1993) is a meditation on the ideal concepts of courage and goodness: Icon animated, in this novel, Murdoch’s troubled reflections on the highly equivocal figure of Saint George and also her meditations on Rembrandt’s Polish Rider.

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Fig. 7.1  Harry Weinberger, Portrait of Iris Murdoch, [1991], Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

Icon and The Green Knight each reveal how Weinberger and Murdoch move beyond conventional imagery of Saint George in an intertextual, cross-referential system of meaning which adds to the depth and texture of their work. In their shared quest to find images sufficiently universal to carry the weight of ideal concepts, each artist fashions an alternative icon, depersonalised, demythologised, simultaneously connected to and separate from Saint George.

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Fig. 7.2  Harry Weinberger, Portrait of Iris Murdoch, [1993], Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

‘I Don’t Think of Myself as Existing Much, Somehow’ Weinberger’s portraits of Murdoch renew and realign critics’ perceptions of Murdoch’s identity and also shed light on Murdoch’s concerns about becoming, herself, a work of art. Although Murdoch was a skilful creator of fictional portraits, into which she blended aspects of the personalities of her friends and acquaintances, she was ever-conscious of the moral dangers of turning life into art. As her fame grew, she increasingly became the object of artists’ attention, but she had reservations about having her image captured and fixed in portraits and the loss of control which this entailed. Peter J. Conradi contends that Murdoch thought of herself as someone with ‘no memory, no continuity, no identity’, and that Murdoch’s

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life was ‘other-centred to the degree that she lost much sense, in the service of her conjecture about the Good, of who she was’.2 Conradi’s benevolent though somewhat unconvincing view equates Murdoch’s apparent formlessness with that of the good characters in her novels, who remain elusive despite the attempts of other characters to classify and thereby reduce them.3 It may be that Murdoch’s protestations of having ‘no identity’ were, at least in part, an attempt to mystify her public identity, so that its crystallisation into a single static image could be prevented. In a 1976 interview with Simon Blow, in relation to her public image, she said, ‘I haven’t got, in that sense, very much feeling of identity. Obviously I do have an image, but I’d rather not have one, and I don’t feel that I have one’.4 She reiterated in 1989 that ‘I don’t think of myself as existing much, somehow’.5 Murdoch’s friend Honor Tracy remarked: ‘She is so very famous… perhaps she feels that, wherever she goes, a kind of other imaginary distorted self has got there ahead of her and put obstacles in her way’.6 Murdoch was adept at constructing, and maintaining simultaneously, many personas in both private and public life. John Bayley recalls that near the beginning of their relationship Murdoch compared herself to the shape-shifting mythological character Proteus: ‘It was in response to my despairing comment that I couldn’t understand her, or the different person she became for the many others with whom she seemed, in my view, helplessly entangled. “Remember Proteus”, she used to say. “Just keep tight hold of me and it will be all right”’.7 The equanimity of her response contrasts markedly with Bayley’s anguish. Tom Phillips recalls how, on the occasion of their last meeting in the late 1990s, Murdoch told him, ‘Of course I know you, you are in a famous painting… in a portrait’.8 Her reversal of the roles of artist and sitter indicates the confusion brought about by Alzheimer’s disease, but it also signals her enduring preference for the role of scrutiniser, rather than that of the scrutinised. Though Murdoch strove in her lifetime to maintain control of her image, she could not, finally, achieve this. Her image has been fragmented amongst a  Peter J. Conradi, Life, xxiii.  Examples of ‘good’ characters include Ann Peronett in An Unofficial Rose (1962), Tallis Browne in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), and Stuart Cuno in The Good Apprentice (1985). 4  Simon Blow, Blow, 24. 5  Nigel Williams, ‘A Certain Lady’, Bookmark, BBC, 29 December 1989. 6  Honor Tracy to Sister Marian, quoted in Life, p. 570. 7  John Bayley, Iris, pp. 40–41. 8  Tom Phillips, ‘Painting Iris Murdoch’, p. 86. 2 3

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multitude of works of art, each one a mask which both conceals and reveals some truth about her. The relationship between sitter, artist, and beholder is interactive: she continues to gaze back from her portraits, challenging our powers of perception. Weinberger’s portraits contribute a new dimension to the multi-faceted picture of Murdoch which is composed of diverse and burgeoning representations in biography, in film, and in the visual arts. Examples include Bayley’s trilogy of memoirs (1998, 1999, 2001) which focuses our attention on Murdoch as a victim of Alzheimer’s disease and is emotional, sincere, and poignant, although at times it confusingly veers into Bayley’s own fantasies. Richard Eyre’s 2001 film Iris, based on the first of Bayley’s memoirs, has further skewed public perceptions of Murdoch by perpetuating for popular consumption two simplified, exaggerated, and polarised images of Murdoch: the young, passionate student and the tortured Alzheimer’s sufferer, which some journalism of the late 1990s and 2000s voraciously exploited and further distorted.9 Conradi’s comprehensive authorised biography of Murdoch, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001) presents a far more nuanced portrait of Murdoch. It provides extensive critical interpretation of Murdoch’s novels and philosophy, reverently depicts Murdoch as a formidably gifted intellectual, and tactfully explores the complexities of her emotional and sexual life.10 A. N. Wilson’s mischievous, sometimes scurrilous Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (2004) was written in reaction to the trilogy and film, which had ‘taken us away from reality’, and also to Conradi’s biography, being ‘deliberately not a hagiography’.11 Paintings of Murdoch include Elinor Tolley’s Adam and Eve (Retired) (1999), a ­candid, witty portrait, owned by Murdoch, of Murdoch and Bayley seated

9  John Bayley, Iris; Iris and the Friends (London: Duckworth, 1999); Widower’s House (London: Duckworth, 2001); Iris, dir. by Richard Eyre (Miramax, 2001). See, for example, Chris Hastings, ‘Murdoch lust stayed strong despite Alzheimer’s’, Telegraph, 1 July 2007 [accessed 16 May 2020]. 10  Pamela Osborn observes Conradi’s idealisation of Murdoch and states that ‘Conradi’s biography inadvertently captures the essence of his denial of Murdoch’s death’. ‘“Art Cannot But Console for What it Weeps Over”: The Art of Mourning in Iris Murdoch’s Novels’ (doctoral thesis, Kingston University, 2013), p. 233. 11  A. N. Wilson, As I Knew Her, p. 10; Miles Leeson, ‘Iris Murdoch as I didn’t know her: A. N. Wilson in conversation with Miles Leeson’, in Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration, ed. by Miles Leeson (Devizes: Sabrestorm, 2019), pp. 105–121, hereafter ‘Wilson Leeson’ (p. 109).

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in an overgrown garden.12 With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch (2010), David Morgan’s collection of fragments of intimate conversations with Murdoch vividly conveys his perceptions of their erotically charged relationship. Becoming Iris Murdoch (2014), Frances White’s biography of the early years of Murdoch’s life, foregrounds the doubts and uncertainties which Murdoch experienced as she began to develop as a writer and thinker. Most recently, the range of recollections by Murdoch’s friends, colleagues, students, and professional contacts in Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019), edited by Miles Leeson, casts fresh light on what she was like in private. Nevertheless, Murdoch’s complexity and essential mystery is repeatedly insisted on: Wilson describes her as ‘an instinctively inward, private person’, and reflects, fifteen years after writing his memoir, that ‘I did know her on one level quite well and on another level I didn’t know her at all’.13 Morgan similarly comments that writing With Love and Rage caused him to begin to see Murdoch from lots of new angles, some of them surprising, some even outrageous, and some perhaps even imagined. That simple Janus figure that I had started with – Iris loving, Iris angry – split into many Irises: angry, compassionate, chaste, vain, voyeuristic, frightening, comic, silly and finally (heartbreakingly) at the end, even monstrous.14

Janet Stone, wife of the engraver Reynolds Stone, and close friend of the Bayleys, photographed them both on numerous occasions. Stone’s photographs of Murdoch may reveal her at her most casual and unguarded, but even Stone’s images were subject to an element of control: Bayley staged some of the compositions, and the help and encouragement which Murdoch gave to Stone in order to bring her collection Thinking Faces (1988) to publication, including her contribution of its foreword, indicate her wish to manage the way she was perceived. Each biographer, director, and painter creates his or her own portrait of Murdoch in an attempt to capture and preserve the essence of her selfhood and so contributes to the unending process of uncovering a little more of Murdoch’s reality. The many versions of Murdoch are masks which simultaneously shield and reveal different facets of her being. They 12  Elinor Tolley, Adam and Eve (Retired), 1999, KUAS202/12/3, Iris Murdoch Collections. 13  Miles Leeson, ‘Wilson Leeson’, p. 106. 14  David Morgan, With Love and Rage, p. 3.

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conflict with and contradict each other, resisting conflation into a single coherent, knowable identity, validating Murdoch’s observation that the reality of the individual is ultimately unfathomable: ‘human lives are essentially not to be summed up’, she stated, ‘but to be known, as they are lived, in many curious partial and inarticulate ways’.15 A visual image, which captures one aspect of the sitter’s identity and stills it for contemplation, can perhaps reveal truth more directly and viscerally than any written account. Yet the visual image must be regarded with sufficient attention. Conradi recalls that a viewer of one of the Weinberger portraits at an exhibition held shortly after the release of Eyre’s film carelessly summarised it by the comment ‘that’s that writer who went mad’, distorting Weinberger’s portrait by overlaying it with the portrait of Murdoch in the film.16 Weinberger’s portraits of Murdoch merit sustained critical scrutiny on their own terms. They renew attention to Murdoch by presenting Weinberger’s unique, intimate, and loving vision of her, transformed into a work of art which is, inevitably, also a portrait of the artist.

‘Imagination Is Best!’ Weinberger’s portraits of Murdoch have not, thus far, been the focus of any sustained critical scrutiny. The portraits were not included in any exhibitions of Weinberger’s work until after Murdoch’s death, as a result, possibly, of Weinberger’s doubts as to whether Murdoch approved of them. He stated to Cathy Courtney in 1995 that he ‘did some drawings of Iris, I don’t think she liked them very much’.17 His misgivings seem surprising, given that Murdoch’s letters so frequently express admiration for Weinberger’s artistic talent, and they may have been the result of his natural modesty or lack of self-belief. However, their correspondence suggests that Murdoch was ambivalent about sitting for Weinberger, and also that she was not entirely comfortable with the results of the sittings. Weinberger repeatedly asked Murdoch to sit for him. In August 1979 she wrote, with apparent enthusiasm, ‘yes I should be very pleased for you to draw me one

 Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, 20 January 1943, quoted in Writer at War, p. 200.  Peter J.  Conradi, Writer at War, p.  10. The portrait referred to is understood to be Figure  7.1, exhibited in the show Harry Weinberger, Duncan Campbell Gallery, 1–24 November 2000. 17  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 115. 15 16

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day, subject to the usual time and space problems!’18 A letter of October 1979 remarked, with a little more reticence, ‘I would be very pleased for you to draw me—but when & where remains difficult. We’ll see’.19 A sitting did not in fact take place until many years later. Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger, addressed from her final home in Charlbury Road, indicate that the portraits were not created until the early 1990s—and this supposition is borne out by her mature appearance in the portraits. By this time, Weinberger was producing fewer portraits of family and friends, but he was evidently still eager to seize the long-anticipated chance to draw Murdoch. For both portraits, Weinberger sketched Murdoch’s head in Indian ink and then added shading with crayons. In the first image (Fig.  7.1) she faces the artist, her expression mild and abstracted, almost but not quite meeting his observing eye. Delicate hues of blue, grey, and green dominate the image; the face is lighted with accents of pink and gold which create softness and warmth. The second image (Fig.  7.2), which seems because of Murdoch’s different hairstyle to have been produced slightly later, has been more firmly delineated, and the colours have been applied more vigorously. The application of pinks and golds animates her face, though her expression remains gentle and benign. Both portraits are notable for their economy of line and colour and are similar in the way that both draw attention to Murdoch’s characteristic gaze, which appears to look through or beyond the viewer, resisting scrutiny. Weinberger’s method of painting, heavily influenced by his tutor Martin Bloch, and by his study of the practice of Russian iconographers of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, required disciplined outward-directed attention. Murdoch said to Weinberger that painting was ‘like prayer’ and this definition resonated deeply with him, seeming to encapsulate the sustained attempt to see another clearly which is motivated by love, diminishes the ego, and moves the perceiver closer to truth.20 Weinberger would firstly spend much time contemplating a subject in an effort to impress it upon his mind. Once the subject was no longer before him, he would embark on the creation of an image from memory, which he would then 18  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, dated 18 August, postmarked 1979, KUAS80/2/90, Iris Murdoch Collections. 19  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 30 October 1979, KUAS80/2/34, Iris Murdoch Collections. 20  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 27.

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reconsider at the next sitting, comparing what he had recollected with what was actually there. The resulting work was a dynamic fusion of memory and imagination, which Weinberger described as ‘pure painting’.21 Judith Bumpas notes in her catalogue introduction to an exhibition of Weinberger’s work at the Duncan Campbell Gallery in November 2000, which included Fig. 7.1, that: Harry Weinberger made several portrait drawings of Dame Iris Murdoch. She hated sitting still, and he must have drawn as much from his store of memories as from direct observation of her lively presence. In this rapid sketch, done at his home in pen and ink and wax crayon, he captures the modesty and warmth of her infinitely charitable personality with remarkable freshness.22

Figure 7.1 featured prominently in this exhibition, which implies that the importance of Weinberger’s friendship with Murdoch was by the turn of the century increasingly being recognised, as well as the aesthetic merit of the portrait itself. Bumpas draws attention to Weinberger’s decision to render Murdoch’s ‘modesty and warmth’, her ‘infinitely charitable personality’; qualities which were foremost in the face which she presented to him. E. H. Gombrich defines the sitter’s dominant expression as ‘the pivot around which all the transformations turn’ and states that it is the artist’s task to find this expression amongst the myriad faces presented by the sitter to the artist and to portray it as faithfully as possible.23 Weinberger chose and arrested these aspects of Murdoch’s identity from the succession of images manifesting before him as he contemplated her constantly changing appearance. Weinberger’s affectionate depictions of Murdoch are tempered by minute observations built up over years of close friendship. Although during the early stages of their acquaintance Weinberger had misjudged Murdoch’s attitude towards him as ‘patronising’, his attention to her was enhanced gradually, imperceptibly, and lovingly by their prolonged reflections on art, their written exchange of ideas, and their discussions in person.24 His  Julian Gardner, in conversation with the author, 15 July 2015.  Judith Bumpas, Harry Weinberger, 1–24 November 2000 (London: Duncan Campbell Gallery, 2000), np. 23  E.H. Gombrich, Julian Hochberg and Max Black, Art, Perception and Reality (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 30. 24  Harry Weinberger, ‘Memoir 1’, p. 15. 21 22

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imagination worked actively and continually to refine his perception of her even when they were apart, exemplifying her definition, in ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason’ (1966), of imagination as a dynamic force: ‘a type of reflection on people, events, etcetera, which builds detail, adds colour, conjures up possibilities in ways which go beyond what could be said to be strictly factual’.25 Weinberger’s vision of Murdoch, progressively shaped by his loving thoughts of her, exemplifies the parable of the mother-in-law (M) and daughter-in-law (D) which Murdoch describes in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1964). M’s vision of D alters as she learns to see D more sympathetically and therefore more rightly via the power of imaginative attention, which is morally active: ‘What M is ex hypothesi attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly […] M’s activity is essentially something progressive, something infinitely perfectible’ (EM, p. 317). By depicting Murdoch as a benevolent, good, and wise friend, Weinberger risks being perceived as what David Morgan calls a ‘shrine-maker’—one who sought to deify her—but this would be an inaccuracy.26 The portrait of Murdoch which emerges from her correspondence with Weinberger closely resembles the images which he has drawn; she is a wise, caring confidante, consistently supportive despite frequent admissions of exhaustion and strain, who stressed to him: ‘Please rely absolutely on my friendship’.27 It must be remembered, of course, that although this was the face which Murdoch constructed for Weinberger, she was capable of constructing several other faces within a single session of letter-writing. She was infinitely complex and ultimately unknowable, but Weinberger’s portraits help to reveal a little more of her reality. His tranquil, platonic portraits of Murdoch contrast sharply with the emotional, erotically charged Murdoch depicted by Morgan, Wilson, and others, and with the intellectual force of Phillips’ portrait, foregrounding a less familiar aspect of her character. Murdoch’s reaction to Weinberger’s portraits of her expands critical understanding of her belief that the artist’s imaginative attention can engender greater truth to reality than mimesis. ‘Thank you very much for the picture of me!’ she wrote to him. ‘It is indeed a liker likeness 25  Iris Murdoch, ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason’, in EM, pp. 193–202, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 198). 26  David Morgan, With Love and Rage, p. 46. 27  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 17 September 1979, KUAS80/2/100, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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(imagination is best!) [….] Thank you for your pictures, Harry, and for one of me!’28 The comment ‘imagination is best’ has been written in parentheses and in the margin of the letter, as if to emphasise to Weinberger her faith in imaginative attention as a path to truth. Murdoch believed that the artist’s disciplined, outward-directed imaginative attention was inherently moral, destroying illusions and pointing the way to freedom. ‘Against Dryness’ makes an explicit call for ‘a new vocabulary of attention’ which will enable the artist to articulate the reality of another person, ‘substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable, and valuable’, with greater truth (EM, p. 293, 294). Weinberger’s imaginative attention revives and repositions Murdoch, guiding the viewer into the same quality of attention in order to recognise the particular truth that he perceives, his vision of her transformed and secured by his art. Murdoch recognises that imagination has the potential to lapse into fantasy. In a 1977 interview with Bryan Magee, she observed, ‘Fantasy is the strong cunning enemy of the discerning intelligent more truly inventive power of the imagination’.29 The Good Apprentice, written after several years of contemplation and discussion of Weinberger’s paintings, provides two examples of portrait-painters whose vision is dangerously occluded by fantasy. The first of these is Jesse Baltram, an enchanter at the centre of a web of illusion, who has conjured up dreamy, erotic images of his daughters Bettina and Ilona instead of trying to see their reality and their need for his support and love. These include Jesse’s painting of ‘a young girl standing with feet apart in a stream, looking at the spectator with a secretive self-satisfied expression, while on the bank a realistically rendered bicycle was lying flat on the grass, and through the spokes of one wheel a large snake was emerging and gazing at the girl’, and another painting ‘representing two adolescent girls with staring pleased eyes and bare small breasts kneeling in a stone recess grown over with damp green plants discovered by a terrified boy’ (GA, pp.  102–103, p. 112). Jesse’s vision is only very occasionally clarified, such as in the ‘beautiful calm not at all sinister drawing of a girl, fully clothed, standing beside an open window. She looked a bit like Ilona’ (GA, p.  183). The second example is Max Point, Jesse’s former lover, who makes increasingly desperate attempts to ­recapture, through portraits of Jesse, their past intimacy; he finds this 28  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated [May 1993?], KUAS80/1/5, Iris Murdoch Collections. 29  Bryan Magee, Magee, p. 11.

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more difficult with the passing of time and retreats into personal fantasy which has the capacity to console, enthral, and torment him. ‘Last picture I painted of him was from a bloody photo, painted him again and again and he got older every time. But he never came back. And now he’s dead’ (GA, p.  354). Rowe suggests that Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger ‘expand the psychology of the painters who appear in the late novels, through whom she refines her criteria for the production of good art and how it can be wrought out of the often corruptive life experiences of the artist’; she contends that Jesse, ‘a man who lives with demons’, can be perceived as Weinberger’s alter ego.30 Both Jesse and Max can be understood as counterpoints to Weinberger, whose mind was at times clouded by pain, but who sought to eliminate this darkness from his art rather than letting it overpower him. ‘So—with demons, you paint cheerful pictures’, Murdoch remarked to him.31 The vision of each artist is a reflection of his own values, generated by what Murdoch terms, in ‘The Darkness of Practical Reason’, ‘the slow delicate processes of imagination and will’ (EM, p. 200). Whereas Jesse and Max lack the moral rigour to cut through illusions conjured up by the mind and therefore produce ‘mediocre art’, which, as Murdoch states in ‘On “God” and “Good”’ (1969), is dominated by ‘the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world’, Weinberger’s sensitive moral compass helped him to employ imaginative attention to reach out towards what is real in his subject.32 Elements of Weinberger’s identity can nonetheless be detected in Jesse and Max, complicating his relationship to the characters and preventing a straightforward juxtaposition. The description of Jesse’s workroom, crammed with ‘toys, dolls, animals, puppets […] ancillary to his imagination and his art’, ‘Australasian and African masks propped against the wall’, and ‘little gaudily painted figures of Indian gods’ (GA, pp. 181–182), seems to have been inspired by Murdoch’s visits to Weinberger’s richly decorated home in Leamington, ‘studded with Ibo masks, Indonesian puppets, Buddhas and Tibetan lions’, which inspired many of his  Anne Rowe, ‘Near the Gods’, 66.  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 8 July 1987, KUAS80/1/14, Iris Murdoch Collections. 32  Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. by Peter J. Conradi (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 337–362, hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as EM (p. 348). 30 31

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paintings.33 Some of Jesse’s paintings, like Weinberger’s, are composed of startlingly intense, glowing patches of colour, and some of his subjects, such as wrestling figures, are Weinberger’s own. The final image of Max Point presents him plunging a knife into one of his paintings (GA, p. 355). This act echoes Weinberger’s destruction of much of his work, but whereas for Weinberger it symbolised his acknowledgement of imperfection and his self-disciplined determination to produce better art, for Max it is an act of self-torture which leads him further into fantasy.34 ‘[C]reative imagination and obsessive fantasy may be very close almost indistinguishable forces’, Murdoch stated in 1977 to Magee.35 The division separating Jesse and Max from Weinberger is a moral division, but it is almost imperceptible, the figure of the artist being precariously positioned on the borderline of illusion and reality.

‘We Feel Our Faces as If They Were Masks’: The Sandcastle and A Severed Head36 The tension generated by the artist’s attempt to render the reality of the sitter’s inner life whilst creating what is, inevitably, also a personal vision wrought from the artist’s imagination, is explored most explicitly by Murdoch in her early novel The Sandcastle. In this novel, a young artist, Rain Carter (who is, according to A. S. Byatt, ‘the nearest Murdoch ever came to a traditional youthful self-portrait’) has been commissioned to paint a portrait of a headmaster, Demoyte.37 Bledyard, the saintly art master whose views are widely ignored or derided by other characters, contends that ‘when we are in the presence of another human being, we are not confronted simply by an object—[…] We are confronted by God’ (TS, p.  71). He believes humans struggle to contemplate each other with  Julian Gardner, ‘Independent obituary’, np.  Weinberger stated that he was ‘embarrassed’ by the paintings he did to pass his final exams at Goldsmiths because ‘they were not done with the conviction with which I normally paint’, and so he destroyed them. He also destroyed many of his war paintings: ‘I felt embarrassed that some of the war pictures were simply not strong enough. I felt in order to do justice to a particular theme like war you had to be a Goya or a Picasso and I was neither’. Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 74, 73. 35  Bryan Magee, Magee, p. 11. 36  Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle (London: Reprint Society, 1959), hereafter referenced parenthetically in the text as TS (p. 98). 37  A. S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), p. 82. 33 34

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s­ufficient reverence, meaning that, inevitably, ‘when we look upon a human face, we interpret it by what we are ourselves’ (TS, p. 71). Like Rain Carter (to whom Bledyard is speaking, and who is fascinated and distressed by his words), and like Murdoch herself, Weinberger recognised in himself the instinct to impose his own vision on his subject and continually strove to progress beyond it. Although he desired to present in a portrait his ‘own image of what [he] saw, rather than a photographic likeness’, he also observed in 1995 that the most effective artistic statement deals with something outside the artist himself [sic], that is to say, it is not enough to aim at self-expression. When the artist communicates an idea, thought or emotion, self-expression is an inevitable by-product, but must never be the sole pre-occupation of the artist.38

Weinberger’s comments reveal his knowledge, which is also Bledyard’s, and Rain’s as she comes to understand her role more deeply, that the artist must try to direct attention beyond the layers of illusion created by the egos of both the artist and the sitter in order to represent the reality of the other with increased clarity. Imagination is inherent in this process: it strives to reach across the boundary between self and other, to inhabit the consciousness of the subject, but it must also be restrained; the artist must abandon the attempt before it becomes destructive, no longer respectful of the subject’s essential difference. Murdoch’s evasive responses to Weinberger’s requests that she sit for him recall the behaviour of the subject of Rain’s portrait, Demoyte, who is similarly concerned that an artist’s discerning gaze might penetrate his mask. ‘“She shan’t know what I’m like if I can help it!”’ Demoyte states (TS, p. 27). The donning of uncharacteristic clothes and his claim to be a published poet (TS, p.  27, 44) are both part of Demoyte’s attempts to disguise his identity in order to hinder Rain’s production of his portrait. Rain does nevertheless succeed in her aim of creating a ‘really good likeness’ of Demoyte (TS, p. 42). Her vision of him is partly realised by means of her careful selection of props—a book, a glass paperweight, a pile of papers, a lustrous, priceless rug—which build up an image of a thoughtful, cultured man. Demoyte’s features are ‘meticulously represented’ and his head, positioned against a richly decorative background, has ‘enormous  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 85; Harry Weinberger, ‘Subversive Activity’, np.

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force’ (TS, p. 154). Bledyard, however, observes that the portrait is ‘too beautiful’ and that the sitter ‘does not look mortal’ (TS, p. 155), causing Rain to recognise that it is an inadequate depiction of Demoyte’s unique and separate reality. She repaints Demoyte’s head and, by creating the impression of incompleteness, tries to prevent its form from crystallising: ‘[a]t first sight it seemed as if she had spoilt it […] The head stood out now solider, uglier, the expression no longer conveyed by the fine details, but seeming to emerge from the deep structure of the face’ (TS, p. 282). At this point Rain abandons the portrait, tacitly acknowledging that it can never represent Demoyte’s otherness with complete truthfulness. Weinberger, like Rain, accepted the limitations of art, acknowledging in 1995 that the subject will continually outrun attention: I think that often a painting, which comes very close to being something that is created out of nothing and yet becomes something with its own references and its own quality, it must fall short of that which is at the back of one’s mind, because of the way in which we ourselves are limited.39

His portraits of Murdoch, like most of his other portraits, seem tentative and sketchy, as if in tacit acknowledgement that the consolation of imposing a more definite judgement on the identity of the sitter cannot be permitted. In his exhibition catalogue of 1994 Weinberger states, ‘because I see that, when a particular picture is finished, it never quite matches my original intention, I start the next one immediately’, implying that he persistently tries to improve the quality of imaginative attention with which the subject is regarded.40 Murdoch, in ‘Salvation by Words’ (1972), similarly accepts that the artist’s effort to create ‘an attempted formal unity and completed statement’ will be an inevitable failure, the artwork incomplete and imperfect, nevertheless she remains adamant: ‘There is no substitute for the discipline of this sort of attempt to tell truth succinctly and clearly’ (EM, p. 240). The effort must be made, as it is inherently moral. The reverence for the reality of individuals which is articulated by Bledyard in The Sandcastle is violated by the principal characters in A Severed Head, who seek to control and absorb each other into their private fantasies. This behaviour is embodied by the sculptor Alexander LynchGibbon’s voracious headhunting. Alexander endeavours to capture and fix  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 95.  Harry Weinberger, 1994CI, np.

39 40

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the identities of other characters by transforming them into works of art. He had, in his youth, expressed a ghoulish, unrealised desire to take a death mask of his mother (ASH, p. 56). He created, near the beginning of their secret liaison, a golden bronze head of his sister-in-law Antonia Lynch-Gibbon, with which he ‘professed dissatisfaction’ and ‘refused to part’ (ASH, p. 53). His remark that ‘[t]he best thing about being God would be making the heads’ reveals his craving for omnipotence (ASH, p. 54); his alignment of the artist with God directly opposes Bledyard’s conviction that the artist, gazing on the sitter, is ‘confronted by God’ (S, p. 71). The lack of respect for otherness manifest in Alexander’s artistic practice also pervades his sexual behaviour: he seems oblivious to the pain which he causes by his affair with Antonia and his seduction of his brother Martin’s mistress Georgie Hands, both of which are motivated by his desire to assert power over Martin. Alexander constructs a ‘clay head in the first stages of composition’, which is unveiled in a menacing half-light; he claims that although the head is ‘not a portrait’, he is ‘looking for the person’ whose head it is, seeking by this means to achieve ‘some sort of impossible liberation’ (ASH, pp.  52–53). ‘[O]ne is put in mind of the making of monsters’, Martin thinks as he contemplates it (ASH, p. 52). When Alexander meets Georgie he muses that hers is ‘the head I was waiting for’ (ASH, p. 128), seduces her and attempts to mould her into his image, callously disregarding her fragile state of mind. Alexander’s destructiveness is echoed in the behaviour of the other characters, who also try to impose their own portraits onto Georgie, the most innocent character in A Severed Head, in order to possess and control her: for Martin, she is a bohemian mistress, a ‘[l]ittle barbarian’; for Antonia, a ‘child’; and for the psychoanalyst Palmer Anderson, a ‘delightful patient’ (ASH, p. 16, 109, 119). As she succumbs to pressure to conform to the fantasies of others, Georgie becomes two-dimensional, her individuality fades, and her voice is no longer heard. Alexander, as a practising artist, makes literal the morally corrupt objectification of others which pervades the novel. Weinberger can be viewed as the antithesis of Alexander, his respect for the essential difference of each sitter offering a foil to Alexander’s rapaciousness and underlining its iniquity.

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‘In Eclipse’: Representations of Ageing In The Sandcastle, Rain’s lover Bill Mor realises that Rain’s portrait sketch of him, drawn at the beginning of their relationship, ‘bore some resemblance to himself’ but it does not correspond with his own self-image (TS, p.  282). Rain’s strong and youthful depiction of Mor implies that her perception was partially veiled by the romantic love she was beginning to feel for him; Mor’s perception of his own being also lacks clarity, as he is unable to distinguish these traits in himself. Neither character succeeds in seeing the other or themselves clearly. Murdoch, in contrast, is sufficiently detached to be able to recognise Weinberger’s portrait as a ‘liker likeness’ of herself, although her guarded response to it implies that she struggled to accept his vision of her.41 She was concerned, maybe, that the quality of Weinberger’s attention to her had caused him to expose a vulnerable aspect of her identity, which she did not want to be known to the public gaze. Apart from one other brief mention in a 1991 letter, almost lost amongst other details, of the ‘kind nice picture of me! (It is quite likely!)’ she does not seem to refer to the portraits anywhere else in their correspondence.42 Weinberger’s portraits are likely to have troubled Murdoch by exposing her vulnerability and causing her to confront the reality of advancing age and mortality. She had from 1975 onwards increasingly taken the harrowing role of carer for her mother Rene, whose health declined sharply with old age. At first, she was able to look after Rene by arranging for Rene to make protracted visits to Cedar Lodge, but following a distressing episode of violence, a stroke and mental collapse in July 1983, Murdoch was forced to place her in a succession of nursing homes and hospitals. Her journal entry for 29 July 1983 states ‘Rene finally going mad’, and, twice underlined, ‘Misery of this’ (Journal 14, p. 38). ‘It is very grievous indeed to see the destruction of someone one loves very much’, she wrote to Weinberger in August 1983.43 She continued to spend as much time as possible with Rene until she died, following another stroke, in September 1985. Murdoch seems to have been haunted by the possibility of 41  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated [May 1993?], KUAS80/1/5, Iris Murdoch Collections. 42  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 25 November 1991, KUAS80/1/121, Iris Murdoch Collections. 43  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 10 August 1983, KUAS80/2/57, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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inheriting her mother’s dementia. Her frequent admissions of exhaustion in her letters to Weinberger hint at her underlying fear of losing control of language as she grew older. ‘I feel tired and cannot write’, she confided in May 1978, and in January 1982, ‘I am very tired & not working well’.44 These admissions increased in number as time goes on, with the expression ‘in eclipse’ being frequently used to describe her debilitated state: ‘I am rather in eclipse at present but hope work will be better later’ she wrote in January 1988, and, ‘I am rather in eclipse at the moment and cannot get anywhere with my next novel’, in January 1989.45 Although, in a 1996 interview with Joanna Coles, the difficulties Murdoch was experiencing with her work were described by Bayley as ‘just a bit of a block’, Murdoch herself seemed to have realised that her condition was more serious, saying ‘I’m in a very, very bad, quiet place’, conceivably with thoughts of her mother’s traumatic final years in her mind.46 Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s disease was officially diagnosed in 1997, and indications of it have been traced in her late work.47Murdoch’s presence can be sensed in her characters’ troubled experiences of ageing. Heather Ingman contends that the reactions of Murdoch’s characters to ageing vary according to gender: ‘Women do age in […] [Murdoch’s] fiction but unlike, for example, John Robert Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) who fears that his brain is ageing, the emphasis is not on the waning of women’s intellectual powers so much as on their changing physical appearance’.48 Ingman suggests that Murdoch’s female characters have ‘gender-specific anxieties around ageing, fertility and physical attractiveness [which] may be read either as an evasion or as reflective of cultural stereotypes around feminism’.49 Some 44  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 May 1978, KUAS80/2/88; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 27 January 1982, KUAS80/4/4, Iris Murdoch Collections. 45  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 11 January 1988, KUAS80/1/29; Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 25 January 1989, KUAS80/1/48, Iris Murdoch Collections. 46  Joanna Coles, ‘The Joanna Coles Interview: Duet in Perfect Harmony’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 245–250, hereafter Coles (p. 246). 47  Peter Garrard, L. M. Maloney, J. R. Hodges, and K. Patterson, ‘The effects of very early Alzheimer’s disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author’, Brain, 128, 2 (2005), 250–60. 48  Heather Ingman, Ageing in Irish Writing: Strangers to Themselves (Dublin: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), hereafter Ageing in Irish Writing, p. 92. 49  Heather Ingman, Ageing in Irish Writing, p. 93.

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of these anxieties may have been Murdoch’s own: her feelings about not having been a mother, for example.50 However, at a 1978 symposium Murdoch said that ‘writing as a man’ was ‘instinctive’ for her, and that she could ‘identify more with […] male characters than […] female characters’.51 Her male characters often find it hard to age well. Ingman notes parallels between John Robert Rozanov and Jesse Baltram, both egoists who resist ageing and descend into confused, ‘chaotic’ deaths; she also observes that Charles Arrowby is in denial about the ageing process, wants to believe that he can reverse it by recreating his love for Hartley, and causes Titus’ death by his vanity about his youthful physique.52 Charles reflects, ‘I ought to have warned […] [Titus], I ought never to have dived in with him on that first day; I had destroyed him because I so rejoiced in his youth and because I had to pretend to be young too…’ (TSTS, p. 459). At the end of the novel Charles seems about to embark on an affair with the much younger Angela, which implies that he is still unable to accept the reality of his impending old age. Charles bears similarities to Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince (1973), who lies about his age to Julian, the twenty-year-old daughter of his friend, with whom he embarks on a disastrous liaison. John Robert Rozanov is, perhaps, the ageing character who most resembles Murdoch. Her correspondence with Weinberger in the early 1980s—when she was writing The Philosopher’s Pupil and also caring for her mother—reveals a marked similarity between Murdoch and Rozanov. Whilst attempting to write his great work on philosophy, Rozanov is forced to recognise that his mind is failing: And now, when there might perhaps burst forth some great symphonic finale, the crown of his laborious trial, at the crucial point demanding the purest most refined thinking of all, he was old, losing the clarity of his mind,

50  Accounts vary regarding Murdoch’s views on motherhood. In a 1996 interview, John Bayley remarked, ‘Iris has never shown the slightest interest in being a mum’ (Joanna Coles, Coles, p. 249). However, A.N. Wilson claims: ‘When I mentioned her lack of children, she wept. Tears streamed over her cheeks. “That was something which was not to be.” […] On another occasion […] [Murdoch] told me in a quiet matter-of-fact tone that she would very much have liked to have children and she envied those who had done so’. A. N. Wilson, As I Knew Her, pp. 14–15. 51  Jean-Louis Chevalier, Chevalier, p. 82. 52  Heather Ingman, Ageing in Irish Writing, p. 99.

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losing his words and mislaying his thoughts. Could he stop thinking? What could he do but think? (PP, p. 134)

Letters dating from 1980 and 1981 document Murdoch’s struggle to prepare for the Gifford Lectures.53 Her words bear much resemblance to those of her character. ‘I’m so very tired of working and thinking. […] The novel goes on but very slowly and I think the philosophy is all nonsense!’ she wrote to Weinberger in August 1980.54 In October 1981, she wrote, ‘I am so sunk in these lectures at the moment I cannot think or plan, or in effect get away. […] I would love to see […] all your open world of art, so unlike horrid philosophy!’55 The strain of assembling her thoughts for the Gifford Lectures (which, she told Weinberger, subsequently passed like ‘bad dreams’ to a dwindling audience) merged with the harrowing experience of her mother’s mental and physical decline to filter into her presentation of Rozanov’s anguish.56 Life came to imitate art still more closely when Murdoch later attempted, like Rozanov, to write a great philosophical book, which was left incomplete at her death.57 She wrote to Weinberger in June 1987: ‘I am very tired, trying to do a difficult piece of philosophy, on Heidegger, and trying to write a novel which is full of difficulties too!’58 The attempt to write philosophy ‘gives no joy. (Well, occasional seconds)’, she told him in 1989.59 The creation of Rozanov  See Frances White, ‘The Gifford-driven Genesis and Subliminal Stylistic Construction of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’ in Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, ed. by Nora Hämäläinen and Gillian Dooley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 17–31. 54  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 22 August 1980, KUAS80/7/6, Iris Murdoch Collections. 55  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 16 October 1981, KUAS80/2/79, Iris Murdoch Collections. There are numerous examples of similar comments in Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger. For instance: ‘I am working very (too) hard & feel awfully tired. Philosophy is exhausting and often feels so empty and fruitless’. Postmarked 30 June 1980, KUAS80/8/17, Iris Murdoch Collections. In a letter postmarked 4 October 198[0], she wrote: ‘I am stupidly (I can’t think when more) overwhelmed by work I am trying to do – especially the philosophy work which is just too hard’, and in a letter postmarked 13 March 1981: ‘[W]ish I could leave philosophy – the stuff is muddled & will have to be much rewritten’. KUAS80/10/3; KUAS80/10/4, Iris Murdoch Collections. 56  Postmarked 30 October 1982, KUAS80/4/5, Iris Murdoch Collections. 57  Murdoch’s incomplete draft manuscript on Martin Heidegger is stored in Kingston University Archives and Special Collections (KUAS6/5/1/4). 58  Postmarked 5 June 1987, KUAS80/1/13, Iris Murdoch Collections. 59  Postmarked [? May] 1989, KUAS80/1/53, Iris Murdoch Collections. 53

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allowed Murdoch to enter imaginatively into a situation which she may have predicted for herself, to confront, work through and thus to try to exorcise the disturbed, disorderly old age and death which she feared. Now, readers’ knowledge that Murdoch suffered with Alzheimer’s disease makes Rozanov’s awareness of his failing faculties seem disturbingly prescient.

‘Pale, Still and Mythical’: Iris Murdoch by Tom Phillips Weinberger’s intimate knowledge of Murdoch’s mental and emotional strains is hinted at in his frank depictions of her ageing face. In contrast, Tom Phillips’ portrait of Murdoch has helped to fix and commemorate her public identity as a relatively youthful, dignified, and commanding intellectual whose work belongs to the tradition of great art. Whereas Weinberger’s portraits are fluid and provisional, suggesting that Murdoch’s identity is still evolving, Phillips’ portrait has a curiously static quality. Although Phillips’ precise delineation of Murdoch’s features implies that he has striven to achieve photographic realism, in fact he chose to remove the signs of age from her face. ‘[T]he historiated aspects of Iris’s face, its lines and creases, were not really important to her actual presence’, Phillips claims, rather controversially, given that the ‘historiated aspects’ of Murdoch’s face might be understood as the marks of experience which form her identity. Murdoch ‘said wonderfully encouraging things’ about this rather flattering image.60 Phillips’ portrait was placed on public view at the National Portrait Gallery in March 1987 to widespread critical acclaim (though Brian Sewell was characteristically scathing about it, claiming, in the Evening Standard, that ‘poor jaundice-eyed Miss Murdoch is as flat and grainy as an overblown holiday snap’).61 Waldemar Januszczak, writing in the Guardian, observes that: ‘This is not just a fine likeness, it is also a portrait of an inner life. It is the show’s notable success, a work of obvious thoughtfulness and ambition. Phillips manages to endow this […] middle-aged Englishwoman with the dignity of a Venetian Doge’.62 Conradi admiringly comments that the portrait catches her  Tom Phillips, ‘Painting Iris Murdoch’, p. 85.  Brian Sewell, Evening Standard, March 1987, quoted by Tom Phillips in ‘Painting Iris Murdoch’, p. 85. 62  Waldemar Januszczak, ‘When a face doesn’t fit’, Guardian, 11 March 1987, p. 27. 60 61

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‘presence-­cum-­absence’ and renders her ‘pale, still and mythical, a light shining in darkness’.63 Nick Turner observes that ‘1986 and 1987 saw Murdoch’s critical and scholarly reputation at, perhaps, its peak’. At this time she was also ‘most definitely a bestseller’.64 Phillips’ portrait reinforced her eminence and enhanced her gravitas. It was not until after Phillips’ portrait had been exhibited and much admired that Murdoch would finally consent to sit for Weinberger. Murdoch took much pleasure in contemplating Phillips’ version of her. Sombre and majestic, it forms a striking contrast to Weinberger’s affectionate and unidealised portraits. Phillips, a professional portrait-painter well-accustomed to depicting eminent persons, was commissioned to paint Murdoch by the National Portrait Gallery in 1984, on the occasion of her DBE.  This commission established Murdoch’s position within many generations of important figures in British history. ‘I am to have my portrait painted (for National Portrait Gallery) by Tom Phillips—I wonder if you know his work? I hardly do as yet’, she wrote to Weinberger in October 1984.65 These remarks are crowded into the second paragraph of the letter, almost as an afterthought, following a detailed discussion of her next projected meeting with Weinberger in London. Murdoch’s rather diffident tone may have been due to her awareness that Weinberger’s view of professional portrait-painting had become increasingly jaundiced with the passing of time; he came to perceive it as a prostitution of his art.66 Furthermore, perhaps sensible to the possibility that Weinberger would view it as an aspersion on his own abilities, Murdoch did not tell Weinberger that she had specifically requested that Phillips be selected to paint her. Phillips’ portrait contributes to Murdoch’s canonisation, both by means of carefully chosen ‘props’ and by its idealised, ageless representation of her. She is depicted before Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, a painting of immense personal meaning to Murdoch, and the subject of the first

 Peter J. Conradi, Life, p. 515, 570.  Nick Turner, ‘Saint Iris? Murdoch’s Place in the Modern Canon’, in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. by Anne Rowe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.  115–123 (p. 117). 65  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked October 1984, KUAS80/2/39, Iris Murdoch Collections. 66  Julian Gardner, in conversation with the author, 15 July 2015. 63 64

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conversation she had with Phillips.67 Murdoch’s head has been positioned in front of the figure of the artist Marsyas, with whom, Murdoch told Phillips, she most identified. Phillips’ selection of Titian’s painting for the background of the portrait explicitly associates Murdoch with the tradition of great art. The inclusion in the foreground of a branch of gingko, the world’s oldest tree, described by Murdoch in a letter to Naomi Lebowitz as ‘a tree I love and hold holy’, provides connotations of age, tradition, and wisdom.68 Phillips artfully reinforces Murdoch’s identity as a thinker by the inclusion of these props, rather in the manner of Rain in The Sandcastle, whose inclusion of Demoyte’s possessions in her portrait of him implies that he is both learned and sensitive to beauty. In contrast, Weinberger’s portraits conspicuously lack any props or background details; his selection of a simple white background gives the impression that he wants Murdoch’s image to stand alone, not to be drawn into a relationship with anything else. Murdoch’s meticulously rendered head emerges from the muted, broad-brush backdrop of Phillips’ portrait with clarity and strength. It is somewhat androgynous, with a sense of power which could be construed as stereotypically masculine.69 Murdoch’s expression is 67  Phillips recalls, ‘When I first met Iris (at a dinner party given by Michael Kustow) we talked about Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas which we had both just seen at the magnificent Venice exhibition at the Royal Academy. When the National Portrait Gallery commissioned me to paint her portrait I recalled our conversation (about whom we most identified with in the picture) and started a fairly hasty copy of the picture to act as a backdrop so that she might sit in front of the head of Marsyas’. ‘Painting Iris Murdoch’, p. 83. 68  Iris Murdoch to Naomi Lebowitz. April 1987, MSS067, Washington University’s Special Collections. Gingko is now used in research into treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. This fact lends poignancy to Murdoch’s love of gingkos, to Phillips’ inclusion of a branch of gingko in Murdoch’s portrait, and furthermore, in Jackson’s Dilemma, to the suffering Benet Barnell’s embrace of the gingko tree in his garden, which brings him momentary respite (JD, p. 47). 69  Murdoch’s androgyny has been remarked on by a number of individuals including Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, who painted her portrait in 1964 and said, ‘[Murdoch] really has a very good face if one understands that she is a man and not a woman’. Marie-Louise von Motesiczky to Elias Canetti, 4 November 1963: quoted by Ines Schlenker in Marie-­ Louise von Motesiczky 1906–1996: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2009), p.  324. Many of her characters are androgynous, Julian Baffin in The Black Prince, for example. Murdoch stated in 1976 that ‘my own characters are often androgynous […] because I believe that most people are androgynous: there is certainly no difference in terms of mental make-up’. Sheila Hale, Interview from ‘Women Writers Now: Their Approach and Their Apprenticeship’, in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. by Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 30–32 (p. 30).

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remote and austere, her gaze directed away from the viewer into the distance, reminiscent of countless portraits of notable individuals dating back at least as far as the Renaissance; by his selection of this pose, Phillips fortifies Murdoch’s position within a distinguished lineage. Her head radiates with a translucent, other-worldly light, conveying the ‘luminous presence’ which Phillips observed in her. He states that ‘the visual metaphor that my head created was of an electric light bulb in that gloomy corner, glowing, casting out darkness. I suppose this is what people of a mystical bent call an “aura”’.70 This description imbues Murdoch with a mystical quality which is almost saintly. Partway through the creation of the portrait, Phillips found himself arriving at what he describes as an ‘impasse’. The Titian had begun to overpower the portrait. He decided to produce four large-scale sketches of Murdoch’s head, and these sketches helped him to refresh and refine his recollections of her and to return to ‘the original light-bulb image’.71 These sketches were named by Murdoch ‘Earth’, ‘Air’, ‘Fire’, and ‘Water’. Her naming of the sketches after the four elements into which, according to ancient Greek culture, all aspects of the physical world could be classified implies that Murdoch’s identity is multi-­ faceted and all-encompassing. By this means she actively contributes to the process of her mythologisation. Although she feared the crystallisation of her image, Murdoch was evidently susceptible enough to enjoy Phillips’ rather theatrical representation of herself. She praised Phillips’ portrait for its separateness and coolness.72 She wrote to Weinberger to express her liking for Phillips’ ­portrait, and several times in March 1987 suggested that they go to visit it at the National Portrait Gallery, where it had recently been put on display.73 The visit appears not to have taken place, however. A letter from Murdoch in July 1987 commented: ‘I’m sorry we didn’t manage to see  Tom Phillips, ‘Painting Iris Murdoch’, p. 83.  Tom Phillips, ‘Painting Iris Murdoch’, pp. 83–84. 72  Nigel Williams, ‘A Certain Lady’, Bookmark, BBC, 29 December 1989. 73  Murdoch wrote to Weinberger: ‘I’d like to visit my portrait with you! I like it. It is exhibited with four large (larger than the picture) sketches, which are interesting too. […] I’ll keep in touch and we will go to Nat. Portrait Gallery later’. Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked March 1987, KUAS80/1/9, Iris Murdoch Collections. Another letter reminded him that she ‘will be back about Easter and summer term. Then we will go and look at pics of me, and other pictures’. Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 19 March 1987, KUAS80/1/10, Iris Murdoch Collections. A further letter reiterates: ‘I’d love to see you in house [sic] before long, and go to NPG with you’. Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 2 May 1987, KUAS80/1/12, Iris Murdoch Collections. 70 71

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my NPG portrait together when it was accompanied by all the sketches—& I’m sorry it’s not on view! (what are they thinking of?)’74 Weinberger may not have been so eager to view the much-lauded portrait, which had been created by a professional rival whose style was decidedly different from his own. In a later letter, a rather chastened Murdoch remarked, seemingly in reference to Phillips’ portrait: ‘I understand your feelings about the portrait—however I still like it—and I see what you mean’.75 Phillips’ portrait has become the most familiar image of Murdoch, and as such it has contributed to her immortalisation. The National Portrait Gallery turned it into a postcard; ‘Iris had always wanted to become a postcard’, Phillips observes.76 It was incorporated into several of the book jackets for her novels and was included alongside her obituary in The Independent.77 It is the portrait which she most fully endorsed and praised, the version of herself which she wanted to be remembered by the public. Murdoch sent Weinberger the postcard of her portrait, unaccompanied by any message, which implies that their difference of opinion had caused the image to become a point of silence in their dialogue.78 Unlike Phillips’ portrait, Weinberger’s portraits of Murdoch are private, small-scale, unassuming, and generally unknown. But they depict aspects of Murdoch’s identity that are rarely exposed: to his discerning eye she is not only wise, perceptive, and loving, but also fragile, ageing, and mortal.

‘An Elusive Moon’: Portraits of Love Weinberger’s many attempts at creating visual and verbal portraits which would convey something of the reality of his wife Barbara, and his dialogue with Murdoch on the difficulties of perceiving, and forming a truthful relationship with, another person, filter into The Sea, The Sea. Charles 74  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 30 July 1987, KUAS80/1/16, Iris Murdoch Collections. 75  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 1 April [1989], KUAS80/1/50, Iris Murdoch Collections. 76  Tom Phillips, ‘Painting Iris Murdoch’, p. 85. 77  The book jackets of the first editions of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) and The Green Knight (1993), both published by Chatto & Windus, feature reproductions of the portrait by Phillips. Both book jackets were designed by Phillips, who also designed the book jackets for The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and The Message to the Planet (1989). 78  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, undated, KUAS80/6/3, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Arrowby has finally acknowledged his inability to grasp the reality of his rediscovered childhood sweetheart Mary Hartley Fitch, who he believes to have been his greatest love and the means by which he will regain the lost innocence of his youth, and to realise that his perception of her was veiled by fantasy: ‘I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality’ (TSTS, p.  499). Similarly, Weinberger’s remarks in interviews reveal his awareness that his endeavours to portray Barbara would inevitably fail, being partial views of her, occluded by his own subjectivity. A painting, Weinberger acknowledged, ‘must fall short of that which is at the back of one’s mind, because of the way in which we ourselves are limited’.79 The image of the disembodied head is a recurrent trope in Murdoch’s novels, most obviously in A Severed Head; it is also found in her later work, for example, when Edward Baltram perceives his estranged father’s head at a séance in The Good Apprentice (1985). In The Sea, The Sea, the nebulous image of a mysterious head functions as a silent comment on the limitations of language to convey the reality of Hartley—or of any character—although the image is itself also inadequate to do so and can only hint at it. This meaning of this obscure image can be expanded in the context of Murdoch’s contemplation of Weinberger’s wistful portraits of Barbara. Charles Arrowby and Weinberger are similar in that each is engrossed by his feelings for a woman whom he loves without comprehension; each is aware, to differing degrees, of the impossibility of grasping her reality by means of either visual or verbal portraiture. Barbara was absolutely central to Weinberger’s life. They were married for forty-five years, and Barbara’s death, when Weinberger was seventy-two, left him devastated: ‘[w]hen I had finally taken in that she had really gone I went a bit mad’, he wrote.80 His private memoir, likely to have been written at least partly as a result of Murdoch’s encouragement to him to document his life, is ostensibly about Weinberger’s own life, but it begins with tender recollections of love letters exchanged during his courtship of Barbara, ends with a description of Barbara’s academic achievements, and continually reverts to the details of Barbara’s life throughout, its form symbolic of her essential significance to

 Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 95.  Harry Weinberger, ‘Memoir 1’, p. 12.

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him.81 However, theirs was a complex and sometimes rather strained relationship. Murdoch’s letters to Weinberger—although circumspect, the writer perhaps realising that they might eventually come into the public sphere—indicate that he confided in her about his marital difficulties, particularly in the early years of their friendship. ‘As for more recent “adventures” I still don’t really understand (am not “unsympathetic”), partly because I didn’t leave us much time for later events, and partly because things are hard to understand and “feel”’, she wrote in November 1977. ‘And of course I have met Barbara & like her so much I cannot help feeling for her too, and in that way respect the complexity of the situation. I am very sorry that you are not happy and I hope this time will pass’.82 Murdoch’s letters to Barbara and references to her in letters to Weinberger make evident her feelings of warmth, affection, and esteem for her. The platonic nature of Murdoch’s friendship with Weinberger meant that Murdoch could view his marriage relatively impartially and objectively, without any erotic charge, and she was sincerely concerned for the well-­ being and happiness of both. Weinberger’s portraits would have been known to Murdoch, who visited his studio and discussed his work with him at length many times from the mid to late 1970s onwards. Weinberger’s portraits of Barbara are intimate renditions of the person who meant most to him, as he strives to comprehend her enigmatic internal reality. He painted Barbara repeatedly during their courtship and early years of marriage. Although Barbara was an accomplished artist herself, Weinberger does not seem to have invited her opinion of his versions of her; an indication, possibly, of more deep-seated communication issues. ‘When I first met her, I did a lot of drawings of her and a few paintings’, he recollected in 1995. ‘Curiously enough I don’t know how she looked at them, what she thought of them, and what mattered to me was always 81  Murdoch wrote to Weinberger, ‘I am very moved and interested by your memoir [of Heinz Koppel, Weinberger’s cousin] – you write it very well. How I wish you could write one, much longer, all about yourself’. Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 23 December 1982, KUAS80/2/71, Iris Murdoch Collections. Another letter reveals that Weinberger subsequently wrote, then destroyed, a memoir of his own life, which disappointed Murdoch: ‘I’m sorry to hear that you destroyed that life story which was for Jakey [Weinberger’s grandson] (…) It would be good if he could have some glimpse back into that past  – the past vanishes so quickly’. Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 15 October 1985, KUAS80/3/1, Iris Murdoch Collections. 82  Iris Murdoch to Harry Weinberger, postmarked 7 November 1977, KUAS80/8/8, Iris Murdoch Collections.

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Fig. 7.3  Harry Weinberger, Barbara, [1945–1954], private collection

to try and present my own image of what I saw, rather than a photographic likeness’.83 The portraits reveal Weinberger’s unsettled feelings about his marriage and his somewhat troubled awareness of the emotional distance between himself and his wife whilst also conveying his admiration of her beauty. There are several delicately painted, tender studies of Barbara’s head. In Barbara (Fig.  7.3), Weinberger uses a warm, sensual palette dominated by blues and pinks which may be indebted to Picasso’s rose period. The colour choices enhance his representation of Barbara’s femininity and elegance. Yet she appears aloof, seeming to avoid his attention instead of meeting his eye.  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, pp. 85–86.

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Fig. 7.4  Harry Weinberger, Study for Portrait, 1954, private collection

Barbara’s gaze is similarly evasive in Study for Portrait (Fig. 7.4). In this portrait, her head is overshadowed by a murky green which also touches her clothes and complexion. The sombre colours contribute to an air of dejection. Another portrait (Fig. 7.5) depicts Barbara standing at a window in a sparsely furnished room, her back turned so that only a little of her face is visible, as if in tacit acknowledgement of her inaccessibility. She seems to be looking rather aimlessly at the blank face of the suburban house opposite. Her bowed head implies a depressed mood. The foreshortened perspective creates a sense of claustrophobia. A yellow cane-­ seated chair under the window seems likely to have been included in homage to the iconic image of the yellow chair painted by Van Gogh, who was revered by Weinberger: the chair is a symbol of Spartan, solitary life.

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Fig. 7.5  Harry Weinberger, Barbara, [1945–1954], private collection

Weinberger’s many portraits of Barbara reveal his rueful awareness that he can only achieve a partial view of her. Charles Arrowby similarly becomes painfully conscious that his version of Hartley was largely false, though he has been sustained for much of The Sea, The Sea by his assumption that it was truthful and complete. Neither verbal nor visual imagery is adequate to convey Hartley’s reality. He realises eventually that ‘[o]ne can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must

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simply respect its veiled face’ (TSTS, p. 500). Charles’ recurring vision of a ghostly head is a sign, albeit unrecognised as such by him, of the impossibility of perceiving another being wholly without illusion. It is an echo of the remote, indistinct images of Barbara which resist Weinberger’s attempts to seek out her inner life. Sitting alone, writing his memoirs late at night in the drawing-room at Shruff End, Charles is suddenly horrified: I looked up and was for a moment perfectly sure that I saw a face looking at me through the glass of the inner room. I sat absolutely still, paralysed by sheer terror. The vision was only momentary but, although I cannot now describe the face, very definite. Perhaps it is significant that I cannot remember the face? (TSTS, pp. 68–69)

Charles tries to find rational explanations for this apparition, wondering whether it could be ‘simply a reflection of my own face’ or ‘the moon reflected in the inner glass’ (TSTS, p. 69), but neither explanation is satisfactory. The reference to the moon strengthens the association between the apparition and Hartley, whose face is described by Charles as ‘very pale’, ‘round and white’ (TSTS, p. 80). Charles’s repeated use of the adjective ‘chaste’ to describe Hartley recalls Diana, goddess of both chastity and of the moon. It is ironic that he thinks of the face as his own reflection because his image of Hartley has been cloaked in illusions generated by his own mind and therefore is a more accurate image of himself than of her. The vision occurs in the inner room which represents the innermost reaches of his mind. Revealing itself on the edge of Charles’s awareness, it functions as a more direct manifestation of his thoughts than words can be, taunting him with the inadequacy of the mediums of expression available to him. ‘[P]ictures of [Hartley] [are] stored up in the dense darkness of my mind’, he muses (TSTS, p. 87), which suggests that on some level he knows that he has constructed Hartley in his own image. As he drifts ‘in a sort of daze’ around the Great Gallery of the Wallace Collection (a well-loved meeting-place for Murdoch and Weinberger), Charles instinctively invokes visual images as a way of articulating his thoughts on the women he has loved, although he fails to give either the women or the portraits sufficient attention, merely indulging in a facile superimposition of the women onto the portraits to bolster up his ego:

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[T]hey were there: Lizzie by Terborch, Jeanne by Nicholeas Maes, Rita by Domenichino, Rosina by Rubens, a perfectly delightful study by Greuze of Clement as she was when I first met her […] There was even a picture of my mother by Reynolds, a bit flattering but a likeness. (TSTS, p. 169, 170)

Hartley alone eludes this superimposition, hovering just beyond his reach: ‘[s]he was a vast absence, a pale partly disembodied being, her face hanging always just above my field of vision like an elusive moon’ (TSTS, p. 170). Charles’s delusions in the Wallace Collection are accompanied by his increasing sense of unsteadiness, with flashing lights and with the insistent drumming sound of hyoshigi ‘which are used to create suspense or announce doom in the Japanese theatre’ (TSTS, p. 171), all signalling to the reader that his moral failure to attend to others will cause still more trauma. He is temporarily rescued by his cousin James, a voice of truth in the novel, but subsequently—having perhaps realised that he will not be able to capture Hartley by means of verbal or visual imagery—he tries to capture her literally by imprisoning her in the inner room at Shruff End, where he can attempt to force her to conform to the fantasy generated by his mind. Charles’s rapacious attempts to coerce Hartley into his fantasy of rediscovered innocence, and thereby to subsume her identity into his own, contrast with Weinberger’s melancholy acceptance of and respect for the emotional distance between himself and Barbara. Weinberger’s visual images of Barbara endeavour to bridge this divide, but they also convey his acknowledgement that she would remain somewhat mysterious to him and that his vision of her would necessarily be incomplete and subjective. ‘I think the last time I painted a proper portrait of her was when our daughter was born’, Weinberger stated in 1995, hedging a little in response to the interviewer’s interest in why he was no longer painting Barbara: ‘I don’t question the reasons, I don’t know why. […] I don’t plan things, I just always paint what the need of the moment dictates’.84 Perhaps the portraits dwindled in number as he became more conscious of the difficulty of articulating her reality. In his late years, Weinberger turned to writing about Barbara instead of painting her, trying to hone his p ­ erception of her through a different medium. His memoirs focus primarily on the romantic, sometimes tempestuous early days of their relationship, which implies that he found it easier, and preferable, to recollect her at this time.  Cathy Courtney, Artists’ Lives, p. 86.

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The young Barbara is described as ‘tall, slim, shy, and very beautiful’; Weinberger quotes from her first love letters to him and recalls the moment when ‘suddenly Barbara smiled […] and said nothing will ever keep us apart’.85 Charles, likewise, dwells on his memories of Hartley when she was young, but his language is far more extravagant than Weinberger’s: Hartley is ‘the jewel of the world’ (TSTS, p. 81); ‘she had the wisdom of the innocents and we conversed as angels’ (TSTS, p. 80). His hubris leads him to construct the young Charles and Hartley as Adam and Eve, inhabiting ‘a suburban countryside […] as lovely and significant to us as the Garden of Eden’ (TSTS, p.  80). Charles also defines Hartley as ‘my Beatrice’ (TSTS, p.  85) in reference to the heroine of Dante’s La Vita Nuova.86 Charles’s romantic literary allusions and elaborate, polished descriptions heighten the impression that his perception of Hartley is unreliable. They contrast markedly with the simplicity and economy of Weinberger’s meditations on Barbara, which convey far more effectively the writer’s sincerity. Weinberger’s multiple visual and verbal portraits of Barbara combine to form a composite, incomplete portrait. Nevertheless, his love for Barbara, although flawed, assisted him in comprehending and articulating elements of truth about her. Charles’s portrait of Hartley, although obscured by fantasy, is likewise not entirely lacking in truth.

Representing Ideal Concepts: Icon and The Polish Rider In the later stages of their careers, a shift in emphasis is noticeable in the ways that Weinberger and Murdoch employed portraits. They moved in a similar direction, expanding the possibilities of portraiture by using it not only to depict the particularity of individuals but also to create visual representations of ideal concepts. Rowe has explored Murdoch’s use of paintings of soldiers and warriors which serve as meditations on the nature of courage and goodness in her novels.87 Rowe further suggests, ‘Murdoch’s concern with the nature of courage, bravery and heroism in her late novels may […] bear the influence of Weinberger’, and there is much evidence to  Harry Weinberger, ‘Memoir 1’, p. 1.  La Vita Nuova (1294), by Dante Alighieri (c.1265–1321), depicts the author’s unrequited, idealised love for Beatrice Portinari, which begins in childhood and transcends Beatrice’s death. 87  Anne Rowe, VAIM, Chap. 4, pp. 85–120. 85 86

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support this view.88 Weinberger’s highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the figure of Saint George provides a new angle on Murdoch’s efforts to utilise portraits to represent ideals in The Green Knight. Saint George, who is traditionally perceived as an epitome of the concept of courage and of the triumph of good over evil, was a source of mutual fascination for both artists. Weinberger’s thoughts regarding Saint George were of intense interest to Murdoch. They animated not only her troubled reflections on Saint George but also her meditations on another image of courage and goodness, Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, which bears a striking similarity to Weinberger’s Icon, the portrait of Saint George which meant most to her. The quest to depict concepts in visual terms became increasingly urgent in the context of deconstruction, when the very existence of concepts was being questioned. Martin Gayford, interviewing Murdoch in 1993, observes that: ‘all the individual concepts—truth, beauty, goodness, even art itself—are under ferocious attack. According to post-structuralist theory—the intellectual orthodoxy of our day—there are no such things as truth or value’.89 Murdoch was early aware of this state of affairs in ‘Against Dryness’, writing that ‘[w]e have suffered a general loss of concepts’ and presenting over thirty years later in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) her impassioned argument against contemporary ‘post’ philosophy (Derridean thinking in particular), which she collectively terms structuralism: ‘[t]he fundamental value which is lost, obscured, made not to be, by structuralist theory, is truth’ (EM, p. 290, MGM, p. 214). This fear that words may no longer authentically express the sense of the concepts which they are supposed to signify is still, crucially, unresolved in the twenty-first century. Niklas Forsberg, writing in 2013, contends that ‘a loss of concepts is something that permeates our culture’.90 Forsberg renews attention to Murdoch’s view that concepts are not stable; as life progresses, an individual’s understanding of a concept evolves. Murdoch, in ‘The Idea of Perfection’, is adamant that ‘moral terms must be treated as concrete ­universals’ but also that these ‘concrete universals’ continually recede from our grasp and will never be fully understood (EM, p. 322). They resemble the Platonic Forms, which are not otherworldly, but are a part of consciousness, and which we can gradually rediscover by a process of  Anne Rowe, ‘Near the Gods’, 65.  Martin Gayford, ‘Beautiful and Good’, 50. 90  Niklas Forsberg, Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 3. 88 89

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anamnesis. In Murdoch’s observation, ‘we have a different image of courage at forty from that which we had at twenty’, her use of ‘image’ is significant because it implies that a concept is thought about in visual terms (EM, p. 322). If it seems almost impossible to articulate the meaning of a concept in words, a visual image may express it more eloquently and thus help to recover the concept. Both Murdoch and Weinberger seem to be reaching after images which are sufficiently depersonalised and universally meaningful to carry the weight of ideal concepts, and which will reawaken a ‘“memory” of what we did not know we knew’, which, Murdoch says in a 1977 interview, is what good art does.91 Chapter 8 considers at greater length how Murdoch and Weinberger reconceptualise Christian iconography for an era of demythologisation; their employment of portraiture to reimagine the soldier-saint Saint George serves as a first example of this. At the time of Murdoch’s first meeting with Weinberger she was already deeply interested in Saint George, being attracted by the ambiguity of the legend surrounding him as well as by his more overt heroic qualities. Murdoch’s inclusion of Giorgione’s The Sunset in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) is one of the ways in which she tries to work out her views regarding Saint George’s equivocal status.92 The Sunset acts as a reflection of the psychological state of Harriet Gavender, who views it in the National Gallery, whilst unaware that her husband has been conducting an affair with another woman by whom he has fathered a child. It is interpreted by Harriet as a portrait of Saint George and Saint Anthony: the former is, to Harriet’s eye, far removed from the conventional image of Saint George as chivalrous hero, being engaged in ‘bullying […] [a] domesticated and inoffensive little dragon’ (SPLM, p.  42), while Saint Anthony tends to a wounded man, oblivious to the demons emerging from a nearby lake.93 In The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch, Rowe presents an analysis of The Sunset’s function in The Sacred and

 Bryan Magee, Magee, p. 12.  The Sunset (Il Tramonto) was painted in 1506–1510 by Giorgione (c.1477/8–1510), founder of the Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting. 93  In an alternative reading of the painting, it has been suggested that the figure in the foreground which Harriet takes for Saint Anthony might be the injured Saint Roch, being attended by his servant Gothardus. Saint Anthony may be the figure peering out of a cave on the right. Unknown author, [accessed 15 April 2019]. 91 92

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Profane Love Machine.94 She suggests that Giorgione’s Saint George is a typical existential hero, displaying ‘active, courageous assertion of will’ which can all too easily degenerate into egoism.95 Furthermore, she observes that there is more than one possible interpretation of Saint George’s behaviour: he ‘may be defending Saint Anthony, or playing games with the dragon to inflate his ego; either action leaves him unwittingly vulnerable to a greater danger’. Saint Anthony’s behaviour is also problematic: his ‘ignoring of the demons allows their proliferation’. The demons themselves, which appear to be relatively harmless, may not be genuinely threatening but ‘merely imagined as such by both saints as an excuse for either kind of heroism’.96 Rowe defines The Sunset as ‘a visual diagram of how Harriet will transform fearful, aggressive self-preservation into stoical, selfless benevolence’.97 Harriet fails to perceive the painting with sufficient attention and therefore cannot apply its symbolic meaning to her own situation. Instead, the painting bewilders her and causes her ‘[a]n intense physical feeling of anxiety’ (SPLM, p. 41). She believes her response to the discovery of the existence of her husband’s mistress and his illegitimate son Luca to be compassionate, selfless, and healing, but in fact her conciliatory attitude brings about further suffering, particularly to her son David. Harriet is forced (by Edgar Demarney, the character who comes closest to being a figure of good in this novel) to confront the possibility that she has been motivated by aggressive self-interest and cowardice: ‘“[Y]ou have not been a healer but an accomplice of evil [….] Vague tolerant pity is not true kindness here. You are trying to spare yourself”’ (SPLM, pp. 185–86). The ‘ridiculously frail, poetical, vibrating motionless tree’ in the background of The Sunset (SPLM, pp.  41–42), which both separates and connects the two saints, symbolises, according to Rowe, ‘the truth that eludes [Harriet]… and, perhaps, the two saints on either side of it’.98 Perhaps the tree in the painting subconsciously reminds Harriet of her recent sighting of Luca, whose identity is not yet known to her, standing beside a tree in her garden ‘merged almost into the dark’; she subsequently dreams of the tree and glimpses Luca’s face in it (SPLM, pp. 3–4). Readers are not provided with any conclusive interpretation either of the 94  Anne Rowe, VAIM, pp. 90–94 and pp. 170–173 (referred to as Sunset Landscape). This painting is also discussed by Bove and Rowe in SSBC, pp. 41–42. 95  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 92. 96  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 92. 97  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 91. 98  Anne Rowe, VAIM, p. 91.

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painting or of the novel, but are encouraged by Murdoch to interrogate both and subsequently to apply their sharpened perceptions to their own lives. It is not certain whether Murdoch was aware of the controversy surrounding The Sunset’s originality when she incorporated the painting into The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. Following its rediscovery in a badly damaged state in the early 1930s, the painting underwent three substantial restorations which involved imaginative reconstructions of some areas by restorers, making it unclear which elements are original and which are more recent. It has been suggested by National Gallery experts that the figures of Saint George and the dragon may not be original, being ‘probably introduced to add extra, if spurious, iconographic interest to the painting’.99 However, there is little doubt that ‘the passage of greatest painterly and academic brilliance—the distant landscape with its melting effect of light—is substantially original, and thus the best “document” of Giorgione’s unique hand’.100 The recent re-examination and clarifications by the National Gallery contribute an additional layer of meaning to Murdoch’s use of The Sunset: as in Harriet’s reading of the painting, the figures are found to be mysterious, mutable, and equivocal, whereas the landscape is the most truthful element. Shortly after the publication of The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Murdoch met Weinberger, and on discovering his great interest in Saint George she was eager to probe and comprehend his thoughts. Weinberger’s extensive icon collection, well-known to Murdoch, included many icons of Saint George, such as a Russian sixteenth-century cast pierced brass Saint George and a Greek seventeenth-century Saint George painted in tempura on a wood panel. Murdoch obtained—probably with Weinberger’s guidance—her own icons of Saint George, including Fig. 7.6. Although the production of these four icons spans two centuries, Saint George is depicted in an almost identical pose in each one: he is dressed in armour and a billowing cloak and seated astride a rearing horse, lance forcefully raised to strike down the dragon, which is being trampled underfoot by the horse as Saint George bears down on it. Divine approval of Saint George’s destruction of the dragon is indicated by Saint George’s halo and 99  Jill Dunkerton, ‘Giorgione and not Giorgione: The Conservation History and Technical Examination of Il Tramonto’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, 31 (2010), 42–63 (53). 100  Scott Nethersole, Il Tramonto (2010)