The Iris Murdoch Review Nº1 2008 Iris Murdoch Society The Iris Murdoch Review ISSN 1756-7572 Volume I, Number 1, The Iris Murdoch Review (continuing from No. 19 of The Iris Murdoch News Letter) Published by the Iris Murdoch Society in association with Kingston University Press Kingston University London, Penrhyn Road, Kingston Upon Thames, KT1 2EE http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/KUP/index.shtml © The contributors, 2008 The views expressed in this Review are the views of the contributors and are not necessarily those of the Iris Murdoch Society. Printed in England A record for this journal is available from the British Library Cover Image: Photograph courtesy of Times Newspapers Ltd 1 The Iris Murdoch Society Appeal on Behalf of the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies by the Society The Iris Murdoch Review is the publication of the Iris Murdoch Society, which was formed at the Modern Language Association Convention in New York City in 1986. It appears annually, The Iris Murdoch Society actively supports offering a forum for short articles, reviews and Kingston University’s acquisitioning of new notices, and keeps members of the society material for the archives at the Centre for Iris informed of new publications, symposia and Murdoch Studies. It has contributed financially other news that has a bearing on the life and towards the purchase of Iris Murdoch’s work of Iris Murdoch. heavily annotated library from her study at her Oxford home, the library from her London If you would like to join the Iris flat, the Conradi archives, a number of Murdoch Society and automatically receive substantial letter runs and other individual The Iris Murdoch Review please contact: items. (A list of new acquisitions appears in the report on the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies in this Review and more detailed information on the collections can be found on Penny Tribe the website for the Centre: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/Iris- Kingston University London _Murdoch/index.shtml Penrhyn Road Kingston, Surrey, The Centre is regularly offered documents, individual letters and letter-runs that are KT1 2EE carefully evaluated and considered for Tel: +44 (0)20 8547 7884 funding. We would welcome any donations Fax: +44 (0)20 8547 7292 that would enable the Iris Murdoch Society to contribute to the purchase of important items Email: [email protected] that may come up for sale in the future. We would also welcome reminiscences of Iris Murdoch, letters from her, or the donation of any other material that would enrich the scholarly value of the archives. The Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies is establishing itself as an internationally significant source of information for researchers on Iris Murdoch’s work. The Iris Murdoch Society would greatly appreciate your help to continue this level of support for the Centre. 2 Contents Peter Conradi: Preface: Twenty Years of the Iris Murdoch Society News Letter 4 Stephanie de Pue: Meeting the Enchantress: Unpublished Interview with Iris Murdoch 7 Peter Garrard: The Iris Murdoch Text Analysis Project and its Importance to the Study 14 of Authorship and Alzheimer’s Disease Alfonso Lopez: The Puzzling Seriousness of Language: Introducing Spanish 18 Philosophy Students to Iris Murdoch’s Philosophy and Fiction Paul Binding: Forgotten and Unknown? The Sandcastle Revisited 23 Valerie Purton: Iris Murdoch and the Art of Dedication 28 Anne Rowe: ‘I embrace you with much love’: Letters from Iris Murdoch to Elias 37 Canetti Jeremy Adler: ‘Tear Up this Letter’: Review of Briefe An Georges, the letters of Veza 41 and Elias Canetti edited by Karen Lauer and Kristian Wachinger Ritchie Robertson: ‘The Great Hater’: Review of Elias Canetti by Sven Hanuschek 45 Alison Scott-Baumann: Review of Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, edited by Anne 50 Rowe Alex Ramon: The Third International Conference on Iris Murdoch: ‘Iris Murdoch: 53 Morality and the Novel’ Otsuki Miharu: The Third Iris Murdoch Conference: A View from Japan 55 Report on the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies 56 Short Reviews and Notices 57 Editorial 60 3 Preface The Iris Murdoch Society and the Iris Murdoch News Letter alike are twenty years old. It is touching now to read the first issues, edited by John Burke in Alabama, which were partly minutes of the Modern Language Association meetings and abstracts of papers, together with John Fletcher's admirable researches into Murdoch juvenilia: work-in-progress for his and Cheryl Bove's massive, invaluable bibliography. It is sometimes said that you can tell how good an artist is by the quality of the scholars attracted to her. By this standard we have much to feel encouraged by. The quality of contributions at the biennial Iris Murdoch conferences - last year’s drawing 90 people from four continents - is impressive. The News Letter today is less of the cosy parish-pump affair than it inevitably began as, and is now being published as an expanded Iris Murdoch Review by the newly formed Kingston University Press. In 1987, when the first Iris Murdoch News Letter was produced, there would still be four more late novels, each contemplating its wounded and dying patriarch. I recall the launch-party Chatto gave in 1987 for The Good Apprentice with Janet Stone (half-Virginia Woolf, half-stork), the Australian composer Sir Malcolm Williamson and others. Although Iris was very important to all her friends, I have little sense now that she was truly known by many. Canetti - who figures importantly in this first Iris Murdoch Review, and hence in this editorial - was one measure of our ignorance. True, Christine Ann Evans, reviewing Richard H. Lawson’s Understanding Elias Canetti in an Iris Murdoch News Letter (No 6, 1992), was – so far as I know – among the first to suggest in print that the power figures in Murdoch might have Canetti as a real-life model. But Party in the Blitz, whose pages on Iris Johanna Canetti sent to me loose-leaf, in uncertain order and in German, in 2001, is – despite Evans’s percipience - an index of the depth of that general ignorance. Canetti and Murdoch now appear locked together like Dante's Paolo and Francesca, doomed to tumble through eternity in terrible, unfulfilling embrace. But not, at least on his part, the embrace of affection. When Party im Blitz appeared in German in 2003 Susie Ovadia, sister of Cannetti’s mistress Friedl Benedikt, rang me from Paris. We had spent two days together in Chaville-sur-Seine in 1998, recording hours of talk together, mainly about Canetti and Friedl; we stayed in touch thereafter. Around 2001 I took her to Chez Jenny on the Place de la Republique - serving fish on Alsacian choucroute - where she talked about Marcel Reich-Ranicki's portrait of Canetti in Author of Myself. She believed herself to be one of the very few people who had never been frightened of Canetti and was always scrupulous and careful in speaking of him. Having worked as a journalist for Radio Free Europe, where her fluent French, German, Swedish and English came in useful, she is neither naïve nor sentimental. What Canetti finally wrote of Murdoch shocked her immensely. Having thought she knew him well for sixty years - since 1934 - he had finally, and after his death, managed to change her view. Yet the sense that Canetti's and Murdoch's relationship was based on kinship persists. In Paris in 2001 Queneau's son let me read, in the family's Neuilly flat, Iris's letters to his father, all written to his work address at Gallimard, the great publishing house; these letters may now have disappeared for good into the Queneau summer-house in Burgundy. I was not permitted to photocopy but could laboriously transcribe, and made a rapid note of a letter from Iris in 1947 or 48, enquiring, I think, about the thinker Kojève, who influenced Queneau; and then - quite distinctly - asking about Canetti. Queneau played a role in having Canetti's Die Blendung (Auto-da-Fe) translated into French post-war - at the same time as it appeared to great acclaim in English in 1946, in a translation by Veronica Wedgwood. (Later I could not locate this letter). 4 Queneau, his son assured me, knew Canetti only slightly. It was, however, striking to discover that Iris's awareness of Canetti pre-dated their meeting by five or so years. Perhaps her admirable and brilliant fellow-Somervillian friend Carol Stuart, whom Iris saw a little of during the war, had told Iris of Canetti. Stuart, who was to translate Crowds and Power into English in 1960, first met Canetti around 1943, I think at a party of William Empson’s. In any case, whatever it was that Murdoch had been told clearly caught her imagination. Anne Rowe in this Review describes the August 1952 letter from Iris to Canetti, soliciting a meeting in Paris, where Canetti's brothers lived. Nissim, also known as Jacques, a musical impresario, backed Yves Montand while Georges was satirised as the psychiatrist in Auto-da-Fe. The appearance of Party in the Blitz changed my view of the politics of their relationship. I tried to express this in the 2005 edition (No 18) of the News Letter as I had in the Guardian. Iris Murdoch first had seemed a victim; now, on the contrary, she looked stronger than Canetti, the person who listened best – ‘greedily,’ as Canetti accused her, feeling his privacy violated, his inner being ‘robbed’. He secretly liked talking even better than listening: she understood his Mr Toad-like vanity and cannibalised his life in her work. John Gross in a Telegraph review points out that one of Canetti's charges against Iris is not - as I had at first thought - that she did not suffer, but that she did not suffer for her art.