POEMS FROM AN ATTIC: Selected Poems, 1936-1995, by Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch, the formidable Irish and British novelist and philosopher, died in 1999. Since then, the Murdoch industry has churned. We’ve had three memoirs about her from her husband, John Bayley (one was published shortly before her death), as well as Peter Conradi’s cleareyed and context-rich biography, “Iris Murdoch: A Life,” published in 2001.
We’ve also had a trickle of posthumous work. Some of this has been nonessential: for example, the diaries Murdoch kept as a young woman, published as “A Writer at War” (2010). Some has been sumptuous. Murdoch’s letters, published as “Living on Paper” (2016), are among the most ardent and vivid literary letters of the previous century. Her intellect and emotions trailed her like thunderheads.
Now comes a collection of her poetry, almost none of which was published during her lifetime. She feared her poetry was mediocre. It isn’t. In its style and subject matter, it’s very much in keeping with the most crucial of her novels, which include “Under the Net” (1954) and “The Sea, The Sea” (1978). A primary theme is obsessive love. Her rhetoric is emotionally charged and shorn, like the blunt chop of the uneven bangs she wore, of clever words and shallow feelings.
The book is called “Poems From an Attic: Selected Poems, 1936-1995.” The word “attic,” in the title, is not a metaphor. Two of this book’s editors were invited up into the attic of Murdoch and Bayley’s last house, on Charlbury Road in Oxford, in 2016. If you know anything about this couple, you know they were indifferent housekeepers. An entire veal-and-ham pie once went missing from their kitchen counter and rats were the prime suspect.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the attic, as described in this book’s afterword, sounds like something out of Shirley Jackson or Edgar Allan Poe:
We found a small space patchily lit by a few exposed lightbulbs, which lent an eerie quality to bulging cardboard boxes, battered suitcases and stacks of books, tilting alarmingly from the floor or spilling precariously from rickety wooden bookshelves groaning with the weight of multiple copies of Murdoch’s novels. Two decades of dust had settled on gnawed plastic carrier bags out of which peeped the paws and heads of beloved soft toys.
It’s the bit about “paws and heads” that drives the apprehension home.
Murdoch’s complicated sexuality — she had all-consuming affairs with both men and women, including the writers Elias Canetti and Brigid Brophy, before settling down with the rumpled and genial Bayley — is front and center from the beginning. A poem written while she was in her teens begins:
She doesn’t know I love her — for I hide My love under a casual friendship. She cannot feel it burning in my hands When I touch her cool white hands. She cannot see it blazing in my eyes When I look into her calm grey eyes.
These early poems display her precocity — her deep reading, casual erudition, the confident flow of her sentences. One is titled “To a Girl With Yellow Hair” and begins: “How is it that we understood each other / At once, and recognized each other / Without the usual preliminaries?”
These poems grow in force and in metrical complexity. One of the central poems in this collection, written in 1955, is titled “Musical Evening for Three.” It describes a trio of friends, with an intertwining sexual history, at a concert. The music extracts painful memories and pushes the poet to something close to a breakdown:
I had not thought such pain were possible Again, not that particular pain. It is the echo that is terrible — To find one’s spirit can be bent again Into that old and agonizing spiral, To taste upon the lips the very shame, Tasted again like wine brought from its rest To shake the memory of an aged guest.
It was the music that destroyed my peace — And then that you, and you, were present too. I could have borne it in another place, Or, without that assault, encountered you.
The editors note that this poem describes a concert Murdoch attended with her friends Philippa and Michael Foote, and refers to a “‘quadrilateral tale’ of partner-swapping that had occurred over a decade earlier.” It’s not essential to have this background — the poem works without it. But this book’s afterword should have been a foreword.
A little knowledge of Murdoch’s life helps. I enjoyed a poem titled “Oxford to Paddington,” written on a train and dedicated to Bayley, in part because she finds herself “wondering if you are now / In the Bodleian working hard perhaps.” This poem improves if you know that the couple liked to kiss and embrace in library stacks, where they could find a bit of privacy.
The best thing about being God, Murdoch once wrote, would be making the heads. She liked to describe her handsome lovers, and even her less handsome ones.
Not all of these poems are so nakedly autobiographical. There is verse about nature, about artworks, about buildings. An urbane poem titled “St. James’s Park” reads a bit like the everyday sketches of Frank O’Hara: “The people are constantly coming over the bridge / And the lips of the women are red.”
A second key poem is “Motorist and Dead Bird,” written from a male perspective, in loosely iambic meter, that peels away layer upon layer of surprises. It begins simply enough: “He felt or thought he felt a crack, / Saw in his mirror the bird-blotted road, / Cursed the compulsion of going back / To find it glossy, without blood, quite dead.” The poem takes a turn in the middle, when he considers how his wife would have reacted, only to note that she is remarried with children while he, in apparently grimier circumstances, is headed toward an “obscure hotel / Where he is waited for.” The poem is a series of emotional shocks.
It underscores something Murdoch said in an interview, that “poets can express much more than novelists, this connected sense of something which is simple and lucid and true and non-bogus and at the same time oddly accidental.”
“Poems From an Attic” does not greatly extend our understanding of Murdoch. But these are formal workings out of impulses, appetites and intense feelings. The best are strong enough that it’s as if she carved them, with a knife, onto a library desk.
POEMS FROM AN ATTIC: Selected Poems, 1936-1995 | By Iris Murdoch | Chatto & Windus | 167 pp. | $28.99
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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