Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography. Peter Conradi J.

Чтение книги онлайн.

       INTRODUCTION

      Iris Murdoch wrote to her friend the painter Harry Weinberger in October 1985, when he was contemplating writing his memoirs, ‘how precious the past is, how soon forgotten’, regretting how little she had researched her own family. She told her old refugee-camp friend Jože Jančar in about the same year to expect a call one day from her biographer. When ‘feeling mortal’ in 1963 she had sent some poems to her publisher at Chatto & Windus, Norah Smallwood, explaining, ‘I would like one or two of these poems to have a chance of surviving.’¹ She lodged a story, her family tree and her husband John Bayley’s Newdigate Prize poem with her literary agent Ed Victor in the 1980s. How she was remembered mattered: she once startled a Jesuit student who had quoted St Augustine by asking, ‘Have you any evidence that he was a good man?’ She kept in London a copy of H. House’s Sketches for a Portrait of Rimbaud, and a well-thumbed Life of Shakespeare by A.L. Rowse. She encouraged Stephen Gardiner in his biographies of Jacob Epstein and Elisabeth Frink.

      The idea of a biography of her was first mooted by the publisher Richard Cohen.² At first appalled, she later consented to her friend A.N. Wilson writing it, and Chatto showed interest in commissioning the book as a Socratic dialogue. At some point in their researches, after 1990, both she and Wilson cooled to the idea. Probably Dame Iris wanted only intellectual biography, at least during her lifetime, though she was resigned, as she told the American biographer Jeffrey Meyers, to the matter being resolved after she had ‘departed this scene’. I raised the issue at the end of 1996, the year when Iris and John Bayley and my partner Jim O’Neill and I had started to spend weeks together in Radnorshire. It did not seem right that the life of so remarkable a person should go unrecorded, and I hoped that it would be written by someone sympathetic.

I had loved her work since finding СКАЧАТЬ