Iris Murdoch; Leading British Writer

Iris Murdoch, one of Britain’s most revered modern novelists, died Monday at a nursing home in Oxford, England. She was 79.

A philosopher by trade and temperament, Murdoch wrote more than 30 novels peopled with cerebral characters embroiled in philosophical turmoil over the meaning of love and freedom and how to live a moral life.

She won England’s most prestigious literary honor, the Booker Prize, in 1978 for “The Sea, the Sea” and was one of a handful of writers ever made a Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Four years ago, the prolific author announced that she was suffering from severe writer’s block. The next year her husband, literary critic John Bayley, amplified on that admission when he reported to a London newspaper that his wife had Alzheimer’s disease.

Murdoch later acknowledged that she was a victim of biological forces beyond her control.

“I’m afraid I am waiting in vain [to write],” she said. “Perhaps I had better find some other kind of job.”

British novelist Malcolm Bradbury on Monday called Murdoch one of “the four or five great novelists of the second half of this century to come out of Britain” and ranked her alongside such major writers as Anthony Burgess and William Golding. “I hope we won’t just remember the sad end of the tale,” he said, “but the brilliant mind that she used to have.”

Murdoch was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919, the only child of Anglo-Irish parents. She grew up in the suburbs of London, earning a scholarship to a private school when she was 13.

She studied classical languages and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford, and flirted with communism in the early 1940s, an affiliation that kept her out of the United States several years later when she won a scholarship to study here.

She worked briefly for the British Treasury during World War II and later for the United Nations refugee program in Austria and Belgium, where she met the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre.

She wrote a study of Sartre and later came to be closely associated with the existential movement, although she later denied ever being a Sartrean or an existentialist.

A central theme in most of Murdoch’s novels was love, which she once defined as “the perception of individuals . . . the extremely difficult realization, that something other than oneself is real.” She dealt with love of all kinds--heterosexual, homosexual, incestuous and adulterous. She created comically tangled webs of relationships, as in “An Unofficial Rose,” in which the character Hugh Peronett decides to fall in love again with his ex-mistress, who is in love with her female assistant, who, it happens, is desired by Peronett’s son.

But as the writer Ian Hamilton observed in a New Yorker magazine article some years ago, in Murdoch’s world, love was more mental than physical: Her characters were “afflicted by passion as if by a disease--a sort of brain disease, in fact, for her books are barely erotic at all.”

Reviewers generally liked her work, and even those who didn’t--one said her books were “Harlequin romances for highbrows”--still took her seriously.

Murdoch never read her reviews (not even “the long serious pieces,” she said 1981) and was, according to her husband, singularly uncompetitive in a market driven by sales and sound bites. She worked in solitude, rarely discussing her work with her husband, except to consult on technical details, such as what a character should eat. She wrote her manuscripts in careful longhand, but didn’t tolerate editing of any kind, an attitude that caused some critics to regard her work as unnecessarily long--”loose, baggy monsters.” Nor did she feel any compulsion to compare notes with other writers. “I certainly do not talk to other writers about my work,” she said emphatically in a 1981 interview.

Her refusal to heed reviews seemed odd considering her marriage to a highly regarded literary scholar, but Bayley respected this. He usually did not read her books until they were published.

Bayley and Murdoch were married for more than 40 years, and their marriage, the New Yorker’s Hamilton said, was “the stuff of doting legend” in literary circles. Bayley had set out to be a novelist, too, but turned to criticism after marrying Murdoch in 1956 because, he acknowledged, she was just better at fiction. “Iris,” he wrote, “was one of those meteors who are instantly recognized.”

Their deep affection for one another imbued Bayley’s recent memoir, “Elegy for Iris,” with heartbreak and humor.

He described how the writer with a luminous mind spent much of her last years watching “Teletubbies” on television, how she beseeched him with little cries and anxious looks, how she would begin sentences but never finish them, all day long.

“Most days are, for her, a sort of despair. . . . She does not know that she has written 26 remarkable novels, as well as her books on philosophy; received honorary doctorates from major universities; become a dame of the British Empire.”

But she also remained herself in many ways--her quickness to smile, her gentleness and eagerness to oblige.

Oddly, Bayley noted, her descent into Alzheimer’s eerily resembled her pre-Alzheimer’s self, in her “tranquil indifference” to much of what matters to most people, such as fashion or what others think.

Murdoch and Bayley, who survives her, had no children. In 1994, Murdoch said that her parents and her work were two of the most important things in her life. But the most important, she said, was her husband. “To have had a happy marriage,” she said, “is a very good thing.”

John Bayley’s book “Elegy for Iris” will be reviewed in Sunday’s Book Review.