THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE MONTH. Cont'd.
writing,
her intellect and even her love-making. Her husband's memoirs lifted the lid
on their relationship, but Canetti's memoirs are altogether more vituperative.
Canetti and Murdoch became lovers in 1953, the year before she met Bayley, now
a retired professor of English at Oxford University. Their three-year
relationship was one of the most influential in her life and she drew on
Canetti for some of her most memorable characters in novels such as the Booker
Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea. Mischa Fox in The Flight From The Enchanter,
which was dedicated to Canetti, and Julius King in A Fairly Honorable Defeat
also lean heavily on him. Intriguingly, those characters are manipulative and
destructive forces, which may say something about the way Murdoch saw Canetti.
It is thought that Canetti, who died in 1994, helped to launch Murdoch's
career by anonymously submitting the manuscript of her first novel, when she
was a complete unknown, to a publisher who took it up. Now Canetti has
responded from beyond the grave in memoirs published in German, on the
authority of his estate, under the title: Party in the Blitz: The English
Years. The book, written in the early 1990s, has just been published in
Germany and is to be translated and published this year in the UK - even
though Canetti wrote on his manuscript "temporary, unordered draft (not to be
published in this form)". Canetti, who lived for decades in Amersham in
Buckinghamshire and Hampstead, north London, begins his 20-page critique of
his former lover with the words: "Yesterday the thick philosophical tome of
Iris Murdoch, with her name in giant letters on the cover. I occupied myself
with it, unfortunately, for a couple of hours. My distaste for her increased
so much that I must say a few things here." He goes on: "Her book is very
badly written, shoddy, like lectures that have not been edited enough. The
tone is unpleasantly academic. That would not be so bad if she had something
to say. "He describes her intellectual world as derivative, dependent upon
philosophical systems she has learnt but not advanced: "There is no single
serious thought in her, everything sleeps on."
Murdoch's many love affairs with both women and men anger Canetti, not least because they are transmuted into her novels which "consist of all the Oxford tittle-tattle that she absorbed in half a century. Her characters are all engendered and born in Oxford ... I could say that she made much out of preying on me but it is mixed with so much other prey that one is embarrassed ... One could call Iris Murdoch the Oxford stew."T he dislike of Murdoch's novels and philosophy is accompanied by a venomous personal attack on Murdoch. Writing in his 80s, Canetti seems baffled and angered, not least by their love-making. "Then the strangest thing happened as soon as we had kissed. The settee on which I always slept was near. Iris undressed herself swiftly, one might say, as fast as lightning, without my laying a finger upon her, she wore things that had absolutely nothing to do with love, woollen, ugly, but they were piled so swiftly into a heap on the floor, she had already laid herself under the blanket on a settee. There was no time to look at her things or at her. She lay unmoved and unchanged, I hardly noticed that I was inside her, I did not feel that she noticed anything." Canetti, married at the time of the affair, also mocks her appearance. And he is startled by her puritanical attitude to food and drink. He admires her ability to listen and enjoys her passion for listening to him. But he thinks she uses this to
