British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of myths. As a writer, she was a perfectionist who did not allow editors to change her text. Murdoch produced 26 novels in 40 years, the last written while she was suffering from Alzheimer disease.
"She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction." (John Bailey in Elegy for Iris, 1998)
Murdoch was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987. From the mid-1990s Murdoch suffered from Alzheimer disease. First signs were seen on visits to Israel, where Murdoch, who always spoke slowly, had difficulties answering questions. Her last novel was a psychological thriller. In the story, Edward Lannion, an aspiring young poet and historical novelist, on the day before his wedding receives an enigmatic letter from his fiancée. Brad Leithauser wrote in The New York Times that Murdoch's prose is strewn with imprecisions and blatant redundancies - Leithauser also asked why the phrase ''then suddenly'' should appear three times in a single paragraph. The mistakes urged Murdoch's devoted readers to send these comments in letters to the writer.
During the last years of her life, Murdoch became like "a very nice 3-year-old," her husband said. She died in Oxford on February 8, 1999. In his memoir Elegy for Iris John Bayley portrays his brilliant wife lovingly but unsentimentally. "She was a superior being, and I knew that superior beings just did not have the kind of mind that I had." Murdoch's benevolent personality was not broken by her disease.
I have not read any of her works, keeping them rather at the bottom of my reading list, but after seeing the movie yesterday I've just pushed the books up the list. What struck me even before was how an author/poet would deal with Alzheimer's Disease - how difficult it would be for them to face not being able to complete a sentence they started, suddenly not knowing what words meant and so on...the movie captured this beautifully...
While on the subject I should also mention that Nissim Ezekiel, the father of modern Indian English Poetry passed away in Jan 2004 having battled with the same disease for several years. Dr.Bhaurcha, a former student of Ezekiel, told us how, despite the disease, he was still very welcoming towards young students of literature and how he gave advice to aspiring poets, for as long as he could.
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