Backlisted - The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Ian Patterson, author of Books: A Manifesto , returns to Backlisted for a joyful discussion of Iris Murdoch and her sixteenth novel The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), the winner of the Whitbread literary award for fiction. For reasons that will be obvious, the talk soon turns to other novels by Murdoch, including The Bell (1958), The Black Prince (1973), The Sea, the Sea (1978) and The Green Knight (1993), plus the film adaptations of A Severed Head (1961) and the unknown book that spawned erotic thriller Love Standing Up (1985). We listen to interview clips from the archive and excerpts from her remarkable and prescient speech ‘Art and Tyranny’ (1972). The author was considered to be a literary titan in her lifetime. But where does her reputation stand in 2026? Was Murdoch a philosopher who wrote novels, a novelist who wrote philosophy, a pioneer of wild swimming, or a unique combination of the three? This is a playful and wide-ranging conversation between Ian, Una, Andy and Nicky, with articulate individuals exchanging sophisticated ideas in a manner similar to, yet entirely unlike, characters in an Iris Murdoch novel. We hope you enjoy it just as much as we did. *For £150 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes and original writing, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. The novel featured on today's show is The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch, first published in 1974 by Chasau and Windus in the UK, and The Viking Press in the USA. I'm Andy Miller, author of the Year of Reading Dangerously and Inventory, an unreliable guide to my record collection. I'm Dr. Una McCormack, award-winning science fiction author and associate fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge. And I'm Nikki Birch, the producer and editor of Backlisted.

Backlisted has been running for 10 years now, and over that time we've built up a loyal community of listeners, patrons and guests, plus, of course, a library of some 250 shows, containing everything from a Christmas carol to the Ice Palace. We have. And we've been making

backlisted shows now every two weeks for all of that time. That's a lot of reading in Andy, Una and John's case or in my case buying a lot of books

and attempting to read some of them. However, soon we are about to take a well-earn break from Backlisted, focusing on our solo albums before we reform again

for more stadium shows later in the year. Yes. Long-time listeners will recall, even if long-time means just last year, 2025. We get banging on about how we've been here for 10 years. Well, that was partly to

prepare you for the fact that we're tired now and we need, it's been a long, it's been a long time. 250 plus shows. So we're going to take a break just to recharge our batteries for a little while. So we're really grateful for your support. Thus far, we'll be back, but we need a rest. Yeah. So this episode is the penultimate show before we take a break. break. But during that break, we'll be replaying some of our archive with lots of new updated introductions. And for those lovely souls who would still like to hear from us and want some brand new bookish content, we will continue to be publishing our subscriber-only shows via patreon.com forward slash backlisted, including actually a brand new read-along Booker Prize Winners Book Club. And that's where you can

keep up with Andy's music writing, inventory and one or two other exciting treats which we'll tell you about in the next show. All the details can be found at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. I would like to distance myself from the phrase brand new bookish content. I wrote that and I'm going to own that. Yeah. Okay. You had the chance to nix it when the drafts went round, you know.

Bookish content does not reflect the views of backlisted and is the individual, Nikki Birch. As I said, solo albums will be working on for the rest of the year. I tell you what, everybody, we all came to this show in separate buses and we'll all be leaving immediately after in different directions. That's how things are. Anyway, thank you so much for that introduction, Nikki. Now, joining us on today's show to discuss the sacred and profane love machine by Iris Burdock is a guest making a return appearance on backlisted.

Welcome back, Ian Patterson, Ian, hello. Hello, great to be back, even into this extraordinary mix of hostilities and mistaken drafts and solo albums. You've joined Kiss at the wrong moment. Or is there, I'm not sure there is, there is a good moment to join Kiss, but anyway. Ian, you, I think you should know that so confident. were we of delivering an absolutely tip-top show on the subject of Iris Murdoch that on social media I teased that this episode was coming but I didn't reveal which book we were going to do and who our guest was going to be. People are beside themselves with excitement trying to work out

which book we're going to talk about. I don't want you to talk about it yet, but I do want you to know this is one of the most anticipated recordings that we've done for a long time. time that the Iris Murdoch readership is out there and is thrilled that this conversation is going to take place. Isn't that nice? Isn't that a nice thing to know? Mostly, yes. No pressure. I don't think anyone guessed the book as well. No, they did not. Shall we do the introductions? We should do the introductions. Yes. Please do. Ian Patterson taught in further education for almost 15 years,

then was a secondhand bookseller for 10 years, specialising in modernism, left wingery and the Spanish Civil War. Translated books from French, then did a PhD at King's College, Cambridge, on cultural critique and canon formation, 1910 to 1939. And finally, after four years as a research fellow at Kings, became a fellow of Queens College, Cambridge, where he taught English for 20 years.

he retired in 2018. Apart from his academic writing, he has published Gernica and Total War, 2007, an account of cultural reactions to the fear of death from the air, from the first bomb dropped from a plane in 1911 to the advent of nuclear weapons, and this year he published books, a manifesto, or How to Build a Library.

A widely published an award-winning poet, his collected poems was published by Broken Sleep in 2024. He's also the editor of the very long-running and very difficult literary quotation quiz Nemo's Almanac, which started in 1892. I thought I'd misread that then. You've been working a long time, Ian? I'm getting tired too, yes. You're about to announce a century off now, yeah. Ian is married to the writer Olivia Lang and lives in Suffer.

and he was last on backlisted in 2019, episode 84, discussing Jilly Cooper's novel Imogen. The lovely late Jilly Cooper who died last year, do you know, Ian, if Jilly Cooper and Iris Murdoch ever met? Well, no, I don't. It seems on the face of it, improbable that they knew each other as friends. improbable too that they never ran into each other somewhere, but I wouldn't have thought they ran closely or quickly towards each other. Now, Nemo's Almanac is horribly difficult by your own admission. Yes, it is. I mean, some years it's more difficult than other years

because I forget whether it's difficult or not. And, of course, it's always easy for the person who sets the quiz. And sometimes I remember that not everybody has read the whole of Trollope or knows about the minor poems of Mervyn Smelt. Well, our listeners barely speak of anything else, Ian. So do you have a question from the most recent instalment that you were particularly pleased with? Let's see if there was one I was pleased with.

There was one or two, actually. Come on, Una. Here you go. I don't like books anymore, Andy. I don't read them anymore. Can't of course tell you the answer. That's true. Hit me with the Star Trek novels. This is not, oddly enough, from a Star Trek novel. This is the third quotation from January and its verse.

The year goes, the woods decay, and I, After many a summer dies. The swan on Bingham's Pond, a ghost comes and goes. It goes and ice appears. It holds, bears gulls that stand around surprised. Right, everybody. See, that's certainly from the autobiography of Spock, I think. It might be, yes.

It was one of the poems that he wrote when he was having his first divorce, isn't it? I thought, and this one for Lott listeners, I thought there was a slightly Betchaman cadence there, though it wasn't Betchman at all, I know that. Come on, Una, let's play along. Let's take a stab, go on. Oh, goodness.

No, well, I was going to say Betchaman, actually, but you got me there. I'm going to say Stevie Smith. And Nikki is going to say, help yeah but Ian do you even know the answer not without looking it up at this point no well that's reassuring isn't it

anyway I couldn't say the answer because that would be giving it away that's good so we can buy that can we now yeah from me good good a quiz so difficult easing the person setting the questions doesn't know the answers good

this is excellent Ian thank you so much And more to the point of our meeting today, you've written a wonderful book called Books a Manifesto or How to Build a Library, which I enjoyed tremendously. I like books about books, but as you can imagine, I've read quite a few now. So have I. And I always think, yes, right? And I always think, okay, impress me. And of course, you did impress me and entertained me while. at the same time. So thank you so much for that pleasure that you gave me. It did occur to me

that listeners to backlisted would enjoy this book terribly. So can I ask you before you just read a little bit? You call it books a manifesto. Why? Partly because I didn't want to call it other things that the publisher might have been suggesting, partly because I like the title, and partly because it's not really a manifesto, but it's got a manifestish undercurrent to it that comes up sometimes. And anyway, if it were a manifesto,

it would be saying what it does say. So it probably is a manifesto. Just not a very manifest manifesto. I'm glad I'm not working in your marketing department. That's all I'll say. Well, I think it's, well, it does what you need it to, which is it distinguishes it from other books of this type. And then when you get into it,

I think it's a pleasing bit of misdirection, a manifesto. I think that's, which is what one would hope for from you. It would be terribly dull if it was an actual manifesto, wouldn't it? Dear, dear. Well, it might not. Depends what it said. But probably it would be duller than this, what you get from the pleasing misdirection once you open the book. Would you please us with a brief excerpt from the introduction?

Yeah. Even for ordinary readers, there are advanced. to having actual books. I know e-books are convenient for travel and storage, but you can't so easily lend one to a friend or remember the particular feel of it in your hand. When I've read a book, if it isn't a library book, I like to have it around on a shelf, fully present, separate but available, ready to be consulted again, shown to other people or borrowed and returned. I've accumulated books all my life. In a sense, books have been my life. or at least they've usually been somewhere near the heart of it. I've been a teacher, an academic, a translator, a political activist, a second-hand bookseller, an editor, a writer and a poet. The constant theme linking them all is books. I'm a reader and an accumulator and collector of books.

Since I was very young I've wanted to read books and have them around me, I believe books and reading are important, all kinds of books and all kinds of reading. It seems natural to me to want to create a library of my books wherever I'm living, even if I'm only to be there for a short time. I used to feel guilty about it sometimes, pray to the accusation that absorption in books is an avoidance of the outside world, a feeble substitute for real life. But that notion of real life is dubious at best.

At worst, it's just bogus ideology, used by right-wing politicians and demagogues to belittle the whole array of creative thinking by accusing artists, writers, academics and intellectuals of retreating into ivory towers when the rarefied world of parliamentary politics is itself much more of an ivory tower than universities, publishing or the media. Reality is complex. It's not just social reality, the things that actually happen in the world, practical matters, action. There's also the life, the mind, the imagination, the arts, history, memory, everything we think. remember, hope for, forget everything that isn't the reality that politicians are mostly concerned

with, but which belongs in another kind of reality, psychic reality, no less real for being imaginative, subjective or invisible, or confined in books. Reading is a necessary part of reality and an unavoidable part of everyday life. Oh, keep going. I want to hear the rest of the paragraph, please. We live within language and using it is as natural to us and as unconscious as breathing. When we think, it's what we think with. Exercising our use of language, both our receptivity to it and our control over it, is how we develop individual personhood, self-knowledge, knowledge of others and of the world. And although we live in language, the language we live in from day to day is like the sea, constantly shifting in permanent restlessness. It's only still when it's written down.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Anyway, it's called Books and Manifesto or How to Build a Library. It's published by Videnfeld and Nicholson. It's by our guest today, Ian Passen, and it's out now. Terrific read. Cannot recommend that. Highly enough. I agree. Una, over to you. Right. Well, we should turn to the book that Ian has brought with him today. Now, rather than a attempt a synopsis of the plot of the sacred and profane love machine. Andy went rummaging around the Debenham's website.

I didn't even know existed. Yeah, that domain name is still whatever still in that warehouse. Taking us all the way back to the 1970s. Andy went back to the Debenham's website and he found the five at a glance features on the page devoted to this novel. what you can expect. Gripping romantic drama. Examines love's complexities. Ambiguous female friendship. Vengeful love story. Modern literary fiction. Now, Debenhams have two copies of the book in stock and you will find it under Home Forward Slash Hobbies and Crafts Forward Slash Books.

It's terribly pleasing to think they've had those since 1974. Before the website, easily, I think. Now, there might be a reason why that's still in stock. And it might be related to this. I was teasing Ian then about, I wouldn't once work in his marketing department. Pity then, the blurb writer tasked with producing jacket copy for the sacred and profane love machine. Here is the insight. flat copy from the hardback first edition of the sacred and profane love machine published in 1974.

This will give you an insight into the glories and challenges of reading Iris Murdoch. Here we go. Montague Small, an obsessive writer of detective thrillers, mourns his lately dead wife, who may or may not have been unfaithful to him. His attempts at meditation are a failure. He detests his fictional detective. His interest in his neighbour's difficulties and his neighbour's wife appear to be his only consolations after all. The neighbour, Blaise Gamander, is an amateur psychotherapist who is seen through himself. Has Blaise the courage to change his life and become an honest man? What is honesty in any case? Blaise's wife Harriet lives for love, love of her husband, love of her son. She is fond of Monty too. Emily McHugh is quite another matter.

She too lives for love, for love and justice and revenge aided and incited by her ambiguous friend Constance Pinn. Emily's son, Luca, a very disturbed child, becomes the subject of a tug of war between two possessive women. Edgar de Mourney, a distinguished scholar, also blunders into the fray. He adores Monty. He adores Monty. and falls in love with Monty's women. A deed of violence finally solves many problems. This is a story of different loves and of how a man may need two women in such a way

that he can be happy with neither. Sacred and profane love are related opposites. The one enjoyed renders the other necessary so that the ever unsatisfied heart swings constantly to and fro. Good Lord! Ian, do you think Dame Iris wrote that? No, I should imagine Nora Small did it, but it might have been anybody.

And Nora Small was her editor at the publisher, right? Yeah, okay. Very interesting. Una, will you tell us a little bit about Iris Murdoch's life? Certainly can. Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on July the 15th, 1919 and grew up in London. She studied classics at Somerville College Oxford from 19, until 1942, receiving first-class

honours. By 1950, she was a fellow at St. Anne's College, Oxford, and a university lecturer in philosophy. She published

her first book, Sarch, Romantic Rationalist, in 1953. Murdoch's career as a novelist began the next year with Under the Net.

Her early successes include The Bell in 1958 and a severed head in 1961, subsequently adapted into a film starring Ian Holme and Lee Remick of which more anon. In 1974, the Sacred and Profane Love Machine won the Whitbread Award for Fiction,

and four years later, she was awarded the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea. She was named a companion of the British Empire in 1976 and a dame of the British Empire in 1987. In total, she published 26 novels, plus a volume of short stories, poetry collections, several the original plays, and five works of philosophy, including the sovereignty of good in 1970, and metaphysics as a guide to morals in 1992, and she died in 1999 at the age of 79. Iris Murdoch was considered one of the most significant novelists of her time, i.e. the 20th century. But where does her reputation? stand today a quarter of the way through the 21st.

Should we think of her as a philosopher who wrote novels, a novelist who wrote philosophy, a pioneer of wild swimming, or some combination of the three? Portrayed on screen famously by Kate Winslet and Judy Dench, is Iris Murdox still a household name? And what on earth is this novel about? When we come back, Ian Patterson will help us answer these questions or perish in the attempt.

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Do that with acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with acrobat. Ian, it's traditional on backlisted to ask this question. And so let me be traditional and say, when did you first read the sacred and profane love machine or become aware of the writing of Iris Murdoch? Well, the latter first,

I suppose anybody growing up in the time that I was growing up in a fairly literate culture, was aware of Aris Murdoch, as a name at least, that is in the 1960s. And I became aware of her as a reader, I guess, probably when I was at university, when I know that I had a copy of Under the Net, her first novel, and I know that I didn't read very much of it. I read about, I suppose, about 50 pages and gave up. I thought, I'm not interested in this. It wasn't until some, probably until I was in my early 30s, that I picked her up again and read the nice and the good

and thought, oh my God, this is extraordinary. And then I started to read more and more. And among the more that I read, was the sacred and profane love machine. So I guess about probably 40 years ago, I read it for the first time. Una, do you want to ask the question, or shall I? You could ask. Oonah is very polite.

So, Ian, Iris Murdoch was famous for her intellectualism and her mischief. and when Una and I met, unfortunately you were poorly before Christmas, but when Una and I had our first meeting to discuss the book in preparation for the show, we spent a lot of the time going, why has Ian chosen the sacred and profane love machine and concluded that it must be a Murdoch-like practical prank? Is that correct? Justify yourself, Ian.

Well, not entirely. No. It was more that I thought it was another one. I just got the titles muddled up. Is that true? Up to a point that is true, yes. Amazing. That's fantastic.

No further questions. The defence rests, Your Honor. Which one I thought it was may emerge in the course of our discussion. That's good to know. Oh, that's hilarious, you know, I feel much better disposed. towards this book now. Okay, that's good. I hope no worse disposed

towards me. I think it raises a perfectly valid point, which Nikki brought to our attention just before we came on air, which is that it is quite easy to get one Iris Murdoch

novel muddled up with another even if you've made a film of them. I thought there was only one cinema adaptation of an Iris Murdo or the aforementioned a severed head but it turns out there's another

one called the Sins of Ilsa also known as the Iris movie which was made in the mid-1980s and it's an American adult erotic film that was shown on the Playboy channel in 1987

under the title Love Standing Up and even the Iris Murdoch Society can't book out which novel it's alleged to be based on. It may well be the sacred and profane love machine. We may well decide that the sins of Ilsa, aka love standing up, is based on this one that you chose accidentally. Well, time will tell.

That's well, well said, suitably no mix style. Thank you, Ian. I think we should hear then from the woman herself. Now, we have an amazing clip here. is from 1962. The period Ian was talking about there when Iris Murdoch was not at her most famous. She was certainly extremely well known, a regular feature of newspaper, comment, radio and television. And here we have an excerpt from an interview Iris Murdoch gave to Frank Kermode for in a BBC program. This was the series.

sixth formers. This is, what you're about to hear was, um, intended to be played, uh, in the classroom. So here we go. Miss Murdoch, it's not altogether common for the same person to be philosopher and novelist. Uh, are the two tasks fully compatible?

Well, they're compatible, except in the sense that one has a limited amount of time and they're both potentially very full-time jobs. Yes, they're compatible. In fact, to some extent, they possibly help each other. Does being a philosopher give you a special kind of angle on the business of writing fiction? Are you more interested in certain aspects of the problem of writing if fiction than non-philosophers might be? No, I don't think so. I think as a novelist, one is just the pupil of the great novelists of the past.

in a quite straightforward way. I don't think being a philosopher alters or certainly doesn't help one's job as an artist when writing a novel. I suppose my interests in philosophy are chiefly in moral philosophy and in political philosophy and possibly to some extent thinking about situations in moral philosophy,

thinking about problems of freedom and problems of moral decision and so on. so on, this may affect sometimes the way one portrays a character. There's a real differences there between the way you think about a moral decision as a moral philosopher and the way in which you think about it as novelist. Well, philosophy is very different stuff from fiction. Writing philosophy is a very different job. One's aiming at a different result, one's not aiming at using work of art, which is a quite special kind of thing. on aiming at producing ushne, but the subject matter is the same, that is human nature, operating. In your first novel, you included a philosopher, in fact too, who discussed problems relating

both to the forms of fiction and to the use of language in general together. Isn't this an indication, as it were, that even in fiction you tend to provide patterns which could be loosely described as philosophical? Well, that was rather exceptional. The introduction of an actual piece of philosophy into Novak. It's a very dangerous thing to do. Go on, Frank. Ask her about wild swimming. The reason I wanted to listen to that, Ian, is this idea of, in her lifetime,

Iris Murdoch was most famous for her fiction. And now, posthumously, she's becoming more famous for her philosophy. And I wondered whether you, however lightly, could say, do you read her as a philosopher writing fiction, or primarily a novelist with philosophical ideas, or some combination of the two? Well, I guess, I mean, as Iris Murdoch would point out very, very quickly. I'm not what she would call a philosopher. I'm a reader and I think she's a

combination of the two all the time actually. And she said she's interested in the ethical problems of humans interrelating. And I'd rather read her novels on the whole than her philosophy because they're more fun. The philosophy is, although as philosophy goes, very readable, if taken fairly slowly and in small doses, it's not particularly dramatic, and it doesn't have much in the way of illustration and landscape and description and stuff.

The reason she's more thought about or written about at the moment as a philosopher than as a novelist is partly because she's just fallen out of fashion a bit, partly because there are plenty of women novelists, but not so many women philosophers, at least they didn't used to be. And so she's part of the business of reclaiming, feminist business of reclaiming her as a philosopher and not another accomplished but to a penny novelist. Una, let me ask you serious question.

this novel was sacred and profane love machine did you find this challenging to read in isolation, that's not what I mean, but imagine you knew nothing about Iris Murdoch. Did you find it challenging from that point of view as opposed to an example of her fiction? So I haven't read much Murdoch and maybe that's, I don't know if that's a function of,

you know, when I was first reading or starting to read maturely, which is what the mid-90s, late 90s were maybe, the fashion is just starting to change it. I had read one Murdoch before this. I won a box of books. I accidentally entered a prize being a competition run by Penguin in around about 1993. And I ended up with... You accidentally won it.

We kind of, we sort of did it for a joke and then shoved it in the post. And the next thing I knew, 50 novels arrived. Oh, okay. Wow. Well, that was a well-spent half hour, you know, in the mitre. What did you have to do? We had to say which five books we thought they should have published. Which five books should have been on their list?

And so me and my other half got our head together and went, oh, they should have done this, they should have done that. Oh, let's put a stamp on that. Shubbed it in the post and 50 novels arrived. It was brilliant. And one of those was the severed head, which I read. and was, well, I was, like Ian said earlier, I was 21.

And I went, well, what the bloody hell is that all about? It's kind of put it on the shelf. And unlike Ian, I hadn't come back to Murdoch just because life is short and there's so many Rachel Cusk novels. And I, uh, that's a throwback for long time listeners. Well done. Oh, that's a serious point, because I think you, there are interesting connections to draw, I think, but, you know, might just be me. But, yeah, I hadn't read another Iris Murdoch

until I read this prank novel that was perpetrated on me. So to come to Murdoch completely cold and coming to this one, I think it's an interesting route to Murdoch. I've subsequently started the bell, which I immediately went, oh, this is completely brilliant. Yeah, I see what's going on here. But I struggled with this one.

I did struggle with this one. And partly the reason I think I struggled with it was that I think that the pull of the philosophical exercise maybe affects the working of the novel, that it doesn't breathe sufficiently as a novel for me. And I think that's partly that there's an architecture, perhaps in her mind. The novel doesn't quite come to life for me.

certainly one of the reviews of the sacred and profane love machine said at the time Iris Murdoch is a frustrating writer or can be a frustrating writer to read regularly because if she just put a little more effort in she could write a different kind and more artfully complete novel but she doesn't she writes them then she she goes on to the next one and she keeps going. I will say I've thought about this book a lot since I read it and I was just walking down the stairs maybe about three or four days ago and I went, oh, that's funny, isn't it?

So you're saying there's a two-month lag on the jokes? You know, it's been a difficult two months. Yeah, it has, yeah. It has. Ian, what do you think? Is she, I've made this joke many times, but is she one of those writers where when you've read all of her books, you've read one of them? No, I don't think she is. Though I see what you mean. There is a similarity.

But the same is true, isn't it, of most detective. story writers. And I think despite the kind of literary fiction guise, her books are really ethical detective stories. They're looking to find out what happened and why. Each time I think she sets herself a series of questions and the novels are there to explore them. And some Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. And sometimes it's a real effort to bring the characters and the situations to life because they smack too heavily of really overthought philosophical problems. And sometimes things just take wing and fly.

This particular novel, despite its intriguing and seductive title, and the clash between love and machine and the opposition between sacred and profane and all the rest of it and it's the thought that it might be the sort of description of some kind of bastard painting in the National Gallery somewhere between Bronzino and Marcel Duchamp

despite all that I think it isn't entirely successful so I'd agree with Uner about the unsatisfactory nature of it. On the other hand, I don't think it's bad. I think it's interesting and I think some of it is terrific. But I do think it is, I think towards the end, certainly. She's thinking, oh my God, I've only got three days before term starts.

I've got to get back to writing philosophy. That's relatable. Do you know, Ian, when you just said, think of them as detective novels, That has just unlocked the whole thing in my head, actually. It makes complete sense. It's about the apportioning of guilt and who is guilty, who is not guilty, how are we complicit, how are we not complicit, where are we complicit in ways that we don't realise?

That's absolutely unlocked something in my head for me. So thank you. Ian, could you read us a little bit from the sacred and profane love machine? so we can hear a bit of the prose. Harriet had told David, that's a very Aris Murdoch sentence. Straight in, go on, Harry had told David. Harriet had told David.

He listened to her in silence only after the start, turning his face away. It was evening. The shorn grass of the lawn, golden as stubble in the parallels of the rich light, Harriet had eaten nothing. She and Blaze had talked till three. Then she had taken aspirins and gone to lie down. Blaze had gone out for a walk.

After that he said he would go and tell Monty. Perhaps he was telling Monty now. Harriet felt that she had heard the whole truth and Blaze's obvious sincerity and relief in telling it had brought a kind of comfort. The weird wrecked feeling of the world persisted, as if a tornado had knocked everything over onto its side, letting in a sort of white glare. Harriet had fed the dogs, her tears falling into their food. All precious domestic rituals

were alienated now. Amidst all this wreckage, she was upheld by an intense loving pity for her husband, and by a stiffness of her own, the absolute need for courage. After all, as she she had firmly told herself, she was a soldier's daughter, and a soldier's sister. She recalled Adrian saying when some incident was being bemoaned, "'But soldiers are supposed to be shot at. It's their job.' Harriet was determined to stay up right now in the gunfire. She summoned up a sort of fierce bravery which she'd never had to use before. The pain was very great, however, and she could feel obscure things in the depths of her mind,

shifting about in order to endure it. Thank you. I think there's an opening for you as the Iris Murdoch audio book reader. I think that was great. Well, no, what was very interesting about that for me, I don't know what you felt, Una. She's so good at creating psychological reality in characters who seem superficially to just be flat on.

the page. So when I think of an Iris Murdo novel, I tend to think of these slightly exosically posh named Dons, getting into and out of bed with one another and the sort of kind of comic existential farce of the thing.

But the portion you've just read there is compassionate and it's a devastated woman. Yes. Life has just been ruined. It's just been wrecked. Through no fault and through no sin and through the, maybe the weakness of somebody that she loves, you know.

Yeah. And still, despite all that, we can see from the way that, or as it developed, we can see from the way in which Aris Murdoch does allow us into the minds of each of these characters that they all don't know everything. and that they can be feeling something entirely genuine or life-destroying by mistake or to some extent through their failure to comprehend the other person, by their failure to love the other person in the right way or to understand them. So you have all these kind of indirect free speech kind of passages where you feel very inward to a character's mind while at the same time with another part of your reading mind knowing that they're mistaken.

What Coleridge calls dupes of a deep delusion. Is that Harriet's sin then, if we sort of call it that? that she loves him in the wrong way, that she loves something that isn't actually him? Is that the failure? Well, yes, I think to some extent that's true. She loves what she thinks she's got or what she thought she was getting.

The evidence in front of her eyes is actually pointing to something completely different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and there are little bits of behaviour like her fondness for picking up dogs at Battersea Dogs Home, that suggests that she has some unconscious consciousness of this and needs to find love somewhere else. And that plays out later in the book with the other child.

That's sort of escalating from dogs to children on which to kind of put your love on is almost the inciting incident. isn't it? It's the... I can hear my colleague, Dr McCormack, warming to this novel in real time. Right? I like looking at how they function, yeah? So that's...

And if they have functioned... To work out how they function or how they're intended to function is interesting whether I think I enjoyed the book or not. But okay, look, we're going to take a little break and when we come back, we're going to hear an excerpt from the trailer

for one of the two Iris Murdoch film adaptations not I'm afraid love standing up but a severed head so we'll see you in just a minute Time Time to choose partners for a severed head It's rather complicated

So please pay attention Keep score if you like Martin and Antonia Are an ideal couple Devoted But not to each other Georgie loves Martin. Palmer loves Antonia.

And all's well. Until Alexander grabs Georgie. And honor snags Palmer. Poor Martin. Poor Antonia. Inconsolable. But... Antonia wins Alexander.

Martin graduates with honor. Palmer consoles Georgia. A severed head is a contemporary version. of musical chairs. A grown-up game for six players. That was an excerpt from the trailer for late 1960s film adaptation of Severed Head, which Iris Murdoch was, A, terribly pleased with. She was on set quite a lot for that.

B, it was directed by Dick Clement of the comedy writing team, Dick Clement and Ian Lefranet, responsible for porridge and alfidazam pet. That is currently available on DVD, a severed head. And there's a director's commentary from Dick Clement, where he says, they ask him, what's it like watching this again after you make? He said, well, I'm asking myself the same question. I asked the producer when he requested, I direct the film.

Who is going to watch this? And yet, and yet. it's a very faithful, enjoyable adaptation of a severed head of an Iris Murdoch novel. Have you seen it ever, that version? No, I haven't. I shall rush to get it now. Debenhens. Debenance, I will go to the Debenance website at once and order it. Well, it's a very starry thing that.

It is. You heard there, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, Ian Holme, Claire Bloom. and yet I wonder, Ian, is there something very appealing about the literariness of Iris Murdoch? You know, the attributes you're crediting her with seem to me very bookish attributes. I think they are.

I think that's right. And I think it's, I mean, you might think, because several of her novels, including the severed head, been adapted for the stage, because the novels have, on the whole, an enormous amount of dialogue in them, that nothing much would be lost from a film or a stage adaptation,

but I don't think that's true. I think an awful lot is lost, partly because the relation between the authorial voice and the internal voices of the characters is sufficiently close for a kind of omnipresent irony. Sometimes the irony is sort of smashed through in honour of the power of love, but often it's there. And the irony is, on the whole, verging towards kind of practical use of tragic irony that doesn't quite rise to that. heights of tragedy, but it isn't just there for comic purposes. I think that the other sorts of things are the way in which she uses letters, the way in which she uses recurrent

framings or allusions or symbols as the novel goes through. So in the novel that we're partly talking about today, the sacred and profane whatever it is, there's an awful lot of looking out of windows. People stand and look out of windows or they sit and look out of windows and what they see is a way that only they can see. And if you have that done by a camera,

you can't give it the personal construction that Iris Murdoch manages to do. Well, it's worth pointing out that the play of a severed head, this is another thing about Iris Murdoch's popularity. She was famous. She was, you know, a celebrated, that rare thing, a celebrated British public intellectual.

And the film is an adaptation of the play. The play, do you know who adapted the play with her? Yeah, J.B. Priestley. And do you know who wrote the screenplay? No. Frederick Raphael. Oh, did he? So what an incredible bank of talent from different disciplines to have Murdoch, Priestley and Frederick Raphael.

And as you said, near the start of this conversation, everyone knew who Iris Murdoch was. Is it true to say, do you think that by the time the sacred and profane love machine comes out in the early 1970s, Has her style changed sufficiently that she's leaving behind those early readers? No, I don't think, not by then. I think that's something that happens after the sea to sea or roundabout that time a little bit later on at the end of that decade. And I think that between that and her last, in my view, her last readable novel, the book and the Brotherhood,

she sort of gets clogger and clogger. And after that, nothing. The last few novels, I think, are not worth bothering with. Really? Okay, that's interesting. Well, it may, I may be wrong. It's just that I conceived that feeling at the time, having started one of them. And after that, I thought, no, I'll stop here.

So I haven't read the last three or four at all. I'm going to say that the event that she came to do at the shop I worked at the time. So this would have been about 92, 93. The Green Knight, does that sound about right? And all I can really remember about it is that there was a bigger and more enthusiastic crowd than we had anticipated. So she was still a draw in the early 90s. and that she came in her slippers. She was delightful, I have to add.

I remember her being charming and doing that great thing of seeming terribly pleased to be in a bookshop on a Wednesday night. And she was tiny, that's the other thing. Did you ever meet her, Ian? You must have done it. No, I never met her. Yes, she was smaller than you, Una. Oh, goodness, that is small. Yeah.

That's below five. foot for people counting at home. Yeah. Yeah. So I recall the Green Knight having, and it might just be that perhaps it was the first Irish-Moddun novel that sort of imposed itself on my consciousness as it was being published. But I recall there being quite a big hoo-haer about it coming out, that it was an event. So I don't know if that was a kind of, because it was an Irish-Moddict novel, or because there was

an upswing happening in her being read. so but I recall. I don't, she was, I suppose what I would, it's merely an impression I think that I have, but that she was still writing was in the 1990s a big deal and the reason it was a big deal is partly because of how prolific she had been

from the 1950s through the 1960s. I mean, to all intents and purposes, she publishes a novel a year, doesn't she, for 15 years or something? So what's the best one then? What should, if you're going to read one, Iris Murdoch, perhaps me, who hasn't read one? Well, well done, Nicky. Very good question.

I mean, a lot of people think the bell is the best. I think the nice and the good is the most absurd and therefore the best. And I'm also quite keen on flight from the Enchanter, but I wouldn't say it was the best. it makes it onto the list. It does, yes. And here we are with the sacred and profane love machine. Dick, you've a high chance of getting to read the C, the C, because that's the Booker, isn't it?

So you've got your... That's the Booker, but I think that was a booker decision more for her. Right. Is that a lifetime achievement rather than that kind of book? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you think, Ian, that's true as well of this, winning the Whitbread then, the Sacred and Profane Love Machine?

I mean, I think people were really quite taken with it at the time, probably, because it deals with things that are, well, it doesn't actually deal with things, but it dramatises situations that were much thought about at the time. At the sort of, you know, what if you're in love with two people at once? What if you want to? Can you be, she wouldn't have said polyamorous, but I mean, can you be polymarried? And can you, and what about this and who's this? And why, you know, all these people are very 70s, early 70s figures. You can imagine exactly the kind of slight failure in the technicolor. Too much light, slightly overexposed elderly Don figures.

too much meadow. The brownness of the furnishings, yeah, and the... Yeah, and the greenness of the fields. I've got Penelope Keith's agent on speed dial, so... I've read The Sea the Sea, which was four years later, and that doesn't feel... That's interesting, doesn't feel dated, no. Not to me, anyway. No.

Well, now, listen, I've got a little thing I'd like to read, if you will indulge me, because I dug this up when I was preparing. It's a speech that Iris Murdoch gave in 1972 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And I just want to read you three brief paragraphs from it. This is 54 years old. And I will read three quick paragraphs, and then I'll say what I think each is about,

which strikes me as incredibly contemporary. So here's the first paragraph of arts and tyrants. We are told that art is now under attack. Of course, it has often been under attack. Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify, while art tends to clarify. The good artist is a vehicle of truth. He formulates ideas which would otherwise remain vague and focuses attentions upon facts which can then no longer be ignored. The tyrant persecutes

the artist by silencing him or by attempting to degrade or by him. This has always been so. However, it may be admitted that in this age, art seems to have rather more enemies than usual. The tyrants, of course, are still here and we know what they do. But now, science, philosophy, and forces arising within art itself threaten this traditional activity, an activity which we are so used to, which we take so much for granted, and which is perhaps more frail and unstable than it might seem. Well, what's that about if it's not about populism? You know, the idea that there aren't, if she thought it was bad in 1972.

it was going to get worse. This second one made me think about AI, this second paragraph. It's very short. The Romantics felt instinctively that science was an enemy of art. And of course, in certain simple and obvious ways they were right. A technological society quite automatically and without any malign intent upsets the artist by taking over and transforming the idea of craft and by endlessly reproducing objects which are not art objects,

but sometimes resemble them. Technology steals the artists public by inventing subartistic forms of entertainment and by offering a great counter-interest and a rival way of grasping the world. You know, that's pretty... That's pretty on the... That's very good, is like, on the button.

And then finally, I... Well, I'm going to use the W-W-word, Una, forgive me. But only as shorthand. There's a kind of woke element to this final paragraph, this final bit of thinking, which is terribly striking, I think. There is also, and has been, only now it is stronger than ever, a decent and comprehensible kind of utilitarian reaction against art. Philistines, of course, we have always with us, but I am thinking here not of Mr. Gradgrind, but of sincere people, who feel that in a world reeling from misery, it is. is frivolous to enjoy art, which is, after all, a kind of play. There is a familiar

puritanical and Protestant ancestry to this thinking, which expresses itself in the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, who refused to allow poetry a dignity which was higher than that of pushpin. Today, technology further disturbs the artist and his client, not only by actually threatening the world, but by making its wretchedness apparent upon the television screen. The desire to attack art, to neglect it, or

to harness it, or to transform it out of recognition, is a natural and in a way respectable reaction to this display. And on she goes. It's really... That's really interesting, isn't it?

Really remarkable piece of writing, which you can find online quite easily, art and tyrants by Iris Murdoch. But Ian, what I was struck there, the similarity with her fiction, is the

clarity of expression, but also the extent to which ideas have been condensed into sentences and paragraphs. They're incredibly rich. We could spend the rest of our time unpick

just one of those paragraphs. They're so, they're so full of, um, sorry, Nikki, content. Um, and they're like,

they're like something you drop in water and watch expand. Not bookish content in this instance. Now, you mustn't drop bookish content in water. No, ruins the pages. Yeah. Yeah.

And I got that similar sense from the fiction. Just from the little extract you, you read earlier. You know, you're being asked to take the condensed sentence and slightly pull it apart for yourself. And she does that also as a structuring device, I think, in a lot of her novels. That is she takes a dream or a figure that somebody has, and then somebody else has a similar dream or a figure,

or the same person has a developed version of that. And it keeps coming back through the novel. Right. In the same way as people use symbols and other kind of visual representations of complicated thoughts, but also with these Japanese paper flower sentences or phrases that you need to watch unfurl and spread their little petally wings and fly across the pages. Should we hear from Iris again? Yes, why not?

I think we should. Here's a clip from Icelandic TV in 1980. probably on just before the Icelandic generation game or something. This is Iris talking about courage in art. I think one of the most important things in being an artist, perhaps in human being, but they give it in relation to art, is courage that you've got to have nerve. You've got to have the courage to destroy what you think is no good and reject and the courage to hold on at a certain moment, this is rather hard to explain perhaps, but there's some, I think the tendency, this is a general moral thing, I think, but it's sort of thinking of in terms of a creation of art, that there's a very strong temptation if one can do something moderately well to move very

quickly from the moment when you think, well this is all provisional, this is a sketch, this is not really the finished thing, to then thinking, oh well it now it's too late, actually it is the finished thing. I'll jump from saying it's too soon to saying it's too late. And it's the middle, it's in between these two things. This is the area that you've got to enlarge. This is where the courage comes in, where you've got to say, well, I'm not going to finish this now.

I'm going to, I don't regard it as finished, and I'm not going to say it's too late. I'm not going to say it's all run on too far and gone too long. I'm going to hold on to it very, very closely and make it better and think in a way that really hurts. You know, when doing philosophy, thinking often hurts. Isn't that glorious? Just what you were saying before, Andy, about having to unfold the writing and dig into it and find out what's going on to it.

She's describing the creative process that's happening behind that, that the temptation to stop or to move on. No, stay here and work with it because probably you can go deeper there and that's where the unfurling of the reading happens when you receive it. Yes, I see what you mean. Actually, that's really interesting.

What I like about Iris Murdoch's fiction is it treats the reader as a real collaborator in the approach. process. Some kinds of novel will be written to carry you along and that's fine and do the work. But she's saying here, you know, we're in this together now and I'm going to give you some things to think about and hold in your brain at the same time. I'm going to pay you the compliment that you might want to think as hard as I have. The novel that illustrates that as well as any of them is the Black Prince, which is her, as it were, a litre novel. Unusually, it's a first

person narrative and the first person is writing the novel of what's happened and talking about it but he is unreliable and also he's not a very good writer. So there is an irony in the authorial style because the authorial style is a fictional character and he's making all sorts of pronouncements about what you do when you're writing. But it's also the most powerful novel about love and one that I was absolutely captivated about in the days when I used to go around falling in love a bit. Having read it again more recently, I see it in a slightly different light.

But it is extremely interesting in terms of, I mean, it's probably the best novel to think about her writing. Either that or what's it called, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine is another one, I think. Well, I think this is... seems like an appropriate point as we haven't worked out what love standing up is. We haven't worked out which book it was that Ian meant to bring us. But we have talked a lot about Iris Murdoch and we have benefited from Ian's wisdom

and enthusiasm. Terrifically. So thank you, Ian. Anyway, let me wrap things up. Many thanks to Ian for helping us map the philosophical terrain of Iris Murdoch's fiction and the fictional terrain of Iris Murdoch's philosophy. And to our producer Nikki Birch, a wild swimmer who faces profound moral choices every time she edits one of these recordings but plunges in regardless. Solo album coming your way very soon.

If you want show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this episode and the previous 253, please visit our website at batlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop. And remember, there's loads of fantastic book chat, bookish content, and book writing, even writing on our patron. Wow.

Patreon.com forward slash backlisted. We really value your support and we couldn't do it without you. Thank you for sticking with us and thank you for letting us take a break so we can rest and read all Iris Murdoch's novels in publishing order. That's my attention. We're not taking a break just yet. We'll be back in two weeks. So we'll see you then. And in the meantime, everybody, thank you so much.

Bye-bye. Bye. Okay. I don't know.