Iris Murdoch and Brussels
Last month, October 2025, my son Samuel kindly took me to Brussels as a birthday treat. The lure for me was three-fold: Magritte, Hergé, and the Musée des Beaux Arts, immortalised by Auden in his poem of that name. Iris Murdoch was – unusually – not in my mind. But as we came out of the station near our hotel, I suddenly thought of her. ‘Iris lived in the Rue Neuve when she was here,’ I remarked to Samuel, ‘I wonder whereabouts in the city that road is?’ He just grinned. I looked up and saw the street sign (top left), a stone’s throw from our hotel (bottom right).
I knew this, because my favourite item in the Iris Murdoch Collections in Kingston University Archives is this smallish cloth-covered pale blue notebook she bought for a special occasion: it cost her 78 francs.
Inside the front cover a gold/red/black/silver sticker says:
100 Ans
Papeteries
NIAS
Bruxelles
1845-1945
On the facing page she inscribed her addresses, both in Brussels and in London:
So early on the morning of my birthday, I walked down the Rue Neuve, following in Iris’s footsteps, exactly 80 years later. The experience had a frisson about it (as do her letters and journals in the archive) and I felt strangely moved. Much of course will have changed, and many of the buildings I passed would not have been there for her to see. But the early eighteenth-century Church of Notre-Dame de Finistiere would have been familiar to her, and I found a clearer street sign too.
During this walk of homage many connections between Iris and Brussels came to mind. She was sent to work in the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) office in Brussels in early September 1945 and spent two months living there until, in early December, she was transferred to work in camps in Austria.
The only previous time Iris had been out of England and Ireland was a very brief visit to Geneva in August 1935 when, as a schoolgirl at Badminton, she attended a League of Nations Summer School for ten days. So living in Belgium was an intoxicating experience for her, after the dark years of life in London during the Blitz. Her letters bubble with excitement: on 4 September she wrote to Leo Pliatzky, ‘Of course I think Brussels is glorious. It has a wild feminine charm […] oh, it’s all delightful to me: the French voices, ridiculous little dogs, the little clanging trams, and the way everyone rides on the running boards and never pays their fares – ’, and on the same day to David Hicks, ‘Brussels itself is quite crazy and utterly charming.’
In just two months, Iris had encounters that changed the course of her life, the chief of which was the reason for her purchase of a new notebook. In her own words from a letter to David on 3 November: ‘Brussels continues wonderful & full of surprises. Last week I had a great experience. I met Jean Paul Sartre. He was in Brussels to lecture on existentialism, & I was introduced to him at a small gathering after the lecture, & met him again at a long café séance the following day.’ And: ‘Yesterday, another joy, I heard Charles Trenet sing.’
So life was suddenly full of excitement for a young woman for whom the world was opening up: her time in Brussels was like a Christmas stocking full of gifts.
I cannot find any specific mention of Iris visiting the Musée des Beaux Arts (now known as the Musée Royaux de Beaux-Arts de Belgique) but as it was founded on 1 September 1801 (by Napoleon) and opened in 1803, it was there long before she was, and Conradi’s biography reports that she hung a reproduction of Breughel’s Fall of Icarus in her office in Brussels. I went to see this painting for myself and was not disappointed.
That the image stayed with Iris is clear from her 1978 novel The Sea, The Sea in which Charles Arrowby tells us that he sees ‘Titus’s long pale legs elevated to heaven as he dived under the green water. He reminded me of Breughel’s Icarus. Absit omen.’
The Magritte Museum and the Hergé Museum both opened on 2 June 2009, ten years after Iris died, but had she had the chance she would have loved them, I think, just as I did. To be honest, Magritte is not one of the painters who feature strongly in her work, though Tim Reede in Nuns and Soldiers (1980) paints pseudo-Magrittes. In 1945 René Magritte (1898-1967) was well established and his signature painting La trahison des images (1929) was famous, but Place Charles Rogier onto which the Rue Neuve gives was not dominated as it now is by this image of Magritte’s Le fils de l'homme which he painted in 1964.
Nor was Iris yet aware of Hergé, as it was John Simopoulos who introduced her to his work long after her time in Brussels. Georges Prosper Remi (1907-83) was well established as a comic strip artist by 1945, when he published Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge, the twelfth book in the Tintin series. But these early years after the war were difficult for both men and they were struggling to maintain their reputations even though neither was a collaborator.
In his 1998 memoir Iris, John Bayley, writing of the early 80s, says: ‘She herself was devoted at that time to the adventures of Tintin, the perky young Belgian “boy reporter” invented by Hergé, whose comic strip stories are illustrated with an inspired contemporary detail, reminiscent of some of the old Flemish masters … Both of us became hooked at once; I think partly because of the French dialogue which is extraordinarily witty and apt, and does not come over at all into English.’
This is closely echoed in the one scene where Iris makes use of Hergé in her fiction. In chapter 29 of An Unofficial Rose (1962), Penn Graham asks his young cousin Miranda Peronett what she is reading.
Miranda frowned and tossed the big coloured book on to the counterpane. Penn picked it up and saw that it was a sort of comic strip; and as he looked back to Miranda he guessed that she was annoyed that he had not found her reading something more grown-up. Then he saw that it was in French. Les Aventures de Tintin. On a Marché sur La Lune. He glanced at a few of the pictures.
‘That looks good. Perhaps I could borrow it when you’ve finished? I don’t think I’d understand much though. My French is hopeless. But I expect I could follow the pictures.’
‘It’s no use without the text,’ said Miranda, retrieving the book and pushing it under her pillow. ‘The words are the point. They’re so witty.’
‘Text’ and ‘witty’ rather disconcerted Penn ….
Les Aventures de Tintin. On a Marché sur La Lune was published in the mid-50s so Murdoch was keeping up with the series as it unfolded. John relates that ‘Iris wrote Hergé a fan letter, and thanking her in reply he mentioned that he would be signing copies in Hamley’s toyshop, halfway up Regent Street. We were in the shop on the day, and Iris had a long chat with the great man, telling him about her time in Brussels with the relief organisation UNRRA, just after the war ended. She never spoke of this to anyone else.’ That, to me, suggests that Hergé had a special significance for her, and she continued to read his work throughout her life, writing to Naomi Lebowitz on 9 February 1972, ‘I am now reading Tintin. Do Jo and Ju [Naomi’s children] read Tintin? If not, why not?
I have spoken and written about Iris Murdoch’s relationship with France, particularly Paris and Provence, but it was not until I went to Brussels myself that it struck me forcefully that her love of Europe began in Belgium in that short but powerfully influential sojourn in the city of Magritte and Hergé, in which, by serendipitous happenstance, she was living when Sartre visited and lectured. Her intellect was fired by her encounter with him which returned her to philosophy after her work for UNRRA came to an end. Her later encounter with Hergé reveals how much her imagination was also fired by his creative genius, and how vital her brief Belgian episode was in the formation of her life and her art.