Out of the Attic
The poet and novelist Sophie Hannah, who was the first to recommend I read Iris Murdoch, once told me she was pacing herself with the twenty-six Murdoch novels, only indulging in one every four years, so that she would never run out in her whole life. I’m not sure if she persists in this plan, but personally I don’t find it necessary; each novel benefits from many a reread, and thus, there is never-ending supply of Murdochian material. This infinite gift is now augmented with a magical book of poems; a carefully curated collection written by Murdoch over the whole span of her life, found in a literal treasure chest in the attic of her home in Oxford, seventeen years after her death.
As someone who lives for both poetry and Iris Murdoch (her own canon and the wonderful world of scholarship that surrounds her), Poems from an Attic, is the best fiftieth birthday present I could wish for. I’ve interrupted my project of reading fifty books published in 1975 (my own vintage) to splash around in the joy of this lyrical cornucopia.
Poetry is the only element of my library where I insist on real books and shun the electronic. Here I had to start with a PDF but have just got my hands on the papery pleasure of the real thing and will likely be dipping in daily for the rest of my life.
I usually save ‘introductions by eminent authors’ till the end, for fear of spoilers, but the opening essay by Sarah Hall, whom I’ve loved since the Electric Michelangelo days, is a breathtaking way to launch into the poems. Her pacy playful language builds a frenzy of anticipation so that you just can't wait to dive in. I think rereading this is going to be my war dance from now on, as I challenge anyone not to have their neurons firing on all cylinders by the end of it.
An early favourite from the juvenilia section is 'Star-Fisher', whose neologistic style will make anyone smile. The poem is about a girl with alternative ambitions, whose interfering family members range from helpful to obstructive, which brought to mind ‘les cousins et les tantes’ from Murdoch’s 1980 novel, Nuns and Soldiers, among many such familial character-castings:
Her three elder sisters and
Ravid relations
Were all much too haughty to
Help with the rest,
But when she had sent them some
Choice constellations,
On Collyfrock’s Day they would
Knit her a vest.
The knitting and the nonsense gave me Wendy Cope’s ‘Narrative’:
Nijinsky’s role in this remains mysterious -
We know he knitted cardigans for both
The Spanish twins and, while he was delirious,
Composed an ode to economic growth
Iris Murdoch’s poems are laden with meaning, which is obviously open to interpretation, but they have an uncommon clarity. You gain from each layer of reading them over but you never find yourself perplexed. There’s a poem called 'Underground Neighbours (Northern Line)' by Rowan Williams I’ve read about a hundred times (my home backs onto the Northern Line). While the words entice and I sometimes get glimmers, if I’m honest I still don’t really know what it’s on about. Murdoch on the other hand, even when she writes philosophy, desists from torturing the brain, and the poems are a positive playground, covering themes of ambition, private and public passions, wild swimming, domesticity, animals, nature and spirituality.
A.S. Byatt was another Murdoch entry point for me, with her book Degrees of Freedom that analyses power structures in the Murdoch novels, mirroring the myriad thermodynamic forces I measured daily during my PhD. In a 1988 essay, about judging the TLS poetry competition, Byatt rails against the modern departure from fixed form poetry:
‘Free verse has come to represent democracy, equal opportunity and self-expression. But in bulk, and unaware of the forms from which it has been ‘freed’ – the iambic pentameters, the alexandrine - it can be extremely depressing.’
I think Murdoch would have agreed. Her poems are laden with iambs and she experiments with many formal structures, most commonly the sonnet and ballad.
In her 1965 novel The Red and the Green, about the Easter Rising, Lieutenant Andrew Chase-White writes a sonnet as a vehicle for an ill-fated marriage proposal:
‘The half-rhymes which he had failed to eliminate troubled him a little, but a friend at Cambridge who published poetry in the Cornhill Magazine had told him that half-rhymes were now an allowable device.’
I’m not sure why this permissive line lodged like an alien chip in my brain, but I’ve had call to quote it often. And I’ve been trawling the book for half-rhymes; this is one I love from 'Irreparable Loss', one of her more innovatively structured offerings:
Unwinged her words come clinking down
Into my sulky silence like
Sugar-lumps into tea-cups thrown.
Being a Northerner, I appreciate any mention of tea and I’m a sentimental sucker for alliteration as you may have noticed.
A subsection of the book called ‘Conversations with a Prince’, that evoked Carol-Ann Duffy’s ‘Rapture’ the whole way through for me, was apparently deposited with Chatto decades ago but never published, possibly because of its shocking content. With prosopopoeiac ‘Love’ as the main character, it charts the dramatic side of relationships, in contrast to the more grounded poems about John Bayley, Iris’s husband, in which Love becomes a 'gentle god' and domestic details enchant.
Despite being closeted for so many years, the contemporary relevance of these poems shines on every page. While I’ve no doubt they will spark many a thesis, their appeal is wide and any book-lover will appreciate finding this volume amongst their seasonal haul.