Friday, August 16, 2013

My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson


Iris Murdoch_Photograph by Jane Bown for the Guardian

My hero: Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson



More than almost any other writer, she understands the currents beneath the surface. Who knew the human heart better?

 Charlotte Mendelson
Friday 16 August 2013 19.30 BST
L
ike many child swots, I yearned to be a novelist. Long before I had read Iris Murdoch, I knew that a famous writer lived in one of the houses I cycled past after school; it seemed almost a failure on her part that she hadn't spotted me – "that girl! In scruffy navy corduroy! Her obvious intelligence; her glorious soul! – and somehow made me a writer too. By the sixth form, having discovered The Black Prince and The Sea, the Sea, I wanted to be her. I had a postcard of Murdoch in a literary shrine above my desk and, as I toiled over Habsburg foreign policy, her bone structure shone down upon me: a beam of intellect and beauty. Like the equally badly dressed and much more underrated Elizabeth Jennings, Murdoch understood the world I came from – North Oxford, where cleverness, cluelessness, poor social skills and terrible haircuts were normal; her weirdos gave me hope.


Today, though my love of Murdoch remains fetishistic – I collect her first editions, read every disappointing biography – it's her unfashionable novels that thrill me most. More than almost any other writer, she understands the currents beneath the surface: the way that inappropriate crushes, egotism, loathing, loneliness, can overcome apparently calm lives and leave disaster, even death, behind. Yes, her ridiculously-named characters rarely experience true physical suffering. Yes, the entanglements, suicides and misunderstandings verge on operetta. But isn't life full of melodrama? Her characters try to destroy each other's relationships, experience bursts of homosexuality, develop fixations on lost objects, agonise over their moral duty: dilemmas which preoccupy us every day. And it isn't all brainy fantasising in Murdochland; there's wild swimming, appalling sandwiches, death, madness and sex.
It's easy to dismiss Murdoch; she was a clever woman, after all – frumpy, odd, middle-class. What could she know of life? But read her, then tell me: who knew the human heart better?
THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016

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