I was walking in Prospect Park, thinking heavy thoughts about the world, when my mind suddenly generated a new thought: I had a new all-time favorite author. And this favorite author was the great Irish/British novelist Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999.

It’s a funny thing to be hit with any kind of revelation while walking in a beautiful city park. Then again, isn’t this what we always hope for when we take a walk in a park? Colorful flowers and stately trees dazzling my eyes, acorns and twigs crunching underfoot, a message suddenly popped into my head like an announcement: Iris Murdoch was my new favorite writer. Maybe my favorite of all time.

I had been reading an Iris Murdoch novel that morning and marveling at its greatness, so the revelation was not completely unprompted. This was my fifth Murdoch in the past two years. I guess it seemed like a fine idea for me to discover that I have a new favorite writer, since I’ve been listing the same dusty classics on this litblog forever (Jack Kerouac, Paul Auster, JM Coetzee, Herman Melville, James Joyce). Still, it’s not like I ever expect to discover a new favorite anything.

Iris Murdoch belongs more to my parents’ generation than my own. She became famous and popular in England in the 1950s with a rambunctious drunken-lad novel called “Under the Net”. She remained trendy and popular in England through the 1960s when a play based on her scandalously bawdy “A Severed Head” was a hit with the London smart set. She was nowhere near as popular in most places outside England, and is perhaps best known around the world today because of the movie “Iris” which stars Kate Winslet, Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent and mostly focuses on her declining final years. I stupidly resisted some suggestions to read Murdoch when I was younger, and only began about ten years ago after noting she was recommended by two of my favorite novelists, John Updike and Nicholson Baker.

Iris Murdoch novels are wide-ranging brainy sex comedies like Updike and Baker’s, and yet Iris Murdoch’s braininess has a dense substance to it that very few modern novelists have, a dead-serious background in philosophy and ethics, a mission to keep alive the conversations about morality found in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Weil.

Iris Murdoch is both a novelist and a passionate and purposeful philosopher, even though she claimed not to write philosophical novels. Of course, her statement that she doesn’t write philosophical novels is the usual blank disclaimer. One reason I am so excited by every Iris Murdoch novel I read is that each one is constructed around a singular, delightfully original philosophical argument about the nature of good and evil.

One of the surprises of any Iris Murdoch novel is figuring out which characters are good and evil. They are all hilarious and tragic as they embody their moral selves. In this way Iris Murdoch writes in the tradition of Jane Austen: there is a strong and original ethical argument to it all.

Murdoch enjoys dissecting the ingenious lies people who exist in jobs and relationships and families (all of us, that is) use to attract, entreat, attack and embrace our loved ones and neighbors. Murdoch can’t stop exposing lies, can’t stop laughing at the ways we fool even ourselves, over and over, and then we learn no lessons and do it again.

The single most common theme in an Iris Murdoch novel, as far as I can tell, is that people can barely exist without constantly deluding each other and themselves. And yet, even though we are immersed in illusion, we still must strive for truth, and it’s the moments when we manage to grasp at truth and universality, when we are brave enough to let go of our illusions, even though letting go of our illusions is the scariest thing in the world, that we find the most meanings in our lives.

It’s also when we let go of our illusions that we become the best people we can be to each other. Iris Murdoch’s philosophy is a philosophy of empathy, of generosity. Along with the great philosopher Simone Weil, she urges a vocabulary of “attention”. To be a good person is to make the constant effort – and it is a constant effort – to pay attention to others.

The reason this is an important emphasis for an existential discussion of ethics is that it’s easy for us to have ethical principles. But principles are lifeless without … attention. Attention is not an infinite commodity, no matter how good we believe ourselves to be. We must pay attention to others even when it’s difficult to do so, and we need to renew this effort every day. This is why life itself is absurd, because we can never really give each other the attention that each of us deserves. This is why ethical existence is an eternal struggle, not a problem that can be solved.

I find it fascinating that “attention” is a key word in the progressive, humane philosophy of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, and the word is also widely used within artificial intelligence communities, because the entire LLM (Large Language Model) revolution was begun by an article called “Attention Is All You Need”.

Iris Murdoch’s 1958 masterpiece “The Bell” begins with a train journey. A young woman is traveling to reunite with a husband she doesn’t love, because she can’t think of anything else to do. He is an angry academic studying at a remote lay community of Anglican religious devotees or near-fanatics who buzz around an authentically ancient nunnery where actual nuns live.

It’s a hell of a setting for a novel about love and attraction and sex. In an early scene, a puritanical elder of the lay community tells the young woman that members of this community are expected to throw off their past identities, their memories, their individuality. This is a shocking idea and actually an ironic distortion of the more benevolent idea of spiritual “unselfing” which is another part of the vocabulary of Murdoch’s thought.

This young woman in “The Bell” has secretly discovered with a co-conspirator an ancient church bell that nobody else in the lay community has yet seen. Neither of them can figure out what to do about their discovery for days, until the darkest hours of a quiet evening when she impulsively rings the bell.

“She pushed it a little and it moved. It was not difficult to move it. She felt rather than heard the clapper moving inside the cone, not yet touching the sides. The bell oscillated faintly, still amost motionless. Dora took off her mackintosh. She stood a moment longer in the darkness feeling with her hand how the great thing was shuddering quietly before her. Then suddenly with all her might she hurled herself against it.

The bell gave before her so that she almost fell, and the clapper met the side with a roar which made her cry out, it was so close and so terrible. She sprang back and let the bell return. The clapper touched on the other side, more lightly. Taking the rhythm Dora threw herself again upon the receding surface and then stood clear. A tremendous boom arose as the bell, now freely swinging, gave tongue to its utmost.“

What she’s announcing with the nocturnal ringing of the bell is an end to the hypocrisy and complacency that she has found everywhere around her inside this religious community. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that I was strolling in a scenic city park when the realization rang so suddenly and with such depth and clarity in my head that I had a new favorite author and that this author was Iris Murdoch. Maybe I was making an announcement for myself to hear.

Iris Murdoch doesn’t go easy on her characters – not even the heroine of “The Bell”. Many of her best novels like “The Sea, The Sea” feature highly unreliable narrators and bizarre obsessions. The notion of attention – this essential but finite quality of human sharing, human love – threads neatly through all her plots. The best explanation of Iris Murdoch’s ethical philosophy as it plays out in everyday real-life situations can be found in this passage from her 1970 tract “The Sovereignty of Good”:

“A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him.

Let us assume for the purposes of the example that the mother, who is a very ‘correct’ person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way…

Thus much for M’s first thoughts about D. Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned (if I may use a question-begging word) by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl.

However, the M of the example is an intelligent well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object, which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again…”

What makes this fable feel so relevant is that we see how this person improves her moral situation simply by making a decision to try to think more generously, which helps her to understand the world more broadly and truthfully. We should all seek the courage to think more generously about the motivations and perspectives of others. This helps us live better and happier lives ourselves.

When I was walking in Prospect Park a few days ago, thinking all those heavy things, I was mainly feeling depressed about the so-called nation I live in, a nation that has been exposing its toxicity with escalating wars from Ukraine to Iran along with vicious ICE raids, theatrical displays of police brutality and newly constructed American concentration camps to make sure everybody feels afraid even in their own homes.

I talked about USA’s current crisis in the latest episode of the World BEYOND War podcast. I even managed a little optimism about an exciting young progressive politician named Zohran Momdani who just won a primary in New York City. Please listen to this episode, which is called “Becoming Anational”:

I was thinking how ashamed I am to live in the USA lately, and how pathetic it is that the most influential philosopher in the western world right now is Ayn Rand, who preached greed and selfishness as the path to human fulfillment. I was wishing that our society could find an opposite philosopher, an antidote to Ayn Rand, who would help us crystallize generosity and empathy as bedrock philosophical values for our progressive and activist communities to share and understand together. This will be helpful as various forms of fascism and military horror tighten their grip on our neighborhoods and cities and lives.

It feels great to blog about literary novels here on Literary Kicks again! I’ve been on a new kind of fiction kick for the past few years, and I really don’t know why. Other novels I’ve enjoyed or been inspired by lately: “Wayward” by Dana Spiotta, “Tehrangeles” by Porochista Khakpour and the stunning tour de force “The Stalker” by the brilliant New York writer Paula Bomer – a shocking story about a bad person that’s realistic, funny and somehow even satisfying at the end.

Happy summer, my friends, and happy reading. This litblog is still alive and I have a new favorite writer of all time.