Iris Murdoch on making your unconscious work for you

“You have to spend a lot of time looking out the window.”

Welcome to the latest issue of Subtle Maneuvers. Previously, we looked into Ennio Morricone’s “mysterious process.” This week, the British novelist Iris Murdoch, who would have turned 101 last Wednesday.

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Iris Murdoch (1919–1999)

“I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure,” the struggling-writer narrator of Murdoch’s 1973 novel The Black Prince declares in a confrontation with his literary rival about midway through the book. “I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”

In any other book, it would be tempting to read this as a reflection of the novelist’s own writing difficulties, but in Murdoch’s case this would be inaccurate. In interviews over the years, the British novelist always said that she found writing rather enjoyable. “I like working and when I have time, I work,” she told the Paris Review in 1990. Naturally, writing had “moments when you think it’s awful, you lose confidence and it’s all black,” she said. “You can’t think and so on. So, it’s not all enjoyment.” But, she continued,