Seeming naked, vulnerable and awkward as a precocious schoolgirl standing on the stage, Iris nevertheless answers audience questions in the direct, honest, awesomely intelligent manner which is her trademark. Before rushing off the stage she admits to working on a novel which will become The Good Apprentice, the account of two brothers’ parallel search—one in the Upperworld, one in the Underworld—for the Good.

At the reception held in the Maybeck-designed Faculty Club, a few guests are present. I wonder, would a Berkeley English professor recognize a major writer standing under his nose? Possessively, enviously or incompetently, the English Department has scarcely advertised the lecture. Now, Iris strides arrowlike across the room, leaving her purse, paper and irises on the table outside. A gracious, eager, youthful, curious person, she asks many questions and soon Betty Roszak is talking about her own novel. Feeling fearfully shy, I stand back with Ted. "Are you going to talk to her?" he asks. "What can one say except exclaim. I love your work!"? "I know," he replies. Years before I told Ted, "The one person in the world I would like to meet is Iris Murdoch." Scornfully he responded. "What would you have to say to her?" I said, "Nothing. Just to be in her presence, to see what that’s like."

Now a sculptor friend is talking happily to Iris and Betty, and I join them. Betty introduces me, "Janine is a poet." "Yes, we met," Iris laughs, shifting her wine so we can shake hands. "Do you teach in the English Department?" "No," I say, feeling like an intruder, "I’m a psychiatrist." The conversation turns to sculpting, then painting—Iris has always wanted to paint—Lawrence, New Mexico and O’Keeffe. Over my bed hangs a print of O’Keeffe’s "Lawrence Tree," its snaky red-brown arms twisting over the blue night sky filled with balls of stars. Surprised, I hear myself telling a recent dream: Under the tree on a steep soft loamy slope, sliding down, I spot the strong rope someone who has been here before me has thoughtfully tied to the lower branch. I’ll be able to pull myself up. "How moving," says Iris.

A few nights later a voice says, "Iris will call." "How absurd," I answer, "that’s a fantasy." Next morning I waken and go to my answering machine. One message: "Oh Janine, this is Iris Murdoch here! I was wanting to ring you up and say how enormously grateful and touched I am that you gave me those wonderful flowers, and so many of them—it was so super. It was a very nice moment and I thank you very much. I’ll try ringing up again, and hoping to find you in—."

"My room looks like a shrine," Iris laughs into the telephone. I talk of my admiration for her work and offer to chauffeur her around the Bay; will come to her office hours at the University in a few days. "Yes. It would be good if someone came. Especially you." Another day, another early morning message in the deep warm commanding voice: She can’t remember our plans—at her office hours we’ll make some further arrangements.

Murdoch’s next talk is sponsored by the Philosophy Department and held in the Faculty club at tea-time. Arriving in black shift over a blouse with big pink polka-dots and flowery black stockings, bangs neatly combed, and rosily glowing, Iris welcomes her fans. She reshuffles her papers for a more informal talk on the Ontological Proof for the lay audience that has gathered. Suddenly she approaches me, "You’re coming to my office hours?" "Yes. Just thought I’d slip in for this too."

"One is always at the beginning," Iris begins, prominent head tilted in thoughtful concentration. She speaks of the new demythologized religion in which morality and religion are one. She borrows Saint Anselm’s notion of God: certain beyond speculation, necessarily existent, necessarily good. We are God’s creatures and shadows. The "invisible things of God" are understood from the "things that are made." It is our task to see God in the world, to distinguish good and evil in the world and our own souls. God is seen in "degrees of goodness" in ourselves and others. Intuitively we know the existence of what is perfect. This knowledge is accessible to everyone; religion and morality are not something specialized. What is real and what is good are connected. God is unique and seen everywhere in God’s creation, the world. We seek what is true and just by scrutinizing our own thought: daydreams, fantasies, dull—even crazy—thoughts have a basis in what is real, truthful and serious. Arts, crafts, scholarship, politics, relationships are parts of what must be learned in this life. Through levels of spiritual achievement we progress, able to see just slightly above our own level. A shadow-image beyond our range casts a light inspiring love. It must be brought out in the light. There are no short cuts: We must attend, wait, as our passions are increased and purified, becoming more disciplined and less selfish. Whereas a saint sees what is most real, the artist must concentrate on "the dark thing," waiting for a presence to emerge. Thus the soul orients itself towards something unknown in pursuit of virtue and the life of the spirit. Religion has always survived by redefining itself. Poets and novelists, who make language, must be metaphysicians, creating consciousness before an all-embracing Moral Demand.

The words of this Platonic priest paralyze my conscience with awe: She shoots me a penetrating look. I run from the room as my heart overtakes my body. The car swims back up to Grizzly Peak through the light mist. Iris, the Rainbow Goddess, was beloved messenger of the gods. Whenever an Olympian lied, Zeus sent Iris the Fleet-footed to fetch the mighty Oath—the icy water that pours over the rocks and silver-pillared palace of the hated goddess Styx. Descending on swift gold wings to the Underworld, Iris brought the water back in her shining cup, and whoever perjured himself by it was struck down unbreathing and banished from the company of the gods.

Early in the morning I wait in front of Iris’s office. A grandmotherly person in dowdy blue pants and sweater arrives, late. Smiling and calm, she asks me about psychiatry; tells me about her depressed friends, a friend’s disillusioning analysis. "I think I have all my illusions intact," she confesses with satisfaction. In the pleasant atmosphere I have forgotten the great books. Spontaneously Iris answers all of my previously memorized questions, without my asking them of course. Then she stops and folds her hands. Is this the sign to say, "I guess I should go. There are people waiting outside." "Yes," she replies, "perhaps we could continue this over a drink."

That afternoon the yard bursts with spring blossoms—lilacs, gardenias, a large white calla lily fallen to the ground, its gold-stamened finger pointing. At seven I dash back down the hill. As I step inside the Faculty Club, Iris bounds forward in a boyish black velvet suit, hair disheveled like a dizzy toddler. I light up at the sight of her. In the small wood-panelled bar we join her husband, critic John Bayley, who converses with two strikingly uninteresting-looking men. We pull our chairs close and Iris plunges into her examination: What kind of patients do I see, are they very dependent on me, do they improve, can they get jobs if they do, do I have a waiting list? Who would make a better presidential candidate, am I involved in politics, interested in Buddhism, what about EST? And the origin of my name, do I have children, where have I traveled? After six hours of introspection with therapy patients, my answers do not arrive fast enough. Impetuous and impatient, Iris hangs her amazing head, legs sprawling, listening and nodding, uttering rich low resonant incomprehensible monosyllables into the dark. Gratified that my paternal ancestors originated ten miles from her house, she proclaims: "You’ll come to Burford, a charming town, and then to visit!" Then her spouse leans over stuttering, "We have, have to leave," and out they whirl.

"Love is a strange thing," Nigel wrote Danby in Bruno’s Dream, Murdoch’s twelfth novel. "There is no doubt at all that it and only it makes the world go round. It is our only significant activity. Everything else is dust and tinkling cymbals and vexation of spirit. Yet on the other hand what a trouble-maker it is to be sure. What a dreamer-upper of the impossible, what an embracer of the feet of the unattainable. It is a weird thought that anyone is permitted to love anyone and in any way he pleases. Nothing in nature forbids it. A cat may look at a king, the worthless can love the good, the good the worthless, the worthless the worthless, and the good the good. Hey presto: and the great light flashes on revealing perhaps reality or perhaps illusion."

"You must be very happy," Betty says to me. "This has nothing to do with happiness, nothing whatever," I insist, quoting Honor Klein the sullen brilliant magnetic anthropologist in A Severed Head who demolishes her mesmerized suitor. I’m disoriented in this great intense vivid reeling and suddenly evaporating Murdochian Universe where people are blindly and mercilessly tossed about like specks of dust. As for the prose poem I began before Iris’s visit—piles of notes, drafts of sections, disordered pages of quotations distilled from her books. After our koan conversation I hike out to the beach, passing clusters of tiny wild irises minutely etched in black and gold; below the sandstone cliffs the sandpiper drills his fine hole in the watery blue-gold iridescent sand; the hills are a brilliant green. My white Samoyed runs through the muddy marsh and comes out half black. Sun, flaring in the florid pink sky, slowly sets behind the mountains.

Driving to Stanford to hear Iris read selections from a novel, I am in danger of turning into George, the mythic madman who relentlessly pursues his idolized mentor, the monstrous philosopher in Murdoch’s recently published The Philosopher’s Pupil. Lost in the lively crowd, I am even more deeply touched as Iris reads exquisitely humorous and tender passages from Nuns and Soldiers (1980) chronicling the spiritual journey of Anne, a former nun: Anne’s devotion to her widowed friend Gertrude; her meeting with Christ in the kitchen; the chipped gray stone in which Christ shows her the cosmos, "all that exists, and how small it is;" her untold unrequited love for the Polish Count who is in love with Gertrude who is in love with Tim; Anne’s encounter in the pub with Tim’s ex-lover Daisy, who inquires, "What do you do if you’re not a writer or a painter or a homosexual or a housewife?" Anne’s solitary departure for America, her lack look at the English winter sky:

Seeming naked, vulnerable and awkward as a precocious schoolgirl standing on the stage, Iris nevertheless answers audience questions in the direct, honest, awesomely intelligent manner which is her trademark. Before rushing off the stage she admits to working on a novel which will become The Good Apprentice, the account of two brothers’ parallel search—one in the Upperworld, one in the Underworld—for the Good.

Thursday morning I am in the kitchen peeling broiled red peppers, soaking the red strips in virgin olive oil with anchovies, thinking of Charles Arrowby, retired play director of The Sea, the Sea, his strange decisive Zen-like tastes in food. Especially fond of toast with anchovy paste, he won’t eat any but English cheeses. I take out the Sonoma Jack. On the way to the Faculty Club, I pick up fresh baguettes from The Bread Garden and smoked salmon; arrive to find Padraigin McGillicuddy interviewing Murdoch for KPFA Radio. Iris appears in a plump summery flowered blue smock, removed and dreamy. In her room where books and clothes lie scattered about, we sit at a table and Padraigin plugs my ear-phones into the tapedeck.

Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919, the only child of Anglo-Irish parents. When Iris was one year old, her parents moved from their fine Georgian house in Ireland—"the most beautiful place in the world"—to London. She attended school at Froebel and the progressive but strict Badminton School in Bristol, and also attended an Anglican Church. Her father was a cavalry officer in World War I who became a civil servant. She describes him as a delightful, shy, clever, bookish, good man. He read her novels during early childhood. A precocious reader, she was soon making up stories. Her mother, "beautiful, witty, laughing and sweet," had given up her high pure soprano voice. They were a ‘a happy trio,’ she the center of their world, her only siblings those of the imagination. By age nine, Iris was writing adventures of rabbits and pirates, and increasingly poetry. But to write fiction was always her life’s aim.

In late adolescence Iris entered Somerville College, Oxford, where she studies Classical Greats, including literature, philosophy and ancient history, receiving honors. She was a student of Wittgenstein’s. World War II absorbed the next years—conscripted into the London Treasury office, she had little time to think or write. After the War came United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation in Austria and Belgium. She met Sartre at this time, who influenced her to study philosophy further. Refused a visa to study philosophy in the United States because of membership in the Communist Party, Murdoch continued her studies at Cambridge.

Vague fantasies of a second career in politics, international work, archaeology or art history were abandoned. She became a Tutor at St. Anne’s, Oxford in 1948 and later a Fellow, teaching there for the next fifteen years. Her first book, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist., was dedicated to her parents and published in 1953 when she was thirty-four. Her first novel, Under The Net, inspired by Beckett’s Murphy, appeared the following year. In this loosely woven tale of a phantom-chasing youth whose ambition is to become a novelist, the hero states, "All that mattered was a vision which I had of my own destiny and which imposed itself upon me as a command." At the novel’s end Jake takes a critical look at his work: "These things were mediocre, I saw it. But I saw too, as it were straight through them, the possibility of doing better—and this possibility was present to me as a strength which cast me lower and higher than I had ever been before. "In 1956, age thirty-seven, Iris married the English literary critic and Oxford don John Bayley, and they made their home in a large stone house in a village near Oxford.

Since that formative time, Iris has published twenty-two novels and four books of philosophy (dedicated to twenty-nine different people!), four plays (although she says she does not like theater), numerous articles on philosophy and aesthetics, and a few poems, including the small delicate A Year of Birds (1978). A number of earlier novels remain unpublished, as well as a body of poetry. Many of the manuscripts have already been acquired by the University of Iowa. She has been awarded several prestigious prizes for her work, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973), the Whitebread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1975), Commander of the British Empire (1976), and the Booker McConnell Prize for The Sea, The Sea (1978). In recent years she has taught at the Royal Academy of Art and other London colleges.

Beginning early in the morning when she feels most intelligent, Iris works on her novels for about five hours; in the afternoon she does housework and gardening, returning to several more hours of writing at half-past four. Like Arnold in The Black Prince who says, "I write whether I feel like it or not. I complete things whether I think they’re perfect or not." Murdoch is methodical. The crucial phase of her creative process is, however, the weeks or months of brooding and thinking which precede writing, when she is devising basic elements of plot, characters and subject, keeping all kinds of notes in a notebook. To Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review (Fall, 1984), Iris explained that "a conglomerate or knot of plot and characters" is the first thing to emerge. Synchronistically visual images which carry mysterious mythological charges appear. Eventually she has an outline. But before the prose-writing begins, "the whole thing’s finished ... like a sort of symphony contained in one’s head." Rapidly—in a period of months—she writes two successive drafts in longhand, revising certain sections numerous times. (Then every word and sentence matter.) The writing comes naturally and produces tranquility. "The novel is a huge thing," she says "it is a great big magical object." Murdoch has been remarkably prolific, until recent years producing with Balzacian ease a novel a year—to the envious dismay of critics whose strongest criticism seems to be, as in the case of Picasso, the cornucopian fecundity of her genius. A lover of rocks, oceans and whiskey, Murdoch’s literary taste is for the giants: Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. She does not watch television, but entertains herself with poker, dancing, swimming, frequent travel and visits to the pub.

Gazing out the window into the sunlit trees, Iris discourses on her work: "The good artist has the whole of his personality united in his work, his deepest desires." I think of the wondrous world of being contained in this one woman: powerful magicians, androgynous innocents, sleeping beauties, fallen angels, cheery egotists, passion-struck lovers, elusive wisemen and hopeless desperadoes; striving artists, detached observers, blind conventional fools; visionaires, sufferers, muddlers and messers; numinous children, awakening adolescents, numbled middle-aged and fading old. Victims or gods, tricksters or saints, all are beings in the various phases of Love. For love is her subject—In Love, Out of Love, Impeded Love, Failed Love, Greater Love—in all of its social and sexual permutations. Her descriptions of the vicissitudes of Love are unsurpassed in literature, her phenomenology one of the most complete. "It is odd that falling in love, though frequently mentioned in literature, is rarely adequately described. It is after all an astounding phenomenon and for most people it is the most astonishing event that ever happens to them: more astonishing, because more counter-natural, than life’s horrors," states Bradley Pearson, middle-aged writer who recounts his love-story in The Black Prince. Bradley describes the unmistakable systems of In Love: "Consciousness half swoons with its sense of humble delighted privilege while keen sight, in between the explosions of the stars, devours every detail of the real presence." But inevitably Bradley "falls" from his sainted pinnacle of joy through a gentle need into deep anxiety and yearning that gives way to insatiable craving, and finally, inferno. In the range of her oeuvre, Murdoch explores not only the love that is joyous, passionate, enslaving, saving and certain; but also love impersonal, cold, unbeautiful and nameless; love that is unavailable and unattainable but leads to understanding; the love that is lonely and ugly; and love that is death and rebirth. "Human Love is the gateway to all knowledge": Through it the absurdly poignant panoply of human life struggles toward Reality—against the beauty and violence of the cosmic setting, with its sacred seas, silent stones, seeing animals, ever-changing skies and extra-earthly visitors.

"The world is, in reality, all outside, all inside," says Bradley. And later Father Bernard, in The Philospher’s Pupil, will write from his cave chapel in Greece: "The inner is the outer, the outer is the inner: an old story, but who really understands it?" Here we are given the equation which expressed Murdoch’s entire work: a vision of the Real cycling from the world to the heart of the artist into the artist’s creation and back to the world. Murdoch, telling of her relationship to her created characters, conveys a sense of egoless interpenetration: She must enter their minds and bodies, feel them from the interior—experiencing an extraordinary sense of solitude when they are completed. For "we think with our body, with its yearnings and its shrinkings and its ghostly walkings" (The Nice and The Good, 1968). Nor does she hesitate to inhabit a male persona. In six of her most powerful and successful novels (Under The Net, A Severed Head, The Black Prince, A Word Child, The Sea, The Sea and The Philospher’s Pupil) she speaks in the contra-sexual first person; never does she narrate as a woman. The male voice is still the universal voice, she claims, gloomy about the future liberation of women from the conviction of female inferiority and male superiority that deeply permeates all of society. The grandest character which Murdoch portrays, however, is that overwhelmingly incomprehensible organism human beings call Nature. In it the artist lives as a necessary spectator:

The style which Murdoch has developed over the decades is jungle-dense, yet cultivated as an English garden: a powerful propulsive modern speech, Baroque in detail and elegance of ornamentation, textured like an intricately patterned medieval tapestry. Ever longer, stronger, more elaborate and labyrinthine in structure, the outer plot mirrors always the inner complexity of character. Repeatedly her stories are revealed to contain a multiplicity of intertwined stories experienced from different vantage points and levels of awareness of the ultimately invisible Reality. "Like a kaleidoscope, like a complex rose," to quote her in An Unofficial Rose. And one thinks of her description there of Tintoretto: "the vast seemingly endless honeycomb of the master’s genius." Queen of Words, Murdoch stuns and drenches with her endlessly varied, encyclopedically informed, alternately lyrical and blunt, now torrentially onrushing, now affectionately lingering depictions, with their commaless strings of adjectives—"mysterious awful untouchable," "brave audacious rash beautiful," "self-contained dignified straight-backed separate taller"—that form a kind of poetic rosary for her worshippers, creating in truth "a jewelled beneficence." Or she is like the thrush in that same novel: "Against a sky of intense blue the thrush sang upon the cedar tree winding all the visible things into the endless thread of his song."

Miraculously, her "heaven of vision" is simultaneously painterly and dialectic—the visual impression stunningly vivid, the philosophical argument ever unfolding. So her mood sustains the grimmest, darkest realism with ever resurging bursts of enlightenment. Finding her way in the introductory works—Under The Net through The Bell; moving through the muddled pitch-dark early-middle novels A Severed Head through The Time of the Angels; to the brighter almost perfect books The Nice and the Good through An Accidental Man; storming her readers with the passionate life and violent searching of her acclaimed mature works The Black Prince through The Sea, The Sea, bringing much light to great darkness; and finally giving us the maturer Nuns and Soldiers, The Philosopher’s Pupil and now The Good Apprentice with its almost fairytale quality—serenity and perspective have taken over. Nevertheless, the whole work—like Ilona’s dance that levitates over the forest floor of Lingam Place—is a kind of "dance of joy, becoming slower and sadder toward the end, as if she felt the breath failing which had lifted her."

"What a lot of pain there was all the way through. So how was it that the whole thing could vibrate with such a pure joy?" Edward muses over Proust, and so one muses over Murdoch. A seer who, like Rembrandt, has always been obsessed with light, paradoxically portraying an ecstatically bright vision of the dark and an existentially dark vision of the light, Murdoch is a painter of light and dark in the human soul.

With the full power of the English language reined in the mind of this consummate artist, Iris Murdoch is indeed the latest and youngest heir to the tradition of Austen, Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, James and Proust—and they her spiritual family. As the reader savors the inimitable brandy she distills from enormous vats of Western civilization, indeed she seems to be the English language, or to be language itself, the verbal evocation of human thought and emotion as it rarely happens in late twentieth century technological times. The power of this woman to conjure a reality, to tell a story, to stir, sear, rend and dissolve her reader, has evoked no weak response. Known to some as "The Novel," Murdoch has been accused of playing puppeteer with her characters, of playing God—with such effective cunning does she manipulate the archetypal eruptions, the ambiguous and unpredictable Fates that propel her characters, wrenching them into tightly interlocked, almost unbearably suspenseful "crystalline" plots. In one virtuoso performance after the other, this enfant terrible of the modern novel works her breathtaking entertainments for mind and soul. She must create: "I must invent people… my imagination would shy absolutely away from portraying real people," she reported. Imagination that "fuses, changes" is the prime mover; technique "without divine fury" is useless. In her 1977 The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artist, Murdoch herself tackles the moral problem of the demonically driven creative mind.

And yet it is not without compassion that Murdoch creates her characters. Above all she uses the novel to teach compassion for the real person, in all of his or her multi-faceted complexity. In her first book, Satre: Romantic Rationalist, she had already delineated the project: "The real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique . . . . Most particular and individual of all natural things is the mind of man," she repeated in her 1959 article "The Sublime and the Good." And in "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited": "Contingency . . . is the essence of personality." In her 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good , she wrote: "we have to accept a darker, less fully conscious, less steadily rational image of the dynamics of the human personality."

Bradley Pearson in the 1973 Black Prince explains further: "We are tissues and tissues of different personae and yet we are nothing at all . . . Of course, we have an unconscious mind and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a "scientific" one . . . . We are intermittent creatures . . . . Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters . . . . Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain." Charles Arrowby in the 1978 The Sea, The Sea contributes: "That our memory, which is our self, is tiny, limited and fallible, is also one of those important things about us, like our inwardness and our reason. Indeed it is the very essence of both."

Murdoch, although mildly influenced by Freud, disclaims any particular theory of human personality, emphasizing that it is rather a moral concept of humanity that concerns her. Like other major twentieth century psychologists of the arts—Henry James, Picasso, Ingmar Bergman—and as any serious novelist must, Murdoch has created a vast descriptive psychology heavily interwoven with the philosophical questions that inherently preoccupy human beings: What are we? And what are we to be? Saintly Anne in Nuns and Soldiers teaches: "Your life doesn’t belong to you . . . . Who can tell where his life ends? Our being spreads out far beyond us and mingles with the being of others. We live in other people’s thoughts, in their plans, in their dreams. This is as if there were God. We have an infinite responsibility." And in The Philosopher’s Pupil we read: "Every human being is different, more absolutely different and peculiar than we can goad ourselves into conceiving: we are in fact far more randomly made, more full of rough contingent rubble, than art or vulgar psychoanalysis leads us to imagine. The language of sin may be more appropriate than that of science and as likely to cure."

Indeed vulgar psychoanalysis like Palmer who is his sister’s lover in A Severed Head (1961), or Blaise whose most disturbed patient is a fabrication fronting for a mistress in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), are shown to be deeply corrupt men, drowned in self-delusion and social deception, the last people one would turn to for direction or help. Nevertheless in 1984, sixty-five year old Murdoch has undertaken for the first time a serious treatment of the healer. In The Good Apprentice Thomas, who like any true healer is a "doubting Thomas," questions his power, accepting it fatefully, using it with the conscious restraint of an artist. "All this stuff of yours just sounds like poetry," cries Edward, Thomas’s tortured patient who has by accident and by his own fault killed his best friend. Thomas’s wife echoes the sentiment: "You aren’t a scientist, you should have been some sort of romantic poet." And Thomas—who variously calls himself an "ad hoc expert on misery and guilt" or "a mediator, an enabler of the gods"—agrees. His view is this: "Each person is different, the general idea of ‘neurosis’ a mere hypothesis. Sometimes at least the afflicted have a right to play out the game themselves without drugs or ‘scientific’ mythology. The "myth’ that heals is an individual work of art . . . . " The helper, whom Thomas also pictured as the servant, can do little except present a vision, his image of this particular salvation, and try to communicate the spiritual force needed to choose the death that leads to life; must, with his eyes open in the dark, and with all the magnetism of his intuition, find and release that force in the deep mind of his patient, making him understand the sense in which he is dead already.

And so, like Charon who ferries the dead over Acheron into Hades, Thomas ushers madly grieving Edward onto his journey to the Underwood—invisibly overseeing it, never participating in it. For "the therapist is not God, not even a priest or a sage, and must prompt the sufferer to heal himself through his own deities." Thomas advises simply: "You . . . must redirect that strange energy which, although it is so ambiguous, is god-given, given to you by the dark gods." Hope for nothing, he insists, except "the truth,"—"We do not have mythical fates, even the individual ‘myth’ is ultimately consumed, it is ‘worked away’ in living and only in this sense exists!" In the end, the human condition is one of "indelible selfishness," to change any man’s temperament for the better is more difficult than to remove a mountain; even Thomas, who loves his work, is nonetheless a "professional meddler" who cannot perceive that his wife is having an affair and his favorite patient is a criminal; and psychoanalysis—that "mismash of scientific ideas and mythology and literature and isolated facts and sympathy and intuition and love and appetite for power" is utterly fallible. "One soon comes to the end of psychology," says one character and we know it’s Murdoch.

Similarly, at the end of her previous novel, The Philosopher’s Pupil, Murdoch—in a conjoint suicide/murder—eliminates her central character, the charismatic but morally bankrupt philosopher Rosanov, because he sees at last "with wide-open eyes, the futility of philosophy. Metaphysics and the human sciences are made impossible by the penetration of morality into the moment to moment conduct of ordinary life: the understanding of this fact is religion." And religion "is to do with the destruction of the personality" (Nuns and Soldiers).

What then about art? The moral possibility and responsibility of art? Good art, Iris explains now in her room in the Berkeley Faculty Club, is made of passion purified of selfish illusions, dreams and fantasies. The ambiguous but powerful force of Eros may lead either to destruction or to the whole range of unselfing which is love. Attachment to reality independent of self is the real love. In good art, the object of desire becomes something separate to which the artist relates creatively and truthfully. Art, Murdoch believes, spontaneously manifests religion. "Good art can seem holy and attending to it can be like praying," she wrote in The Fire and the Sun. And indeed her own work is suffused throughout with a religious consciousness that embraces Existentialism, Platonism, Christianity, Buddhism, and ancient Irish magic. Her unique religious blend offers us as its mystic patron and matron saints: Plato, Christ, Buddha, Augustine, Julian or Norwich, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Simone Weil.

Her latest priestly creation, the comical but wonderful Father Bernard who is a sort of holy fool, tells us much of her stance in the world: No, he doesn’t believe in God; yes, he is a narcissist—narcissists are more generous; yes, he is a homosexual, but a celibate one; yes, he meditates and prays—while sitting in an armchair facing a Buddha with Scott Joplin’s "Sugar Cane" on the phonograph and an icon of Jesus in a dim corner; and yes, he tries to be of help. "Oh God," he prays, "help them, help us all, help the planet. The lonely circling planet moving into night . . . . We are frail human creatures, all our good is mixed with evil. It is good nonetheless." And yes, he calls it "God"—"there is God beyond God, and beyond that God there is God. It doesn’t matter what you call it." Father Bernard finally retreats from life in a small-town English spa to Greece, where he lives in a cave, "led at last to a clear understanding of my true vocation: I and others (how many are we, I wonder?) are chosen to strive for the continuance of religion on this planet." He preaches: "‘Nothing exists except God and the Soul’: and when one has understood that, one knows that there is no God. For what is real and true look at these stones, this bread, this spring of water, these sea waves, this horizon with its pure untroubled line. Only perceive purely and the spiritual and the material world vibrate as one . . . . The power that saves is infinitely simple and infinitely close at hand." Tears spring into Iris’s eyes as she listens to this passage, read by Padraigin, as if for the first time. Then Padraigin asks her if she finds California very hedonistic. "Oh yes," she chuckles, "good old hedonism!"

"I’m so hungry I could break off one of those breadsticks from your bag!" says Iris as we make our way to the car. Sasha, my loyal Samoyed, climbs into John’s lap in the backseat and we drive up to Grizzly Peak Boulevard that winds along the top of the Berkeley hills, overlooking silver-blue bay, Mount Tamalpais, the Golden Gate. "I like that bridge," she says solemnly. Walking into the house, she gravitates toward the cat on the mailbox, the gold harp, stones and shells that strew tables and ledges, the exquisite pale-blue Picasso—lovely thinking Dora Maar. "I thought this was your Bible"—she stands in front of the large Webster’s Third International Dictionary.

Cats lounge about on the deck. In the brilliant sun I set the peppers and anchovies, cheeses, salmon, cucumber and tomato, bread, bulging strawberries and papaya, the sparkling wine. Sitting under the olive and pine trees, we’re drunk. Iris wants to know about America, my experiences with drugs, my visions. Perhaps she is musing about Thomas the poetic psychiatrist or Mark’s pristine drug trip or the character she will send to visit Stanford, land of "the earthly gods." Like her newest protagonist Stuart, she is a "higher hedonist" for sure, a seeker in love with The Good. Like him she is afraid "we could lose our language, and so lose our souls, our sense of truth, and ordinary reality, our sense of direction, our knowledge or right and wrong"—But in the end she will have her characters join together—idealistic Stuart, selfish Harry and suffering Edward—in a toast to the good things of life.

Her eyes fill with noon light. Opening another bottle of wine, we ramble on about poetry, our warm ordinary conversation evaporating into thin air. Yet elsewhere I hear murmuring and splashing, the cascading River Murdoch that rushes along with its dazzling lavish gift of language bearing truth:

Even as Betty is saying, "Iris Murdoch is coming!", I envision myself gathering from the collective flower shops of Berkeley a bouquet of bouquets of irises. Weeks later I climb into my Honda and descend the steep hill overlooking the Bay. At the Kensington Flower Shop dozens of three-foot tall stalks of bright yellow and sedate purple irises stand up in a large bucket on the sidewalk. "I’d like all of those." The woman tactfully hands me the flowers in an orange-cra