Vol. 25 No. 24 · 18 December 2003
pages 38-39 | 2572 words
Diary
John Jones
I’ve been basking in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above everyone else except Hegel, about whom more later, in its account of her attention to the classical masters. This is a big merit, and a needful one because others, including her official biographer, have been at fault here. While spending a lot of time with Plato and Christian Platonism, as of course they should, they have allowed Kant to languish in the dusty rear.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 1 · 8 January 2004
From Malcolm Gluck
Can I have been the only Murdochian who gave a whoop of delight (and recognition) at reading John Jones's Diary (LRB, 18 December)? For here was the missing link, writ large. One could read the whole piece as a supplement to, a missing chapter of, any of Iris's novels. Her stories give us indistinct, often blurry, clues as to the precise provenance of her heroes and villains, her posturers, her intellectuals, her sociopaths, but after 1970 and A Fairly Honourable Defeat the severity of many of her characters' philosophical pursuits and opinions offered no doubt that their origins, in some cases their whole personas, were inspired by fellow Oxford dons. With her death, far from being robbed of our annual feast, that seasonal Murdoch novel we would have paid five times the cover price to devour within a week of its publication, we have had her husband's various published revelations, a movie, Peter Conradi's stunning biography, A.N. Wilson's memoir (which gave John Jones 'a warm glow' but filled me with disgust). It is John Jones, however, who, with his words as much as with his faded photographs (did the Box Brownie have delayed shutter release or was there a third person on hand to snap away?), has finally given us what even the archivally omnivorous Conradi and the sneeringly matey Wilson could not: Iris's muse! To learn that Iris and John Jones shouted philosophical phrases at one another as they toured the countryside on the latter's postwar motorbike (forever the pillion passenger where men were concerned, lovely Iris, yet always in control once Elias Canetti was dead); to discover how Plato, Kant and Hegel were tossed around (much like us normal mortals employ family gossip); and to be made aware of John Jones's utter modesty and goodness, and his flirtation with fringe Christianity, is to realise that he was far more than, as Conradi has it (writing of him with his wife, Jean), 'one model … for the kindly, hospitable, ambiguous host-and-hostess figures who dominate Iris's novels of the 1960s and 1970s': he was the man who appears in all early works in nebulous priestly or pedagogic guise and in her later ones philosophically but is absent in any of these inspiring roles from all the biographical insights thus far published. It is a tribute to his overwhelming virtuousness that he has been, until now, barely visible. I hope I live long enough to read his published letters, his collected poems, the biography, and to see his statue erected in Trafalgar Square.
Malcolm Gluck
London NW3
