A Friendship with Iris Murdoch

By Pendle Harte on August 24th 2010

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What to expect from someone who writes a novel about their relationship with a famous person? David Morgan, a recently retired art teacher, has published a book about his 30-year “platonic affair” with Dame Iris Murdoch. It’s not the first book about Murdoch, by any means,
but it’s different to those written by her husband John Bayley, and Peter Conradi’s official (and flattering) biography, and the one (widely seen as bitchy) by AN Wilson. “I wanted to capture the darker bits of her that I knew. But it’s not a kiss and tell, if that’s what you're thinking," says Morgan at his home in Bassett Road, where he is one of the few remaining non-millionaires to inhabit the once shabby W10 address. “It’s a record of a friendship and the pain of falling out of love into friendship.”
The book started as a collection of letters between Murdoch and Morgan, which Morgan dug out when Conradi asked him for memories. “I wrote notes and it got me remembering, so I re-read the letters and it was a bombshell. I thought, blimey, these are love letters.” The Centre of Iris Murdoch Studies expressed interest, first for their archive, then for their newsletter, and then (over a period of ten years; David writes slowly and keeps rewriting) they grew into a book. With Love and Rage, a Friendship with Iris Murdoch became the book that Morgan had always wanted to write, to eternalise not just his beloved Iris but also his beloved Notting Hill, which has changed almost beyond recognition and which he misses deeply. “The wave of gentrification is spreading and people like me in housing association flats are sort of aliens now,” he laments.
David Morgan met Iris Murdoch at the Royal College of Art in the mid 1960s when she, at the height of her fame as a novelist, was teaching Philosophy in its General Studies Department. She was 44 and his tutor; something clicked between them. He, 20 years her junior, had had
a troubled childhood and was trying to make up for his lack of education; she was the first person to give him some self-belief. “I don't see why a middle aged woman shouldn’t have a brief platonic affair with a younger man, there’s nothing wrong with that,” says Morgan. Their friendship lasted until her death from Alzheimer’s, though it lost its initial intensity. “"A two-year affair went bit by bit into something less and it hurt.
I felt that gradually I was being dropped but she was so gentle about it that it took 30 years. Iris had an insatiable appetite for people and there were always fresh people replacing you.”
David moved to Ladbroke Grove from his native Birmingham in 1961 and is still here even though most of what he loved about the place has now gone. “There are little bits left but you have to hunt. Most of the lovely lovely squalor has gone. I was a Notting Hill hippy in the 1970s when the whole slummy area was on acid. You’d meet Alan Ginsberg at Notting Hill Gate and David Hockney on Ladbroke Grove, but there were still traces of a real Victorian darkness with real danger. All the stucco was black and peeling and there were still totters in North Ken. When I first came they had just finished digging out the bodies of Christie’s victims.” Morgan is overcome with nostalgia and his serious face strains with these memories.
"I remember once on Notting Hill Gate somebody on acid got a can of pink paint and painted all the long lamppost shadows pink. It was amazing. That couldn’t happen now."
It was to Morgan’s “slummy flat” at 129 Ladbroke Grove that Iris Murdoch addressed her letters, and where she visited on several occasions. “She never rang the bell. It was an odd experience having Iris Murdoch suddenly appear in your room,” remembers Morgan. According to him, Iris had two categories of friends – the “grandee friends from Oxford” and “her casualties”, (of which he was one) the people who needed her and whom she helped. “I felt there were quite a lot of us misfits. I remember her taking soap to a man in prison.” Murdoch used to give Morgan money and it became a point of argument between them because she wanted him to get a job. “That’s why the book is called Love and Rage – because I made her very angry and was quite frightened of her. She thought I behaved badly to girls and that I wanted to live
in poetic idleness on her handouts, which I’m afraid I did for several years – I kept trying to get art teaching jobs but kept getting the sack, knowing that she’d help me out if things got too bad.”
Morgan moved to Bassett Road in 1974, and “became sane overnight” when his daughter, now in her early 30s and still living with him, was born. He will always regret not buying a house in the street when it was offered to him for £3,000 in the mid-60s. “I could have robbed somebody,” he muses. Now he lives opposite the head of an American bank and despite mourning the old W10, he’s too fond of the place to leave. He mourns the little milk shops, the pawnbrokers, the totter’s horse (called Philip) and the cries of “any old lumber?” He remembers when St Stephen’s Gardens was a Rachman slum, when the top of Portobello was full of jugglers; the hurdy gurdy man with his monkey; the escape artist in chains. He watched the Westway being built, displacing Gypsy Rose Lee in his caravan and countless Jewish tailors in little shops. “Where would I go? I mean, can you imagine living in Fulham?”
His distaste is comical. “I couldn't live anywhere else. There’s still enough here to keep me going. Ladbroke Grove library hasn’t changed at all, it’s still got all those awful colours inside and the really nasty green paint. That’s intact.”
It’s hard to know what to make of David Morgan. He’s burdened with anguish about the past, and deeply philosophical about the tragedies of the present. He loves the Portobello Road Tesco, the Kensington Park Pub and the canal but hates the new All Saints store on Westbourne Grove (“vile, vile place – it doesn’t even sell sewing machines”). Still, as he says, he’ll never leave for Fulham or anywhere else because his heart very much belongs in Notting Hill, even if it’s not the place it once was. l

A Friendship with Iris Murdoch

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