Letters reveal Iris Murdoch's frustrated passion for Raymond Queneau

Letters reveal Iris Murdoch's frustrated passion for Raymond Queneau

Correspondence spanning 30 years lays bare profound feeling for the French novelist she regarded as mentor
Alison Flood FROM THE guardian.co.uk



Iris Murdoch's passion for Raymond Queneau, and the way in which the experimental French writer inspired the Booker-winning British novelist, are revealed in newly-released letters which tell the story of a relationship that spanned almost 30 years.

"Anything I shall ever write will owe so much, so much, to you," wrote Murdoch to Queneau, a married French novelist, poet and publisher with whom she corresponded between 1946 and 1975. "As I think more about literature [...] I realise more and more how crucial for me is everything you write."

The 164 letters, acquired by Kingston University's Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies for £50,000, show the author's deep desire for Queneau, telling him that she feels joy because he exists in 1946, and later, in a 14-page love letter written in 1952, that "I would do anything for you, be anything you wished me, come to you at any time or place [but] you don't need me in the way in which I need you".

Although Murdoch is known for her busy love life, Peter Conradi, her official biographer, said the relationship with Queneau was never physical, with the pair only meeting face to face a few times. "It was as a mentor that she chiefly valued him," he said. Queneau, best known for his novel Zazie dans le métro, was part of the surrealist movement in the 1920s, later becoming a publisher for Gallimard. His work is playful and experimental – Zazie starts with the word "Doukipdonktan", a phonetic transcription of "D'où est-ce qu'ils puent donc tant?", while his Exercices de style gives 99 versions of a single anecdote.

Part of Murdoch's correspondence with Queneau. Photograph: Liz Parham Dr Anne Rowe, director of Kingston's Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies and the Iris Murdoch Society, said the letters necessitated a re-examination of Murdoch's work. "She was writing to Queneau at a time when the novel in Britain was perceived to be lagging behind and parochial. It wasn't – she was talking to Queneau, finding out how he wrote, how he thought, trying to bring in more of the European tradition to Britain," said Rowe. "Generally critics identify her as writing in the British tradition – it didn't quite click what she was doing. Now we have the whole picture we will be able to examine in more detail how she borrowed from the European tradition, and her novels can be opened to new interpretations."

The letters show, said Rowe, "how insecure she was, that she wanted to be the best sort of writer she could be". Although the pair were very different writers, "she saw Queneau as a mentor and wanted to emulate him – she desperately wanted him to help her get her thinking straight about what kind of writer she wanted to be".

In 1946, writing to Queneau about the first draft of her debut novel Under the Net – which she later dedicated to him – Murdoch said "there is something heavy in what I write … that makes me wonder if I shall ever write something good", and "I am going to regret that I spoke of my work, because it seems to give an importance to something that is nothing nothing nothing."

The author, who went on to win the Booker prize for The Sea, the Sea and who was made a Dame of the British Empire, confessed to Queneau that "the hatred and contempt that I usually feel for my completed work ... has come on rather earlier than usual", and also wrote to him of her depression, speaking of "fighting with my own demons" in 1946, and in 1948, of being in bed with "some psychological malady". A year later she wrote that "life is hell" and she wishes to "get out of the grip of this death wish", wondering in 1953 if she might need psychoanalysis.

Other letters show the author talking about her unpublished early novels, her views on religion ("I often wish I could be Christian, there is such worth there and values which are real to one but the rest remains a fairy tale to me") and philosophy, and her time working at UN refugee camps in Europe.

Conradi suggests that the letters mean the character of Jake translating Breteuil in Under the Net can now be seen as a self-portrait of Murdoch translating Queneau's Pierrot. Rowe agreed the letters reveal how much Murdoch's own experiences are reflected in her writing. "They throw light on areas of the novels which in the past have been slightly in the background, bringing peripheral areas which critics didn't take notice of to the fore," she said. "I think they mean that we will be able to see more of how her experiences have filtered through to her art."