I have a battered old volume of Iris Murdoch's essays, most of them written in the 1960s and 70s. The essays exude Oxbridge intellectual confidence (verging on the arrogant?). In gusts of precise, muscular language, she lays out her views on literature, philosophy, politics. We are slack and she wants us to toughen up. We are to be more intelligent. We are, at least, to try. She is not detached or ironic. She is serious. Take a look at a photograph of her. She has the appearance of an ex-nun from one of the more demanding Orders, her hair still growing out, her gaze, not unkind, but suggestive of a certain fierceness. I can imagine laughter, though I suspect she was the sort of friend who you would, on going to visit, be aware of the need to be at your best, your sharpest. There are biographies; I haven't read them; I have grave doubts about biography. I saw the film based on her husband's memoir, the sad tale of her Alzheimers. (Her husband didn't much like sex, thought it too ridiculous; she liked sex a lot, with men and women. Somehow I know that much.) 

The essay I return to most often, Against Dryness, was written for Encounter in 1961. The tone is sometimes unnervingly aloof, patrician. But I'm mightily drawn to certain phrases that seemed when I first read them - seem even more now? - to toughen up my own approach to writing. Sooner or later in a writing life you need a theoretical context for your work, something to guide its ambition. At the beginning, you don't much, or it's somehow provided by a confident sense of play carried over from childhood.

As she draws together her threads at the close of the essay, it's worth quoting her at length:

'We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Or current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons...It is here literature is so important...through literature we can rediscover a sense of the density of our lives. Literature can arm us against consolation and fantasy and can help us to recover from the ailments of Romanticism. If it can be said to have a task, that surely is its task.' 

A plea for complexity, seriousness, art. That line about the opacity of persons is one I've turned over in my pocket for years. It feels like an incitement to writers to throw themselves against said opacity, to break against it. Which brings to mind that wonderful line from Emerson - 'The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.' The point of writing is not (say I) to 'succeed'. It is not to come back with tales of the opacity resolved (leave that to science, or the pseudo-science of psychology). Nor is this about making a fetish out of human mystery. The mystery is simply there. We have, for example, no real idea how consciousness arises.

What we are free to attempt as writers is a description of our confusion, of the way our lives are poised, improbably, in a circumstance that both dazzles and unnerves us. And of course we will fail in this task. Failure is the default experience of any artist. But that comittment to the density of our lives - also to their spaciousness, their lightness - is a necessary counter to the reductiveness a busy culture increasingly subjects us to.