The jacket illustration is by Tom Phillips who has painted the portrait of Iris Murdoch.New York Times Book review of 'Living on Paper: Letters From Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995': At 17, Iris Murdoch was asked what she intended to do with her life. She gave a one-word answer: "Write." Sixty years on, what may have been Dame Iris Murdoch's last coherent words as she was sucked into the darkness of Alzheimer's disease were: "I wrote."She usually did it the hard way: longhand, preferably with a Montblanc fountain pen. Her writing encompassed 26 published novels as well as ­philosophical treatises, essays and, most time-consumingly, an ocean of letters. She ­dutifully replied to every one she received, unless they were "mad or spiteful." Writing letters, Avril Horner and Anne Rowe note in their introduction to "Living on Paper," their selection of Murdoch's correspondence, routinely took up four hours of her afternoon.They were not drudging hours. For Murdoch, there was a sheer joyousness in sitting down at her desk. "I can live in letters," she told her oldest friend and sometime lover, Philippa Foot. She took pride in how good she was at it. "I have in fact only once corresponded with anyone (now departed from my life) who was as good at writing letters as I am," she crowed to Foot "” who was perhaps a little miffed at not being that "anyone."There were other reasons for Murdoch's dependence on correspondence. Meniere's disease and its attendant deafness sealed her off. So too did her sphinx-like demeanor and her singular air of ­being present and absent simultaneously. And she had the luxury to write. In her day, the life of an Oxford academic wasn't onerous. There were few distractions. She and her husband, John Bayley, were, she boasted in 1991, "the only people in the south of England" not to have a television set. They were as cultivated as people of their type needed to be, but not great ­theater-, concert- or cinemagoers.More significantly, Murdoch belonged to a generation and class for whom the handwritten letter was as necessary as breathing. The habit was instilled at her boarding school, where letters home were an obligatory chore. Throughout her life, her personal messages retained an endearing jolly-hockey-sticks flavor. (She played with distinction on the school team.) "Middlemarch," the 53-year-old Murdoch remarked, was "super." A few years later, "Germinal" "” "my first Zola" "” was "terrific." One notes, in passing, that for a giant in the genre, Murdoch read surprisingly little fiction. When, in her 60s, she plowed through Virginia Woolf's novels for a conference, she recognized a certain narrative skill but added, "I can't be very interested in her thoughts." Un-super. (Be warned: Readers of this volume hoping for much illumination on Murdoch's own fiction will be ­disappointed.)Outside the neo-Platonic virtue ethics she and Foot ­promoted, Murdoch was, these letters suggest, largely incurious about other areas of philosophy. She thought the logical positivism advanced by ­Alfred Ayer just "a rattle of dry bones." Her postwar passion for Sartre didn't last beyond the book she wrote on him. A Marxist at 13, she gradually lost faith in the U.S.S.R., without ever talking about it much, and by middle age her position had shifted radically. She admired Simone Weil. There were, Murdoch said, few people she regarded as "very much cleverer" than herself. Wittgenstein was presumably among them. She met the great man briefly and reported that he made a good wisecrack: One conversation with a philosopher, he said, was as pointless as one piano lesson. Murdoch's first published novel, "Under the Net," pays homage to him.Although Murdoch destroyed many of her letters and journals and may well have instructed her correspondents to do the same, a mountain survives. The selection Horner and Rowe have made offers insight into many corners of her life and work as well as her abiding, always discreet, kindness to friends. But the central focus is on Murdoch's sexual career.It's not prurient. "Like Socrates," Murdoch said (perhaps a touch too grandly), "love is the only subject on which I am really expert." Despite the aura of "cold virginity" she projected in public, this observation was founded on an unusually wide carnal experience. In a mere two pages, the editors of "Living on Paper" reel off the names of eight lovers "” most of them upper crust. Her long-term, if platonic, lover, Raymond Queneau, was "a very avant-garde man." Her long-lasting and far-from-platonic lover Elias ­Canetti would be a Nobel Prize winner. Nonetheless, when the whim or need took her, Murdoch could aim lower. She and her virginity "parted company," as she put it in a letter to a male friend from Oxford, at the latish age of 23. It was something to be cleared out of the way, and the trophy was carried off by a man she doesn't even bother to name. On another occasion, she gave herself to a handsome chauffeur in France. "But," she assured the current ­lover, with whom her relationship was serious, "it wasn't in the nature of a conscious act. Don't worry." A strange reassurance, some men might think.It is tempting, using her own categories, to place Murdoch's lovers along a spectrum, with saints at one end and monsters at the other. Most monstrous was ­Canetti, who liked to role-play rape with her. During one notorious tryst, he did so in the apartment where his wife would ­later prepare a meal for the three of them. According to Canetti's nasty memoir, "Party in the Blitz," it was Murdoch who was the passive conqueror in their bouts. On their first encounter, the "bubbling Oxford stewpot" submitted unprotestingly but, a discomfited Canetti recalled, "she lay unmoving and unchanged, I barely felt myself enter her. ."ˆ."ˆ. It was an indifferent act, endowed with a baffling significance for her." Not for himMurdoch's adventurism in free love brought her close to scandal. She was obliged to resign her post at an Oxford women's college because of a talked-about affair with a female colleague. At the Royal College of Art in London, where she went on to work part-time, she flouted regulations by having a steamy affair with a male student. He has since talked about it a lot Was it nymphomania? This volume's selection of letters tacitly suggests that Murdoch's sexual activity can be seen as part of her quest live as a "whole person." The different aspects of her life did not always coincide. There was an "austere puritan" Murdoch who sternly set her face against promiscuity, and there was another Murdoch, her Mr. Hyde, who could proclaim, "I am a sadomasochistic male homosexual." Which was the real Iris?During World War II, Murdoch announced that she would not marry until she was 35 and then, according to her biographer Peter Conradi, "to a civil servant." She seems never to have considered motherhood. As a mate, she finally selected an emotionally subservient don, John Bayley. It was not, on her side, a monogamous union. Bayley was required to raise complaisance to heroic levels as his wife embarked on triangular, sometimes quadrilateral affairs (a sexual geometry played with imaginatively in her ­novel "A Severed Head"). Gallantly, Bayley made it known that being a cuckold didn't matter. The sexual act, he remarked, was "inescapably ridiculous." One closes this astonishing volume with the thought that in her creative years the sexual act was anything but ridiculous for Iris Murdoch. Indeed, it may have been as important as writing itself. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.