Notes on a scandal: Iris Murdoch's letters to pupil who became her lover are revealed for first time.

An astonishing series of letters from the writer Iris Murdoch to her one-time student David Morgan charted the 'love and rage' of their relationship. And now, they are about to be published for the first time

By James Morrison The Independent, Sunday, 7 March 2010


Left - David Morgan refutes suggestions that he was portrayed as a character in Murdoch's novels - photo Jean Goldsmith

February 1964, and a portly female lecturer in early middle age sits hunched beneath a Goya print in her top-floor office at the Royal College of Art (RCA), marking scripts. In the corridor, a man 20 years her junior hovers, waiting to be invited in to discuss his thesis. Within moments, David Morgan would be standing before Iris Murdoch. Little did either know this meeting would signal the start of a relationship of increasingly emotional encounters and a correspondence whose tone would veer from passion to acrimony over a period of three decades.

Theirs was an unlikely love story: she was a successful 44-year-old writer with seven darkly philosophical novels to her name, and a critical reputation to match; he was a penniless autodidact who'd spent time in a school for maladjusted boys and a mental asylum, before blagging his way into art school on the strength of a hastily scribbled outline of his left foot. But what ensued between Murdoch and the young man she would affectionately refer to as "dear boy" and "my child" was to achieve, for a time, the intensity of a full-blown affair.

Now, details of this tempestuous 31-year relationship are being laid bare with the release of a trove of intimate letters from one of Britain's most respected novelists to her former pupil. In With Love and Rage: A Friendship with Iris Murdoch, a personal memoir by Morgan out tomorrow, he sheds light on an association that, until now, has been explored only in scattered references in an earlier biography of the writer.

Though now a respected lecturer himself, at Chelsea College of Art and Design, 46 years after he first encountered Murdoch there is still something of the outsider about Morgan. Home is a rented maisonette festooned with bohemian clutter on the top floor of a 19th-century townhouse in west London. As I'm ushered into the lounge by a pretty woman in her thirties, Morgan approaches, hand extended. Yet he seems nervous as he gestures to a velvety sofa, its back lined with plastic dolls' heads. Is this his work? "No, it's not my work!" he snaps, adding after a pause: "The severed heads – OK... I put off letting my lady have a child for many years, and as a substitute I bought her freakish dolls' heads from Portobello Market. The girl who let you in – when we had a child, she was that child." (Morgan tells me his "lady", Pauline, is painting upstairs.)

The full story at The Independent.