Murdoch urged writers to abandon refined style for a richer engagement with real life

Evidence

One of the few reviewers to show a certain sympathy to Wilson after the Outsider blow-up was Iris Murdoch, who considered him an ass yet wrote in the Manchester Guardian that she preferred Wilson’s ‘rashness’ to the pedantic ‘dryness’ of more established philosophers. She too had a tendency to write in a generous spillage of words and ideas. In 1961, she wrote a kind of manifesto, ‘Against Dryness’, in which she urged writers to abandon the ‘small myths, toys, crystals’ of beautiful writing that had been fashionable, and to return to the real writer’s task, which is to explore how we can be free and behave well in a complicated world, amid the rich ‘density’ of life. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 911

Categorization

• QUESTION: Murdoch’s ‘Against Dryness’ essay sounds worth reading in full; its pairing of philosophical density with writerly craft could open up a whole essay.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Against Dryness’ as a bridge between existentialist ethics and the craft of prose — how literary style and philosophical seriousness entwined in mid-century British thought.