Last year, when John Bayley, in Iris: A Memoir, recounted how his wife Iris Murdoch, "the most intelligent woman in England", succumbed to Alzheimer's disease he placed her where she had never wished to be, centre stage. The book (a bestseller) spawned complex arguments regarding privacy and intrusion. Murdoch herself, a very private woman, was made public without her knowing, without her consent. What he himself calls "the externalisation of Iris" had begun.
Asked recently if she would marry again, the American writer Annie Proulx said: "Are you kidding? I've been there done that and don't want to do it again. Besides I might get someone like that man who wrote that awful book about his marriage to Iris Murdoch." Opinions are certainly divided on that unsettling book. Some saw it as the greatest love story of our age; others were grateful for an honest, detailed account of how a noble mind was o'erthrown by Alzheimer's. But, whatever your view, it is impossible not to read Bayley's memoirs against what Iris Murdoch once was.
Two weeks after his wife died Bayley began writing this rushed second memoir. Iris still figures in block capitals and looks out at us from the cover, but this time it is little more than a clever marketing ploy. Most of the book is given over to Bayley's recollections of his own early secretive childhood in Kent, boarding school, his time in the army, with what Bayley sees as its innocent physical affection, embarrassing and clumsy attempts at a relationship with an ex-nun and surreal flights of fantasy. All these have been prompted, he says, by Iris's own memory loss and the book records "the compensatory pleasures which memory, let loose now like a horse in a meadow, is bringing me." Those pleasures, however, are Bayley's, rarely the reader's.
The telling is, for the most part, indulgent and inconsequential. He spends too much time, even for a Professor Emeritus, thinking in quotations, with strained and irritating literary allusions. Sometimes the book does come alive: there's the briefest glimpse of Murdoch the novelist's creative technique; a description of the young Bayley's chance encounter with Rosamond Lehmann; his and Murdoch's meeting with Patrick White in Australia; Iris Murdoch's friendship with Norah Smallwood at Chatto and Windus.
Iris Murdoch does not dominate this book and when she appears it is, mostly, an Iris who carries clothes or sticks and stones about the debris-strewn house, "making little cooing or humming sounds", or pulls again and again at the locked front door or clamours in the car "like a demented cockatoo". She is fed spoonfuls of beans and creamed rice and ice cream. The portrait is upfront, disturbing and undoubtedly moving, as is Bayley's self-portrait when, as exasperated carer, he says to her "Have you any idea how much I hate you?"
This book is Bayley's therapy. He says so himself and he justifies his writing it several times. "The comfort I give Iris depends on my ability to lead this inner life" and "these childhood memories are a way of escape" but he also knows that it is in part "deliberate seif-indulgence" (sic - did anyone proofread?). It was written and published in too great a haste. On the inside jacket flap the publisher announces that Murdoch died "in January this year". She died on February 8th, and this is but the first of too many carelessnesses, typographical and editorial, throughout.
"Most memoirs and autobiography have a `clever little me' feel about them somewhere," says Bayley and to his credit he avoids that danger. He grieves, as he must, in his own way, at times recklessly: "I don't care what I do write or say about her or about anything else. I know I am worshipping her no matter what I say." Easy to ask, then, if she would have written about him in a similar way and for the very same reason that he writes (and writes) about her.
Bayley has claimed that Iris would approve of anything that makes him happy. He is happy to have written these books: "I should never have supposed before that there could be so much positive pleasure in remembering things". He describes Iris holding his first memoir and smiling: "when it came out she loved to see the book, and the picture on the cover. She would once have never believed such a thing would be done, and have known that I couldn't do it, or have done it. Nor would I once". But who can smile reading his account of how she defecates on the carpet and "lays the results, as if with care, on a neighbouring chair or bookshelf"?
Accompanying photographs show her in the 1950s with a look which Murdoch herself described as "determined to make my mark". The final one, taken a few months before she died, shows us emptiness. What he calls "the dark escort" has come for her. But she made her mark all right and, if anything, these memoirs reminded me of the closing lines in Murdoch's The Black Prince: "Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters." And it is in her art that the true Iris Murdoch lives.
While writing this book Bayley had a breakdown: "shouting and sobbing and screaming", humbly adding, "no reason for it". What John Bayley has endured these past years is remarkable and this book captures that twilight, that painful time. The "friends" he called on are unusual and varied: unconsciousness, memory, autumn and winter, solitude, a fantasy sex-life, daydreaming desire and pneumonia, which he calls "the last of the friends", have helped sustain him. Sex, we are told, is not a friend of Dr Alzheimer and Bayley adds, in what I thought an unnecessary low, that even before her illness "Iris never bothered with it very much". The "best of the friends" comes at last with death. His account of Iris Murdoch's end is riveting.
As he coped with "the certainty of things getting worse", John Bayley's courage and generosity are all admirable, his reasons for writing understandable. And yet. The externalisation of Iris has indeed begun. According to Bayley it will "inevitably continue and grow greater". The earlier memoir was focused, and balanced the darkness with intensely happy evocations of their life together. Iris and the Friends does not have that redeeming quality - and in the end, the friend I felt John Bayley needed most was the one who would tell him not to publish this book.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin