Memoir/ Niall MacMonagle: Few novelists have spawned so many spin-offs so quickly. Iris Murdoch's Alzheimer's and her death in 1999 resulted in three memoirs by husband John (Oliver) Bayley, Peter Conradi's revealing, riveting biography, the Richard Eyre Oscar-winning film, a rainforest of newsprint.
And now, man of letters and self-styled old fogey A.N. Wilson, an old friend and admirer, offers his tuppence-worth - and it's not worth that. I've admired his biographies of Tolstoy and Jesus, his novel The Healing Art (he's written 17, and dedicated his first to Murdoch and Bayley) but there Wilson was in professional mode; here, it's as if he's at a dinner party in rambling, reminiscent mode.
In 1988, Murdoch, knowing that biography was inevitable, had asked Wilson to write the life. "Look here, old thing, I want you to write my biography." But Wilson balked at the task, knowing that he would not and could not write openly of Murdoch's sexual adventures and bisexuality. It never happened because "a biography, which began with her birth in Dublin and ended with her pathetic death . . . bulked out with stories of her erotic indiscretions" would come nowhere near "plucking out her mystery or capturing what made her so brilliant a writer, so charming and unusual a companion and friend". Instead, he now produces what he recently called, in a Guardian profile, an "anti-biography" of a woman "who has been inside my head . . . for 35 years". Knowing that Murdoch was "a life-enhancing person", someone who had said "a universal yes to life", Wilson wanted to give back the fiercely intelligent novelist.
Murdoch and Bayley become IM and JOB to "capture the sort of focus I wished to achieve" and to distance himself from two people whom he once saw as mother and father figures. Poor Bayley is called "fishy-face", a "little leprechaun", "a smiling pixie". His s-stammer is p-p-printed on the page; her "Irish" accent is mocked. Wilson claims that JOB merely pretended to read Murdoch's novels. In a remarkable scene from 1974, a very young Wilson is invited by his tutor Bayley to look in on Eric Christiansen, medieval historian. The diary entry ends with their coming upon Christiansen and another "tightly entwined" on a daybed, the other being IM; their subsequent conversation contained the germ of an idea for Murdoch's The Word Child, published 14 months later.
There are little things, affectionately told. When JOB broke his ankle, Murdoch "sat at the end of his hospital bed with a large pad, writing her novel" or "if she had an hour to kill waiting for a train, out would come the pad once more", or Murdoch singing "south of the border, down Mexico way . . ."
But the strongest and most valuable part of the book is Wilson's assessment of Murdoch the novelist. Sometimes she descends to "mere silliness", "pretty good tosh", and he reminds us of how she suffered from her refusal to be edited. Yet he points out that, while "ideas date as rapidly as clothes", Murdoch in her novels keeps ideas alive, that "when the intellectual map of our own times comes to be sketched out, IM will occupy a position analogous to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in this regard".
As for life's sordid side, we're all lesser than the angels, and I'm with Dr Johnson that "(i)f nothing but the bright side of characters should be shewn, we should sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything". But with Wilson there are barrel-bottom scrapings. IM apparently liked Mars bars and Crunchies, drank plonk, and "found praise of Muriel Spark hard to stomach". And it gets worse. "Down and dirty" acquires a new meaning here. He wants us to know that her kisses were "rather smelly", that Murdoch's London "pigsty" of a flat had a loo encrusted with "ancient excrement and some not so ancient". And this observed by Wilson the dinner guest.
She did live in a house companionably chaotic, where meals were inventive harmonies of opposites: boiled potatoes, cold sausages, salads, chocolate slices, booze. Always welcoming whenever I visited and never self-important, she famously dressed down, and nothing suggested that she would leave more than £2 million in her will. But conversation mattered, and you came away buzzing and glowing.
Without the Bayley memoirs and especially the Conradi biography, this book, with its diversions, gossipy indulgences, asides, speculations, indiscretions, just wouldn't add up. The diary entries from years back certainly give the book an immediacy. There's a funny account of how J.B. Priestley took an instant dislike to Wilson and a subsequent car race on the M40. And that's the problem. A thing of shreds and patches, it hatchets JOB and belittles Murdoch.
That said, I couldn't put the damn thing down, but it's an enervating read, and I ended up feeling soiled. Time to draw a veil, no, a blackout curtain, over this one. Time to go back to the half-dozen very fine Murdoch novels that brim with crazy life. Let Murdoch have the last word. In The Black Prince she says, "We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings", and in The Sea, The Sea, "We are such inward secret creatures that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason".
Humility and empathy. And that's why she's worth reading.
Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her By A.N. Wilson Hutchinson, 275pp. £18.99
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College, Dublin