John Bayley: Iris and the Friends

By ELSPETH SANDYS*

I approached this book, part memoir, part personal tribute, with trepidation. I knew John Bayley and Irish Murdoch, not well, but well enough to feel protective of Murdoch's privacy, and worried about her husband's rush to publish the story of her final, tragic illness.

For that reason I have never read the first book he wrote about this experience, the highly praised Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch. I will, however, be reading it now. For while there were moments in Iris and the Friends when I winced for Murdoch, and longed for none of these revelations to have gone further than her circle of devoted friends, I could not help but be moved by Bayley's painful, painstaking honesty; his evident devotion to his wife (whom he confesses at one point to "worshipping"); and the desolation that hits him after Murdoch's merciful death. "How will I get through the time when I am not looking after Iris?" is the question he leaves unanswered at the end of the book.

The story covers, roughly speaking, the last year of Murdoch's life. But it is far more than just a record of her slow disappearance into dementia, and her husband's efforts to take care of her. It is as much about Bayley's memories as it is about his present life in Oxford. A concealed memoir, in other words.

Reading about Bayley's childhood between the wars, the summers spent with his two older brothers at Littlestone-on-Sea, was like watching a black and white movie from that period. Bayley, a gentle English romantic, whom no one could fail to like, was never any good at dealing with reality. He preferred the life of books and the imagination. As a boy of 8 he was horror-struck by the sight of a wax model of a dog "strapped down and stuck full of needles," displayed in the window of the Anti-Vivisection Society in London. He knew even at that tender age that what he was seeing represented "life, real life." The rest - his innocent childhood adventures; his daydreams about sex (there is a definite whiff of pre-pubescent innocence about his affair with Hannelore in postwar Germany) - were not real at all.

In the light of this confession of inadequacy, the story of Bayley's daily care of Murdoch becomes even more poignant. Obliged to perform intimate daily tasks for her, he becomes her parent, a role neither he nor Murdoch ever wanted to play. And like any parent he is often irritable, and sometimes shouts. "Damn your eyes, blast your guts, bugger off, can't you?" he yells at her one day, fed up with her constant stalking of him. Though he is careful to keep a smile on his face while he shouts, he nevertheless feels wretched afterwards.

What sustains him through this, the last and darkest part of his journey with Murdoch, is memory. Like Proust he chooses to remember the past in order to escape the pain and tedium of the present. Sometimes he even reinvents the past, investing it with a fantasy outcome quite different from the one experienced in the "real" world. But always Murdoch is present: his muse; his companion of nearly 50 years; his beloved wife.

Having sat with them in their impossibly cluttered kitchen, and talked of writing and writers, and basked in the sunshine of their unfailing interest in other people, I can only say that I found this book one of the saddest and sweetest I have ever read.

Abacus

$24.95

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.