ROBERT WElL
Memories of Iris
Iris Murdoch, the renowned philosopher and beloved novelist, died in
Oxford on February 8, 1999 of complications of Alzheimer's disease. Self–
effacing and modest despite her genius, she eschewed the praise and
publicity which have aggrandized many contemporary writers. Yet this
most private of people would have fully approved of the very public way
in which her husband, John Bayley, chronicled her inexorable decline in
his two memoirs,
Elegy Jar Iris
and
Iris and her Friends.
In fact, like many
characters in her more than two dozen novels, Murdoch would have pre–
ferred to go by example, because she had always maintained that moral
values could
only
be communicated through individual trial and personal
behavior.
Aware of Iris's philosophy,John Bayley decided in the fall of 1997 to
defy conventional sensibilities about illness, and deal with Iris's incapacity
strictly on their own terms. Deeply influenced then by the works of Leo
Tolstoy, Bayley was bringing his own Tolstoyan drama to life, making Iris's
death as visible as that of his literary mentor, who, in 1910, ran away from
home at the age of eighty-two, his whereabouts not even known to his
wife, Countess Sophia.
Writing in unsparing yet rhapsodic detail about the ravages brought on
by Alzheimer's, Bayley, also a most private man, was following Tolstoyan
precedent in redefining society's fear of disease and mental illness, echoing
the words of Ivan Ilyich, who had "searched for his accustomed fear of
death and could not find it." Bayley's dramatic decision not only to come
forward with a public announcement of his wife's illness, but also to write
joyously and spiritually about his experiences in caring for her reflects his
estrangement from a late twentieth-century society where old age is feared
and where death has been sanitized by our mainstream culture.
I first met Iris in September of 1994 on a routine publishing trip to
London, where I received an unexpected phone call from Natasha and
Stephen Spender (whom I had just signed up for what would become his
last two books) for what was described as a "simple dinner" with "just a
few friends," among them Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, as well as
Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter. Fearing that I would be perceived as a
neophyte at best, I tried to allay my anxiety by running out and buying
a few Murdoch works that were readily available. I was apprehensive that
