656
PARTISAN REVIEW
The
danger in all this attention being paid now to Iris's last few years
is that we are inclined to overlook her prodigious output, and only memo–
rialize her for her tragic passage into senility. This would be a horrendous
trivialization of a remarkable career, and Iris's essence-her extraordinary
struggle to depict the individual battle between good and evil-can be
found in such novels as
The Nice and the Good
and
The Red and the Green,
or in her own comments that she provided to other writers. "I believe," she
once told the noveli st Rachel Billington, "we live in a fantasy world, a
world of ill usion. And the great task is to find reali ty." And reviewing
Murdoch's
The Good Apprentice
in
The New York Times Book Review,
Harold
Bloom noted: "Miss Murdoch's only consistent spirituality is grimly par–
allel to Freud's, since her novels insist that religious consciousness, in our
postreligious era, must begin with the conviction that only death centers
life, that death is the only valid representation of a life better than the life–
in-death we all suffer daily."
Iris's death, in fact, came suddenly on a Monday afternoon with John
at her bedside. Forced by her rapid physical decline to place her only a few
weeks before in an Oxford nursing home that specialized in Alzheimer's,
John had not anticipated how immediately her death would come,
although he had alerted me the night before that Iris was no longer eat–
ing. Upon hearing the news from colleagues on February 8, I sifted
through old files at home to find the last lucid conversation I had had with
Iris last fall. Although generally unable to communicate anymore on the
phone, she had surprised me that last occasion with a rare burst of lucidity:
"How are you, Iris?" I had asked.
"You know," she volunteered, ''I'm just a strange person."
"You're not strange at all, you're a wonderful person and you give love
to everyone."
"Ah, but my head, I'm not real," she responded.
And after a few minutes of familiar patter, we had our parting words:
"I hope you have a good weekend, Iris."
''I'll try."
"You know, everyone loves you, Iris."
"Ah, but you're a wonderful person, I love you."
And a little over three months later Iris was gone. Yet as Tolstoy
observed, "Instead of death there was light."
