It was a cold, clear day. I’m guessing March. A rambling country house by Steeple Aston, 15 miles north of Oxford, all light yellow Cotswold stone outside, all civilised bohemian muddle inside.
John Bayley answered the door and ushered us to the drawing room. He fluttered about preparing drinks, making a fuss of us, dripping charm in alarming quantities. He reminded me of a beaming cherub. Someone who was fun, good, and jolly, as frothy and sweet as a meringue.
I didn’t think Iris Murdoch would be remotely like that. She was 49, and near the height of her literary reputation. Eleven novels written already, including The Nice and the Good, the one we were meant to be interviewing her about; another 14 to go until the end we now know all about - the desert of Alzheimer’s and the immortality of celluloid. A true grande dame, I had thought: someone who sternly refused to give interviews to the media; a philosopher who was already regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of her generation. In a word, frightening.
Just to make it even more so, it was also the first interview I had ever done in my life.
I look back now, with Richard Eyre’s film Iris still playing in my brain, and what do I see? Not the full-on Iris Murdoch layed by Kate Winslet, the kind of woman who would make clear her sexually predatory intentions by grabbing a man by the testicles: no, the woman in front of me was both much older yet also far more girlish.
But the unflattering pudding basin haircut, the Aertex shirt, sagging skirt, gym shoes and socks, that cross between an Oxford don and a games mistress: well, they got that right.
I had done my research. I’d found out the basics about her background. How she grew up in Chiswick as the beloved only daughter of a minor civil servant who had taken out a loan to pay for her education. There were some curiosities there - this as a woman who was both a Communist bohemian and a Treasury civil servant, which seemed a bit hard to reconcile - but no-one then had any idea of the full range of her sexual adventurism revealed by Peter Conradi in his monumental biography of her last year.
Not knowing any of that - nothing about Murdoch’s affair with the sadistic, controlling Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti, and her relationships with the novelist Brigid Brophy and the philosopher Philippa Foot - I had presumed Murdoch would be as formal and spinsterish as most other female Oxford dons. But instead of staying true to the stereotype, Murdoch confounded it: wonderfully bumbling and unpompous rather than the imposing littérateur I had prepared myself to meet. She had the air of a mischievous schoolgirl. Her attitude towards us was almost conspiratorial, as though we were all involved in ome entertaining prank.
Us. I should have explained that, because that was the reason I got to see Iris Murdoch without any of her intellectual defences up. For I was accompanied by Laura Cecil, the daughter of Lord David Cecil, a close and long-standing friend of both Murdoch and Bayley. They were both delighted to see her and I suppose I came with the package.
But I came with a package of my own. Or at least a large reel-to-reel tape recorder, for our plan was to interview Murdoch for a student magazine we had recently set up. Literary scoops, we reckoned, wouldn’t come much bigger.
There was just one problem.
Some way into the interview, we tested the tape recorder, only to find that it had failed to record anything at all. I was cringing with embarrassment but Murdoch started to giggle and the whole thing became an enormous joke. I am relieved to say that I no longer remember our questions, which were along the impossibly jejune lines of "How do you write a novel?" but I recollect that she told us of her great affection for Dickens and how some of her characters were portrayed in an almost Dickensian way. I must admit that I had never noticed it - it sounded as far-fetched as Germaine Greer admitting that her real role model all along was Jane Austen - but I’m sure I nodded politely.
Richard Eyre’s film brought the whole day back to me. It captures Murdoch’s girlishness; Bayley’s attentive devotion to his wife; their mutual sense of fun and their rather innocent, child-like qualities. The powerful performance given by Judi Dench as the older Murdoch, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, is in stark contrast to the confident, bold, sexually audacious young don at St Anne’s. Bayley, then a young academic at nearby St Anthony’s, was immediately entranced when he saw Murdoch riding past his window on her bicycle. In his memoir of his wife, Iris, Bayley captures the moment even more potently than the film:
"Perhaps I fell in love. Certainly it was in the innocence of love that I indulged in the momentary fantasy that nothing had ever happened to her: that she was simply bicycling about, waiting for me to arrive. She was not a woman with a past, and an unknown present ... Her head was down as if she was driving on thoughtfully towards some goal, whether emotional or intellectual. I remember some friend saying playfully, perhaps a little maliciously, after she met Iris: ‘She is like a little bull.’"
The film weaves in and out between these two images of Murdoch: the confident young woman, full of promise, and the fearful, dependent wife in the grip of a disease that would ruthlessly extinguish her memory and all aspects of the challenging, independent person she had once been. It is harrowing to watch the scene in the film where one of our greatest contemporary writers struggles to find the right word to describe the postman and to see the author of 25 world-famous novels and some key books on philosophy engrossed in Teletubbies.
In many ways, the film is a faithful portrayal of the beginning and end of Bayley’s memoir. Many of the scenes are taken directly from the book, including one of their earliest conversations, when he is amazed to discover that she has just written a novel, having always presumed that, as a philosopher, she had no interest in fiction.
The Iris and John that Laura and I saw on that March afternoon was an equally long way from everything about her in either the film or the book. And in both there are secrets that lie far deeper than Murdoch’s wish to keep the contents of her next book to herself. Another scene taken almost word for word from Bayley’s memoir is the one in which Murdoch gave him a carefully annotated list of her former lovers. In his memoir, he described the moment as being rather like the grave moment when he was told the "facts of life" by his headmaster at his first school.
Their mutual passion for water and swimming (particularly in rather muddy rivers) is used in the film as a visual metaphor both for their relationship and for the creeping fog that gradually descends on Murdoch’s brain as the Alzheimer’s takes hold. At times the film is so visually striking that it almost overpowers the story. Some of the images are repeated too insistently, particularly the biking scene where they career down a hill with Murdoch in the lead and a rather nervous Bayley ollowing behind, just out of reach, but frantically trying to catch up. She used to tell him that she was like Proteus, the god who could change himself into any shape he wished - lion, serpent, monster or fish - and who only revealed his true shape when Hercules forced him into submission. Bayley used to reply gloomily that he wasn’t Hercules.
Before her death in l999, Bayley did, in spite of himself, perform this Herculean task, when his sick and frightened wife clung to him for some semblance of her own identity.
The continuous contrasts between the young and old Murdoch provide an effective structure for the film but they ignore any facets of her complex personality. She clearly enjoyed keeping different parts of herself for different friends and lovers and a large, private part for her novels. According to Bayley, she wanted to have her friends, each of them, for themselves; she wanted them to know her in the same pristine way, for there to be no comparing of notes between them.
My interview with Murdoch was at a time when she was fully in control of her creative powers; had a wide circle of intelligent and amusing friends and an admiring and supportive husband. Little is shown of this period of her life. The film depends entirely on Bayley’s view of his wife, seen almost as the heroine of a strange and tragic fairytale. In Iris, he noted the impossibility of ever conveying the full dimensions of his wife’s personality.
That March afternoon, I had only seen one side: Murdoch, the contented partner in an obviously happy marriage. But there were so many others: Murdoch, the philosopher, the experimental writer, the inspiring lecturer and the masochistic lover of "god-like" older men of outstanding intellectual ability, whom she adored and admired, as well as her close relationships with women friends and colleagues. Even Eyre’s film does little more than hint at such emotional complexity.
As Conradi’s biography points out, even those characters contained their own internal contradictions. The inspiring college lecturer was sometimes too wrapped up in her own problems to teach; the advocate of tolerance could on occasions often be censorious; the existentialist could also question the value of freedom; the novelist who sought critical approval was nauseated by praise; the sexually free spirit could also make a ringing endorsement of monogamy.
So who was Dame Iris Murdoch? Perhaps even she did not know. Certainly Bayley says as much in his memoir, when he recalls her telling him that she had always been puzzled by the question of identity because she didn’t think that she had one. An identity-free spirit would, he noted, find importance not in herself but in what she lived in and what she revealed. Could such a person be less hurt by the appalling ravages of Alzheimer’s? It was the only shred of consolation he could possibly find to clutch at.
Alzheimer’s was to reduce Murdoch into an essential essence of her many selves and this film emphasises the fact that the last surviving features of her personality were her humour and her love for her husband. For Bayley, in one sense, the closest bonds between them were still intact. He writes in his memoir: "Only memory holds reality." Everyone’s memories of a person are different, particularly when that person could change into so many different characters. Just like Proteus. And exactly like Iris Murdoch.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending this article which appeared in The Scotsman (UK) on January 26, 2002. I do not know the name of the author.