Iris Murdoch's life is about to be celebrated in a new film. Josephine Hart, first inspired by her fellow novelist at 16, recalls their friendshipIRIS MURDOCH was a force for good in my life - and she still is. Would that I could leave such a legacy. I judge myself against her standards of behaviour and always fail - but, as Beckett admonished, I try to fail better.
She exploded into my life when I was 16, home from my convent boarding school for holidays in the exciting metropolis of Mullingar, Co Westmeath, population 7,000. I don't think I ever recovered from reading A Severed Head. Its main character, Honor Klein, strode with me through the streets and down the corridors of my school, fierce and dangerous - my kind of woman. A woman who, in reply to her lover's question: "Shall we be happy?", had the sheer daring to say: "Happiness has nothing at all to do with it." Since he'd just thrown away his life for her, I was dazzled by her challenging impertinence. More than that, I knew she was right.
Thus began my life with Iris Murdoch, the writer, decades before I met her. I read everything she wrote, often twice - the only way, according to Nabokov. Sentences were sometimes learnt by heart, such as: "Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. She decided six months later to return to him for the same reason" - the opening line of The Bell.
My favourites - "There are perhaps times in a man's life when there is no substitute for the discipline of guilt" (it's the word discipline that gives that sentence its sharpness) and "We cannot altogether evade responsibility for the subtle chains of moral failure which bring about the evil we swear we never intended" - are true Murdoch, tough on the self, rather than others. They come from her masterpiece, The Black Prince.
My desire to produce the book as a play in the West End was the catalyst for me finally meeting Iris Murdoch, on December 19, 1984, in the Connaught Hotel, London. It was a meeting we were to celebrate each year, until her illness made it impossible.
Iris sat on one of the very grand chairs in the very grand lounge, smiling at me as, hugely pregnant, I stumbled towards her. "Hello Josephine," she said. "I'm Irish, too."
I was astonished, being unaware at that time of her passionate definition of herself as Irish. She once told her biographer, Peter Conradi, that she had an Irish accent "you could cut with a knife". This was endearing, but patently untrue. However, as the years went by, I understood more the tenacious grip "mad Ireland", which "hurt you into poetry" as Auden wrote of Yeats, had on Iris's imagination.
At that lunch, we spoke of love, of death, of the death of those we love. This was an experience of which she knew too much. The terrible death of the young Frank Thompson, who had once described Iris as "his ideal girl", and who was executed by the Nazis in 1944, seemed particularly cruel.
I described to her the frozen soul that had almost destroyed me in the aftermath of one particular tragedy. She put her hand on my arm and said: "My dear, you were very tired." Just that, and absolution flooded over me. I loved her from that day on in a way that, apart from my family, I have loved no one else.
Now began another treasured life with Iris. First in the world of theatre, as The Black Prince became a play with Ian McDiarmid, her ideal Bradley Pearson. Then of endless support from her when I started writing. Once, she travelled down from Oxford to the ICA, where we were to share a stage, and pulled from one of her famous paper bags pages of notes on my first book. Writers, let me assure you, are rarely so generous.
She did not like to be described as good. Perhaps because "the goodness had been hard fought for", as Conradi remarked. The tempestuous early sexual life, with its inevitable compromises, makes clear the battles involved. She triumphed and passed on the lesson that the essential death of the ego can lie side by side with self-realisation - and that self-realisation must be predicated on the most profound respect for the reality of others. It's harder than it sounds but it's difficult to think of a better philosophy.
Her goodness had no element of the saccharine. She saw people as they were and no one was quicker in analysis. "A soldier of fortune," she said immediately of one of our dearest friends who, some years later, died tragically young and in mysterious circumstances. When, in our grief, we were on the verge of launching an investigation into what had happened, she advised strongly against such action. I never see his children now without thanking her for that wisdom which preserved their youth from horror.
"An unhappy woman, made unhappy by money," she said of another friend, who was eventually to spend a fortune on "alternative lifestyles".
She caught every nuance in any conversation, even one among those who, by training and talent, dissemble brilliantly. She silently absorbed the undernote during a first reading of The Black Prince, when we both believed we had the ideal director for the play.
She sent me a card that afternoon: "Dear girl, he won't do it." I assured her he would. I was wrong. But I was all will then and she was, as ever, all wisdom. I treasure a memory of that worldly knowledge that is in no way incompatible with kindness. During the interval on the successful first night of The Black Prince, I whispered to her: "All your friends will be just thrilled for you, Iris." She smiled and whispered back: "Not quite all of them, darling."
"Marriage," she once wrote, "is a long conversation." So is friendship. Letters, if they are true, are a continuation. I have kept them all and read them often. She bequeathed me a treasured, tiny, green polished wood wheel, which her husband John said had always been on her desk. I gaze at it every day. The conversation, in a way, continues.
Iris had a steady way of looking at one as she spoke which, combined with the sturdy completeness of her figure, was both arresting and calming - as though she were saying: "Rest, just for a moment. Rest and think."
She altered the dynamics of any room she entered, possessed of a physical power that she shared with Ted Hughes. They both slowed the pace down, so that you looked towards them for something you didn't quite understand. This power was clearly dangerous for some in the case of Ted Hughes, but benign for all in the case of Iris Murdoch.
And, of course, I met Professor John Bayley. Let no one underestimate what an experience that is. I have never accepted the portrait of John as "the innocent", sweetly stumbling round the dazzling young Iris and helplessly endeavouring to fend off her multitudinous admirers. This is a man who won his heart's desire and out-manoeuvred her other suitors. Not, I think, by accident. He is the cleverest of men: a novelist whose first book, In Another Country, is on the 20th-century classics list; a literary critic "second only to Ruskin", according to his admirers. A man so well read that someone once remarked: "If, by some terrible mischance, all of English literature was lost to us, one need only ring Professor Bayley and he could dictate most of it."
But, like Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog, John Bayley knew one great thing. He knew what Iris wanted: she wanted art. Together, they lived a life of high seriousness dedicated to literature and to each other. That life and marriage are now celebrated in Richard Eyre's extraordinary film Iris, starring a radiant Kate Winslet as the young Iris, and eliciting perfect performances from Hugh Bonneville and Jim Broadbent as John, young and old. Judi Dench as Iris, in the grip of the implacable enemy Alzheimer's, gives a performance beyond technique and craft, one that is drenched in the mysterious, alchemic art of the actor. It is a performance of genius.
The film is based on John's trilogy, his long love letter to Iris. It opens with Iris, old and young, swimming. As a long-distance swimmer, in a freezing lake in midlands Ireland, I learnt the hypnotic joy of surrender to the enchantment of water. But Iris was in an altogether different category when it came to obsessive swimming.
I have a memory of her sitting on the back of an old Thames river boat, in a muddy lake in Sussex. Suddenly, Iris stripped and slipped into the water. She swam, with her magnificently determined stroke, to a tiny island, scattering ducks and geese. It was the same in France. Swimming pools were a total bore to her - she wanted "the sea, the sea" and as often as possible; rain or high waves presented no impediment.
While on holiday, she took a vast delight in long lunches and dinners, during which little attention was paid to the abstemious recommendation of two glasses a day. They were often preceded by a "Bayley Cocktail" - not for the faint-hearted. Basically, it contained a drop of everything.
Sometimes, Iris sang to us - Believe me if all those endearing young charms, The Kerry dances, or Are you right there, Michael, are you right? One night, we recited The Cremation of Sam Magee, a poem that we'd both been taught, when small, by our fathers.
Iris's sense of fun was often overlooked, as she became more and more enveloped in a cloak of greatness, which, I think, made some people freeze at the thought of being with her.
Then, another cloak began to hide her, sadly, even from those who loved her. John has written the definitive account of the terrible journey into a lonely wilderness, which the victim of Alzheimer's is forced to undertake.
I add nothing but this. The books that he wrote about this expedition into a kind of hell have done more good for the families of victims than anything else in the past decade. That is not my prejudiced assessment but that of nurse Tricia O'Leary, of The Vale, in Oxford, where Iris finally died - so peacefully that, as John said: "You know, I wouldn't mind doing that myself."
Thanks to Jan M for sending me this article which appeared in The Electronic Telegraph (UK) on January 12, 2002