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Iris Murdoch, philosopher and novelist, died on 8 February 1999 three months after her husband John Bayley, himself an academic and author, wrote his first book about her. The second was published immediately after her death. The first book was a bestseller for Duckworth his publishers; the fate of the second is not yet known.
The first of these books begins in a moving and promising way, charting the beginnings of a relationship between the author and Iris that was to lead to a marriage. They remained a childless couple with their exceptional creativity being harnessed into their work. The marriage itself reads for all the world like a haven for two siblings, away from the parental couple. Oblivious of the pain of being behind the bedroom door, they seem to muddle through an enchanted life: a kind of secret world of perpetual latency.
John Bayley conveys the slow decline in ‘Iris's’ mental health with a benevolence and a tolerance which are both illuminating and moving. How does he manage to be himself and stay within himself in the thrall of her mental collapse? In part the explanation seems to rest in the paradox that in her diminished state of mind, and in her consequent absolute dependence on him, he is closer to her as a physical human being than ever before. The disintegration in her mental life leads them into more of what he calls a ‘marriage’, a closeness and physical intimacy that he had not known with her before. There is no longer an otherness in her condition; there is a sameness.
It is a moving and tragic tale made the more so because it was written whilst she was still alive, typed on the typewriter in the early mornings whilst she lay beside him in the marital bed: there and not there, absent and present. She was private and silent. He was private and about to go public. ‘Her reserve was deep and as natural to her as it was deep’ (Bayley 1998, p. 69). But now we know that this fierce intellectual, this author who could be the dreamer of inner worlds an