Elegy for Iris: A Memoir by John Bayley

From the Publisher

With remarkable tenderness, John Bayley recreates his passionate love affair with Iris Murdoch--world-renowned writer and philosopher, and his wife of forty-two years--and poignantly describes the dimming of her brilliance due to Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a story about the ephemeral beauty of youth and the sobering reality of what it means to grow old, but its ultimate power is that Bayley discovers great hope and joy in his celebration of Iris's life and their love. In its grasp of life's frailty and its portrayal of one of the great literary romances of this century, Elegy for Iris is a mesmerizing work of art that will be read for generations.

New York Observer - Regina Marler

This is a sad and loving reflection, but it can be read as the ultimate diaper-airing...this is a sickbed memoir, grossly limited and limiting. While Mr. Bayley offers an intimate view of his senile wife, he cannot offer a portrait of a brilliant and esteemed writer -- the Iris, presumably, for whom one would write an elegy.

Mirabella - Francine Prose

A testament to a love that has endured and transcended the most terrifying ravages of illness and old age.

The New York Times - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

What makes [Iris Murdoch] alive in these pages is her husband's love, which is so absolute and mysterious that it pervades every word he writes....What brought them together was...the discovery of the children in each other....in Elegy for Iris, Mr. Bayley celebrated his beloved partner's survival.

Gail Caldwell

Beautiful and heartbreaking. —The Boston Globe

Carolyn G. Heilbrun

I would neverhaving read [Bayley's] literary criticismhave suspected him capable of this book: a portrait of a thriving marriage we must regard as close to unique. —The Women's Review of Books

Book Magazine

Tender vignettes of Iris' active and somewhat unconventional past are contrasted with heart-rending glimpses of her life since she became of victim of Alzheimer's in 1994.

Publishers Weekly

It is seldom that someone at once so brilliant and so visible as novelist Iris Murdoch develops Alzheimer's disease in full public view; seldom, also, that a sufferer from this dreadful malady has so skilled and loving an interpreter by her side.

Bayley, a noted literary critic (and, recently, novelist) in his own right, was married to Murdoch for 40 years, and part of the charm of this enormously affecting memoir lies in the ways in which he shows the affections of old age as in no way slower than the passions of youth. Murdoch was already a dashing and rather mysterious figure when she and Bayley met in the Oxford of the '50s; she was a philosophy don at a women's college who had just written a much-admired first novel; he was a bright, rather naive graduate student. Something mutually childlike clicked between them, however, and a naked swim in the River Isis (which later became a fond habit lasting even into Iris' illness) cemented their loving friendship. Writing with great tenderness and grace, Bayley evokes their long, warm, mutually trusting marriage, and introduces in the gentlest way the moments, four years ago, when he realized that his wife's sense of reality and of herself were slipping away. At the end of her life she became anxious, repetitious and often nonsensical in her speech, but was still suffused with the same quizzical sweetness and absolute trust he loved in her from the start. Few people with an Alzheimer's partner could be as self-effacing and endlessly patient as Bayley, but in a way almost as mysterious as the creation of a Murdoch novel, he evokes depths of understanding and warmth that seem scarcely ruffled by the breezes of the conscious mind.

This beautiful book could hardly help being deeply consoling to anyone thus afflicted; it is also a compelling study of the overthrow of a remarkable spirit.

The New York Times Book Review - Mary Gordon

This splendid book enlarges our imagination of the range and possibilities of love.

The Women's Review of Books - Carolyn G. Heilbrun

I would never, having read [Bayley's] literary criticism, have suspected him capable of this book: a portrait of a thriving marriage we must regard as close to unique.

Boston Globe

"ELEGY FOR IRIS is beautiful and heartbreaking...a love poem writ in melancholy, an ode to the past and the stratosphere of commitment that such a past ensures."

Kirkus Reviews

A sweet if somewhat old-fashioned memoir about a literary marriage. Bayley, author of the novel The Red Hat and a noted critic, met novelist and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch (Jackson's Dilemma) while he was teaching at Oxford's St. Anthony's College and instantly came under her sway.

What People Are Saying

John Bayley
A solitary life is splendid, provided you can lead it with someone else. That's paradoxical, but it's extremely true in our case. We've always had that sort of life; she had her life, and I had mine. And now one can have that same sort of thing. I do have that solitary life because she's there, and I couldn't have it on my own. It would simply disappear....She is not sailing into the dark. The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer's, she has arrived somewhere. So have I.
-- Interviewed in The New York Times, December 20, 1998

Dan Rather
Elegy for Iris has seduced me, with its painstaking reconstruction of the love between two people.

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Product Details

• ISBN: 0312253826
  
• ISBN-13: 9780312253820
• Format: Paperback, 288pp
• Publisher: Picador
• Pub. Date: November 1999
• Edition Description: REV
• Edition Number: 1
• Sales Rank: 139,701

• Table of Contents
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• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

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    A hot day. Stagnant, humid. By normal English standards, really hot, insufferably hot. Not that England has standards about such things anymore. Global warming, no doubt. But it's a commonplace about growing old that there seem to be no standards anymore. The dog days. With everything gone to the dogs.

    Cheerless thoughts to be having on a pleasure jaunt, or what used to be one. For years now, we've usually managed a treat for ourselves on really hot days, at home in the summer. We take the car along the bypass road from Oxford, for a mile or two, and twist abruptly off on to the verge--quite a tricky feat with fast-moving traffic just behind. Sometimes there are hoots and shouts from passing cars which have had to brake at speed, but by that time we have jolted to a stop on the tussocky grass, locked the car, and crept through a gap in the hedge.

    I remember the first time we did it, nearly forty-five years ago. We were on bicycles then, and there was little traffic on the unimproved road. Nor did we know where the river was exactly; we just thought it must be somewhere there. And with the ardour of comparative youth, we wormed our way through the rank grass and sedge until we almost fell into it. Crouching in the shelter of the reeds, we tore our clothes off and slipped in like water rats. A kingfisher flashed past our noses as we lay soundlessly in the dark, sluggish current. A moment after we had crawled out and were drying ourselves on Iris's half-slip, a big pleasure boat chugged past within a few feet of the bank. The steersman, wearing a white cap, gazed intently ahead. Tobacco smoke mingled with the watery smell at the roots of the tall reeds.

    I still have the half-slip, I rediscovered it the other day, bunched up at the back of a drawer, stiff with powdery traces of dry mud. It is faded to a yellowish colour, with a wrinkled ribbon, once blue, decorating the hem. Could a woman of our own time, who became my wife, have actually worn such a garment? It looks like something preserved from the wardrobe of Marie Antoinette. I never gave it back to Iris after that occasion, and I think she forgot all about it.

    In any case, we were having a busy day that day. We had a lunchtime engagement we could not miss. By the time we had cycled back into Oxford and down Woodstock Road, we were as hot as we had been earlier that morning, before we had crawled through the dense green undergrowth and discovered the river. Still dripping with sweat, and making vague efforts to tidy our hair and clothes, we rang the bell of a flat in Belsyre Court. As we waited, we looked at each other expressionlessly, then burst at the same moment into a soundless fit of giggles.

    Our host, who had been getting lunch, was quite a time coming to the door. He was a brilliant green-eyed young doctor named Maurice Charlton. When even younger, he had been a classics don at Hertford College, and considered one of the best in the university. So good at it, indeed, that he gave it up after three years and turned to medicine. He now held a research appointment at the Radcliffe Hospital. He was supposedly rather in love with Iris. That was why he had asked her to lunch. She had told him she was spending the morning with me--we were going to cycle out together to see Cassington church--and so asked if I could come, too.

    He took it like a man. He had prepared a delicious lunch. The flat was not his own, but belonged to a rich older don at Balliol, with whom he may or may not have had an ambiguous relationship. He seemed to be able to borrow the flat at any time, for his friend lived mostly at the college when he wasn't away in Italy or Greece.

    Fifty or so years ago, life in the university seemed more constricted and formal, but at the same time more comfortable and relaxed. For us, in those days, there was no paradox involved. We maintained public standards and conventions almost without being conscious of them, while leading our own private lives. We worked very hard--at least Iris did; I was more naturally indolent.

    Maurice Charlton probably worked harder than either of us, or than both of us put together, I should say. But he was totally relaxed, his green eyes sparkling, and had a delightful air--as soon as he saw us--of collusion in something or other: what he had been doing, what we had been doing. This intimate feel, as if we could become naughty children together any moment, was enhanced by the sombre dignity of the flat, which was full of rare books, good furniture, glass. I still remember the long-stemmed green and white wineglasses from which we drank a great deal of very cold hock. I think it was the white wine people usually drank in those days.

    I feel admiration now for the way Charlton must have apprehended that Iris and I had been up to something together, and how he not only took it in his stride but encouraged us in some way to include him. We had never got to Cassington church, we said. It had been far too hot. We had cycled back in an exhausted state, and it was wonderful to be there in the cool, drinking the wine. We both said something like this without looking at each other. Iris jumped to her feet to go over and kiss Maurice, and it seemed just the right and spontaneous act, making all three of us laugh: we two men laughing both at and with Iris as she gazed delightedly round the dark and, as it seemed, rather mysteriously grand flat, as if she were Alice in Wonderland on the threshold of a new series of adventures.

    As we sat laughing and eating--I remember lobster and the delicious garlic mayonnaise our host had made--I was conscious of my soaking trouser pocket, where. Iris's undergarment reposed, rolled up. I hoped the wet wouldn't get on the dining room chair, which was covered in some sort of damask. As lunch went hilariously on, we seemed more and more like a family. Through a bewitching miasma of hock, I was conscious of Iris as a kind sister, fond of both her brothers, equally close to them. Maurice had the air of a brother, but he also looked like a sort of patriarch as he sat grinning benignly at the head of the table.

    Maurice Charlton died young, of cancer, I believe, more than twenty years ago. My impression is that he never married, but I may be wrong about that. He certainly looked at Iris with his green eyes as if he liked her very much. It was possible he had borrowed the flat and prepared the lunch with a purpose, and that my presence had thwarted his plans for the afternoon. In that case, I admire his behaviour all the more, at this distance in time. He carried off perfectly what might well have been a frustrating situation for him.

    I mention the lunch with Maurice Charlton, and that enchanted Sunday morning when Iris and I had our first swim together, because I remember it all very vividly, not because it had any great importance in itself. Although I had met Charlton a few times, and admired him, that lunch was probably our only social occasion together. He continued to work in Oxford, but we lost touch which is why I don't know what happened to him later, except that he was a distinguished man when he died. It was typical of my relations with Iris at that time that I had very little idea of the other people in her life, or what they might mean to her. That was probably due to the ecstatic egoism of falling in love for the first time. For me, it was the first time, though I was not exactly young. Iris was thirty-four, Maurice Charlton about the same age. I was twenty-eight. Difference in age, which means a good deal at school and not much in later years, was only a part of the atmosphere of that lunch party, because we seemed for the moment like a family. And a family takes such differences in age for granted.

    But, as I say, I still had very little idea of the other people in Iris's life, or what they meant to her. That was instinctive on her part, I think, rather than deliberate, as privacy pervaded all kinds of relationships. An "open" society is what we aim for now, or say we aim for, as an enhancement of our all being more classless and democratic. We were not consciously undemocratic, I think, in the fifties, but we took private life for granted. That was particularly true in Oxford, still an academic society, in which one could be on good terms with a large number of people, meeting them most days in college, at dinner in hall, or in lecture rooms and laboratories, without having any idea of how they were situated domestically, or socially, or sexually. Other people's lives might have seemed intriguing, which was part of the fun of privacy, but they remained what was on the whole an accepted and comfortable blank.

    By some emotional paradox, being in love made me, at least at first, more incurious about this, not less. Iris existed for me as a wonderful and solitary being, first seen about six months before, bicycling slowly and rather laboriously past a window in St. Antony's College, where I was living. Trying to work, and gazing idly out at the passing scene on Woodstock Road, now intolerably full of traffic but a comparatively quiet thoroughfare then, I noted the lady on the bicycle (she seemed at once to me more of a lady than a girl) and wondered who she was and whether I would ever meet her. Perhaps I fell in love. Certainly it was in the innocence of love that I indulged 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 or an unknown present.

    For me she was a woman without a past, or a present.

    She was looking both absent and displeased. Maybe because of the weather, which was damp and drizzly. Maybe because her bicycle was old and creaky and hard to propel. Maybe because she hadn't yet met me? Her head was down, as if she were driving on thoughtfully towards some goal, whether emotional or intellectual. I remember a friend saying playfully, perhaps a little maliciously, after she first met Iris, "She is like a little bull."

    It's true in a way, although I have never seen it, because of course I have never seen her objectively. But if each of us resembles some sort of animal or bird, as our personalised bestiary emblem, then I can see that Iris could indeed be a small bull. Not unfriendly, but both resolute and unpredictable, looking reflectively out from under lowered brows as it walks with head down towards you.

    In her first published novel, Under the Net, it is remarked of the leading female character that she never lets on to any one of her friends just how closely bound she is to all the rest of them. Few of them even know one another. That was true of Iris. Naturally enough, it made quite a difference to the heroine of the novel, but it has never made any difference to Iris. She always used to write back to fans who had written to her. Careful, long, intelligent letters, directed to a person, not just to a fan. They were real letters, even though she had never met, or probably would never meet, the person to whom she was writing. I have to try to write letters back to her fans now, and, naturally enough, I can't do it like that; although from their letters, and their attitude towards their adored author, I see why one of them at once replied, after Iris had written to him, that he felt now they had become "pals for life."

    Like so much to do with our emotions, the egoism of love has something absurd about it, though something touching, as well. It was certainly absurd that I should have taken for granted in those days that Iris was pure spirit, so to speak, devoted to philosophy and to her job, leading a nunlike existence in her little room in college, devoid of all the dissimulations and wonderings and plottings and plannings that I took for granted in myself. She was a superior being, and I knew that superior beings just did not have the kind of mind that I had.

    Besides, there had been something almost supernatural about the way I had actually met her, after I had seen her riding past the window on her bicycle. The following day, I had encountered Miss Griffiths in the street, outside the Examination School, where university lectures were given. A diminutive figure, she was just taking off her billowing black gown, preparatory to mounting her own bicycle and cycling home to St. Anne's College. She had been lecturing on Beowulf. Miss Griffiths had had a soft spot for me ever since my viva--the face-to-face-oral exam--when she had congratulated me on my essay on Chaucer's Knight's Tale, even though she caught me out on a minor question of Anglo-Saxon syntax. After I had obtained my degree, she had followed my career, such as it was, with benevolent interest, and now she seized me by the arm as I walked past, enquiring how things were going. In fact, things were barely going at all, as I had no proper job and was staying on sufferance in the newly founded St. Antony's College, where I was supposed to act as a tutor and guide to a few ebullient Frenchmen and Americans who had come to study science or politics there.

    St. Antony's at that time was a study in itself, but its principal interest for me now, and in memory, was its proximity to St. Anne's College, an institution designed at the time solely for women students, although, like most other colleges, it has since become co-educational. Out of the deference I felt for an older and senior member of the English faculty, I walked a few yards that morning beside Miss Griffiths, who showed no immediate disposition to mount her bicycle and be off. I think she wanted to enjoy reminiscing for a moment about the exam and the viva--like most dons, she was vain about her examination exploits and technique--and to recall with the pleasure of generosity her discernment about the good points of my Chaucer essay, as well as to remind me, with the pleasure of superior knowledge, about my errors in Old English grammar. Having done those things, she suddenly asked me if I would care to come to her college room for a drink that evening. I was happy to accept.

    Although it was just across the road from St. Antony's, I had never been into St. Anne's, which I regarded as an all-female province, likely to be virtually out of bounds to males and male students. I wasn't wholly wrong about this. Incredible as it may seem today, there were then fairly strict rules governing the conduct of men who had the nerve and temerity to go visiting in these female strongholds. They had to remain in the public parts of the college, and the girls were not allowed to receive them in their rooms. The matter was, in any case, of little or no interest to me. Students like myself, who had been in the army at the end of the war, were older than the new generation of undergraduates, whom they were sometimes employed temporarily to instruct, owing to the post-war shortage of teachers. Oxford at the time seemed to me like a school; apart from having to teach a few of its younger denizens, I took no account of them. The cinema was my resort for relaxation and refuge, and cinemas were cinemas in those days. In the afternoon, they were churchlike spaces dense with tobacco smoke, inhabited by couples, or by solitary worshippers motionless in the darkness, illuminated from time to time by the glowing tip of a cigarette.

    The idea of a drink with funny, wizened little Miss Griffiths--I imagine she was only a year or two over forty, but if I thought of it at all, I thought of her past the boundaries of age--was a decidedly agreeable one. Drinks were drinks in those days, just as cinemas were cinemas, and I had heard that Miss Griffiths--Elaine, as I afterwards came to know her--liked a good strong drop of gin. Besides, it could only be a good thing to be on social terms with a senior member of the English faculty, to which I aspired in time to belong.

    All such prudential considerations vanished when I presented myself at six o'clock that evening. Miss Griffiths was just finishing a tutorial, and as I knocked on the door, a young girl in a scholar's gown came out, dropping her eyes demurely at the sight of a man standing there. I barely glanced at her, for through the open doorway I had caught sight of the bicycle person--the woman? the girl? the lady?--standing and talking to some unseen character, with a well-filled glass in her hand.

    She looked different from the bicycle lady, naturally enough. This was a social scene and she was not wearing an old macintosh. Her short fairish hair, unkempt and roughly fringed on the forehead, looked both healthy and greasy, as it still does. Later on, I was to cut and shampoo it for her now and then, but at that distant time, she hardly bothered. Indeed, I have the feeling that women then--certainly academic women--were nothing like so attentive to appearances as they are today, when girls may look like scarecrows, but only of set purpose. Slovenliness in those days was next to seriousness, at least in university circles. It was rare, however, for women in those circles to wear trousers. Iris had on a worn and grubby tweed skirt, rather overlong and ungainly. I noticed her legs were short and robust, clad in brown cotton stockings. Nylons were still uncommon in the early fifties.

    This woman certainly had a serious look, and it dawned on me that my bicycle lady, who this clearly was, must be an academic of some sort. That gave me an immediate feeling of despondency, just as my fantasy when I first saw her was that she had neither a past with others nor a future without me, so now I was reluctant to feel that she could be anything so commonplace as a university don. It placed her; and I disliked the idea that she should be placed, even by myself. At the same time, I was heartened by her general appearance, and its total absence of anything that for me in those days constituted sex appeal. There was nothing so conventional as that about this woman. She was not "a girl," and she had no girlish attractions. That made the fact that I was in love with her much more exciting; and it also seemed highly satisfactory, for what, as I instantly realised, was a rather ignoble reason. Since she had no obvious female charms, she was not likely to appeal to other men.

    Why I was so convinced at first that there was nothing sexually attractive about Iris is a complete mystery. Other people, of both sexes, certainly didn't think so. It was my naive and now inexplicable assumption that she could appeal only to me, and to no one else, that stopped me seeing how fearfully, how almost diabolically attractive everyone else found her. They knew more about such things, I suppose.

    "Ah, there you are, John. I may call you John, mayn't I?" Miss Griffiths gave a characteristic small giggle. "Meet Miss Ady, and Miss Murdoch. Iris, this is one of the more promising young ones in the English school. Very good results in finals. I caught him out over Old English grammar, his weaker side, I fear, but he did a beautiful piece on the Knight's Tale."

    That bloody Knight's Tale. Was I never going to hear the end of it? Iris Murdoch gave me a kindly look, said "Hullo," and continued talking to Miss Ady. Miss Griffiths handed me a glass, from which I at once took a desperate swig. I coughed, and felt myself going scarlet in the face. It was a strong gin and French, the English equivalent of an American martini--no ice in those days, of course. Although I had become accustomed to strong drink in the army, I had barely touched it during my student days. I had lost the taste, and besides, it was too expensive. Iris and her friends drank a lot of it, and for me that was the first of many.

    I resented Miss Griffiths referring to me as one of the "young ones" in the English school. I was not particularly young. Were these women so much older? For I now saw, and with a certain satisfaction in spite of my embarrassed state, that I was the only man in the room. There were four or five women at the party, and as a result of my confusion and fit of coughing, they were all looking at me in a kindly way. Obviously, they took it for granted that I was a clueless young creature, and that it behoved them, as sophisticated women of the university world, to be nice to me.

    But they all seemed to want to talk to Iris. I was left with Miss Griffiths, who was herself looking at Iris with a wistful expression which even at that awkward moment surprised me.

    What I had not the slightest idea of was that St. Anne's, at that time, was a hotbed of emotion. The dons in general were not professional lesbians, so to speak. Many were, or had been, married; they led domestic as well as academic lives. They were nice, clever donnish women, hardworking and conscientious, but a lot of feelings ran beneath the surface, and I had the impression later on that they seemed to catch such emotional intensities from one another, like germs or fashions. Some time afterwards, I heard the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who had become a great friend of Iris, describe an acquaintance as "an old-fashioned lesbian of the highest type." Elizabeth Bowen's inimitable stutter on the L made this sound both grand and comic. The ladies of St. Anne's were not grand exactly, but their type, I'm sure, was both high-minded and sound. Whatever they felt among themselves was never communicated to their pupils, nor were their pupils ever roped in. I had Iris's word for that, much later on. Any suggestion that one of their girl charges had been made advances to, or encouraged in a crush for one of them of her own, would have been universally frowned upon.

    In any case, I had simplistic ideas about sex at that time, supposing that everybody must be either one thing or the other. When it dawned on me, a short time after the party, that they had all seemed to be in love with Iris, I had a sensation of despair. If they all felt like that about her, didn't it follow that she must feel the same about them? at least about one or two of them? Iris was, as I realised later, much too kind to discourage affection, even yearning affection, but she was apt to draw a line if a woman expressed it too physically.

    Miss Griffiths seized her colleague in the English department, a lady with a resounding Polish surname, introduced me to her, and made thankfully off to join the little group around Iris. I saw the dashing Miss Ady, dark-haired and with beautiful eyes, tap Iris playfully on the wrist while emphasising some point to her, perhaps about their teaching, for Miss Ady, as I afterwards discovered, taught politics and economics, while Iris handled the philosophy. The Polish-sounding lady, who wore a black coat with a scarlet lining and seemed to me equally dashing, departed from the party's air of cheerful frivolity by asking in an intense and, as I thought, foreign tone a serious question about my "research." My reply failed to carry conviction to myself, or, it seemed, to her. Her gaze was forgiving but also a little reproachful, I felt.

    Instead of talking to the person I had fallen in love with, or even meeting her properly, I seemed destined, as a result of Miss Griffith's heaven-sent invitation, only to make a decidedly mediocre impression on another of my senior faculty teachers. I discovered afterwards that Miss Griffith's colleague was well known for her air of severity among pupils and colleagues alike, but that she was in fact a kind as well as a devoted teacher, married to a Polish officer during the war. She was herself from Yorkshire and bore some sturdy name like Sidebotham, but she preferred to retain the more romantic surname she had acquired from a husband from whom she was now separated.

    I never managed to talk to Iris at that party, although at a later stage, and after two or three other men had arrived, I hovered vainly near her, seeming to exchange words with every other person present. After a few of those gins and Frenches, I felt I could have made a good impression, but no opportunity arose, and Iris excused herself and departed well before the gathering dispersed, amid much conviviality.

    The god of chance seemed, however, to be in a long-suffering mood. After seeing me fail to make anything of the unexpected coincidence he had arranged, he patiently set to work yet again. Asked to supper three weeks later by a couple who knew a friend I had not seen for years, I discovered that Iris was my sole fellow guest. But I soon felt that I was failing again. Although friendly and not at all shy, Iris was not a helpful conversationalist. I offered openings and raised points in what I hoped was an interesting way, but she smiled kindly and did not respond. Like many philosophers in Oxford, she had the habit of considering what was said in a silence that was judicious, almost sibylline. She turned my poor little point over as if asking, what exactly does this mean? and if she decided it indeed meant very little, she was too polite to say so. Mutual enthusiasm failed wholly to take fire. I was comforted to observe that our host, a lively law fellow who was clearly hoping to pump Iris about the fashions and topics of contemporary philosophy, fared no better than I did. At the same time, I resented his air of knowing her so well that he could often appeal to jokes or thoughts they had in common, or jolly times she had shared with him and his family. My solitary bicyclist, I felt, should not have been happy to go on holiday with these people. I became prey to the jealousy I was often to suffer from in the months to come. I began to see that there was a lot that Iris had done--must have done, during the long years I had not known her--which I could not approve of, which was not suited to the image my fancy had officiously formed of her.

    Quite abruptly, and early, Iris said she must go home. Our hosts looked disappointed. For the first time, I managed to seize the moment, and I said regretfully that I must go, too. Our hosts looked more philosophical about that, for it was Iris they had wanted, almost greedily, to stay. I was surprised by this, because as a guest she had seemed to take very little trouble, if any, even though she had disseminated around her what seemed an involuntary aura of beneficence and goodwill. But she had not risen at all to the law fellow's blandishments, his attempts to interest her in his ideas and persuade her to set forth her own. To have observed this gave me some satisfaction.

    Good nights having been said and the front door closed, we unlocked our bicycles and set out together into the damp, mild Oxfordshire night. My lights were in order; her front one dimmed and wavered, on the verge of final extinction, and I respectfully urged her to bicycle on the inside and to keep as close as possible to my own illumination. Then we rode in silence, and I assumed it was to break it that she asked me in her friendly way if I had ever thought of writing a novel. It was a wholly unexpected question, but for once I had an answer ready. Yes, I had. Indeed, I was writing one, or trying to write one, at that moment.

    This was not strictly true. It was nearly true, and I determined on the spot and as we rode along to make it true that very night. The wife of my professor, a sweet, tremulous woman whose father had been a well-known critic, had asked me the same question about a month before. I had given her much the same disingenuous reply; and by way of encouragement, she had suggested with a gentle smile that we should both try to write one--she wouldn't mind having a go herself, she said. With some laughter, we had made a pact to see who could finish first. I had since attempted to gather a few ideas, and I had thought of an opening for the first chapter, but I had done nothing.

    But why should Miss Murdoch ask me about novels? It must be to indulge me and get me to talk about myself, I thought, for clearly she, a philosopher, could have no interest in the matter. She probably never read them; far too busy with higher things. I made some deprecating comment to this effect, and the next moment could hardly believe my ears. Miss Murdoch said that she herself had written a novel, which was shortly to be published.

    I felt overwhelmed with awe and admiration. So this extraordinary creature had thrown off a novel, as if negligently, in the intervals of a busy life of teaching and practising philosophy. What could it be about? I ventured to ask. "You mustn't tell anyone," she said, stopping her bicycle and putting a foot to the ground. She looked straight at me, speaking lightly but also very seriously. "I don't want anyone to know."

    I gave a fervent promise. I would not reveal her secret to a soul. I was overwhelmed with joy that she could have confided this secret to me. She must for some extraordinary reason not only have complete trust and confidence in me, although we had scarcely met each other, but with swift and masterful decision have concluded that I was just the right person--the one who ought to know. Why? I could only marvel, and be aware that my heart was bounding with gratitude and joy. As well as with love, of course. I really felt as we stood there in the dark road, half on and half off our bicycles, that this wonderfully intuitive and perspicacious being had seen right down inside me, liked what she saw, judged it worthy of her fullest trust. Perhaps even loved what she saw? Could she have known that I had fallen in love with her, and have decided like a philosopher, on a ground of reason and good sense, that she was also in love with me?

    As I came to know her, it soon occurred to me to wonder if she had not in fact revealed this secret of her novel to quite a number of people. Maurice Charlton seemed to know about it, so did the Johnsons--the law fellow and his wife. Most of her many friends in London must have known about it, too. What is more, some of them had even read it--in manuscript, in Iris's own handwriting. The Johnsons had read it, as they took good care to let me know when they saw that I was becoming friendly with Iris and that I met her at places other than their own house. For, of course, there is something highly displeasing about one's friend getting to know one's other friends without telling one, as La Rochefoucauld might have said.

    Iris's instinct here was essentially a kindly one. She wanted to have her friends, each of them, for themselves; she wanted them to know her in the same pristine way. No groups, no sets. No comparing of notes between two about a third. This desire that each of her relationships should be special and separate, as innocent as in the Garden of Eden, was of great significance to Iris. Since what she felt about each of them was totally genuine and without guile, it could have no relation to any other person. There was no graduation among her friendships, no comparisons made. Each was whole in itself.

    I had, in fact, misunderstood her. No doubt because I was in love with her. Like all lovers, I suppose, I wished to be a special case in quite the wrong sense. To be "the one." By telling me she didn't want anyone to know of the novel's existence, I felt she was singling me out. But it was a routine precaution, almost a formula. Her friends could know, should know. But she didn't want the matter talked about, either among them or in a wider context.

    Naturally enough, the precaution functioned only on the higher level; as a practical measure, it was ineffective. That was brought home to me when I realised that many people who knew Iris were talking about her novel. I did not resent the fact, nor did I feel in the least disillusioned. I was so much in love (or so I told myself) that I saw clearly and without dismay that Iris was not in the least in love with me. She had told me about her novel as an act of kindness, seeing that I was interested in such matters. She had told me precisely because she was not in love with me; not because she was, or was beginning to be. We had become friends; that was all.

    Friendship meant a great deal to her. It was a sign of how much she valued her friends that she kept them so separate. To me, it meant nothing, or at least very little. For me, friendship was a question of contextual bonding, as I believe psychologists call it. I had met people at school and in the army whose company was agreeable at that time and in that place; it did not occur to me to ask whether or how much I valued them as friends. When the situation changed, so did my acquaintance, so that I retained nobody who could be called "an old friend." The idea of Iris wishing, or at least being prepared, to regard me as one of her friends did not appeal to me in the least.

    Nonetheless, that was the way it had to be. We met about once a fortnight. We both disliked the telephone--that was something about her I discovered early on--so communicated by note. Such notes were exchanged via the college messenger, by what was known as "pigeon post." I disliked pubs, but there was no alternative to suggesting we should meet in a pub. Iris liked them and had her favourites among them, as I soon found out. I also disliked eating out, which in Oxford at that time was expensive, at least in terms of my meagre income, and usually bad. We sometimes ate at cafes or in bars. I became a gloomy connoisseur of their shortcomings.

    I suppose we got to know each other, and talked a good deal, but I don't remember what about. I know there was never anything so electrifying as the pause on our bicycles had been, when we confronted each other in the darkness and she told me not to mention the existence of her novel. After we had remounted, I enquired diffidently about the content of this work. What was it about? How had she come to write it? She made no direct reply, but, much more excitingly, she said with emphasis how important it was for any narration to have something for everybody, as she put it. This was a discovery she had made. I was surprised but also impressed by the simplicity of the idea, and the force with which she spoke of it, slowly and reflectively.

    "A bit like Shakespeare," I suggested.

    "Well, perhaps, yes."

    I have often pondered that moment, wondering whether her words really meant anything very much, or were they, for me, part of the unwitting electricity of falling in love? Falling in love on my side, that is. For her, it was obvious, and still is: The words were grave, sober, and true. She wanted, through her novels, to reach all possible readers, in different ways and by different means: by the excitement of her story, its pace and its comedy, through its ideas and its philosophical implications, through the numinous atmosphere of her own original and created world--the world she must have glimpsed as she considered and planned her first steps in the art of fiction.

(Continues ...)