"WHEN he had tucked his wife, Dame Iris Murdoch, the great novelist, into bed, registering from her expression of sweet content that Dr Alzheimer had been temporarily banished by sleep, John Bayley would go downstairs. There, at the kitchen table, he would pour himself a drink and find a book to read. Among the piles of unwashed plates, papers and pill packets—and, somewhere, a large pork pie which they had put down and never seen again—would be a Jane Austen or a Barbara Pym, well-worn and ever welcome.
As he read, though, his thoughts would start to wander, first ambling and then running, like a horse let out in a field. He had held them back all day, of necessity, as Iris had rattled the front door crying to escape, or fought against putting on her shoes. Now he did not resist them. Like the devil Belial in “Paradise Lost”, he surrendered to open-ended daydreaming.
"For who would lose
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
These thoughts that wander through eternity?"
He was, he supposed, that “intellectual being”, though he made no great play of it. The Warton Professorship of English at Oxford sat on him as lightly as his tattered Oxfam jumpers and caps. His books of literary criticism were lauded, especially his studies of Tolstoy and Henry James and a work called “The Characters of Love”, of 1960, which opened with the disarming sentence “It has become difficult to imagine literature without love.” Q-q-quite so, as he would say, with the stutter that made him seem eager and doubly endearing or, according to prejudice, doubly a buffoon.
His style, lucid and jargon-free, was aimed at the intelligent common reader, but the clever men in other English departments attacked him because he laid down no system and had no followers. At Oxford, where he taught at New College and St Catz—and was renowned for losing essays and leaving high table with chunks of dinner in his pockets—he was also famous for demotic provocations, such as declaring that Keats’s “bad” poetry was much better than his attempts to write in the Parnassian grand style. Well, darling, he believed it, or had done at the time.
For there was always an alternative interpretation. Truths were not as true as all that. That was why didacticism bothered him, and why his thoughts so happily wandered. It was a habit formed in childhood, as he roamed alone over the golf-links in Littlestone by the sea, looking for balls and birds’ eggs, and it was reinforced at Eton, where he rejected any book that was either on a syllabus or recommended by a teacher. Essentially, he remained that wilful child. He had daydreamed his way through the army and then through Oxford, where he had championed Walter Scott because no one else thought he was any good. In 2001 his anthology “Hand Luggage” saluted the random tags of poetry in the brain of the ordinary reader, and said that Shakespeare would never have minded misquotation. Far better to recall scraps clumsily, but with affection.
A mud-caked waist-slip
One way and another, love and literature did indeed keep twining together. His life with Iris was testament to that. He had not meant to marry a formidable and feted writer, but that was how things turned out, after he saw her, one day in 1954, cycling laboriously past his college window. Their courtship consisted largely of rubbing noses and swimming in the Thames, and her mud-caked waist-slip from one such occasion was still at the back of a drawer. Sex did not feature much, for the act, he thought, was inescapably ridiculous, and Iris was happy to have multiple affairs with both men and women which, on discomposing occasions, he witnessed for himself. Nonetheless their marriage worked, as two solitary people who regularly met and, when they did, erupted in gales of giggling like two small children together. He was free and, more important, she was, and he was proud of what she produced in her hidden world. If he was overshadowed by it, never mind.
Sympathy might not imply understanding. Both Iris and her books, philosophically commanding in a way he could never be, were mysteries to him at that creative level, though usually enjoyable on the surface. When a novel was in progress they seldom discussed it, though he might help her with the practical details of, say, firearms. She always gave him the finished, typed-up drafts, but he would buoyantly declare them marvellous without reading a page. It was one of several private fictions they kept running between them.
In some ways, then, their lives altered little when Iris, in 1995, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. They withdrew all the more into their own worlds, but still met at the ever-more-squalid kitchen table, where he would feed her baked beans and ice cream and where they would communicate in faint pulsations and echoes, like the sonorities of whales. Clearly he could not cope, but he refused all help for four years, recording the Iris who had vanished in two unsparing memoirs and treasuring each rare, surviving smile. For what remained amid his wandering thoughts, the not-quite-truths and daydreamings, was what Henry James called “the strangely accepted finality of relationship”, a solid core of love."
John Bayley, English don, literary critic and husband of Iris Murdoch, died on January 12th, aged 89.
He became better known in later life for writing about his wife.
Professor Bayley, who was awarded a CBE in 1999, is survived by his second wife Audi Villers.
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