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62 two john bayley and iris murdoch “In Widowhood You Lose Not Only Your Loved One but Much of Yourself” John Bayley had written one novel and several books of literary criticism before his wife, Iris Murdoch, began developing Alzheimer’s disease in the mid 1990s, but he was not a memoirist, nor did he seem interested in autobiographical writing. He appeared to share his wife’s suspicion of self-disclosure; she insisted that her novels were about “fictional” characters rather than “real” people. Peter J. Conradi notes in his biography that she not only denied drawing her characters from real life but also found the practice immoral. He quotes a 1982 diary entry in which she expresses her distaste of the personal element of fiction. “Autobiography: ‘to try to tell the truth about oneself’—why bother? So you are indifferent to truth? No—one struggles with truth versus falsehood all the time. But that effort would be pointless, one must just try to be good. Idea of autobiography is utterly unattractive to me as an art form—and also somehow morally sickening” (529). Bayley and Murdoch were fascinated by psychology, yet neither spent much time reading literature as disguised self-revelation. They kept their personal lives separate from their literary lives—they had no interest in being celebrities. For all of these reasons, it was unlikely that Bayley would write a memoir about his wife; in fact, he wrote three: Elegy for Iris (1999), Iris and Her Friends (2000), and Widower’s House (2001). They were, to be sure, two of England’s most distinguished writers. In his critical study The Saint and the Artist, the British Conradi calls Murdoch “our most intelligent novelist since George Eliot” (5), a comparison that would not have entirely pleased her, since she was no fan of “not only your loved one but much of yourself” 63 the nineteenth-century novelist. The author of twenty-six novels, two books on philosophy and ethics, and a book on Sartre, Murdoch was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987. Her novel The Sea, the Sea received Britain’s most prestigious literary honor, the Booker Prize, in 1978. She was also one of the century’s key moralists, as Martha Nussbaum suggests: “Murdoch, more than any other contemporary ethical thinker, has made us vividly aware of the many stratagems by which the ego wraps itself in a cozy self-serving fog that prevents egress to the reality of the other” (36). In the afterword to his biography, Conradi cites Harold Bloom’s pronouncement upon her death in 1999 that there are “no first-rate writers left in Britain” (595). John Bayley was no less gifted, an eminent literary critic and the Wharton Professor of Literature at Oxford. He wrote many books and was a regular reviewer for the New York Review of Books. Murdoch believed—with justification—that her husband was the “greatest literary critic in England since Coleridge” (qtd. in Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 403). John Fletcher called their marriage “one of the most fruitful literary and critical partnerships of our time, and remarkable in any time” (qtd. in Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 18). It was also an unlikely marriage, partly because they were so different . The 2001 film Iris, starring Jim Broadbent, Judi Dench, and Kate Winslet, captures Bayley’s eccentricity and humor as well as his love for and devotion to his wife, though it fails to convey his intellectual brilliance and originality. “‘I intend to make my mark,’ the young Iris had once said, long before I met her. Her genius lives in her books’” (Widower’s House, 132). Murdoch indeed made her mark, as did Bayley, and their genius lives in their many books. Bayley’s 1961 book The Characters of Love (titled The Character of Love in the 1963 edition I am using) foreshadows the portrayal of love in his memoiristic trilogy, which chronicles a remarkable forty-four year marriage. The Character of Love is not only a “study in the literature of personality,” as its subtitle accurately states, but also a portrait of the author’s vision of love. The book exemplifies “in one way or another the understanding about love which I had picked up in the course of my relationship with Iris” (159). Focusing on Chaucer’s long poem Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Othello, and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Bayley announces his thesis in the chapter called “The Worlds of Love...

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