Iris Murdoch and Other Reptiles

When they were both pretty old John Bayley put an essay about his wife, Iris Murdoch, in the New Yorker. She had Alzheimer’s, which is mostly what the essay was about. It was out a year before she died. The content was not surprising. It was a neat exercise in form. It’s easy to imagine why Bayley wrote. And then writers have various stuff to say about why they publish at all.

It was not a distinctly bad way to treat her (I imagine that in most respects Bayley was being pretty generous). Still it struck me as the wrong sort of thing to do to your wife. Work like Bayley’s succeeds where it demonstrates a mastery over the subject. Portrait-making is, I think, the right way to describe it. There are many ways to make a good portrait. But the artist will pick one in particular. And when you are looking at the finished work, you do not imagine every other way the artist might have drawn the subject. Rather you have learned something true about the subject, because they were drawn this particular way.

Then can I fault Bayley? He had to display a kind of mastery. Otherwise he would not be doing her justice. The only thing worse than putting the decline of your once-brilliant and now absent wife in a popular magazine is doing a shoddy job of it. I am convinced we all do this kind of portrait-making (maybe we are more or less eager, and more or less private) and although I am not sure what the right attitude is, I am sure that we cannot simply get away from it. Doing philosophy Murdoch wrote about loving attention. I am not too good with the metaphysics her view is attached to. But the main idea is that you get to apprehend truly by loving (and she means something specific by “loving” here), and so in loving someone you have a specific idea of them. This does not mean thinking exclusively nice stuff, but it does seem to involve a kind of earnest charitability.

The characters in Murdoch’s novels receive loving attention. Many of them love poorly or get engaged in long-running mistakes. Still on balance I think Murdoch is writing about people trying to be fair to each other, and at least, she is trying to be fair to them. The way she goes about it involves a lot of machinery (famously she wrote “philosophical novels,” the common criticism is that her characters are always too busy being shuffled around). At any rate if this works, it works because Murdoch is very able. Although (Bayley says) she does not write with a personality that “fascinates and mesmerizes,” Murdoch does unambiguously exercise force. She declares mastery over her characters and their private worlds, i.e. she wraps them up. A lot of the time this involves having fun with them, or specifically, having fun at their expense. Murdoch’s characters don’t just make mistakes but characteristic mistakes.

Maybe it’s unsurprising that Bayley, mostly a critic but also a writer, would pick up portrait-making. Jim Shepard, a fiction writer that I like, said that authors are reptilian because they will use any material that they get. Though I am not so convinced. I think there is something distinctly hot-blooded about the people that Jim’s thinking of. For lack of a better word I’d say they are being vicious. They proceed with easy certainty, so that if you are reading along and feel pleasantly confused about the “themes” or central concerns, you are in equal measure sure about the details, the small facts of the characters and their world. What do I mean vicious, am I being dramatic? I just mean they are engaged in an activity that is very hard to justify. And further that if you do it you are certainly doing it wrong, it’s probably unjust, even if you have a really good explanation, receipts and everything, it is tied up with a whole set of base impulses. The word I used to use was “authenticity.” It never seemed to do the job. I expect the extent to which Bayley’s picture is vivid, and strikes us most directly, and tells us real stuff about Iris his wife, will match the extent to which it is – not misguided but – unjustified. People are radically underdetermined in access and maybe substance. In order to make a good picture, you need to be adequately motivated, and then you have to do a lot of invention along the way.

Jim also said that authors must condemn themselves. Maybe this is the root of the vicious impulse. You start by trying to victimize yourself, everybody else just gets roped in. Maybe that is what Bayley was doing. At any rate I think there is no good substitute. There is no possible quantity of antiseptic expertise that will do the job. Which is to say, you can’t get off the hook. Bayley describes a very simple failure. > Like all lovers, I suppose, I wished to be a special case in quite the wrong sense ... Iris wanted each of her friends 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 with Iris.