Talking Culture

by Martin Amis

November 28, 2001

Remembering A Life

Director Richard Eyre’s new film, Iris, is an unstinting look at the great English novelist Iris Murdoch, her tragic battle against Alzheimer’s disease, and her husband John Bayley’s transcendent love.

"Like being chained to a corpse, isn’t it?" This remark was offered to John Bayley by a fellow sufferer in an Alzheimer’s marriage. He found himself "repelled" by the simile and didn’t care to give it the demolition it deserved. A corpse, we may reflect, has several modest virtues: It is silent, stationary, and, above all, utterly predictable. A corpse, so to speak, has done its worst. In addition, a corpse is not loved, and a corpse will not die.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external. In Bayley’s three-volume meditation on his wife, Iris Murdoch, the agony of Alzheimer’s is partly eased by the consolations of philosophy, by the elegant and entirely natural detours into Proust, Hardy, Tolstoy, James. Richard Eyre’s Iris, on the other hand, for all its subtlety and tenderness, is excrutiatingly raw. As you collect yourself while the credits roll, you find you have developed a lively admiration for cancer.

The Bayley’s were eccentric - "out of center" - in their complementary brilliance (he is a novelist, a quondam poet, a literary critic of effortless fluidity). But they were also famously eccentric in their temperament and habits, and if you’re an American you don’t know the type. They are the kind of people who like being ill and like getting old, who prefer winter to summer and autumn to spring (yearning for "gray days without sun"). They want rain, gloom, isolation, silence. "We had no TV of course," writes Bayley, commalessly, and the reluctant acquisition of a radio feels like a surrender to the coarsest modernity. The Bayley’s were further cocooned and united, it has to be said, by their commitment to extreme squalor.

At their place even the soap is dirty. "Single shoes [and single socks] lie about the house as if deposited by a flash flood... Dried-out capless plastic pens crunch underfoot." An infestation of rats is found to be "congenial, even stimulating." Everywhere they go they have to hurdle great heaps of books, unwashed clothes, old newspapers, dusty wine bottles. The plates are stained, the glasses "smeary." The bath, so seldom used, is now unusable; the mattress is "soggy"; the sheets are never changed. And we shall draw a veil over their underwear. On one occasion a large, recently purchased meat pie "disappeared" in the kitchen. It was never found. The kitchen ate it.

One of the unforeseen benefits of having children is that it delivers you from your own childishness: There’s no going back. John and Iris, naturally, did not toy long with the idea of becoming parents; it was themselves they wished to nurture ("two quaint children" and "co-child" were typical Bayleyisms). This was intimately connected by their embrace of dirt and clutter, a clear example of nostalgie de la boue - literally, homesickness for the mud, for the stickiness and ooziness of childhood, babyhood, wombhood. The plan seemed to work. Professor Bayley and Dame Iris were crustily cruising into a triumphant old age. And then a three-year-old comes to stay, to live, to die. It is Iris Murdoch.

Eyre’s movie is devotedly faithful to the main lines of Bayley’s narrative. Yet there is also an undertow of creative defiance. He has taken a highly unusual story about two very singular people - a story saturated with oddity, quiddity, exceptionality - and he has imbued it with the universal. How?

In the Iris books Bayley glides around in time and space, indulging his "intellectual being," in Milton’s phrase, and "those thoughts that wander through eternity." Eyre, characteristically, is direct and rigorous, almost geometrical in his approach. He constructs a double-time scheme of present and past, and lays down a reciprocal rhythm of back and forth, of ebb and flow. Throughout, the film tremulously oscillates between the 1950s, when the two principals are just entering each other’s force fields, and the 1990s and the protracted visit from "the dark doctor": Doctor A.

Thus, in the opening scenes we watch the young Iris riding her bicycle (comfortably outspeeding the more timorous John), her head thrown back in exhilaration, appetite, dynamism; she is rushing forward to meet the fabulous profusion of her talent. Then we fade to elderly Iris, in the chaos of her study, working on what will be her final fiction. In the margin she writes out, again and again, the word puzzled. Puzzled puzzles her; she is puzzled by puzzled. "All words do that when you take them by surprise," says her husband, and in her eyes we see an infinity of fear. "It will win" is the pathologist's prognosis. It will win: Age will win. Eyre’s emphasis is very marked. Iris becomes a tale of everyman and everywoman; it is about the tragedy of time.

What scenarists would call the "back story" is a comedy of courtship. Avital symmetry establishes itself here, because young John is younger than young Iris (28 to her 35), and most decidely the junior partner. He is a lovestruck provincial virgin with a bad stammer. She is a robust bohemian and free spirit; he soon learns "how fearfully, how almost diabolically attractive" she is to all men (and most women). Her numerous lovers are artists and scholars, big brains, dominators. And her greatest resource is the private universe of her imagination. This, though, proves to be John’s entreé. In at least two scenes Iris "settles" for him, however lovingly. She intuits that domesticity - and the scruffier the better - will liberate her art.

The "front story," the age story, begins with the onset of the disease and spans the five years between diagnosis and death. Soon "the most intelligent woman in England" (Bayley’s plausible evaluation) is watching the Teletubbies with a look of awed concentration on her face. This is now Iris at her best. A clinging, smothering dependence is punctuated by spells of terrifying agitation; she rattles a latch, she bolts, she flees. Alzheimer’s is symetrical too, in its way: Each new impoverishment reduces the awareness of loss. It is John’s sufferings that multiply, and we are not spared his surges of rage, bitterness, and contempt. He had always wanted to possess her mind - her secret. Now as total master, he does possess it. And there’s nothing there. Certain cerebrovascular disasters are called "insults to the brain." The more beautiful the brain, the more studious (and in this case protracted) the insult. Iris’s brain was indeed very beautiful. Returning to her novels, with hindsight, we get a disquieting sense of their extreme innocence and skittishness, their worrying unpredictability. Beneath their painterly opulence runs the light fever of fragility, like an omen.

Eyre’s film is built on the cornerstones of four performances. As the young Iris, Kate Winslet is slightly hampered by the conventionality of her good looks, but the seriousness and steadiness of her gaze effectively suggest the dawning amplitude of the Murdoch imagination. Hugh Bonneville and Jim Broadbent portray Bayley quite seamlessly (their stutters must have been calibrated by stopwatch); much more is asked of Broadbent, of course, and it is duly given. As for Judi Dench, as the mature Iris: She is transcendent. I knew Iris; I have respectfully kissed that cunning, bashful, secretive smile. It is as if Dame Judi and Dame Iris were always on a metaphysical collision course. Her performance has the rarest quality known to any art - that of apparent inevitability.

Mariners talk of a turn in the tide as the moment when the waves "reconsider." Over and above its piercing juxtapositions of youth and age, Iris has an oceanic feel, and this provides a further symmetry. Although she never cared for George Elliot, as Bayley notes, Iris’s "wholly different plots and begins remind me of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss saying. ‘I am in love with moistness.’" And "Against Dryness" was one of the more famous of her philosophical essays. The imagery of Eyre’s film is against dryness: the lakes and rivers in which John and Iris habitually immerse themselves; the sea, of course (Iris’s key novel was The Sea, the Sea); and the rain, the rain, that seemed to hide them from the world. Hold yourself in readiness, too, for the streams of your tears.

Footnote: In the row behind me at the screening of Iris sat John: Professor Bayley. When I staggered up to meet him afterward, it seemed to me that of the dozen of us in the theater John was easily the most composed. He wasn’t undone by Iris, as we were. He had already lived it. He alone was perfectly prepared.