Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire.

Henry, Richard

John Bayley. Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire. New York. Norton. 1999 (c2000). x + 275 pages, ill. $22.95. ISBN 0-393-04856-X.

In 1998, John Bayley published his tribute to Iris Murdoch, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (see WLT 73:4, P. 748; British title, Elegy for Iris). There, Bayley recounted his life with the noted philosopher and novelist, through her diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and the subtle changes in their lives as the disease progressed. One theme that dominated the 1998 memoir was how much Bayley and Murdoch were concerned with the distinction between the private self and the public self, as well as how much the human mind served as the playground for those selves. In Iris and Her Friends Bayley continues this thread, but the subject is the sanctuary of his own mind. He retreats further and further into his own self as the progress of Alzheimer's dramatically weakens Murdoch's private and public selves. This retreat is punctuated by his care for Murdoch, care that is marked by the physical world, by routines, and by the overall effacement of his own intellectual activities (as well as hers). It is while Murdoch sleeps quietly beside him that Bayley is free to slip into the care of his memories and desires: "I am conscious once more of how much [memories] have become a way of escape; even, it must be said, a way of escape from the loved one who lies at my side."

His own story is a story of his private life, a story of his mind, a mind immersed in literature and the imagination. So, with Milton's devil Belial at his side, he presents his relationships with his brothers, a passing encounter with a man who may or may not have been a pedophile, his fascination with Gerda (the family's Danish cook) and a later "love" with Hannelore (a German woman he met in postwar Germany), and his artillery unit during the war. There is a bemusement underlying these stories -- recounted from a distance of fifty years or more -- a wondering detachment from the events. One senses, however, that Bayley always enjoyed a wondering detachment from the world around him.

As in his earlier memoir, he claims a lifelong detachment from Murdoch as well. "The happiest marriages are full of alternative lives, lived in the head, unknown to the partner," he writes in the second half of this memoir as he tells of his infatuations with other women, real and imaginary: an ex-nun who wrote a poem that he admired, an imaginary woman at a cocktail party, and other literary characters. His escape into his memories and desires only underscores the depth of his attachment to Iris Murdoch. For all of these alternative lives, it is clear that Bayley had the happiest of marriages, precisely because he could have made these alternative lives known to Murdoch had he wished, and that she would have understood completely.

Richard Henry SUNY, Potsdam