- Title: Elegy for Iris
- Author: John Bayley
- Year Published: 1999 (St. Martin’s Press)
- Year Purchased: 2001?
- Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
- About: I get it, I really do: Iris Murdoch is one of those love them or hate them writers. The Sea, The Sea is one of my favourite novels of the later years of the 20th century, but I understand why her work isn’t for everyone. I don’t care where you stand on the subject of Iris-as-writer, if you aren’t affected to the point of tears whilst reading her husband’s memoir it can mean only one thing. You are dead inside. If you are dead inside, then you obviously have larger issues to contend with than not being properly moved by this fantastically written sad-fest cum love letter. Carry on, then. For everyone not alienated by my prickly hard-lined attitude, where were we? Ah, yes. I’m absurdly passionate about books, writing and reading. I must weep tears of commiseration and despair quite on the regular, then, as literature is full of enough negative emotions to turn a sensitive reader to mush? Nope. I’m not much of a literary weeper, even when I am truly caught up in a moment. I’ll cry over pretty much anything else you can think of, no matter how trifling or absurd; just not books. Odd, no? Elegy for Iris is one of the few exceptions. I won’t wax maudlin, I promise. I’ll say a few things, and then run off to cry silently in a corner: John Bayley is a fine writer in his own right. His works of literary criticism are amazing. He loved his wife. Very much. In his books about Iris, he does not wield his grief like a weapon or enclose himself in it like armor. It’s simply an inevitable part of their long love story, as it is for everyone’s: it’s a facet, not the focus. That is why it’s so moving.
- Motivation: Iris. John. John. Iris. Iris + John. John + Iris.
- Times Read: Once, because a second read-through would be too painful. I occasionally take a peek at random pages, though, because it is just so lovely.
- Random Excerpt/Page 15: “Why I was so convinced at first that there was nothing sexually attractive about Iris is a complete mystery. Other people, of both sexes, certainly didn’t think so. It was my naive and now inexplicable assumption that she could appeal only to me, and to no one else, that stopped me seeing how fearfully, how almost diabolically attractive everyone else found her. They knew more about such things, I suppose.”
- Happiness Scale: 9 1/2, although I feel weird choosing a happiness rating for this book.
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A Small Press Life: Books. Art. Writing. Life. Tea. 
I have never read any of her novels, but I think I saw the movie of her life? It was a very sad movie. She had Alzheimer’s disease, if I’m thinking of the right one. It was from the perspective of her husband.
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I assume you are talking about ‘Iris’ (2001), with Kate Winslet as young Iris and Judy Dench as old Iris? It was based on the books by her husband, John Bayley (including Elegy for Iris). I enjoyed it a lot, actually.
You should read one of her books some day, then you will know if you fall in the love them or hate them column!
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I’m a big Iris fan. In fact, I’ve got her book of letters waiting for on shelf of upcoming reads. There are only a few of the novels I haven’t read. Even read her thesis on Sartre, in which she explores Sartre’s idea of the “glue” that binds reader to writer, that it’s a dialogue between the two, the rhythms of thought creating the illusion that you’re in someone’s mind; but that you have to work with the glue. It only works if you don’t get too close so that you lose your critical faculty, but not to be so distanced that you don’t know what the writer is really trying to say.
I didn’t like A.N Wilson’s biography. I got the feeling that he felt excluded from the inner sanctum and was resentful, and then he spends the first section of the book apologizing for what he might say.
The Sea, The Sea is a great novel.
Didn’t she also say, “I’m a homosexual man trapped in a woman’s body.”
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I’ve never read the A.N. Wilson biography. I’ve read (and own a copy of) ‘The Victorians’, which I adore. That’s an entirely separate matter, though. If I ever come across a copy of this book, I’ll have to scoop it up just to see if I get the same impression as you. I love a good bio, and I love to hate a bad one. I’ll win either way.
I’m also a big Iris fan. I love all of her books I’ve read (which is not everything). I think she brought something different to the novel, which is hard to do at all let alone well. I’ve not read the Sartre thesis, but would like to; Sartre through Murdoch intrigues me.
The Sea, The Sea is the first Murdoch novel I read, years ago. I’ve been hooked since.
I’ve no idea if she said that or not, but it made me laugh.
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The Sartre book was written (and published, I think) while she was still at Oxford. It was her first publication. I haven’t read The Bell, which is supposed to one of the big ones. I especially like her early novels, Under the Net (about being under the net of language), A Severed Head and The Italian Girl, the last especially deliberately using a melodrama style. But books like The Sacred and Profane Love Machine are also great. She was intrigued by goodness, but also by the idea of being seduced by the charisma of wicked men. As Will Self titles his story (not about Iris): The impossibility of self determination as to desire.
Many of her detractors cite her use of stock characters, those culled from academic life, as her big downfall. But you write what you know, and even though there are many tropes of certain charters in different books, she’s still one of the most nourishing writers I’ve ever read.
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I read The Bell around the same time I first read The Sea, The Sea. It’s my favourite of her early works. I’m not sure if I like it or The Sea, The Sea better. I’m thinking of re-reading the latter again in the next few months. Maybe I’ll be able to make up my mind then. I’ve read most of her output, just not the Sartre thesis (which I want to read even more now than I did before), A Severed Head, The Green Knight and a few others I cannot name off the top of my head.
When it comes to literature, I think that we all have what we can live with and what we cannot (and that varies from writer to writer). I understand the criticism of stock characters but, in her hands, it simply isn’t an issue for me; what would probably annoy me coming from another writer gets a pass here. There’s too much that I like of Murdoch to be bothered by such distractions, just as with other authors there is too much I dislike to be captivated by certain amazing qualities. Readers’ quirks and all that jazz.
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The thing about Iris is I fell in love with her. She has that thing I crave most in writers: to know, no matter what the plot and story are, who they are as people. But I don’t always fall in love.
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I’m half in love with her myself, as I am with probably 10% of writers, artists and creative types who truly speak to me in a deeper than average way. It’s not the norm, but it happens.
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