I got to know John Bayley, whose death was reported this week, when I made the film Iris, based on his two memoirs of his wife, Iris Murdoch, and her decline and death from Alzheimer’s. I found him enchanting: highly intelligent, of course, a sharp and entirely accessible literary critic but, rarer still, a marvellous writer and wonderful company. Some criticised him for writing his account of his wife’s illness: they were people who had never lived with someone with Alzheimer’s. Of his memoirs Bayley said: “Iris would have approved.” I believe she would. He was eccentric, droll and, in my experience, undeviatingly honest.
There was nothing grand about John. He would as happily talk about Hollywood in the 1940s as about Tolstoy – and seamlessly switch from one to the other. We were talking once of the character of Anna Karenina – he was a brilliant advocate of Russian literature – when I suggested that Anna K had a kind of glow about her. “I think it was true of Iris, too,” he said, “but of course I never thought that she was pretty. She had a very compelling face. My views of feminine beauty, which are very simple-minded, were based entirely on the cinema. I liked people like Esther Williams, the swimming star. I used to say to Iris, ‘You know, she has such a kind face, rather like yours.’ She did have a nice face.”
John was a brilliantly readable reviewer, often witty and sometimes waspish, but invariably bearing the authority of a man who could speak knowledgeably of all European cultures. He believed that the point of literature was to make sense of the world, and, although shy and unassertive, he was a blazingly confident guide to how and where to discover those truths. If I were looking for an epitaph for him it would be from Tolstoy: “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
