The Celebrity Effect
Iris Murdoch
‘Look, old thing,’ Iris said on the phone, ‘would you mind if we brought my mum to your party? She’s staying with us, you see, and it would be lovely if she could get out a bit.’
We said of course we didn’t mind. It was one of those summers you’d like to think your youth consisted of, in the days when the weather experts couldn’t decide whether we were all going to burn or freeze to death, when the sky was bright blue and the sun brought out the fifty shades of green in the trees and dried the grass so it didn’t need mowing and the heat was perfectly bearable. The kind of weather that makes you think everything was brighter and better and easier back then, though it only takes one dreary drizzly day to make you realize grey is normal and there’s always stuff to grumble about.
We’d met the novelist Iris Murdoch when we were still in London and our pair of farmworkers’ cottages in what was then unfashionable Oxfordshire were being knocked into shape for our new married life, with our plans for children, cats, dogs, and chickens sliding off the drawing board into reality. Iris and her husband John Bayley lived in a lovely old stone cottage in Steeple Aston, in the same part of Oxfordshire as we were - John was a professor of English at Oxford and Iris was an emeritus fellow in philosophy as well as a prolific novelist. The year before our party she’d won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea, and I’d worked with her on a pitch to get her novel The Nice and the Good televised by ITV.
The book had everything a tv audience could desire: lust, corruption, infidelity, death, danger, love, and a touch of satanism. Also philosophy, and a dog. ITV, who had briefly hired me to give them ideas for offbeat drama, got quite excited, then said no. Iris was neither surprised nor disappointed. The only thing she regretted was that I’d had to omit a couple of her characters to keep the cast size manageable.
‘I understand, old thing,’ she said, ‘but they become like family.’ Of which, in real life, she had only her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, but was still very sociable.
Her mother arrived at our party with the sort of hat a proper lady would wear to take tea with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. We provided her with a chair in the middle of the lawn, from which she waved regally to the assembled company. Iris’s husband John, a balding, bespectacled, bird-like man who chirruped enthusiastically about everything from wine to wild mushrooms - ‘never eat anything that grows on something else, such as a tree’ - draped a tea towel on his arm and went round filling people’s glasses, including his mother-in-law’s. ‘She thinks the party is for her,’ he explained, ‘and she’s very happy.’
Iris kept an eye on her, but she was much more interested in talking to our friends, including a farmer who’d flirted with communism before becoming a Labour county councillor. As someone who had actually been a member of the communist party, Iris took issue with our friend on a number of topics, and argued with amicable heat over his support of the IRA. She came up to me shaking her head. ‘He’s got them all wrong,’ she said, ‘but then he’s not Irish. I am.’
Following our party, we were invited to dinner in Steeple Aston. The hall and ground-floor rooms of their cottage were full of leaves that had blown in from their large untidy garden, which had a couple of meandering paths half-heartedly mown among grass that had long gone to seed. Inside, most of the leaves had landed up against the skirting-boards, as neither John nor Iris cared about sweeping and dusting. Iris had commented on how tidy our living-room was and asked who did the cleaning. When we said we did, she shook her head and wondered where we found the time - not in a pitying or patronizing tone, more in surprise that if you were busy writing, you would bother about things like dirt or debris.
Their bedroom was only remarkable because the pile of gossipy magazines on one side of the double bed they shared belonged to John, and the academic journals on the other side to Iris. But then John was on record as describing sex as ‘ridiculous’, whereas Iris had affairs with both men and women, which were apparently sometimes witnessed by her husband.
Their cooking was idiosyncratic, as the best cooking is. Gourmet food it was not: a lot of it came from tins, which perhaps harked back to their wartime experiences, though the Oxford of the 1970s knew more about roux than rissoles. What I most remember was the dessert John had made: rice crispies (in Rosie’s memory it was muesli) over which he had poured melted chocolate. Interesting, but neither of them fussed over either the content or the presentation of food, whereas we believed in making a real effort, despite having young children who could be difficult at mealtimes. Maybe we should have followed Iris and John’s example: when we first moved to our village, our friends flocked to stay with us, convinced we’d be back in town within weeks, and would meanwhile be starved of intellectual stimulus. As most of them were writers, they came during the week, not just at weekends, and expected three meals a day, which we attempted to make appetizing for our own sake as well as our guests’. It was like running an hotel, but it was our own fault. John and Iris would never have let that happen: though they were very sociable, their work took priority. Possibly that’s another reason my books weren’t instant bestsellers the way Iris’s were: Rosie and I still discuss food more than any other subject.
John and Iris eventually sold their cottage and moved into Oxford’s Summertown. Iris began to lose her creative energy, which John at first thought was caused by depression. I reminded him of the long depression Rossini endured, from which he emerged to write some of his most beautiful work, though it was very different from his operas. John was a little cheered by this, but it soon became obvious Iris had inherited her mother’s Alzheimer’s. I wish we could have given a party just for her.