In recent weeks, the British literary world was rocked to its foundations. While plague swept through the bovine world, and the pyres burned into the night, the chattering classes at the Groucho were contemplating the not uncomic story of a basset-faced septuagenarian locked in a struggle to keep erotomaniacal women out of his bed and out of his house. The comedy was further enhanced when a newspaper spat arose between the Telegraph (which bought the serialisation) and the Sunday Times as to whether said incidents and said women were real or fantastical.
The book in question is Widower's House, the last (mercifully) in John Bayley's memoir trilogy about his life and times with, and without, his novelist and philosopher wife Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999. Bayley, a respected critic, a professor of English, and a less famous novelist, weathered a minor storm back in 1998 when volume one, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, was published. Then, the battle lines were drawn over the seemliness or otherwise of Bayley's detailing his eminent wife's descent into the netherworld of Alzheimer's disease.
Nevertheless, that book was well received and justly so, being, as it mostly was, about the fascinating Murdoch, who even in dementia, managed to be intriguing. Great credit too was due to Bayley personally for translating his loving vision of Iris, this complex yet simple but highly unusual woman, into an intelligent and thought-provoking memoir. But he should have stopped there.
Where do trilogies come from and is there any place for them beyond the novel form? In this instance, was Bayley presenting manuscripts to his publisher or was his publisher asking for yet another volume? Either way, there was little excuse for volume two, Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories (1999), and the premise for Widower's House is almost non-existent other than to satisfy the thirst of some readers to know what happened next. Sadly though, the problem with Widower's House is that this volume of the memoir is written after Murdoch's death and though her benevolent presence is felt throughout the book, Bayley, on his own, exposes himself as a vain, pompous bore. Strangely, he even seems to recognise this ("What a shit I was, or had become!") but bumbles on regardless, seeming quite assured of his readers' indulgence.
The early chapters of the memoir deal with the difficulties faced by the newly widowed when friends try to lighten the loss by cooking and cleaning and generally making a fuss of them. We all know now though that the newly widowed would rather be left alone to wallow and should not have to beat off amorous women with a short stick. It's all too much! The women are Margot, a substantial widowed matron, and Mella, an insubstantial waif whose "body was scrawny and unattractive, and it was somehow not a very nice colour either ". It seems compulsory to add here that this is written by an elderly codger with severe continental drift, dirty underwear, a surgical stocking and smelly socks. Naturally, he does not describe his own physicality or lovemaking skills. Since publication, he has said that Mella and Margot are fantasy composites and that he more or less invented them as he did the Woman of Gerrard's Cross in an earlier volume.
Part II of Widower's House is spent wittering on about his solitary pain. He uses passages from Milton or Hardy to illustrate how truly great men feel in times of trial. However, life without Iris is as drab for the reader as it is for Bayley. In the penultimate chapter of the book, mantraps Mella and Margot blow in on their broomsticks again looking ominous. Bayley, poor fellow, legs it to Lanzarote to his and Iris's old friend Audi, an heiress to an electric blanket patent. And reader, he married her.
Yvonne Nolan is a journalist and critic