Never further than Dinner or Tea

Alexander Nehamas

• Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch by John Bayley
  Duckworth, 189 pp, £16.95, September 1998, ISBN 0 7156 2848 8

The first thing Alzheimer’s disease took away from Iris Murdoch was her luminous powers. At a conference in Israel in 1994, she was unable to answer her audience’s questions. In 1995, she completed, with great difficulty, her 27th novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, in which readers found several errors and inconsistencies; it was to be her last. Her philosophical work had already stopped. To a friend’s question about her writing, she replied that she felt she was ‘sailing into the darkness’. Then the disease deprived her of the ordinary abilities to function on her own. John Bayley, who had been married to her for more than forty years, had to dress and undress her, feed her and bathe her, reassure her and watch over her constantly to make sure she came to no harm. In its advanced stages when he wrote this book, Alzheimer’s gradually eroded her most basic individual characteristics.