Iris
Now it happens that life (normally so slothful, indifferent, and plain disobliging) had gone out of its way, in this very peculiar situation, to provide me with a ‘control’, a steady point of comparison: if I wanted to know what Alzheimer’s could do to a brilliant, prolific, erudite, lavishly inspired, and excitingly other-worldly novelist, then I needed to look no further than the example of Iris Murdoch.
Iris was a very old friend of Kingsley’s. As undergraduates they were both card-carrying Young Communists – they marched and agitated and recruited, heeding the diktats of Moscow. And in later life they continued to fraternise as they crossed the floor (more or less in step) from Left to Right…
So Iris had been an intermittent presence since my childhood. The last time I saw her was at a party or function in 1995 or 1996. It was being put about in the press, around then, that she was suffering from nothing more serious than writer’s block; I had no reason to doubt this polite fiction, and I said,
‘How awful for you, Iris.’
‘It is awful. Being unable to write is very boring. And lonely. I feel I’m somewhere very boring and lonely.’
‘Writer’s block – I get that.’ Yes, but only ever for a day or two. ‘You can’t do anything but wait it out.’
She said hauntedly, ‘And I already have a waiting feeling.’
We talked on. Present as always throughout was Iris’s one and only husband, the distinguished literary critic John Bayley (who was crooked forward in gentle commiseration). As I was leaving I laid a hand on her wrist and said,
‘Now Iris. Don’t let yourself think it’s permanent. It isn’t. It will lift.’
‘Mm. But here I am somewhere dark and silent,’ she said, and kissed me on the lips.
That at least hadn’t changed. With Iris (who was Irish), if she liked you she loved you. It was the way she was – until February 8, 1999, when she ceased to be.
Not satisfied with giving me a control experiment in the example of Iris, life, in September 2001, was suddenly giving me a detailed crash course on the further decline of Iris: earlier in the summer Tina Brown (then editor of Talk magazine) had asked me to write a piece about Iris, and to this end I read John Bayley’s two memoirs (Iris and Iris and the Friends) and arranged to go to a preview of Richard Eyre’s biopic, Iris. So I was in no position to echo Harvey Keitel’s line in Taxi Driver: ‘I don’t know nobody name Iris.’ In principle, I knew a fair amount about Iris, and about Alzheimer’s, or so you might suppose.
…Towards the end of the morning of Friday, September 14, I went to the screening room off Golden Square. In the thoroughfares the pedestrians, the comers and goers, still gave off an impression of tiptoe or sleepwalk, a flicker of contingency, as they moved past the boutiques and bistros of aromatic Soho…John Bayley was standing at the door; with a dozen others we took our seats as the lights were going down.
Kate Winslet plays the younger Iris – all hope and promise and radiance. Judi Dench plays the older, incrementally stricken Iris: her growing apprehension, and then the shadowing and clouding over as her mind starts to die. And before very long you are the witness of an extraordinary spectacle: Britain’s ‘finest novelist’ (John Updike), or ‘the most intelligent woman in England’ (John Bayley), sits crouched on an armchair with an expression of superstitious awe on her face as she watches…as she watches an episode of the preschooler TV series, Teletubbies.
This is now Iris on a good day: Iris, the author of twenty-six novels and five works of philosophy, including Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. And you thought, Oh, the tragicomedy of brain death, the abysmal bathos of dementia…‘It will lift,’ I had told her in 1995 or 1996. ‘It will win,’ says the young doctor in Iris. And he was right.
After the lights came back up I established that the only dry eyes in the house belonged to Professor Bayley. Perhaps he was seeing the film for the second time – or let’s say the third time, in a certain sense. We only had to watch it, but John, in addition, had had to live it.
It won’t be like that with Saul, I kept saying to myself, almost dismissively, throughout the autumn. He couldn’t ‘take in’ September 11. Well who could?
It won’t be like that with Saul.
The first crow
‘Hitch, when did all this get going? Islamism. When did Muslims stop saying Islam is the problem and start saying Islam is the solution?’
‘In the 1920s. Atatürk dissolved the Caliphate in ’24, banned sharia, and separated church and state. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded four years later. Islam is the solution was the first clause in its charter.’
Then I asked him: when did jihadi attention turn from the near enemy to the far enemy? When did it turn from the Middle East to the West?
‘I suppose 1979 is the date. Khomeini versus the Great Satan. Or 1989. First, the Ayatollah provokes an epic war with Iraq. And with that out of the way he –’
‘And how many dead? I’ve read that Iran lost a million. Can that be true?’
‘Nobody’s really sure. But prodigious. And while the citizens of Persia are digesting that, the loss of an entire generation for no gain, Khomeini looks for a means to “re-energise the Revolution”. I.e., to regather some legitimacy. He needs a cause. And he alights on…The Satanic Verses. And our friend.’
‘Mm. Khomeini said Salman
