Portrait: AN Wilson (original) (raw)

As literary feuds go, it's as good as they get. Novelist and newspaper columnist AN Wilson has just published a biographical sketch of his erstwhile friend and heroine, the writer Iris Murdoch. Among other things, the book is mischievously revelatory and quite spectacularly rude about Murdoch's widower, John Bayley. He, of course, has already published three well-received books about his wife, their marriage and her death from Alzheimer's disease (successfully adapted for the cinema as Iris, with Kate Winslet and Judi Dench sharing the starring role).

As an antidote to what might be seen as the beatification of Iris and John, Wilson's Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her claims that Bayley confessed that he [Bayley] did not like, or even read, his wife's novels; that Bayley's political opinions, allegedly including a "whooping enthusiasm for capital punishment", placed him to the "right of Genghis Khan"; that Bayley's accounts of life with Iris were at times misogynistic and motivated by envy of her success, and in general served to trivialise a great writer by reducing her to an "Alzheimer's Lady".

Wilson's pungent revision of Bayley's story has provoked a bitter backlash. Over the weekend, reviewers were swift to tag him a traitor, false friend, sneak and prig. On Monday, the controversy was ratcheted up several notches when the London Evening Standard published - simultaneously - a hostile review of Wilson's book by Murdoch's authorised biographer, Peter Conradi, and Wilson's own regular column, which he used to hurl back the criticisms with interest.

"Her husband, John Bayley, has now started to say that Iris sacked me as her biographer, but this is not true," wrote Wilson. "She made me her official biographer. Until shortly before Iris died, Bayley was writing letters urging me to continue with my book and expressing candidly demeaning views about the pedestrian quality of Conradi's mind. Of course, I was too kind to put these things in my book..." One could almost hear the chant of "Fight, fight, fight, fight" from diary editors all over London.

Regent's Park Terrace showed few signs of storm damage on Tuesday morning. Situated in that part of literary London between Primrose Hill and Camden Town that is also home to Alan Bennett, Martin Amis and others, it has probably seen worse, and will do so again. Wilson opens the door before I knock. Though now agnostic, Wilson once intended to be a clergyman, and something of that is still visible in his bearing: erect, but solicitous, and slightly buttonholing.

He shows me into the front room, evidently his study. Extremely polite, with old-fashioned manners, he is not obvious bare-knuckle fighter material. He looks much like his picture byline: thin-faced, hair brushed over, fiftysomething but quite boyish, with penetrating blue eyes. His shirt cuffs are too long for the black V-neck sweater he is wearing, giving him an appear ance of scruffy fogeyishness that is at once bohemian and a bit square. Later, he commends my questions; I feel I am seeing an Oxford don for a tutorial.

"Although I was impressed by the film, I began to realise that [Iris's] life had turned into fiction in the minds of most people," he says. "All that was left of Iris was a young woman cycling in Oxford and a very old woman going demented. Whereas for me, the really interesting fact about Iris Murdoch was that she wrote some pretty good novels."

The "pretty good" is revealing. Wilson acknowledges that his feelings about her writing are mixed - the same doubts expressed in his book, where he wonders, in flashback, whether her novels are not "pretty good tosh" as well as being at times brilliant. This seems already an equivocal statement from someone who claims that his book about Murdoch is intended to rescue her, above all, qua writer.

I explain that I will only be taking notes of our conversation, rather than recording the interview. Wilson approves. "I know: you can make it up a bit, but it'll be more truthful that way." Another slightly disconcerting statement, but an interesting point of view for a biographer.

"I had lost faith in biography," he explains. "I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels." His misgivings about biography - he casts himself in his book as deeply reluctant, cajoled and pushed into the role - were shared by Murdoch, he says. For four or five years after his "appointment", he recorded lots of tapes with Murdoch, but she would discuss only generalities and external things - why she joined the Communist party and so on - but nothing about her personal life. "She knew I would never write a kiss-and-tell biography," says Wilson. "Nowadays, I understand, you have to do some of that, but I wouldn't have written about nearly as many lovers as Conradi lists."

But if he shared her distrust for the whole enterprise, why did he embark on this book? "This is an anti-biography," he says, looking pleased with his sophistry.

But there is an element of truth in it. As biography, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her is extremely partial - in every sense. It makes no claim to be comprehensive, objective or even fair. Gossipy and speculative, it is a series of snapshots with waspish captions attached.

"I wanted to tell the truth. I'm not surprised by the reactions, but I think they're hamfisted," says Wilson. One defence is that while he has been castigated for his unflattering portrait of Murdoch (her drinking, her promiscuity, her faux-Irishery, her deceptions) and frank criticism of Bayley, he has reserved his harshest eye for himself. "I appear as a complete twit, among this couple who are really mainly trying to be nice. I'm an absolutely ridiculous character - not realising how ambitious I am, how socially clumsy I am... If [his critics] have interpreted this as inadvertent, they're wrong. I don't write books inadvertently."

For Wilson, the vitriol comes with the territory. "There is a weird barricade around John Bayley. If you criticise him, you're accused, as I have been, of being Judas Iscariot." Privately, though, he insists that the reception has been very different.

"I've had five or six horrid reviews, but I've also had 25 phonecalls from friends [people who also knew Iris and John] who've said they were hooting with laughter," he remarks. "And yet if one of them had to write a review, they'd probably do the same."

He seems philosophical about this fate, but perhaps one sees a glimpse of the same priggish young man he describes in his book - someone ambitious, yet with a sense of himself as an outsider, rubbing up against a literary establishment that seemed ambivalent about admitting him and, in his mind, quick to close ranks against him. If he was ambitious, was he not also envious?

"Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good," he admits. "Blake loved Milton so much, he hated him; he wanted to kill him." But if Wilson was not immune to envy, he was at least aware of it, he argues. "It's patronising for me to say this - I'm playing God here, I know - but John doesn't know how envious he was of Iris. I'm sure it's unconscious."

In the book, Wilson relates several incidents in Iris and John's company where he was not quite sure whether some "tease" was being perpetrated - and whether he was the butt of the joke. Later, Wilson relates how Murdoch failed to realise that the game "Mornington Crescent" on the radio show I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue was a spoof. It seems so trivial a reminiscence - what does it add to our understanding of Murdoch as a writer? - that it is hard not to see Wilson repaying his mentor for the perceived slight. Surely, there is an Oedipal drama here of which Wilson is only partly conscious himself? He makes his barbs then disavows them - he's only joking, it's just a tease. "Everyone in this country says that we're a cynical culture, but in many ways we're very innocent: if you tease or criticise anyone, then it's treated as an outrage and people get terribly upset."

Wilson quotes Murdoch herself to say that, in the novel of our lives, we would all be characters in a comedy - except comedy, of course, can be very cruel. It seems safe to say that Bayley does not appreciate Wilson's sense of humour.

"He wrote me a very angry letter after I had mocked him in a newspaper article for being in the line-up with Kate Winslet at the premiere of Iris. It was unkind," he concedes. "It was meant humorously, but I think he took it as an attack - that I was criticising him for making money out of the film."

When he first started work on Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her, Wilson wrote to Bayley to ask if they could talk. "He wrote back a rather cross letter, saying Iris had never liked me, had never wanted me to write her biography, and would I please go away, basically."

Perhaps, with his curmudgeonly letters to Wilson, Bayley unwittingly gave his former friend licence to be as indiscreet as he liked. The Evening Standard column about Conradi's review demonstrates that, when piqued, Wilson counterpunches hard. And, like many writers, he seems to thrive on such negative energy: the radioactive fission of feud and betrayal.

"My publishers are pleased," says Wilson. "Last week they thought I was a mild little man, now they they're thrilled I'm Mr Evil."