A Double Thread
John Gross
Chatto & Windus £18.99, pp190
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Widower's House
John Bayley
Duckworth £16.99, pp205
Buy it at a discount at BOL
The vogue for memoir, which dominated the book world in the 1990s, has rather diminished in the new century. But you could not have two more distinguished additions to this canon than Mr Gross and Professor Bayley. What's more, you could not have two more contrasting and illuminating exhibitions of the genre of autobiography.
John Gross, an influential man of letters, comes to his account of his early life as a prodigiously gifted outsider for whom any sense of entitlement has to be earned through hard work. Gross's memoir, which begins in the Jewish East End (a marvellous evocation of pre-Second World War London) and closes in Oxford, is a sophisticated meditation on the place of the immigrant experience in the English tradition and a nostalgic evocation of an almost vanished way of life. In particular, his account of being evacuated as a nervous townie, first to Shropshire and then to Egham, is beautifully observed.
On every page, A Double Thread is instinctively tactful and unshakably urbane. Anti-Semitism? 'I can't help wondering whether recent historians have sometimes made out the situation to be worse than it was.' Tellingly, Gross says he encountered prejudice against the Jews 'most frequently on the printed page'. Lesser writers might have exploited the shadow of the Holocaust over their formative years, but it is a mark of the distinction of A Double Thread that Gross eschews sensationalism and sticks to a remembrance of lost time, based on the facts.
At the very end, when he goes up to Oxford for his interview, he encounters a mysterious young English don, stuttering over 'Te-te-Tennyson'. Enter John Bayley, as English as tea and crumpets and as different from Gross's East End Jude the Obscure as it is possible to imagine. Bayley has been a member of the literary establishment ever since, ending an equally distinguished career as the Warton professor of English and devoted husband of Iris Murdoch. In stark contrast, however, Bayley has become celebrated not so much for his scholarship as for Iris: A Memoir, his account of his wife's slow descent into that special circle of hell reserved for sufferers of Alzheimer's.
When it was published in 1997, Bayley's heartrending descriptions of Murdoch, reduced to watching Teletubbies, won him international acclaim and even a film contract. Then, hard on the heels of her death in February 1999, and of the success of Iris: A Memoir, Bayley published a sequel, Iris and Her Friends, in which he described her final days. This time, the book's candour was rather embarrassing, its construction slapdash, and the press were less kind. A few people began to wonder, tentatively, if Bayley should not keep his bereavement to himself.
Widower's House is the defiant response to that suggestion. In Iris and Her Friends, there's a passage in which Bayley describes how 'shamelessness' has come upon him now that Murdoch had gone. 'I don't care,' he says, 'what I do write or say about her or about anything else. I know I am worshipping her, no matter what...'
There is plenty of 'shamelessness' in Widower's House. Bayley is unsparing on what it means to be widowed. Whether the now notorious (and very funny) account of Bayley's amorous besieging by 'scrawny' Mella and 'ample' Margot, who have decided to take him in hand, amounts to an act of Murdoch-worship I am not sure. At times, Widower's House reads like a sketch for a novel Murdoch might have written, with Bayley's marriage to Audi Villers as a real-life happy ending.
The fuss surrounding the authenticity of 'Mella and Margot' will quickly be forgotten, but one thing is certain - the memoir of the 1990s was always vulnerable to the charge that it was thinly disguised narcissism. John Bayley has demonstrated that the only thing that really matters in good writing is an appreciation of the importance of love.
