Iris Murdoch: The re-creation of Iris on paper and celluloid

A discussion about the novelist between Richard Eyre and John Bayley, chaired by Christopher Cook at Cheltenham Town Hall

Cook: Do you think there is a kind of assumption, maybe enshrined in the act of making a biography, memoir or film of somebody, that the person is the product of her background, as it were, that the child is father to the man?

How you each approach this structurally is very interesting. You can do it chronologically, as a series of key events each leading into the other with a certain kind of logic: the accumulation of knowledge, the change of character. Or, as John has done [in his book, Iris, about the woman he married], have a series of doors that suddenly open and take you backwards and forwards. Or, as you did Richard [he directed Iris, a film of Bayley's book], two sets of actors, creating past and present.

All of these are devices, but all of them are also charged with particular ways of interpreting the relationship between past and present. All therefore create very different images of the Iris who stands in the present tense, and the Iris at the end. And I wondered why you made that decision, Richard, to stay with two sets of actors.

Eyre: I was very, very taken with the device in John's book, because his returns to the past in it are always motivated by a very specific, Proustian memory, like snagging his cardigan on a chair. You have a sense of the tremendous loneliness of the present forcing him to go back to the past. I wanted a device that would enable me to put off the illness until as late as possible in the film. Originally I wanted to have the same actors playing old and young. I thought, yes, Judi Dench could look 28, of course she can. The head of Sony pictures said that that wouldn't work. But if you have two different actors, the device has a very different resonance to the device John uses.

Cook: The resonance it has – isn't it? – is that something has been lost. That when we were young we were living in a state of grace and innocence, and that old age is an absence of and an expulsion from that. But John, the feeling that I get from your use of the device is that it's a wonderful and deeply sympathetic attempt to banish the notion of time. It's the way that time present encompasses time past.

Bayley: Yes, I think that's it. I think the feeling I had when Iris was ill was a very strange one: that in some way all the things that had happened to us during our lives were being re-enacted. It was partly the reason why I suddenly thought I must write it down in a way that would be comprehensible to other people.

Cook: The idea that comes from that, then, is exactly the reverse of the sense that comes from Richard's film. It's of time, in an almost Proustian sense, redeemed. The Iris that you offer us gives us a sense that you've returned to something you might have lost in another version.

Bayley: Yes, I think that's true, too. Because, of course, time and the memory have such strange connections. And also, absence is a connection. I find today – which doesn't worry me, but it's odd – that I can hardly remember Iris as she was before she was ill. Because illness as well became an actual presence. There was something so very much there about Iris when she was ill. The thereness of her was accentuated by the state she was in. That was particularly touching about Iris because, yes, she fell in love all the time, but she also fell into friendship all the time, the two were so much the same with her.

Her friends and the people she loved were almost the same thing, really. And when she loved people, the sense of their being was terribly important to her. She lived literally for love and for friendship. That's very rare in novelists, who are extremely egocentric.

Cook: Oh dear, let that not be said in Cheltenham this week.