19/08/18: John Bayley – Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998)

A moving account of their life together. Bayley flits between a history of their relationship (meeting in Oxford, low-key marriage, studious if messy cohabitation) and present-day observations about Iris living with Alzheimer’s. (She would die in 1999 and he in 2015.)

Although his account is written with obvious love and tenderness, it’s uncomfortable to read about him caring for his ailing wife. Details of how he washes her, for example, feel too private and intimate to be shared with the general reader, who knows Murdoch only through the great intellect displayed in her writing. Sometimes her condition seems so pitiful, such as when he describes he repeatedly asking the same question or watching children’s television:

“At the same time she will watch the animated cartoons on children’s TV with something approaching glee. They can be a great stand-by at ten or so – the trickiest time – till eleven in the morning. I usually watch the Teletubbies with her, and become absorbed myself in their odd little sunlit world, peopled with real rabbits, real sky, real grass. Or so it seems. Is some human agency inside the creatures, some actual and cunning little mannikin? It certainly looks like it, and the illusion, if such it is, continues to hold both our attentions.”

You feel voyeuristic reading this stuff, even if he did choose to share it with the public – for example, when he describes how she “stoops like an old tramp to pick up scraps of candy paper or cigarette ends from the pavement”. With Iris clearly having no say in the matter, you are left with no choice but to accept the wish of a husband to write about the woman he loves.

There are moving passages and also anecdotes of their friends and travels. There’s not much about her books or her writing processes, frustratingly, although he does sometimes reveal the people and places behind certain stories. If nothing else, it sends you straight back to the novels where her fierce intelligence remains alive and undimmed.

13/04/18: Olivia Laing – The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016)

“You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others.”

“Not so long ago, I spent a period in New York City, that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass, inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Though it wasn’t by any means a comfortable experience, I began to wonder if Woolf wasn’t right, if there wasn’t more to the experience than meets the eye – if, in fact, it didn’t drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive...What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?” 

In this brilliant analysis of what it is to be lonely in an urban environment, Olivia Laing draws on examples from art and culture as diverse as Henry Darger, internet entrepreneur Josh Harris, Edward Hopper, Zoe Leonard, Klaus Nomi, Andy Warhol (and Valerie Solanas, who shot him) and David Wojnarowicz. Her sensitive biographies of these figures – one per chapter – bring out the prominence of loneliness in each of their lives. She observes how, in many cases, that loneliness served as a guiding principle in their work. Also factored in at various points are Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and singers Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys) and Billie Holiday.

This isn’t a dry academic exercise, although Laing does bring an academic’s rigour to her analysis. It’s a deeply personal work. She’s not afraid to expose her own vulnerability and to talk about the “shame” she associates with being alone. You are left in no doubt that she understands how it feels: “It feels like being hungry: being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.”

There’s a compassionate section on the impact of AIDS on 1980s America and how poorly it was understood at first. The isolating effects of the internet and social media in more recent decades are also considered. I found the book most interesting when the author wrote about her own life, and would have welcome even more of that. Her experiences of using Twitter – and how it both connected and distanced her from others – will strike a chord with anyone who checks their phone a little too often.

I particularly like the ways she weaves together apparently incongruous threads, with the subject of one chapter naturally popping up again in another with a satisfying sense of connectivity. It’s a fluid construction, with the book flitting effortlessly between genres: art criticism, autobiography, biography and psychogeography. At its heart is a deep empathy for anyone who has ever felt alone.

09/09/17: Frances Wilson – How to Survive the Titanic, or, The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (2011)

Bruce Ismay was the chairman of the White Star Line shipping company, which was responsible for the creation of the Titanic. He was on the famously "unsinkable" ship when it sunk on its maiden voyage in 1912. Rather than observing the "women and children first" policy – the so-called Birkenhead Drill – he escaped on a lifeboat while 1,500 drowned in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. When the inquiry began into why the ship sank and who was to blame, Ismay found himself scapegoated by the press and the public.

It was Ismay's decision to sacrifice the number of lifeboats on the deck for aesthetic reasons: they made the ship look cluttered. As a result: "The Titanic had lifeboat capacity for 1,100 of the 2,340 passengers and crew on board, but only 705 people were saved, of whom 325 were men." He didn't help himself by having an aloof manner and appearing not to understand the gravity of the situation when questioned.

This book expertly tells his story. For every account of what happened on the ship there is another, conflicting account and it is likely that no one will ever know for sure exactly how those two hours and 40 minutes of terror played out.  

Frances Wilson is a literary critic and often draws parallels between Ismay's life and great works of fiction. I liked this aspect of the book, but it might be a distraction for those seeking a "pure" biographical account. In particular, she focuses on similarities with Conrad's Lord Jim ("a difficult read"), whose plot is neatly summarised as "Jim jumps from a sinking ship and then faces a life without honour". She even suggests that Conrad's narrator Marlow should have been the one telling Ismay's story rather than allowing it to be assembled by a set of contradictory witness reports: “It is only when we place Ismay's crude, monotonous, absolutely unfinished narrative next to that of Lord Jim that his form begins to thicken, his blood to flow and his consciousness to take on an essential extra layer."

The book cannot answer all the questions it sets itself. What did happen that night? What would you do in that situation? Humans are incredibly complex; not riddles to be solved. But it's an intelligent, thought-provoking work of historical biography and literary criticism, and in exploring these questions Wilson offers refreshing insights into how any of us might behave when the ordinary and extraordinary come together.