I have always admired the qualities that made Iris Murdoch a great
novelist: her technical skill, richness of imagination,
philosophical ideas, and moral vision.
In March 1978 I
met Iris and her husband, John
Bayley, Warton Professor of English at Oxford, when they were invited to teach
at the University of Denver. They each gave a public lecture—Iris
on “Art Imitates Nature,” John on “Hardy’s Poetry”—and jointly led
a two-week seminar on “Truth and Falsehood in Fiction.” When my wife
and I drove in to attend the seminar from the University of Colorado
at Boulder, where we were both teaching, we were surprised to find
only three other participants. We wondered if the locals were too
intimidated to attend a class taught by what journalists had called
“the most intelligent couple in the world.”

The dimly-lit seminar room gave me my first glimpse of them. John,
like Professor Calculus in the Tintin books, was short and bald,
with little wings of hair on the sides of his head. He had untied
shoelaces and mismatched socks, a stained woolly tie, and fly at
half-mast. Soft-voiced and benign, he managed to steer his dazzling
talk through an alarming, even spectacular, stutter. Photographs of
Iris in her twenties reveal that she’d been a great beauty, and in
her youth many Oxford men had fallen in love with her. Though bulky
now at sixty, she was still attractive. She had a charming
expression, serene yet alert and curious, with short, roughly-cut
hair, bright,