Iris and the Friends

by John Bayley

  I was the more reassured during this visit because an extremely pleasant Englishman who worked on the South China Times sought us out whenever his duties permitted, and himself seemed to find Iris’s company and conversation reassuring. He told us he often felt extremely lonely and depressed out there. That didn’t seem surprising. We ourselves felt weighed down by a sort of Far Eastern melancholy, not wholly attributable to the monsoon weather, for the monotonous rain and soft overpowering warmth was something to be enjoyed, at least for a time. The broad river spilled over the hotel frontage like tea brimming over a saucer, and we used to stand watching it, fascinated by the huge branches wreathed in green creepers that floated past at high speed, level with our eyes. They did nothing to intimidate the drivers of the slender craft that buzzed about the river, propelled by a sort of eggwhisk at the end of a powerful engine that roared and echoed down the klongs like an express train. It was a special relief to stand outside in the warm rain because the hotel rooms, heavily air-conditioned, felt icy. Our suite, furnished in ornate colonial style, advertised itself as the favourite stopping-place of Somerset Maugham on his Far Eastern trips. His chilly presence certainly seemed to pervade it.

  Jackson had been finished at last, and named Jackson’s Dilemma. Iris was gloomy about it, but so she was about any novel she had done with, and I did not feel unduly perturbed. For the first time I took to enquiring about her ideas for a next novel. She had ideas she said, but they wouldn’t come together. She was trying to catch something by its tail, and it always eluded her. She sounded resigned. Hoping against hope now I worried and importuned her every day. Any luck? Is anything happening? You must go on trying. If I went on too long she would start crying, and then I stopped quickly and tried to console her. After the Far Eastern trip the sardonic face of Somerset Maugham, smiling from signed photos all round the hotel room, still haunted me at moments when I was telling Iris that all writers at some time suffered from writer’s block. ‘I never had writer’s block,’ he seemed to be saying, with an air of contempt.

  Nor did Iris have it. That soon became clear. Alzheimer’s is in fact like an insidious fog, barely noticeable until everything around has disappeared. After that it is no longer possible to believe that a world outside fog exists. First we saw our own friendly harassed GP, who asked Iris who the Prime Minister was. She had no idea but said to him with a smile that it surely didn’t matter. He arranged an appointment at the big hospital with a specialist in geriatrics. Brain scans followed; and after an article appeared about this famous novelists’s current difficulties the Cambridge Research Unit of the Medical Council took a special interest, giving her a number of exhaustive tests in memory and language which she underwent politely, seeming both to humour the researchers and to enjoy working with them. Jackson’s Dilemma came out and got exceptionally good reviews. I read these reviews to Iris, a thing I had never done before because she had never before wanted to listen. Now she listened politely but without understanding.

  The irony did not bother her or even occur to her. Nor did I tell her that there had also been a number of letters about the reviews, pointing out small errors and inconsistencies in the narrative of Jackson’s Dilemma. It was clear that these points were mostly made by fans, fondly indicating that the writer they admired so much could sometimes nod. Meanwhile I was anxiously canvassing medical opinion about the possibility of ameliorative drugs. An old friend and fan, a Swedish expert on autism, sent some pills to try, a mild stimulant of the intellectual processes. The new experimental drugs were not recommended, and no doubt wisely, for they have since been shown to be all too temporary in their effect, and apt, during a brief period of possible effectiveness, to confuse and even horrify the recipient. The friendly fog suddenly disperses, revealing a precipice before the feet.

  When writing about the onset of Alzheimer’s it is difficult to remember a sequence of events; what happened when, in what order. The condition seems to get into the narrative, producing repetition and preoccupied query, miming its own state. I remarked on this to Peter Conradi, Iris’s future biographer, who had already become a pillar of close friendship, support and encouragement. He and his friend and partner Jim O’Neill were longstanding friends of Iris’s, who had in former times often visited them in Clapham. He is a passionate admirer of her books and knows them inside out. Even more important, he loves her and the atmosphere in which she lives and moves. He knows her thought; and he responds to her own knowledge with deep feeling. The same goes for Jim, whose sense of Iris’s being gives her a unique kind of comfort. He too is widely read in her novels, and a shrewd and practical critic.

  Iris loved seeing their blue-eyed sheepdog Cloudy, and she loved talking to this extraordinarily dedicated and relaxing couple about books and philosophy and Buddhism. Both somehow fit a routine of meditation, retreats, hospitality to visiting dignitaries from Tibet or Bhutan, into their own working lives: Jim a psychotherapist, Peter a professor of literature. In now distant days Iris used to return to Steeple Aston or Hartley Road full of her visit to them, and of what they had told her about their Welsh cottage, a converted schoolhouse. They told her of the pool they had built in the field beneath it, the kingfishers and otters who came to visit there.

  They were always pressing us to come and stay. When we managed it at last Iris already needed all the support this great pair could give her. Jackson came out in 1995: Iris’s condition has deteriorated steadily over the past eighteen months. Like someone who knows he cannot for much longer avoid going out into the cold I still shrink from the need for professional care – helpers, the friendly callers of Age Concern, even the efforts of kind friends. All that is to come, but let us postpone it while we can: Iris becomes troubled as well as embarrassed if she feels a visit is to keep her company, or to look after her if I have to be absent. In fact I am never absent, so helpers are not now needed. We are lucky to be able to go on living in the state to which we have always been accustomed; Iris can still go out to lunch alone with such an old friend as Philippa Foot.

  And Peter and Jim make all this still easier. They do not bother about the dirt in the carpet or the stains on the glasses, although their own home is kept like a new pin and so is the Welsh cottage. They pick us up as often as it can be done, and carry us off there.

  When life fails

  What’s the good of going to Wales?

  We proclaim Auden’s lines joyously together sometimes, sitting in the back of the car. It’s a joke, for we know better. So it seems does Cloudy, who sleeps during the journey with her head in Iris’s lap, but who opens her muzzle to smile, while her blue eyes shine with anticipation.

  PART II

  NOW

  — 1997 —

  1 January 1997

  Didn’t Margaret Thatcher, at mention of whose name Cloudy always starts barking, use to say there was no such thing as ‘society’? She didn’t put it in inverted commas of course: she knew what she meant. But her point wouldn’t have been so obviously untrue if she had said there is no such thing as the ‘people’, a word that today only achieves some sort of meaning if placed, whether accidentally or deliberately, in a given context. It made sense afterwards to say that Diana Princess of Wales was ‘the people’s princess’, because when she died everybody grieved, publicly and together. But ‘the people’ are a fictitious body, invoked by politicians in the interest of democratic emotionalism, whereas ‘society’ is still a neutrally descriptive term, making sense in any context. The only way ‘the people’ can be contextualised is as ‘ordinary people’, another purely emotive phrase which has just been used by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his New Year’s speech on TV. Every ‘ordinary’ person is in fact extraordinary, often grotesquely so, and in every sort of way.

  Pondered such matters while making Iris her drink, after the Archbishop’s speech. Important to make a routine of this. Around twelve o’clock or a little before. The drink itself slightly dishonest: a little drop of white wine, a dash of angostura
bitters, orangeade, a good deal of water. Iris likes it, and it has a soothing effect, making her sit watching TV for longer periods. Otherwise she is apt to get up and stand with her back to the TV, fiddling incessantly with her small objets trouvés – twigs and pebbles, bits of dirt, scraps of silver foil, even dead worms rescued from the pavement on our short walks. She also puts water – sometimes her drink – on the potted plants by the window, which are now wilting under the treatment. But she never does this with a real drink, an alcoholic one. Sensible girl, her old fondness for bars still stands her in good stead.

  20 February 1997

  Teletubbies. They are part of the morning ritual, as I try to make it. I have to insist a bit, as Alzheimer’s now seems to have grown inimical to routines. Perhaps we all know by instinct that an adopted routine preserves sanity?

  Just after ten, as part of the BBC 2 children’s programme, the Teletubbies come on. One of the few things we can really watch together, in the same spirit. ‘There are the rabbits!’ I say quite excitedly. One of the charms of this extraordinary programme is the virtual reality landscape supplied. An area of sunlit grass – natural – dotted with artificial flowers beside which the real rabbits hop about. The sky looks authentic as well, just the right sort of blue with small white clouds. The Teletubbies have their underground house, neatly roofed with grass. A periscope sticks out of it. A real baby’s face appears in the sky, at which I make a face myself, but Iris always returns its beaming smile.

  The creatures emerge, four of them, in different coloured playsuits. How are they animated, what is inside their plump cloth bodies? The way they trot about and smile is almost obscenely natural, as are their grown-up male voices. Twiggy or something, Winky, Poo ... They trot about, not doing anything much, but while they are there Iris looks happy, even concentrated.

  This form of childishness is itself like virtual reality. We used to have a more genuine spontaneous kind. It began, just before we were married, with a postcard of a very clueless-looking kitten putting its nose wonderingly round a door. Appropriately labelled ‘Ginger’. Iris sent it to me, making a balloon on the front and writing in it ‘Just coming’. She became Ginger, and then Gunga.

  ‘Haunted by Gungas’, I teased her the other day, will be the title of the first section of my autobiography. She laughs and is pleased to be talked to that way, but I don’t think she recognises the word any more.

  Something about the Teletubbies reminds me of going to see the bluebells in Wytham Wood. Since living in Oxford and finding out about this amenity we have been to see them every year. Coming on them if the sun is shining has something of the beautiful dubiousness of Teletubby land. Can they be real? Do they really exist? They live in a thick and distant part of the wood, under dark conifers which stretch away downhill, and as they recede into darkness they light up into their most intense colour. They vanish as if into a strange land where an endless dark blue lake begins. Close at hand they look much more ordinary. Greyish, purplish.

  We stand and look at them. For the first time last May Iris seemed not to take them in at all.

  On the way there are real trees. Two gigantic sycamores, overpowering as a cathedral. But Iris has now a great fear of trees and I hurry her past them. I thought: this had better be the last time we go. And that was last year.

  As we got in the car I said to her reassuringly, ‘Soon be back in Teletubby land.’ But I don’t think she remembered what Teletubbies were. I would quite like to be able to forget them myself.

  The sense of someone’s mind. Only now an awareness of it; other minds are usually taken for granted. I wonder sometimes if Iris is secretly thinking: How can I escape? What am I to do? Has nothing replaced the play of her mind when she was writing, cogitating, living in her mind? I find myself devoutly hoping not.

  1 March 1997

  When Iris’s mother was taken to the mental hospital we did not tell her where she was going. I had doped her but the drive seemed interminable. As the nurse took her away she looked back at us with a lost unreproachful look.

  The same look on Iris’s face when I manage to leave her for an hour with a friend.

  Like school. Being left there. Probably such moments would not be so painful now if they hadn’t started all those years ago at school, inside one’s own ego.

  I knew where I was going when I was taken to school. But being left there felt the same as the look on Iris’s face, and her mother’s. In fact we retrieved her mother after she had been a few weeks in the asylum. Back again later. So it was like school.

  Associations of that look. Seeing it I remember the first little boy I met at the school, after being left there. He was wizened, like a little old man, with a pale leprous skin. I shrank from him, all the more because he was extremely friendly. Confidential. He said: ‘Shall I tell you what my father told me? My father said it was the most important thing there was. He said: “There is no difference at all between men and women. Absolutely none at all.” ’

  I regarded the little boy with horror and fear. It all seemed part of this nightmarish new world of school. At the time it seemed the worst thing I had ever heard, or was ever likely to hear.

  *

  Long piece in London Review on Iris’s essay collection Existentialists and Mystics. The critic made a great thing of the contrast between Iris’s views on the novel, the importance in it of free and independent individuals, character creations etc., and her own practices in writing fiction, which instead of giving her characters ‘a free and realised life make them as unfree as pampered convicts’. This has always interested me too. In one way it is an obviously true point: in a more important sense it is irrelevant. For Iris makes a free world in her novels, which carries total conviction because it is like no other, and like no one else’s. That is what matters, and that is why this world has such mesmeric appeal for all sorts of different people.

  It is bound to be a tautology to talk about ‘freedom’ in a novel, in which only the author is free to do as he likes. Pushkin, and Tolstoy following him, liked to emphasise that their characters ‘took charge’, and that they were surprised by what they did, and by what happened to them. Once again there is a kind of truth in that, but it won’t really do. It is a cliché which novelists invent or repeat. What matters is whether the world created is both convincing and wholly sui generis, and here of course Pushkin and Tolstoy pass with top marks. So does Iris in her own way.

  I remember that time, years ago, when I was working on a study of Tolstoy, and we used endlessly to discuss the sort of perplexing questions that arise in the case of great novelists. I used to make the point that Tolstoy’s greatest and least visible strength, or ‘freedom’, was the cunning way he blended many different novel tactics when creating a character. At one moment they behave, as if deliberately, like ‘people in a novel’; at the next they are suddenly like people we know, as inconsequential as people in life. They seem entirely themselves, as created characters, but the next moment they are behaving just as we might do, so that one can feel in a rather eerie and disquieting way, ‘How does this writer know what I am like?’

  Tolstoy’s people are both completely particular and completely general. At this point in my argument (such as it was) Iris used to look thoughtful. As a philosopher she wanted to get things more clear than that; and I used to think that perhaps there was a real incompatibility between the philosophic mind and the simple undifferentiated muddle in which free characters and creation must move. Tolstoy, I felt, was not clear-headed at all; he merely picked up one thing and dropped another. Plato wouldn’t have cared for that, or for Tolstoy, or for the novel generally?

  Your characters, I used to tell her, have contingent aspects because you know that there are so many contingent things in life, and therefore the novel must have them too. But contingency in some novels is not like that; it is glorious in itself and has no other purpose than to be itself. It’s always funny, like the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona.

  ‘Is ther
e a dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona?’

  ‘I think so. I hope so, but I may have got the play wrong. Anyway you see what I mean?’

  Iris always, and as if indulgently, did see what I meant, though it didn’t necessarily mean anything to her. We loved those conversations, usually over food or wine. Only for a few moments or minutes did they bother to last, with the gramophone playing in the background. It all seemed funny too. But I was surprised how much of what we touched on, all clarified and sharpened, is there in the essays collected in Existentialists and Mystics, now superbly edited by Peter Conradi. Peter pointed out a lot of things to me, which he said were like things in The Characters of Love and Tolstoy and the Novel. It hadn’t struck me before, because those words between us, now vanished, just seem part of us both, although how that can be when our minds were so different – hers clear, mine muddled – remains a mystery.

  We can still talk as we did then, but it doesn’t make sense any more, on either side. I can’t reply in the way I used to do then but only in the way she speaks to me now. I reply with the jokes or nonsense that still makes her laugh. So we are still part of each other.

  *

  30 March 1997

  The horrid wish, almost a compulsion at some moments, to show the other how bad things are. Force her to share the knowledge, relieve what seems my isolation.

  I make a savage comment today about the grimness of our outlook. Iris looks relieved and intelligent. She says: ‘But I love you.’