by John Bayley
After she had become well-known she never mentioned the novel she was working on in public; nor, I think, to her friends; scarcely to me either. She would say something about it if I asked, but I soon had no habit of asking. One of the truest pleasures of marriage is solitude. Also the most deeply reassuring. I continued to do my own job, teaching English in the university, writing the odd critical study. Iris soon gave up St Anne’s – the emotional pressures in that community may have had something to do with it – and entered her own marvellous world of creation and intellectual drama, penetrating reflection, sheer literary excitement. Something for everybody in fact: just as she had said as we first stood there that late evening, beside our bicycles.
Occasionally she used to ask me about some technical detail she wanted for a novel. Once she enquired about automatic pistols – old army training made it easy to answer that one – sometimes about cars, or wine, or what would be a suitable thing for a certain character to eat. The hero of The Sea! The Sea! required, so to speak, a very special diet, and I had fun suggesting all sorts of unlikely combinations to which he might be partial: oat bran and boiled onions, fried garlic and sardines, tinned mango and stilton cheese. Some of these found their way into the novel; and when it won the coveted Booker Prize one of the judges, who happened to be the distinguished philosopher A.J. Ayer, remarked in his prizegiving speech that he had much enjoyed everything in the novel ‘except for the food’.
Only to one of Iris’s novels, and that was a long time ago, did I contribute a small section myself. It was in her fourth published novel, The Bell. For a reason I now forget she asked me to read the first chapter, which has one of her most sibylline epigrammatic openings. She never used a typewriter, and in her first handwritten version it read: ‘Dora Greenfield left her husband because she was afraid of him. A year later she returned to him for the same reason.’ I was thrilled by this instant concision, as many a subsequent reader must have been, for the sentence remained substantially as quoted here. But as I read on I began to feel an immediate inquisitiveness about young Dora Greenfield and her husband Paul which the early pages did not satisfy. So arresting were they, as characters, that I wanted to know a little more of them at once, to be given a hint by which to glimpse their potential. I said something of the sort to Iris, who said ‘OK then, you write something for me.’ I think she may already have felt herself something of what I, as reader, was now feeling: our sympathy and intuition automatically intermingled.
At the time I was trying to write a study later titled The Characters of Love. I was bewitched by Henry James, who observed to a friend about one of the ladies in the novel he was writing that he could already take ‘a stiff examination’ about her. Concerning such a personality, he had remarked, the author needs to supply a forewarning, ‘an early intimation of perspective’. With this in mind, and highly flattered by Iris’s suggestion, I set out to produce some idea of what might have happened to Dora and her husband, even if it was to have no part in the book, whose story as yet I did not know.
My idea was that he as a husband deeply needed and wanted children, even if he was not necessarily conscious of the fact, while she – much younger than her husband – did not. I suggested that she had it in her none the less to become ‘a prompt and opinionated mother’, and that this would be her only means in their marriage of standing up to Paul. As it was she was highly alarmed at the prospect of ‘becoming two people’, though in her passive manner she had done nothing to inhibit conception. Indeed she had come back to her husband like an apprehensive sleepwalker, still unconsciously depending on the ability of her fears to ‘whisk her instantly away, like a small animal’. At the same time she wanted him because she feared him, and because she knew he had it in him to allay her fears.
I produced something to this effect, and the results are on page ten of the novel as first printed, in a longish paragraph. It reads a bit too much in the Jamesian style, rather than merging into Iris’s own inimitable originality; but it does none the less perhaps have the function of suggesting alternatives and open spaces, which the scope and intent of the novel will not necessarily want to occupy. The novel’s theme is the desire and pursuit, whether in true or false ways, of the spiritual life; and I had nothing to contribute to Iris’s own marvellous feeling for what some people hunger for, and how in consequence they behave. Indeed I have very little understanding of the spiritual life; but that has never stopped me having a passionate appetite for Iris’s novels, which I have usually read only after publication. The Bell, or at least the first piece of it, was an exception.
This sympathy for what was or might be going on in Iris’s mind, together with my inability to understand or enter into it, must have developed quite early on. The sympathy alone was what was needed in the case of our communing together over the beginning of The Bell, and I remember vividly my then unexpected sense of it. Normally it was something which by then I took for granted in our marriage, like air or water. Already we were beginning that strange and beneficent process in marriage by which a couple can, in the words of A.D. Hope the Australian poet, ‘move closer and closer apart’. The apartness is a part of the closeness, perhaps a recognition of it: certainly a pledge of complete understanding. There is nothing threatening or supervisory about such an understanding, nothing of what couples really mean when they say (or are alleged to say) to confidants or counsellors, ‘the trouble is that my wife/husband doesn’t understand me’. This usually means that the couple, or one of them, understands the other all too well, and doesn’t rejoice in the experience.
Still less is such apartness at all like what the French call solitude à deux, the inward self-isolation of a couple from anything outside their marriage. The solitude I have enjoyed in marriage, and I think Iris too, is a little like having a walk by oneself, and knowing that tomorrow, or soon, one will be sharing it with the other, or equally perhaps again having it alone. It is a solitude, too, that precludes nothing outside the marriage, and sharpens the sense of possible intimacy with things or people in the outside world.
Such sympathy in apartness takes time to grow, however, as well as being quite different by nature from that intoxicating sense of the strangeness of another being which accompanies the excitements of falling in love. The more I got to ‘know’ Iris, in the normal sense, during the early days of our relationship, the less I understood her. Indeed I soon began not to want to understand her. I was far too preoccupied at the time to think of such parallels, but it was like living in a fairy story – the kind with sinister overtones and a not always happy ending – in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing. Eventually he makes some dire mistake and she disappears for good. At this distance in time that comparison seems more or less true, if a bit fanciful. Iris was always disappearing, to ‘see’ her friends (I began to wonder and to dread, early on, what the word ‘see’ might involve) about whom, unlike the girl in the fairytale, she was always quite open. I knew their names; I imagined them; I never met them.
And there seemed to be so many of them. Persons who were in a sense in my own position. Iris seemed deeply and privately attached to them all. No doubt in all sorts of different ways. I could only hope that she did not talk to any of the others in quite the way that she talked to me, chattered childishly with me, kissed me. This Iris was so different from the grave being I had seen on the bicycle, or at a party in the public domain, that I sometimes wondered what had become of the woman I had fallen in love with, as I then supposed. Absurdly, I had imagined our future together as somehow equally grave, a wonderfully serious matter, and only the pair of us of course, for no one else in the world was or would be in the least interested in either of us. We would simply be made for each other, and exist on that basis.
The happy child-like girl or woman she had now turned into when she was with me was delightful, but also – as I sometimes could
not stop myself wistfully thinking – fundamentally unreal, like the girl in the fairy story. This could not be the real Iris. But with the hindsight that also saw a parallel with the fairy story I can now feel that I was giving Iris without knowing it the alternative being that she required: the irresponsible, even escapist persona (‘escapist’ was a word often used in those days, accompanied by a disapproving headshake) which she had no idea that she wanted or needed. Neither did I have any idea that I was supplying it. I felt I was in love, indeed I was sure of it; and I was innocently sure, too, that it must be the most important thing for both of us, although Iris never gave any indication that she thought so too. The Iris with whom I talked nonsense and gambolled about, the woman who entered with such joy into those frolics, was delightful; and yet I could not but feel that she was not the same woman I had first seen and marked out: nor was she the ‘real’ Iris Murdoch, the serious hard-working responsible being observed and admired by other people.
After our relationship became itself more serious, and as we became aware that we were travelling inevitably towards a separation or a solution we couldn’t anticipate or foresee, Iris once or twice mentioned the myth of Proteus. It was in reply to my despairing comment that I couldn’t understand her, or the different person she became for the many others with whom she seemed, in my view, helplessly entangled. ‘Remember Proteus,’ she used to say. ‘Just keep tight hold of me and it will be all right.’ Proteus had the power of changing himself into any shape he wished – lion, serpent, monster, fish – but when Hercules held tightly on to him throughout all these transformations he was compelled in the end to surrender, and to resume his proper shape as the man he was.
I used to reply gloomily that I was not Hercules, lacking that hero’s resources of musclepower and concentration. Then we would laugh and become our old secret and childish selves again for the moment. As we did when we first crawled through the undergrowth and slipped secretly into the river.
That occasion for me marked a turning-point in our relations, although it was one I didn’t grasp at the time, nor could I have defined it until much later. The fact was that on that day she had let me for the first time into another of her friendships, by asking Maurice Charlton if I might be included in the lunch he had planned for the pair of them. I had no idea of this, nor, as I said, of the admirable good nature which Charlton himself must have displayed. If he was disappointed he gave no hint of it at all. Because I was there with them both I was not conscious of him as a rival, nor did I mind at all the way in which he seemed spontaneously included in the relations between Iris and myself. All fitted in, and seemed beautifully natural.
I never asked Iris how I had come to be included in that party. It would not have occurred to me to ask. Now, of course, it is too late. Iris does not remember the lunch party, nor the bicycle ride, nor the morning swim, nor Maurice Charlton himself. I have sometimes mentioned that occasion, without evoking any response beyond a usual and touchingly anxious interest in what I am talking about. And yet I think she would recognise Maurice Charlton, or other friends from those days, were they to appear suddenly before her in the flesh. Memory may have wholly lost its mind function, but it retains some hidden principle of identification, even after the Alzheimer’s has long taken hold.
A woman I sometimes meet, whose husband is also an Alzheimer sufferer, once invited me to share in a brisk exchange of experiences. ‘Like being chained to a corpse, isn’t it?’ she remarked cheerfully. I hastened to agree with her in the same jocular spirit, feeling reluctant none the less to pursue that particular metaphor. ‘Oh, a much-loved corpse naturally,’ she amended, giving me a slightly roguish glance, as if suggesting I might be thankful to abandon in her presence the usual proprieties that went with our situation.
But I was not at all thankful. I was repelled – I couldn’t help it – by the suggestion that Iris’s affliction could have anything in common with that of this jolly woman’s husband. She was a heroine no doubt, but let her be a heroine in her own style. How could our cases be compared. Iris was Iris.
Troubles do not necessarily bring people together. I felt no togetherness at all. This lady wanted – needed – to dramatise her situation and claim me as a fellow actor. I felt I could not cooperate in the spirit, though out of politeness I made a show of doing so. My own situation, I felt, was quite different from hers. It’s not an uncommon reaction, as I’ve come to realise, among Alzheimer partners. One needs very much to feel that the unique individuality of one’s spouse has not been lost in the common symptoms of a clinical condition.
But the woman’s figure of speech did not lose its power to haunt me. Her image of the corpse and the chain still lingered. There is a story by Thomas Hardy called ‘On the Western Circuit’, one of those soberly ironic tales the author obviously enjoyed writing, in which a young barrister meets a country girl while accompanying the rounds of the circuit judge. They fall in love and he makes her pregnant. She implores the sympathetic married lady in whose house she works as a maid to write letters for her to the young man, she being illiterate. Her mistress does so, and as a result of their correspondence begins to fall for the young man herself, while he, instead of escaping from his predicament as he had first intended, is so charmed by the girl’s sensible and loving little letters that he determines to marry her. The outcome, though predictable and characteristic of Hardy, is none the less moving for that. The marriage takes place in London, and the sole meeting between the young man and the girl’s employer, before she returns to her own lonely and barren married life in Wessex, reveals to him how their involuntary intimacy has taken place. The love letters she has written have made him love her, not the girl. The poor girl is distracted by her husband’s discovery of the deceit – he had asked her to write a little note of thanks to one of the guests – and he is left to face the future fettered to an unchosen partner, like two slaves chained in a galley. Hardy’s grim metaphor no doubt seemed wholly appropriate both to him and to his young hero.
I remembered the story while the woman was speaking. Our own situations were not the same, it was to be presumed, as those of the young man and girl. Fate had not deceived us. We had known our partners as equals over many years, told and listened and communed together, until communication had dwindled and faltered and all but ceased. No more letters, no more words. An Alzheimer sufferer begins many sentences, usually with an anxious repetitive query, but they remain unfinished, the want unexpressed. Usually it is predictable and easily satisfied, but Iris produces every day many such queries, involving ‘you know, that person’, or simply ‘that’, which take time and effort to unravel. Often they remain totally enigmatic, related to some unidentifiable man or woman in the past who has swum up to the surface of her mind as if encountered yesterday. At such times I feel my own mind and memory faltering, as if required to perform a function too far outside their own beat and practice.
The continuity of joking can very often rescue such moments, Humour seems to survive anything. A burst of laughter, snatches of doggerel, song, teasing nonsense rituals once lovingly exchanged, awake an abruptly happy response, and a sudden beaming smile that must resemble those moments in the past between explorers and savages, when some sort of clowning pantomime on the part of the former seems often to have evoked instant comprehension and amusement. At cheerful moments, over drinks or in the car, Iris sometimes twitters away incomprehensibly but self-confidently, happily convinced that an animated exchange is taking place. At such moments I find myself producing my own stream of consciousness, silly sentences or mashed-up quotations. ‘The tyrant of the Chersonese was freedom’s best and bravest friend’, I assure her, giving her a solemnly meaningful look. At which she nods her head gravely, and seems to act a conspiring smile, as if the ringing confidence of Byron’s line in ‘The Isles of Greece’ meant a lot to her too.
Our mode of communication seems like underwater sonar, each bouncing pulsations off the other, and listening for an echo. The bafflin
g moments at which I cannot understand what Iris is saying, or about whom or what – moments which can produce tears and anxieties, though never, thank goodness, the raging frustration typical of many Alzheimer sufferers – can sometimes be dispelled by embarking on a joky parody of helplessness, and trying to make it mutual. Both of us at a loss for words.
At happy moments she seems to find them more easily than I do. Like the swallows when we lived in the country. Sitting on the telephone wire outside our bedroom window a row of swallows would converse animatedly with one another, always, it seemed signing off each burst of twittering speech with a word that sounded like ‘Weatherby’, a common call-sign delivered on a rising note. We used to call them ‘Weatherbys’. Now I tease her by saying ‘You’re just like a Weatherby, chattering away.’ She loves to be teased, but when I make the tease a tender one by adding ‘I love listening to you’, her face clouds over. She can always tell the difference between the irresponsibility of a joke, or a straight tease, and the note of ‘caring’ or of ‘loving care’, which however earnest and true always sounds inauthentic.
All this sounds quite merry, but most days are in fact for her a sort of despair, although despair suggests a conscious and positive state and this is a vacancy which frightens her by its lack of dimension. She mutters ‘I’m a fool’ or ‘Why didn’t I’ or ‘I must ...’ and I try to seem to explain the trouble while rapidly suggesting we must post a letter, walk round the block, go shopping in the car. Something urgent, practical, giving the illusion of sense and routine. The Reverend Sydney Smith, a benevolent clergyman of Jane Austen’s time, used to urge parishioners in the grip of depression who appealed to him for help, to ‘take short views of human life – never further than dinner or tea’. I used to quote this to Iris, when troubles began, as if I was recommending a real policy, which could intelligibly be followed. Now I repeat it sometimes as an incantation or joke, which can raise a laugh if it is accompanied by some horsing around, a live pantomime of ‘short views’ being taken. It is not now intended to be rationally received, but it gets a smile anyway.