Dan Glaister : First Person
John Bayley has written a moving elegy to his wife, the writer Iris Murdoch, in the New Yorker magazine. It is a tale of two swimming trips to the same river near Oxford, United Kingdom.
Two trips punctuated by a space of 40 years, and haunted by Alzheimer’s disease. “With the ardour of comparative youth we wormed our way through the rank grass and sedge until we almost fell into [the river] … Crouching in the shelter of the reeds, we tore off our clothes and slipped in like water rats … A moment after we had crawled out, and were drying ourselves on Iris’s waist slip, a big pleasure boat chugged past within a few feet of the bank. The steersman, wearing a white cap, gazed intently ahead.”
Forty years later, the couple return to the site of their youthful tryst. “The little nook where we usually entered the river is empty, as usual. Once, we would have shed our clothes as soon as possible and slid silently into the water, as we did on that first occasion. Now I have quite a struggle getting Iris’s clothes off: I managed to put her bathing dress on at home, before we started. Her instinct nowadays seems to be to take her clothes off as little as possible. Even in this horribly hot weather, it is hard to persuade her to remove trousers and jersey before getting into bed. She protests, gently though vigorously, as I lever off the outer layers.
“In her shabby old swimsuit, a two-piece, with a skirt and separate tunic top, she is an awkward and anxious figure, her socks trailing around her ankles. She is obstinate about not taking them off, and I give up the struggle. A pleasure barge chugs slowly past, an elegant girl in a bikini sunning herself on the deck, a young man in white shorts at the steering wheel. Both turn to look at us with an air of disbelief.”
Forty years ago John Bayley was an awestruck English literature student, captivated by a vision on a bicycle. When he met the vision at Oxford, in 1953, she was 34, he 28. She too was an English student, but she was also a writer, with her first novel finished and already picked up by a publisher. In the years between the two swims she became one of Britain’s most successful writers, acclaimed for her fiction and for her philosophy. He became a professor of English at Oxford.
Three years ago she was diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. It is almost a search for “the real Iris”. Through Alzheimer’s, suggests Bayley, a clearer picture has emerged of a writer and a personality who hid behind her characters, who found the question of identity “puzzling”, and thought that she herself “hardly possessed such a thing”.
“She is not sailing into the dark,” he asserts. “The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer’s she has arrived somewhere. So have I.”
The two first met at a tutor’s drinks party at Oxford. Their second date, a ball at St Antony’s College, was a disaster. The food, service, even the wine, were dreadful and Iris tripped on her dress as they entered the ball. But they retired to his room, where he had hidden a bottle of champagne, and spent the night talking and babbling like children. “With arms around each other, kissing and rubbing noses, we rambled on and on, seeming to invent on the spot, as we talked, a whole infantile language of our own.”
Today their language is childlike, but in a different way. “At cheerful moments,” he writes, “over drinks or in the car, Iris sometimes twitters away incomprehensibly but self-confidently, happily convinced that an animated exchange is taking place. This prompts me to produce my own stream of consciousness, silly sentences of mashed-up quotations.”
There is between them a “continuity of joking”, where seemingly lost, tragic moments can be rescued by humour, by the power of the absurd. Their communication, he says, is like underwater sonar: “The baffling moments when I cannot understand what she is saying, or about whom or what – moments that can produce in Iris tears and anxieties, though never, thank goodness, the raging frustration typical of many Alzheimer’s sufferers – can sometimes be dispelled by my embarking on a jokey parody of helplessness, and trying to make it mutual: both of us at a loss for words.”
The onset of Alzheimer’s has created a distance almost within her. The power of concentration, the ability to form coherent sentences, and the knowledge of her own achievements have all gone.
Writing of their early relationship, Bayley says: “The more I got to know Iris … the less I understood her,” and he quotes the words of the Australian poet AD Hope about marriage being a process of growing “closer and closer apart”. Paradoxically, Alzheimer’s, and the distance created by it, has brought them closer together.
Their routine is now dominated by the demands of caring for Iris. “There are some days when `When are we leaving?’ never stops, though the question is repeated without agitation. Indeed there can be something quite peaceful about it, as if it hardly mattered when we went, or where.”
Getting dressed, too, can provide the same mixture of comedy and irritation. “Most days dressing is a reasonably happy and comic business. I am still far from sure which way around her underpants are supposed to go: we usually decide between us that it doesn’t matter. But Alzheimer’s has not brought out the negative aspects of her personality,” says Bayley. Rather, it has served to “exaggerate the natural goodness in her”.
Her face, however, has assumed the “lion’s face” ascribed to Alzheimer’s sufferers, impassive and expressionless. “The Alzheimer’s face indicates only an absence,” he writes. “It is, in the most literal sense, a mask.”
But within the space created by Alzheimer’s, there are “days of silent tears, when her grief is unconscious of that mysterious world of creation she has lost and yet is aware that something is missing”. But Alzheimer’s brings blessings too: the ability to sleep like a cat, at any time of day or night, or to sleep through in the morning, undisturbed by the sound of Bayley sitting in bed alongside her, tapping away at the typewriter perched on his knee.
“Every day, we move closer and closer together,” concludes Bayley.”We could not do otherwise … Purposefully, persistently, involuntarily, our marriage is now getting somewhere. It is giving us no choice, and I am glad of that. Every day, we are physically closer; and Iris’s little `mouse cry’, as I think of it, signifying loneliness in the next room, the wish to be back beside me, seems less and less forlorn, more simple, more natural.”