Authors: John Bayley
There are so many doubts and illusions and concealments in any close relationship. Even in our present situation they can come as an unexpected shock. Her tears sometimes seem to signify a whole
inner world which Iris is determined to keep from me and shield me from. There is something ghastly in the feeling of relief that this can’t be so: and yet the illusion of such an inner world
still there – if it is an illusion – can’t help haunting me from time to time. There are moments when I almost welcome it. Iris has always had – must have had – so
vast and rich and complex an inner world, which it used to give me immense pleasure
not
to know anything about. Like looking at a map of South America as a child, and wondering about the
sources of the Amazon, and what unknown cities might be hidden there in the jungle. Have any of those hidden places survived in her?
Showing me a tracing from the most elaborate of the brain scans Iris underwent a year or so ago, the doctor indicated the area of atrophy at the top. The doctors were pleased by the clearness of
the indication. I thought then – the old foolish romantic idea of the Amazon – that her brainworld had lost its unknown mysteries, all the hidden life that had gone on in it. It had
been there, physically and geographically
there
. And now it was proved to be empty. The grey substance that sustained its mysteries had ceased to function, whatever a
‘function’, in there, can possibly mean.
Twice Iris has said to Peter Conradi that she feels now that she is ‘sailing into the darkness’. It was when he asked her, gently, about her writing. Such a phrase might be said to
indicate the sort of inner knowledge that I had in mind. It seems to convey a terrible lucidity about what is going on. But can one be lucid in such a way without possessing the consciousness that
can produce such language? And if consciousness can go on producing such words, why not many more, equally lucid?
Were I an expert on the brain I should find it hard to believe in such flashes of lucidity revealing, as it were, a whole silent but conscious and watching world. It would be as if – to
use a clumsy analogy from my hidden city in the jungle – a flash of lightning were to reveal its existence, and then the explorers found that it didn’t exist after all. The words which
Iris used with such naturalness and brilliance cannot be stacked there silently, sending out an occasional signal. Or can they? I notice that the eerie felicities which Iris has sometimes produced,
like ‘sailing into the darkness’ or ‘I see an angel’, seem to come, so to speak, with a little help from her friends. They are like the things a young child suddenly comes
out with, to the delight and amusement of parents and friends. But it was the friends or parents who unconsciously did the suggesting. Must have been.
Iris has heard nothing from a great friend, a novelist whom she had once befriended and inspired, counselled and consoled. Had this now famous friend left her, abandoned in her silence? Was it
in resignation or in bitterness of spirit that she spoke those words? Sailing alone into the dark ....
In my own daily intercourse with Iris words don’t seem to be necessary, hardly appear to be uttered. Because we don’t talk coherently, and because we talk without seeming to
ourselves to be talking, nothing meaningful gets said. The clear things Iris does sometimes come out with are intended for public consumption. They are social statements. They have the air of last
remarks before all the lights go out.
1 December 1997 (I think, a Sunday anyway.)
I always liked a Sunday morning. Iris never noticed them. She still doesn’t, but now I find TV a great help. Looking in on her as I potter about I am relieved to see her
sitting intently, like a good child, watching the Sunday morning service. Later she is still there; the service has changed to an animated cartoon featuring bible history, Roman soldiers etc., in
which she is equally engrossed. Thank goodness for Sunday morning TV.
There are occasions when I have such a strong wish to remind Iris of something we did or saw that I find myself describing it hopefully, in great detail. I don’t say, ‘You probably
don’t remember, but –.’ Instead I now have the feeling that she is trying to follow something I am myself creating for her. Spring is more vivid when you talk about it in winter,
and I find myself telling her about one of our visits with Peter and Jim to Cascob in Wales, at the end of last May. The small school house, where twenty or thirty children were once taught, lies
on a rising knoll at the end of a steep and narrow valley. It is an old place, a single large high-roofed room, with the schoolmistress’s house, one up and one down, almost touching but
separate. The friends have joined the two, and made some alterations, but left the structure intact. The crown of the hillock on which it stands slopes sharply down to their pond, with a little
island in the middle, thick with alder and willow and with flowers in summer. Just beside the school is an extremely old church, half buried in green turf nearly up to the window openings on one
side, so that the sheep could look in. An immense yew tree, much older even than the church, makes a kind of jungle beside it, dark red with shadows.
On that visit to this enchanting place we soon found a special routine. A pair of redstarts were nesting just above the back doorway. If we sat motionless in the little courtyard, or looked out
of the schoolhouse window we could see them come and go: small flame-like birds, looking much too exotic to be seen in England. The breast and tail (
steort
means tail in Old English) are
bright cinnamon red, the head jetblack, with a white ring on the neck. When they hovered near the nest-hole, wary of a possible watcher, they were as jewel-like as hummingbirds.
After watching the redstarts our ritual was to go round to the churchyard, where we could have quite a different experience, though of the same kind. Jim had fixed a nesting box on a great ash
tree where the graveyard bordered their copse. He told us a pair of pied flycatchers were nesting there. This is a little bird even more rare and local than the redstart, a migrant who now only
comes back to the borders of south and central Wales. We stood by a gravestone, watching. Nothing happened for a long time. Suddenly and soundlessly a neat little apparition, in black and pure
white, appeared by the nest-hole. It was motionless for a moment and then vanished inside. We looked at each other, hardly believing we had really seen it. It seemed like a pure speck of antiquity,
robed in the hues of the old religion, almost as if a ghostly emanation from the church itself.
After this we could not keep away from the gravemound by the edge of the copse, the vantage point only a few feet away from the nest on the ashtree. The little birds seemed unaware of us, just
as ghosts would have been. Their busy movements had a soft spirit-like silentness. Peter and Jim told us they did have a small song, but we never heard them make a sound. Although we saw both
birds, and identified the male and the female, we could not really believe in their physical existence at all. Like the ghosts in
Macbeth
they came like shadows, so departed.
In the winter I find myself telling all this to Iris, and she listens with a kind of bemused pleasure and toleration, as if I were making up a fairy-story. She doesn’t believe it, but she
likes to hear it. I found myself that these bird memories, and the whole memory pattern of summer sunshine and green leaves, was becoming subtly different from what it had been like at the time. It
really was as if I had made the whole thing up.
I remembered that Kilvert, the Victorian parson who had lived not far off in the same part of Wales, and had so much loved writing his Diary about his days, his walks and his priestly duties,
had once confided to it that what he wrote down was more real to him than what he had actually seen that day or the one before, and was now writing about. Only memory holds reality. At least this
seems to have been his experience, and that of a lot of other writers too – romantic souls who, like Wordsworth (worshipped by Kilvert), made the discovery that for them to remember and to
write was to make their lives, and their sense of living things. The actual experience was nothing beside it, a mere blur always on the move, always disappearing. Proust or D.H. Lawrence must have
felt the same, however much Lawrence himself might protest about ‘Life –
Life
’ being the great thing. Wordsworth only
really
saw his daffodils when he lay on his
couch and viewed them with his inward eye.
Iris’s genius as a writer is rather different, I think, more comprehensive. Nor does one think of Shakespeare as creating this wonderful vision, after the event. It seems to be a romantic
discovery, this sense that all depends on memory. But like all such generalisations that can’t be more than a little bit true: writers and artists (Vermeer for instance) have done it and
known it for ages, but without bothering to make a song and dance about it.
As I create, or recreate, those birds for Iris I wonder what is going on in her head. Is she cognisant of an invention, a fairy-tale, instead of a memory? For a writer of her scale and depth the
power of creation seems so much more important than memory, almost as if it could now continue independent of it. And yet the one seems to depend on the other. So what are we remembering when we
invent?
The main thing is she likes to hear me talk about the birds. They must be just a part, a coming-and-going part, of the me she is always with. Once I was right away outside her, a reality quite
separate from herself, her mind, her powers of being and creating. Not now.
Now I feel us fused together. It appals me sometimes, but it also seems comforting and reassuring and normal.
Reminded of my novel
The Red Hat
, and the Vermeer portrait that for me haunted our short happy stay at the Hague. When we were there I at once began to have that fantasy about it, which
I told to Audi and Iris, separately I think. For Audi I wanted it to be comic, a comical adventure fantasy, with sinister overtones, which we could laugh at together. Could it be that for Iris I
instinctively tried to make it sound a bit like something in her own novels? As if I were trying to remind or inspire, or even carry on the torch by a kind of imitation? However that was, the story
I wrote about it does not sound in the least like Iris, except perhaps to me. It came out much more like the fantasy I told Audi, who kindly said she enjoyed it when the book appeared a year
later.
Life is no longer bringing the pair of us ‘closer and closer apart’, in the poet’s tenderly ambiguous words. Every day we move closer and closer together. We could not do
otherwise. There is a certain comic irony – happily not darkly comic – that after more than forty years of taking marriage for granted, marriage has decided it is tired of this, and is
taking a hand in the game. 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. She is not sailing into the dark: the voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer’s she has arrived somewhere. So have I.
This new marriage has designed itself, as Darwin once speculated that fish perhaps designed their own eyes, to bring to an end her fearful anxieties of apartness – that happy apartness
which marriage had once taken wholly for granted. This new marriage needs us absolutely, just as we need it. To that extent it is still a question of ‘taking for granted’.
The phrase was in my head because I had just received a letter from the Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi. Admiring her novels, he had once corresponded with Iris, and his ideas had interested
her. As pen friends they had got on, and the three of us had once met in Tokyo. He had read a piece of mine on ‘marriage’ which had been commissioned by
The Times.
The paper
had naturally wanted it to be about Iris’s Alzheimer’s, but I had also made our old point about taking marriage for granted, quoting Iris’s character in
A Severed Head
who had lamented that her marriage ‘wasn’t getting anywhere’. This had struck the distinguished psychologist, the explorer of
amae
, the taken-for-granted bond which
supplies the social cohesion of the Japanese people, and he had titled the essay which he now sent me ‘Taking for Granted’. Japanese husbands and wives, he said, do not make a fuss
about marriage, in the western style, but take it for granted. I wrote thanking him for the piece, and remarked that marriage was now taking us for granted rather than we, it.
As in old days nothing needs to be done. Helplessness is all. Yet it’s amusing to contemplate ‘new marriage’. Like New Labour, the New Deal etc? Not quite like that. Hard,
though, to contemplate one’s arrangements without their becoming, at least to oneself, a private form of public relations. I need our closeness now as much as Iris does, but don’t feel
I need cherish it. It has simply arrived, like the Alzheimer’s. The best as well as the fullest consciousness of it comes in the early morning, when I am beside Iris in bed tapping on my
typewriter, and feel her hearing it in her doze, and being reassured by it.
In the old days she would have been up and in her study, in her own world. I am in mine, but it seems hers too, because of proximity. She murmurs, more or less asleep, and her hand comes out
from under the quilt. I put mine on it and stroke her fingernails for a moment, noticing how long they are, and how dirty. I must cut them and clean them again this morning. They seem to grow
faster by the month, and I suppose mine do the same.
14 December 1997
As I am sitting in the kitchen, trying to read something, Iris makes her mouse noise at the door. She is carrying a Coca Cola tin picked up in the street, a rusty spanner
– where on earth did she get that? – a single shoe.