Love Story

The death last week of novelist Iris Murdoch has made John Bayley’s portrait of their marriage an elegy in the truest sense of the word. As new readers discover Murdoch and her legacy, Bayley’s memoir offers a touching and decidedly British look at who Murdoch was beyond the pages of her books. What is most refreshing about “Elegy for Iris” is how well Bayley has captured the complex, layered, rich, rewarding and confounding nature of a life lived with another and yet demonstrates how challenging it is to take measure of a marriage. Certainly fidelity or the lack of it is by itself an incomplete yardstick, the mark of an unimaginative vocabulary.

Far better to understand a marriage from words such as those that Bayley uses to describe his relationship with Murdoch as it first evolved: “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 undertaking, nothing of what couples mean when they say (or are alleged to say) to confidants or to counselors that their husband does not understand them. This usually means that one partner understands the other all too well, or that both do, and doesn’t rejoice in the experience. . . . The solitude I have enjoyed in marriage, and, I think, Iris, too, is a little like having a walk by oneself and knowing tomorrow, or soon, one will be sharing it with the other, or equally perhaps, again having it alone. It is also a solitude that precludes nothing outside the marriage, and sharpens the sense of possible intimacy with things or people in the outside world.”

Bayley is a distinguished literary critic and writer, the author of seminal works on Tolstoy and Shakespeare and the short story. Still, despite his scholarship, he has for most of his married life been eclipsed by his wife’s fame. One never senses that this in any way troubled him; rather, from the moment he first met her in Oxford, where she taught philosophy, the feelings he seems to have had for her, other than love, were those of awe and admiration, mingled with a sense of trepidation: “[I]t was like living in a fairy story--the kind with sinister overtones and not always a 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.” Murdoch in turn seemed to have found in Bayley the mate around whom she could drop formality. Describing their first intimacies after he had escorted her to a dance and then to his room, he writes, “Now she babbled like a child. So did I. With arms around each other, kissing and rubbing noses (I said how much I loved her snub nose), we rambled on and on, seeming to invent on the spot, as we talked, a whole infantile language of our own. She seemed to be giving way to some deep need of which she had been wholly unconscious: the need to throw away not only the maneuvers and rivalries of intellect but also the emotional fears and fascinations, the power struggles and surrenders of adult loving.”

If “Elegy for Iris” were merely the story of a 43-year marriage, it would be a remarkable document both because of Bayley’s gift for teasing out aspects of the sacred in secular marriage and because of the glimpse it provides of the private life of a woman who was until her death arguably England’s foremost novelist. But as the title implies, there is so much more to this story. Sadly, at the time her husband’s book came out, Murdoch did not know that she had “written 26 remarkable novels, as well as her books on philosophy; received honorary doctorates from the major universities, become a Dame of the British Empire. . . . If an admirer or a friend asks her to sign a copy of one of her novels, she looks at it with pleasure and surprise before laboriously writing her name, and if she can, theirs. . . . It takes her some time, but the letters are still formed with care, and resemble, in a surreal way, her old handwriting. She is always anxious to oblige. And the old gentleness remains.” Bayley’s early fears about Iris’ disappearing as if in a fairy tale had in a sense come true: Iris Murdoch was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. It robbed her of memory and insight. “Elegy for Iris,” then, is more than a memoir; it is also a heart-wrenching and brilliant illness narrative, depicting the parallel trials of both the patient and the caregiver. There is no textbook description of the clinical features of Alzheimer’s that could match the following:

“No more letters, no more words. An Alzheimer’s 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. . . . 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. Humor 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.”

“Elegy” is organized into two sections, “Then” and “Now.” “Now,” which comes toward the end, is a diary, a journal that depicts the day-to-day trials that the couple went through in her last years. Fortunately it is briefer than the more engaging “Then,” in which Bayley skillfully wanders between past and present, juxtaposing the memory of one of their earliest rituals together--swimming--with the effort involved in that same task now: “Once, if there had been little river traffic about, we would have swum at once the hundred yards or so across the river and back. Now it was too much trouble, and a possible producer of the omnipresent anxiety typical of Alzheimer’s patients, which spreads to the one who looks after the sufferer. Not that it would have been dangerous; Iris still swims as naturally as a fish. Since we first entered the water here together, 44 years ago now, we have swum in the sea, in lakes and rivers, pools and ponds, whenever we could and wherever we happened to be. . . . As she took my hands, her face contracted into that look of childlike dread which so often comes over it now, filling me, too, with worry and fear. Suppose her arm muscles failed her, and she slipped back into deep water, forgetting how to swim and letting water pour into her mouth as she opened it in a soundless appeal to me? I knew on the spot that we must never come to bathe here again.”

We are drawn to Bayley throughout this book, not out of pity for his difficult situation but out of admiration for the extraordinary love he has for his wife and for the way it has played out over such a long time. It is as if modesty--an emotion he greatly admires in Iris--makes him unaware of the nobility of his love. It comes through even in his describing his frustration with her--as when he is sick with a fever and cold: “What’ll she do if I die? If I’m ill and have to go to the hospital. . , I make these demands with increasing hostility and violence. I am furious to see my words are getting nowhere, and yet relieved, too, by this, so that I can continue to indulge my fury. She knows none of these things can or will happen. While I am still screaming at her, she says, ‘Let’s go. There now. Bed.’ She says this quite coherently. We squeeze together up the stairs, huddle under the cold duvet, and clutch each other into warmth. In the morning I feel a lot better.”

How much more instructive is that prose than the Mars-Venus-Ten-Commandments- psychoprattle that passes for our American discourse on love. Here, between the covers of an incredible book, is love heroic, love that doesn’t hedge, love for which there are no ready outs, love that feels as inevitable as breathing, and the result is stunning.