Iris

by John Bayley

  That is something to be tried for all the time. It transforms her face, bringing it back to what it was, and with an added glow that can seem almost supernatural. The Alzheimer face has been clinically described as the ‘lion face’. An apparently odd comparison but in fact a very apt one. The features settle into a leonine impassivity which does remind one of the King of Beasts, and the way his broad expressionless mask is represented in painting and sculpture. The Alzheimer face is neither tragic nor comic, as a face can appear in other forms of dementia: that would suggest humanity and emotion in their most distorted guise. The Alzheimer face indicates only an absence: it is a mask in the most literal sense.

  That is why the sudden appearance of a smile is so extraordinary. The lion face becomes the face of the Virgin Mary, tranquil in sculpture and painting with a gravity that gives such a smile its deepest meaning. Only a joke survives, the last thing that finds its way into consciousness when the brain is atrophied. And the Virgin Mary, after all, presides over the greatest joke of the lot, the wonderful fable made up, elaborated, repeated all over the world. No wonder she is smiling.

  The latest smile on Iris’s face seems to come from association with another Mary. Trying to cheer her up one day I thought of an inane childhood rhyme, forgotten for years.

  Mary had a little bear

  So loving and so kind

  And everywhere that Mary went

  You saw her bear behind.

  Iris not only smiled – her face looked cunning and concentrated. Somewhere in the deserted areas of the brain old contacts and impulses became activated, wires joined up. A significance had revealed itself, and it seems only to work with jokes, particularly silly jokes, which in the days of sanity would have been received with smiling but slightly embarrassed forbearance. Iris always mildly disliked and avoided what used to be called vulgar or risqué jokes. Maybe the innocence of the bear rhyme pleased her – who can say what subtle feelings and distinctions from the past can be summoned back to her mind by something as childish – but perhaps as touching too – as the bear rhyme? My own memory had retained it despite my conscious wishes, which is something that often happens. I could recall now the small boy at school – I secretly thought him rather repulsive but was too polite to say so – who told me the rhyme with a knowing air of complacency, sure that it would be a hit with me. I resolved on the spot to forget it at once, but here it was back again.

  When I quoted Byron’s certainly very memorable line about the old Greek hero Miltiades, Tyrant of the Chersonese and victor at the Battle of Marathon, I thought involuntarily again of Maurice Charlton, and the enchanted lunch on that hot summer day. He had been this fabulous young Greek scholar, before he had become a medical doctor. No doubt Iris had admired him, as she had admired all high skill and learning. And had he been going to attempt seduction that warm afternoon, a project thwarted by his own courtesy in acceding to her suggestion that I should come along too? I had no idea, and still have none. Clueless as I still was I did know by then that Iris had several lovers, often apparently at the same time. I also intuited – quite how I don’t know but it turned out to be correct enough – that she usually gave her favours out of admiration and respect: for, so to speak, the godlike rather than the conventionally attractive or sexual attributes in the men who pursued her. Men who were like gods for her were also for her erotic beings, but sex was something she regarded as rather marginal, not an end in itself.

  — 3 —

  I had no illusions about being godlike. I realised that she loved to be with me as if we were children again, and was tender when she saw with what childlike eagerness I had come to desire her. She sensed I had next to no knowledge of lovemaking (how absurdly oldfashioned it all seems today!) A little while before our own swimming expedition on that hot morning she had remarked with brisk indulgence ‘Perhaps it’s time we made love,’ and she had shown me how, although as I had no condom with me (they were known as French letters in those days and a good deal of guilt and secrecy hung about their supply and use) she did not permit me to get very far. We had done better once or twice after that, but in a genial and wholly unserious way that did not in the least mar for me the unfamiliar magic of the proceedings: doing this odd and comical thing with someone whom one really loved. The paradox was itself comical, though not at all depressing.

  What was a trifle depressing was the growing knowledge that I was far from being the only one with whom she was doing it – probably only on occasion: she was much too busy and interested in other things to make a habit of it, so to speak. But to me in those days she seemed at the negligent disposition of these unknown and godlike older men, whom she went humbly to ‘see’ at times when it suited them. Here, I began dimly to perceive, was where her creative imagination lay, and it was to feed it – almost, it seemed, to propitiate it – that she would make what appeared to me these masochistic journeys to London; and chiefly to Hampstead, for me the abode and headquarters of the evil gods.

  As my own feelings became closely involved I saw all such matters in an absurdly lurid light. In reality the people Iris went to see were not gods or demons but intellectuals, writers, artists, civil servants, mostly Jewish, mainly refugees, who knew one another and formed a loose-knit circle, with its own rivalries, jealousies and power struggles. They loved Iris and accepted her as one of themselves, although she remained inevitably an outsider, living and teaching as she did in humdrum academic circles, away from their own focus of attention. In time I met most of them and got on with them well, surprised and in later days amused when I looked back at the storm of fears and emotions they had once aroused in me. It was Iris’s own imagination which had in a sense created them, and continued to create and nurture them as the strange and unique characters of her wonderful novels. It was the second of these, The Flight from the Enchanter in 1955, which first showed me how the genius of Iris’s imagination did its own work, in its own way. And all the teeming complex variety of her later novels continued in its own mysterious fashion to be distilled from the alembic of those original obsessions and enchantments.

  But Maurice Charlton was quite different: a sunlit character whose spiritual home was that hot but never oppressive Oxford summer, even though he lived for the moment, as if himself the beneficiary of some enchantment, in that gloomy exotic flat, surrounded as it seemed to me by heavy glittering cutlery and tall green Venetian wineglasses. When first in love one feels attended on all sides, almost jostled, by such unexpected and incongruous symbols of romance. That morning marked a turning-point, however little I realised it at the time, in the way in which Iris behaved towards me. The lunch party and the river made me too bemused and delighted to see it, but she was not only including me in another part of her social life: she was also indicating to a third person that I played a role in that life which had begun to possess a public continuity, and was not something to be privately taken up between us and discarded from moment to moment. I was far from becoming her official ‘swain’, in the quaint old sense, but in the eyes of the world I had come to have some kind of status beyond the sphere of mere acquaintanceship.

  With the perception that made him an excellent doctor as well as a brilliant classical scholar Maurice Charlton may well have been aware in some sense of all this, while his green eyes went on surveying us in their merrily convivial but impassive way. He reminded me in some way of the great Professor Fraenkel, whom I had seen once or twice at the time, a venerable almost gnome-like figure, shuffling up the High Street after giving some class or lecture, surveying the world with a disconcertingly bright and youthful eye. A Jewish refugee from Germany, he arrived in Oxford at the time Iris became a student, and such was his reputation that he soon acquired a Chair, even though Oxford had by then a glut of distinguished refugees. He had given Iris tutorials, and she attended his famous Agamemnon class. I had been a mere schoolboy then, and so for that matter had been Maurice Charlton himself, though an older one. But his green glance had much the same l
ight in it as Fraenkel’s black twinkle. Perhaps that resemblance was what had attracted Iris to him.

  She had already told me how fond she had been of Fraenkel, both fond and reverential. In those days there had seemed to her nothing odd or alarming when he caressed her affectionately as they sat side by side over a text, sometimes half an hour over the exact interpretation of a word, sounding its associations in the Greek world as he explored them, as lovingly keen on them as he seemed to be on her. She had been pleased it was so, and revelled in the sense of intellectual comradeship she felt. That there was anything dangerous or degrading in his behaviour, which would nowadays constitute a shocking example of sexual harassment, never occurred to her. In fact her tutor at Somerville College, Isobel Henderson, had said with a smile when she sent Iris along to the professor, ‘I expect he’ll paw you about a bit,’ as if no sensible girl, aware of the honour of being taught personally by the great man, would be silly enough to object to that.

  Nobody did, so far as Iris knew. She sometimes spoke to me of the excitement of the textual world Fraenkel revealed to her, and mentioned in an amused way how he had stroked her arms and held her hand. Few girl students had any sexual experience at that time, and Iris was in any case unusually virginal. We sometimes laughed together over her memories of the one ‘bad’ girl in Somerville, a dark-haired beauty who used to climb back into the college late at night, assisted by her boyfriend. Professor Fraenkel was devoted to his wife, and had told a close friend that when she died he would follow her. He did, taking an overdose the same night.

  My ancient Greek is virtually non-existent; and Iris’s, once extensive, of course has gone completely. I used to try reading the Agamemnon and other Greek plays to her in a translation, but it was not a success. Nor was any other attempt at reading aloud. It all seemed and felt unnatural. I did several chapters of the Lord of the Rings and The Tale of Genji, two of Iris’s old favourites, before I realised this. For someone who had been accustomed not so much to read books as to slip into their world as effortlessly as she slipped into a river or the sea, this laborious procession of words clumping into her consciousness must have seemed a tedious irrelevance, although she recognised and reacted to them, even knowing, as they appeared before her, the people and events described. But the relation of such recognition to true memory is clearly a painful one. Tolkien and Lady Murasaki had been inhabitants of her mind, denizens as native to its world as were the events and people who so mysteriously came to her in her own process of creation. To meet them again in this way, and awkwardly to recognise them, was an embarrassment.

  On the other hand she was always roused to the point of animation if I managed to turn some matter from reading into our own sort of joke. Then we would stop at once and I would embroider the idea into a mini-fantasy, as I did when attempting to interest her again in a translation of the Odyssey. The Lestrygonian giants had just sunk eleven of Odysseus’s twelve ships and devoured their crews. I imagined him calling an office meeting in the surviving flagship next morning, and starting the proceedings by saying, ‘Gentlemen, we shall have to do better than this.’ She thought that quite funny, and always seemed to remember it if I said to her when she had arranged dead leaves and bits of rubbish from the street in patterns round the house, ‘Come gentlemen, we shall have to do better than this.’ I was unconsciously copying the phrase from some other context half-remembered – possibly the moment in Pride and Prejudice when Mr Bennet remarks to his younger daughter who has been playing her instrument before the company: ‘Come Mary, you have delighted us long enough.’ (The unfortunate Mary is the only one among Jane Austen’s characters who never gets a fair deal from the author at all, any more than she does from her father.)

  I think this attempt at reading and being read to is also a reminder of the loss of identity; although reminder is hardly the word, for an Alzheimer patient is not usually conscious in any definable way of what has happened. If it were otherwise the process, however irreversible it becomes in the end, would have developed along different lines, in a different form. Some sufferers do remain conscious of their state, paradoxical as this seems. The torment of knowing that you cannot speak or think what you want must be intolerable, and I have met patients in whom such a torment is clearly visible. But when Iris talks to me the result seems normal to her and to me surprisingly fluent, provided I do not listen to what is being said but apprehend it in a matrimonial way, as the voice of familiarity, and thus of recognition.

  Time constitutes an anxiety because its conventional shape and progression have gone, leaving only a perpetual query. There are some days when ‘When are we leaving?’ never stops, though it is repeated without agitation. Indeed there can seem something quite peaceful about it, as if it hardly mattered when we went, or where, and to stay at home might in any case be preferable. In Faulkner’s novel Soldier’s Pay the blinded airman keeps saying to his friend, ‘When are they going to let me out?’ That makes one flinch: the writer has contrived unerringly to put the reader in the blind man’s place. Iris’s query does not in itself suggest desire for change or release into a former state of being; nor does she want to know when we are getting in the car and going out to lunch. The journey on which we are leaving may for her mean the final one; or, if that sounds too portentous, simply some sort of disappearance from the daily life which, without her work, must itself have lost all sense and identity.

  Iris once told me that the question of identity had always puzzled her. She thought she herself hardly possessed such a thing, whatever it was. I said that she must know what it was like to be oneself, even to revel in the consciousness of oneself, as a secret and separate person – a person unknown to any other. She smiled, was amused, looked uncomprehending. It was not something she bothered about. ‘Then you live in your work? Like Keats and Shakespeare and all that?’ She disclaimed any such comparison; and she did not seem particularly interested when I went on to speak (I was after all in the Eng. Lit. business) of the well-known Romantic distinction, fascinating to Coleridge, between the great egocentric writers, Wordsworth and Milton, whose sense of self was so overpowering that it included everything else, and these identity-free spirits for whom being is not what they are, but what they live in and reveal. As a philosopher I suspect that she found all such distinctions very crude ones. Perhaps one has to be very much aware of oneself as a person in order to find them at all meaningful or interesting. Nobody less narcissistic than Iris can well be imagined.

  Conceivably it is the persons who hug their identity most closely to themselves for whom the condition of Alzheimer’s is most dreadful. Iris’s own lack of a sense of identity seemed to float her more gently into its world of preoccupied emptiness. Placidly every night she insists on laying out quantities of her clothing on my side of the bed, and when I quietly remove them, back they come again. She wants to look after me? Is that it? It may be a simpler sort of confusion, for when we go to bed she often asks me which side she should be on. Or is it something deeper and fuller, less conscious and less ‘caring’ than that far too self-conscious adjective suggests. She has never wanted to look after me in the past, thank goodness; indeed one of the pleasures of living with Iris was her serenely benevolent unawareness of one’s daily welfare. So restful. Having a busy personality, I made a great thing to myself about looking after her: she never needed to tell herself to look after me. But when I broke my leg once in the snow at Christmas, and had to lie up for a few days in Banbury hospital, a dozen miles off, she came and stayed in a bed and breakfast hotel outside the hospital gate. I besought her to remain at home and work, instead of wasting her time. There was nothing she could do. But no. She stayed there until I was fit enough to come home with her.

  Philosophers once used to argue the question of whether I could have a pain in your foot. Iris certainly could not. Presumably the point of the argument, if it has any, is to investigate the possibilities of physical sympathy. ‘She may not understand you, but she always feels with you
,’ remarked Coleridge fondly of his ideal woman. One doesn’t need to be a feminist to find this nonsense. Either sex may or may not be able to feel the pleasure or pain of other persons, just as either sex can possess or lack a sense of smell. Iris, as it happens, has no sense of smell, and her awareness of others is transcendental rather than physical. She communes with their higher being, as an angel might, and is unconcerned with their physical existence, their sweaty selves. I have often been struck by the brilliant accuracy with which she can notice details about the lives of the characters in her novels, their faces and bodies, without any instinctive sense of how those characters function in themselves, on the humbler level.

  But of course she was instantly aware of emotion, and quick to respond to it. Misery or mere sadness in her friends she intuited at once, and was always able to help it, often by letting it put on for her some dramatic appearance, gently encouraging it to assume some form gratifying or reassuring to its owner. She never participated in the drama of themselves put on by others, but she could feel intensely herself emotions of love, jealousy, adoration, even rage. I never saw them myself but I knew they were there. In my own case she could always take jealousy away simply by being with me. In early days I always thought it would be vulgar – as well as not my place – to give any indications of jealousy: but she knew when it was there, and soothed it just by being the self she always was with me, which I soon knew to be wholly and entirely different from any way that she was with other people.

  In those early days as I now think of them, about a year or eighteen months after we first met, she was engaged every Saturday evening with a Jewish Italian professor, another wartime refugee, from London University. He loved her deeply, an affection she sweetly and reverently returned. He was a gentle little man, neat and elderly, and they did not go to bed together (I believed that) but sat talking all evening about the ancient world while he kissed her sometimes and held her hand. He had a wife and grown-up daughter in London, whom Iris knew well and was greatly attached to. His wife accepted their relationship with complete understanding. Punctually at half-past eleven the professor would leave her room – she was then living not in college but on a top floor in Beaumont Street, close to the centre of Oxford – and walk to his small hotel in the Banbury Road. I knew, because I was usually there. Sometimes I would follow him back – he never guessed my presence: he did not know about me – or sometimes I continued to stand in the street looking up at her lighted window.