Iris

by John Bayley

  Iris smiled. ‘Well thanks very much. I don’t like to think about what happens when I do it. You’re the critic, not me.’

  Almost any picture could inspire her in these invisible ways. Once we were in Lille, the big bustling industrial town in the north of France, a sort of Pittsburgh or Manchester one would think where the fine arts were concerned. We were going to do our usual thing, a joint discussion and a question and answer session. The occasion was a festival, boosting the cultural life of the university and town. We always enjoyed such outings. Iris loved meeting new people; and although she never wanted to give a proper lecture she was always immensely popular as a speaker because of her candidly unofficial approach and the warmth with which she talked to everyone she encountered. Lille was no exception: but what was surprising in those days was the unexpectedly magnificent bookshop, called ‘le Furet’ – the Ferret – and the equally grand and well-filled art gallery. We had trouble in finding it – a long walk – but there was a small picture by a lesser Dutch master which absorbed Iris’s silent attention while I wandered on among enormous late Empire canvases by Bouguereau and his friends, – ample naked ladies expanding like balloons into a sky full of sickly-tinted flowers. No doubt they had once been popular with the burghers of Lille, but Iris had found a small gem (I still cannot recall the name of the painter) which showed no more than a narrow white road ascending through broom bushes over a hill, and disappearing. As with the Italian policeman, and Piero’s mysterious and saturnine Christ, that picture has a ghostly presence among the landscapes and characters of many of her later novels.

  There were other pictures. The one by Balthus of the girl with the slyly indulgent smile playing cards with a flamboyant opponent who holds a card or two behind his back. Perhaps a retarded youth from the locality, to whom in her own self-possessed way she is being kind? Perhaps a younger brother? Having seen it in the catalogue Iris and I chased that picture through the many galleries and corridors of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Collection in Madrid. This emanation, as the poet Blake would have said, is there transmogrified in her next novel, as are the Beckmanns we were to see in the St Louis Art Gallery.

  But the painting which had the deepest and at the same time the most visible effect on her work was the very late Titian, the faun Marsyas flayed by Apollo, which lives in a remote monastery in Moravia and was lent a few years ago to a Royal Academy exhibition in London. Iris went to see it countless times, and never said a word. To be mute about pictures was her way of paying them homage. Once when we were in the gallery together, and almost to tease her, I remarked that the martyred faun was like Piero’s Christ in reverse, and that the terrible smile – of agony? of ecstasy? – on his upside-down features reminded me in some way of the terrifying detachment of Christ’s face as it rises indifferently above what is happening lower down in the picture. She looked at me, thought, and smiled to herself, but said nothing. The Titian became her most ‘public’ picture however, the one whose effect on her was most apparent and acknowledged. It features as a background icon, dusky but unmistakable, in the portrait of her done by the London artist Tom Phillips, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

  So married life began. And the joys of solitude. No contradiction was involved. The one went perfectly with the other. To feel oneself held and cherished and accompanied, and yet to be alone. To be closely and physically entwined, and yet feel solitude’s friendly presence, as warm and undesolating as contiguity itself.

  — 5 —

  I never ‘missed’ Iris, and I don’t think in that sense she ever missed me. Apartness, when it happened, was itself a kind of closeness. In those early days, when televisions were all black and white and we never possessed or wanted one, there was an advertisement we saw on the flickering screen sometimes when we visited her mother. It showed a young man on a genteel urban street corner with an English drizzle gently falling. He is turning up his hat brim against the rain (hats were still quite normal then) and lighting a cigarette. Along the road some young people have emerged laughing from a lighted house and are getting into a car. Our young man surveys them with a self-satisfied and slightly pitying amusement, and puffs on his cigarette. The caption was: ‘You’re never alone with a Strand.’

  We had often seen the Strand advertisement together on her mother’s TV, and laughed over it. And so TV advertisements as well as great pictures entered the emerging world of her novels. More important for me, the advertisement symbolised the satisfactions of our own kind of solitude in closeness.

  The Strand was one of the most unsuccessful brands of cigarette ever marketed. I remember later hearing from a young man, an ex-pupil who worked in advertising, that in those circles it was mentioned in the same breath as Craven A. Craven A, though it continued to be a popular smoke, once nearly ruined itself with the advertisement: ‘Craven A – does not affect your throat.’ Smokers had at once put their hand to their throats and thought God, I’d better cut them out. The young man in the Strand advertisement had the same effect on the smoking public. He was so clearly going to be alone for a long long time. But I took the same satisfaction in the advertisement that I did in our new way of life.

  It was very different from the life we live today. It was like being alone, and yet we were not alone. I never travelled in the spirit after Iris when she was away for a brief period – in London or teaching – or once when she had a half semester’s fellowship at Yale – and I don’t think she ever needed or wanted to rush back to me. We were separate but never separated. I never looked at a photograph of her either. It seemed to have no connection with her as she was.

  *

  Now we are together for the first time. We have actually become, as is often said of a happy married couple, inseparable, in a way like Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon, to whom the gods gave the gift of growing old together like entwined trees. It is a way of life that is unfamiliar. The closeness of apartness has necessarily become the closeness of closeness. And we know nothing of it; we have never had any practice.

  Not that we ever practised the opposite: the way of life, not uncommon in academe, to define which a philosophical friend of Iris’s coined the word telegamy. Telegamy, marriage at a distance, works well for some people, who prefer to remain an independent part of an item. It may sharpen their satisfaction in time spent together, as well as being of practical convenience if careers are to be pursued in places far apart. But it is not, as noted by Anthony Powell, the same thing as being married. Apartness in marriage is a state of love; and not a function of distance, or preference, or practicality.

  A goose which cannot find other geese will attach itself to some object – another animal, even a stone or a post – and never lose sight of it. This terror of being alone, of being cut off for even a few seconds from the familiar object, is a feature of Alzheimer’s. If Iris could climb inside my skin now, or enter me as if I had a pouch like a kangaroo, she would do so. She has no awareness of what I am doing, only an awareness of what I am. The words and gestures of love still come naturally, but they cannot be accompanied by that wordless communication which depends on the ability to use words. In any case she has forgotten public language, although not our private one, which cannot now get us far.

  I sit at the kitchen table, and make desperate efforts to keep it as my own preserve, as it has always been. Iris seems to understand this, and when prompted goes obediently into the sitting-room where the TV is switched on. In less than a minute she is back again.

  *

  Before we got married we had found a house to live in. Visiting houses round Oxford, in the Riley, armed by the Agent with a sheaf of particulars and prices, was more like a game than the real thing. (Perhaps we were never the real thing, in that serious sense, the sense intended by Iris’s character in A Severed Head who complained that her marriage was not going anywhere.) We looked at these houses in an atmosphere of frivolity. One, at Bampton, fascinated Iris because it had a powder closet next to one of the bedrooms. Anot
her had a sizable pond in the garden, perhaps big enough to swim in. A third, rather far out, possessed a real swimming pool, even though a small one and obviously neglected. But man-made pools had little appeal for us. In those days there was a rich variety of country houses for sale, mostly old ones, going cheap. We got as far as saying to one another: ‘This could be your work-room’ or ‘The kitchen fire-place would be nice to sit in front of’, but we had no idea about heating, cooking, drains, bathrooms (though we admired one all-tiled number done in peacock blue).

  Iris fell in love with a house in the village of Taynton, near Burford. The place itself, near the river Windrush, was very beautiful. This was the house she must have. Even though she was still not at all sure she wanted to get married. She could always live there on her own, I said craftily, and as if in the most rational way. I would come and visit her. ‘But what about the badgers,’ she said smiling. The badger joke had already become well established. How would she cope with them when they broke in if I didn’t return from work every evening? ‘But you would be working in Oxford too – the badgers would have to look after themselves.’ We laughed, and never decided anything, except about this house.

  It was June 1956. Iris was going over to Ireland to stay with the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, with whom she had recently become very friendly. I was left in charge of making a bid for the house, arranging a down payment, all that sort of thing. I did so, and everything seemed satisfactory. Then the Agent rang to say the owner had changed his mind. He would sell the house not to the buyer who offered the asking price, but to anyone who made an offer, unspecified, above it. No doubt he had heard that several potential buyers were interested. I knew how much Iris wanted the place, wanted to marry it more than she wanted to marry me. Perhaps I was jealous. I was certainly innocent about property selling and its techniques, and I was cross with the owner, who I felt had deceived us, although the Agent seemed to regard his procedure as perfectly normal. I told the Agent we would stand on the offer we had made. Next day he rang to tell me we had lost the bid: the house had gone to another purchaser.

  The day after that Iris arrived back from Ireland. On the phone she was unusually expansive and confiding, telling me of the great time she had had at Bowen’s Court, the gaunt house in County Cork, where she and the owner had sat chatting and drinking Guinness and brandy. Iris disliked telephoning, using it only for the briefest of practical messages, and I was both touched and disturbed by her ebullience about the Irish visit. I dreaded having to tell her she had lost the Taynton house. But when I nerved myself to do so she was as calm and understanding as she had been on the occasion when I had crashed the Hillman Minx. She was generously philosophical: she told me not to worry – it couldn’t be helped. I have sometimes wondered at odd moments whether those two accidents did more to make her feel she would like to be married than any amount of faithful and supportive attention on my part could have done. Misfortunes suffered together, even before the normal misfortunes of married life, can no doubt have such an effect.

  There might have been something else as well. She told me a good deal later, after we were married and when we were going to see Elizabeth Bowen who was by then living in Oxford, that Elizabeth had shown a good deal of quizzical Irish curiosity about her younger guest’s emotional life. Perhaps under the influence of the Guinness, or the brandy, Iris had most uncharacteristically confided in her hostess. Alone together in the big house, apart from the ‘outside man’ and a young girl who cooked, the pair had several heart-to-hearts together. Elizabeth told Iris of the happiness of her own marriage, which many of her intellectual friends had regarded as incongruous, even incomprehensible: her husband a worthy man but painfully dull. She and her husband had agreed together not to have children. She had wanted above all things to write; her husband had been through the war on the western front, and sincerely felt the modern world too awful to justify bringing a new life into it. Unlike Iris, Elizabeth had some regrets in later life about this decision, as her last novels touchingly though fleetingly reveal. Her husband’s death must have increased her sense of loneliness and lack of family life, for her own mother and father died before she was twelve.

  I find it touching myself to think of the two women, normally of an almost masculine reserve, confiding in each other during those quiet damp days in an Irish country house. In the mornings they remained apart and got on with their own work – each was writing a novel. After lunch they walked or went out in the car, then more work after tea. Claret flowed freely at both meals, but for Elizabeth the high spot of the day, well documented in her late novel The Little Girls, was the drinking time at six, the happy hour as she used sardonically to refer to it, for she loved America and the Americans. For the fellowship of this hour she had always depended on what she called a ‘boon companion’, and it so happened that Iris’s visit filled a gap between the departure from Doneraile of two of Elizabeth’s old friends, and her own sudden decision to sell the family house and leave Ireland. This too she had confided to Iris, and insensibly they had got on to the question of how one decided things in life. For Elizabeth the business of leaving Ireland, with no husband to support her and to confer with, was going to be agonising. ‘I couldn’t buy a pair of shoes without Alan,’ she told Iris, and the most terrible moment in her life had come when she woke up in the night at Bowen’s Court and found him dead beside her.

  I think Iris was much moved by the helplessness revealed to her by this strong sardonic reserved woman, whose work she admired without being at all familiar with it, and whose friendship at that moment she so greatly valued. No doubt she had been unusually confiding in her own turn, and she told me later that Elizabeth had impressed upon her almost with urgency the advantages of the married state. Before she left she had said something about me, and about her idea of a house in the country. Elizabeth, whom I had not met at that time, sent her best wishes to me, and for the house.

  And now I had to tell Iris that the house had fallen through. I did not tell her that it had been through my own caution, or lack of enterprise and financial spirit. The truth was that apart from possible feelings of jealousy I had never believed in that house. There was something fishy about it. Iris, carried away by its undoubted charm and the beauty of village and countryside, perhaps also its proximity to the river Windrush, had been indifferent to all else. As it happened the house agent rang me again a few weeks later to report that the other sale had gone off and that we could have the house on the old terms. This information too I suppressed, for by that time, fortunately for me, another house had turned up, and it engaged all Iris’s attention.

  I had never met Elizabeth, but I had read everything she had written and had lived in the world of her novels and stories with immense pleasure, almost with passion. The Death of the Heart was my favourite. I once made the mistake of telling Elizabeth that, and she looked displeased. She had never cared for The Death of the Heart, or its success; she preferred her fans to find whatever was her latest book her most intriguing, challenging, unexpected. Those things were certainly true of her last two novels, The Little Girls and Eva Trout, but what I had specially liked about them was her return to the magic place she had made her own, the seaside country of Romney Marsh and the little town of Hythe. She had lived there as a girl before her mother died, and after trying Oxford she bought a little house on the hill in Hythe. No doubt she knew well that it is usually a mistake to return to live in a place in which one has been happy, and about which she had incidentally created so vivid a comedy world. Or perhaps she didn’t know it: she was very simple and uncalculating in some ways. She never spoke of it, but I had the feeling on our visits to her that the experiment of living in Hythe had not been entirely a success, although she had no trouble there in finding ‘boon companions’ and being at home in a wholly unliterary and unintellectual world, rather like that of The Little Girls and of the Heccomb family in The Death of the Heart.

  She was far from well when she decided to come bac
k to Oxford, to settle in a couple of rooms in an annexe of the Bear Hotel at Woodstock. She had throat cancer – always a sixty-a-day smoker, she liked to puff on a cigarette between mouthfuls at lunch and dinner – but she made a good recovery after the operation and often came to visit us. Once I was doing a class on Jane Austen, and to my great concern she asked if she could come along. I felt overwhelmed at first by her powerful presence, but she could not have been nicer or more quietly helpful, silent most of the time, but now and again injecting a shrewd query or making some encouraging comment on a point raised by one of the young graduates. Quite unacademic by nature, she was of course well-read, a sharp and droll natural critic. About this time she had great success as a visiting teacher on campus in America, where the students viewed her queenly presence with delight and awe.

  There could indeed be something peremptory, almost alarming, about her. Lord David Cecil, who was a very old friend, told me that he had once asked her to a small dinner party with a carefully chosen and congenial company, which he was sure she would enjoy. But the party was not a success. Elizabeth could never be silent, but she remained uncooperative and on her dignity all evening. Afterwards she said to her host severely, ‘David, I think you should know me well enough by now to realise that I want to see you either on your own, or at a large party.’ There was no answer to that one. She could be jealously possessive of her close friends, and hostile to their wives or husbands; and she could be fiercely loyal to an institution or person, even if she disapproved of what they stood for.

  Her own family was Protestant – ‘Ascendancy’ as it used to be called in Ireland – and she would have attended the Church of Ireland service as a part of her position and lifestyle, but she never forgave her fellow-novelist Honor Tracy for investigating a financial scandal which had occurred among the local Roman Catholic clergy, and denouncing it in an article which appeared in the Sunday Times. Honor was a Roman Catholic herself, but that was neither here nor there. The point was the indecency, as Elizabeth saw it – and here all her Irish and local instincts were atavistically at work – of being disloyal to neighbours. By seeking to uncover its scandals Honor Tracy as journalist was guilty of treachery to a hallowed Irish institution, the Roman Catholic Church.