Iris and Her Friends
Bayley, John & Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
BOOKS Love in a time of Alzheimer's Iris and Her Friends A Memoir of Memory and Desire John Bayley Sain/ Martin's iV.ss, ±22 tfj. ;>/; 2™ Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Just a year ago, John...
...Iris and Her Friends focuses not so much on Murdoch or their marriage or their friends, but on Bayley and his seemingly unlimited capacity to deal patiently with a wife become a willful, and at times demonic, infant...
...It is the record of these reveries and small pleasures that makes up Iris and Her Friends...
...Though she may have lost her self, Bayley does not lose her or the sense of reality that constituted their life together...
...I started to kiss the face, and I started laughing, too, as we embraced each other...
...This imagined exchange occurs as Bay-ley and Murdoch are driving home in the dark from a funeral in which Bay-ley has made a fool of himself giving the eulogy and Murdoch fools of them both by her childish behavior...
...his English boy school days, his undistinguished army service, and after the war an oddly comic courtship of a German fraulein, recently a member of the female branch of the Hitler Youth...
...I found myself rolling down a steep grassy slope...
...Winicott, spoke of "the ordinary good mother," or "the good enough mother," not minCommonweal 21 October 8,1999 imizing the task of care giving but emphasizing how capable most of us are of caring for those who are or are become helpless...
...I plunged through and immediately lost my footing...
...And so Bayley proves himself a "good enough mother...
...Holding on to an Iris, a wife without identity or memory, is both heroic and touchingly maternal...
...and here is an equally small volume about the couple's last year together, really about Bayley's last year with a lost soul...
...What is true...
...Maternal and heroic, I think, in the sense in which Bayley's countryman, the pediatrician and child analyst D.W...
...her memory gone, her ability to be calmed and cared for was radically diminished...
...As I picked myself up, breathless, I found Iris was beside me...
...It is Bayley's forbearance and almost infinite patience that are so striking and give the story its luminous sense of generosity...
...In the course of the drive home from the funeral, Murdoch throws herself from the car...
...More practically, after Murdoch had been put to bed, he enjoyed a sacrosanct cocktail hour, a quiet supper, and late-night TV...
...There are moments when the reader wonders...
...Has Bayley himself gone daft...
...In one surrealistic encounter, Bayley and Elias Canetti, an early rival for Murdoch's affection, agree to exchange wives...
...After jumping out of the car, she must have fallen down the slope, just as I had done, and landed up safe at the bottom like a little puffball...
...Her face now was just visible in the gloom...
...By way of surviving the difficult and frustrating final months, Bayley turned to daydreaming, dreams, and journal keeping...
...Murdoch had literally lost her self...
...Bayley found that the marriage to which each had entered somewhat gingerly was in extremis "now getting somewhere...
...The memoir—an elegant and poignant account of their life together including the increasingly difficult recent years when Bayley cared for Murdoch at home—was at heart her story and the story of their marriage...
...Of course, there are moments of anger, and even looming violence...
...2™ Margaret O'Brien Steinfels Just a year ago, John Bay-ley's Elegy for Iris (Saint Martin's Press) appeared...
...Bayley's wife, here named Priscilla, and Canetti's wife, Iris, will each become the wife of the other...
...What wholly the work of imagination...
...He recounted, in that small volume, the story of his marriage to Iris Murdoch, the English novelist and philosopher, who was then suffering from Alzheimer's...
...He declares himself at one point to be on the verge of a breakdown: "Suddenly I started crying in earnest, gulping and hiccuping, with my mouth gaping open...
...Is there a difference...
...her review of Elegy for Iris appeared in the issue of February 12,1999...
...All of this could have been a caregiver's nightmare—and at times it seems to have been...
...Bayley stops and frantically begins running down the hill they have been winding up: "Down the road again, a few steps farther on, and the shadow of the hedge lifted: there was a long gap in it...
...Iris Murdoch died last February...
...Margaret O'Brien Steinf els is the editor of Commonweal...
...More remarkably there are endurance, bemusement, and an almost catatonic forbearance toward Murdoch's mindless (literally) and exasperating behavior...
...In fact, by snatching time to live so vividly an alternative life in his own imagination, he is able to live through the utter breakdown and chaos of daily life with Murdoch...
...She was lying on her back and laughing, quite unhurt...
...In his daytime reveries, which spill over into his dreams, and which he reflects on in his journal, Bayley revisits his childhood: the real one and the one he imagined while the real one was going on...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 17
