Sailing Into the Darkness
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Sailing Into the Darkness Elegy for Iris By John Bayley St. Martin's. 288 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s One hot day in the...
...Sometimes用articularly in France and Italy葉hese turned out not to be so secret, but nothing could halt the quest...
...On its shadowed bank, with "the ardor of comparative youth" (she was 34, he six years younger), they tore off their clothes and "slipped in like water rats...
...Once, though, she asked for help, and he supplied a paragraph...
...Then there are the readers of Bayley's own critical writings, which continue to appear in literary publications on both sides of the Atlantic...
...I assumed and rather hoped it would be something dark, preferably black, suitable to the person of mature years and sober disposition I still assumed and hoped her to be...
...Hours of innocent talk between kisses follow, even baby talk用erhaps less unusual among British intellectuals than Americans might imagine...
...But he finds no ray lighting the moment of lucidity when Iris told her biographer that she felt she was "sailing into the darkness...
...But could a straightforward, well-organized account truly reflect what life is like with someone who asks wistfully, every few minutes, "When are we leaving...
...If Iris could climb inside my skin now, or enter me as if I had a pouch like a kangaroo, she would do so...
...The closest Bayley comes to a frank reservation is in discussing her loyalty to a once-popular work by the other Lawrence, T. E. "This willingness to be uncritical about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" he says rather sternly, "went along with its much deeper and more serious romantic influence strongly discernible in many of her own novels...
...Iris can slip into the river (though with Alzheimer's stubbornness she won't let her husband pull off her stockings), but climbing out of the depths is perilous...
...Normally, during her productive decades, he knew nothing of what she was writing...
...But the careful reader catches hints of strain...
...When he manages to meet her he finds, as expected, a scholarly type lacking the urge to erotic display...
...First, Iris Murdoch's devotees, of whom葉o judge by Bayley's account of attempting to answer their fan letters as fully as Iris did葉here are thousands...
...On any outing she "stoops like an old tramp to pick up candy wrappers or cigarette butts" or even dead worms after a rain...
...Some are delightful, such as Bayley's reporting that despite Iris' earnest devotion to the existentialists, she sometimes reminded him of the person Boswell described as wanting to study philosophy "but cheerfulness kept breaking in...
...The humane tone of Bayley's memoir, its atmosphere of endless patience and cheer, may tend at first to discourage other caregivers by seeming to set an impossibly high standard...
...It seems that Bayley has always been prone to outbursts of anger, tolerantly termed "tantrums" by Iris, who could soothe him by becoming motherly...
...During their recent troubles he has sometimes put on one of his tantrums to make her forget some frustration of her own...
...He presents their marriage as an idyll of closeness in solitude...
...A sort of folie à deux had taken possession of them: a passion for searching out secluded riversides for secret swims...
...What she is now is the author of 26 highly praised novels that she cannot remember writing...
...Suppose her arm muscles failed her and she slipped back into the deep water, forgetting how to swim...
...Only incidentally does Bayley mention that Iris has no sense of smell, or that her mother had long been institutionalized with the disease now afflicting her daughter...
...She made no direct reply but, much more excitingly, she said with emphasis how important it was for any narration to have something for everybody, as she put it...
...They laughed, afterward, about the time a sheriff stood solemnly by, protecting their nudity...
...Their embarrassment came too late...
...When she first told him she was writing a novel, he asked her what it was about...
...Not only the form but the content of Elegy holds surprises...
...Kindly friends offered them competent helpers to "do for" them, but they refused to be done for, declining the "tyranny" that would go with a clean house...
...We learn, too, that when a philosopher colleague spoke scathingly about D. H. Lawrence's "half-baked religiosity" in matters of sex, "Iris mildly demurred, saying that she thought he was such a marvelous writer it didn't matter what he wrote about...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s One hot day in the early 1950s two Oxford intellectuals, newly lovers, got off their bicycles on a country road and burrowed through tall grass to find a nearby river...
...As I put them down on the table," he writes, ""we fell into each other's arms...
...Bayley does offer a clue to readers puzzled by the mixture of philosophy and old-fashioned melodrama in Murdoch's fiction...
...But squirming through the reeds is not so easy anymore...
...He uses words like "wonderful," "unforgettable," even "genius...
...Waiting outside her door, Bayley speculates about what she might wear...
...I was surprised but also impressed by the simplicity of the idea, and the force with which she spoke of it, slowly and reflectively...
...He describes his thrill, soon after they met, at her confiding that she has embarked on fiction...
...Even now, 45 years later, as John Bayley tells it in Elegy for Iris, a poignant, surprising memoir of his marriage to the celebrated novelist Iris Murdoch, on a hot day they will head for the river to repeat that first trysting swim...
...After seeing it in print he thinks "the result is a bit too much in the Jamesian style, rather than merging into her own inimitable originality...
...Murdoch's work elicits from her husband almost unmitigated adulation...
...I have called Elegy for Iris surprising partly because it is not ordered by chronology or subject...
...He is easily diverted by memories of friends such as Elizabeth Bowen, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen and Natasha Spender...
...Scattered around are Iris' treasures...
...After Bayley's early efforts to keep things tidy, with little help from Iris, who cared not at all how much dirt collected around her desk, he gave up...
...Bayley ranges over his life with Iris, telling what he feels impelled to, sometimes simply and plainly, other times in set pieces of real eloquence or pages of precise analysis...
...The change since then could hardly have been more drastic...
...they were hooked...
...John Bayley's near-total devotion began with a moment of falling in love that contains elements of mystery...
...She always wore these honors lightly, but today any reference to them bewilders her...
...Yet he describes Murdoch, then teaching philosophy at a women's college, as a fairly typical Oxbridge bluestocking, much like the others riding past his window...
...Would anyone believe, except for Bayley's detailed insistence, that these distinguished members of the British literary world live in a state of squalor...
...They escape the dance floor to his room, where he gets a bottle of champagne (surely warm) and two glasses from the cupboard...
...Until 1994 when, it appears, Iris' problems began, the two enjoyed happily independent working lives...
...Gone from her memory too are her works of philosophy, her many awards and prizes (with rumors of a possible Nobel), or that she is Dame Iris, the equivalent of a knight...
...Others are a bit unsettling...
...It hardly matters...
...And "I don'tthink she ever needed or wanted to rush back to me...
...At the minimum three audiences will be eager to read this book...
...His obvious interest fails to distract her from the shop talk of the women clustered around her...
...The day he looked out his study window and saw Iris Murdoch riding by on her bicycle he knew at once he must marry her...
...He comforts himself that she is spared the torment of those Alzheimer's sufferers who are conscious of what they have lost, since "Iris' own lack of a sense of identity seemed to float her more gently into its world of preoccupied emptiness...
...As to meals, Iris always thought of herself as housewifely only in theory, and now they dine, apparently, on such snacks as Bayley can concoct...
...Once I was outside her," Bayley says, but no more...
...alone), to know how this eminent couple is trying to cope with the dreaded disease...
...Maybe this was how he postponed painful episodes to dwell on sunny ones, or those he, amazingly, perceives as sunny 様ike their shared pleasure in watching Teletubbies, or his ability to apprehend Iris' unintelligible sentences "in a matrimonial way, as the voice of familiarity, and thus of recognition...
...Even when she spent a term at Yale, he didn't miss her...
...For he finds it difficult to write about her as she was...
...From reflections like this, from intimate glimpses of their day-to-day life, between digressions and pages of Bayley's analyses, we get what information we can about Alzheimer's as it is diagnosed in Britain...
...But he persists, and after a few casual meetings invites her to a dance...
...Bayley describes it all as if from a need to re-experience the scene to make sure it really happened...
...it is unsystematic, informal, even rambling...
...As they took turns drying themselves on her silk half-slip with blue ribbon threaded through the lacy hem, a sightseeing boat suddenly rounded the bend...
...She feels one with them and will find them a home if she can...
...This was a discovery she had made...
...I can think of her only as she is now...
...When she appears in flame color, her face dabbed with powder and too much lipstick unskillfully applied, he is scandalized and appalled, yet dazzled...
...She gave such friendly responses that one man wrote back happily assuring her that they were "pals for life...
...Finally, there are the many who will be curious, even desperate (4 million people suffer from Alzheimer's in the U.S...
...Bayley reports that evening in detail, beginning with a series of mishaps, disasters and ineptitudes more likely to befall a pair of inexperienced teenagers...
Vol. 81 • December 1998 • No. 14
