Love story
John Bayley's meditation on his life, past and present, with Iris Murdoch, now afflictated with alzheimer's disease

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, January 3, 1999

Page: M1

Section: Books

If memory is both the treasure and the drafting table of human consciousness, then the tragic loss of it manages to annihilate experience even as it exalts its timeless present. Without the hindsight to digest and take note of our existence, by which we turn it into life's narrative, there is nothing left but the transience of the moment -- the fleeting aroma of the garden, the feel of a hand upon the cheek, the taste of coffee or sherbert almost immediately forgotten. This amnesic state is particularly tragic because we understand its counterpoint: understand that the world we have built -- art and God and the blessings of love and all the triumphs of human accomplishment -- has little value without the power to comprehend it.

``Take short views,'' the English literary critic John Bayley reminds himself, borrowing the phrase from an adage for depression. ``Never further than dinner or tea.'' Alzheimer's disease afflicts millions of people each year, and, with the violent egalitarianism of most illnesses, cares not whether its victims are 52 or 84, poets or madmen. It struck Bayley's wife, the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, in 1994, when she was 75, and in the few infinite years since, as she has said to Bayley, she has been ``sailing into the darkness.'' He is with her on the voyage. Sometimes the seas are stormy and terrifying; more often, they are known but endless, granting an occasional sense of peace. There is little else there now but these two devoted people, the one helpful and the other helpless, clinging to each other and staring at the far horizon.

``Elegy for Iris'' is Bayley's restrained and elegant love song to his wife of 42 years, with whom he first became enchanted when she rode a bicycle past his window at St. Anthony's College, where he was teaching in Oxford. She was 34; he, 28, a young man in love with literature and the promises of the intellectual life. When they met again, at the home of a colleague, she was sporting brown cotton stockings and unwashed hair, and she charmed everybody in the room. She was a philosopher at Oxford, Bayley knew; later, when they bicycled home together, she confided to him that she was working on a novel. Thrilled with this privileged information, he learned soon enough that she had revealed the same secret to easily a dozen friends. It didn't matter, by then: He was hopelessly in love, and when he took her to a dance, she appeared wearing garish lipstick and promptly fell down the stairs. She got up smiling, and later wrote in her diary: ``St. Anthony's Dance. Fell down the steps, and seem to have fallen in love with J. We didn't dance much.''

There wasn't time for dancing: There were instead novels and critical studies and works of philosophy, and country houses and foxes and long swims in the river, and all the braided pleasures that constitute a shared life. Bayley had to convince this sterling mind and free soul to marry him; Murdoch seemed far wider and wilder than that, and only succumbed, he now believes, because she found a house in the country where he, too, seemed to fit. For the next several decades, they found together the blissful solitude for each that Bayley describes, not incongruously, as ``one of the truest pleasures of marriage.'' And from the beginning, they seemed to possess a language of intimacy -- a thick communication, childlike in the best sense -- that superseded the brilliant critical and creative faculties they each possessed. Today they rely on that secret language, creating from necessity a kind of jabberwocky to communicate the feelings between them, if not the words themselves. ``Now we are together for the first time,'' writes Bayley. ``. . . In a way, like Orids Baveis and Philemon, whom the gods gave the gift of growing old together as trees.''

``Elegy for Iris'' is beautiful and heartbreaking, though it isn't really elegiac -- it's more a love poem writ in melancholy, an ode to the past and the stratosphere of commitment that such a past ensures. Relayed with the fluid style and even humor of that old admirable school of British critics, most of whom write as though they were playing ragtime piano, Bayley's memoir is candid about the depth and severity of Murdoch's incapacity and yet riven with dignity. More than anything, it is respectful: This is a woman, after all, whom he has adored for nearly half a century, and adore her he still does. In reminiscing through their decades together, he takes us to Italy and the artwork of Piero della Francesca and Titian, the writing of Lawrence and Proust, the rivers, beckoning on a summer day, where he and Murdoch left their clothes to swim. And in recapturing the past, he has delivered his Iris to us wholly formed, throughout the cumulative beauty of her life day by day. When the quite tall novelist Barbara Pym met Murdoch and Bayley, she later wrote to Philip Larkin about the encounter, saying she feared she had ``seemed to tower above Iris (though only in height, of course).''

Exercising restraint about the specific ravages of Alzheimer's, Bayley is nonetheless never euphemistic; he admits after a particularly tender passage that ``most days are for her a sort of despair.'' Like ``Patrimony,'' Philip Roth's brilliantly moving memoir about his father's death, the tribute and beauty of the words here are stronger than the pain and mess they describe. Bayley concedes that he knows nothing of the spiritual life, but it isn't quite true: The whole lifetime shared in ``Elegy for Iris'' is full of spirit, generous and resilient and partaking of the bounty, before the darkness began to fall. During the early days of their love affair, when things between them were difficult or ill-resolved, Murdoch used to remind Bayley of the myth of Proteus, who had the power to assume different shapes; when Hercules gripped him firmly, he returned to his original shape. ``Remember Proteus,'' she would say to Bayley. ``Just keep tight hold of me and it will be all right.'' This reassurance, wrenching now, contains the essence of their life together -- what it was and, perhaps on the better days, still is.

Alzheimer's sufferers are not always gentle. I know that. But Iris remains her old self in many ways. The power of concentration has gone, along with the ability to form coherent sentences and to remember where she is, or has been. She does not know she has written twenty-seven remarkable novels, as well as her books on philosophy; received honourary doctorates from the major universities; become a Dame of the British Empire. . . . If an admirer or 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. ``For Georgina Smith. For Dear Reggie . . .'' 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.

JOHN BAYLEY, from ``Elegy for Iris''