Iris (23 page)

The creatures emerge, four of them, in different coloured playsuits. How are they animated, what is inside their plump cloth bodies? The way they trot about and smile is almost obscenely
natural, as are their grown-up male voices. Twiggy or something, Winky, Poo ... They trot about, not doing anything much, but while they are there Iris looks happy, even concentrated.

This form of childishness is itself like virtual reality. We used to have a more genuine spontaneous kind. It began, just before we were married, with a postcard of a very clueless-looking
kitten putting its nose wonderingly round a door. Appropriately labelled ‘Ginger’. Iris sent it to me, making a balloon on the front and writing in it ‘Just coming’. She
became Ginger, and then Gunga.

‘Haunted by Gungas’, I teased her the other day, will be the title of the first section of my autobiography. She laughs and is pleased to be talked to that way, but I don’t
think she recognises the word any more.

Something about the Teletubbies reminds me of going to see the bluebells in Wytham Wood. Since living in Oxford and finding out about this amenity we have been to see them every year. Coming on
them if the sun is shining has something of the beautiful dubiousness of Teletubby land. Can they be real? Do they really exist? They live in a thick and distant part of the wood, under dark
conifers which stretch away downhill, and as they recede into darkness they light up into their most intense colour. They vanish as if into a strange land where an endless dark blue lake begins.
Close at hand they look much more ordinary. Greyish, purplish.

We stand and look at them. For the first time last May Iris seemed not to take them in at all.

On the way there are real trees. Two gigantic sycamores, overpowering as a cathedral. But Iris has now a great fear of trees and I hurry her past them. I thought: this had better be the last
time we go. And that was last year.

As we got in the car I said to her reassuringly, ‘Soon be back in Teletubby land.’ But I don’t think she remembered what Teletubbies were. I would quite like to be able to
forget them myself.

The sense of someone’s mind. Only now an awareness of it; other minds are usually taken for granted. I wonder sometimes if Iris is secretly thinking: How can I escape? What am I to do? Has
nothing replaced the play of her mind when she was writing, cogitating, living in her mind? I find myself devoutly hoping not.

When Iris’s mother was taken to the mental hospital we did not tell her where she was going. I had doped her but the drive seemed interminable. As the nurse took her away
she looked back at us with a lost unreproachful look.

The same look on Iris’s face when I manage to leave her for an hour with a friend.

Like school. Being left there. Probably such moments would not be so painful now if they hadn’t started all those years ago at school, inside one’s own ego.

I knew where I was going when I was taken to school. But being left there felt the same as the look on Iris’s face, and her mother’s. In fact we retrieved her mother after she had
been a few weeks in the asylum. Back again later. So it was like school.

Associations of that look. Seeing it I remember the first little boy I met at the school, after being left there. He was wizened, like a little old man, with a pale leprous skin. I shrank from
him, all the more because he was extremely friendly. Confidential. He said: ‘Shall I tell you what my father told me? My father said it was the most important thing there was. He said:
“There is no difference at all between men and women.
Absolutely none at all
.” ’

I regarded the little boy with horror and fear. It all seemed part of this nightmarish new world of school. At the time it seemed the worst thing I had ever heard, or was ever likely to
hear.

Long piece in
London Review
on Iris’s essay collection
Existentialists and Mystics
. The critic made a great thing of the contrast between Iris’s
views on the novel, the importance in it of free and independent individuals, character creations etc., and her own practices in writing fiction, which instead of giving her characters ‘a
free and realised life make them as unfree as pampered convicts’. This has always interested me too. In one way it is an obviously true point: in a more important sense it is irrelevant. For
Iris makes a free world in her novels, which carries total conviction because it is like no other, and like no one else’s. That is what matters, and that is why this world has such mesmeric
appeal for all sorts of different people.

It is bound to be a tautology to talk about ‘freedom’ in a novel, in which only the author is free to do as he likes. Pushkin, and Tolstoy following him, liked to emphasise that
their characters ‘took charge’, and that they were surprised by what they did, and by what happened to them. Once again there is a kind of truth in that, but it won’t really do.
It is a cliché which novelists invent or repeat. What matters is whether the world created is both convincing and wholly
sui generis
, and here of course Pushkin and Tolstoy pass
with top marks. So does Iris in her own way.

I remember that time, years ago, when I was working on a study of Tolstoy, and we used endlessly to discuss the sort of perplexing questions that arise in the case of great novelists. I used to
make the point that Tolstoy’s greatest and least visible strength, or ‘freedom’, was the cunning way he blended many different novel tactics when creating a character. At one
moment they behave, as if deliberately, like ‘people in a novel’; at the next they are suddenly like people we know, as inconsequential as people in life. They seem entirely themselves,
as created characters, but the next moment they are behaving just as we might do, so that one can feel in a rather eerie and disquieting way, ‘How does this writer know what I am
like?’

Tolstoy’s people are both completely particular and completely general. At this point in my argument (such as it was) Iris used to look thoughtful. As a philosopher she wanted to get
things more clear than that; and I used to think that perhaps there was a real incompatibility between the philosophic mind and the simple undifferentiated muddle in which free characters and
creation must move. Tolstoy, I felt, was not clear-headed at all; he merely picked up one thing and dropped another. Plato wouldn’t have cared for that, or for Tolstoy, or for the novel
generally?

Your characters, I used to tell her, have contingent aspects because you know that there are so many contingent things in life, and therefore the novel must have them too. But contingency in
some novels is not like that; it is glorious in itself and has no other purpose than to be itself. It’s always funny, like the dog in
Two Gentlemen of Verona.

‘Is there a dog in
Two Gentlemen of Verona
?’

‘I think so. I hope so, but I may have got the play wrong. Anyway you see what I mean?’

Iris always, and as if indulgently, did see what I meant, though it didn’t necessarily mean anything to her. We loved those conversations, usually over food or wine. Only for a few moments
or minutes did they bother to last, with the gramophone playing in the background. It all seemed funny too. But I was surprised how much of what we touched on, all clarified and sharpened, is there
in the essays collected in
Existentialists and Mystics
, now superbly edited by Peter Conradi. Peter pointed out a lot of things to me, which he said were like things in
The Characters
of Love
and
Tolstoy and the Novel
. It hadn’t struck me before, because those words between us, now vanished, just seem part of us both, although how that can be when our minds
were so different – hers clear, mine muddled – remains a mystery.

We can still talk as we did then, but it doesn’t make sense any more, on either side. I can’t reply in the way I used to do then but only in the way she speaks to me now. I reply
with the jokes or nonsense that still makes her laugh. So we are still part of each other.

30 March 1997

The horrid wish, almost a compulsion at some moments, to show the other how bad things are. Force her to share the knowledge, relieve what seems my isolation.

I make a savage comment today about the grimness of our outlook. Iris looks relieved and intelligent. She says: ‘But I love you.’

Iris surprised me when the radio was on and we were having lunch – toast, cheese, beetroot and lettuce salad – by asking, ‘Why does he keep saying
“education?” ’ She sounded anxious. Anxiety and agitation are so much a part of her speech now, like the unending query, ‘When are we going?’ But lunch and supper are
usually quite peaceful times. Trying to make everything as much a reassuring routine as possible. But now something on the radio has very much unreassured her. Government ministers say
‘education’ so often. It ought to be a soothing word, even if a comparatively meaningless one.

It occurs to me that Iris is worried that it might mean something different now, which she has failed to grasp. In a sense of course that is true. It refers to skills with computers and such,
which we know nothing about. But I think it is the frequency of the word in political speech that bothers her. It becomes almost like her own queries.

I try to say something about the importance of education, and everyone getting enough of it. Iris still looks anxious. ‘Do they read books?’ I wonder whether education now chiefly
means reading books, as it did when she was at school and college. Her coherence perturbs me. Normally now sentences trail off, become deadlocked – start again in another place. Only anxiety
queries complete themselves, and this seems to be one. I remember the kindly specialist at the hospital advising that another word suggested from outside can as it were clear the circuit,
temporarily allay the language anxiety. ‘It’s a question of learning, I suppose. As we used to.’ Her face does clear a little. Learning is not a word one hears much now, and
certainly not ‘book learning’. ‘Education’ has taken over. But learning is, or used to be, the more specific term.

The old rhyming proverb returns to my head – is it borne on the same mysterious circuitry that has failed in Iris’s case?

‘When are we going?’

‘I’ll tell you when we go.’

Iris always responds to a jokey tone. But it is sometimes hard to maintain. Violent irritation possesses me and I shout out before I can stop myself, ‘Don’t keep asking me when we
are going!’ Only a short time ago, as it seems, this would have registered as a ‘tantrum’, and the circuit would have visibly adjusted itself and responded with that mixture of
amusement and forbearance, complete understanding, which survived as an automatic but infinitely welcome response. One notices that a lot of women respond to snappish husbands in public, and no
doubt in private too, with what Milton, describing Eve, tellingly refers to as ‘sweet austere composure’. The opposite of understanding. Eve was the first to rail herself off in sex
disapproval.

Iris never did that. She never got cross herself, and never does now: but when I did so in the past she would soothe me by a particular sort of reassurance, implying that I was most lovable and
close to her when I was being angry, silly, or tiresome.

Now her face just crumples into tears. I hasten to comfort her and she always responds to comfort. We kiss and embrace now much more than we used to.

Often something that Iris says now, or a word she repeats, starts me off too on some more or less dotty train of association. I remember her mother with early Alzheimer’s
– not diagnosed or labelled then – used to repeat a word in a touching way, as if it were a talisman or portent. If somebody said ‘journey’ or ‘Baron’s
Court’, where she lived, she would go on repeating it at intervals, and the same if the word happened to be ‘shandy’ or ‘ham and cheese’. Once the mind attends to this
involuntary habit it becomes a conscious one. I become aware that the word ‘learning’ has been popping up at intervals in my mind, and so play with it idly.

Significant, perhaps, that it is in some way a competitive word. A learned man stands out from his fellows: an educated man does not especially do so. Hence education is a more OK word,
something we can all have if the government goes about it the right way. It used to be normal to try to shine, to have read some book or books that others had not, to be able to quote. Lord
Birkenhead or someone like that proclaimed in the 30s – was it in Oxford? – that there were still ‘plenty of glittering prizes for the sharp sword’. The comment was adapted,
ironically, by Auden in his poem ‘Oxford’, so attitudes to that sort of thing must already have been changing. If prizes are given now they must be given to all. In theory at least.

It’s a relief in a way that things have changed. The atmosphere of ‘learning’ is always tiresome, can be oppressive. Even my dear Barbara Pym, whose novels I am so fond of,
must have been awful when she was young, and all her set too, because they were always trying to dazzle with clever remarks, or by neatly capping quotations. Innocent enough, and rather charming in
her early novels, but it must have been fatiguing in life. Socially speaking, people thought they had to
try
in those days.

Iris is a great contrast with all that. When young she was already formidably learned, but I’m sure it never showed. Perhaps considered unsuitable for serious women to show it? Male dons
certainly vied with each other, and I remember disliking it while trying to keep up with it. Nowadays Common Room conversation is blessedly untaxing. But does ‘learning’ require some
sort of overt display, like a bird’s feathers, to show how important it still is, or should be? It would have been thought odd if Prime Minister Blair had proclaimed his new
government’s policy to have been ‘Learning, learning, learning’, instead of ‘Education, education, education’. In spite of its competitive nature learning is ideally
an end in itself, and no government particularly wants to encourage that, or to pay for it either.