Brain Vol. 128 No. 2 © Guarantors of Brain 2005; all rights reserved
‘A beautiful creature that jumps’
London, UK
The career of writers, like that of trees, is often dateable by observable means. To write a play, or a full-length novel, would seem to require a fully operative, healthy body, more than usual physical and, usually, sexual energy, and a capacity for what one could call management, i.e. the capacity to organize material, to hold several themes together, and to take big architectonic views of the work in prospect. There are obvious exceptions to these generalizations, but a study of the lives of writers will usually find all these factors in place. I am not speaking of those whose output is small or limited. I am not talking, for example, about the authors of haiku or short lyrics, or epigrams, but of the long haul required to produce, at its finest, War and Peace, Paradise Lost or David Copperfield. It is impossible to imagine any of these works being written by an old person. In the case of John Milton, who lived from 1608 to 1674, there is distinct evidence of slowing down after he passed his 60th birthday. The emotional and sexual tempests of his earlier two marriages were followed by a quieter third marriage. The man who was in effect Foreign Secretary in Cromwell's Commonwealth and who had great organizational powers, to the point of being able to dictate an entire epic poem which he had held in his head while going blind, wrote the late work, Samson Agonistes, which is full of good bits, but which is dramatically and linguistically incoherent. It is a mere series of short scenes.
Now, evidently Milton did not suffer from Alzheimer's disease, but I mention it to show that in any writing life which lasts beyond the 60th or 65th birthday, there is likely to be a very noticeable difference between the sheer energy and organizational skills of the practitioner when comparisons are made with earlier work.
Dr Peter Garrard and colleagues' study of the work of the late Dame Iris Murdoch (page 250) takes us into slightly different territory. Post-mortem examination demonstrated that ‘there were features of Alzheimer's disease throughout the brain, with disproportionate deposition of plaques and tangles, as well as gliosis and spongiosis in temporal regions’.
The authors of this fascinating paper have provided an analysis of three texts by Murdoch—her first novel Under the Net, written in her 30 s; The Sea, The Sea, which is considered by the authors to be a work demonstrating Murdoch at the height of her powers; and her final book Jackson's Dilemma, published in 1995, but already demonstrating signs, they aver, of the incipient disease.
What their survey shows is that while structure and syntax remain more or less intact in the final text, there is a dramatic decline in semantic and lexical dexterity. Presented with these images during formal examination of her cognitive state, for Dame Iris a kangaroo was a ‘beautiful creature that jumps’; and a bus ‘something carried along’. Put crudely, I draw the inference from this evidence, that Iris Murdoch was still able to form sentences when she was in the early stages of incipient Alzheimer's, but that she was already losing her grip on English vocabulary; there was a much narrower semantic and lexicographic range. The authors of the survey also quote the dismay of the reviewers who found the story of Jackson's Dilemma incoherent. A. S. Byatt found it ‘an Indian Rope Trick in which all the people have no selves and therefore there is no story and no novel’.
I think it is worth saying near the outset, as a literary comment on this paper, that there are difficulties with this particular patient or ‘sample’. For scientific purposes, it is sad that, for example, Dame Agatha Christie did not suffer from Alzheimer's disease. They would then be able to compare the beautifully neat and coherently plotted novels produced in her vigour with those of her decline. In Christie's case, there was no decline. Nor was there in P. G. Wodehouse. They had discovered a formula. Each had a modest intake of alcohol. They knew how to craft their books in rather the same way that an old potter could still throw a vase or an old carpenter could still turn a beautiful chair leg. Iris Murdoch was never a very neat writer in this way. Very few of her novels are wholly coherent. She wrote at great length and she refused to be edited. Many of the incoherencies and inconsistencies noted by ‘critics’ in Jackson's Dilemma could be found in her earlier books too. She was extremely careless and none of her books really contains a simple or perfectly organized plot. She was also a repetitive writer. For many years before the onset of Alzheimer's was diagnosed, she was a heavy drinker and would often write after dinner. These effusions, even if repetitions of what she had written that morning, would not be changed, however tactfully an editor tried to persuade Murdoch otherwise.
I knew Iris Murdoch well over a period of more than 20 years, and the period in which I saw most of her was in the 5 years before she developed Alzheimer's. There was no doubt in my mind that, in the period when she was struggling to write Jackson's Dilemma, she was in a very strange state, frequently losing the thread of her own spoken sentences and often complaining of tiredness. She was also drinking heavily during this period, and I attributed the memory lapses and general repetitiveness to simple inebriation.
This devastating survey of her lexical abilities shows me that I misread the situation badly. If you see someone often and over a considerable period of time, you make adjustments for their slow decline. You do not notice the day by day, month by month crumbling of masonry. The survey here presented, of on the one hand a youngish and vigorous middle-aged mind, with an old mind in decrepitude is a stark demonstration of the loss of her power over language. She used to list ‘Learning Languages’ as her hobby in ‘Who's Who’, and I can recollect that when we were making a television film together in preparation for her 70th birthday, she said to me that she prided herself on writing a good prose. The examples here cited from her best work show a mind with a large vocabulary, a wide frame of reference and a supple delight in the power and variety of words.
We tend to take it for granted when older friends become repetitive, or ‘always say the same things’. I should say I noticed this tendency in her several years before she wrote Jackson's Dilemma, and it is only in reading this paper that I fully recognize how easily I was taking her decline for granted. Other friends, far older than Iris Murdoch when she died, have continued to retain a capacity for taking in new thoughts, new forms of expression, just as they have retained the agility to, for example, finish the Times crossword each morning. So, there was no ‘reason’ for my taking Iris's decline for granted.
This survey provides a fascinating link between the health of the functioning brain and its capacity to use a wide variety of verbal signifiers. The evidence for the retention of syntactical and grammatical skills is much less vivid, in so far as we would seem to be seeing, in these data, a writer pursuing old habits. So long as the capacity to write, or to form sentences, is retained, we human beings seem to be able to hold on to the tricks of grammatical utterance.
I can remember, after it had begun to occur to me that Iris was ill, rather than simply muddly and old, being impressed by the way that she retained the carapace of rational discourse, even though she seemed to be losing her memory. I know almost no natural history. My knowledge of trees, for example, is disgracefully small. When she moved house, some years before the onset of Alzheimer's had been diagnosed, I asked her the names of the trees in her new garden. In times past, she would have known them all and would have delighted in telling me about them. On this occasion, she said, ‘We shall consult John [her husband] about this important matter’. In all the years which followed, I noted that she had very many ways of concealing the fact that the right word simply would not ‘come’.
For any, like myself, who admired her novels and loved her in her vigour, this analysis of Jackson's Dilemma will make very sad reading. In the light of her continuing interest in, and engagement with, Wittgenstein's later work, and that philosopher's understanding of the cognitive functions and processes of vocabulary ‘in use’, there seems something doubly painful in this analysis of her fading grasp.
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