John and Iris, or, Why did I start blogging?

Last night I watched the movie Iris, about Dame Iris Murdoch and her descent into dementia at the end of her life. Murdoch had a fine and lively mind; she wrote some 26 novels, five books of philosophy, and assorted plays and other pieces. Her libido was equally energetic and wide-ranging; while she was married to John Bayley for forty-three years (until her death), she had a long string of lovers, men and women alike, for many years.

The movie focuses mostly on the end of her life and her battle with Alzheimer's disease, but there are flashbacks to the early years when John Bayley met her and courted her. And as the courtship progresses, we see his understanding of her go through several stages. At first he is simply intrigued by her peculiar and interesting insights; then he is progressively more fascinated by the complexity he discovers in her; and finally -- when he learns about her tangled personal life and remarkable promiscuity -- he comes to some kind of terms with who she is, and ends up marrying her. Of course, he is a little shocked at first -- shocked and somewhat hurt that she is fucking other men (and women) at the same time she is romancing him. But in the end he seems to accept that this is inevitable for a woman like Iris; that the same energy which drives her creative intellect also drives her strong physical lusts and her hunger for personal relationship.

What I find so interesting -- and not at all a surprise -- is how much of myself I see in John Bayley. I don't mean that any one of my relationships is quite like his with Iris. Wife doesn't have the inellectual productivity of Murdoch, and D seems shy about her past lovers. (She also keeps insisting that there is no-one today besides me; this fact, if it is true, is enough right there to spoil any comparison with Murdoch.) What I mean, rather, is that I find it easy to understand what I take to be his point of view -- that for some people, at any rate, sexual fidelity is kind of beside the point. On the one hand they find it difficult or impossible; but on the other hand there are things about them at a fundamental level which both explain their promiscuity and make it all worth while. I think in a way my willingness to see things like this may be related to my tendency to be attracted to high-maintenance women. In any event -- what may be a critical point -- I know I would have understood this exactly the same way long before I started my own affair with D.

In many ways, this is what I told myself for many years about my marriage to Wife. Of course, this was back when Wife had a lot more creative energy than she does now, so that I had something to put on the other side of the balance scale. But I remember having conversations with myself very much like the ones John Bayley must have had with himself, talking the subject over and coming to the conclusion that yes, it was worth it. In the same way, if I were ever (purely hypothetically) to discover that D has someone else to keep her warm at night besides me -- someone perhaps a lot closer geographically -- I would naturally be disturbed by her many statements to the contrary; but I would not be the least bit astonished. D is a woman who has developed eroticism into a whole philosophy of life, for heaven's sake. How could I possibly be shocked if it turned out, remarkably enough, that she really believed it?

Only, ... I was musing this way after the movie, not paying too much attention to my thoughts since they all seemed fairly familiar, ... when suddenly I realized that this line of thought totally erases my whole motive for starting this blog in the first place! Way back in my very first post, I wrote: "After nigh on a quarter century, I still find myself confused by my marriage .... [because] during that time, my wife has had five affairs ...." And yet, if everything that I remembered after watching Iris were true, the affairs themselves shouldn't have been the crux of the problem.

And in retrospect, perhaps they weren't. Perhaps the real problems between Wife and me were all these other things that have come bubbling to the surface in the ensuing two years of posts: the incessant lying, the denigration, the emotional betrayals, the self-centered obsessions, ... every single one of the dozens of little rocks in my shoes over the years. Maybe those were the real problem all along. Of course, it is hard to pin those down. Even now, when I started writing this paragraph, I wasn't quite sure what to include in that list two sentences ago and what to skip. Fucking other people is a lot more dramatic, and so it is a lot easier to complain about. But today I have started thinking that if Wife had been fucking other people -- even more than she really did -- but if at the same time she had been clear and honest with me, if she had been kind and loving in a reliable way, if she had been able to see past herself to understand how her words and deeds made others feel ... well, in that case maybe the fucking wouldn't have been such a big deal.

Of course if things had worked out like that, then we (you and I) would never have known each other either, so I have to admit there have been side-benefits to the way things actually happened. But it is an interesting thought all the same ....