IRIS MURDOCH’S last novel reveals the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research.
Scientists have detected symptoms of the illness between the lines of Jackson’s Dilemma, written in 1995, a year before the disease was diagnosed. The novelist — who died of the disease in 1999 — herself disclosed that she had been dogged by writer’s block while working on the book, a story about the lives and love affairs of a group of friends.
By converting the texts of three of her novels into a digital format and analysing them, scientists at University College London (UCL) and the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in Cambridge, have found that her vocabulary dwindled and her language had simplified in her last novel.
Scientists focused on Jackson’s Dilemma, as well as her first published work, Under the Net, 1954, about a writer in postwar London and her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea, The Sea, written in 1978 at the height of her creative powers. They reduced the texts into word lists showing the frequency of each word by word type, to assess the vocabulary used.
They found that, while the structure and grammar of Murdoch’s writing remained roughly consistent throughout her career, the number of word types in Jackson’s Dilemma (90,004) was greatly reduced from those in The Sea, The Sea (209,085).
Peter Garrard, a neurologist and senior lecturer at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: “The findings suggest an enrichment in vocabulary between the early and middle stages of Murdoch’s writing career, followed by an impoverishment before her final work.
“The vocabulary of Jackson’s Dilemma was the most commonplace and that of The Sea, The Sea the most unusual.”
The study — published today in the online issue of the journal Brain — emerged during research into the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on language. Dr Garrard said: “This unique opportunity to study someone’s writing style over their lifetime could help researchers improve current diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s.”
The findings are consistent with the early stages of Alzheimer’s, he has concluded, noting that many sufferers experience word-finding difficulties while retaining an ability to produce well-formed sentences.
Her husband, John Bayley, a former Warton Professor of English Literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, published a memoir which inspired the film Iris, starring Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet.
Commenting on the research, he said: “When I was first contacted by the research team, I told them that I had felt there was something different about Iris’s last novel. I felt sure that Peter Garrard would find something unusual in her writing.”
Dr Garrard believes that his research may explain why some critics were disappointed by her final novel.
HOW IRIS MURDOCH LOST HER FLOW OF INSPIRATION by Derwent May
Under the Net (1954)
Murdoch’s first novel was a dazzling little story, very light and comic in touch. Murdoch said that two of the characters represented for her two contrasting kinds of good man — the artist and the saint. But one only sees that clearly in the light of her later work. The book reads as if it were just a highly intelligent, picaresque tale, not needing the richest of language.
“Dave once said to me that to find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love, so perhaps I loved Anna . . . Anna is six years older than I am, and when I first met her, she did a singing act with her sister Sadie. Anna provided the voice and Sadie provided the flash. Anna has a contralto voice that would break your heart even over the radio; and she makes little gestures while she sings which make her quite irresistible face to face. She seems to throw the song into your heart, and this was what she did to me the first time I heard her, and I never got over it.”
The Sea, The Sea (1978)
Here, with this Booker prizewinner, you are in deep and powerful Murdoch territory. The 60-year-old hero rediscovers a lost love and tries by force of his obsession to turn her back into the girl he remembers. There are tragicomic consequences that radiate out through a wealth of characters and the depths of many psyches are revealed. That needed great language.
“I woke up next morning to an instant sense of a changed world . . . there was a new, extremely anxious excitement and a sheer plucking physical longing to be in her presence, the fierce indubitable magnetism of love. There was also a weird hovering joy, as if I had been changed in the night into a beneficent being, powerful for good. I could produce, I could bestow, good.
I was the king seeking the beggar maid. I had power to transform, to raise up, to heal, to bring undreamt-of happiness and joy.”
Jackson's Dilemma (1995)
This baffled everybody. Lovers, mystics, scholars and children bustle about in a country-house setting, with a mysterious butler whose purpose is unclear. This confusion is not only because Murdoch does not seem to have thought her plot through, it is also because the language is often too flat to rise to the challenge of the ideas. As seen in the opening paragraph of the book, the language is uninspired.
“Edward Lannion was sitting at his desk in his pleasant house in London, in Notting Hill. The sun was shining. It was an early morning in June, not quite midsummer. Edward was good looking. He was tall and slim and pale. He was very well dressed. His hair, lightly curling, thickly tumbling down his neck, was a dark golden brown. He had a long firm mouth, a rather long hawkish nose, and long light brown eyes. He was 28.”
