She cites Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” to show how hard it is to dislodge families from their accustomed roles; Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (its lawyer-narrator’s efforts to rouse the protagonist “disturbingly familiar to caregivers”); and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” to highlight the importance of “the familiar rhythms and inflections of conversation” that can “coax a dementia patient back to a reality they once shared with someone.” For my 87-year-old mother, a musician, turns of phrase set to simple tunes have proved particularly durable.
When Bayley, who died in 2015, wrote “Elegy” — and a sequel, “Iris and Her Friends” — some critics castigated him for invasion of privacy, a concern that may now seem quaint, when a few in the dementia domain even have TikTok accounts with millions of followers devoted to patients’ progress (or, less rosily, regress). MY FATHER’S BRAIN, by Sandeep Jauhar (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 256 pp., $28) is a fascinating mixture of the medical and the personal. Jauhar, a cardiologist who has contributed to The New York Times, writes frankly about his difficulty separating out filial feeling when confronting his father’s condition. He too grasps at the liberal arts for insights: King Lear’s cry of “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”; Shakespeare’s “melancholy Jaques” in “As You Like It”; Struldbruggs of “Gulliver’s Travels,” whose author, Jauhar writes, makes “a clear nod to hippocampal degeneration.”
In one of the book’s transcendent moments, he discovers several copies of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Letters of Saint Augustine,” a poem his hard-working father loved, in the piles of his study. (“The heights by great men reached and kept/Were not attained by sudden flight/But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.”)
As poetry does, dementia demands that its audience, skittering along impatiently in daily life, pause and be — another loathsome word — present; alert to new associations, resistant to old grievances. It is a mystery, and a saga, a tragedy with glimmers of comedy that has inspired at least one great modern play: Kenneth Lonergan’s “The Waverly Gallery,” which in its 2018 revival showcased the great Elaine May.
Until there’s a pill to definitively forestall the fog, what can one say but let there be literature?
