Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 19

Happy childhoods are rare. Iris was both a happy and a ‘docile’¹ child. She led an idyllic life at home. When she wrote about her pre-war life, especially at her two intensely high-minded and eccentric schools, all was, despite a rocky start at the second, golden, grateful and rhapsodic, a cross between late Henry James and Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. These reminiscences were requested by the schools in question – ‘Why did I agree?’ Iris wrote in vexation.² Moreover, though three friends had already sent their daughters to Iris’s old school Badminton on the strength of her example,³ when the critic Frank Kermode in 1968 wished to send his daughter there, Iris advised against it: ‘she had not been altogether happy there’. Presumably the tone of her written recollections – decorous, nostalgic, pious, suppressing the uncomfortable – owed something to Iris’s desire to please former mentors. With such provisos, and especially by contrast with what was to come, this period was broadly happy, and she was lucky in both her schooling and her family life. She once said to Philippa Foot, ‘I don’t understand this thing about “two’s company, three’s none". My mother and father and I were always three, and we were always happy.’ She pictured her parents and herself as ‘a perfect trinity of love’.⁴ They were a self-sufficient family unit, contented to be doing things together.

Hughes was interested in reading and study. He loved secondhand bookshops, frequenting one during his lunch-hour in Southampton Row,⁵ where classics such as Dickens and Thackeray could be picked up for, say, sixpence.⁶ He bought first editions of Jane Austen,⁷ and read Ernst Jünger’s First World War fiction.⁸ Both her parents loved reading to Iris, and Hughes would discuss the stories they read together. Her ‘earliest absolutely favourite books’ were Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Kim,⁹ which she had a great feeling of living ‘inside’.¹⁰ Treasure Island was the perfect adventure story, and she and Hughes would both enjoy being frightened by Blind Pew’s stick tapping along the road, and the exciting moment when Jim goes up the mast – ‘And another step Mr Hands and I’ll blow your brains out.’ This passage later became part of her and her husband John’s private mythology, with its brilliantly observed detail of the fish or two which ‘whip past’ the shot and drowned Hands.

The childlike, visceral excitements of these works travelled with Iris through adulthood. Intellectual though she was, she never despised the old-fashioned, primitive satisfactions of storytelling. She gave Hands’s surname to a favoured character, Georgie, in A Severed Head. Among the first passages to move her was a quarrel between the swashbuckling Alan Breck and David Balfour, the quiet abducted Lowlander in Stevenson’s Kidnapped,¹¹ and a quarrel between two men later fuelled many of her novels. Kim is cited in Nuns and Soldiers when Gertrude and the ex-nun Anne imagine travelling through life ‘like Kim and the lama’. And in her most difficult and intimate novel, The Black Prince, she gave her semi-autobiographical hero the dying words ‘I wish I’d written Treasure Island.’ ‘Stories are art, too,’ he had earlier explained. Perhaps good writers retain their childlike interest in and wonder at the world. Iris’s Belfast cousins were much struck that Iris, though so intelligent and academic, was simultaneously so simple. When cousin Sybil lost her husband and Iris at the Festival of Britain in 1951, she discovered them riding together on the merry-go-round, en route to see the ‘amazing motor-cyclists’ on the Wall of Death. ‘I do like your Reggie,’ Iris pronounced, with the only child’s unconscious egoism.

When the family came to England, their absolute friendlessness there somehow did not matter, since the three of them were such a ‘tight little entity’. Hughes probably did not introduce his office acquaintance into the family circle. Nor did he and Irene miss social life, Hughes being, like many men of his class and time, a home-body. Yet the compactness and intimacy of this family unit is remarkable. Iris had her own names for her parents, unusual for a child in those inter-war days. ‘Rene’ and ‘Doodle’ was how she normally addressed them – ‘Doodle’ being Iris’s coinage, and perhaps a baby’s mispronunciation of ‘Daddy’.

When Iris created the aptly named (since innocent) ‘Adam’ Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, it was of her own father that she was thinking.

My father was a quiet bookish man and somehow the gentlest being I have ever encountered. I do not mean he was timid, though I suppose he was timid. He had a positive moral quality of gentleness. I can picture him now so clearly, bending down with his perpetual nervous smile to pick up a spider on a piece of paper and put it carefully out of the window or into some corner where it would not be disturbed. I was his comrade, his reading companion, possibly the only person with whom he ever had a serious conversation … We read the same books and discussed them: children’s books, adventure stories, then novels, history, biography, poetry, Shakespeare. We enjoyed and craved for each other’s company … I remember feeling in later life that no one else ever knew how good my father was.¹²

Perhaps the family’s Irishness contributed to their self-containment. Landladies, after all, put up notices advertising rooms with the proviso ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ as late as the 1950s. In the 1920s, at the height of the Troubles, when the Murdochs first settled in London, an Irish accent could not have been an asset. Iris’s future mother-in-law Olivia Bayley, née Heenan and half-Irish by descent, was determinedly English, ‘plus royaliste que le roi’. Rene by contrast had a brogue which deepened in some situations. And, as cousin Sybil was to discover on a visit to Birmingham coinciding with the terrible IRA bombings of the 1970s,¹³ the English are not always skilled in making nice distinctions between varieties of Irish voice and identity.