Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 34

In mid-January 1937 Iris won joint first prize (£2.125.6d) for an essay on lectures organised at Regent Street Polytechnic by the Education Department of the League of Nations Union. She watched the German (and Nazi) lecturer fatuously explaining that persecution of the Jews was designed merely ‘to make an independent people of them’, and wrote of how the choice between democracy and dictatorship was made urgent by Spain. She is engaged with the Literary Club, and wins her hockey colours. She is now in her eighteenth year, and her political judgements must be thought of as those of an adult, albeit a very young one. She finds space in a piece praising community singing – ‘Music was everywhere,’ she was later to write – to commend ‘that courageous and much maligned country, Soviet Russia’. On the verso page of this eulogy appears, with dramatic irony, one of Iris’s lino-cuts, entitled ‘The Prisoner’, of a man evidently suffering in solitary confinement – but not, of course, in the USSR, which Iris believes ‘is now becoming more and more democratic’. This was a view, horribly wrong-headed as it now appears, that Iris and BMB were scarcely alone in holding.

In 1936–37 alone, we now know, two million died in Stalin’s purges.⁵⁸ Nor was such knowledge hidden at the time. Two years later George Orwell famously wrote that to English intellectuals ‘such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, &tc &tc are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.’⁵⁹ The appeal of the Communist Party – which Iris joined the following year – at the time of the Spanish Civil War is well attested, and not just by Orwell. Yet it is remarkable that Iris, who praised the Communist Party as late as spring 1943 to Ruth Kingsbury, a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, rarely expressed misgivings about the USSR. She thought Russia on the whole misunderstood over the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and even after the Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939 she stayed On the Stalinist line’. Badminton, she later pointed out, had caused her, like many others, to ‘live in a sort of dream world’ politically: they really believed that politics was a much simpler matter than it later turned out to be, and that ‘the Soviet Union was a good state, rather than a thoroughly bad state’.⁶⁰

By 1945 her view of the USSR had shifted, and in the 1970s she would help campaign for the release of the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, of course seeing Stalinism as a great evil. That she had no such understanding before 1943 may attest a political naïveté some friends⁶¹ felt long accompanied her. Tenderheartedness, in politics as in love, may be accompanied by unsettling blindness.