Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 35

By spring term 1937 Iris is head girl, mediating on at least one committee between staff and girls, reporting on the League of Nations Union, determined ‘not to falter in our search for peace’, recording a visit to the home of the millionaire marmalade manufacturer and amateur archaeologist Alexander Keiller, whose taste and Druidic megaliths alike leave her ‘dazed’, playing lacrosse, publishing an untitled poem in which her love of London is apparent: ‘And I watch for the bended bow of the Milky Way/Over London asleep’. In July she wins a distinction in English for her Higher School Certificate, plays a home cricket game against a neighbouring school – probably the match at which Rene made a rare appearance and a great impression. Iris seemed, to Dulcibel Broderick as she did to others, more like Rene’s elder sister than her daughter.

She published an eighteen-line translation from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonos – her Greek was coming on stream. W.H. Auden visited the school and read part of a new play he and Christopher Isherwood were writing – presumably On the Frontier. Iris sat next to Auden, finding him ‘young and beautiful with his golden hair’.⁶² She soon enlisted his help in writing a foreword to Poet Venturers, her own brainchild, a collection of poems by Bristol schoolchildren published by Gollancz at a price of ‘only one Shilling’ – the proceeds to be given to the Chinese Medical Aid Fund. Iris’s poem, ‘The Phoenix-Hearted’, lyrically hymns China’s powers of recuperation from the invading Japanese ‘hosts of glittering dragon-flies’. She wins an Open Exhibition of £40 a year for three years at Somerville College, Oxford.

For the second year running she won a prize for a League of Nations essay competition, this time entitled ‘If I were Foreign Secretary’ (the second prize of one guinea went to the future critic Raymond Williams, of King Henry VII School, Abergavenny). Apart from advocating, among other measures, recognition of the legality of the Spanish government, her essay is of greatest interest for its pious belief that the Fascist countries can be brought to heel through sanctions alone, after which ‘the world would be calmed and reassured and the menace of war would gradually disappear’. After she joined the Communist Party the following year, Iris’s pacifism would strengthen. ‘Looking back we see the thirties as a time of dangerously unrealistic political dreams,’ she later commented, dreams embodied above all in the statutes of the League of Nations, based on the optimistic premise that all nations were already, or could by persuasion soon become, freedom-loving, peace-loving democracies. Iris renounced her own advocacy of peace at all costs only in 1941.

It could be said that all her fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth, when she thought that setting people free was easy, that ‘socialism (of which we had no very clear idea) would bring freedom and justice to all countries, and the world would get better’.⁶³ This optimism entailed a belief in the imminent birth of a ‘clean-cut rational world’ within the century dominated by Hitler and Stalin. Her work explores, among other matters, those ‘irrational’ psychic forces within the individual which make Hitlers possible, and freedom problematic.

Despite BMB’s hostility to most films as ‘mental dope’, a school cinema was opened, and Iris gave a speech thanking the Governors. The first film shown was Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. She published two promising poems.⁶⁴ In spring 1938 she was one of four soloists in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater,⁶⁵ and she records an expedition to see the Severn bore. She recalled both its strange noise, and the equally strange local pride in it, thirty years later.⁶⁶ The paper she read to the Literary Club on Modern Poetry is described as ‘exceptionally interesting’. Iris kept her schoolmistress Ida Hinde’s 1937 gift of a book of her own poems, At the Edge of a Dream, inscribed ‘with love’ from its author, with its pièce-de-résistance, ‘Sapphics’. Yet exclusive friendships were closely monitored and frowned upon, and seating arrangements at meals periodically altered, which helped pre-empt them.

‘One sound way of preventing complete forgetfulness of school … and its ideals is to become a Life Member of the O.B.A.’ – the Old Badmintonians’ Association – BMB advised the departing Iris and others, and Iris became a ‘Life Member Without Magazine’. BMB’s advice about choosing a husband had her usual gruff good sense: ‘Try to remember that this is the person to whom you will have to pass the marmalade 365 days a year until one of you dies.’ She gave pride of place to a picture by Iris of Lynmouth harbour painted when the school moved there in 1941, and there was an old-girl reunion.⁶⁷ BMB, who asked Ann Leech to ‘keep an eye’ on Iris at Oxford, may have feared, Leech later thought, that Iris might be ‘wild’ there.⁶⁸