Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 37

‘My schooldays lacked colour and gaiety in à way that they needn’t have done – and in a way which made the change from school to student life violent and positively intoxicating.’¹ Iris, who had read Angela Brazil’s exciting boarding-school tales, found her own schooldays unnecessarily ‘dreary’ by comparison: she had had to ‘spend my time making bloody dresses when I could have been learning languages’.² None the less, most Oxford peers noted that she arrived at the university with some assurance.³ Her memory differed. A schoolchild before the war had no ‘part’ to play. Teenagers had not yet been invented. Being able to play-act the role of a student, by contrast, gave Iris confidence at a time when she ‘needed it badly’.

Iris and her fellow new arrivals at Somerville were given a talking-to by the tall, gaunt French scholar Vera Farnell, speaking as Dean: ‘You must seriously realise that you have to be careful how you behave. It isn’t a joking-matter, the women are still very much on probation in this University. You may think that it doesn’t matter if you do something a little wild, but I can tell you that it will.’ This was the voice of hard experience: a second-year Somerville student to whose case Farnell was reported to be unsympathetic had, the previous year, been ‘sent down’, or permanently dismissed from Oxford, after being found in flagrante in her boyfriend’s rooms by his landlady. The boyfriend’s fate, by contrast, was merely to be ‘rusticated’, or banished for a term, after which he resumed his studies. Lucy Klatschko, quiet, fey and very beautiful, half-Latvian and Jewish senior scholar reading Modem languages, who was later to be both a nun and lifelong friend of Iris, is the student referred to in John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (Elegy for Iris in the USA) as being helped by a boyfriend back over the college wall. There was an easy place, and she climbed back quite often.⁴

Despite Vera Farnell’s caveats, and the fact that keeping Iris at Oxford was ‘just ruining’ Hughes,⁵ life here was different, joyous and painful, full at last of Iris’s intellectual equals. She positively threw herself into the stage-role of ‘being-a-student’, into a ‘hurricane of essays and proses and campaigns and committees and sherry parties and political and aesthetic arguments’.⁶ She had heard plenty of classical music at school, but no jazz, despite growing up during the best part of the jazz age. She had to wait until she was nineteen before she realised that dancing – as opposed to the Greek dancing practised at Badminton – ‘can be something marvellous, something ecstatic’. There were further sources of bliss and pain, apart from the untoward number of men who fell in love with her.

Iris felt joyous when, having been called ‘Iris’ at school, her tutors called her ‘Miss Murdoch’.⁷ There was her very first alcoholic drink, consumed in the Royal Oak opposite Somerville in the company of Carol Stewart and another undergraduate.⁸ Drinking was a forbidden pleasure. No students were officially allowed to keep drink in their rooms, or to enter a pub – a delightful adventure in itself because one might be ‘progged’ – caught by the rule-enforcing Proctors. Iris did not know the names of any drinks, so one of her companions ordered a gin and lime for her: ‘The experience comes back to me surrounded by a halo of the purest and most intense joy.’⁹ Carol Stewart saw something ‘aboriginal’ in Iris – ‘simplicity, naiveté, power, and space’. She further noted how unusually watchful and observant Iris was. The joy of her first drink accompanied her joy at freedom. There were disappointments also. She thought she would get straight into the Bach Choir, but was turned down when she admitted she could not sight-read: ‘They didn’t even hear me sing. That caused me such rage.’¹⁰

Mary Scrutton (later Midgley, the philosopher), daughter of a canon who had been Chaplain at King’s College, Cambridge, has a strong memory of Iris when both first came up. Iris’s peers were timid, very afraid of making fools of themselves, doubtful about what was expected of them, anxious about opening their mouths. Iris was different. When she went to tea with the Principal, the painfully shy Helen Darbishire, she reported herself disgusted by the claustrophobic and stilted conversation: ‘What a waste, to go to tea with a really intelligent woman, & talk about Siamese cats.’¹¹ Iris’s confidence, Mary Scrutton felt, was extraordinarily helpful to others in her year. She had a faculty which stayed with her: she didn’t care much what people thought, was not self-conscious. She was there to get on with things and enjoy them. She at once arranged her room in East Quad, on the first floor above the archway, overlooking the quad and the Woodstock Road,¹² which she managed to make look like an art student’s room, with posters and an art deco cushion which lived on for sixty years at her flat in Cornwall Gardens, aquamarine, stripy, with inset spheres. Mary and Iris took to each other right away – Mary sat on the floor, and they began a conversation that went on for decades, and which in 1998 Iris recalled with warmth.

Iris occupied a position simultaneously central, and yet also apart, at Somerville. The tables across the dining-room went third-year (by the windows), second-year, first-year (by the doors). But down the dining-room they went, unofficially, ‘stodgy, middling, and wild’. Those who sat at the top table were nearest to the dons: ‘some dull people from the history school’ who trooped in punctually in a body from the library, then trooped back to the library immediately afterwards (or so, with the superciliousness of youth, it appeared to Iris and Mary). Nearest the door was the ‘wild’ table, comprising those who least wanted it to be noticed whether they arrived on time or not. There sat a Princess Natalya Galitzine, who eloped in her first term, beautiful, quiet, slim, composed Anne Cloake, and Leonie Marsh, a ‘flamboyant Bolshevik’ with a face like ‘a slightly dissipated lion’s’. Wildness here referred primarily to politics, meaning membership of the Oxford Labour Group and/or the Communist Party, also to frequent changes of partner, to attractiveness, dress and hairstyle. Leonie dressed ‘like a bolshevik … in her warm woollen jerkin, her blue serge skirt, red belt, sandals and red mittens’.¹³ Respectable hair was short or up-and-back; ‘wild’ hair could be long or curled in some exciting manner, possibly dyed. Iris’s hair was long and blonde; Leonie’s a ‘black defiant lion’s mane’.

Then there was the bourgeois middle table where sat Mary, Charlotte Williams-Ellis and Nancy Fisher. Philippa Bosanquet, who came up in 1939, sat either at the middle table or, if in trousers, at the ‘end’ table. Iris was liable to turn up anywhere, at the wild or the middle tables, even at the top. What was distinctive about this, and unlike anyone else that Mary knew, was that Iris always had important friendships of very varied kinds. Her movement from table to table seemed a metaphor for her way of appearing at home in different milieux, throughout her life, while belonging essentially to herself.

Iris believed that university friendships lasted for life.¹⁴ Hers were to. Novel after Iris novel depends upon the convention that a court of characters have been friends since college days. Did she understand how uniquely true this was of her own generation – more, arguably, than of any other? Friendships formed just before the war partook of the same intensity as did politics and love; no one, after all, knew who would survive the coming onslaught. Casualties of war apart, Iris mislaid few friends notably or dramatically, and when losses did happen she brooded over them, accounting them significant. David Hicks, Hal Lidderdale, Noel Martin, Mary Midgley, Leo Pliatzky, Frank Thompson, Philippa and Michael (M.R.D.) Foot: their names resonate through the nearly sixty years of her journals.