Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 40

In November 1938, on the afternoon when he had just become College Secretary of the Liberal Club, Frank Thompson went to Queen’s College to listen to Rex Warner, who was then engaged in writing a left-wing allegorical novel, The Aerodrome, and the poet Stephen Spender talk about Spain. Munich, he wrote, which had numbed them for a time, ‘still filled us with a deep restless anger’. The hall, which Spender described ‘foolishly’ as a ‘glorified railway station’, was crowded. Students were sitting on the tables and floor, but Frank managed to squeeze onto a bench against a wall. While Spender was making a woolly speech about ‘the poet in politics’, Frank noticed a girl leaning on her elbow on the table in front of him. She wasn’t pretty, and her figure was too thick to be good.

But there was something about her warm green dress, her long yellow locks like a cavalier’s, and her gentle profile, that gave a pleasing impression of harmony. My feeling of loneliness redoubled. ‘Why didn’t I know anyone like that?’ I saw her again at a Labour Club Social, dancing, – perhaps ‘waddling’ is a better word, with some poisonous-looking bureaucrat. It wasn’t until the middle of next term that I got a chance to speak to her.

Frank was brilliant, tall, slim, fair-haired, grey-blue-eyed, high-cheekboned, a gifted poet, an intense idealist dedicated to stopping Hitler, a Wykehamist who spoke six languages and later acquired three more. His was a nature riche. He was one year younger than Iris,³⁶ and was reading Mods at New College. He came from a liberal, anti-imperialist and well-connected bohemian family that was also hospitable, ‘quick with ideas and poetry and international visitors';³⁷ his younger brother E.P. Thompson was to make his mark as the best-known left-wing historian and activist of his generation. A childhood friend of both, Anthony Carritt, had been blown up and killed while driving an ambulance with the International Brigade in Spain.³⁸ As a student Frank is remembered as charming, shambolic and uncoordinated. ‘Stop apologising,’ friends would say to him. Wartime photographs show a face of some beauty, intelligence, and grace.³⁹ The first time Iris had seen him ‘he was very drunk and lying flat on his back in the entrance hall of the Union with his head inside the telephone-box’.⁴⁰ ('He couldn’t tell one drink from another,’ Iris wrote to his mother in 1941.) It was almost certainly at that November meeting at Queen’s that someone – probably Leonie Marsh, among the first to join the Communist Party – pointed Frank out to Iris: ‘"There’s Frank Thompson. He’s a most remarkable man. We must get him into the Party.” And so,’ Iris remembered, ‘we did … He was, I think, the most remarkable person that I met as an undergraduate at Oxford.’⁴¹ Their first meeting happened a term later.

There is a pleasing symmetry about the fact that Iris is remembered in her Oxford years, among other things, for her involvement in political life and in amateur theatricals, especially her memorable Leader of the ‘Chorus’ in the Christ Church production of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in June 1940.*⁴² The two relate. Even if her play-acting was not always politicised, her politics were certainly dramatic, and it is fitting that the by-election in which she played a role was rapidly turned into part of a student play. A play, moreover, in which most of the leading players were, in real life, to be in love with each other, but not in the right order, and many of the men, sooner or later, were in love with Iris. In Auden’s ‘A Summer Night’, a favourite poem,⁴³ where a bitter historical and political irony collides with an intense elegiac lyricism, Continental Europe is about to be convulsed in suffering, while the guilty English ‘whom hunger cannot move,/In gardens where we feel secure,/Look up, and with a sigh endure,/The tyrannies of love’. Love intoxicated the players as well as politics.

The Lindsay/Hogg by-election continued to resonate in Iris’s second term at Oxford. To show the dangers of Fascism in Britain, Frank and some friends, notably Leo Pliatzky and Leonie Marsh, wrote, produced and acted in It Can Happen Here, which imagined Britain as a Fascist police state.⁴⁴ Frank and Leo’s friendship spanned the social spectrum, and the two constituencies from which the Labour Party drew its strength. Leo Pliatzky – ‘the old cynic himself, Iris was to call him⁴⁵ – was at Corpus reading Honour Mods. Later to be Secretary of the Fabian Society and a distinguished, indeed knighted, Treasury civil servant, he was Jewish, Manchester-born and poor, with a St Petersburg-born father who gambled. He had been rescued by the Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, Harold Laski, from working for l7/6d a week in the Houndsditch Warehouse Company;⁴⁶ Laski paid to complete Leo’s education, and Oxford was memorable in part for offering, for the first time in his life, three square meals a day. Mainly set in a concentration camp in Christ Church Meadow, with flashbacks to a sherry party and to a meeting of the Oxford Union, It Can Happen Here also portrayed the proctors and a works meeting. The Lindsay committee rooms during the by-election featured significantly. The play had one performance at 8.15 p.m. on 6 March 1939, admission price sixpence, in St Michael’s Hall to a (largely) Labour Club audience, and was well received.

Frank (who played ‘Dennis Fairlie') and Leo (who wrote but did not act) went on a pub-crawl afterwards, ending up with a bottle of whisky in the play’s producer Doug Lowe’s rooms in Ruskin. Leonie had seen to it that Iris – ‘the dream-girl to whom I’d never spoken’, as Frank called her – was with them. Doug Lowe told Frank that Iris was ‘a nice girl, and pretty easy too, from wot I ‘ear’ – wishful thinking on Lowe’s part.⁴⁷ Lowe, on one side of the bed on which Iris reclined, started to ‘paw’ her. Frank, on the other, wanted to stroke her too: ‘Anyone would want to stroke Iris,’ Frank observed. Indeed a ‘witty liberal’ was trying to edge Frank out. But Frank could see that Iris did not wish to be pawed, and wanting to make a good first impression despite being pretty drunk, he grew solemn and started on politics. He had left the Liberal Club the week before because it was ‘too frivolous’. He had no use for the Labour leaders either. Iris asked him provocatively, ‘What about the Communist Party?’

I was dumbstruck. I’d never thought of it before. Right then I couldn’t see anything against it, but I felt it would be wise to wait till I’d sobered up before deciding. So I said, ‘Come to tea in a couple of days and convert me’. Then I staggered home and lay on a sofa … announcing to the world that I had met a stunner of a girl and was joining the Communist party for love of her. But next morning it still seemed good. I read [Lenin’s] State and Revolution, talked to several people, and soon made up my mind.

By the time Iris came to tea in Frank’s very untidy room with, typically, ‘Liddell and Scott always open on the table, and a large teddy-bear and a top hat on the mantelpiece and Voi che Sapete on the gramophone’,⁴⁸ there was no need for a conversion: ‘My meeting her was only the point at which quantitative change gave place to change in quality.’ Frank pondered, ‘maybe I needed to meet her, to realise how gentle and artistic communists can be. Or maybe I needed to be drunk, so I could consider the question with an open mind.’ Leonie welcomed him into the Party with a ‘dramatic gesture, saved by a wicked smile’. He wrote to a friend,⁴⁹ ‘I’ve met my dream-girl – a poetic Irish Communist who’s doing Honour Mods. I worship her.’

The group associated with It Can Happen Here took to ‘knocking about together': Frank, Leonie Marsh, Leo, Iris, and also fellow-Wykehamist Michael (M.R.D.) Foot. ‘That was a bad passage, the first fortnight of the summer term,’ wrote Frank:

Like something in rather poor taste by de Musset. I was pining green for Iris, who was gently sympathetic but not at all helpful. Michael was lashing himself into a frenzy for Leonie [Marsh] who would draw him on and then let him down with a thud. In the evenings we would swap sorrows and read bits of Verlaine to each other.

Frank spent three whole days that May walking round and round New College gardens, observing the chestnuts bearing their white candles, the pink tulips and blue forget-me-nots, in the intervals between writing letters to Iris and tearing them up. He wrote poems to her expressing ‘calf-love’.⁵⁰ Iris, ‘with her gentleness and her simplicity’, was the person from whom he wanted to hear good news about himself, ‘But Iris never told a lie yet, so I got worse and worse.’ Michael hid Frank’s cut-throat razor from him. Leo, more down-to-earth, invited him to dinner. When, one evening, Iris disappeared into Doug Lowe’s rooms in Ruskin, Frank went back to his parents’ house on Boar’s Hill and, on his mother’s sensible advice, dug up an entire bed of irises as a counter-charm.⁵¹ He stopped sleeping, started talking to himself, was in such a bad way that he escaped to spend a week at home, gardening, going for walks, climbing trees. Other things cheered him. There was the ‘big joyous world of his friends, not only political ones’.⁵² He found comfort in the idylls of Theocritus, especially the tenth, and in two other Greek pastoral poets, Bion and Moschus, whom Iris recalled his quoting to her ‘exuberantly’.

So Frank’s old schoolfriend and rival from Winchester Michael (M.R.D.) Foot was crazy about Leonie, who adored Frank, who was hopelessly in love with Iris. If Iris had loved Michael, it would have made a perfect quartet of frustrated desire, like that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, and doubtless one blueprint – there would be others – for the love-vortices of her novels. On this unhappy love quartet, Frank was able to joke in a parody of Marxist-Leninist Newspeak: ‘It’s not shortage of resources that’s the problem, comrades. It’s maldistribution of supplies.’⁵³