Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 41

Scarcity of resources, however, also played its part. The ratio of men to women at Oxford at that time exceeded six to one, and the Labour Club was reputed to have the best women. Some men joined the club merely to meet and get ‘lined-up with’, in the jargon of the period, a woman. Within that closed society-within-a-society, ‘line-ups’ were regarded as temporary, and might – equally might not – involve a sexual affair.* Leo Pliatzky’s first ‘line-up’, for example, was with Leonie, his second with Iris, his third with Edna Edmonds (later Healey). Who Iris’s first lover was, and what such affairs meant to her, will have to wait for a later chapter. A comment of Leonie Marsh gives the general impression of Iris at that time. Leonie left Oxford in June 1940, married in February 1941 and was surprised when Iris declared herself envious of the baby that followed: ‘Funny, she was always so virginal.’⁵⁴

It was probably on a punt journey to the arboured tables and chairs at the Victoria Arms, with Mary Scrutton and the two shy and unpretentious Williams-Ellis sisters, Charlotte and Susie, that Iris said, in the summer of 1939,? long to get married, I’d do anything to get married.’ ‘But you’ve had six proposals this term alone,’ said one of the other girls. ‘Oh, they don’t count,’ Iris retorted dismissively. Susie thought Iris incredibly beautiful, with great big round blue eyes, very blonde shoulder-length hair cut straight across in a fringe: ‘beauty of character as well as of appearance’. Susie had come to Ruskin for one term from the Chelsea School of Art; Charlotte was at Somerville. It is interesting that Iris’s apparent confidence so far exceeded that of the patrician ‘Char’ and Susie, whose father was Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of Portmeirion, and whose mother Amabel Strachey, children’s story-writer and cousin to Lytton. Charlotte recalled: ‘Iris was kind and pleasant to the shy and socially inept as I was.’⁵⁵ Clare Campbell, granddaughter of a distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, who gained a first in Honour Mods without apparent effort, was none the less ‘amazed by Iris’s social poise as well as fluency’ at meetings of the Jowett Society – the undergraduate club where philosophical discussion took place. By comparison with Iris she felt like ‘an over-age schoolgirl’.

M.R.D. Foot noted that ‘practically everyone who was up with Iris fell for her. She had personality and that wonderful Irish voice.’⁵⁶ ‘Pretty and buxom, with blonde hair and dirndl skirts,’ is how Leo Pliatzky recalled her. Leo had turned his attentions towards Iris before Frank, Michael some time after. They were not alone. At times Iris at Oxford seems like a cross between Zuleika Dobson and Wendy in Peter Pan, looking after the ‘lost boys’. Despite the ‘thick’ figure Frank accurately noted, and a walk which a fellow-student compared to the rolling gait of the oxen in Homer,⁵⁷ others outside the close-knit central group of Iris, Frank, Leonie, Leo and Michael felt her attractions. The interest of David Hicks, who had graduated in PPE at Worcester in 1938, and was taking a Dip. Ed., was aroused in November 1938.⁵⁸ Hicks was three years older than Iris, who resembled, he wrote to her, a ‘fairy-tale princess’ but one with a ‘quaint virginity cult’. She visited his London home on Boxing Day 1938. His friend, kind, warm-hearted, undiplomatic Hal Lidderdale, a scholar at Magdalen reading Greats, also sympathetic to the Communist Party,⁵⁹ was another who fell for Iris. Iris liked his ‘warmth & humanness, his lazy pleasure in life’s good things, his lack of petty vanities & meannesses’.⁶⁰ She planned a camping holiday with Patrick O’Regan at Merton, who loaned her some cash which she repaid, and sent her, in July 1940, a book that seems positively emblematic. This was C.S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love, with its history of the courtly cult, by many gentleman-admirers, of the princesse lointaine.⁶¹ Nor is this an exhaustive list. Another (un-named) Irishman wrote her verse.⁶² John Willett, stage designer for It Can

Happen Here, school-friend of Frank and Michael, and with the distinction of not being in love with Iris, thought – echoing others including Charlotte Williams-Ellis – that it was Iris’s inner quality that attracted everyone: not a classic beauty, a beauty of soul.⁶³

This would tally with the view of shy and gentle Noel Martin. Martin⁶⁴ was sitting in a friend’s room on the first floor of Corpus quad one early evening in the autumn of 1938. Aged only eighteen and headed for a first in Mods, he saw a gowned and corn-haired Iris pass the pelican sundial with a Somerville girlfriend, probably Mary. She had a lively gait and looked, he thought, ‘different’. Leonie Marsh, for example, whom he knew, was ‘quite a girl’ – one of those who get noticed. Iris, by contrast, was unassertive, grave,⁶⁵ reserved. But there was something about her, and he felt attracted. Iris and her companion were on their way to Eduard Fraenkel’s brilliant, towering explication of the Agamemnon on the far left of the quad, on the ground floor.⁶⁶ Noel simply came down the stairs and followed her. He could not profit from the seminar, but spent his time gazing at Iris. Later, he and Iris talked. Frank Thompson observed that good-natured Noel’s being ‘sick for Iris’ made him ‘dopier than usual’. Twenty years later Iris wrote, ‘[Leo] loved me, in the days when Frank and Noel Martin loved me too. And indeed I loved them. My God, that was a golden time.’⁶⁷

Philippa Bosanquet, who came up in 1939, recalls that the fascination with Iris then, as later, was general. Many were in love with her, could not get enough of her company. And she struck women, as well as men. Mary Douglas recalls her as ‘dazzlingly pretty and tremendously dynamic in her personal style – with a formidable reputation as a debater’. Milein Cosman, at the Slade, which was evacuated to Oxford, saw Iris – ash-blonde, white blonde, high Slavic cheekbones – at a talk by ‘splendid-looking’ Graham Sutherland at New College: ‘Look at that fantastic-looking girl, I’d like to draw her.’ Milein’s companion egged her on to talk to her, and an invitation from Iris to cocoa at Somerville ensued. Milein, a refugee from the Rhineland, had never heard of the exotic Oxford custom of inviting people for cocoa – but out of it came her first lithograph, of Iris’s head, executed on the steps of the Ashmolean. Iris looks solemn, preoccupied, fey, melancholy, jolie-laide.

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Iris sent an account of her first year at Oxford to her old school magazine.⁶⁸ She ‘loves her work passionately, and … takes a zestful interest in the life of the University. She … finds a day of twenty-four hours quite insufficient for her needs. She represents the First Year on the Junior Common Room Committee, is a member of the College Debating and Dramatic Societies – is to play Polixenes in next term’s A Winter’s Tale.⁶⁹ The Classical Association, the Arts Club, the B.U.L.N.S [British Universities League of Nations Society] claim other parts of her day. She helps run Somerville Labour Club. For 4 terms she was advertising manager to Oxford Forward, progressive University weekly, has joined the staff of Cherwell, and hopes next term to sub-edit that paper.’ In her first summer she contributed four reports about events at Somerville to Oxford Magazine,⁷⁰ and attended a one-week Communist Party summer school in Surrey, where the future historian Eric Hobsbawm, then studying at Cambridge, was deeply impressed by her looks, character and intelligence, noting that she associated there with the daughters of Ulster grandees.⁷¹

Franco won the war in Spain that April. In that love-fraught May Iris continued to publish poems. ‘Lovely is earth now, splendid/With year-youth’ casts her in the role of world-watcher, and shows the imprint of Housman and Hopkins: ‘to like,/To breathe, is pain and wonder’. ‘Oxford Lament’ begins:

Deliver me from the usual thing,

The clever inevitability of the conversation,

The brilliant platitudes and second-hand

Remarks about life.

She expresses both the self-conscious world-weariness behind which the averagely intelligent student in so many periods hides unconfident immaturity, but also a brave revulsion from the pose of having-seen-through-all-poses, and a longing for an intensity of expression that might strike the reader as unmediated and fresh. A frustrated longing, in a sense, for the powers of a ‘grown-up’ sensibility that might still evoke intensity:

O for the tangent terror

Of the metaphor no one has used –

The keenness of cutting edges

On fresh green ice of thought.

Gradually, the young men at Oxford were called up for the war. The summer of 1939 was the last of Oxford for Frank. One of his last nights was spent at Corpus with Leo and Noel.

In Corpus everyone stands one drinks and I was pretty whistled … After I had eaten two tulips in the quad and bust a window, they dragged me into Leo’s room and sat on me. I calmed down and they thought I was safe enough to take on the river. The red clouds round Magdalen tower were fading to grey, when we met two people we didn’t like. We chased them and tried to upset their canoe. We got slowed up at the rollers, and then I dropped my paddle. With the excitement all the beer surged up in me. Shouting the historic slogan, ‘All hands to the defence of the Soviet fatherland!’ I plunged into the river. They fished me out but I plunged in again. By a series of forced marches they dragged me back and dumped me on the disgusted porter at the Holywell gate.

After Frank had burst into ‘an important meeting of the college communist group’ Comrade Foot, by a unanimous vote, was given ‘the revolutionary task of putting [him] to bed’. Such jokey accounts make Frank sound like a rugger ‘hearty’. His inclinations, in fact, were political, passionately humanistic and aesthetic, and he spent much of that year putting his idealism to the test. That Easter he had worked in a school for refugee Jewish boys at New Herrlingen in Kent: ‘I like the Jews … They have a queer fascination for me. They’re so alive, so intelligent and so generous.’ (Iris shared this impassioned philo-Semitism, which belongs to its epoch: ‘I find my pro-Semitism becoming more & more fanatical with the years.’⁷²)

Frank was understandably struck and unnerved by a request from two of the boys for help in getting their parents out of Germany. In July, as Secretary to New College Boys’ Club in impoverished Hoxton, in London’s East End, he spent ten days supervising activities in the boys’ camp, then a fortnight working in a camp for the unemployed at Carmarthen in Wales ('thundering good value'), finally a week at the Communist Party summer school near Guildford, for political education.⁷³ Such experiences left him more than ever critical of the government’s failure to address the issues of unemployment and Fascism.

On 31 July 1939, just before his nineteenth birthday, Frank completed a sonnet dedicated to Iris, entitled ‘To Irushka at the Coming of War':

If you should hear my name among those killed

Say you have lost a friend, half man, half boy

Who, if the years had spared him, might have built within

Courage, strength and harmony.

Uncouth and garrulous, with tangled mind

Seething with warm ideas of truth and light,

His help was worthless. Yet had fate been kind,

He might have learned to steel himself and fight.

He thought he loved you. By what right could he

Claim such high praise, who only felt his frame

Riddled with burning lead, and failed to see

His own false pride behind the barrel’s flame?

Say you have lost a friend, and then forget.

Stronger and truer ones are with you yet.

Rupert Brooke, more than the other soldier-poets Owen or Sassoon, lies behind this attempt to enlist sympathy and invite Iris to ‘love what [she] must leave ere long’, and it is hard to disentangle the myth of the poem from what was to happen to Frank. Yet, if the poetry does not only lie in the self-pity, the self-dramatisation is also less boldly absolute than in Frank’s deservedly renowned poem ‘Polliciti Meliora’, written a year or so later, and more memorably poignant.