Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 42

Iris spent the last two glorious August weeks of that final summer of peace with the strolling Magpie Players, exploring a different kind of poetry and a different mode of self-dramatisation. Scatty and likeable Tom Fletcher from Ruskin, who lived on Magpie Lane – ‘ a little king and … no constitutional monarch either’ – organised a dozen or more students into a group reminiscent of J.B. Priestley’s ‘good companions’ to tour the countryside around Oxford, performing mainly set-piece ballads and songs⁷⁴ (’It Ain’t Gonna Rain no Mo” for the company, and, among others, Samuel Daniel’s ‘Love is a Sickness’ for Iris, which, she wrote, ‘filled me with joy'), and short dramatic or comic interludes – ‘Tam Lin’, ‘The Lay of the Heads’, ‘Auld Witch Wife’, ‘Binnorie’, ‘Green-sleeves’, ‘Clydewater’, the medieval ‘Play of the Weather’, ‘Donna Lombarda’ … Since the group aimed to capitalise on ‘the fascination Oxford holds for the general public’,⁷⁵ they were enacting the roles of ‘care-free students’, as much as the parts within the sketches. Proceeds went to the Oxford University Refugee Appeal Fund.* They start on 16 August at the Blade Bone pub in Bucklebury, the first time Iris had lived ‘on a genuine farm’. She is bemused to be woken early by roosters and cows, to whom she plays her recorder. Later, seven horses stop to listen. The takings in Bucklebury are £7. They make their own publicity, both stunts and posters, and proceed, with ten stops, to Winchcombe, by which time war has been declared. It is a lyrical, picaresque, hand-to-mouth progress, with daily uncertainty about scenery and props arriving in time for a performance at a new venue, uncertainty about where the next meal or hot bath will come from —'wolfed dinner’ is one leitmotiv – uncertainty about audiences, who vary from the parsons and ‘intelligentsia’, who pay two-and-six to five shillings, to the toughs of Northleach paying a few pennies. They sew their own costumes: ‘Mother of God preserve me from the simple sewing machine’ precedes a comic rant in Iris’s journal about defective tension, needles, bobbins. On Tuesday, 22 August, Fox Photos turn up and take two hundred snaps for Picture Post. One shows a notably attractive Iris prettily sewing, another wolfing food, a third as the emblematic ‘Fairy-tale princess’.

Her hundred-page journal of those two weeks is her first surviving prose narrative. She archaically spells — and was for decades to spell – ‘show’ as ‘shew’. The handwriting is firm and very confident, fluent about what she perceives. The troupe’s antics are juvenile – she had only the previous month reached twenty, after all – but her eye is keen in discerning the painful jocularities of youth, and the agonising fou rires that are really signs of pre-first night nerves. Meeting a group of gypsies, the Magpies note a kinship, leading as both do a wandering existence cut off from the ordinary run of life. Iris expects daily arrest since ‘the number of copyright songs we are singing without permission, & performances we are giving without licences, and cars we are driving without insurances, is really amazing’. She notes: ‘Riding on running boards when the car is going a good forty is most exhilarating sport.’

She muses to herself of the company: ‘They’re a wonderful collection to be sure, & it’s devilish fond I am of them': Irishness was her stock-in-trade. Cherwell had recently published her satirical ‘The Irish – Are they Human?’ – an answering polemic pointed out that she was obviously Scots-Irish⁷⁶ – and Denis Healey, part-Irish, two years older, and not knowing her well, believed for the following sixty years that Iris had come straight to Oxford from Dublin. Iris writes of Virginia Woolf as ‘the darling, dangerous woman’⁷⁷ and is given to the imprecation ‘Holy Mother of God’. After big, unshaven and, to Iris, very attractive Hugh Vaughan James finally arrives – a link with the Labour Club and the Communist Party – ‘with all the dust of Kerry on him and the same old devil in his extraordinarily blue eyes’, having hitch-hiked from the west of Ireland on cars and a tramp steamer, missing two nights’ sleep, she soon notes that his brogue is ‘better than mine’, a phrase that suggests Irishness as a matter of identification and impersonation as well as inheritance. Hugh was mistaken for a member of the IRA in Valencia. Tom Fletcher’s indifferent Irish accent, and worse jigs, by contrast, grate. It is no accident that Iris’s writing persona, in her first published novel, was to have an Irish voice.

She talks about Communism and the international situation with Hugh, for whom she felt a tendresse to which they briefly give expression, Iris imagining him an old Bolshevik and amazed to find he has been ‘in’ (i.e. the Party) only a few months. He fills the scene-shifting intervals with ‘brilliant’ songs and patter, does Cossack dances on the running-board travelling at sixty. At fifteen stone and with a three-day growth of beard he resembles a Viking chieftain or some ancient Celtic hero. Indeed he pleases Iris by believing in the little people; he is, after all, himself a ‘giant’.

Low points of the tour, for opposite reasons, were Buscot and Northleach. At glorious Buscot Park, seat of Lord Faringdon, Iris approves the rows and rows of Left Book Club covers, of Marx and of Engels in the library, and even frescos of the Socialist ‘Lord Faringdon addressing the Labour Party’. Moreover there is a magnificent theatre with every conceivable gadget except the blackout facility needed for ‘Tam Lin’. But the twenty noble lords and ladies who arrive in their Rolls-Royces are ‘as dead as doornails’ and not to be pleased. Each turn misfires or falls flat. ‘Well-bred. God! but they were well-bred,’ comments Iris. ‘The devil take them, they were neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring – we didn’t know where to have them. If they had been less genteel they’d have liked the broader things, & if they’d been more cultured they’d have liked the ballads – but they were merely gentry & so got no fun.’ She has nice and democratic social instincts, and values them in others. In Faringdon’s library the company behaved badly, talking loudly amongst themselves about the performance. Only she and Hugh took pains to speak to Faringdon’s secretary Captain Bourne, whom both had noticed looking ill at ease.

Worse was to come two days later at Northleach, the town covered in ‘recruiting bills and adjurations to young men to join the Territorials and defend their homes’. The place is ‘scared stiff & in an appalling state of nerves. Never having seen or heard of gas masks before, they are now in a panic & imagining slaughter & sudden death.’ A great mob of toughs barracked, laughed and cat-called. The intelligentsia shushed them, to no avail. Iris was ‘mad with rage’, nearly weeping with fury. Tom Fletcher lost his head and offended the rest of the cast by guying the ‘Play of the Weather’. They were saved when all the lights failed: air raid precautions? ‘Northleach hospitality’ received its final blow when the company arrived at an immense Elizabethan manor and found no food prepared.

By contrast, the high point on 29 August was Tusmore Park, abode of Lady Bicester – not merely the ‘wide tall tawnily-weathered 18th C building with mile-long terraces & a most beautiful lake to double it all in reflection’, but also ‘lamb both hot and cold to eat, sauces and vegetables, veal, ham, apple pie & cream & peaches, washed down with cider or beer and barley-water, & apologies for an impromptu meal’, off silver plate, to boot. Iris’s acting is admired by Irish Lady Bicester,⁷⁸ who likes ‘Tam Lin’ best. Iris records throughout an innocent hunger for praise. She had been instantly enslaved to fellow-Magpie Ruth Kingsbury (who recalled Iris’s publicly declared willingness to deploy her charm on Hugh Vaughan James) when Ruth had praised her Cherwell poems. Iris notes happily that ‘Joyce [Taylor] said my arm movements reminded her of Peggy Ashcroft,’ embraces the Magpie harpist Frances Podmore for reporting one member of the audience whispering, ‘Aren’t her movements perfectly beautiful?’ and on 29 August ‘shrieked with joy inside’ at being asked by a charming American girl which drama school she had attended, as she had been such ‘a delight to look upon’. This was not necessarily sycophancy. Three fellow-Magpies – Moira Dunbar, Denys Becher and Frances Podmore – wrote unprompted sixty years later about Iris’s ‘marvellous way with the old ballads’. Moira Dunbar could still hear Iris’s low mellow voice reciting lines from ‘Tam Lin’, and could recall many verses verbatim. As could Iris; she declaimed from ‘Tam Lin’ for years:

Then up spake the Queen of the Fairies

Out of a bush of Broom –

She that has gotten the young Tam Lin

Has gotten a stately groom.

Denys Becher, who had arrived ‘looking more than ever like some unutterably wronged and tragic lad out of Housman’,⁷⁹ played Tam Lin ('perfect – wild and intense and unearthly'), who falls tragically in love both with Janet, played by Iris, and with the Queen of the Fairies. (Only nineteen, he was in fact smitten with Iris, who never guessed.⁸⁰ He first sighted her standing in Bucklebury stream, rapt in silent contemplation, and thought her ‘the most beautiful woman he had ever seen’.) When they gave a (successful) free matinee to a Basque refugee children’s camp on 28 August, near Shipton-under-Wychwood, ‘to crown our joy three real bushes of broom were in flower behind the “stage"’.

As well as enjoying her own proficiency, Iris takes delight in others too, notably Hugh fencing with Cecil Quentin (not the ‘lofty conceited and utterly snobbish young swine’ she first took him for); and quietly persuades Tom Fletcher to allow her to give up a coveted part in ‘Clydewater’ to a weeping fellow-actress,⁸¹ whose career depends upon the tour as she wants a job as an actress with a repertory company.

8

‘Is there any better way of spending the eve of war?’ asked Tom Fletcher at Filkins early in the tour. The interest of the Magpies interlude lies in the confluence of the dramatic international events with a pastoral living-for-the-moment world so soon to be threatened and destroyed: acting out Auden’s ‘A Summer Night’ itself. The Nazis were readying for their invasion of Poland, with their own wicked amateur-theatrical feint of dressing up German convicts in Polish uniforms at the wireless station at Gleiwitz (Gliwice) on 31 August – the convicts were then shot, so that German newspapers could claim a Polish ‘invasion’ of the Reich.

Uncertainty about the international situation fills Iris’s journal, as do the problems of apprehending it as real without over-dramatising it. In Bucklebury on 23 August, the day the Ribben-trop-Molotov non-aggression pact is signed – ‘Over which,’ she writes, ‘much unnecessary fuss is being made’, and ‘Curious how many intelligent people are getting the Soviet Union wrong over this business’ – she notes that ‘the papers seem scared and I suppose a grave crisis is on but I cant seem to feel any emotion about it whatsoever. This is a such a strange, new, different, existence I’m leading & so entirely cut-off from the world.’ The following day at Buscot ‘there is more trouble over Danzig.* But all the people we meet seem very upset, & it must be a great storm to ripple these placid waters.’ That afternoon the performance is interrupted by a speech on the wireless by the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. On Friday, 25 August, on the way between Wallingford and Brightwell, Iris tries to argue Tom out of doing Auden’s ‘Soldiers Coming': ‘with things as they are’ Auden’s melodramatic ballad, with its haunting sense of imminent and anarchic male soldierly violence, ‘comes far too close to the bone’.

On Sunday, 27 August Iris and Joyce Taylor, having lost their cases, stay with a hearty old couple, about whom Iris comments with brisk condescension, ‘good working class stock, but unintelligent’. They are ‘the sort of people who are nice to you when you come canvassing, but who will not buy a copy of the Daily Worker, as they “already get the Herald, thank you very much".’ On Monday, 28 August ‘a worried letter from home’ and the Daily Worker sounding desperate both cause Iris to ponder, ‘Maybe things are worse than I thought … I wonder if this is the end of everything at last? Anyhow, if it is, I am having a very grand finale.’ Michael Foot is called up and writes to make Iris his literary executor ‘with instructions what to publish should Anything Happen to him. But Michael always did take life melodramatically.’ The following day after lunch, the group ‘walked down to the lake and admired the beauty of the place & wondered if we were to die young & what it all meant anyway’. In the churchyard – ‘God, but it’s beautiful’ – Iris lay across one of the graves and ‘thought how quiet it would be to be dead’. On 30 August: ‘The Territorials were called up, today.’ Iris feels ‘strangely unmoved’ and sends a postcard home, self-consciously nonchalant: ‘Bibury has unexpectedly cancelled our performance – Crisis I suppose. We are most wonderfully oblivious of the international situation.’ On 31 August the horrible Gliwice farce was staged, and almost at once the brave, doomed Poles at Westerplatte on the North Sea were attacked by the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein. Since they were in civilian dress when they returned fire, they were subsequently shot without mercy after capture. In the small hours of 1 September the German invasion of Poland began, and by 6 a.m. Warsaw was being bombed. The first evacuation of women and children from London and other major centres began the same day.

The Magpies spent 1 September at an agricultural cooperative set up in Gloucestershire by a German refugee group, the Brüderhof, who in the circumstances preferred to skip the performance. The men sat on one side of the table, the women on the other, while their leader spoke emotionally to his followers of their precarious position in the event of war. The heavy atmosphere was almost too much for Moria Dunbar. She thought, ‘God, if war is going to be like this I might as well slit my throat now.’⁸² After the war, Tom Fletcher promised, the Magpies would tour again. But, he added sadly, ‘our show will be frightfully pre-war, I’m afraid.’⁸³

Much against the will of the company ('Do you realise there’s a pretty good chance of London being bombed tonight? Don’t be a little fool') Iris resolved, the day war was declared,⁸⁴ to return to London. She and Hugh travelled in the dicky of the Magpie business-manager Jack Trotman’s grand, buff-yellow, Renault sports-car de luxe, as it roared over the Berkshire Downs to Oxford station. It was intensely exhilarating. Grey-blue clouds and streaks of green and pink sky wreathed the horizon. Hugh put his arm round Iris and they sighed at their luck. A long wait at Reading, the place deserted and troop trains packed with ‘singing canon fodder’ passing every ten minutes, and she chatted in the carriage to two half-drunk reservists who had just been called up. At Paddington she caught the last train, after 1 a.m, but at Hammersmith waited vainly for either Tube or trolley-bus. Somehow she got home.⁸⁵ The epoch she was later aptly to describe to Frank as ‘the playtime of the ‘30s, when we were all conscience-ridden spectators’,⁸⁶ was coming to an end.

* Directed by Frances Podmore, it was the first play at Oxford in which male and female students were allowed to act together. Prior to that dons’ wives acted the women’s parts in college performances; West End actresses were called upon for the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS).

* Denis Healey recounts the fury caused in the OULC by Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass Observation and then at Cambridge, with his savage essay on what he called ‘Oxsex’, which Healey thought ‘not unfair’ (The Time of my Life).

* This included the Earl Baldwin Refugee Fund, the China Relief Committee and the National Joint Spanish Relief Committee.

* Hitler agitated about the position of Germans in Danzig as a pretext for the invasion of Poland.