Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 44

Perhaps there was a streak of absolutism in both Iris and Frank: in her, for sticking to the Party line; in him, for ignoring it. Headstrong as she always was, Iris was cross when she experienced the ‘confusion and suspension of judgement’, which she with scornful humour associated only with ‘New Statesman liberals’.²² The sources of some ‘unashamed certainties’ lay in the exigencies of the period, but received expression – very differently – in two immensely influential male tutors. One, Eduard Fraenkel, must have been known to Frank. The other, Donald MacKinnon, she wrote to him about. Their imaginative impact on her was lifelong: both helped mould and form her. Both are ‘larger than life’, and it is hard to convey their uniqueness and present them briefly as more than collections of eccentricities. The relationships with both went awry.

In May 1940 Iris and Mary moved on to Greats. Isobel ('Iso') Henderson was their tutor for ancient history. Lively and interesting, from a fortunate and distinguished background, widowed in the first weeks of her marriage, she lived with her family in Lincoln College, very different from the somewhat boarding-school existence of dons resident at Somerville. Her father J.A.R. Munro was a distinguished historian and Rector of Lincoln. She was very much a child of Oxford, worldly, good at power-broking.²³ Physically beautiful, fair, with a lovely voice, polyglot and passionate about music, horse-racing, poetry, cricket, Spanish culture and sailing in the Mediterranean – ‘One is always wrong not to like things,’ she used to say. If you did not like music or horse-racing, she felt, you simply had not taken the trouble to find out enough to make your enjoyment real. ‘She had a basic certainty,’ a colleague recalled after her death in 1967, ‘about what had been best in ancient civilisation, and was still the best in the liberal European civilisation of which she felt herself a part.’²⁴ This certainty that a continuity existed between the ‘brilliant but terrible people’ of the ancient world,²⁵ and those of the modern world, Iris inherited. Frank’s letters abound in it, and are forward-looking too.

Although Noel Martin simply followed Iris into Fraenkel’s seminar on the Agamemnon, tutors normally recommended their better students for it. The seminar had no designed relevance to the syllabus. Iris recalled Isobel Henderson²⁶ saying briskly in the first year, ‘Go to Fraenkel’s classes – I expect he’ll paw you a bit, but never mind.’ Iris did not mind Fraenkel putting his arm about her, or stroking hers. This was before the days when such demonstrativeness was deemed gross moral turpitude. Fraenkel ‘adored’ Iris;²⁷ Iris ‘loved’ Fraenkel. She had private tuition from him, and he gave her Wilamowitz’s Pindar in March 1940. Their relation was chaste. Not all undergraduates had Iris’s confidence, or were so reverential.²⁸ A little later Mary Warnock was disturbed to find Fraenkel’s mixture of superb pedagogy and indiscretion, the marriage in him of the intellectual and the erotic, exciting.²⁹ Preparing for a class was for Warnock like dressing for battle, to ensure that Fraenkel’s ‘pawings’ stayed within the bounds of acceptability, and that tears were, if possible, avoided. Iris had no objection to ‘difficult’ men (or women). She was moreover later to make of the relations between eros and intelligence a whole philosophy.

The German tradition of the Seminar was new to Oxford. Between twelve and twenty people sat around a long table, in the ground-floor room in Corpus ‘so visibly ancient that one had the impression of forming part of a timeless tradition of scholars’.³⁰ Fraenkel presided at the top, for two hours between five and seven, once a week. There was ‘a lot of passion around, including Fraenkel’s passion for dominance’.³¹ Many distinguished scholars acknowledge these famous Agamemnon seminars, which went on for years, as their own first-beginnings. To Hugh Lloyd-Jones, later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the remarkable impact of Fraenkel’s teaching was due to them.³² To the future scholar Kenneth Dover they were simply ‘what mattered most at Oxford’.³³ To Iris, Fraenkel gave

ever since the days of the Agamemnon class, a vision of excellence … The tones of the Merton clock striking the quarters still brings back to me the tense atmosphere of that class – and how afraid I felt in case I was asked something I didn’t know.³⁴

The ‘terrifying’³⁵ seminar has also been described as a circle of rabbits addressed by a stoat.³⁶ To try out an idea on Fraenkel was awesome – his head would begin to shake, his cheeks quivered with dissent. Iris’s class-notes include Fraenkel’s expostulations at variant readings from previous scholars: ‘Nonsense’ – ‘Unspeakable!’³⁷ He could be persistent in following up a casual remark and liked to reprove error. Hugh Lloyd-Jones recalled, ‘How terrifying it could be to see him bearing down on one.’³⁸ Yet a note next day might admit that his view needed qualification, and in the preface to his exhaustive and heavy-going three-volume study of the Agamemnon, published in 1950, he particularly acknowledged his indebtedness to the ‘common-sense of the young’. Iris later noted, ‘The best teachers are a trifle sadistic.’³⁹

Dover was unfrightened, since the seminar was attended by dons – Wade-Gery from Corpus, Bryan-Brown of Worcester and the historian R.C.K. Ensor – as well as undergraduates: ‘On occasion their ignorance stood as nakedly revealed as ours.’⁴⁰ To others the sight of a college head ‘curdy commanded to fetch a book, a celebrated scholar berated for his poor “Englisch"’, made the event the more terrifying. Many prayed they would not be picked on, some were scared off altogether. Those who stayed gained: Fraenkel had the imaginative sympathy that brings literature alive. Even apathetic students found themselves infected with ‘the vitality of ideas that struck home because they were actually lived by the speaker’.⁴¹ He read poetry with a moving expressiveness and in lectures would, to the delight of his young hearers, break into song, singing Horace’s Integer Vitae to a tune presumably learnt in the Gymnasium, or rendering raucously the frog-chorus from Aristophanes’ Frogs.

Iris and Mary Midgley had to prepare Clytemnestra’s speech, lines 920–34. After a term of silent participation:

One had to … try and understand both the poetry, and at the same time, why the language was what it was and what to do about the variant readings. In the hands of a pedant, this might have been less useful. But Fraenkel was really profoundly into the poetry, and we concentrated on the Cassandra scene … a don … prepared the same dozen lines. Discussion went to and fro, and you were expected to follow, and to see what humane scholarship was like for people whose life it was … [Fraenkel] really did take you into what Aeschylus was all about, which is about as deep as things get. There was a terrific insistence on getting the details [of the scholarship] right, and he did it in a way that really was creative and important and useful … he would tell you the history of the scholars, of what had happened in the Renaissance and in medieval times: … it was extremely hard work.

After one class Fraenkel started to invite Iris back to his rooms, but she was giggling with Mary and with Nick Crosbie, with whom Mary was in love, and he got the whole party instead. He showed them all the passage in Goethe’s Faust where Mephistopheles says, ‘ich bin der Geist der stets verneint’ – the spirit that continually negates, and spoke of its connexion with the nature of evil. Shortly after, they met him in Mildred Hartley’s room, and on somebody’s mentioning Nick, Fraenkel said, ‘Ach, he is the Cherubino of my classes.’ That implied that he saw himself as the Count.*