Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 47

In the third winter of the war Iris wrote twice to Frank about Donald MacKinnon, her and Mary’s philosophy tutor for Greats.

This man MacKinnon is a jewel, it’s bucked me up a lot meeting him. He’s a moral being as well as a good philosopher. I had almost given up thinking of people & actions in terms of value – meeting him has made it a significant way of thinking again.

One month later:

I have this incredibly fine guy MacKinnon as a tutor, which makes things lucky. It’s good to meet someone so extravagantly unselfish, so fantastically noble, as well as so extremely intelligent as this cove. He inspires a pure devotion. One feels vaguely one would go through fire for him, & so on. Sorry if this makes him sound like a superman. There are snags. He’s perpetually on the brink of a nervous break-down … He is perpetually making demands of one – there is a moral as well as an intellectual challenge – & there is no room for spiritual lassitude of any kind.⁶¹

Vera Hoar, who was tutored by MacKinnon at about the same time,⁶² wrote: ‘If I think of the two people who have most influenced me, they would be Donald MacKinnon and Iris – I think of them together.’ He gave his tutorials in one of the towers of Victorian-Gothic Keble in a room utterly bare, save for a table – no desk – in the middle cluttered high with books and papers, and Iris and Vera sometimes exchanged greetings in the dark passage there. To Vera Iris said that MacKinnon inspired the sort of love one would have for Christ – quite unconditional. He was a passionate High Anglo-Catholic married to a Scots-Norwegian girl at odds with his High Church connexions. ‘The vitality of ideas that struck home because they were actually lived by the speaker’ was one description of Fraenkel. It works for MacKinnon, too. Iris worshipped both.

His philosophy tutorials, given from his battered armchair, or to some male students from his bath, or while lying on his back under his table, sucking a razor-blade which, when not cutting the table, he sometimes turned over and over in his lips or hands, were notably dramatic (Iris when later an Oxford don herself would sometimes imitate the supine tutorial, not the razor-blade). Or he would sharpen up to a dozen pencils. If he had been fire-watching the night before, he stayed proudly in the boilersuit worn for that purpose. He was skilful at making you feel something very important was happening.⁶³ When he got to something impossible to explain, he would protrude his tongue with his upper denture balanced on the end. Nervous tutees had been known to edge backwards, so as not to have to catch the denture if it fell. Sometimes he talked out of one of his room’s two windows. To hear him, you put your head out of the other, like another gargoyle. Once he rolled himself up in the carpet, like Beatrix Potter’s Tom Kitten caught in the pastry. Such gimmicks developed the logic of an argument. However bizarre they are to read about, they did not feel false. Certainly not, in any case, to Iris. Like many Oxford characters of the day MacKinnon was profoundly eccentric. When David Pears suggested that he consciously overdid it, Iris, who reverenced him, was exasperated by the imputation. Tom Stoppard drew heavily on MacKinnon stories when creating ‘George’, the Professor of Moral Philosophy in his play Jumpers (1972).⁶⁴

MacKinnon had been a legend even while a schoolboy at Winchester,⁶⁵ and to a cold eye he could appear comical. One such saw him as absolutely devoted to philosophy and dedicated to his students, deeply religious, yet rather absurd, a joke Wykehamistscholar in the way he talked – a mixture of pedantry and madness – and not in the first rank of philosophers. But his writings do less than justice to his true impact, which was face-to-face. Iris wrote of his resonant voice-type as ‘the slightly alcoholic crafty coyness of a well-marked Wykehamist’.⁶⁶ Some felt an undercurrent of menace.⁶⁷ His native Argyllshire featured, and he liked to speak of leaving the tea he brewed to ‘infuse’. Huge, shambling, broad-shouldered, very powerful, dark-suited, ham-fisted and maladroit – he once crushed a glass at a Balliol dinner – he told one wartime student that he had so terrible a conscience about not being in the forces that he lived in his college rooms, and left his newly-married wife living twenty or thirty yards away, working far too hard in order to justify himself.⁶⁸ During public lectures, as the outward expression of inward mental travail, he would famously stab himself with his pen with remarkable vigour, and grasp his shaggy, beetling brow. Detractors saw him as a cut-price English version of Simone Weil: tortured, but on terms with a large intelligentsia-following, which included unbelievers.

One day he said to Dennis Nineham, future Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, ‘The only time I can fit you in is Sunday morning at 11 o’clock. Will you guarantee that you go to church first?’ Nineham rightly replied that whether or not he went to church first was his own business.* This sense, however importunate, that everyone’s soul hung in the balance points to some legacies in Iris’s thinking. MacKinnon was at the tail end of the Oxford Idealist tradition, refusing to believe in the demise of metaphysics, a Kantian and post-Kantian idealist.⁶⁹ His dominant interest was the philosophy of religion, and in 1960 he was to be appointed to the Norris-Hulse Chair of Divinity at Cambridge. The tide of his inaugural lecture – ‘Borderlands of Theology’ – is evocative. Philosophy and theology are somehow to be brought back together.

Already in the 1940s, when he had published only two books of basic theology, MacKinnon’s thinking points towards attitudes Iris would later adopt wholesale. That those thinkers especially are to be commended who ‘live out … the consequences of [their own] attitude of mind’, moral philosophy being the study of ‘what in the last resort can only be lived’, a central tenet of her The Sovereignty of Good. If life must bear witness to philosophy, then enquiry into the ‘good life’ still matters; those who call ethics a ‘bogus subject’ are usually posturing, and ‘the kind of mystery which tends to gather round … notions of good and evil’ cannot easily be dispelled. That it is a pious superstition to believe that pain necessarily ennobles: like Iris, MacKinnon was fascinated by pain. That those whose experience is deepest may be inarticulate. That intellectual integrity is something at least partly moral in character. That the fundamental sin is pride. That it is dangerous to seek the good of one’s fellows ‘in blind oblivion of the poor stuff of which one is oneself made’. That the field of personal experience must be taken into account; that the individual should be approached with a sense of his or her ‘unconditional worth’.⁷⁰ That ‘only a suffering Christ could help’, who might teach how to ‘displace the self from the centre’.⁷¹

George Steiner has written of MacKinnon as ‘that most searching of modern British moral philosophers’.⁷² His absolute dedication to and impact on his students is remarkable. Many speak of feeling uniquely and accurately apprehended by him; Iris among them. Mary Midgley remembered: ‘He was capable of giving one a full two hours tutorial and saying “We need more time, you’d better come back on Thursday.” ‘ Seeing how busy he was – he was rumoured to teach eighty hours a week, the number of students swollen by army and naval cadets on short courses, as well as his Oxford undergraduates now coming up termly, not annually – that kind of attention, and his meticulous courtesy also, were staggering.⁷³ David Pears, disenchanted with his course, owed his becoming a professional philosopher mainly to MacKinnon’s patient encouragement and inspiration. Philippa Bosanquet, not given to hyperbole, described him as ‘holy’ – ‘No one has influenced me more … He created me’ – while tellingly defining holiness as ‘an absolute lack of sense of proportion’. He taught both Philippa and Iris how to care for the afflicted: lovingly, imaginatively, with limitless patience. He showed them how to look after people. When Vera Hoar was ill with depression, MacKinnon alone dealt with her with skill as well as sympathy. Nor were such recollections restricted to his wartime students. A much later pupil has described how the profundity and moral passion of MacKinnon’s thinking, and his obsessive preoccupation with the difficulty and the danger of truthful speech, created in most of those who knew him ‘a sense of deep affection, puzzlement, a kind of awe’.⁷⁴ His legacy in Iris and Philippa’s thought was that philosophy is central to how you live your life.

Philippa Bosanquet came up to Somerville to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in 1939. Her chief memory of Iris before 1942 was of herself nominating an alternative candidate to Iris as President of Somerville Junior Common Room Committee. She feared both that Communists were generally a nuisance, and also that Iris might convene too many meetings. Since Philippa’s nominee won – unlike Iris, she was someone not at all prominent – others must have shared her fears. There were limits to Iris’s popularity, constituencies immune to her charm. Enid Stoye, reading history, felt Iris despised her group of friends for their political conservatism and Christianity, and that Iris within herself stood apart from all groups. She and Iris disliked each other. Stoye felt Iris had a covering of ice.

In the summer of 1942, MacKinnon mentioned to Iris that Philippa was ill – she had suffered, partly under the stress of studying with her august tutors, a suspected recrudescence of childhood abdominal tuberculosis and was corseted in plaster-of-Paris, stuck at home, struggling with Finals. The mother of Philippa’s flatmate Anne Cobbe saw to it that MacKinnon and Thomas Balogh – a brilliant but abrasive teacher – gave Philippa tutorials in her lodgings. It is typical of MacKinnon’s skill at involving others in practical solicitude that he told Iris, ‘Philippa might appreciate a friendly visit.’ Iris, hitherto a somewhat distant and glamorous figure, one year senior, arrived at Philippa’s lodgings at 2 Bradmore Road with a bunch of wildflowers. ‘I recall the joy with which I found her,’ wrote Iris later, her ‘life-long best friend’.⁷⁵ Iris chronicled the ups and downs of this friendship, over nearly sixty years, more than any other.⁷⁶ Philippa’s mother had been born in the White House, her grandfather Grover Cleveland twice President of the United States, and she had been mainly brought up with her sister Marion by governesses in the North of England. Like Iris she was self-possessed, strong-willed, intelligent. Also attractive, and in those days unconfident, she was for Iris the ‘good sister’ Iris had never had. MacKinnon greatly influenced both. He ‘cared about goodness’, was the keeper of Iris and Philippa’s goodness, saw himself as a steadying influence against (in his view) their wartime bohemianism. They were in awe of him. Around 1990 Iris and Philippa were staggered to discover MacKinnon’s true age. He was born in 1912. They had thought him much older, an ancient prophet-figure, a holy man whom they revered.