Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 49

On 17 October 1940 Iris’s signature in the Bodleian Library register sits immediately before Philip Larkin’s,¹⁰² a reminder that hard scholarly work continued too, throughout her last two years. Results came out after vivas in the Ashmolean in June 1942. Mary had a viva voce, or face-to-face examination.¹⁰³ Iris didn’t, and quite wrongly feared the worst. In the event both got firsts, Iris’s ‘unquestioned’. Isobel Henderson arranged a dinner party in a smart restaurant for Iris and Mary, her only Greats finalists at Somerville that year, and invited two distinguished sages to entertain the girls: J.B. Trend, Mozart-scholar, translator, musicologist, and the polymath A.L. Rowse. Iris and Mary were very tired, though quite willing to be interested, but Rowse showed off, ate up the available space, was conceited and self-centred, and this exhausted and confused them. ‘Did we learn something new this evening?’ Mary asked Iris, as they stumbled home through bright moonlight on St Giles.

‘O yes, I think so,’ declared Iris, gazing up at the enormous moon. ‘I do think so. Trend is a good man and Rowse is a bad man.’ At which exact but grotesquely unfashionable judgement we both fell about laughing so helplessly that the rare passers-by looked round in alarm and all the cats ran away.¹⁰⁴

Mary thought Iris’s diagnosis was ‘dead right’ and that it put the evening in perspective. Rowse’s showing-off battered at them. Imperfect behaviour can make the young feel inadequate, irrationally guilty. It was a great relief to Mary to have Iris’s (Manichaean) perspective.¹⁰⁵ (Iris and Rowse later got on. Despite having little or no sexual interest in women, he once took bizarre pleasure in pulling her hair in a taxi.¹⁰⁶ Monsters great and small interested her.)

In one of a series of letters expressing her impatience for Finals to be over and for war work and ‘real life’ to begin, Iris wrote to Frank, serving overseas, ‘I suppose I hanker for the dramatic & heroic – ridiculous. I can almost see myself joining the WRNS just to demonstrate my vicarious suffering for Leningrad – & my contempt of [sic] Oxford'; and, later, ‘ATS seems more and more probable. Teaching or Civil Service also conceivable';¹⁰⁷ she also thought she might nurse or fill shells.¹⁰⁸ A central register had been set up for bright women undergraduates, and dons spared from teaching, willing to carry out war work in the short-staffed civil service. Mary got the Ministry of Production, Philippa the Nuffield Social Survey under G.D.H. Cole in Oxford. Iris was interviewed,¹⁰⁹ and for some days was anxious in case her CP membership prejudiced her chances of a job. Finally the buff-coloured HM Stationery envelope arrived, inviting her to the governmental department with the greatest self-conceit, the Treasury, which favoured those who had undergone the formation professionelle of cold baths and irregular Greek verbs that shaped the English ruling class for centuries. ‘Iris Murdoch has of late been no more a roving, and her old haunts know her not,’ she wrote to the Badminton School Magazine.¹¹⁰

Recalling Oxford in wartime, she later wrote of how often one heard the announcement: ‘Extra coaches will be added to the end of this train.’¹¹¹ On one such train, in early July 1942, only ten days after having sat her Finals, Iris left Oxford for London. She sent the news that she was a temporary Assistant Principal to Frank.¹¹² ‘But do not please on this account say Irushka is dead, long live Miss Murdoch, an official in the Treasury.’ ‘Bureaucrat’ was a dirty word to them both.*

* ‘A New Non Nobis, the War-Song of the British Public’, August 1939, attacks the British for lazy pacifism. The USSR-German non-aggression pact was signed on 23 August, and she wrote ‘Dangerous Thoughts inspired by Curious Conduct on the part of the USSR’ on 1 October.

* Frank Thompson inaccurately recorded that Noel, ‘like most sane people’ depressed by the ‘stupidity of Greats’, had left Oxford for farming in the Berkshire hills, where he ‘married a rich Jewess after only a fortnight’s acquaintance’. The friends wagged their heads and said, ‘We knew he had it in him.’ The farm was in Oxfordshire; Ruth Basch, the Czech Jewess to whom Noel became semi-engaged there, was not rich; and nor did he marry her, or anyone else, until 17 February 1943, when he married Carol (also known as Grace) Nethersole. Such inaccuracies may be set down to the fact that Frank, only nineteen and a writer in the making, could have given himself ‘poetic licence’. Wartime too made it harder to check one’s facts.

* In Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Cherubino is page to Countess Almaviva, whose husband the Count has a wandering eye.

* Roughly, ‘uppity Jewboy’.

* Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Chairman of the League of Nations Union and President of the Board of Governors at Badminton School, was also a neighbour and friend of the Thompsons on Boar’s Hill.

* Arnaldo Momigliano understood the Jewish aspects of Fraenkel’s thought. See his Quinto contributo all storia degli studi classici e mondo antico (Rome, 1977), pp. 1026–9.

* It is likely from her dedicating the poem to him that Iris believed Frank had attended the class. His presence is not recalled by any survivors, most of whom had other matters on their minds: Noel Martin, Leo Pliatzky, Clare Campbell, Mary Midgley, Kenneth Dover. Of these Leo was closest by far to Frank – Frank visited Leo’s parents’ home in the East End – and was most likely to remember. Probably Frank came to a few sessions in Trinity 1939 when he was most disturbed about Iris. His letters abound in references to Aeschylus.

* Nineham nonetheless turned up at Keble: there was no answer when he knocked, until a voice from behind another door said, ‘Come in.’ Nineham went in, and found MacKinnon in his bath. He motioned to Nineham to sit on the lavatory seat and read his essay. When MacKinnon had finished his bath, he rose and complained, ‘I haven’t got a towel.’ He opened the door and shouted, ‘Mabel, Mabel!’ (the scout). She didn’t come, and he complained, ‘This is always happenning: I think that girl thinks I’m queer or something.’ So Nineham volunteered to get a towel. MacKinnon dressed in the most astonishing and terrible clothes, and they adjourned to the Lamb and Flag, where he bought Nineham a whisky, himself a double, then paced up and down the crowded bar, completing the tutorial, unaware of the effect his rhetoric was having on the other drinkers: ‘You see WHEN Kant says this, he MEANS to say that, and THIS is CRUCIAL,’ in his unique Scots-Wykehamist brogue. This continued for thirty minutes, and the drinkers – all servicemen – went completely silent. When he’d finished, the entire bar broke into entranced applause at this exotic manifestation. MacKinnon was genuinely nonplussed, and blushed deeply. He was ‘not a self-conscious eccentric but a genuine one’. Nineham, like Vera Hoar, identified MacKinnon as Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil, an alarming figure to his students: Rozanov, unlike MacKinnon, maltreats them.

* Iris wrote to Raymond Queneau on 27 February 1949 à propos this book: ‘how rationalistic I must have been at 19’.

* See MacKinnon’s Times obituary, 4 March 1994. In 1953 he edited Christian Faith and Communist Faith, a series of studies by members of the Anglican Communion.

* It showed her ‘in her true colours as a Red’.

* Frank always used the word pejoratively. See the ‘poisonous-looking’ bureaucrat Iris was dancing with when he first saw her, and Iris’s condescension when mentioning to Frank that of the first-year intake of Somerville ‘lasses’ in 1941, ‘half of them are bureaucrats’. Among these new students were two non-bureaucrats – Chitra Rudingerova – one of the Czech partly Jewish girls from Badminton (first name from Tagore) who came up in 1941, whom BMB asked Iris to take under her wing. Chitra thought Iris marvellous, quiet and somehow fey, not quite in the real world – her quietness hiding or exemplifying great power. Marjorie Boulton came up in 1941 too, an unconfident Lincolnshire girl reading English, who would be a lifelong friend. See also M.R.D. Foot to Frank Thompson, 28 November 1942: ‘I promise you the “charms of bureaucracy” shall not enslave me.’ This was not, averred Frank’s future sister-in-law Dorothy Thompson, who joined the Communist Party aged fifteen in 1939, an uncommon attitude: the short stories of Mikhail Zoschenko, The Woman who Couldn’t Read Stories (translated around 1945), are both pro-Party and satirical of bureaucracy.

† This colleague tried to make it up in the 1950s, sending Fraenkel a book in which he professed: ‘memor’ (I remember). Fraenkel sent him back a two-word answer: ‘et ego’ (I also).