Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 50

Two weeks after her arrival in London in July 1942,¹ Iris wrote to Philippa Bosanquet that she now lived

in a fantastic world, ringing with telephonic voices, & peopled by strange fictional personalities such as Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury … (Oxford has nothing on the Treasury as far as tradition goes.) I can’t believe that it’s me writing these peremptory letters & telling people over the phone where they get off … all I do at present feels like play-acting.²

She sat at a ‘desk 8 feet square amid heaps of blue files tied up with tape’ devising new regulations ‘with names like 1437/63538 90m. (14) &tc’,³ sharing a ‘lofty airy office on the 3rd floor’ working in ‘Establishments’, in what was then called the New Public Offices on the corner of Great George Street and Whitehall, looking straight onto the north front of Westminster Abbey.⁴ Her room-mate at one point was ‘a charming but excessively talkative staff-officer in whose company work is virtually impossible’.⁵ Iris sometimes fled to the Treasury library. Haughty pre-war Treasury tradition meant Lords Commissioners issuing Letters of Permission. Wartime procedure was more informal, and letters coming into the department went first, to their surprise, to the new, young ‘Assistant Principals’ (AP’s) such as Pat Shaw (later Lady Trend), Peggy Stebbing (later Pyke-Lees) and Iris. They had considerable power, looking up precedents and drafting official letters, which they passed on up to one of the two Principals ‘to’ whom they worked.⁶

In Iris’s second novel, The Right from the Enchanter (1956), a small army of energetic, ambitious and effective young women alone understand the workings of the fictional ‘sELIB‘,* to the terror of at least one male colleague. This may reflect Iris’s war work. In September 1939 there was one notable woman in the Treasury – Evelyn (later Baroness) Sharp, an Assistant Secretary,⁷ and by 1941 the then thirteen women were still regarded as odd creatures. By 1943, following Iris’s arrival, their number had gone up to twenty-three. They acted on their own initiative, did not always consult their seniors or let things go via committee. Because they were Treasury APs, they dealt directly with heads of other Civil Service divisions.⁸

Was Iris ‘Treasury material'? Senior Treasury ‘top brass’ are famously statesmen in disguise, carrying with them a mass of interrelated exact knowledge, extreme day-to-day precision, intellectual detachment and realpolitik. While generally the Treasury was loosening up, and in measurable ways, Iris had landed in its stuffiest and narrowest division. Other departments looked outwards towards the wider world. ‘Establishments’⁹ looked inward, dealing with the internal workings of the civil service itself – discipline, pay, emoluments, rooms, complaints, requests to move.¹⁰ Iris spent much time on what she called ‘certain pay questions’¹¹ – calculating what increments those civil servants who had been seconded for war work should be entitled to receive at the end of hostilities; otherwise known – a standing Bayley joke, this – as Notional Promotion in Absentia. She was also secretary to three committees, one designated to ‘investigate causes of delay’. She wrote to Frank:

I still lose more files & overlook more important letters than anyone else in the Treasury … I’m learning a hell of a lot of new things about how our curious country is governed – & I’m even beginning to think that Administration is a serious & interesting activity.¹²

Her colleagues were ‘decent and endowed with senses of humour’,¹³ and Michael Foot reassured Frank that August that Iris was ‘in good heart, but grown very quiet’.¹⁴ She was none the less frustrated. Frank had written from Cairo in June 1942 inviting her to ‘Join the WAAF, get a job as a cipher operator, and come out here. I’d love to see you again. I’d love to see anyone who makes sense.’¹⁵ Iris’s was not a ‘bad’ war, though, being Iris, she chafed at her ‘cushy job’ when the rest of Europe was ‘taking it on the chin’. She voiced her disaffection to Frank on 24 November:

Lord, lord. I get so damnably restless … I would volunteer for anything that would be certain to take me abroad. Unfortunately there is no guarantee given one when one joins the women’s forces & anyway the Treasury would never let me go; for, inefficient as I am, I am filling a very necessary post in a semi-skilled sort of way. Sometimes I think it’s quite bloody being a woman. So much of one’s life has to consist in having an attitude (I hope you follow this, which is a little condensed.) …

I should of course like you to be a hero – but I doubt if I could accept the risk – & I am quite certain you have all the qualities of a stout fella, without the necessity of a vulgar display … I miss that unanxious society in which we trusted each other & were gentle as well as gay … The Treasury yields a number of pleasant men and women who, besides being very intelligent (& some of them very beautiful) are good company over a beer or whiskey. But they lack a certain redness of the blood – a certain human gentleness and sensitiveness. On the other hand, my Soho, Bloomsbury & Chelsea acquaintanceship is widening also. ‘The Swiss’ in Old Compton Street, ‘The Wellington’ in Wardour Street* & ‘The Lord Nelson’ in King’s Road are the clubs [sic] which I frequent in search of the Ultimate Human Beings – and knowledge & experience & freedom. A strange society – composed of restless incomplete ambitious people who live in a chaotic and random way, never caring about the next five minutes, drunk every night without exception from 6 o’clock onwards, homeless & unfamilied, living in pubs & copulating upon the floors of other people’s flats. Poetry is perhaps the only thing taken seriously by them all – & the only name they all respect is T.S. Eliot. Politics they do not understand or care about [my emphasis]. Their thought & their poetry is concerned with subtleties of personal relations – with the creation of the unexpected in words – ‘dredging the horrible from unseen places behind cloaks and mirrors’.

Perhaps it is a betrayal to make friends with these people while our armies are fighting in North Africa. But I cannot help finding these off-scourings of Horizon a goodly company in some ways – they seem, indefinably, to be better human beings than these smiling Treasury people who drink, but never too much, & who never in any sense give themselves away. They are queer & unreliable, many of them – but they meet you in a level human sort of way, without the miles & miles of frigid protective atmosphere between. They have a sort of freedom, too, which I envy. I think it arises from a complete lack of any sense of responsibility – (so of course my envy is not whole-hearted. I may be flying blind at present, but I would not cast all the instruments overboard …) … I write a bit. I read a lot – am having an orgy of Edmund Wilson at the moment —(good on literature, superficial on history) …

… I feel in a peculiar sort of way that I mustn’t let you down – yet don’t quite know how to set about it. I don’t think I believe any more in clean hands & a pure heart … I am on First Aid Duty tonight at the Treasury – an oasis of peace in a far too full life. I must go down to bed pretty soon (We had one casualty tonight. Great excitement. A man with a cut finger. Christ.)

I think of you often. May the gods guard you. Goodnight, my gentle Frank – Much love to you. Iris.