Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 52

In July 1942 Iris wrote to Philippa: ‘Best prospect for a flat is probably a single room in Gerrard Place – with a wonderful view of the blitz & practically no plumbing.’ But she did considerably better, and by mid-August²⁷ found the flat which, a year later, would accommodate Philippa too, and which fifty-eight years later was still ‘in the family’, tenanted by Philippa’s sister Marion. Iris called it a ‘studio-flat … of quite indescribable charm … of utterly irresistible personality … with some 6 square miles of window to guard, in blitz & blackout’.²⁸

A few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace is a sliver of land called Brewer’s Green, in what was once an area of breweries – Stagg’s, Green’s, Elliott’s and the Artillery – all now long gone. Number 5 Seaforth Place nearby was always known to Iris and Philippa simply as ‘Seaforth’. The tiny alley off Buckingham Gate was marked by a narrow cleft with a white post in the middle of it, and has no other front door. The flat belonged to the stables servicing a curious chain of pubs serving only non-alcoholic drinks, which provided rest-places for the poor.²⁹ Even today ‘Seaforth’ is a tiny, ancient white cube curiously beached in an era strange to it, an ensemble so closed off and secret that it seems, like the mysterious enclosures of Iris’s Gothic fictions, a little lost world on its own.³⁰

At street level was an empty garage or warehouse where the brewers once stabled their horses; their loose-boxes survived the war. The places on the wall where the halters were attached are visible today. Inside, a little bit of brown linoleum in the hall and a steep, uncovered stairway (with a very narrow, windowless bathroom fuelled by a geyser tucked under the stairs to the left – you could not stand up in the bath) led to the spacious first floor above the stalls. When you reached the top you were in the roughly converted old brewer’s granary, twenty-five feet square and interrupted only by the staircase slicing up the middle, which Iris grandly termed ‘the atrium’.³¹ To the left of this was a corridor where she soon placed an ancient gas-stove, to make a kitchen³²

twenty-five feet long by eight feet wide, with a small dark window looking out onto a mews containing first-floor drawing offices over garages, and interrupted by an approach just wide enough for a coach and horses to enter the coach-houses on Spencer Street. This kitchen had an ill-fitting greenhouse roof of overlapping glass panes, and so was boiling hot in summer, freezing in winter and dripping when it rained. It contained a primitive improvised stand, pitcher and ewer, and water could be scooped up with a jug from the zinc-lined water-tank nesting under a ringed, wooden-hinged hatch-door at the top of the stairs. There was no water, hot or cold, in the kitchen, so washing-up was done downstairs in the bathroom.

To the right of the atrium, beyond what resembled a proscenium arch from which hung simple blue curtains, was the living-room, once the brewer’s hayloft, similar in size to the granary/atrium. A large skylight on the left looked towards the St James’s Court Hotel; two windows on the other side fronted – only a few feet away, like an alley in Palermo – the Territorial Army drill-halls, one for Artillery, one for Scottish conscripts.³³ Iris put in bookshelves on either side of an old-fashioned Edwardian gas-fire in the living-room, with an elegantly curved chimney-breast. This gas-fire, its perforated porcelain columns giving a Tew pale inches of war-time gas’,³⁴ was the only heating – useful for making toast, too – though the ancient gas-oven could also be turned on, on a bitter winter night. Earlier groom-tenants had had some sort of pied-à-terre in the flat. Into what had probably been their bread-oven set into the wall, Iris put extra bookshelves, still there today. In January 1943 she wrote to Frank: ‘I have a pleasant flat near St james’s Park… which … is rapidly becoming so full of volumes of poetry of all eras & languages that I shall have to go & camp on the railway line (or feed ‘em to the mice, after they’ve finished their present strict diet of airgraphs*).’³⁵ The mice had been eating Frank’s letters.

Lacking any inner doors, the flat effectively constituted one huge ‘modern’ open-plan space, seventy feet long. Being in so old a building, it also lacks straight lines or true right-angles. There is a gentle swept-back angle between atrium and kitchen, probably to ease the passage of hay. A delightful old coachman survived and was a source of lore about the place, until the coachhouses were demolished, and the character of the whole area changed, by the building of the new Westminster City Hall in 1960.³⁶

Not that the wider world, especially in wartime, left Seaforth Place untouched. It was near enough to Whitehall to hear Big Ben, and to Westminster Cathedral to hear the angelus. For some friends living out of London, this very central flat was ‘a convenient hotel’. Close friends believe that, on CP advice, Iris nominally left the Party just before joining the Treasury in order to disarm suspicion, while remaining for much of the war what the Party called an ‘underground’ (i.e. clandestine) member, one of those who paid no dues but could be expected to attend some branch meetings.³⁷ Leonie Marsh indeed reported Iris in July 1943 ‘unchanged in the slightest particular of manner, voice, dress or Weltanschauung [world-view]’.³⁸ Three scrupulous letters from Seaforth – undated but probably early in 1943 – to Marjorie Boulton, still up at Somerville until 1944, and seeking Iris’s advice about joining the CP, support this view. Iris is anxious to proffer only Objective’ advice to the then impressionable Boulton. ‘Oxford is not typical of the Party,’ she wrote in one, implying that she knew the London CP also. In another:

Whatever happens you mustn’t dramatise this business & join us on the crest of a wave of emotion. Our organisation is in many ways intensely prosaic & often even sordid. There are bitter domestic quarrels – & sometimes the framework seems unbearably rigid & the people stupidly dogmatic. It is very easy to lose the beautiful clear vision & the joy of comradeship … there are two main things. Do you agree with our general policy? And then – more disquieting to me – your religious views … … Soon (I hope) you’ll feel the deep quiet certainty that nothing can shake.*

CP members were required to feed information about their war work to the Party, which Iris, out of an idealism she would later see as misplaced, duly did. The CP explicitly trained its members to a habit of systematic dissimulation, which caused some to quit. The moral pressure to accept the resulting isolation from most of those around one was undoubtedly extreme: one’s reaction to that pressure might largely depend on one’s personal relations with the people who were calling on one to accept it. Iris later spoke of the role of an army captain, her immediate superior, who stole and copied documents, largely at night, for her to hand on either directly or to hide by dead-letter drop, probably in a tree in Kensington Gardens. We cannot know what she passed on. While it may, as John Bayley believed, have been unimportant information about colleagues and Treasury doings, she would probably not have hesitated to pass on information of greater moment too.³⁹

The capacity to operate clandestinely resembles the capacity to run love relationships concurrently: both evidence that warm-yet-cool ability to enter into, and operate within, many other people’s worlds that Keats, in a famous letter, admired in Shakespeare (now read by certain critics as a spy in the Catholic cause). Training in dissimulation also throws some light on, even if it cannot altogether explain, the co-existence within Iris of a striking outward stillness or serenity with an equally turbulent inner world. But it is extraordinary that she attempted to be a loyal ‘cadre’ for so long: she had too much sense and heart to be loyal to that kind of political clique, and detested, once she properly understood it, Stalinist tyranny.⁴⁰

Her Treasury colleague Walter Pyke-Lees mentioned Iris’s Communism casually and tolerantly to his future wife and co-colleague Peggy Stebbing, who recalled it as being, with some exceptions, ‘understood, in a civilised spirit’, Russia being at that time Britain’s newest ally. There is little direct evidence about when or why she severed her links with the Party. CPGB archives up to 1942 are now in Moscow, and the absence of the name ‘Iris Murdoch’ from the 1943 CP list of members⁴¹ proves nothing: ‘underground’ members, by definition, were not listed. In the spring of 1943 Iris proselytised (unsuccessfully) the ex-Magpie Ruth Kingsbury (later Mills), who, though unconvinced, nonetheless bought at Iris’s suggestion a Russian grammar and a Tolstoy short story in Russian. Iris’s poet friend Paul Potts, recalled as sympathetic to the CP,⁴² was also a friend of George Orwell, who had bravely unmasked the USSR, notably in ‘Inside the Whale’. If it is true that the CP held meetings in Iris’s flat with her agreement, but in her absence,⁴³ they were probably of some dull, perhaps ‘bureaucratic’ committee in whose doings she took no interest.⁴⁴ No such events are recalled after Philippa moved in in October 1943, and a reasonable guess is that Iris had started a withdrawal, probably painfully, by 1944, under the influence of the politically clearer-sighted Thomas Balogh, sufficiently anti-Communist as a thirteen-year-old schoolboy in Budapest after its ‘Socialist revolution’ of 1919 to take potshots with a rifle at Bela Kun’s troops.⁴⁵ Frank Thompson’s future sister-in-law Dorothy⁴⁶ was from September 1944 attending what would have been Iris’s local Victoria/Pimlico branch of the CP, but never met Iris at the Dolphin Square meetings.

There was much in wartime London to worry a tender social conscience: one and a half million homeless alone by May 1941. There were many air raids, and people from the devastated East End were sleeping in bunks on the platforms of Tube stations such as St James’s Park, more or less underneath the Seaforth flat. They ‘trekked into central London each night and out to work in the mornings. Strangers sheltering in doorways would sometimes accompany each other home,’ Philippa recalled. The constant rumble and vibration of the District and Circle Line trains beneath the flat Iris was later to use in The Time of the Angels. She relished ‘both the noise and the shaking’.⁴⁷ On nights when the bombs fell heavily, Iris or Philippa if alone in the flat would on occasion shelter in the bathtub under the stairs, Iris having carefully reasoned that a tin hat protected against shrapnel, and the closest item they had to a tin hat (albeit upside-down) was a bath.⁴⁸ When a V2 took out three largish houses on the other side of the St James’s Court Hotel – which must have protected them – they lost windows and frames; these were soon repaired.

Visitors were surprised by how big the flat looked. It had very little furniture, some of it at orange-box level. In those days of rationing and coupons, everything was rather bare – food, clothing, furnishing alike. Iris’s bohemianism also tended to make her avoid any hint of luxury, even if she could have afforded it. The aesthetic minimalism was impressive. There were two armchairs by the gas-fire, one of them Mary Midgley’s,⁴⁹ a table and chairs. Having found the flat in August 1942, she moved in by September.⁵⁰ In October she wrote to Frank that she was settled more or less into both her flat and her job.