Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 53

In March 1941 Frank, having transferred the previous August from the Royal Artillery to ‘Phantom’, a small communications and intelligence unit, was posted to the Middle East. He and Iris met before this at least once in London, and visited Westminster Cathedral together, Frank lighting a candle to the Madonna. He left behind with Iris a ring-bound folder of his typed poems predating this departure, including a handwritten ‘To Irushka’ in heroic mode, later damned by him as ‘Hooey’. He sailed, from Clydeside via Cape Town, to Cairo, disgusted by the disparity between the slum-like conditions and diet of the men and the six-course meals and menu-cards taken for granted by the officers. In November 1941, after two months with septicaemia in the Australian Hospital in Damascus, but now back in Cairo, he wrote to his parents that he had just heard from Iris, ‘gloomy and as always when she hasn’t seen me for a long time, full of affection’. For over three years they continued their correspondence, and many of their letters survive.⁵¹ Iris was in 1991 to judge her wartime letters Very affectionate but a bit stilted, young person’s letters’.⁵² Of this ‘stilted’ tone, one early instance was sent to Frank around December 1939: ‘I am particularly distressed that you are worried about the world. I was, but am much less so now – remember, your environment is probably less likely to induce clear thought than mine is.’ Here is Iris-as-perpetual-Head-Girl, a role she did not easily outgrow.⁵³

But generally these gifted, energetic letters, which Iris refers to as a ‘flow of talk’,⁵⁴ are alive even now. Frank repeatedly makes clear how good they were to receive: ‘It seems strange to compare your gentle letters with flint but the simile has this much aptness. They strike fire immediately. And when one arrives, as has yours … I am impelled forthwith to answer it.’⁵⁵ Iris made clear how intensely lonely she felt in busy London, and how ‘much in need of intellectual intimacy’. Frank’s was, uniquely, ‘the patient mind which is prepared to comprehend my own & toss me back the ball of my thought’.⁵⁶

Iris’s habitually intense reserve inspired awe throughout her life. To the absent Frank she now started to reveal the ‘inward’ unconfident soul who suffered ambition and insecurity, was lost and confused in the ordinary way of young mortals. Instead of Iris always consoling Frank, Frank now increasingly ‘plays the man’ and cheers Iris up when she is despondent. With few other friends does she ever reveal herself thus.

Of Frank’s growing importance to Iris there is plenty of evidence, from letters, from friends and from Iris herself, who in 1996 was distressed to recall the terrible waiting which went on and on, week by week, more than half a century before, through much of 1944, to find out where Frank was and what had happened to him. By demonstrating his independence in joining up, he had significantly shifted the balance of power between them. Moreover, as he wrote to his parents, ‘an Englishman of our class seems to change more between 20 and 23 than at any other time’.⁵⁷ He, one year younger, was in some ways growing up faster than she. He had less choice. He was known in North Africa by his men as ‘the gaffer’, and to play the officer at twenty-one and twenty-two required him to act ten years older than he was. He now wrote to his brother: ‘The OULC looked needlessly bohemian to outside observers. The men (I was a very bad offender) were often unwashed and wore the most ridiculous clothes. Many of the women did the same and both conducted the most tangled and nauseating love affairs in public, while the rest of the university kept its sex life fairly decorous behind closed doors.’⁵⁸ He could measure the distance between the callow youth he once had been and the young man he was becoming. When Iris wrote to Frank that ‘the more letters I get from you, the more I admire you’, she was expressing no more and no less than the truth.

What of Frank? He wrote to Iris that there were only four people in England to whom he could speak almost as clearly on paper as with his lips: ‘Three of them are my closest kin and the other one is you.’⁵⁹ He got close to other women, corresponded with a number, but did not cherish their letters as he did hers.⁶⁰ Even his family was told that, if they wished, they should make copies of their letters before sending them to him. He had acquired so many sackfuls that he could not keep them all. Iris’s letters alone, he kept.⁶¹

A relationship maintained only by letter must be precarious. How much belonged to the realm of fantasy? Iris after all had not been a body to him ‘for nearly 4 years’, he wrote in April 1944. The sinister vagaries of wartime postal delivery alone might delight a Thomas Hardy. Just as Frank may never have learnt that he had in 1944 been gazetted Major, so Iris does not understand that he had, in September 1942, been promoted Captain, until half a year later. These were frustrations to which both refer. Letters matter intensely to Frank. He gets ‘down’ when they are delayed, feeling it impossible to believe he has ‘kin’ anywhere; then, when a letter arrives, ‘feels as though home were only a five minute walk away’. In October 1942 he wrote to Iris:

Three years and a bit since I joined the Army. More than that since you & I first exchanged Weltanschauungs in a room in Ruskin. Now I am 22 instead of 18, and you are 23, almost a matron. Looks like being another three years straight before we meet again. We shall probably find we have both changed out of all knowing and have nothing any longer in common. Write whenever you can. An airgraph is a pleasant way of saying ‘I havent forgotten you’. But a letter is a golden gift, a winged gift – worth more than a half the world to a mortal in depression.⁶²

Iris wrote that she had found that reciting Homeric hexameters went very well with the rhythm of the Tube train. Frank replied:

I’m greatly cheered by the picture of staid Iris Murdoch reading Homer in the Underground. Does the train ever stop suddenly, leaving your words to ring out in all their natural clarity? If so, many must be the tired stock-broker whose heart is melted and his vision beautified. Doubt if I could construe a line of Homer now.

Iris and Frank’s four-year correspondence betokens the tenacity of their feeling, as does the quality of their letters. In January 1942 he translated Pushkin’s short early poem ‘I loved you once’ ('Ya vas Lyubil'), managing to convey the explosive compression, and also the calm, peace, and sheer stylishness, of the twenty-year-old Pushkin’s Russian:

I loved you once in silent desperation.

Shyness and envy wracked me numb with pain.

I loved you once. God grant such adoration

So true, so gentle, comes your way again.

He also wrote a story about a certain Gunner Perkins who wishes to express his passion by letter to his girlfriend Helen, rather than thoughts about books and politics. ‘If only he had had the courage before he left. Now it was too late, you could never break down barriers by letter.’ ‘Helen’ is an interesting nom-de-guerre for Iris: the Greeks died at Troy for another Helen. Interesting too, in the light of Frank’s wartime career, is this passage from Iris in a letter, of 24 November 1942, in which she celebrates Allied progress, but worries that it is terrible to ‘rejoice in something which totals up to such a sum of human anguish’ – especially when one is ‘snug in Whitehall’ oneself:

[L]ately I reread The Seven Pillars [of Wisdom]. I feel a sort of reverence for that book – for that man [T.E. Lawrence] – which it is hard to describe. To live such a swift life of action & yet not simplify everything to the point of inhumanity – to let the agonizing complexities of situations twist your heart instead of tying your hands – that is real human greatness – it is that sort of person I would leave everything to follow. [My emphasis.]

Iris is unusual among liberal novelists in admiring soldiers. She later recalled lying on the floor and watching the Vis ‘tottering past the window’ – a brilliantly chosen phrase for the movement of the mass-produced buzz-bomb, propelled by its unsteady ‘pulse-jet’.⁶³ While destroying many wartime writings, she saved a brief account of her reactions when bombs fell near the Hungarian economist Nickie Kaldor’s flat in Chelsea Cloisters⁶⁴ in March 1944: the thirty-second crash, the rocking of the house, the pattering fall of debris which taps the window, and the fact that ‘I cannot stop watching my own reaction even when there is no-one about before whom I want to keep up appearances.’

Iris’s obsession with T.E. Lawrence – an acquaintance of the Thompsons, whom Frank met as a child – shared by Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil, was lifelong, and the ascetic warriors in her novels – Felix in An Unofficial Rose; General James Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea; Pat Dumay in The Red and the Green; even James in The Bell, whose simple piety relates to his coming from ‘an old military family’ – owe something to this ‘world-changer who never lost his capacity to doubt’,⁶⁵ as well as something to the figure of Frank. Iris’s encouragement helped persuade another admirer, Paddy O’Regan, to join the Special Operations Executive (SOE),⁶⁶ set up by Churchill in 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by supplying arms and other support to guerrilla and sabotage groups. This was a dangerous move, to say the least; Hitler had ordered in the autumn of 1942 that any Allied soldier found involved in clandestine activities could be shot on sight, and part of the routine training involved an explanation of the extreme risks involved.⁶⁷ O’Regan would win an MC and bar. Frank had his own motives for volunteering for SOE, on 5 September 1943. The unfolding logic of his and Iris’s love-at-long-distance may also have played a role in his deciding to make this move, as his choice of the name ‘Helen’ suggests. Iris began as the ‘unmoved mover’. By 1943 she was, in some sense, increasingly in love with the absent Frank.