Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 55

On 22 January 1943, settled alike into her flat and her job, Iris wrote Frank a ten-page letter that is by turns playful – ‘Darling, the mice have been eating your letters again,’ it starts – then serious, lyrical, informative and, in a familiar wartime mode, resolutely undramatic. She does not ‘mind how many dangers you face, so long as I don’t know at the time, & you emerge in good condition – & don’t suffer miseries en route of course’. She shares with him her writerly ambitions, pondering hopefully Aldous Huxley’s doctrine that, for a writer, ‘it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters’. She imparts news of mutual friends, reports on her reading – Wilfred Owen, Ann Ridler, the Beveridge plan ('a fine piece of work, thorough and equitable’, though she is anxious about the chances of this blueprint for the post-war Welfare State being fully realised), ‘numerous moderns’. She describes her life, the emptiness she feels in his absence, and the intellectual intimacy which she strongly implies that only he now offers her (Philippa had not yet joined her in Seaforth Place). After reporting that she is ‘hellishly lonely’, despite being in ‘great and beautiful and exciting London’, she continues:

I should tell you that I have parted company with my virginity. This I regard as in every way a good thing. I feel calmer & freer – relieved from something which was obsessing me, & made free of a new field of experience. There have been two men. I don’t think I love either of them – but I like them & I know that no damage has been done. I wonder how you react to this – if at all? Don’t be angry with me – deep down in your heart. (I know you are far too Emancipated to be angry on the surface.) I am not just going wild. In spite of a certain amount of wild talk I still live my life with deliberation.

If she had cared for him less, Iris would not have thought Frank worth this proximate candour. Her painful belated honesty is a token of love, the more so in that friends thought her loss of virginity had happened before she left Oxford.⁷⁷ The exact sequence is obscure. Noel Eldridge, whom she had met through Oxford student journalism – Oxford Forward, Cherwell and the short-lived Kingdom Come – had asked her to marry him, arguing light-heartedly that, as he was almost certain to be killed, she could at least enjoy a modest war widow’s pension. Iris later told John Bayley, ‘laughing and weeping’, that she had told Noel she would not marry him, but was willing to sleep with him instead. He was indeed shot and killed by a sniper somewhere along the Bologna-Rimini road, having rejoined the Queen’s Royal Regiment fighting the Germans in Italy, in September 1944.

Noel’s twin sister Lilian Eldridge in 1998 recognised the playfulness of Noel’s bid,⁷⁸ a playfulness Iris could express too. Noel wrote to his mother around November 1939:

The sanest attitude I think is The Murdoch’s: she is announcing that she wants the literary remains of all her friends and is going to make lots of money with a slim anthology when the war ends. I’ve refused to give her anything yet as I’m holding out for a cash payment.

Iris kept all her life many slim volumes of verse that had belonged to Eldridge: Auden’s 1930 poems, Herbert Read, David Gascoyne, Paul Eluard, Caudwell, Francis Thompson, and an Imagist anthology.

Leo Pliatzky believed, by contrast, that he was Iris’s first lover, very broadly construed, just as she was, after Leonie Marsh, his second. He spoke of the unusual parental complaisance of Rene and Hughes, who allowed him and Iris to be unchaperoned in her room in Chiswick. Iris later recalled a time when Leo tried to undress her in his rooms at Corpus, and she wept. Noel Eldridge and Leo are not the only contenders,⁷⁹ and the different stories which different friends were told reflect Iris’s intention not to cause hurt, as much as a positive desire to mystify, though she was certainly capable of mystification.⁸⁰ It is hard to know how much weight to give to her jest, delighting in her own ‘modernity’, to Margaret Stanier⁸¹ that there was perhaps only one man in Oxford she had not had an affair with:⁸² bohemianism was for her generation often part of the same revolt against bourgeois conventionality as Communism.⁸³ Walking across Westminster Bridge one midnight in 1943, Iris told Clare Campbell that she had recently lost her virginity and was sad about it (though the man ‘was very kind’, she added when they recapped this decades later). Clare had no idea how to respond. She recalls that Iris could not at this time hear without crying the theme song from a film, ‘Oh the Pity of it All’.

Frank knew and disliked Noel Eldridge, whom he once, probably from jealousy, called to Iris ‘that snake’, but Leo was his good friend. Indeed Leo and Frank ran into each other in a Field Army Workshop in North Africa in September 1943, and drank a can each of warm beer together. One perplexity of Frank and Iris’s friendship is that almost all the male friends to whom she refers in her letters to him – Leo, Noel Martin, David Hicks, Noel Eldridge, Michael Foot – were at some time in love with her. A number were at some point her lovers. When, in a letter dated 29 January 1942, she asks Frank for news of Leo, Hal Lidderdale and David Hicks, she is in sober fact asking him for news of three of his many potential rivals. Frank and Hal also met during the war, in Libya in July 1943; Iris heard of this meeting through Hal. The imaginative importance she accorded each man is another matter. She lost touch with Eldridge, for example, well before his death – he married after a brief courtship in 1943.* Hal and David became her lifelong friends. Frank, on the other hand, never her lover, preoccupied her all her life. And she played her cards close to her chest, one admirer rarely being told of rival-claimants.

The war, like the decade following it, was a period of sexual and emotional experimentation – something long claimed as a natural right by men, with whom Iris in some ways easily identified. The ‘wild talk’ she tells Frank about shows in an early letter to Philippa, two months after they had first properly met:

I have a great many friends in London – I have lunch or dinner with a different person every day – but I get no satisfaction or consolation from them, & our relations seem superficial & even chilly. I feel like going out & picking up the first man I meet that’s willing, simply for the sake of a more intense relationship of any description with another human being.⁸⁴

This has an air of Lawrentian bravura, indicative of the itch for emancipation. Fifty years after the war Iris recalled ‘Hammersmith Palais de Danse with Susie Williams-Ellis, and we danced with soldiers, and they were so sweet and gentle. Waltz.’⁸⁵ This was dancing for the love of it: her own range of acquaintance was large enough to provide her with a lover if she needed one. It is a paradox about Iris that she managed to run an increasingly complicated love-life, while continuing to appear to many observers chaste if not chilly. Anne Cloake and Leonie Marsh were two Somerville friends from the OULC. Anne, who thought she had taught Iris the facts of life, always referred to her as a prim blue-stocking.⁸⁶ Leonie found Iris in 1942 virginal, and as late as 1944–45 the novelist Mulk Raj Anand, later a Minister in the Indian government, remarked to Vera Hoar in a pub that ‘Iris was always virginal.’ Frank, too, in his complex reply to Iris’s confession, reports his fear that she had been wedded to ‘a cold virginity’.

The myth of a cold virginity was one Iris had difficulties in dispelling. She had written to Frank one year before: ‘Gentle gloom bloody hell. I get so sick of that myth. I’m not a Blessed Damozel you know, at least not any more. There isn’t even a trace of Burne-Jones – & the faint aroma of incense has perished in the high wind …’ The ‘Blessed Damozel’ reference amounts to a standing joke in their circle, possibly an uncomfortable one.*

Iris had also written to Frank from Oxford: ‘I haven’t a face any more. I am prepared to give up the clear contours & the cutting edge which were formerly my ideal. I feel generally iconoclastic, and the eikon I most want to smash is the pretty golden image inside myself I’ve preserved so carefully. Completeness terrifies me – I have no more pat answers – I want to hurl myself down into the melee & the mud & I dont care how filthy it is …’ It was the Blessed Damozel image of herself she wished to smash, one in which, with its pressure of intense sexual idealisation, Frank had some investment. Iris’s nostalgie de la boue is one reply.