Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 56

Iris’s letter took twelve weeks to reach Frank in the Levant. He replied at comparable length on 22 April: ‘I could have no cause for anger. Nor can I, since I am not conventional after the modern fashion, be unreservedly glad without due reflection.’

Rossetti’ for the wombat, and wishes Rossetti had painted wombats instead of ‘Blessed Damozels & all that poppycock’.

He lists two ‘stumbling-blocks’ or possible problems. He understands that his is not the only tendency towards idealisation: ‘I know of course, that your men are not ordinary men but parfit gentle knights. But it will take years of sorrow to realise how violently misogynistic most men are au fond.’ His second ‘stumbling-block’ points to the impact of her news on him. He writes of ‘a theory which I’m still engaged in formulating … I, you see, have messed up my sex-life … [with] a most terrible dichotomy by which women fall into two categories – Women it would be rather nice to sleep with provided one didn’t have to talk with them for more than five minutes/women one really likes avec lesquelles il ne vaut pas s’embeter dans un lit.'* This classic dualism, he perfectly realises, insults both kinds of women. He had expressed it three years earlier to his brother:

My chief concern is looking for a woman … There are plenty to pick up on the streets but few one wants … The trouble is, I expect rather a lot of a woman. She’s got to be one I can talk to, and if she is, she’s probably not sexual enough or else she’s clever enough to see through me. I’ve had friendships with several girls, like my beloved Iris, but it never gets farther than that. That’s the trouble with idealistic women, and if a woman’s not an idealist, I don’t want her. Enough of this muck. A few months in the army is bound to lower my standards.⁸⁷

Three years had not lowered his standards, and his biographer believes that they were never so lowered.⁸⁸ Frank goes on to refer Iris to the oft-hymned joys of a honeymoon in which both parties are virgin: ‘To medicine me from this would probably take years of psychotherapy combined with the best type of free love … But having suffered all this, I am coming to the conclusion that it is better to abstain altogether until one falls head over heels in love … I remember thinking … often … that a good love-affair would do you the devil of a lot of good.’ He feared that she was wedded to ‘a cold virginity from which it would be yearly more difficult to free yourself. So, on balance, it is obviously a subject for joy. If I’ve said anything here that is clumsy or stupid, forgive me. I’m afraid there is no finesse about me, Irushka.’ He ends, tellingly: ‘Do write me more long letters like your last. I talk a lot of baloney when I answer, but maybe I understand more than I let on.’

Frank’s reply contains an interesting polemic against introspection. He improbably claims that, unlike Iris, he has no books of poetry with him, and says that, on the one hand ‘unless you are an introvert, you have not the vision to look into other people’s minds’, on the other ‘Tolstoi & Chehov went as far into the minds of our fellow-men as it is profitable or seemly to go.’ This seems in context like a caveat against pursuing dangerous lines of enquiry. Iris, who would write to Frank when depressed that she was ‘feeling rather Chehov tonight’, saw in him someone who, like T.E. Lawrence, could rise above the mere introspection to which her desk – and pub-bound life constrained her.

He must have known that, had Iris cared for him less, she would not have thought him worth her confession. The coldness of his analysis is his only mild punishment, and means of self-protection. Before writing it, he went and sat in a Greek Orthodox church. She had earlier enquired whether his apparently inviolable good spirits were ‘stiff upper lip on your part? Give me a line on that.’ His mother Theo also complained to him that ‘You never say when you are down.’ He replied to Iris that he was ‘far too malleable’ to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’.

This is bravado. Three weeks before, on 18 May 1943, Frank had written to his parents asking them to tear up his will,⁸⁹ together with the letter he had left to accompany it – almost certainly a letter to Iris, or making mention of her. Within a month, also, M.R.D. Foot, to whom alone of his correspondents he was willing to sound vulnerable,⁹⁰ received from him a ‘wildly melancholiac letter’ which so disturbed him that it prompted two letters in reply urging him not to despair, until Frank angrily persuaded Michael that his fears were ‘baseless’. ‘Faced with stark horror I prefer to grapple with it silently and alone,’ he said, à propos watching a companion parachute to his death. Had he just ‘roman-candled’ in love? ‘Half-man, half-boy’, he had described himself to Iris in 1939, and his growing older did not prevent him from finding tears in his eyes on leaving his unit – his father touchingly wrote that his description of this parting was worthy of Tolstoy. Nor did it prevent him from weeping the following year – in SOE, and with the end of the menace of Fascism finally in view – to think of the new Europe they were to build after the war.

Iris’s announcement of the loss of her virginity did not change the direction of Frank’s attachment. On 22 July 1943 in Libya he met their mutual friend Hal Lidderdale, ‘a small dark-eyed humanist’ and Captain in No. 2 Anti-Aircraft battery, and they agreed about the complacent and stupid ethos of their respective officers’ messes.

Hal and I are really rivals for Iris, but the fair object of our rivalry is so remote in time and space that it only serves to cement our friendship. At the moment I think Hal’s leading quite comfortably, [as] Iris goes to stay with his mother.⁹¹

Iris wrote to Frank in spring 1943: ‘As a matter of interest, how have you fared with women in the East? I don’t mean from the grand passion point of view, but just from the sex experience point of view.’ Very ‘Ursula and Gudrun’, this rehearsed casualness, and that cunningly placed word ‘just’, would-be worldly, downplaying the ‘merely’ physical aspects of sexuality. It seems to betoken the hope that an equivalent confession to her own from Frank would lessen any sense of guilt on her part, although she would certainly have been jealous, too. ‘Do you spend your days lying with lovely Iranians? How do you feel about that racket now? It’s terrible, Frank, how little we know really in spite of fairly frequent letters of how the other party is developing in these fast and fatal years. Perhaps we shouldn’t pry into each other’s minds … God what a difference half an hour’s conversation would make.’