Читать книгу Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography - Peter Conradi J. - Страница 57

Frank had other ways of learning about Iris. Leo Pliatzky wrote to him: ‘I have continued to hear from Iris at intervals, though nothing in the last week or two and nothing at all unusual. She finds the world tragic and moving, but that is not unusual. I shall not be writing to her for some time … But when I do I shall convey your undying affection – perhaps a little more articulately than you have so far managed to do.’⁹²

On one of Iris’s visits to Oxford before June 1943,⁹³ when Vera Hoar took her Finals, she thought that Iris looked particularly radiant. ‘Go and sleep with some nice man … it’s a technique that has to be learnt,’ Iris sagely advised, a briskly matter-of-fact memory that might be set against another. There was also the emotional Iris who, as Leo noted, found the world in general ‘tragic and moving’. Iris sometimes found love so, too. A Senior Staff Officer at the Treasury, W.C. Roberts, MBE, saw her travelling home on a bus one winter evening in the 1943 blackout, the bus windows covered in scrim against bomb blast. (The war years found him writing the long – anonymous, of course – His Majesty ‘s Stationery Office Blue Book: A Digest of Pension Law, with whose rulings on Civil Service pensions and conditions of service Iris would have been familiar.) Iris was peering out into the gloom through the little rectangle which was left clear and he realised with distress that she was silently sobbing, the tears running down her face. Treasury reserve was overcome and he moved to put a comforting arm about her.

‘Miss Murdoch, what is the matter? Can I help in any way?’

‘No thank you. I’m quite all right. It’s just this love business,’ she cried.

‘Never mind,’ he said, thinking it indiscreet to enquire further and having faith in both her common sense and her intelligence.⁹⁴ ‘I’m sure it will work out all right in the end.’⁹⁵

*Special European Labour Immigration Board. Probably based on the European Voluntary Worker scheme (EVW), through which Iris’s friends the Jancars (see Chapter 9) came to Britain.

*The Swiss and the Wellington, like the Wheatsheaf, Black Horse and Fitzroy, were well-known for their literary-bohemian ambience, and formed part of a familiar pub-crawl. See e.g. Tambimuttu, ed. Jane Williams, Bridge Between Two Worlds (Peter Owen, 1989), pp-75ff.

*Susan Stebbing had died the week before.

*A letter to Paddy O’Regan is also dated 3.30 a.m., and one of her poems was completed at 4.30 a.m.

*An airgraph was written on a single quarto sheet, then microfilmed and taken by flying-boat to its destination (Poole harbour in Dorset to Karachi took only three days), where it was developed, magnified, put into a manila envelope and delivered.

*All three letters are undated, but C1942–43. Iris also wrote: ‘I am more sorry than I can say that your dawning interest in the Party should have coincided with an era of bloodiness really unparalleled in my experience of our extremely imperfect organisation … Oxford is not typical of the Party, & this recent fracas not typical of Oxford'; ‘Serious political work (as opposed to the Labour Party) does tend to shorten tempers, fray nerves, & … produce the text brandishing dogmatist.’ Marjorie was finally deterred from joining the Party by the ten-shilling subscription.

*See Chapter 7.

*Frank to Iris, 14 August 1943: ‘Michael [Foot] has sent me Creve-Coeur. … Aragon has scored several bulls.’ Iris later sent a copy to David Hicks which had to be cleared by the censor.

*Noel married Jane Brown McNab, and then introduced his wife and mother casually on the street. Two weeks later he was sent abroad. He and his wife never saw one another again.

*The letter was dated 29 January 1942. Compare Iris to Clare Campbell, April 1941: ‘I am inebriating myself with French poetry and Malory, and becoming more romantic and unphilosophical every day. Soon I shall turn into a pre-Raphaelite bubble (Holman Hunt variety) and float away before the breeze …’. Compare also Frank to Iris, 27 July 1942, à propos the conceit that Iris has green hair: ‘a good green, mind you, none of yr ghoulish pre-Raphaelite stuff'; and on 17 October 1942 Frank thinks he has ‘written to you before about the Noble Passion of Dante Gabriel

*Roughly: ‘with whom it’s not worthwhile bothering oneself in bed’.

† Barbara Mitchell met Iris by prior arrangement at the Pillars of Hercules pub in Soho in 1943, and learnt that Iris was writing from the time the last Underground train left St James’s Park at night to the time the first one started in the morning. In 1944, by contrast, when Philippa Foot anxiously walked the City streets, Iris slept soundly.