Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography. Peter Conradi J.

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      Iris recorded on an early dust-jacket that ‘although most of her life has been spent in England, she still calls herself an Irish writer’. From 1961, with the Anglo-Irish narrator of A Severed Head, and following her father’s death, this changes permanently to ‘she comes of Anglo-Irish parentage’, a doubtful claim if meant to refer to an Ascendancy, land-owning, horse-riding background. Iris never claimed to belong to the Ascendancy as such, and it is doubtful that Rene used the word. Yet Rene certainly knew that her once grand family had, in her own phrase, ‘gone to pot’. Iris’s interest in this pedigree dates from August 1934, when she discovered on holiday in Dun Laoghaire that the Richardsons had a family motto, and a ‘jolly good one’. She noted that, as well as ‘virtue’, ‘virtus’ in ‘Virtuti paret robur’ could also mean ‘courage … But never mind, away with Latin. We shall be climbing the Mourne mountains next week, the Wicklow mountains the week after.’⁶⁶ Pious about distant glories the family may have been.⁶⁷ Snobs they were not. Hughes got on very well with Rene’s brother-in-law Thomas Bell, who had been commissioned with him in the same regiment and now worked as a car-mechanic at Walton’s, a Talbot Street Ford showroom;⁶⁸ one of Thomas’s four sons, Victor, later a long-distance lorry-driver for Cadbury’s, appears with Iris in holiday snaps; a further two, Alan (also known as Tom) and John Effingham Bell, also worked for Cadbury’s in Dublin, as fitter and storeman respectively. They lived on Bishop Street.⁶⁹ If by Anglo-Irish is meant ‘a Protestant on a horse’, a big house, the world of Molly Keane or of Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court, this is not it.

      In her first year at Oxford, in an article in Cherwell entitled ‘The Irish, are they Human?’, Iris was to refer to the Anglo-Irish as ‘a special breed’. In her second, after the IRA had declared war on Britain in January 1939, which was to cause over three hundred explosions, seven deaths and ninety-six casualties,⁷⁰ and at the start of what in Ireland is called the ‘Emergency’,⁷¹ she was treasurer of the Irish Club, listened to Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) talk of ‘chatting with De Valera’ and herself gave a paper on James Connolly, Communist hero of the 1916 Rising.⁷² To Frank Thompson in 1941 she wrote of Ireland as ‘an awful pitiful mess of a country’, full, like herself, of ‘pretences and attitudes … but Ireland at least has had its baptism of blood and fire’. The Richardson family motto ‘Virtuti paret robur’ is often repeated in her later journals, like a talisman or mantra. Iris saw herself, like her friend from 1956 Elizabeth Bowen, as caught between two worlds and at home in neither.⁷³

      To be of a once distinguished Protestant family in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century still conferred a sense of caste.⁷⁴ As recently as 1991 Iris defined her mother’s family as Anglo-Irish gentry whose ‘estate in County Tyrone … had vanished some time ago’.⁷⁵ Insistence that one’s family was still ‘gentry’, no matter how impoverished, was partly tribal Protestantism. Even those Irish Protestants in the early Irish Free State who came of humble stock felt that they emphatically belonged, none the less, to a ‘corps d'élite:

      Ex-Unionists – including those who were not very bookish – were proud of the Anglo-Irish literary heritage. They prided themselves … on possessing what were regarded as Protestant virtues, a stern sense of duty, industry and integrity together with the ability to enjoy gracefully and whole-heartedly the good things of life. [This] esprit de corps. … was voiced with vibrant force by Yeats in his famous and thunderous intervention in a Senate debate in 1925. Speaking for the minority, he declaimed, ‘we are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Berkeley; we are the people of Swift; we are the people of Parnell.’⁷⁶

      Iris’s willingness to mythologise her own origins, and to lament a long-lost demesne (in her case, a real ancestry), both mark her out as a kinswoman of Yeats.* The ‘Butler’ appended to the Yeats family name proposed a not entirely fictitious connexion to that grandest of clans, the Anglo-Irish Dukes of Ormonde. Family pride runs through much of Iris’s rhetoric about her background, both in interviews and also in Chapter 2 of The Red and the Green, with its authorial identification with the old Protestant ruling order, as well as its claim for that order to speak for the whole of Ireland, Catholic and Protestant alike.

      The relation between Iris and her cousins was complex. Another Richardson relative she claimed⁷⁷ – on no known evidence – who had presumably not suffered from the general Richardson decline, was a Major-General Alexander Arthur Richardson, serving with the Royal Ulster Rifles in the Second World War. The Belfast family phrase ‘the Ladies’ bathing-place’ amused Iris. So did the Belfast cousins calling a ‘slop-basin’ – for tea-slops – a ‘refuse-vase’, which the Murdochs considered a genteelism.⁷⁸ If Iris’s family found the Belfast cousinry genteel, Belfast cousin Sybil Livingston conversely thought the cigarette-holder Iris sported for a while ‘posh'; and she was amazed in 1998 to learn that Rene had a sister of any kind, let alone one with four sons, giving Iris first cousins in Dublin as well as Belfast. ‘You are my only family,’ Sybil recalls Iris saying – mysteriously as it might appear: perhaps there was a remarkable depth of reserve on both sides.⁷⁹ Sybil around 1930 had passed on to her a ‘wonderful’ party frock of Iris’s, pale blue satin, with a braid of little pink and blue and white rosebuds sewn round the neck and sleeves. For Iris, a much-loved only child, as for Elizabeth Bowen, Ireland represented company.

      Iris believed that, after her birth in Dublin, her parents lived with her there for one or two years,⁸⁰ until the inauguration of the Irish Free State at the very end of 1921. These supposed years in Dublin, often mentioned in interviews – again, like Elizabeth Bowen – confirmed her Irish identity. Around 1921 all Irish civil servants were offered the choice of moving to Belfast or London. It is easy to see why, in the political turmoil of those years, with the Troubles, the introduction of martial law, and then the civil war looming, Hughes, who was after all not merely a Protestant and an Ulsterman but also an ex-officer, might have opted for London, a city he had known on and off since 1906. Iris said he came to England to find his fortune⁸¹ but saw this as a radical move, a kind of exile. In fact, if Iris as a baby spent even as much as one year in Dublin, it was only with her mother. On Iris’s birth certificate Hughes gives 51 Summerlands Avenue, Acton, London W3 as his address, and his civil service position was second division clerk in the National Health Insurance Committee, working in Buckingham Gate, London (apart from his three years’ active service) from 15 June 1914 until 24 November 1919, when he joined the Ministry of Health. Cards from fellow-conscripts during the war give his working address as ‘Printing, Insurance Commission, Buckingham Gate, London, S.W.’. The move to London – in reaction against the madnesses of Ulster in 1914, just as much as against those of Dublin in 1921 – had already begun. Presumably Iris was born in Dublin because Rene could rely there on kin and womenfolk to help with the birth. And perhaps Rene and Iris had to wait for Hughes to find the flat in Brook Green where they first all lived together.

      Honor Tracy was certainly right that the value to Iris of her Irishness was great: ‘… my Irishness is Anglo-Irishness in a very strict sense … People sometimes say to me rudely, “Oh! You’re not Irish at all!” СКАЧАТЬ