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

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СКАЧАТЬ lot of very distinguished thinkers and writers’⁸² – Bowen, Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, Goldsmith and Yeats all epitomised Irish modes of expression while living in England and ‘regretting Ireland’.⁸³ The term ‘Anglo-Irish’ is less unhelpful if it means, as Arthur Green argued and the OED allows, some broad confluence of English, Irish and indeed Scots-Irish – a product, in fact, of both islands. It is from this point of view interesting that Iris believed she had Catholic Irish connexions,⁸⁴ as well as Quaker, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian ones. The pattern of English life, she wrote in 1963, can be dull, making little appeal to the imagination.⁸⁵ Ireland, by contrast, was romantic. Moreover she identified, until 1968, with Ireland-as-underdog.⁸⁶ England had destroyed Ireland, one of her characters argued in The Red and the Green, ‘slowly and casually, without malice, without mercy, practically without thought, like someone who treads upon an insect, forgets it, then sees it quivering and treads upon it a second time’.⁸⁷

      Iris’s Irish identification was more than romanticism. Her family, Irish on both sides for three hundred years, never assimilated into English life, staying a small enclosed unit on its own, never gaining many – if any – English friends. When Hughes died in 1958, having lived for forty-five of his almost sixty-eight years in England, there were only, to Rene’s distress, six people at the funeral: Iris and John, Rene, cousin Sybil’s husband Reggie, Hughes’s solicitor, and a single kindly neighbour, Mr Cohen, who owned the ‘semi’ with which the Murdoch house was twinned. Not one civil service mourner materialised. And quite as surprising is that no friends or associates of Rene were there. Iris’s first act that year of bereavement was to take Rene and John to Dublin, to find a suitable house for Rene to move back to. The following year Rene took Iris and John to see Drum Manor. There was a dilapidated gatehouse, and some sense of a gloomy and run-down demesne.⁸⁸ Rene and Iris were reverential.

      As Roy Foster has shown, the cult in Ireland of a lost house was a central component of that ‘Protestant Magic’ that both Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen shared:⁸⁹ Irish Protestantism, Foster argues, even in its non-Ulster mode, is a social and cultural identity as much as a religious one. Some of its elements – a preoccupation with good manners together with a love of drama and occasional flamboyant emotionalism, a superstitious bent towards occultism and magic,* an inability to grow up, an obsession with the hauntings of history and a disturbed love-hate relation with Ireland itself – can be found in Iris as in Bowen and Yeats. Bowen’s Protestant Irishness made of her a ‘naturally separated person': so did Iris’s. Yeats, coming from ‘an insecure middle-class with a race memory of elitism’,⁹⁰ conquered the inhabitants of great houses such as Coole Park through unique ‘charm and the social power of art’,⁹¹ rather as Iris later visited Clandeboye and Bowen’s Court. Both Yeats and Iris elevated themselves socially ‘by a sort of moral effort and a historical sleight-of-hand’.⁹² Each was, differently, an audacious fabulator, in life as in art.

      In the confusion of her latter years when much was to be forgotten, the words ‘Irish’ and ‘Ireland’ were unfailing reminders of Iris’s own otherness. Both struck deep chords, and she would perk up and show particular interest. In Provence in June 1997 she remarked emphatically, ‘I’m nothing if not Irish.’ The following winter, sitting at the small deal kitchen table after a bracing walk on the Radnorshire hills, she disconcerted her hearers by asking, ‘Who am I?’, to which she almost at once soothed herself by musing, ‘Well I’m Irish anyway, that’s something.’ A lifetime’s investment in Irishness, visible in every decade of her life, was then, as it had always been, a source of reassurance, a reference-point, a credential, somewhere to start out from and return to.

      10

      Iris’s early memories were of swimming, singing and being sung to, of animals, and of wonderment at the workings of the adult world. She sat at the age of about seven under the table while her parents played bridge – either reading a favourite childhood book or, as she put it, ‘simply sitting in quietness’⁹³ and listening in astonishment to the altercations and mutual reproaches of the adults at the end of each rubber. Wonderment, imaginative identification with a fantastic range of creature-kind, capacity to feel strong emotions, secretiveness, and also Irishness: these are recurrent and related themes within her story.

      Early photographs show her a blonde, plump, exceedingly pretty baby, flirting in a straw Kate Greenaway bonnet with her mother, and even more with her photographer-father, in Dalkey in August 1921. If the family was by then already based in London, neither this nor the Black and Tans, who had that year raided ‘rebel’ houses in Blessington Street itself,⁹⁴ prevented the annual Irish summer holiday. The truce of 11 July that year would have offered holidaymakers, among others, reassurance.

      Hughes, Rene and baby Iris lived first of all in a flat at 12 Caithness Road, Brook Green, Hammersmith. Hughes was fairly low down on the civil service ladder but had a permanent position as a second class clerk in the Ministry of Health, a ministry he was to stay at until 1942. He kept a pocketbook in which he noted the day’s expenditures, no matter how minor.⁹⁵ This same meticulousness shows itself in the young Iris’s carefully managed stamp collection. She tucked away in the back both a small ‘duplicate book’, in case of losses, and an envelope marked emphatically ‘valuable stamps: King Edward’, referring, of course, to stamps pertaining to the short reign of Edward VIII.

      What exactly constitutes a ‘first’ memory? Surely later imaginative significance as much as strict chronological primacy. Iris gave as her ‘first’ memory not ‘My mother flying up above me like a white bird’,⁹⁶ but herself swimming in the salt-water baths near Dun Laoghaire when she was three or four years old.⁹⁷ Her father got quickly to the further side, where he sat and called out encouragement. In 1997 she could still enact the excitement, fear, sense of challenge, and deep love entailed in her infant efforts slowly to swim to the other side and regain her father’s protection – a powerful enough proto-image in itself of her continuing life-quest for the authority of the Father. Another version has Hughes first of all persuading her to jump in, and into his arms.

      Swimming was the secret family religion. It is not merely that Hughes liked to swim in the Forty-Foot: swimming is mentioned on postcard after postcard, in letter after letter, from and to Iris over many decades, and the word order of one particular card from Sandycove, Dun Laoghaire, from her mother to Iris makes clear which activity carried the greater weight: ‘Had a bathe this morning – after church.”⁹⁸ Churchgoing is likely to have occurred mainly because Rene was still singing in the choir.

      In her journals Iris would recollect, especially latterly, many songs her mother taught her. In January 1990 she records:

      Recalling Rene. A prayer she must have taught me when

       I was a small child. I remember it as phrased –

      Jesus teacher: shepherd hear me:

      bless СКАЧАТЬ