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

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      keep me safe till: morning light.

      She must have taught it to me word for word as soon as I could talk.⁹⁹”

      Rene also sang to Iris ‘Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and His Love’. But who exactly was Jesus’s love? The infant Iris, misconstruing this sentence as small children are apt to, used to wonder …

      Grown-up Iris knew the words of the combative ‘Old Orange Flute’, probably from her father, who could also recite Percy French’s ‘Abdul the Bulbul Ameer’. Rene sang, as well as works such as Handel’s Messiah in a choir, light ballads, French’s among others. Percy French songs suggest the comfortable synthetic Irishness Tracy later made fun of in her books. Rene took pride, too, in singing Nationalist or ‘rebel’ songs:

      Here’s to De Valera,

      The hero of the right,

      We’ll follow him to battle,

      With orange green and white.

      We’ll fight against old England

      And we’ll give her hell’s delight.

      And we’ll make De Valera King of Ireland.

      After the shootings that followed the Easter Rising, when Rene was seventeen, some Protestant Richardsons were pro-independence;¹⁰⁰ Rene was pro-Michael Collins and against De Valera in 1922, when the two found themselves on opposing sides in the civil war. She took delight, when she learnt it later, in the song ‘Johnson’s Motor-Car’. The Nationalist ‘rebels’ borrow Constable Johnson’s car for urgent use, and promise to return it in this fashion:

      We’ll give you a receipt for it, all signed by Captain Barr.

       And when Ireland gets her freedom, boy, ye’ll get your motor-car.

      Grandma Louisa, after a visit to London in the twenties, would often recount Iris sitting on the pavement and weeping inconsolably about a dog which had been hit by a car. Iris was to give the death of a pet dog as a first memory, and first trauma, to characters in successive books.* The dog might have been hers: a photograph of Hughes with a mongrel (possibly containing some smooth-haired terrier) survives, and a smaller third hand must belong to the child Iris, otherwise wholly hidden behind the animal. Another shows Iris proudly stroking the same beast on her own.

      There were cats also, Tabby and Danny-Boy. Danny-Boy uttered memorable growling noises on sighting birds from the windowsill. Seventy years later Iris recalled her father wishing the cats goodnight before putting out the lights.¹⁰¹ They attracted friends: Cousin Cleaver recalls Hughes putting out fish and chicken for the neighbourhood strays.¹⁰² There seems never to have been a time when Iris was not capable of identifying with and being moved by the predicament of animals – dogs especially. When the Mail on Sunday invited her in 1996 to contribute to a series on ‘My First Love’,¹⁰³ her husband John, writing on her behalf, told of her first falling in love as a small girl with a slug. It is not wholly implausible. Cousin Sybil remembers Iris and Hughes carefully collecting slugs from the garden, and then tipping them gently onto waste land beyond. In the autumn of 1963, seeing John’s colleague John Buxton look sadly at his old dog Sammy during dinner, Iris was moved to tears and could hardly stop weeping. The dog died a few weeks later.

      ‘The strict faith of the Plymouth Brethren appealed to many mid-nineteenth-century Irish Protestant families, including that of Parnell.’ Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), p-543, n12.

      † Told in Gath (Belfast, 1990), reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, 21 June 1991, p.10, ‘A Peculiar People’ by Pat Raine, and by Patricia Beer in the London Review of Books, 23 May 1991, p.12. Iris and Wright met only once, when she received her honorary doctorate at Queen’s University in 1977, although they corresponded thereafter.

      Probably his cousins Isabella and Annie Jane, always known as Daisy and Lillie, daughters of Thomas Hughes Murdoch.

      Elias married Charlotte Isabella Neale, a Quaker. His sister Sarah married firstly Charles Neale, who was Charlotte’s brother and also a Quaker. One child of this marriage, Mariette Neale, an active Quaker, was step-aunt to Reggie Livingston, also a Quaker, who married Iris’s first cousin Sybil.

      † Quakers figure in An Accidental Man, A Word Child, Henry and Cato, The Message to the Planet, The Philosopher’s Pupil and Jackson’s Dilemma. See Arthur Green, ‘The Worlds of Iris Murdoch', Iris Murdoch Newsletter, no. 10, 1996.

      Nor did Rene’s mother, Elizabeth Jane Richardson, witness the marriage. Dean’s Grange Cemetery shows that she died, aged seventy-five, on 10 February 1941 at 34 Monkstown Road, where she was living, together with Mrs Walton, with the newly-wed Eva and Billy Lee. The two witnesses are Rene’s sister Gertie and one ‘Annie Hammond’, whose son Richard Frederick Hammond went, often hand-in-hand, to primary school with Rene. Annie Hammond (née Gould) worked as housekeeper first to her husband’s brother Harry Hammond, later to Dr Bobby Jackson of Merrion Square. (Letter from R.F. Hammond’s son Rae Hammond to Iris Murdoch, 4 February 1987.)

      See Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London, 1993), Chapter 11, ‘Protestant Magic’, pp.215ff. The Richardson version of the ‘Butler’ worn by Yeats may be the frequently recurring middle name of ‘Lindsay’, associating them with the Earls of that name. The Australian Dictionary of National Biography, under ‘Richardson (Henry Handel) ‘, notes that Richardsons claimed descent from the Earls of Lindesay. O’Hart gives four different Lindesay Richardsons among IM’s immediate ancestors.

      * For Iris Murdoch’s interest in these matters see pp. 277, 451, 525–6.

      * Eugene in The Time of the Angels; Willy in The Nice and the Good.

       2 No Mean City 1925—1932

      Happy childhoods are rare. Iris was both a happy and a ‘docile’¹ child. She led an idyllic life at home. When she wrote about her pre-war life, especially at her two intensely high-minded and eccentric schools, all was, despite a rocky start at the second, golden, grateful and rhapsodic, a cross between late Henry James and Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. These reminiscences were requested by the schools in question – ‘Why did I agree?’ Iris wrote in vexation.² Moreover, though three friends had already sent their daughters to Iris’s old school Badminton on the strength of her example,³ when the critic Frank Kermode in 1968 wished to send his daughter there, Iris advised against it: ‘she had not been altogether happy there’. Presumably the tone of her written recollections – decorous, nostalgic, pious, suppressing the uncomfortable – owed something to Iris’s desire to please former mentors. With such provisos, and especially by contrast with what was to come, this period was broadly happy, and she was lucky in both her schooling and her family life. She once said to Philippa Foot, ‘I don’t understand this thing about “two’s company, СКАЧАТЬ