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

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СКАЧАТЬ slightly retroussé, high cheek bones, high colour there … I can hear the strong Irish brogue, firm clear voice, forceful, authoritative enunciation (possibly countering shyness) … Round her neck a thin cord suspending a money purse which disappeared under the protective tunic – I didn’t wear such a purse but many did.

It was this image which darted into Allott’s head when, thirty years later and a literary critic, she saw an Observer profile on Iris and realised for the first time that the novelist whose works she had begun to teach at university, and to publish on, was her fellow Old Froebelian.³⁴ Miriam’s mother may have been uneasy about Iris, possibly in case she were a bit of a tomboy, possibly because she was Irish. Miriam had two imaginary and genderless friends, known as Chelsea and Battersea, while Iris for her part invented a brother, her references to whom always ‘express[ed] some special feeling for him’. He was a rounded character who developed over time. Miriam Allott wrote to Iris in the 1960s that she wondered ‘whether the character of Toby in The Bell had been inspired by Iris’s brother’.³⁵ Iris’s reply could not have touched on this subject, since Allott was stunned to learn only in 1998 that he never existed.* It is hard to know how much to make of this. The invention of an imaginary or magical friend or sibling is not uncommon among children. It can assuage loneliness by providing fantasy company, but in another sense increase it because of the complications involved in inviting friends home, leading to possible discovery. Living within a fictional world can replace the satisfactions of real friendship. It can also augment the intimacy of the family unit.

      Iris herself said that she began writing stories at nine in order to provide herself with imaginary siblings. So writing was an extension of inventing companions. She ‘loved words, sentences, paragraphs'; learning Latin at Froebel made a deep impression also.³⁶ All this suggests some qualification of the purely ‘idyllic’ picture of her childhood, and a compensatory process that started early. There are few clues. One comes in a 1945 letter in which Iris described her childhood as a time when she sometimes felt ‘weak at the knees’, and, presumably remembering her anxieties as a child, goes on, ‘What a fantastic frightening irrational world one lives in.’³⁷ Writing as a strategy for assuaging anxiety or loneliness is certainly common: witness, for example, Beatrix Potter or Elizabeth Bowen.

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      ‘The child is innocent, the man is not,’ an Iris character was to proclaim.³⁸ Did Iris idealise Froebel? Miriam Allott thinks this possible, since her own memories of Miss Bain are of a figure less than ‘magisterial’ (Iris’s word). ‘Innocence’ among the children was probably not as widespread as Iris recorded in 1992. Allott recalls that there was competitiveness among the squires and knights when jockeying for their dames and ladies, and some pronounced pre-adolescent passion, occasionally even some odd and tentative, if innocuous, pre-sexual behaviour. Allott thinks Froebel’s insistence on script writing for everyday use, which Iris admired, led to difficulties when pupils began ‘joined-up’ fast writing, which often descended into a scrawl. ‘[Iris’s] own grown-up handwriting was appalling [a judgement at which others demur] and so generally was mine.’

      What was the reason for the winter and summer games, the medieval and the Native American Indian? Presumably they were thought of as inculcating a certain spiritual and moral nobility, and respect for the shared nobility of different cultures. Might the general system reflected in the ‘Knights and Ladies’ game have unwittingly encouraged a certain kind of moral snobbery – and possibly on reflection some social distinctions too?³⁹ Titles came into Iris’s life, she remarked, easily and early.

      The rituals associated with being Knighted and Lady-ed (kneeling before the King, accolades, the violets &tc), together with the accompanying kudos and sense of being somehow specially endowed with grace, have something in common with less edifying aspects of the Honours system … It was never clear whether the elevations were based on being clever and good, or being somehow ‘elect’, and if so, how determined and by whom?

      Both Allott and Iris are reminiscing ‘through’ the Second World War. One exercise touches Allott deeply to remember. Selected children were invited to come to the front of the form and speak about how they would like things to turn out in life, what they would like to do when they grew up, what they planned for themselves, and what they would like to achieve. Edward Meyer, small, fair-haired, the son of a doctor or dentist, perhaps partly central European, stood at the front and gestured to indicate some kind of physical activity – travel, or was it sport? Whatever it was he wished to do with his life, he had little more than ten years ahead of him. He was to be killed in the war, like the red-haired and freckled John Clements.

      Barbara Denny wept copiously when she had to leave Froebel for Putney High School in 1934. Miriam Allott also ‘grieved’ to have to leave, in her case for Egypt in the spring of 1932. She missed the bizarre pageant of Froebel life, bright days in Kensington Gardens, Peter Pan and the Serpentine, so wretchedly that she wrote to Miss Bain. Miss Bain replied kindly and conventionally, but ‘happened by’ Cairo later with Miss Armitage, a friend of Miriam’s mother, and tried to cheer her up on the tram between Heliopolis and Cairo. And Iris? ‘Dame is such a nice concept, so old-fashioned and romantic,’ she commented after becoming DBE in 1987. ‘Knights and Ladies’ casts a fresh light on The Unicorn and The Green Knight, on her taste for Gothic, her explorations of courtly love, her invention of a fictional universe simultaneously contemporary and yet mythical and timeless, where the young wear ‘tunics and tabards’ and the boys have a ‘raffish Renaissance look’.⁴⁰

      Around 1933 it seems there was a palace coup at Froebel. Miss Bain left, and since Mr Dane, Miss Bosley and Miss Short left too, parental protest or controversy were probably involved. The touchingly absurd, idealistic school ethos was conscripted into the humdrum twentieth century. When Quaker Miss Barbara Priestman became headmistress in 1934, ‘Knights and Ladies’ (too martial?) was replaced by ‘Guilds’, more appropriate for the socially engaged 1930s, but less enthusiastically received by the children. After wartime evacuation in Buckinghamshire, the Demonstration School moved to its current position in Roehampton; and soon the buildings in Colet Gardens were taken over by the Royal Ballet School and extensively altered. In the hall where the strange concentric prayer-meetings had been held, young girls in tutus now exercised.

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      Iris once told her friend from Somerville College, Oxford, Vera Hoar that she had been ‘brought up on love’. ‘She was a denizen of no mean city,’ says Crane. If Froebel was not entirely idyllic, how was life at home in Eastbourne Road? Because Iris was an only child, of very loving parents, and she a loving child, they got on together as if they were all equals.

Iris’s grandmother Louisa once asked Rene whether Iris was going to have any children: ‘I jolly well hope NOT!’ Rene at once returned vehemently, to her mother-in-law’s surprise.⁴¹ This exchange, long before Louisa Murdoch’s death in 1947, may be taken as evidence for John Bayley’s theory that Iris’s birth had been a traumatic experience. Rene had been only nineteen, it was a difficult birth, and Rene decided that ‘she wasn’t going to go through that again’, which is why Iris never had a real as opposed to imaginary little brother. Some, John Bayley among them, think that Hughes and Rene’s marriage was a mariage blanc, with abstinence the normal form of contraception, a view Billy Lee, widower of Iris’s quasi-cousin Eva Robinson,* СКАЧАТЬ