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

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СКАЧАТЬ and writing a poem entitled ‘The Diver’ which recalls the 1930s fashion for the aviator as culture-hero but, in true Murdoch fashion, substitutes water for air and celebrates swimming instead. She writes up the activities of the Literary and Architecture Clubs (Lady Precious Stream,≠ Francis Bacon, Chesterton, an exhibition of Everyday Things in Bristol); acts in a parody of Euripides’ Alcestis ('Al’s Sisters') where, arrayed as a butler bearing cocktails, she is noted as ‘among the stars of the cast’, and also plays Hank Eisenbaum in ‘Hollywood Rehearses Shakespeare’. Her dramatic activities at Froebel and Badminton, and later at Oxford, are interesting. Although the adult and puritan Iris disliked theatre, young Iris enjoyed acting and was famous at Oxford for her talent.

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      In mid-January 1937 Iris won joint first prize (£2.125.6d) for an essay on lectures organised at Regent Street Polytechnic by the Education Department of the League of Nations Union. She watched the German (and Nazi) lecturer fatuously explaining that persecution of the Jews was designed merely ‘to make an independent people of them’, and wrote of how the choice between democracy and dictatorship was made urgent by Spain. She is engaged with the Literary Club, and wins her hockey colours. She is now in her eighteenth year, and her political judgements must be thought of as those of an adult, albeit a very young one. She finds space in a piece praising community singing – ‘Music was everywhere,’ she was later to write – to commend ‘that courageous and much maligned country, Soviet Russia’. On the verso page of this eulogy appears, with dramatic irony, one of Iris’s lino-cuts, entitled ‘The Prisoner’, of a man evidently suffering in solitary confinement – but not, of course, in the USSR, which Iris believes ‘is now becoming more and more democratic’. This was a view, horribly wrong-headed as it now appears, that Iris and BMB were scarcely alone in holding.

      In 1936–37 alone, we now know, two million died in Stalin’s purges.⁵⁸ Nor was such knowledge hidden at the time. Two years later George Orwell famously wrote that to English intellectuals ‘such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, &tc &tc are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.’⁵⁹ The appeal of the Communist Party – which Iris joined the following year – at the time of the Spanish Civil War is well attested, and not just by Orwell. Yet it is remarkable that Iris, who praised the Communist Party as late as spring 1943 to Ruth Kingsbury, a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, rarely expressed misgivings about the USSR. She thought Russia on the whole misunderstood over the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and even after the Russian invasion of Finland in November 1939 she stayed On the Stalinist line’. Badminton, she later pointed out, had caused her, like many others, to ‘live in a sort of dream world’ politically: they really believed that politics was a much simpler matter than it later turned out to be, and that ‘the Soviet Union was a good state, rather than a thoroughly bad state’.⁶⁰

      By 1945 her view of the USSR had shifted, and in the 1970s she would help campaign for the release of the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, of course seeing Stalinism as a great evil. That she had no such understanding before 1943 may attest a political naïveté some friends⁶¹ felt long accompanied her. Tenderheartedness, in politics as in love, may be accompanied by unsettling blindness.

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      By spring term 1937 Iris is head girl, mediating on at least one committee between staff and girls, reporting on the League of Nations Union, determined ‘not to falter in our search for peace’, recording a visit to the home of the millionaire marmalade manufacturer and amateur archaeologist Alexander Keiller, whose taste and Druidic megaliths alike leave her ‘dazed’, playing lacrosse, publishing an untitled poem in which her love of London is apparent: ‘And I watch for the bended bow of the Milky Way/Over London asleep’. In July she wins a distinction in English for her Higher School Certificate, plays a home cricket game against a neighbouring school – probably the match at which Rene made a rare appearance and a great impression. Iris seemed, to Dulcibel Broderick as she did to others, more like Rene’s elder sister than her daughter.

      She published an eighteen-line translation from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonos – her Greek was coming on stream. W.H. Auden visited the school and read part of a new play he and Christopher Isherwood were writing – presumably On the Frontier. Iris sat next to Auden, finding him ‘young and beautiful with his golden hair’.⁶² She soon enlisted his help in writing a foreword to Poet Venturers, her own brainchild, a collection of poems by Bristol schoolchildren published by Gollancz at a price of ‘only one Shilling’ – the proceeds to be given to the Chinese Medical Aid Fund. Iris’s poem, ‘The Phoenix-Hearted’, lyrically hymns China’s powers of recuperation from the invading Japanese ‘hosts of glittering dragon-flies’. She wins an Open Exhibition of £40 a year for three years at Somerville College, Oxford.

      For the second year running she won a prize for a League of Nations essay competition, this time entitled ‘If I were Foreign Secretary’ (the second prize of one guinea went to the future critic Raymond Williams, of King Henry VII School, Abergavenny). Apart from advocating, among other measures, recognition of the legality of the Spanish government, her essay is of greatest interest for its pious belief that the Fascist countries can be brought to heel through sanctions alone, after which ‘the world would be calmed and reassured and the menace of war would gradually disappear’. After she joined the Communist Party the following year, Iris’s pacifism would strengthen. ‘Looking back we see the thirties as a time of dangerously unrealistic political dreams,’ she later commented, dreams embodied above all in the statutes of the League of Nations, based on the optimistic premise that all nations were already, or could by persuasion soon become, freedom-loving, peace-loving democracies. Iris renounced her own advocacy of peace at all costs only in 1941.

      It could be said that all her fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth, when she thought that setting people free was easy, that ‘socialism (of which we had no very clear idea) would bring freedom and justice to all countries, and the world would get better’.⁶³ This optimism entailed a belief in the imminent birth of a ‘clean-cut rational world’ within the century dominated by Hitler and Stalin. Her work explores, among other matters, those ‘irrational’ psychic forces within the individual which make Hitlers possible, and freedom problematic.

      Despite BMB’s hostility to most films as ‘mental dope’, a school cinema was opened, and Iris gave a speech thanking the Governors. The first film shown was Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. She published two promising poems.⁶⁴ In spring 1938 she was one of four soloists in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater,⁶⁵ and she records an expedition to see the Severn bore. She recalled both its strange noise, and the equally strange local pride in it, thirty years later.⁶⁶ The paper she read to the Literary Club on Modern Poetry is described as ‘exceptionally interesting’. Iris kept her schoolmistress Ida Hinde’s 1937 gift of a book of her own poems, At the Edge of a Dream, inscribed ‘with love’ from its author, with its pièce-de-résistance, ‘Sapphics’. Yet exclusive friendships were closely monitored and frowned upon, and seating arrangements at meals periodically altered, which helped pre-empt them.

      ‘One sound way of preventing complete forgetfulness СКАЧАТЬ