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

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СКАЧАТЬ Greek prose translations, but also verse – particularly hard if you had not been trained. There was a sense of background nagging as she put them through their paces. Iris’s training had been a bit better than Mary’s; they suffered together. Both had extra tutorial coaching in Classics.¹⁷

      Mildred Hartley had had a hard struggle to come up in the world, and could appear pedantic and fussy. Her hidden eccentricity – celebrating the end of term by donning trousers, taking down a thriller from the shelves and smoking a pipe – is a modest one.¹⁸ Iris was furious when it was reported to her that Hartley had remarked that she was always in fancy-dress,¹⁹ an observation also pointing towards identity itself as like ‘dressing-up’. (Iris’s Dublin ‘cousins’ Eva and Billy Lee always looked forward to meeting Iris off the Dun Laoghaire boat-train, never knowing in advance what she would this time come ‘dressed as’.) Certainly Iris had her own dress-sense. Hartley would later refer to Iris as ‘my shaggy little Shetland pony’, suggesting no lack of affection,²⁰ and would comment accurately that Iris ‘did not understand the meaning of idleness’.²¹ Most undergraduates had to choose between evenings out and getting essays written. Iris somehow did both, coming in late and yet being first down to breakfast, looking rested and lively.²²

      The students got a lot out of their course. They went to the great and terrifying Eduard Fraenkel’s lectures on Horace, and also studied some Plato, lectured on by the impressive, but very shy E.R. Dodds: a few dialogues – certainly Phaedo, probably Symposium and Phaedrus. Iris despised Plato, thinking him reactionary, dishonest, full of cheap dialectical tricks. Reading the Republic left her feeling aggressive, and she opposed Plato, in letters to a friend, directly to Marx. After denouncing Plato as ‘the old reactionary’, she wished she lived ‘near enough to know how people live in mines & cotton mills … I feel very bitterly the second-handness of most of my knowledge of life’ – a sense that a later Iris would use Plato to explain. As if to cure herself of the taste of Plato, she sold the Daily Worker to the ‘thronging multitudes of Blackpool’, where her parents were evacuated in 193g.²³ Dodds also lectured on the Greek dramatists.

      Greek Vase Painting was Iris’s special subject: Professor Sir John Beazley, an inspiring scholar and teacher, lectured on Classical archaeology at the Ashmolean Museum. He showed his classes beautiful Attic objects, taught ways of understanding them. Gifted students would be invited ‘back-stage’ to view the more ‘frank’ or salacious vases otherwise relegated to a top shelf.²⁴ Iris’s careful, copious, string-bound, loose-leaf handwritten notes for the class, comprising some few hundred pages, are illustrated by her pen-and-ink drawings of decorative details and of statues of Greek youths.

      3

      To find out who someone is, Napoleon remarked, one must ask, ‘How did the world look, around the time that they were twenty?’ The twelve months before the outbreak of the Second World War were a time of intense hope and fear, anxiety and dread. The young were intensely stirred up. Intensity is the key-word in politics, in friendship and in love alike; a dramatic intensity that radically divided the lives of those who went up to Oxford a year before the war – like Iris, to ‘serious-minded’²⁵ Somerville College in 1938 – from those who, like John Bayley, went up in the disenchanted post-war years. In 1938–39 a Manichean fight against the powers of darkness was imminent, the drumbeat of war unmistakable. There was constant talk of Nazism, the Moscow treason trials, marching and raising money for arms for Spain, the bestial pogrom against German Jews in November 1938, Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. At the same time student life for the first year after Iris came up in late September 1938 was still agreeably wild, irresponsible, aesthetic and cranky. There was still a sense of scope and completeness.²⁶ Charismatic figures abounded, among the students as among the dons. The sober diminishment of university life came later, with war and mobilisation.

      The dominant international issue was the Spanish Civil War, which ended only in April 1939. No other cause ever stirred comparable passions in Oxford. The death in Spain of the poet John Cornford, whose brother Christopher was to play a significant role in Iris’s life in the 1960s, had made him ‘a martyr of mythic power’. The war in Spain was so real ‘that it hurt’.²⁷ Iris denied having penned early in 1939²⁸ a bad poem about Barcelona, signed ‘I?’, which appeared in the progressive university magazine Oxford Forward. Entitled ‘Vanguard’, it began: ‘Remember – they have ringed/Us England, roundabout with steel/Spain-tempered’, and ends: ‘Yes, gutters running red/In broken Barcelona bear/Witness to a debt. Look,/England, who fights for you.’

      A lot of the English aristocracy, together with powerful financiers, were members of the sinister pro-Hitler ‘Anglo-German Fellowship’. Might Britain even enter the war on the wrong side?²⁹ In October 1938 the sitting Conservative Member of Parliament for Oxford had died. Student pressure helped force Patrick Gordon-Walker, the Labour candidate, out of the running, so that tall, shambling Sandy Lindsay, Master of Balliol – the first confessed Socialist to head a college – could fight as the Popular Front candidate against the Conservatives’ Quintin Hogg, the ‘flamboyant and ill-mannered supporter of Chamberlain’,³⁰ without a rival from the left. Lindsay’s support stretched from the Communists through the Labour and Liberal parties, to dissident Conservatives. The international context, immediately after Neville Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler, made this ‘Munich’ by-election a fight of mythic proportions. ‘Save Peace, Save Czechoslovakia’ was one Lindsay slogan; ‘A vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler’ another: the by-election was both a referendum on the Munich agreement and a vote of confidence in Chamberlain, who had proposed on 18 September to allow Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.

      The substitution of Lindsay for Gordon-Walker affronted sections of middle-class Oxford. Iris canvassed, together with Raymond Carr, a clever, ambitious scholarship boy, down the left-hand side of the Woodstock Road, both of them ill-at-ease and both sympathetic to, and soon members of, the Communist Party. Iris was later to claim, ‘The very first thing I did when I arrived at Oxford was to join the CP':³¹ this went well with the ideals of Badminton.³² They also worked stuffing envelopes in the Lindsay campaign room opposite St Peter’s College. Carr was in awe of Iris because she was intellectually very impressive, did not care about her dishevelled appearance, and seemed to him to have been at Oxford a full year before him. In fact this was her first month there.³³ He was not the first or the last to be struck by Iris’s extraordinary confidence. She also worked in this by-election with fellow-Somervillian Anne Cloake,³⁴ with whom Carr thought her in love. Certainly Anne Cloake, who had no lesbian proclivity, but did like to shock, later boasted of having helped teach Iris the ‘facts of life'; in their second year they shared digs at 43 Park Town.

      Hogg won by a small majority. In St Aldates the defeated Lindsay supporters with their tattered red-and-yellow rosettes confronted the Conservatives ‘in their horsey check-coats, with their carnations and rolled umbrellas’ who, they felt, rushed to sneer and crow СКАЧАТЬ