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

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СКАЧАТЬ who’s doing Honour Mods. I worship her.’

      The group associated with It Can Happen Here took to ‘knocking about together': Frank, Leonie Marsh, Leo, Iris, and also fellow-Wykehamist Michael (M.R.D.) Foot. ‘That was a bad passage, the first fortnight of the summer term,’ wrote Frank:

      Like something in rather poor taste by de Musset. I was pining green for Iris, who was gently sympathetic but not at all helpful. Michael was lashing himself into a frenzy for Leonie [Marsh] who would draw him on and then let him down with a thud. In the evenings we would swap sorrows and read bits of Verlaine to each other.

      Frank spent three whole days that May walking round and round New College gardens, observing the chestnuts bearing their white candles, the pink tulips and blue forget-me-nots, in the intervals between writing letters to Iris and tearing them up. He wrote poems to her expressing ‘calf-love’.⁵⁰ Iris, ‘with her gentleness and her simplicity’, was the person from whom he wanted to hear good news about himself, ‘But Iris never told a lie yet, so I got worse and worse.’ Michael hid Frank’s cut-throat razor from him. Leo, more down-to-earth, invited him to dinner. When, one evening, Iris disappeared into Doug Lowe’s rooms in Ruskin, Frank went back to his parents’ house on Boar’s Hill and, on his mother’s sensible advice, dug up an entire bed of irises as a counter-charm.⁵¹ He stopped sleeping, started talking to himself, was in such a bad way that he escaped to spend a week at home, gardening, going for walks, climbing trees. Other things cheered him. There was the ‘big joyous world of his friends, not only political ones’.⁵² He found comfort in the idylls of Theocritus, especially the tenth, and in two other Greek pastoral poets, Bion and Moschus, whom Iris recalled his quoting to her ‘exuberantly’.

      So Frank’s old schoolfriend and rival from Winchester Michael (M.R.D.) Foot was crazy about Leonie, who adored Frank, who was hopelessly in love with Iris. If Iris had loved Michael, it would have made a perfect quartet of frustrated desire, like that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, and doubtless one blueprint – there would be others – for the love-vortices of her novels. On this unhappy love quartet, Frank was able to joke in a parody of Marxist-Leninist Newspeak: ‘It’s not shortage of resources that’s the problem, comrades. It’s maldistribution of supplies.’⁵³

      5

Scarcity of resources, however, also played its part. The ratio of men to women at Oxford at that time exceeded six to one, and the Labour Club was reputed to have the best women. Some men joined the club merely to meet and get ‘lined-up with’, in the jargon of the period, a woman. Within that closed society-within-a-society, ‘line-ups’ were regarded as temporary, and might – equally might not – involve a sexual affair.* Leo Pliatzky’s first ‘line-up’, for example, was with Leonie, his second with Iris, his third with Edna Edmonds (later Healey). Who Iris’s first lover was, and what such affairs meant to her, will have to wait for a later chapter. A comment of Leonie Marsh gives the general impression of Iris at that time. Leonie left Oxford in June 1940, married in February 1941 and was surprised when Iris declared herself envious of the baby that followed: ‘Funny, she was always so virginal.’⁵⁴

      It was probably on a punt journey to the arboured tables and chairs at the Victoria Arms, with Mary Scrutton and the two shy and unpretentious Williams-Ellis sisters, Charlotte and Susie, that Iris said, in the summer of 1939,? long to get married, I’d do anything to get married.’ ‘But you’ve had six proposals this term alone,’ said one of the other girls. ‘Oh, they don’t count,’ Iris retorted dismissively. Susie thought Iris incredibly beautiful, with great big round blue eyes, very blonde shoulder-length hair cut straight across in a fringe: ‘beauty of character as well as of appearance’. Susie had come to Ruskin for one term from the Chelsea School of Art; Charlotte was at Somerville. It is interesting that Iris’s apparent confidence so far exceeded that of the patrician ‘Char’ and Susie, whose father was Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of Portmeirion, and whose mother Amabel Strachey, children’s story-writer and cousin to Lytton. Charlotte recalled: ‘Iris was kind and pleasant to the shy and socially inept as I was.’⁵⁵ Clare Campbell, granddaughter of a distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, who gained a first in Honour Mods without apparent effort, was none the less ‘amazed by Iris’s social poise as well as fluency’ at meetings of the Jowett Society – the undergraduate club where philosophical discussion took place. By comparison with Iris she felt like ‘an over-age schoolgirl’.

      M.R.D. Foot noted that ‘practically everyone who was up with Iris fell for her. She had personality and that wonderful Irish voice.’⁵⁶ ‘Pretty and buxom, with blonde hair and dirndl skirts,’ is how Leo Pliatzky recalled her. Leo had turned his attentions towards Iris before Frank, Michael some time after. They were not alone. At times Iris at Oxford seems like a cross between Zuleika Dobson and Wendy in Peter Pan, looking after the ‘lost boys’. Despite the ‘thick’ figure Frank accurately noted, and a walk which a fellow-student compared to the rolling gait of the oxen in Homer,⁵⁷ others outside the close-knit central group of Iris, Frank, Leonie, Leo and Michael felt her attractions. The interest of David Hicks, who had graduated in PPE at Worcester in 1938, and was taking a Dip. Ed., was aroused in November 1938.⁵⁸ Hicks was three years older than Iris, who resembled, he wrote to her, a ‘fairy-tale princess’ but one with a ‘quaint virginity cult’. She visited his London home on Boxing Day 1938. His friend, kind, warm-hearted, undiplomatic Hal Lidderdale, a scholar at Magdalen reading Greats, also sympathetic to the Communist Party,⁵⁹ was another who fell for Iris. Iris liked his ‘warmth & humanness, his lazy pleasure in life’s good things, his lack of petty vanities & meannesses’.⁶⁰ She planned a camping holiday with Patrick O’Regan at Merton, who loaned her some cash which she repaid, and sent her, in July 1940, a book that seems positively emblematic. This was C.S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love, with its history of the courtly cult, by many gentleman-admirers, of the princesse lointaine.⁶¹ Nor is this an exhaustive list. Another (un-named) Irishman wrote her verse.⁶² John Willett, stage designer for It Can

      Happen Here, school-friend of Frank and Michael, and with the distinction of not being in love with Iris, thought – echoing others including Charlotte Williams-Ellis – that it was Iris’s inner quality that attracted everyone: not a classic beauty, a beauty of soul.⁶³

      This would tally with the view of shy and gentle Noel Martin. Martin⁶⁴ was sitting in a friend’s room on the first floor of Corpus quad one early evening in the autumn of 1938. Aged only eighteen and headed for a first in Mods, he saw a gowned and corn-haired Iris pass the pelican sundial with a Somerville girlfriend, probably Mary. She had a lively gait and looked, he thought, ‘different’. Leonie Marsh, for example, whom he knew, was ‘quite a girl’ – one of those who get noticed. Iris, by contrast, was unassertive, grave,⁶⁵ reserved. But there was something about her, and he felt attracted. Iris and her companion were on their way to Eduard Fraenkel’s brilliant, towering explication of the Agamemnon on the far left of СКАЧАТЬ