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

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      Dover was unfrightened, since the seminar was attended by dons – Wade-Gery from Corpus, Bryan-Brown of Worcester and the historian R.C.K. Ensor – as well as undergraduates: ‘On occasion their ignorance stood as nakedly revealed as ours.’⁴⁰ To others the sight of a college head ‘curdy commanded to fetch a book, a celebrated scholar berated for his poor “Englisch"’, made the event the more terrifying. Many prayed they would not be picked on, some were scared off altogether. Those who stayed gained: Fraenkel had the imaginative sympathy that brings literature alive. Even apathetic students found themselves infected with ‘the vitality of ideas that struck home because they were actually lived by the speaker’.⁴¹ He read poetry with a moving expressiveness and in lectures would, to the delight of his young hearers, break into song, singing Horace’s Integer Vitae to a tune presumably learnt in the Gymnasium, or rendering raucously the frog-chorus from Aristophanes’ Frogs.

      Iris and Mary Midgley had to prepare Clytemnestra’s speech, lines 920–34. After a term of silent participation:

      One had to … try and understand both the poetry, and at the same time, why the language was what it was and what to do about the variant readings. In the hands of a pedant, this might have been less useful. But Fraenkel was really profoundly into the poetry, and we concentrated on the Cassandra scene … a don … prepared the same dozen lines. Discussion went to and fro, and you were expected to follow, and to see what humane scholarship was like for people whose life it was … [Fraenkel] really did take you into what Aeschylus was all about, which is about as deep as things get. There was a terrific insistence on getting the details [of the scholarship] right, and he did it in a way that really was creative and important and useful … he would tell you the history of the scholars, of what had happened in the Renaissance and in medieval times: … it was extremely hard work.

After one class Fraenkel started to invite Iris back to his rooms, but she was giggling with Mary and with Nick Crosbie, with whom Mary was in love, and he got the whole party instead. He showed them all the passage in Goethe’s Faust where Mephistopheles says, ‘ich bin der Geist der stets verneint’ – the spirit that continually negates, and spoke of its connexion with the nature of evil. Shortly after, they met him in Mildred Hartley’s room, and on somebody’s mentioning Nick, Fraenkel said, ‘Ach, he is the Cherubino of my classes.’ That implied that he saw himself as the Count.*

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      Reverencing her father, Iris thirsted for fatherly guidance for the intellectual she was becoming. Hence her need for gurus, for the same qualities on a more august and majestic scale. She found them in a series of learned exiles who famously influenced every aspect of British intellectual life,⁴² of whom Fraenkel might be taken as a prototype. Czechs, Austrians and elderly German Jews – ‘scholars with long hair and longer sentences’⁴³ – crowded the wartime Oxford pavements, and on the buses to North Oxford it used to be said that one needed to speak German.⁴⁴ The Central European refugees that Iris admired, pitied and collected had lost their culture, their language, their homes, sometimes their families, their money, their professions, their way of life. These were wounded patriarchs, deprived even, in many cases, of the ability to fight. The British attitude towards them was not uniformly generous:⁴⁵ ‘What are they doing, taking jobs away from our boys who are away at the front?’ was a common reaction. Small surprise if some could be difficult.

      An immensely learned, formidable and astonishingly generous man – generous with his time, and with money – with a complex, intense and dominating personality, Fraenkel was without deviousness, but could be impetuous, hot-headed, easily hurt. He was born a Jew in Berlin in 1888, and came out of the greatest period of German Classical scholarship: on his desk stood a large photo of Leo (1851–1914), his stern taskmaster; on his library walls, Wilamowitz (1848–1931) and Mommsen (1817–1903). Such were his models. He had forced himself to learn to use an arm withered from osteomyelitis and a grossly deformed hand, in a gruelling daily routine that started at 8.30 a.m. and often continued through the small hours.⁴⁶

During the summer of 1933, after the Nazis had come to power, books were burnt, university classes disrupted. Fraenkel was deprived of his professorship at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, forbidden to teach, subjected to insults – a senior Professor publicly denouncing him as a ‘frecher Judenjunge’.* Another colleague and ‘close friend’ wrote to explain why he could henceforth no longer have anything to do with him.† It was not until the Röhm purges of 1934 that he and his Lutheran wife Ruth⁴⁷ left Germany and, with help from Gilbert Murray,* settled first in Cambridge, before he took the Corpus Professorship of Latin at Oxford, which he held until his retirement in 1953. A disdainful letter to the Sunday Times asking whether there was no English person who could have done the job just as well was wittily answered by A.E. Housman: there was only one English person better qualified – himself – and ‘he is not interested in the Chair’.⁴⁸

      There were coolnesses and misunderstandings. Fraenkel was capable at first of treating kindness with startling rudeness. He could be tactless with colleagues, severe towards pupils, dogmatic and single-minded. Originally the very type of the unassimilated foreigner, disdaining the superficiality of British scholarship, he later became part of the fabric of college life. Some felt that his ‘inhuman’ devotion to scholarship was at the expense of his wife and family.

      He was short, with a disproportionately large head, a magnificent forehead merging into a dome that was bald except for a fringe of hair, had fine eyes, large ears and nose, a most determined jaw … Mobile eyebrows, and a face expressive of feelings to a comic degree so that anger was a terrifying mask, laughter a complete dissolution of the features, his smile a disarmingly conspiratorial surprise.

      Physically vigorous, walking fast with a shuffling pace, he wore a brown beret which he could dextrously scrape on and off.⁴⁹

      Fraenkel’s admiration for Iris is clear. David Pears attended the seminar for one week only in 1941, and though he did not speak to or properly meet Iris for another decade, he found her the most riveting, noticeable person in the room, ‘with her lioness’s face, very square, very strong, but very gentle’. To Pears, Fraenkel called her the only truly educated person of her generation, using the Greek word ‘mousikee’ meaning inspired by the muses, hence genuinely cultivated. Fraenkel, whom Pears admired, recalled to him nonetheless the vain and dictatorial Professor Unrat in the film Blue Angel.

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      Fraenkel haunts Iris’s novels. The dedicatee of The Time of the Angels, he lies behind the magisterial and dying Levquist in The Book and the Brotherhood, and behind Max Lejour in the earlier The Unicorn, who movingly sings to a ‘plain-song lilt of his own’ a chorus from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, while his old pupil listens to the ‘healing familiar lines':

      Zeus, who leads men into СКАЧАТЬ