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

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СКАЧАТЬ dropping upon the heart in sleep, so even against our wills does wisdom come upon us.⁵⁰

      Here Aeschylus’ crucial Hymn to Zeus is a key to the novel’s gainsaying of the liberal-humanist illusion that life can (or should) have to do only with the pursuits of happiness and ‘freedom’. On the contrary, only those who are positively wounded⁵¹ –if not corrupted by the experience – have the chance of learning wisdom ('suffering teaches,’ Iris wrote in 1945⁵²). Moreover, in her Platonic dialogue Art and Eros Callistos tries to recite a different translation of the same hymn throughout, succeeding in being heard only in the play’s culminating moments. Here Callistos is putting on show a high-point of literary art, and disturbing, moving and infuriating Plato – who is ‘anti-art’ – with the ‘terrible beauty’ of the Hymn to Zeus.

      In the commentary to the Agamemnon he finally published, the fruit of twenty-five years’ labour disrupted by exile, the most detailed commentary ever devoted to a Greek classic, Fraenkel writes that in the Hymn to Zeus ‘ [Aeschylus] endeavours in a sublime effort to unriddle the ultimate cause of the fate and suffering of man.’⁵³ He identifies the views of the chorus with those of Aeschylus, being obsessed by the theology of Agamemnon’s guilt. It is noteworthy that Iris wrote of the lines as ‘healing’. Not all suffering was amenable to Socialist ‘correction’. Much is built into the very conditions of life, and the Party offered ‘too obtuse and partial an explanation of the world’s evil and of human goodness’.⁵⁴

Probably Fraenkel also found in the play a grand key to the general drama being acted out in Europe at that time, a magisterial exploration of the themes of evil and implacable divine justice, a commentary on the bitter roots of all suffering, including his own.* Perhaps he saw human affairs as simpler and more dramatic than they actually were – seeing his friends, for example, as endowed with vices or virtues,⁵⁵ seeing Agamemnon as a ‘gentleman’. If Fraenkel gives, either here or in his work on Horace, a sentimental or false picture of the relationship between poetry and politics,⁵⁶ this was a simplicity Iris shared, to the enrichment of her own work.

      Iris’s later poem about Fraenkel’s seminar, ‘The Agamemnon Class, 1939’ (1977), is remarkable for its deliberate conflation of different kinds of dread: of the war; of being unable correctly to identify the tenses of some familiar verb; and what might be termed moral dread, the deep fears that can accompany the awakening of an acute adult moral consciousness. She also conflates two kinds of heroism, ancient and modern, Greek and twentieth-century British. The long poem, dedicated to Frank Thompson’s memory, starts thus:

      Do you remember Professor

       Eduard Fraenkel’s endless Class on the Agamemnon? Between line eighty three and line a thousand It seemed to us our innocence Was lost, our youth laid waste, In that pellucid unforgiving air,

      The aftermath experienced before,

       Focused by dread into a lurid flicker, A most uncanny composite of sun and rain. Did we expect the war? What did we fear? First love’s incinerating crippling flame, Or that it would appear In public that we could not name The Aorist of some familiar verb. The spirit’s failure we knew nothing of, Nothing really of sin and of pain, The work of the knife and the axe, How absolute death is, Betrayal of lover and friend, Of egotism the veiled crux, Mistaking still for guilt The anxiety of a child. With exquisite dressage We ruled a chaste soul. They had not yet made an end Of the returning hero. The demons that travelled with us Were still smiling in their sleep …

Mary Warnock, who joined Fraenkel’s seminar in 1942, pleased Iris by commenting on the poem: ‘that atmosphere of dread and apprehension brought it all back to me. One dread merging into another. How amazing.’⁵⁷ Frank, too, who may have attended the seminar in the summer of 1939,* believed Agamemnon the greatest drama yet written,⁵⁸ and wrote an Aeschylean chorus comparing the Trojan to the Second World War, in both of which ‘boys died bravely, in a war of others’ making’.⁵⁹ To his brother E.P. he refers, albeit within a joke, to ‘suffering as stark and Aeschylean as any I have known in this war’.⁶⁰

      5

      In the third winter of the war Iris wrote twice to Frank about Donald MacKinnon, her and Mary’s philosophy tutor for Greats.

      This man MacKinnon is a jewel, it’s bucked me up a lot meeting him. He’s a moral being as well as a good philosopher. I had almost given up thinking of people & actions in terms of value – meeting him has made it a significant way of thinking again.

      One month later:

      I have this incredibly fine guy MacKinnon as a tutor, which makes things lucky. It’s good to meet someone so extravagantly unselfish, so fantastically noble, as well as so extremely intelligent as this cove. He inspires a pure devotion. One feels vaguely one would go through fire for him, & so on. Sorry if this makes him sound like a superman. There are snags. He’s perpetually on the brink of a nervous break-down … He is perpetually making demands of one – there is a moral as well as an intellectual challenge – & there is no room for spiritual lassitude of any kind.⁶¹

      Vera Hoar, who was tutored by MacKinnon at about the same time,⁶² wrote: ‘If I think of the two people who have most influenced me, they would be Donald MacKinnon and Iris – I think of them together.’ He gave his tutorials in one of the towers of Victorian-Gothic Keble in a room utterly bare, save for a table – no desk – in the middle cluttered high with books and papers, and Iris and Vera sometimes exchanged greetings in the dark passage there. To Vera Iris said that MacKinnon inspired the sort of love one would have for Christ – quite unconditional. He was a passionate High Anglo-Catholic married to a Scots-Norwegian girl at odds with his High Church connexions. ‘The vitality of ideas that struck home because they were actually lived by the speaker’ was one description of Fraenkel. It works for MacKinnon, too. Iris worshipped both.

      His philosophy tutorials, given from his battered armchair, or to some male students from his bath, or while lying on his back under his table, sucking a razor-blade which, when not cutting the table, he sometimes turned over and over in his lips or hands, were notably dramatic (Iris when later an Oxford don herself would sometimes imitate the supine tutorial, not the razor-blade). Or he would sharpen up to a dozen pencils. If he had been fire-watching the night before, he stayed proudly in the boilersuit worn for that purpose. He was skilful at making you feel something very important was happening.⁶³ When he got to something impossible to explain, he would protrude his tongue with his upper denture balanced on the end. Nervous tutees had been known to edge backwards, so as not to have to catch the denture if it fell. Sometimes he talked out of one of his room’s two windows. To hear him, you put your head out of the other, like another gargoyle. Once he rolled himself up in the carpet, like Beatrix Potter’s Tom Kitten caught in the pastry. Such gimmicks developed the logic of an argument. However bizarre they are to read about, they did not feel СКАЧАТЬ