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

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СКАЧАТЬ met the French writer and critic Raymond Queneau in 1946, he noted in his journal that she had formerly been a CP member for four years. So, if card-carrying, she did not tear up her card until 1942, probably on the advice of the Party itself when she entered the Treasury.⁷⁷ Iris’s disdainful comments, after going down in 1942, on the political commitments of the average student show that her world-view had not yet changed.⁷⁸ She wrote to Philippa in late 1942, ‘I feel that when anyone really thinks about [politics] there is only one conclusion! But maybe I’m prejudiced.’⁷⁹ Later, she wished she had been a bit less high-minded at Oxford, and a bit more frivolous. She thought £5 for a ticket for a Commem Ball a ‘terrible waste of money’⁸⁰ – £5 was exactly the then large sum Anne Cloake once begged off Mary Midgley for an undisclosed political cause. ‘They [CP members and sympathisers] lived a very exciting life,’ Mary commented, with irony. By 1938 the Moscow treason trials were documented. By 1940 Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was published. Mary – uneasily – admired the courage and whole-heartedness of those who like Iris, Anne and Leonie Marsh could ‘jump’ into the Party, but she could not follow them. Yet like most of their set, Mary was politically active, and the CP was scarcely the only outlet for political passion. ‘Buy the Tuppeny Strachey,’ ‘Char’ and Susie Williams-Ellis would cry, selling their uncle John Strachey’s pamphlet Why You Should be a Socialist.

Opinions vary as to whether – Frank apart – Iris proselytised. Vera Hoar, who came up only in 1940, remembered: ‘she never thrust Marxism down one’s throat; she just waited patiently for you to see the light. Though she once told me she had her doubts about whether dialectical materialism was philosophically sound.’ ‘Char’ Williams-Ellis noted that Iris ‘was a diligent and persuasive missionary for the CP and I did even go along to one or two meetings at her urging’. Iris’s copy of A Handbook of Marxism (Left Book Club Edition, edited by Emile Burns, with ‘Not For Sale to the General Public’ clearly printed on it), though little annotated, was much-thumbed. She admired Lenin’s State and Revolution.* Iris later spoke of her CP years as having taught her from the inside how a small, ruthless group of individuals can wield destructive power, and compared a dictatorial CP branch with an IRA cell. But it is hard to see what ‘destruction’ the wartime CPGB effected. The nearest and most sensitive example is the ‘recruitment’ by Leonie and Iris of Frank in 1939. Philip Toynbee’s memoir Friends Apart makes uncomfortable reading: ‘The Oxford CP practised dishonesty almost as a principle … the Party was, of course, indelicate, authoritarian and possessive … [displaying] a crudity of judgement which … extended to a bluff insensitivity about love affairs … There was a “line” for love; there was almost a line for friendship.’⁸¹

But Frank had his own political journey. He had been a rebel even at Winchester. He was more than ready for conversion, and his own man. ‘Almost any undergraduate who wanted to stop Hitler was then easy game for the Communists,’⁸² wrote Denis Healey, and Toynbee recalls the ‘marvellous atmosphere of conspiracy and purpose’⁸³ which they generated. The Labour Party in 1935 had permitted fusion of Communist and Socialist societies at the universities,⁸⁴ and there were close Labour links with CP headquarters on Hythe Bridge Street. Since then the University Labour Federation had been under CP domination. The Labour Club at Oxford, dominated by Communists, had over a thousand members; nearly all its committee were in the CP.⁸⁵ But then all of the committees of the League of Nations Union, the Liberal Club, the Student Christian Movement, two of the five Conservative Club committee, and two even of the ten British Union of Fascists were also in the CP.⁸⁶ It helps give the atmosphere of the times to point out that Robert Conquest, later to pioneer the objective history of Stalinism, while an open Communist, was a member of the university’s conservative Carlton Club, with the approval of both bodies, and that the CP included John Biggs-Davidson, later Chairman of the right-wing Monday Club.⁸⁷ Probably there were dons also in the CP. Donald MacKinnon, who was not, certainly had instinctively radical social and political principles* – the oft-repeated tale of his climbing under the table to bite the calf of a visiting Anglican bishop has only symbolic truth: he was at odds with what would later be termed the Establishment.

      Of the over two hundred CP student-members at Oxford, thirty were ‘open’, among them Robert Conquest, Denis Healey and Iris. She could scarcely have been more open. Her CP membership was referred to in June 1939 in Cherwell Moreover, in the first newsletter of the Old Froebelian, 1940–41, while Iris’s peers modestly vouchsafe merely that they are serving in the Air Ministry, are humbly ‘one of the people on the Home Front’, or ‘work in a canteen at Marylebone’,⁸⁸ Iris on the same page, having reported that she got a second in Mods and is now doing Greats, then heroically boasts, ‘I am a member of the Communist Party.’ Indeed a dramatic announcement. Meeting fellow-Froebelian Garth Underwood for the first time for eight years in Foyle’s bookshop in March 1940,⁸⁹ she declared her CP membership. She was until June 1941 consistently unsympathetic to the war effort.

      The first Executive Committee of the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) Iris attended was on 19 April 1940, just after ‘schools’ for Mods;⁹⁰ she soon made her mark. In summer 1940 she represents ‘culture’ on the committee and proposes a meeting on Ireland.⁹¹ (When the following year Kingsley Amis, also in the ‘student’ branch of the CP in his first year at Oxford, was co-appointed to take over ‘this sector of the front’ – culture – he interpreted the job less strenuously, as ‘gramophone recitals’ rather than, for example, working-class Oxford history. His CP membership, he later claimed, involved little more than meeting girls, ‘trying to read Marx, Lenin and Plekhanov (aargh), going to meetings, speaking at meetings …’.⁹² Some – like Lilian Eldridge – became members mainly in order to go to Saturday-night ‘hops’ at Ruskin.)

      April 1940 was an interesting month in Oxford Labour politics. Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland, both nauseated by the CP rubric that the Red Army was fighting to liberate the tiny, brave Finnish people from the reactionary rule of President Mannerheim⁹³ (just as it had, in collusion with the Nazis, ‘liberated’ the Poles), broke with the OULC and set up a much bigger Democratic Socialist Club, with Crosland as Chairman and Jenkins as Treasurer. Meanwhile the tiny official rump-OULC continued to support the USSR despite its invasion of Finland, Iris remaining ‘apparently rigid on the Stalinist line’.⁹⁴ While the German armies were chasing the British Expeditionary Force across the fields of Picardy, towards Dunkirk, Jenkins spent fruitless weeks attempting to sort out the assets and liabilities of the rival groups, writing to ‘Dear Miss Murdoch’ as OULC Co-Treasurer and receiving humourless answers from her addressed to ‘Dear Comrade Jenkins’. ‘Student politics,’ Jenkins later reflected, ‘have rarely been notable for their sense of proportion.’⁹⁵ The Labour Party took no great interest: the OULC, as Crosland’s widow Susan would write, resembled ‘the sex life of the amoeba – dividing itself constantly’.⁹⁶

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