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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Jenkins was famous for singing ‘Frankie and Johnnie’. On 1 May 1940 the Communists, trying to hold a May Day meeting, were pelted with tomatoes, oranges, rotten eggs and stink-bombs as they marched over Magdalen Bridge and up the ‘High’.⁹⁷ Mary extemporised a comic verse about the ‘Fascist’ tomato Iris was cross at having to wash out of her hair.* But that summer after the fall of France, when Britain was fighting Hitler entirely alone, the two factions were still squabbling, both sides using Marxist arguments.⁹⁸ In winter 1941 Iris is OULC Secretary, in spring Chairman. She appears a competent minute-taker – one predecessor contributed almost as many doodles as notes – and a conscientious and effective chairwoman. Life had become, in one of her expressively breathless lists, ‘one long committee meeting, with intervals in which interminable letters, articles, resolutions, protests, exhortations and minimum programmes have to be drafted’.⁹⁹

      On 22 June 1941 the Germans invaded the USSR, which now made it into an anti-Fascist war of which ‘we’ did approve. Iris told Mary that the CP had again to spend a week sorting out the Party line. During this turmoil Leo Pliatzky cut his ties with the Party: Hitler’s invasion of Russia for him gave the lie to the former Party diktat. Similarly Iris told Margaret Stanier that disillusionment – not yet with Marxism, but with the Party for abandoning its opposition to the war effort – had made her consider quitting it. Even after she gave up office, the OULC nominated her to oppose a Democratic Socialist Club speaker.¹⁰⁰ By October 1941 a motion pinned into the minute book pressed for the opening of a second front for ‘the safety of the USSR, of this country, of the whole world’. Negotiations to heal the split between OULC and DSC proceeded fruitlessly until 1943.¹⁰¹

      7

      On 17 October 1940 Iris’s signature in the Bodleian Library register sits immediately before Philip Larkin’s,¹⁰² a reminder that hard scholarly work continued too, throughout her last two years. Results came out after vivas in the Ashmolean in June 1942. Mary had a viva voce, or face-to-face examination.¹⁰³ Iris didn’t, and quite wrongly feared the worst. In the event both got firsts, Iris’s ‘unquestioned’. Isobel Henderson arranged a dinner party in a smart restaurant for Iris and Mary, her only Greats finalists at Somerville that year, and invited two distinguished sages to entertain the girls: J.B. Trend, Mozart-scholar, translator, musicologist, and the polymath A.L. Rowse. Iris and Mary were very tired, though quite willing to be interested, but Rowse showed off, ate up the available space, was conceited and self-centred, and this exhausted and confused them. ‘Did we learn something new this evening?’ Mary asked Iris, as they stumbled home through bright moonlight on St Giles.

      ‘O yes, I think so,’ declared Iris, gazing up at the enormous moon. ‘I do think so. Trend is a good man and Rowse is a bad man.’ At which exact but grotesquely unfashionable judgement we both fell about laughing so helplessly that the rare passers-by looked round in alarm and all the cats ran away.¹⁰⁴

      Mary thought Iris’s diagnosis was ‘dead right’ and that it put the evening in perspective. Rowse’s showing-off battered at them. Imperfect behaviour can make the young feel inadequate, irrationally guilty. It was a great relief to Mary to have Iris’s (Manichaean) perspective.¹⁰⁵ (Iris and Rowse later got on. Despite having little or no sexual interest in women, he once took bizarre pleasure in pulling her hair in a taxi.¹⁰⁶ Monsters great and small interested her.)

      In one of a series of letters expressing her impatience for Finals to be over and for war work and ‘real life’ to begin, Iris wrote to Frank, serving overseas, ‘I suppose I hanker for the dramatic & heroic – ridiculous. I can almost see myself joining the WRNS just to demonstrate my vicarious suffering for Leningrad – & my contempt of [sic] Oxford'; and, later, ‘ATS seems more and more probable. Teaching or Civil Service also conceivable';¹⁰⁷ she also thought she might nurse or fill shells.¹⁰⁸ A central register had been set up for bright women undergraduates, and dons spared from teaching, willing to carry out war work in the short-staffed civil service. Mary got the Ministry of Production, Philippa the Nuffield Social Survey under G.D.H. Cole in Oxford. Iris was interviewed,¹⁰⁹ and for some days was anxious in case her CP membership prejudiced her chances of a job. Finally the buff-coloured HM Stationery envelope arrived, inviting her to the governmental department with the greatest self-conceit, the Treasury, which favoured those who had undergone the formation professionelle of cold baths and irregular Greek verbs that shaped the English ruling class for centuries. ‘Iris Murdoch has of late been no more a roving, and her old haunts know her not,’ she wrote to the Badminton School Magazine.¹¹⁰

Recalling Oxford in wartime, she later wrote of how often one heard the announcement: ‘Extra coaches will be added to the end of this train.’¹¹¹ On one such train, in early July 1942, only ten days after having sat her Finals, Iris left Oxford for London. She sent the news that she was a temporary Assistant Principal to Frank.¹¹² ‘But do not please on this account say Irushka is dead, long live Miss Murdoch, an official in the Treasury.’ ‘Bureaucrat’ was a dirty word to them both.*

* ‘A New Non Nobis, the War-Song of the British Public’, August 1939, attacks the British for lazy pacifism. The USSR-German non-aggression pact was signed on 23 August, and she wrote ‘Dangerous Thoughts inspired by Curious Conduct on the part of the USSR’ on 1 October.

* Frank Thompson inaccurately recorded that Noel, ‘like most sane people’ depressed by the ‘stupidity of Greats’, had left Oxford for farming in the Berkshire hills, where he ‘married a rich Jewess after only a fortnight’s acquaintance’. The friends wagged their heads and said, ‘We knew he had it in him.’ The farm was in Oxfordshire; Ruth Basch, the Czech Jewess to whom Noel became semi-engaged there, was not rich; and nor did he marry her, or anyone else, until 17 February 1943, when he married Carol (also known as Grace) Nethersole. Such inaccuracies may be set down to the fact that Frank, only nineteen and a writer in the making, could have given himself ‘poetic licence’. Wartime too made it harder to check one’s facts.

* In Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Cherubino is page to Countess Almaviva, whose husband the Count has a wandering eye.

* Roughly, ‘uppity Jewboy’.

* Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Chairman of the League of Nations Union and President of the Board of Governors at Badminton School, was also a neighbour and friend of the Thompsons on Boar’s Hill.

* Arnaldo Momigliano understood the Jewish aspects of СКАЧАТЬ