Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography. Peter Conradi J.
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Название: Iris Murdoch: A Life: The Authorized Biography
Автор: Peter Conradi J.
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007380008
isbn:
* Nineham nonetheless turned up at Keble: there was no answer when he knocked, until a voice from behind another door said, ‘Come in.’ Nineham went in, and found MacKinnon in his bath. He motioned to Nineham to sit on the lavatory seat and read his essay. When MacKinnon had finished his bath, he rose and complained, ‘I haven’t got a towel.’ He opened the door and shouted, ‘Mabel, Mabel!’ (the scout). She didn’t come, and he complained, ‘This is always happenning: I think that girl thinks I’m queer or something.’ So Nineham volunteered to get a towel. MacKinnon dressed in the most astonishing and terrible clothes, and they adjourned to the Lamb and Flag, where he bought Nineham a whisky, himself a double, then paced up and down the crowded bar, completing the tutorial, unaware of the effect his rhetoric was having on the other drinkers: ‘You see WHEN Kant says this, he MEANS to say that, and THIS is CRUCIAL,’ in his unique Scots-Wykehamist brogue. This continued for thirty minutes, and the drinkers – all servicemen – went completely silent. When he’d finished, the entire bar broke into entranced applause at this exotic manifestation. MacKinnon was genuinely nonplussed, and blushed deeply. He was ‘not a self-conscious eccentric but a genuine one’. Nineham, like Vera Hoar, identified MacKinnon as Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil, an alarming figure to his students: Rozanov, unlike MacKinnon, maltreats them.
* Iris wrote to Raymond Queneau on 27 February 1949 à propos this book: ‘how rationalistic I must have been at 19’.
* See MacKinnon’s Times obituary, 4 March 1994. In 1953 he edited Christian Faith and Communist Faith, a series of studies by members of the Anglican Communion.
* It showed her ‘in her true colours as a Red’.
* Frank always used the word pejoratively. See the ‘poisonous-looking’ bureaucrat Iris was dancing with when he first saw her, and Iris’s condescension when mentioning to Frank that of the first-year intake of Somerville ‘lasses’ in 1941, ‘half of them are bureaucrats’. Among these new students were two non-bureaucrats – Chitra Rudingerova – one of the Czech partly Jewish girls from Badminton (first name from Tagore) who came up in 1941, whom BMB asked Iris to take under her wing. Chitra thought Iris marvellous, quiet and somehow fey, not quite in the real world – her quietness hiding or exemplifying great power. Marjorie Boulton came up in 1941 too, an unconfident Lincolnshire girl reading English, who would be a lifelong friend. See also M.R.D. Foot to Frank Thompson, 28 November 1942: ‘I promise you the “charms of bureaucracy” shall not enslave me.’ This was not, averred Frank’s future sister-in-law Dorothy Thompson, who joined the Communist Party aged fifteen in 1939, an uncommon attitude: the short stories of Mikhail Zoschenko, The Woman who Couldn’t Read Stories (translated around 1945), are both pro-Party and satirical of bureaucracy.
† This colleague tried to make it up in the 1950s, sending Fraenkel a book in which he professed: ‘memor’ (I remember). Fraenkel sent him back a two-word answer: ‘et ego’ (I also).
6 This Love Business 1942–1943
Two weeks after her arrival in London in July 1942,1 Iris wrote to Philippa Bosanquet that she now lived
in a fantastic world, ringing with telephonic voices, & peopled by strange fictional personalities such as Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s Treasury … (Oxford has nothing on the Treasury as far as tradition goes.) I can’t believe that it’s me writing these peremptory letters & telling people over the phone where they get off … all I do at present feels like play-acting.2
She sat at a ‘desk 8 feet square amid heaps of blue files tied up with tape’ devising new regulations ‘with names like 1437/63538 90m. (14) &tc’,3 sharing a ‘lofty airy office on the 3rd floor’ working in ‘Establishments’, in what was then called the New Public Offices on the corner of Great George Street and Whitehall, looking straight onto the north front of Westminster Abbey.4 Her room-mate at one point was ‘a charming but excessively talkative staff-officer in whose company work is virtually impossible’.5 Iris sometimes fled to the Treasury library. Haughty pre-war Treasury tradition meant Lords Commissioners issuing Letters of Permission. Wartime procedure was more informal, and letters coming into the department went first, to their surprise, to the new, young ‘Assistant Principals’ (AP’s) such as Pat Shaw (later Lady Trend), Peggy Stebbing (later Pyke-Lees) and Iris. They had considerable power, looking up precedents and drafting official letters, which they passed on up to one of the two Principals ‘to’ whom they worked.6
In Iris’s second novel, The Right from the Enchanter (1956), a small army of energetic, ambitious and effective young women alone understand the workings of the fictional ‘sELIB‘,* to the terror of at least one male colleague. This may reflect Iris’s war work. In September 1939 there was one notable woman in the Treasury – Evelyn (later Baroness) Sharp, an Assistant Secretary,7 and by 1941 the then thirteen women were still regarded as odd creatures. By 1943, following Iris’s arrival, their number had gone up to twenty-three. They acted on their own initiative, did not always consult their seniors or let things go via committee. Because they were Treasury APs, they dealt directly with heads of other Civil Service divisions.8
Was Iris ‘Treasury material'? Senior Treasury ‘top brass’ are famously statesmen in disguise, carrying with them a mass of interrelated exact knowledge, extreme day-to-day precision, intellectual detachment and realpolitik. While generally the Treasury was loosening up, and in measurable ways, Iris had landed in its stuffiest and narrowest division. Other departments looked outwards towards the wider world. ‘Establishments’9 looked inward, dealing with the internal workings of the civil service itself – discipline, pay, emoluments, rooms, complaints, requests to move.10 Iris spent much time on what she called ‘certain pay questions’11 – calculating what increments those civil servants who had been seconded for war work should be entitled to receive at the end of hostilities; otherwise known – a standing Bayley joke, this – as Notional Promotion in Absentia. She was also secretary to three committees, one designated to ‘investigate causes of delay’. She wrote to Frank:
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