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

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">³⁸ Three scrupulous letters from Seaforth – undated but probably early in 1943 – to Marjorie Boulton, still up at Somerville until 1944, and seeking Iris’s advice about joining the CP, support this view. Iris is anxious to proffer only Objective’ advice to the then impressionable Boulton. ‘Oxford is not typical of the Party,’ she wrote in one, implying that she knew the London CP also. In another:

Whatever happens you mustn’t dramatise this business & join us on the crest of a wave of emotion. Our organisation is in many ways intensely prosaic & often even sordid. There are bitter domestic quarrels – & sometimes the framework seems unbearably rigid & the people stupidly dogmatic. It is very easy to lose the beautiful clear vision & the joy of comradeship … there are two main things. Do you agree with our general policy? And then – more disquieting to me – your religious views … … Soon (I hope) you’ll feel the deep quiet certainty that nothing can shake.*

      CP members were required to feed information about their war work to the Party, which Iris, out of an idealism she would later see as misplaced, duly did. The CP explicitly trained its members to a habit of systematic dissimulation, which caused some to quit. The moral pressure to accept the resulting isolation from most of those around one was undoubtedly extreme: one’s reaction to that pressure might largely depend on one’s personal relations with the people who were calling on one to accept it. Iris later spoke of the role of an army captain, her immediate superior, who stole and copied documents, largely at night, for her to hand on either directly or to hide by dead-letter drop, probably in a tree in Kensington Gardens. We cannot know what she passed on. While it may, as John Bayley believed, have been unimportant information about colleagues and Treasury doings, she would probably not have hesitated to pass on information of greater moment too.³⁹

      The capacity to operate clandestinely resembles the capacity to run love relationships concurrently: both evidence that warm-yet-cool ability to enter into, and operate within, many other people’s worlds that Keats, in a famous letter, admired in Shakespeare (now read by certain critics as a spy in the Catholic cause). Training in dissimulation also throws some light on, even if it cannot altogether explain, the co-existence within Iris of a striking outward stillness or serenity with an equally turbulent inner world. But it is extraordinary that she attempted to be a loyal ‘cadre’ for so long: she had too much sense and heart to be loyal to that kind of political clique, and detested, once she properly understood it, Stalinist tyranny.⁴⁰

      Her Treasury colleague Walter Pyke-Lees mentioned Iris’s Communism casually and tolerantly to his future wife and co-colleague Peggy Stebbing, who recalled it as being, with some exceptions, ‘understood, in a civilised spirit’, Russia being at that time Britain’s newest ally. There is little direct evidence about when or why she severed her links with the Party. CPGB archives up to 1942 are now in Moscow, and the absence of the name ‘Iris Murdoch’ from the 1943 CP list of members⁴¹ proves nothing: ‘underground’ members, by definition, were not listed. In the spring of 1943 Iris proselytised (unsuccessfully) the ex-Magpie Ruth Kingsbury (later Mills), who, though unconvinced, nonetheless bought at Iris’s suggestion a Russian grammar and a Tolstoy short story in Russian. Iris’s poet friend Paul Potts, recalled as sympathetic to the CP,⁴² was also a friend of George Orwell, who had bravely unmasked the USSR, notably in ‘Inside the Whale’. If it is true that the CP held meetings in Iris’s flat with her agreement, but in her absence,⁴³ they were probably of some dull, perhaps ‘bureaucratic’ committee in whose doings she took no interest.⁴⁴ No such events are recalled after Philippa moved in in October 1943, and a reasonable guess is that Iris had started a withdrawal, probably painfully, by 1944, under the influence of the politically clearer-sighted Thomas Balogh, sufficiently anti-Communist as a thirteen-year-old schoolboy in Budapest after its ‘Socialist revolution’ of 1919 to take potshots with a rifle at Bela Kun’s troops.⁴⁵ Frank Thompson’s future sister-in-law Dorothy⁴⁶ was from September 1944 attending what would have been Iris’s local Victoria/Pimlico branch of the CP, but never met Iris at the Dolphin Square meetings.

      There was much in wartime London to worry a tender social conscience: one and a half million homeless alone by May 1941. There were many air raids, and people from the devastated East End were sleeping in bunks on the platforms of Tube stations such as St James’s Park, more or less underneath the Seaforth flat. They ‘trekked into central London each night and out to work in the mornings. Strangers sheltering in doorways would sometimes accompany each other home,’ Philippa recalled. The constant rumble and vibration of the District and Circle Line trains beneath the flat Iris was later to use in The Time of the Angels. She relished ‘both the noise and the shaking’.⁴⁷ On nights when the bombs fell heavily, Iris or Philippa if alone in the flat would on occasion shelter in the bathtub under the stairs, Iris having carefully reasoned that a tin hat protected against shrapnel, and the closest item they had to a tin hat (albeit upside-down) was a bath.⁴⁸ When a V2 took out three largish houses on the other side of the St James’s Court Hotel – which must have protected them – they lost windows and frames; these were soon repaired.

      Visitors were surprised by how big the flat looked. It had very little furniture, some of it at orange-box level. In those days of rationing and coupons, everything was rather bare – food, clothing, furnishing alike. Iris’s bohemianism also tended to make her avoid any hint of luxury, even if she could have afforded it. The aesthetic minimalism was impressive. There were two armchairs by the gas-fire, one of them Mary Midgley’s,⁴⁹ a table and chairs. Having found the flat in August 1942, she moved in by September.⁵⁰ In October she wrote to Frank that she was settled more or less into both her flat and her job.

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      In March 1941 Frank, having transferred the previous August from the Royal Artillery to ‘Phantom’, a small communications and intelligence unit, was posted to the Middle East. He and Iris met before this at least once in London, and visited Westminster Cathedral together, Frank lighting a candle to the Madonna. He left behind with Iris a ring-bound folder of his typed poems predating this departure, including a handwritten ‘To Irushka’ in heroic mode, later damned by him as ‘Hooey’. He sailed, from Clydeside via Cape Town, to Cairo, disgusted by the disparity between the slum-like conditions and diet of the men and the six-course meals and menu-cards taken for granted by the officers. In November 1941, after two months with septicaemia in the Australian Hospital in Damascus, but now back in Cairo, he wrote to his parents that he had just heard from Iris, ‘gloomy and as always when she hasn’t seen me for a long time, full of affection’. For over three years they continued their correspondence, and many of their letters survive.⁵¹ Iris was in 1991 to judge her wartime letters Very affectionate but a bit stilted, young person’s letters’.⁵² Of this ‘stilted’ tone, one early instance was sent to Frank around December 1939: ‘I am particularly distressed that you are worried about the world. I was, but am much less so now – remember, your environment is probably less likely to induce clear thought than mine is.’ Here is Iris-as-perpetual-Head-Girl, a role she did not easily outgrow.⁵³

      But generally СКАЧАТЬ