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

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       7 ‘A la Guerre, comme à la Guerre’ 1943–1944

      Iris’s wartime letters, though kind, abound in anti-sentimental pragmatism. While consoling Michael Foot on his hurt on the occasion of Leonie Marsh’s marriage, she remarks to Frank, ‘This sort of damn silly fidelity is rare enough in this bloody matter-of-fact chacun-pour-soi existence.’ This grim note of ‘à la guerre, comme à la guerre’ recurs. In November 1942 she wrote that she missed Frank’s ‘burly self, and ‘like all sensible people, I am searching out substitutes’. Two months later, after recounting to Frank her loss of virginity, she comments:

      Ersatz? Well, yes, a bit – but then all life is rather ersatz now, since the genuine articles have been separated from us – & he is a fool who does not go ahead on the basis of what he has.

      This is bitter-sweet consolation, especially for one whose standards for marriage were, in Frank’s own words, ‘1860 Baptist Chapel’. He wanted both an idealistic wife who would believe ‘crazily’ that ‘the whole of life can be cast anew’,¹ and children. Meanwhile Iris’s lovers, she implies, are inferior imitations or substitutes for Frank himself, tokens of how much he is missed. Finally, in March 1943 she writes:

      It isn’t as if we all had endless lives & could say ‘OK we’ll put all that off till a better time’. Christ, this is the only time we’ve got, poor wretches, & we must make the best of it – our only lives and short enough of youth to enjoy them to the full.

      Such briskness could sound cruel. When Iris reported to a friend that she had decided she was stronger than ‘David’ from the OULC, with whom she had spent a night, it is hard not to wonder how the chap in question felt about the verdict, albeit presumably unspoken. In one of her best novels, A Fairly Honourable Defeat, the devilish Julius taunts his listener, and the reader, by proclaiming that ‘Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes. They never really see each other at all.’ For the wise the first proposition might be true, but not the second.

      Iris at this time was not wise, despite Frank’s idealisation of her, and nor did the exigencies of war, with its endless sense of a nightmare present full of longing and dread, cut off from its future, necessarily encourage wisdom. ‘How the war changed my life I only now begin to see and feel,’ she noted in 1977;² and later: ‘There is a kind of intensity, even rage, about that time when I had no notion what the future held.’³ Though she never wrote directly about the war in her novels, her experiences during it inform all her fiction. She put photos of the narrow alley outside Seaforth into her album. The flat and the famous hothouse emotional atmosphere of the war alike incubated within her imagination.⁴

      2

      In the autumn of 1943 Philippa Bosanquet moved from Oxford to London. She worked as an economics research assistant at Chatham House in St James’s Square on the prospects for post-war European economic reconstruction with American capital, together with representatives of governments-in-exile.⁵ At first she lived sometimes in her close friend Anne Cobbe’s rather grand flat in Weymouth Street, Marylebone, where she and Anne had a couple to look after them, but found this constricting (if meals are being prepared, you have to say when you will be in for them). So she gravitated more and more to the simplicity and freedom of Seaforth Place. But she was also looking for a place of her own, and found a rather flea-ridden but attractive flat in Fitzroy Street, into which she put a bit of furniture. It was only when Iris said she supposed they would in future spend half the week together in Seaforth and the other half in Fitzroy Street СКАЧАТЬ