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

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СКАЧАТЬ of companions – on 22 March 1917 he writes: ‘Four B Sqn men were killed, and about 15 wounded’ – but also the casualties among horses, which he loved, and is remembered as having taken care of. Even at the front, his mother would proudly and wonderingly relate, he kept half his food for his horse.¹⁷ On 23 March 1917 he takes dispatches through the lines and is stopped ‘about four times by the French and ten times by the English patrols, each way’. On 8 April his Lieutenant-Colonel – one Lionel or ‘Jimmie’ James, author-to-be of a regimental history which Hughes purchased – wrote to Louisa that her son was ‘a most excellent and trustworthy British soldier’ of whom she should, like him, be proud.

      After the post-Easter Rising executions in April 1916 Irish opinion turned against the British government,¹⁸ and King Edward’s Horse found difficulty recruiting subalterns in Dublin. On 11 May 1917 – during the Arras offensive, when 159,000 lives were lost in thirty-nine days – Corporal Murdoch was interviewed for a commission by Brigadier-General Darell at Nesle, and two weeks later left Peronne, on the Somme, for Dublin and then Lisburn. The journey home took one full week. He was gazetted Second Lieutenant¹⁹ on 22 February 1918.²⁰

      Musing about these diaries after they came to light in 1987,²¹ Iris pondered various matters. One was that ‘when (31.12.1916) my father wrote in his notebook, “All the afternoon shrapnel was dropping all around …” ‘, Wittgenstein, perhaps in similar circumstances, but fighting on the other side, might well have been making notes for the Tractatus. Even their ages – one born April 1889, the other April 1890 – were ‘practically the same’. She sadly notes that after the war Hughes ‘never saw a horse again, except the milkman’s horse’.²² He enjoyed betting on them, however, like his father, and ‘surprisingly, being Irish, did it quite well’.²³

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      In the last months of the war Hughes was on leave from his regiment, which was stationed at the Curragh. One Sunday in Dublin, probably in uniform,²⁴ he met Irene Richardson in a tram, en route for the Black Church on the corner of Mountjoy Street and St Mary’s Place, where she sang in the choir.²⁵ They fell in love. Irene was dark, petite, very beautiful and spirited. Dublin is a great singing city, and ‘Rene’²⁶ (rhyming with ‘teeny') as she was always known had a beautiful voice. She was training as a singer, and had already started performing at amateur concerts. She sang the standard operatic arias, and was particularly fond of ‘One Fine Day’ from Madama Butterfly. Its story of an innocent girl made pregnant then abandoned by the sailor she loves perhaps distantly echoes her own, happier story.

      Hughes and Rene were married in Dublin on 7 December 1918 – a photo shows Hughes in full-dress uniform. Rene’s sister Gertie (later Bell) was a witness. On the wedding certificate Hughes gives his army rank, second lieutenant, under ‘profession’, and his address as ‘Marlborough Barracks’. Jean Iris Murdoch was born on 15 July, St Swithin’s Day, the following year, just over seven months later. The marriage was probably therefore hasty.²⁷ Even in October 1918, when Iris would have been conceived, an early end to the war was not certain. Her character Andrew Chase-White in The Red and the Green, born, like Hughes, in a colony and serving, like Hughes, as a young officer in King Edward’s Horse, feels some pressure from relatives to marry and make his wife pregnant before he has to go to the front and a likely death. Arthur Green’s hypothesis that Hughes might have felt he had a comparable duty to perform before his marriage seems unlikely. Iris was probably a happy accident.

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      The extended Murdoch family comes out as a very intelligent, middle-class organism, stuffed with independent minds, a model example of Protestant and British Ireland. One group stems from the Brethren and has strong dental and medical associations; the stepson of one of Iris’s aunts was a Unionist politician, while a second cousin lectured in philosophy at Queen’s University.²⁸ Uncle Elias, a Presbyterian married to a Quaker,* and Harold, a Quaker, ran the two well-known ironmongers’ stores at Dun Laoghaire; another cousin, Brian Murdoch, also a Quaker, became Professor of Mathematics at Trinity College, Dublin.²⁹ Cousin Sybil also married a Quaker in Reggie Livingston; and some Richardsons are Quakers. There are today a mere 1,500 Quakers in the whole of Ireland, and if the frequency with which Quakerism turns up in Iris’s fiction invites comment,† it is also disproportionately reflected in Irish history, being particularly prominent in famine relief, big business and education.³⁰ If Iris was herself touched by Quakerism’s emphasis on integrity, quietness and peace, its belief in the availability of Inner Light to all, that all are capable of growing in wisdom and understanding, it is as likely to be from her headmistress at Badminton School as from her Irish relations that the influence came.

      Rene’s family represents another strain in the history of Protestant middle-class Ireland: Church of Ireland rather than Presbyterian, Dublin-based rather than from Belfast, former ‘plantation squires’ rather than ‘plantation farmers’.³¹ Not yeoman farmers and merchants like the Murdochs, the Richardsons, a complex and highly inter-related family, began as major land-owners in the seventeenth century and became minor gentry in the eighteenth, when Catholics were debarred from sitting in Parliament and holding government office, as well as suffering many petty restrictions, and Protestants had a virtual monopoly of power and privilege. Thereafter, the family’s status declines. It mattered to Iris that she was grandly descended from Alexander Richardson, ‘planted in Ireland in 1616 to control the wild Irish’,³² as she put it, and living at Crayhalloch in 1619. Readers of An Unofficial Rose will recognise the similar name of the house ‘Grayhallock’, with its links to the wealthy linen merchants of County Tyrone. Alexander Richardson’s family motto ‘Virtuti paret robur‘, is proudly quoted in The Oreen Knight, and translated as either ‘strength obeys virtue’ or ‘virtue overcometh strength’.

      In the 1990s an amateur genealogist from Ulster, Arthur Green, wrote up his patient investigations into Iris’s family history. He showed, amongst much else, that she was ‘una bambina di sette mesi’, painted her parents’ marriage – almost certainly accurately – as a hasty register office affair,³³ and tried to show that her claims to be descended from the Richardsons of Drum Manor, and her identification with an Anglo-Irish background, were, in his word, ‘romanticism’. He also queried whether her father’s civil service status on his retirement in 1950 was as exalted as she believed. Green, at the suggestion of A.S. Byatt, sent these findings to Iris’s publishers, Chatto & Windus.³⁴ Iris defended her pedigree with (at first) some stiffness, later lamenting that she had not asked more questions of her parents, and so been better-informed. She referred Green to O’Hart’s History of Old Irish Families,³⁵ telling him she had lodged copies of relevant pages with her agent Ed Victor for safekeeping. Both Rene’s father Effingham Lynch Richardson and her grandfather Robert Cooper Richardson merit a mention in O’Hart, which is noted for being, before 1800, notoriously untrustworthy, СКАЧАТЬ