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

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      A marriage brings two worlds, as well as two people, into collision. Hughes’s cousin Don Douglas, grandson of Elias and so a ‘solid’ Murdoch by birth, regarded the Richardsons as rackety, and recalled Hughes’s marriage as a serious social blunder.⁵¹ If Rene had, by the hypocritical standards of the day, ‘got herself into trouble’, such odium would be explained. Her sister Gertie must also have been pregnant when she married, on 22 February 1919: Gertie gave birth at 59 Blessington Street to her eldest child Victor four months later, only three weeks before Iris was born at the identical address, probably in the same room. Gertie’s Scottish husband Thomas Bell, like Hughes, was a Second Lieutenant in King Edward’s Horse. There must have been a double courtship. It is striking that there is no Murdoch witness to Iris’s parents’ marriage certificate, especially as Hughes’s uncle lived close by in Kingstown, and his mother and sisters in Belfast.* Rene’s father is moreover shown, erroneously, as a solicitor (deceased). The Law Society in Dublin has no record of a solicitor called Effingham Richardson. In fact he worked in a solicitor’s office, ‘law assistant’ probably signifying a clerk. Perhaps Rene and Gertie enhanced his status to compensate for any loss of caste on Hughes’s part, or perhaps their mother had misremembered and misinformed them.

      Iris’s birth at 59 Blessington Street was probably difficult, perhaps, John Bayley believed, with the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck. Rene had also had a rough time from Hughes’s sisters and mother. She ‘didn’t fit in with the Protestant ethic’, thought Iris’s first cousin Cleaver Chapman.⁵² As an Elder in the Apsley Hall Brethren assembly, his words come with some authority. Rene was beautifully made-up, cheerful and bright; she loved the coffee-shop, Cardews, in Kildare Street, where she went as a ‘flapper’. Her new sister-in-law, ‘wonderful’⁵³ Aunt Ella, was bossy and critical and on occasion ungenerous, smiling but lacking charity. Rene handled the disapproval very well, with tact, patience and good grace.

      Rene liked to joke about North and South Dublin, and to be ironical at her own expense, socially speaking. When Iris’s husband John Bayley in later life complimented her gallantly by saying that he was sure Rene must have been ‘the toast of Dublin’ when she was a girl, she would jokingly reply, ‘Only of North Dublin.’⁵⁴ While Dublin north of the River Liffey was seedy and poor, the rich, smart suburbs stretched out to the south, from Rathmines to Dalkey. None the less, Rene had started to make her mark as a singer, and as a charming and modest personality. Like her mother-in-law, she had a happy temperament. There was a great deal of amateur opera about in Dublin, ‘that great singing city’, as Joyce’s own life, and his story ‘The Dead’, display. After her marriage Rene gave up professional performance, although choir-singing continued, and her beautiful voice was most often heard privately. She never said she minded abandoning her training, had ‘no great agony about it’, and appeared indifferent to fame and ambition. She knew she was talented, but did not take her gift too seriously. Iris, on the other hand, minded for her, and grieved for her mother’s loss of career.⁵⁵ In her fiction she depicted wife after wife who has abandoned career for her husband.⁵⁶

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      The fine comic writer Honor Tracy⁵⁷ first met Iris and John in Dalkey around 1958. A big jolly woman with rubicund and endearingly porcine features, Honor wore her flaming Anglo-Norman red hair somewhere between en brosse and beehive, had an occasionally combative manner, and appeared to be one (mainly) for the ladies.⁵⁸ Thus began a close friendship that survived until Tracy’s death in 1989. Over the following thirty years her graphic letters provide an extravagant, loving, tough-minded and unreliable chorus to Iris’s developing self-invention and what Tracy termed her ‘weird extravagant fancies’:

      You ask how Irish she is – the answer is, strictly not at all. Her father was of Ulster Protestant stock, but that is really a Scottish race, and Murdoch is a Scottish name. Mr Murdoch was a Civil Servant and happened to be posted to Dublin (pre-Republic) for a short time, during which Iris was born. She makes the most of it, as people are very apt to do: the number of English people who claim ‘Irish grandmothers’ is a famous joke in Ireland.⁵⁹

      The ‘Jean’ of Jean Iris Murdoch must indeed be Scots-Irish, from the Murdoch side, albeit never used. From the first she was known as ‘Iris’, complementing her mother’s ‘Irene’.⁶⁰ One charm of her name is that ‘Iris’ does not quite belong to ‘Murdoch': ‘Jean’ or ‘Jeannie’ Murdoch might be some tough lady from Glasgow; Iris Murdoch confounds two sets of expectations. An accidental charm is that another ‘Iris’ was goddess of rainbows, many-coloured, protean, hard to pin down.

      ‘Irish when it suits them, English when it does not,’ was what Honor Tracy’s erstwhile friend and neighbour Elizabeth Bowen said the ‘true’ Irish claimed of the Anglo-Irish – both the Protestant Anglo-Irish like the Bowens, and also ‘castle Catholics’⁶¹ like the original Tracys. Tracy, for example, spoke aggressively County English when in England, yet with a brogue when the Bayleys visited her house on Achill Island in County Mayo. Is Tracy’s wit at Iris’s expense partly tribal? It is certainly an irony at the expense of someone who – to an extraordinary degree – was to become the darling of the English, far more than of the Irish, intellectual and cultural establishments.⁶² She loved to tease Iris about her Irishness in a way that was envious, admiring, combative, ignorant (as in her letter above) and flirtatious. Iris took this in good part – in The Red and the Green she was to create an Anglo-Irish character for whom calling himself Irish was ‘more of an act than a description, an assumption of a crest or a picturesque cockade’.⁶³ Both Iris’s parents showed their Irishness in their voices. Rene had a Dublin voice, a ‘refined’ voice, with that Dublin habit of pronouncing ‘th’ as ‘t’, especially at the start of a word – for example, ‘t’ings like that’. Hughes had a very mild Ulster intonation and idiom: ‘Wait while I tell you!’ he would advise. Young Iris had a slight brogue, acquired from her parents. Well into adult life she would sometimes pronounce ‘I think’ as ‘I t’ink’. On 1 April 1954, on a trip to Glengarriff on the Beara peninsula, most westerly of all the peninsulas of Cork, she noted, ‘I have an only partly faked-up impression of being at home here.’

      The last of Tracy’s Catholic Anglo-Norman ancestors to have lived in Ireland was Beau Tracy, who left in 1775, when Iris’s great-great-great-grandfather was High Sheriff of Tyrone. Tracy, born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, educated in Dresden and at the Sorbonne, first lived in Ireland at the age of thirty-seven,

      when the Sunday Times sent her there as a special correspondent in 1950, and she set six of her thirteen books there. But no one ever agrees about who is entitled to lay claim to Irishness. Iris’s Belfast cousins today call themselves British, not Irish, while Hughes’s humorous comment on a photograph of Paddy O’Regan, Iris’s boyfriend of Irish descent around 1940, was, ‘Typically Irish – he looks as if he wants to fight something.’⁶⁴ With both parents brought up in Ireland, and an ancestry within Ireland both North and South going back three centuries, Iris had as valid a claim to call СКАЧАТЬ