‘My schooldays lacked colour and gaiety in à way that they needn’t have done – and in a way which made the change from school to student life violent and positively intoxicating.’1 Iris, who had read Angela Brazil’s exciting boarding-school tales, found her own schooldays unnecessarily ‘dreary’ by comparison: she had had to ‘spend my time making bloody dresses when I could have been learning languages’.2 None the less, most Oxford peers noted that she arrived at the university with some assurance.3 Her memory differed. A schoolchild before the war had no ‘part’ to play. Teenagers had not yet been invented. Being able to play-act the role of a student, by contrast, gave Iris confidence at a time when she ‘needed it badly’.
Iris and her fellow new arrivals at Somerville were given a talking-to by the tall, gaunt French scholar Vera Farnell, speaking as Dean: ‘You must seriously realise that you have to be careful how you behave. It isn’t a joking-matter, the women are still very much on probation in this University. You may think that it doesn’t matter if you do something a little wild, but I can tell you that it will.’ This was the voice of hard experience: a second-year Somerville student to whose case Farnell was reported to be unsympathetic had, the previous year, been ‘sent down’, or permanently dismissed from Oxford, after being found in flagrante in her boyfriend’s rooms by his landlady. The boyfriend’s fate, by contrast, was merely to be ‘rusticated’, or banished for a term, after which he resumed his studies. Lucy Klatschko, quiet, fey and very beautiful, half-Latvian and Jewish senior scholar reading Modem languages, who was later to be both a nun and lifelong friend of Iris, is the student referred to in John Bayley’s Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (Elegy for Iris in the USA) as being helped by a boyfriend back over the college wall. There was an easy place, and she climbed back quite often.4
Despite Vera Farnell’s caveats, and the fact that keeping Iris at Oxford was ‘just ruining’ Hughes,5 life here was different, joyous and painful, full at last of Iris’s intellectual equals. She positively threw herself into the stage-role of ‘being-a-student’, into a ‘hurricane of essays and proses and campaigns and committees and sherry parties and political and aesthetic arguments’.6 She had heard plenty of classical music at school, but no jazz, despite growing up during the best part of the jazz age. She had to wait until she was nineteen before she realised that dancing – as opposed to the Greek dancing practised at Badminton – ‘can be something marvellous, something ecstatic’. There were further sources of bliss and pain, apart from the untoward number of men who fell in love with her.
Iris felt joyous when, having been called ‘Iris’ at school, her tutors called her ‘Miss Murdoch’.7 There was her very first alcoholic drink, consumed in the Royal Oak opposite Somerville in the company of Carol Stewart and another undergraduate.8 Drinking was a forbidden pleasure. No students were officially allowed to keep drink in their rooms, or to enter a pub – a delightful adventure in itself because one might be ‘progged’ – caught by the rule-enforcing Proctors. Iris did not know the names of any drinks, so one of her companions ordered a gin and lime for her: ‘The experience comes back to me surrounded by a halo of the purest and most intense joy.’9 Carol Stewart saw something ‘aboriginal’ in Iris – ‘simplicity, naiveté, power, and space’. She further noted how unusually watchful and observant Iris was. The joy of her first drink accompanied her joy at freedom. There were disappointments also. She thought she would get straight into the Bach Choir, but was turned down when she admitted she could not sight-read: ‘They didn’t even hear me sing. That caused me such rage.’10
Mary Scrutton (later Midgley, the philosopher), daughter of a canon who had been Chaplain at King’s College, Cambridge, has a strong memory of Iris when both first came up. Iris’s peers were timid, very afraid of making fools of themselves, doubtful about what was expected of them, anxious about opening their mouths. Iris was different. When she went to tea with the Principal, the painfully shy Helen Darbishire, she reported herself disgusted by the claustrophobic and stilted conversation: ‘What a waste, to go to tea with a really intelligent woman, & talk about Siamese cats.’11 Iris’s confidence, Mary Scrutton felt, was extraordinarily helpful to others in her year. She had a faculty which stayed with her: she didn’t care much what people thought, was not self-conscious. She was there to get on with things and enjoy them. She at once arranged her room in East Quad, on the first floor above the archway, overlooking the quad and the Woodstock Road,12 which she managed to make look like an art student’s room, with posters and an art deco cushion which lived on for sixty years at her flat in Cornwall Gardens, aquamarine, stripy, with inset spheres. Mary and Iris took to each other right away – Mary sat on the floor, and they began a conversation that went on for decades, and which in 1998 Iris recalled with warmth.
Iris occupied a position simultaneously central, and yet also apart, at Somerville. The tables across the dining-room went third-year (by the windows), second-year, first-year (by the doors). But down the dining-room they went, unofficially, ‘stodgy, middling, and wild’. Those who sat at the top table were nearest to the dons: ‘some dull people from the history school’ who trooped in punctually in a body from the library, then trooped back to the library immediately afterwards (or so, with the superciliousness of youth, it appeared to Iris and Mary). Nearest the door was the ‘wild’ table, comprising those who least wanted it to be noticed whether they arrived on time or not. There sat a Princess Natalya Galitzine, who eloped in her first term, beautiful, quiet, slim, composed Anne Cloake, and Leonie Marsh, a ‘flamboyant Bolshevik’ with a face like ‘a slightly dissipated lion’s’. Wildness here referred primarily to politics, meaning membership of the Oxford Labour Group and/or the Communist Party, also to frequent changes of partner, to attractiveness, dress and hairstyle. Leonie dressed ‘like a bolshevik … in her warm woollen jerkin, her blue serge skirt, red belt, sandals and red mittens’.13 Respectable hair was short or up-and-back; ‘wild’ hair could be long or curled in some exciting manner, possibly dyed. Iris’s hair was long and blonde; Leonie’s a ‘black defiant lion’s mane’.
Then there was the bourgeois middle table where sat Mary, Charlotte Williams-Ellis and Nancy Fisher. Philippa Bosanquet, who came up in 1939, sat either at the middle table or, if in trousers, at the ‘end’ table. Iris was liable to turn up anywhere, at the wild or the middle tables, even at the top. What was distinctive about this, and unlike anyone else that Mary knew, was that Iris always had important friendships of very varied kinds. Her movement from table to table seemed a metaphor for her way of appearing at home in different milieux, throughout her life, while belonging essentially to herself.
Iris believed that university friendships lasted for life.14 Hers were to. Novel after Iris novel depends upon the convention that a court of characters have been friends since college days. Did she understand how uniquely true this was of her own generation – more, arguably, than of any other? Friendships formed just before the war partook of the same intensity as did politics and love; no one, after all, knew who would survive the coming onslaught. Casualties of war apart, Iris mislaid few friends notably or dramatically, and when losses did happen she brooded over them, accounting them significant. David Hicks, Hal Lidderdale, Noel Martin, Mary Midgley, Leo Pliatzky, Frank Thompson, Philippa and Michael (M.R.D.) Foot: their names resonate through the nearly sixty years of her journals.
English is what Iris was accepted into Somerville to study, but she ended by reading Classics. Possibly the English tutor Mary Lascelles, remembered as hard to please, failed to take to Iris. Happily Iris’s brilliant General Paper had won her an Exhibition for merit, and in it she had used a Greek word, in Greek script.
Isobel Henderson, who taught Iris the history of the ancient world from 1940 on, snapped her up. No record survives of when she changed to Classics, or ‘Mods and Greats’.15
Mods and Greats, moreover, took four years rather than the normal three required for an undergraduate degree. In Mods (Honour Moderations), which took the first five terms, students read most of Classical Greek and Latin literature, and wrote prose and verse in both languages. Greats (Literae Humaniores) was divided into ancient history and ancient philosophy, with a smattering of later philosophers up to Kant. Designed by Benjamin Jowett in the nineteenth century for young gentlemen who were thus readied, for example, for the Colonial Civil Service, Mods and Greats trained analytic capacity, and placed its students firmly within the category of the civilised, as opposed to the barbarian, of belonging to that part of Europe which, unlike Germany, had been ruled by Rome, and had retained some degree of cultural coherence ever since:16 an opposition fraught with critical significance in 1938–39, when Germany appeared to be returning to the Middle Ages, unillumined this time by the mercy of Christ. Male students who had been to the great public schools were best prepared for the rigours of the course; pre-war Classical training at girls’ schools was not always equal to them.
Iris and Mary’s Mods tutor, Mildred Hartley, was understandably keen to have everything done in such a way as to be a credit to Somerville, and indeed to her. She intensely wanted her students to be good scholars – which they were, carrying off many Classical prizes. She insisted that the girls do not only Latin and Greek prose translations, but also verse – particularly hard if you had not been trained. There was a sense of background nagging as she put them through their paces. Iris’s training had been a bit better than Mary’s; they suffered together. Both had extra tutorial coaching in Classics.17
Mildred Hartley had had a hard struggle to come up in the world, and could appear pedantic and fussy. Her hidden eccentricity – celebrating the end of term by donning trousers, taking down a thriller from the shelves and smoking a pipe – is a modest one.18 Iris was furious when it was reported to her that Hartley had remarked that she was always in fancy-dress,19 an observation also pointing towards identity itself as like ‘dressing-up’. (Iris’s Dublin ‘cousins’ Eva and Billy Lee always looked forward to meeting Iris off the Dun Laoghaire boat-train, never knowing in advance what she would this time come ‘dressed as’.) Certainly Iris had her own dress-sense. Hartley would later refer to Iris as ‘my shaggy little Shetland pony’, suggesting no lack of affection,20 and would comment accurately that Iris ‘did not understand the meaning of idleness’.21 Most undergraduates had to choose between evenings out and getting essays written. Iris somehow did both, coming in late and yet being first down to breakfast, looking rested and lively.22
The students got a lot out of their course. They went to the great and terrifying Eduard Fraenkel’s lectures on Horace, and also studied some Plato, lectured on by the impressive, but very shy E.R. Dodds: a few dialogues – certainly Phaedo, probably Symposium and Phaedrus. Iris despised Plato, thinking him reactionary, dishonest, full of cheap dialectical tricks. Reading the Republic left her feeling aggressive, and she opposed Plato, in letters to a friend, directly to Marx. After denouncing Plato as ‘the old reactionary’, she wished she lived ‘near enough to know how people live in mines & cotton mills … I feel very bitterly the second-handness of most of my knowledge of life’ – a sense that a later Iris would use Plato to explain. As if to cure herself of the taste of Plato, she sold the Daily Worker to the ‘thronging multitudes of Blackpool’, where her parents were evacuated in 193g.23 Dodds also lectured on the Greek dramatists.
Greek Vase Painting was Iris’s special subject: Professor Sir John Beazley, an inspiring scholar and teacher, lectured on Classical archaeology at the Ashmolean Museum. He showed his classes beautiful Attic objects, taught ways of understanding them. Gifted students would be invited ‘back-stage’ to view the more ‘frank’ or salacious vases otherwise relegated to a top shelf.24 Iris’s careful, copious, string-bound, loose-leaf handwritten notes for the class, comprising some few hundred pages, are illustrated by her pen-and-ink drawings of decorative details and of statues of Greek youths.
To find out who someone is, Napoleon remarked, one must ask, ‘How did the world look, around the time that they were twenty?’ The twelve months before the outbreak of the Second World War were a time of intense hope and fear, anxiety and dread. The young were intensely stirred up. Intensity is the key-word in politics, in friendship and in love alike; a dramatic intensity that radically divided the lives of those who went up to Oxford a year before the war – like Iris, to ‘serious-minded’25 Somerville College in 1938 – from those who, like John Bayley, went up in the disenchanted post-war years. In 1938–39 a Manichean fight against the powers of darkness was imminent, the drumbeat of war unmistakable. There was constant talk of Nazism, the Moscow treason trials, marching and raising money for arms for Spain, the bestial pogrom against German Jews in November 1938, Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. At the same time student life for the first year after Iris came up in late September 1938 was still agreeably wild, irresponsible, aesthetic and cranky. There was still a sense of scope and completeness.26 Charismatic figures abounded, among the students as among the dons. The sober diminishment of university life came later, with war and mobilisation.
The dominant international issue was the Spanish Civil War, which ended only in April 1939. No other cause ever stirred comparable passions in Oxford. The death in Spain of the poet John Cornford, whose brother Christopher was to play a significant role in Iris’s life in the 1960s, had made him ‘a martyr of mythic power’. The war in Spain was so real ‘that it hurt’.27 Iris denied having penned early in 193928 a bad poem about Barcelona, signed ‘I?’, which appeared in the progressive university magazine Oxford Forward. Entitled ‘Vanguard’, it began: ‘Remember – they have ringed/Us England, roundabout with steel/Spain-tempered’, and ends: ‘Yes, gutters running red/In broken Barcelona bear/Witness to a debt. Look,/England, who fights for you.’
A lot of the English aristocracy, together with powerful financiers, were members of the sinister pro-Hitler ‘Anglo-German Fellowship’. Might Britain even enter the war on the wrong side?29 In October 1938 the sitting Conservative Member of Parliament for Oxford had died. Student pressure helped force Patrick Gordon-Walker, the Labour candidate, out of the running, so that tall, shambling Sandy Lindsay, Master of Balliol – the first confessed Socialist to head a college – could fight as the Popular Front candidate against the Conservatives’ Quintin Hogg, the ‘flamboyant and ill-mannered supporter of Chamberlain’,30 without a rival from the left. Lindsay’s support stretched from the Communists through the Labour and Liberal parties, to dissident Conservatives. The international context, immediately after Neville Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler, made this ‘Munich’ by-election a fight of mythic proportions. ‘Save Peace, Save Czechoslovakia’ was one Lindsay slogan; ‘A vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler’ another: the by-election was both a referendum on the Munich agreement and a vote of confidence in Chamberlain, who had proposed on 18 September to allow Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.
The substitution of Lindsay for Gordon-Walker affronted sections of middle-class Oxford. Iris canvassed, together with Raymond Carr, a clever, ambitious scholarship boy, down the left-hand side of the Woodstock Road, both of them ill-at-ease and both sympathetic to, and soon members of, the Communist Party. Iris was later to claim, ‘The very first thing I did when I arrived at Oxford was to join the CP':31 this went well with the ideals of Badminton.32 They also worked stuffing envelopes in the Lindsay campaign room opposite St Peter’s College. Carr was in awe of Iris because she was intellectually very impressive, did not care about her dishevelled appearance, and seemed to him to have been at Oxford a full year before him. In fact this was her first month there.33 He was not the first or the last to be struck by Iris’s extraordinary confidence. She also worked in this by-election with fellow-Somervillian Anne Cloake,34 with whom Carr thought her in love. Certainly Anne Cloake, who had no lesbian proclivity, but did like to shock, later boasted of having helped teach Iris the ‘facts of life'; in their second year they shared digs at 43 Park Town.
Hogg won by a small majority. In St Aldates the defeated Lindsay supporters with their tattered red-and-yellow rosettes confronted the Conservatives ‘in their horsey check-coats, with their carnations and rolled umbrellas’ who, they felt, rushed to sneer and crow at them ‘as if after a day’s beagling, or a night in London': ‘What depressed us was that obscurantism had triumphed.’ On the Lindsay side were ‘the creative, the generous, the imaginative. In the other we saw only selfishness, stodginess and insincerity.’ ‘I hope North Oxford gets the first bombs, but it would be rough on the pekinese,’ commented one supporter.35
In November 1938, on the afternoon when he had just become College Secretary of the Liberal Club, Frank Thompson went to Queen’s College to listen to Rex Warner, who was then engaged in writing a left-wing allegorical novel, The Aerodrome, and the poet Stephen Spender talk about Spain. Munich, he wrote, which had numbed them for a time, ‘still filled us with a deep restless anger’. The hall, which Spender described ‘foolishly’ as a ‘glorified railway station’, was crowded. Students were sitting on the tables and floor, but Frank managed to squeeze onto a bench against a wall. While Spender was making a woolly speech about ‘the poet in politics’, Frank noticed a girl leaning on her elbow on the table in front of him. She wasn’t pretty, and her figure was too thick to be good.
But there was something about her warm green dress, her long yellow locks like a cavalier’s, and her gentle profile, that gave a pleasing impression of harmony. My feeling of loneliness redoubled. ‘Why didn’t I know anyone like that?’ I saw her again at a Labour Club Social, dancing, – perhaps ‘waddling’ is a better word, with some poisonous-looking bureaucrat. It wasn’t until the middle of next term that I got a chance to speak to her.
Frank was brilliant, tall, slim, fair-haired, grey-blue-eyed, high-cheekboned, a gifted poet, an intense idealist dedicated to stopping Hitler, a Wykehamist who spoke six languages and later acquired three more. His was a nature riche. He was one year younger than Iris,36 and was reading Mods at New College. He came from a liberal, anti-imperialist and well-connected bohemian family that was also hospitable, ‘quick with ideas and poetry and international visitors';37 his younger brother E.P. Thompson was to make his mark as the best-known left-wing historian and activist of his generation. A childhood friend of both, Anthony Carritt, had been blown up and killed while driving an ambulance with the International Brigade in Spain.38 As a student Frank is remembered as charming, shambolic and uncoordinated. ‘Stop apologising,’ friends would say to him. Wartime photographs show a face of some beauty, intelligence, and grace.39 The first time Iris had seen him ‘he was very drunk and lying flat on his back in the entrance hall of the Union with his head inside the telephone-box’.40 ('He couldn’t tell one drink from another,’ Iris wrote to his mother in 1941.) It was almost certainly at that November meeting at Queen’s that someone – probably Leonie Marsh, among the first to join the Communist Party – pointed Frank out to Iris: ‘"There’s Frank Thompson. He’s a most remarkable man. We must get him into the Party.” And so,’ Iris remembered, ‘we did … He was, I think, the most remarkable person that I met as an undergraduate at Oxford.’41 Their first meeting happened a term later.
There is a pleasing symmetry about the fact that Iris is remembered in her Oxford years, among other things, for her involvement in political life and in amateur theatricals, especially her memorable Leader of the ‘Chorus’ in the Christ Church production of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in June 1940.*42 The two relate. Even if her play-acting was not always politicised, her politics were certainly dramatic, and it is fitting that the by-election in which she played a role was rapidly turned into part of a student play. A play, moreover, in which most of the leading players were, in real life, to be in love with each other, but not in the right order, and many of the men, sooner or later, were in love with Iris. In Auden’s ‘A Summer Night’, a favourite poem,43 where a bitter historical and political irony collides with an intense elegiac lyricism, Continental Europe is about to be convulsed in suffering, while the guilty English ‘whom hunger cannot move,/In gardens where we feel secure,/Look up, and with a sigh endure,/The tyrannies of love’. Love intoxicated the players as well as politics.
The Lindsay/Hogg by-election continued to resonate in Iris’s second term at Oxford. To show the dangers of Fascism in Britain, Frank and some friends, notably Leo Pliatzky and Leonie Marsh, wrote, produced and acted in It Can Happen Here, which imagined Britain as a Fascist police state.44 Frank and Leo’s friendship spanned the social spectrum, and the two constituencies from which the Labour Party drew its strength. Leo Pliatzky – ‘the old cynic himself, Iris was to call him45 – was at Corpus reading Honour Mods. Later to be Secretary of the Fabian Society and a distinguished, indeed knighted, Treasury civil servant, he was Jewish, Manchester-born and poor, with a St Petersburg-born father who gambled. He had been rescued by the Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, Harold Laski, from working for l7/6d a week in the Houndsditch Warehouse Company;46 Laski paid to complete Leo’s education, and Oxford was memorable in part for offering, for the first time in his life, three square meals a day. Mainly set in a concentration camp in Christ Church Meadow, with flashbacks to a sherry party and to a meeting of the Oxford Union, It Can Happen Here also portrayed the proctors and a works meeting. The Lindsay committee rooms during the by-election featured significantly. The play had one performance at 8.15 p.m. on 6 March 1939, admission price sixpence, in St Michael’s Hall to a (largely) Labour Club audience, and was well received.
Frank (who played ‘Dennis Fairlie') and Leo (who wrote but did not act) went on a pub-crawl afterwards, ending up with a bottle of whisky in the play’s producer Doug Lowe’s rooms in Ruskin. Leonie had seen to it that Iris – ‘the dream-girl to whom I’d never spoken’, as Frank called her – was with them. Doug Lowe told Frank that Iris was ‘a nice girl, and pretty easy too, from wot I ‘ear’ – wishful thinking on Lowe’s part.47 Lowe, on one side of the bed on which Iris reclined, started to ‘paw’ her. Frank, on the other, wanted to stroke her too: ‘Anyone would want to stroke Iris,’ Frank observed. Indeed a ‘witty liberal’ was trying to edge Frank out. But Frank could see that Iris did not wish to be pawed, and wanting to make a good first impression despite being pretty drunk, he grew solemn and started on politics. He had left the Liberal Club the week before because it was ‘too frivolous’. He had no use for the Labour leaders either. Iris asked him provocatively, ‘What about the Communist Party?’
I was dumbstruck. I’d never thought of it before. Right then I couldn’t see anything against it, but I felt it would be wise to wait till I’d sobered up before deciding. So I said, ‘Come to tea in a couple of days and convert me’. Then I staggered home and lay on a sofa … announcing to the world that I had met a stunner of a girl and was joining the Communist party for love of her. But next morning it still seemed good. I read [Lenin’s] State and Revolution, talked to several people, and soon made up my mind.
By the time Iris came to tea in Frank’s very untidy room with, typically, ‘Liddell and Scott always open on the table, and a large teddy-bear and a top hat on the mantelpiece and Voi che Sapete on the gramophone’,48 there was no need for a conversion: ‘My meeting her was only the point at which quantitative change gave place to change in quality.’ Frank pondered, ‘maybe I needed to meet her, to realise how gentle and artistic communists can be. Or maybe I needed to be drunk, so I could consider the question with an open mind.’ Leonie welcomed him into the Party with a ‘dramatic gesture, saved by a wicked smile’. He wrote to a friend,49 ‘I’ve met my dream-girl – a poetic Irish Communist who’s doing Honour Mods. I worship her.’
The group associated with It Can Happen Here took to ‘knocking about together': Frank, Leonie Marsh, Leo, Iris, and also fellow-Wykehamist Michael (M.R.D.) Foot. ‘That was a bad passage, the first fortnight of the summer term,’ wrote Frank:
Like something in rather poor taste by de Musset. I was pining green for Iris, who was gently sympathetic but not at all helpful. Michael was lashing himself into a frenzy for Leonie [Marsh] who would draw him on and then let him down with a thud. In the evenings we would swap sorrows and read bits of Verlaine to each other.
Frank spent three whole days that May walking round and round New College gardens, observing the chestnuts bearing their white candles, the pink tulips and blue forget-me-nots, in the intervals between writing letters to Iris and tearing them up. He wrote poems to her expressing ‘calf-love’.50 Iris, ‘with her gentleness and her simplicity’, was the person from whom he wanted to hear good news about himself, ‘But Iris never told a lie yet, so I got worse and worse.’ Michael hid Frank’s cut-throat razor from him. Leo, more down-to-earth, invited him to dinner. When, one evening, Iris disappeared into Doug Lowe’s rooms in Ruskin, Frank went back to his parents’ house on Boar’s Hill and, on his mother’s sensible advice, dug up an entire bed of irises as a counter-charm.51 He stopped sleeping, started talking to himself, was in such a bad way that he escaped to spend a week at home, gardening, going for walks, climbing trees. Other things cheered him. There was the ‘big joyous world of his friends, not only political ones’.52 He found comfort in the idylls of Theocritus, especially the tenth, and in two other Greek pastoral poets, Bion and Moschus, whom Iris recalled his quoting to her ‘exuberantly’.
So Frank’s old schoolfriend and rival from Winchester Michael (M.R.D.) Foot was crazy about Leonie, who adored Frank, who was hopelessly in love with Iris. If Iris had loved Michael, it would have made a perfect quartet of frustrated desire, like that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, and doubtless one blueprint – there would be others – for the love-vortices of her novels. On this unhappy love quartet, Frank was able to joke in a parody of Marxist-Leninist Newspeak: ‘It’s not shortage of resources that’s the problem, comrades. It’s maldistribution of supplies.’53
Scarcity of resources, however, also played its part. The ratio of men to women at Oxford at that time exceeded six to one, and the Labour Club was reputed to have the best women. Some men joined the club merely to meet and get ‘lined-up with’, in the jargon of the period, a woman. Within that closed society-within-a-society, ‘line-ups’ were regarded as temporary, and might – equally might not – involve a sexual affair.* Leo Pliatzky’s first ‘line-up’, for example, was with Leonie, his second with Iris, his third with Edna Edmonds (later Healey). Who Iris’s first lover was, and what such affairs meant to her, will have to wait for a later chapter. A comment of Leonie Marsh gives the general impression of Iris at that time. Leonie left Oxford in June 1940, married in February 1941 and was surprised when Iris declared herself envious of the baby that followed: ‘Funny, she was always so virginal.’54
It was probably on a punt journey to the arboured tables and chairs at the Victoria Arms, with Mary Scrutton and the two shy and unpretentious Williams-Ellis sisters, Charlotte and Susie, that Iris said, in the summer of 1939,? long to get married, I’d do anything to get married.’ ‘But you’ve had six proposals this term alone,’ said one of the other girls. ‘Oh, they don’t count,’ Iris retorted dismissively. Susie thought Iris incredibly beautiful, with great big round blue eyes, very blonde shoulder-length hair cut straight across in a fringe: ‘beauty of character as well as of appearance’. Susie had come to Ruskin for one term from the Chelsea School of Art; Charlotte was at Somerville. It is interesting that Iris’s apparent confidence so far exceeded that of the patrician ‘Char’ and Susie, whose father was Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of Portmeirion, and whose mother Amabel Strachey, children’s story-writer and cousin to Lytton. Charlotte recalled: ‘Iris was kind and pleasant to the shy and socially inept as I was.’55 Clare Campbell, granddaughter of a distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, who gained a first in Honour Mods without apparent effort, was none the less ‘amazed by Iris’s social poise as well as fluency’ at meetings of the Jowett Society – the undergraduate club where philosophical discussion took place. By comparison with Iris she felt like ‘an over-age schoolgirl’.
M.R.D. Foot noted that ‘practically everyone who was up with Iris fell for her. She had personality and that wonderful Irish voice.’56 ‘Pretty and buxom, with blonde hair and dirndl skirts,’ is how Leo Pliatzky recalled her. Leo had turned his attentions towards Iris before Frank, Michael some time after. They were not alone. At times Iris at Oxford seems like a cross between Zuleika Dobson and Wendy in Peter Pan, looking after the ‘lost boys’. Despite the ‘thick’ figure Frank accurately noted, and a walk which a fellow-student compared to the rolling gait of the oxen in Homer,57 others outside the close-knit central group of Iris, Frank, Leonie, Leo and Michael felt her attractions. The interest of David Hicks, who had graduated in PPE at Worcester in 1938, and was taking a Dip. Ed., was aroused in November 1938.58 Hicks was three years older than Iris, who resembled, he wrote to her, a ‘fairy-tale princess’ but one with a ‘quaint virginity cult’. She visited his London home on Boxing Day 1938. His friend, kind, warm-hearted, undiplomatic Hal Lidderdale, a scholar at Magdalen reading Greats, also sympathetic to the Communist Party,59 was another who fell for Iris. Iris liked his ‘warmth & humanness, his lazy pleasure in life’s good things, his lack of petty vanities & meannesses’.60 She planned a camping holiday with Patrick O’Regan at Merton, who loaned her some cash which she repaid, and sent her, in July 1940, a book that seems positively emblematic. This was C.S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love, with its history of the courtly cult, by many gentleman-admirers, of the princesse lointaine.61 Nor is this an exhaustive list. Another (un-named) Irishman wrote her verse.62 John Willett, stage designer for It Can
Happen Here, school-friend of Frank and Michael, and with the distinction of not being in love with Iris, thought – echoing others including Charlotte Williams-Ellis – that it was Iris’s inner quality that attracted everyone: not a classic beauty, a beauty of soul.63
This would tally with the view of shy and gentle Noel Martin. Martin64 was sitting in a friend’s room on the first floor of Corpus quad one early evening in the autumn of 1938. Aged only eighteen and headed for a first in Mods, he saw a gowned and corn-haired Iris pass the pelican sundial with a Somerville girlfriend, probably Mary. She had a lively gait and looked, he thought, ‘different’. Leonie Marsh, for example, whom he knew, was ‘quite a girl’ – one of those who get noticed. Iris, by contrast, was unassertive, grave,65 reserved. But there was something about her, and he felt attracted. Iris and her companion were on their way to Eduard Fraenkel’s brilliant, towering explication of the Agamemnon on the far left of the quad, on the ground floor.66 Noel simply came down the stairs and followed her. He could not profit from the seminar, but spent his time gazing at Iris. Later, he and Iris talked. Frank Thompson observed that good-natured Noel’s being ‘sick for Iris’ made him ‘dopier than usual’. Twenty years later Iris wrote, ‘[Leo] loved me, in the days when Frank and Noel Martin loved me too. And indeed I loved them. My God, that was a golden time.’67
Philippa Bosanquet, who came up in 1939, recalls that the fascination with Iris then, as later, was general. Many were in love with her, could not get enough of her company. And she struck women, as well as men. Mary Douglas recalls her as ‘dazzlingly pretty and tremendously dynamic in her personal style – with a formidable reputation as a debater’. Milein Cosman, at the Slade, which was evacuated to Oxford, saw Iris – ash-blonde, white blonde, high Slavic cheekbones – at a talk by ‘splendid-looking’ Graham Sutherland at New College: ‘Look at that fantastic-looking girl, I’d like to draw her.’ Milein’s companion egged her on to talk to her, and an invitation from Iris to cocoa at Somerville ensued. Milein, a refugee from the Rhineland, had never heard of the exotic Oxford custom of inviting people for cocoa – but out of it came her first lithograph, of Iris’s head, executed on the steps of the Ashmolean. Iris looks solemn, preoccupied, fey, melancholy, jolie-laide.
6
Iris sent an account of her first year at Oxford to her old school magazine.68 She ‘loves her work passionately, and … takes a zestful interest in the life of the University. She … finds a day of twenty-four hours quite insufficient for her needs. She represents the First Year on the Junior Common Room Committee, is a member of the College Debating and Dramatic Societies – is to play Polixenes in next term’s A Winter’s Tale.69 The Classical Association, the Arts Club, the B.U.L.N.S [British Universities League of Nations Society] claim other parts of her day. She helps run Somerville Labour Club. For 4 terms she was advertising manager to Oxford Forward, progressive University weekly, has joined the staff of Cherwell, and hopes next term to sub-edit that paper.’ In her first summer she contributed four reports about events at Somerville to Oxford Magazine,70 and attended a one-week Communist Party summer school in Surrey, where the future historian Eric Hobsbawm, then studying at Cambridge, was deeply impressed by her looks, character and intelligence, noting that she associated there with the daughters of Ulster grandees.71
Franco won the war in Spain that April. In that love-fraught May Iris continued to publish poems. ‘Lovely is earth now, splendid/With year-youth’ casts her in the role of world-watcher, and shows the imprint of Housman and Hopkins: ‘to like,/To breathe, is pain and wonder’. ‘Oxford Lament’ begins:
Deliver me from the usual thing,
The clever inevitability of the conversation,
The brilliant platitudes and second-hand
Remarks about life.
She expresses both the self-conscious world-weariness behind which the averagely intelligent student in so many periods hides unconfident immaturity, but also a brave revulsion from the pose of having-seen-through-all-poses, and a longing for an intensity of expression that might strike the reader as unmediated and fresh. A frustrated longing, in a sense, for the powers of a ‘grown-up’ sensibility that might still evoke intensity:
O for the tangent terror
Of the metaphor no one has used –
The keenness of cutting edges
On fresh green ice of thought.
Gradually, the young men at Oxford were called up for the war. The summer of 1939 was the last of Oxford for Frank. One of his last nights was spent at Corpus with Leo and Noel.
In Corpus everyone stands one drinks and I was pretty whistled … After I had eaten two tulips in the quad and bust a window, they dragged me into Leo’s room and sat on me. I calmed down and they thought I was safe enough to take on the river. The red clouds round Magdalen tower were fading to grey, when we met two people we didn’t like. We chased them and tried to upset their canoe. We got slowed up at the rollers, and then I dropped my paddle. With the excitement all the beer surged up in me. Shouting the historic slogan, ‘All hands to the defence of the Soviet fatherland!’ I plunged into the river. They fished me out but I plunged in again. By a series of forced marches they dragged me back and dumped me on the disgusted porter at the Holywell gate.
After Frank had burst into ‘an important meeting of the college communist group’ Comrade Foot, by a unanimous vote, was given ‘the revolutionary task of putting [him] to bed’. Such jokey accounts make Frank sound like a rugger ‘hearty’. His inclinations, in fact, were political, passionately humanistic and aesthetic, and he spent much of that year putting his idealism to the test. That Easter he had worked in a school for refugee Jewish boys at New Herrlingen in Kent: ‘I like the Jews … They have a queer fascination for me. They’re so alive, so intelligent and so generous.’ (Iris shared this impassioned philo-Semitism, which belongs to its epoch: ‘I find my pro-Semitism becoming more & more fanatical with the years.’72)
Frank was understandably struck and unnerved by a request from two of the boys for help in getting their parents out of Germany. In July, as Secretary to New College Boys’ Club in impoverished Hoxton, in London’s East End, he spent ten days supervising activities in the boys’ camp, then a fortnight working in a camp for the unemployed at Carmarthen in Wales ('thundering good value'), finally a week at the Communist Party summer school near Guildford, for political education.73 Such experiences left him more than ever critical of the government’s failure to address the issues of unemployment and Fascism.
On 31 July 1939, just before his nineteenth birthday, Frank completed a sonnet dedicated to Iris, entitled ‘To Irushka at the Coming of War':
If you should hear my name among those killed
Say you have lost a friend, half man, half boy
Who, if the years had spared him, might have built within
Courage, strength and harmony.
Uncouth and garrulous, with tangled mind
Seething with warm ideas of truth and light,
His help was worthless. Yet had fate been kind,
He might have learned to steel himself and fight.
He thought he loved you. By what right could he
Claim such high praise, who only felt his frame
Riddled with burning lead, and failed to see
His own false pride behind the barrel’s flame?
Say you have lost a friend, and then forget.
Stronger and truer ones are with you yet.
Rupert Brooke, more than the other soldier-poets Owen or Sassoon, lies behind this attempt to enlist sympathy and invite Iris to ‘love what [she] must leave ere long’, and it is hard to disentangle the myth of the poem from what was to happen to Frank. Yet, if the poetry does not only lie in the self-pity, the self-dramatisation is also less boldly absolute than in Frank’s deservedly renowned poem ‘Polliciti Meliora’, written a year or so later, and more memorably poignant.
Iris spent the last two glorious August weeks of that final summer of peace with the strolling Magpie Players, exploring a different kind of poetry and a different mode of self-dramatisation. Scatty and likeable Tom Fletcher from Ruskin, who lived on Magpie Lane – ‘ a little king and … no constitutional monarch either’ – organised a dozen or more students into a group reminiscent of J.B. Priestley’s ‘good companions’ to tour the countryside around Oxford, performing mainly set-piece ballads and songs74 (’It Ain’t Gonna Rain no Mo” for the company, and, among others, Samuel Daniel’s ‘Love is a Sickness’ for Iris, which, she wrote, ‘filled me with joy'), and short dramatic or comic interludes – ‘Tam Lin’, ‘The Lay of the Heads’, ‘Auld Witch Wife’, ‘Binnorie’, ‘Green-sleeves’, ‘Clydewater’, the medieval ‘Play of the Weather’, ‘Donna Lombarda’ … Since the group aimed to capitalise on ‘the fascination Oxford holds for the general public’,75 they were enacting the roles of ‘care-free students’, as much as the parts within the sketches. Proceeds went to the Oxford University Refugee Appeal Fund.* They start on 16 August at the Blade Bone pub in Bucklebury, the first time Iris had lived ‘on a genuine farm’. She is bemused to be woken early by roosters and cows, to whom she plays her recorder. Later, seven horses stop to listen. The takings in Bucklebury are £7. They make their own publicity, both stunts and posters, and proceed, with ten stops, to Winchcombe, by which time war has been declared. It is a lyrical, picaresque, hand-to-mouth progress, with daily uncertainty about scenery and props arriving in time for a performance at a new venue, uncertainty about where the next meal or hot bath will come from —'wolfed dinner’ is one leitmotiv – uncertainty about audiences, who vary from the parsons and ‘intelligentsia’, who pay two-and-six to five shillings, to the toughs of Northleach paying a few pennies. They sew their own costumes: ‘Mother of God preserve me from the simple sewing machine’ precedes a comic rant in Iris’s journal about defective tension, needles, bobbins. On Tuesday, 22 August, Fox Photos turn up and take two hundred snaps for Picture Post. One shows a notably attractive Iris prettily sewing, another wolfing food, a third as the emblematic ‘Fairy-tale princess’.
Her hundred-page journal of those two weeks is her first surviving prose narrative. She archaically spells — and was for decades to spell – ‘show’ as ‘shew’. The handwriting is firm and very confident, fluent about what she perceives. The troupe’s antics are juvenile – she had only the previous month reached twenty, after all – but her eye is keen in discerning the painful jocularities of youth, and the agonising fou rires that are really signs of pre-first night nerves. Meeting a group of gypsies, the Magpies note a kinship, leading as both do a wandering existence cut off from the ordinary run of life. Iris expects daily arrest since ‘the number of copyright songs we are singing without permission, & performances we are giving without licences, and cars we are driving without insurances, is really amazing’. She notes: ‘Riding on running boards when the car is going a good forty is most exhilarating sport.’
She muses to herself of the company: ‘They’re a wonderful collection to be sure, & it’s devilish fond I am of them': Irishness was her stock-in-trade. Cherwell had recently published her satirical ‘The Irish – Are they Human?’ – an answering polemic pointed out that she was obviously Scots-Irish76 – and Denis Healey, part-Irish, two years older, and not knowing her well, believed for the following sixty years that Iris had come straight to Oxford from Dublin. Iris writes of Virginia Woolf as ‘the darling, dangerous woman’77 and is given to the imprecation ‘Holy Mother of God’. After big, unshaven and, to Iris, very attractive Hugh Vaughan James finally arrives – a link with the Labour Club and the Communist Party – ‘with all the dust of Kerry on him and the same old devil in his extraordinarily blue eyes’, having hitch-hiked from the west of Ireland on cars and a tramp steamer, missing two nights’ sleep, she soon notes that his brogue is ‘better than mine’, a phrase that suggests Irishness as a matter of identification and impersonation as well as inheritance. Hugh was mistaken for a member of the IRA in Valencia. Tom Fletcher’s indifferent Irish accent, and worse jigs, by contrast, grate. It is no accident that Iris’s writing persona, in her first published novel, was to have an Irish voice.
She talks about Communism and the international situation with Hugh, for whom she felt a tendresse to which they briefly give expression, Iris imagining him an old Bolshevik and amazed to find he has been ‘in’ (i.e. the Party) only a few months. He fills the scene-shifting intervals with ‘brilliant’ songs and patter, does Cossack dances on the running-board travelling at sixty. At fifteen stone and with a three-day growth of beard he resembles a Viking chieftain or some ancient Celtic hero. Indeed he pleases Iris by believing in the little people; he is, after all, himself a ‘giant’.
Low points of the tour, for opposite reasons, were Buscot and Northleach. At glorious Buscot Park, seat of Lord Faringdon, Iris approves the rows and rows of Left Book Club covers, of Marx and of Engels in the library, and even frescos of the Socialist ‘Lord Faringdon addressing the Labour Party’. Moreover there is a magnificent theatre with every conceivable gadget except the blackout facility needed for ‘Tam Lin’. But the twenty noble lords and ladies who arrive in their Rolls-Royces are ‘as dead as doornails’ and not to be pleased. Each turn misfires or falls flat. ‘Well-bred. God! but they were well-bred,’ comments Iris. ‘The devil take them, they were neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring – we didn’t know where to have them. If they had been less genteel they’d have liked the broader things, & if they’d been more cultured they’d have liked the ballads – but they were merely gentry & so got no fun.’ She has nice and democratic social instincts, and values them in others. In Faringdon’s library the company behaved badly, talking loudly amongst themselves about the performance. Only she and Hugh took pains to speak to Faringdon’s secretary Captain Bourne, whom both had noticed looking ill at ease.
Worse was to come two days later at Northleach, the town covered in ‘recruiting bills and adjurations to young men to join the Territorials and defend their homes’. The place is ‘scared stiff & in an appalling state of nerves. Never having seen or heard of gas masks before, they are now in a panic & imagining slaughter & sudden death.’ A great mob of toughs barracked, laughed and cat-called. The intelligentsia shushed them, to no avail. Iris was ‘mad with rage’, nearly weeping with fury. Tom Fletcher lost his head and offended the rest of the cast by guying the ‘Play of the Weather’. They were saved when all the lights failed: air raid precautions? ‘Northleach hospitality’ received its final blow when the company arrived at an immense Elizabethan manor and found no food prepared.
By contrast, the high point on 29 August was Tusmore Park, abode of Lady Bicester – not merely the ‘wide tall tawnily-weathered 18th C building with mile-long terraces & a most beautiful lake to double it all in reflection’, but also ‘lamb both hot and cold to eat, sauces and vegetables, veal, ham, apple pie & cream & peaches, washed down with cider or beer and barley-water, & apologies for an impromptu meal’, off silver plate, to boot. Iris’s acting is admired by Irish Lady Bicester,78 who likes ‘Tam Lin’ best. Iris records throughout an innocent hunger for praise. She had been instantly enslaved to fellow-Magpie Ruth Kingsbury (who recalled Iris’s publicly declared willingness to deploy her charm on Hugh Vaughan James) when Ruth had praised her Cherwell poems. Iris notes happily that ‘Joyce [Taylor] said my arm movements reminded her of Peggy Ashcroft,’ embraces the Magpie harpist Frances Podmore for reporting one member of the audience whispering, ‘Aren’t her movements perfectly beautiful?’ and on 29 August ‘shrieked with joy inside’ at being asked by a charming American girl which drama school she had attended, as she had been such ‘a delight to look upon’. This was not necessarily sycophancy. Three fellow-Magpies – Moira Dunbar, Denys Becher and Frances Podmore – wrote unprompted sixty years later about Iris’s ‘marvellous way with the old ballads’. Moira Dunbar could still hear Iris’s low mellow voice reciting lines from ‘Tam Lin’, and could recall many verses verbatim. As could Iris; she declaimed from ‘Tam Lin’ for years:
Then up spake the Queen of the Fairies
Out of a bush of Broom –
She that has gotten the young Tam Lin
Has gotten a stately groom.
Denys Becher, who had arrived ‘looking more than ever like some unutterably wronged and tragic lad out of Housman’,79 played Tam Lin ('perfect – wild and intense and unearthly'), who falls tragically in love both with Janet, played by Iris, and with the Queen of the Fairies. (Only nineteen, he was in fact smitten with Iris, who never guessed.80 He first sighted her standing in Bucklebury stream, rapt in silent contemplation, and thought her ‘the most beautiful woman he had ever seen’.) When they gave a (successful) free matinee to a Basque refugee children’s camp on 28 August, near Shipton-under-Wychwood, ‘to crown our joy three real bushes of broom were in flower behind the “stage"’.
As well as enjoying her own proficiency, Iris takes delight in others too, notably Hugh fencing with Cecil Quentin (not the ‘lofty conceited and utterly snobbish young swine’ she first took him for); and quietly persuades Tom Fletcher to allow her to give up a coveted part in ‘Clydewater’ to a weeping fellow-actress,81 whose career depends upon the tour as she wants a job as an actress with a repertory company.
8
‘Is there any better way of spending the eve of war?’ asked Tom Fletcher at Filkins early in the tour. The interest of the Magpies interlude lies in the confluence of the dramatic international events with a pastoral living-for-the-moment world so soon to be threatened and destroyed: acting out Auden’s ‘A Summer Night’ itself. The Nazis were readying for their invasion of Poland, with their own wicked amateur-theatrical feint of dressing up German convicts in Polish uniforms at the wireless station at Gleiwitz (Gliwice) on 31 August – the convicts were then shot, so that German newspapers could claim a Polish ‘invasion’ of the Reich.
Uncertainty about the international situation fills Iris’s journal, as do the problems of apprehending it as real without over-dramatising it. In Bucklebury on 23 August, the day the Ribben-trop-Molotov non-aggression pact is signed – ‘Over which,’ she writes, ‘much unnecessary fuss is being made’, and ‘Curious how many intelligent people are getting the Soviet Union wrong over this business’ – she notes that ‘the papers seem scared and I suppose a grave crisis is on but I cant seem to feel any emotion about it whatsoever. This is a such a strange, new, different, existence I’m leading & so entirely cut-off from the world.’ The following day at Buscot ‘there is more trouble over Danzig.* But all the people we meet seem very upset, & it must be a great storm to ripple these placid waters.’ That afternoon the performance is interrupted by a speech on the wireless by the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. On Friday, 25 August, on the way between Wallingford and Brightwell, Iris tries to argue Tom out of doing Auden’s ‘Soldiers Coming': ‘with things as they are’ Auden’s melodramatic ballad, with its haunting sense of imminent and anarchic male soldierly violence, ‘comes far too close to the bone’.
On Sunday, 27 August Iris and Joyce Taylor, having lost their cases, stay with a hearty old couple, about whom Iris comments with brisk condescension, ‘good working class stock, but unintelligent’. They are ‘the sort of people who are nice to you when you come canvassing, but who will not buy a copy of the Daily Worker, as they “already get the Herald, thank you very much".’ On Monday, 28 August ‘a worried letter from home’ and the Daily Worker sounding desperate both cause Iris to ponder, ‘Maybe things are worse than I thought … I wonder if this is the end of everything at last? Anyhow, if it is, I am having a very grand finale.’ Michael Foot is called up and writes to make Iris his literary executor ‘with instructions what to publish should Anything Happen to him. But Michael always did take life melodramatically.’ The following day after lunch, the group ‘walked down to the lake and admired the beauty of the place & wondered if we were to die young & what it all meant anyway’. In the churchyard – ‘God, but it’s beautiful’ – Iris lay across one of the graves and ‘thought how quiet it would be to be dead’. On 30 August: ‘The Territorials were called up, today.’ Iris feels ‘strangely unmoved’ and sends a postcard home, self-consciously nonchalant: ‘Bibury has unexpectedly cancelled our performance – Crisis I suppose. We are most wonderfully oblivious of the international situation.’ On 31 August the horrible Gliwice farce was staged, and almost at once the brave, doomed Poles at Westerplatte on the North Sea were attacked by the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein. Since they were in civilian dress when they returned fire, they were subsequently shot without mercy after capture. In the small hours of 1 September the German invasion of Poland began, and by 6 a.m. Warsaw was being bombed. The first evacuation of women and children from London and other major centres began the same day.
The Magpies spent 1 September at an agricultural cooperative set up in Gloucestershire by a German refugee group, the Brüderhof, who in the circumstances preferred to skip the performance. The men sat on one side of the table, the women on the other, while their leader spoke emotionally to his followers of their precarious position in the event of war. The heavy atmosphere was almost too much for Moria Dunbar. She thought, ‘God, if war is going to be like this I might as well slit my throat now.’82 After the war, Tom Fletcher promised, the Magpies would tour again. But, he added sadly, ‘our show will be frightfully pre-war, I’m afraid.’83
Much against the will of the company ('Do you realise there’s a pretty good chance of London being bombed tonight? Don’t be a little fool') Iris resolved, the day war was declared,84 to return to London. She and Hugh travelled in the dicky of the Magpie business-manager Jack Trotman’s grand, buff-yellow, Renault sports-car de luxe, as it roared over the Berkshire Downs to Oxford station. It was intensely exhilarating. Grey-blue clouds and streaks of green and pink sky wreathed the horizon. Hugh put his arm round Iris and they sighed at their luck. A long wait at Reading, the place deserted and troop trains packed with ‘singing canon fodder’ passing every ten minutes, and she chatted in the carriage to two half-drunk reservists who had just been called up. At Paddington she caught the last train, after 1 a.m, but at Hammersmith waited vainly for either Tube or trolley-bus. Somehow she got home.85 The epoch she was later aptly to describe to Frank as ‘the playtime of the ‘30s, when we were all conscience-ridden spectators’,86 was coming to an end.
* Directed by Frances Podmore, it was the first play at Oxford in which male and female students were allowed to act together. Prior to that dons’ wives acted the women’s parts in college performances; West End actresses were called upon for the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS).
* Denis Healey recounts the fury caused in the OULC by Tom Harrisson, founder of Mass Observation and then at Cambridge, with his savage essay on what he called ‘Oxsex’, which Healey thought ‘not unfair’ (The Time of my Life).
* This included the Earl Baldwin Refugee Fund, the China Relief Committee and the National Joint Spanish Relief Committee.
* Hitler agitated about the position of Germans in Danzig as a pretext for the invasion of Poland.